Weird Immanence: Genre and Belief in Blackwood's Fiction

Abstract

This article explores how Algernon Blackwood's spiritual and mystical beliefs complicate his relationship with the Gothic genre. Rather than adhering strictly to Gothic conventions, Blackwood blends supernatural elements with a sincere evocation of the numinous, creating a literature of possibilities rather than impossibilities. Writing at a time when distinctions between psychic phenomena and scientific materialism were fluid, he challenges conventional horror by framing the supernatural as an expression of heightened consciousness rather than external terror. This discussion also considers authorial intent. While Wimsatt and Beardsley's ‘Intentional Fallacy’ warns against privileging authorial intention in literary criticism, Blackwood's nonfiction and autobiographical writings offer valuable insight into his creative process. By analysing ‘The Willows’ (1907) alongside his travelogue ‘Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe’ (1901) and essay ‘The Psychology of Places’ (1910), I argue that Blackwood's concept of ‘dramatised emotions’ transforms the supernatural into a means of communicating subjective reality. Using the pantheist notion of divine indwelling in nature, I propose the term ‘weird immanence’ to describe how Blackwood employs genre to articulate subjective truths more potently than mimetic realism. Unlike the traditional Gothic sublime, in which the natural world mirrors human drama, ‘The Willows’ represents an authentic emotional response to landscape, intensifying the eerie potency of Blackwood's fiction.