Re: HPL and Sophocles. (I kept thinking about this topic despite having said I wouldn't get into a discussion now.) Anyone can write a story in which bad things happen to people. What made me think of Sophocles in connection with "Colour"?
This might not make sense to anyone else, but I think there's a sense that the victims in each case are made "holy." If I remember rightly, Rudolf Otto, in
The Idea of the Holy, argues that the eventual association of "holiness" and goodness was an achievement of Judaism and Christianity, but "holiness" can exist apart from goodness. It has to do with a sense of awe. That which provokes awe is different from the commonplace, the quotidian, etc. In
Oedipus Rex (to give the Greek play its common Latin title), a man is
set apart by fate for a horrible experience; it is prophesied that he will kill his father and marry his mother, violating two of the most basic laws of human life. And he does these things, as it transpires, not because he is a bad man, but because of the adults' horror of such a prophecy when Oedipus was born -- they wanted to prevent such terrible things from happening. But they happen and the land is stricken.
Somewhat similarly, in Lovecraft's story, an appalling fate overcomes the victims (and "victim" had originally a connotation of the sacred, btw). And here too the land is stricken.*
And so the Lovecraft story, as I read and experience it, is not simply a weird story about how "shit happens." It really does evoke some sense of so-called primitive awe (I might prefer "perennial" to "primitive"). Lovecraft is tapping into something rather more disturbing than the ghoulish figures of the pulp horror story -- though he didn't realize it, I imagine.
There's something like this in Hodgson's best story, "The Voice in the Night." There's a stricken land -- the island isolated in the North Pacific on which the fungus grows. Two shipwreck victims at last consume the fungus and progressively lose their human appearance
while remaining fully human, suffering their withdrawal from the community of man. I think it's a pretty great story and one of the ones I would advance to show the legitimacy of the genre of weird horror if I were trying to convince someone thereof. I think, though, that Hodgson's story is less Classical than Lovecraft's. The two victims remain, in a sense, too easy to identify with to be like Oedipus. They are like victims of some progressive and incurable disease. But with Oedipus and the victims in "Colour," you have sufferers who are made "holy" by their fates. I don't think "Voice" is better or worse than "Colour" but that they are not really doing the same thing even though they have interesting similarities.
I realize that the three stories have "stricken lands" but the strickenness is from different causes.
[a]In Sophocles, the land (Thebes) is stricken
because of the sins of patricide and incest.
[b]In Lovecraft, the land is stricken from space and the strickenness reaches out to the people who live there.
[c]In Hodgson, the land was stricken with the fungus presumably long before the two castaways arrived.
These are differences that do matter.
Arthur Machen mentions Oedipus here:
[
www.youtube.com]
Now I really am gonna leave this alone for a while.
*The Arthurian legends tap into something like this. I might not remember exactly right, but there's a Maimed King, and one of the knights meets him and
fails to ask what happened; and so -- here again, the land is stricken.
There's an outstanding evocation of the idea of the "holy" I've been discussing in C. S. Lewis's "myth retold,"
Till We Have Faces. The story's narrator, living perhaps 300 BC, describes the rather ugly temple of Ungit, a mother-goddess, with sacred prostitutes, prescribed cultic rites, a big stone on which blood must be shed, etc. For this narrator, all this is "holy" -- the priest smells "holy," etc. These things are
set apart and awe hovers around them.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 10 Mar 21 | 03:47PM by Dale Nelson.