Think to New Worlds:
The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers
By Joshua Blu Buhs (University of Chicago Press)
This book is about the legacy of Charles Fort. Fort himself is hard to describe. Imagine someone who actually was who Joe Rogan thinks that he his, except that Dana White is Theodore Dreiser.
Fort was something of a writer’s writer, and while his lit-fic was unpublished or destroyed (by Fort) he grew famous on the basis of his quasi-journalistic compilations of weird, unexplained, and anomalous events in the world, and his books include some Menocchio-grade cosmology of nonsense. What Fort believed about what Fort wrote requires its own post to disentangle; his successors in the Fortean Society were less critical.
The book focuses on three areas: science fiction, art, and UFOs. The sections document many individuals who are more famous for other reasons and who were affiliated in one way or another. Many times this is a sort of direct interaction. Other times, it is a matter of similarity of thought or imagery.
The text is sumptuously cited, but this leans towards logical fallacy at points. Fort was an artsy weirdo, and associated with other artsy weirdos. Many of those artsy weirdos employed ideas that would fit within Fort’s work. But it does not follow that any Fortean theme in a contemporary artsy weirdo is influenced by Fort, as opposed to a sort of mutuality of the zeitgeist. It is useless to try and distinguish between what is or what is not, but the text always assumes that it is.
On the other, other hand, it is like Blavatsky and Theosophy (of which there is overlap with Forteans) and once you see it, you will never unsee it. So I like the big picture, even if I question some of the specifics.
There are two specific things that hold this book back. The first is this is scholarly rather than popular. There is a chapter dedicated to Fort, and another to what happened to the Fortean Society afterwards, but this is a lousy introduction to Fort and the Forteans. Or at least it is not a proper history of the society, and the book is not arranged chronologically but thematically.
The second are the vignettes that are scattered in throughout the book. I think that the intention was to give asides to interesting side and supplemental material in something more of a Fortean style. But whatever the purpose was, it does not work. They disrupt the text and are often hard to follow within their own context, and feel more like the struggle between an author and editor.
The book concludes with the absorption of Fortean ideas into a more contemporary New Age and Occult oriented society, which the author cleverly ties up with how Post-Modernism parasitized the Modernism of the Forteans. And this is when where we live now comes up, and the news cycle dominated by conspiracy theory on paranoid obsession, straight from a Fortean playbook. The author acknowledges the parallels between the Fortean approach and that of, say, 200 Mules, but closes the matter with the acknowledgement. I am not so sure.
Throughout the book, the author does not flinch from how frequently the Foretans dabbled in fascism and racism. Like the Forteans seem to be the Ur-example of a group of people who go from an earnest desire to question the status quo and learn about the world and end up hating science and allying with ’38 Nazis. This sociological function does not need to be in the scope of the book, but maybe it ought to be?
My thanks to the author, Joshua Blu Buhs, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 