The Force of Things Unknown

Abstract

When strange forces impose on us and command our attention from the sky or oceanic depths, when they rustle invisibly or naked in the vegetation of a desolate grove, the sciences and humanities have different responses to the alterity of the encounter—the first presupposing a stable object or “content” that it seeks to identify, the latter presupposing an unstable meaning which it seeks to explicate. These complimentary modes of distinguishing phenomena, which epitomize the “two cultures” of academia, abruptly manifest their strengths and weaknesses when confronted by indeterminate forces of a predatory or polymorphic nature. By conducting selective readings of narratives by Edgar Allan Poe, Hermann Melville, Ambrose Bierce and Arthur Machen, the present study retraces the historically problematic explication of forces that breach norms of identity (such as gender, species, and appetite) by exposing protagonists to cosmic obscurities that destabilize visualization and embodiment, and hence, the self-understanding of both the individual and her community. In the late Victorian genre of weird tales, due to the technical difficulties of visualizing unknown forces, these narratives depended less on concrete depictions of objectively identifiable events than of disturbing encounters tinged with erotic, chthonic, and/or mystical sublimity. In its most extreme obscurity, to quote Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1893) a force is “neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form” (188). Only in the twentieth century does the shapeshifting force of the alien encounter become fully visualized cinematically in horror masterpieces such as John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).