Many readers of The Night Land, and more still who give up on the book, gag on its prose; The Night Land is a famously “difficult read.” For The Night Land, Hodgson devised an eccentric, faux seventeenth- or eighteenth-century style, convoluted and orotund, which even Lovecraft found “grotesque and absurd.” A few critics have supported Hodgson’s stylistic choice (Greer Gilman in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Nigel Brown in “An Apology for the Linguistic Architecture of The Night Land”), but Murphy mounts an innovative defense. He asks us to see the difficulty of reading as an intrinsic element of weird fiction, a twinning of the reader’s efforts with those of the characters’:
... the labor of the weird and the resistance to it often (but not always) transform the human subject who undergoes them, and those transformations are materially reflected in the language of Hodgson’s tales, imposing a labor of the weird on the reader as well as on the characters.
In Hodgson, the weird is inseparable from its expression and its reception—the reader must be estranged from current reality in all ways. As Murphy stresses, Hodgson’s “stylistic and formal strategies [are] centered on the problem of how to refer to or represent the non-/un-/abhuman.” In so doing, Hodgson reminds me of Christian mystics such as Jakob Böhme, Hildegard of Bingen, and Teresa of Ávila, and of alchemists such as “Basil Valentine” and Michael Maier, who each in idiosyncratic ways contorted syntax and made strange their vocabulary in attempts to represent the interaction of the human with that which is not human and with that which is cosmic. Equally, Hodgson points forward to the varied linguistic permutations of the twentieth century. As Murphy asserts: “weird fiction constitutes an explicitly self-reflexive and experimental genre that is, in its own unique ways, comparable to the broader formal experiments of high modernist and postmodernist fiction that developed alongside and after it.” I agree fully with that assessment, and would love to see studies putting The Night Land in conversation with The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake, Dadaist and Surrealist plays and manifestos, Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and so on.
Posted 43 days ago.
