ABSTRACT
Few people have heard of Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932).1 Sometimes mention of the Fortean Society, however, will ring a bell. ‘Oh, isn’t he something to do with UFOs?’ The answer, from a historical point of view, is ‘not really’. The International Fortean Society as it now exists was reinvented in 1961, the UK-based Fortean Times in 1973. As such, they were creations of the Cold War, and their UFOs – which were indeed a prominent part of their focus – part of the well-established political and cultural paranoia of that time (Seed, 1999). A pall of weirdness hangs over the Forteans – alien abductions, conspiracy theories – which has served to silence any serious historical investigation of Fort. Ominously, his Wikipedia page (8 May 2015) is flagged as having ‘multiple issues’. Charles Fort was, in his own words, no more a Fortean than he was an elk
(Knight, 1971: p. 81). Fort died long before the Second World War and although there are other worlds in his work, there are no UFOs in anything like the Cold War sense (Kripal, 2010: pp. 93-141). The society that was established in his name was largely the work of Tiffany Thayer; it was spawned at a gathering in Fort’s apartment in the year before his death. Thayer began publishing the Society’s magazine in 1937; it quickly became a vehicle for his own preoccupations, ventriloquised as Fort’s. Yet, notwithstanding his subsequent historical silencing, Fort’s voice was his most remarkable feature. He possessed considerable and unique talents as a writer, and one aim of this chapter is to bring this voice to historical and literary-critical attention. Fort’s voice, I argue, was above all raised in criticism of contemporary science
and its silencing tendency in relation to outsider voices. I focus upon Fort’s first book in order to make his argument clear; he attempted to raise a chorus of anomalous data that could not be silenced as individual efforts to critique science usually were. It is my claim that Fort’s critical and creative stance on science is a more fruitful way of understanding his oeuvre than the more usual focus on his weird cosmos and strange phenomena. At the chapter’s close I reflect, via one of Fort’s stories, on why his strategy of raising a chorus of dissent from scientific data was ultimately unsuccessful. In short, it was a thermodynamic failure; just as heat returns to cold, so sound becomes chaotic noise, and finally recedes into silence. Meanwhile, the chapter is shot through
with a second-level meditation upon silencing: a consideration of the reasons why Fort is such a problematic figure, having been silenced by historical and literary scholars to date. These reasons are threefold: that he was derivative, an insignificant loner, or just plain mad. None of these, I argue, quite suffices as reason to dismiss Fort.
