Posted on November 4, 2022
What is it about “the strange” that allows us, readers and writers alike, to access some deeper human truth? How does strangeness operate on us—as we read it, as we write it, as we experience it? Some variation of this question was posed by one of my former professors, and I think about it often. I’ve yet to formulate a definitive answer. To be honest, I think the question is more satisfying without one. “Strange” means a lot of things to me: fantastic, bizarre, wild, queer, inventive, surreal, uncanny. But, most of all, it’s a gesture toward the unknowable. Encountering strangeness means resting in uncertainty.
This is hardly a new idea. John Keats wrote about something similar when describing a concept he termed “negative capability,” which—much like negative space—is potential defined by absence. Negative capability: when we are “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important reminder for both readers and writers. I’m always most struck by the things I can’t explain.
My education in strangeness began just prior to the start of the pandemic (how apt) and continues to the present day. So, here are the works that have been vital to my development—the ones I’ve been reading, resting in, and returning to.
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Something Wonderful, Jo Lloyd
I read Something Wonderful over the summer, when days were long and sun-drenched afternoons bled into evenings. This sort of landscape—perennial, dreamlike, restless—pairs well with Lloyd’s entrancing debut collection. In nine stories, Lloyd travels from the surface of human experience to its depths. Filled with rare perception, compassion, and wit, this collection had me from the start. While some stories deal with more explicit weirdness—such as “The Invisible,” winner of the 2019 BBC National Short Story Award and my personal favorite—others turn the familiar into the strange. Or, rather: they acquaint us with the strangeness of the familiar. Work, relationships, roommates, life—you get the idea. Together, these stories illuminate a world in which, to borrow Lloyd’s words, “people who know nothing behave as if they have lifetimes to learn more.”
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun is a dystopian science fiction novel told from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF) taken home by a child with an unstated illness. Compared to her fellow AFs—humanoid robots that serve as companions to young children—Klara is uniquely observant and empathetic. It’s hard to pull off a narrative written from a perspective like this one—that is, from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with our world and our humanity—but Ishiguro does it masterfully. Through Klara’s eyes, we see both of these landscapes anew—fresh in all of their strangeness, capable of inspiring wonderment. What I find most impressive about Klara and the Sun, however, is how it challenges our pessimism. Klara possesses the kind of hopefulness that seems naïve—misguided, even. Yet, there is surprising wisdom in her naïveté. Through Klara’s eyes, Ishiguro explores what it means to love and to grieve, to be human in an increasingly dystopian and inhuman world.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi
This is a book that never stays on my shelf for long. I first read it a few years ago, and have been continually returning to it (and talking about it) ever since. Oyeyemi deals in fairytales and fabulism, myth and magic. Her stories sweep from one character to the next, creating expansive worlds with incredible depth. Nothing is stable, everything is strange. And yet, Oyeyemi never loses control; she guides us through these worlds with a delicate hand and a sharp mind. I look to the stories of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (“Drownings” and “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” in particular) as models for the kind of strangeness I wish to explore in my own writing. Though the outward conditions of these worlds are indeed strange, the internal worlds of their characters are perhaps stranger. You could argue that Oyeyemi grounds the fantastic with strong characters—and you would be right—but she also uses the fantastic to further illuminate her characters, allowing us to see them in all their beautiful, messy humanness.
Man V. Nature, Diane Cook
In Man V. Nature, Cook writes stories of survival, of our internal and external wildernesses, of the interplay between nature and the human condition. And yes, it gets (delightfully) weird. Cook’s stories are filled with characters that act strangely, and we are left to wonder if this strangeness is a cause or a consequence of their environments. Cook pushes the boundaries of our world and what can happen in it, but her stories remain firmly centered around people, their experiences, and their relationships—a common theme among all of the stories I’ve mentioned here, and just about any successful story that takes up the strange. I’m a little bit in love with Cook’s response to a similar comment made by Karolina Waclawiak during an interview, which I’ll end with here: “In a story you’re often just following people’s day-to-day lives; it just happens that on one of those days something notable occurs. In these stories that notable thing is often extreme. Like, the days after a world-ending flood. But, really, it’s just more days, just more life.”
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With their strangeness, the works I’ve mentioned create spaces of powerful understanding and imagining. There, we can find strangeness in the familiar, and familiarity in the strange. And—in a time when everything seems strange—I think there’s some solace to be found there, too.
KATIE WORDEN is a first-year fiction student and holds the Fred Chappell Fellowship. She currently serves as a Graduate Assistant for the Humanities Network and Consortium, an program dedicated to connecting the university’s humanities scholars to one another and to the public.
