The Weird, the Ontological, and the Normal. (13th April 2019) - Strombeck, Andrew
Abstract: Benjamin J. Robertson's None of This Is Normal (2018) addresses the entire fictional project of the New Weird writer Jeff VanderMeer. In doing so, Robertson intervenes within recent discussions of new materialism, accounts of which have been entwined with the New Weird. Robertson finds VanderMeer querying the normalizing discourses of capitalism and colonialism, showing how the New Weird can serve as a site to extend and challenge the sometimes-limiting frameworks of the new materialisms. As its critics have shown, object-oriented ontology and other new materialisms risk reinforcing problems of primitivism and positivism. For Robertson, VanderMeer evades such problems by foregrounding the liberal, humanist frameworks marginalizing planet and colonized subject alike. Examining what he calls VanderMeer's fantastic materiality, Robertson contends that VanderMeer supersedes what Darko Suvin calls cognitive estrangement; VanderMeer asks readers to encounter a world that is estranged but not cognitively recoverable. And yet, by reminding readers of VanderMeer's poststructuralist attention to language and narrative, Robertson avoids the often-masculinist tendency to posit a primitive world beyond human cognition. None of This Is Normal will be useful to scholars interested in pushing past new materialism's limits while retaining the field's insights for questions of climate change and nonhuman agency.