HPL was somewhat attracted to 18th century / 19th century rationalistic positivism, but was not Christian enough to modify that with a dose of Christian humility. At the same time he was attracted to the supernatural through his love of ghost stories and horror stories. He sensed that his love of the supernatural was in some sense in conflict with rationalist pride and positivist ambitions. At the same thing, he sensed that rationalistic pride and postivist ambitions were in conflict with modern science when viewed though an atheist/materialist lens.

He called this cosmic horror -- this realization of the rationalist/positivist that some of his pride was misplaced. But I don't think any devout Christian would have had any problem with the idea that humanity is very little in the ultimate scheme of thingts.

Sawfish Wrote:


> If so, I'd see it as an aspect of setting. Sound
> about right?


Yep! What you have is a scenario in which (to begin with) the characters in their settings -- the scholarly, independent bachelor gentlemen -- are in harmony. Lovecraft then destroys this harmony by intruding his cosmic entities. However, this doesn't threaten the reader, for whom those entities are really extravagant. And in fact, for many readers, they're rather cool. Hence the fun fan artists have had with them.

Platypus, would you develop this thought a bit? "he [Lovecraft] sensed that rationalistic pride and positivist ambitions were in conflict with modern science"?

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Platypus, would you develop this thought a bit?
> "he sensed that rationalistic pride and
> positivist ambitions were in conflict with modern
> science"?


Specifically "rationistic pride" and "positivist ambitions". I'm uncertain what these terms mean.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wrote something awkwardly -- I wrote

" a scenario in which (to begin with) the characters in their settings -- the scholarly, independent bachelor gentlemen -- are in harmony"

What I meant was that in a given story like this, the scholarly, independent bachelor gentleman is in harmony with his pleasant setting, whether or a university campus or his private residence, etc.; and that Lovecraft, as I remember the stories, seems to have setups like this in several stories.

And then he works it so that characters like these are in settings and situations with which they are very much not in harmony.

M. R. James does this initial setting-thing even more than Lovecraft, and I am certain that this is an important part of the appeal of his stories. MRJ's characters usually survive their encounters with the "disharmonious" entities, their sanity is usually intact, and no threat to the survival of the human race is expected -- since MRJ doesn't deal in "cosmic horror," at least not anything like so overtly as HPL does.

REH never writes stories with scenarios like this, does he? -- scholarly gentlemen, comfortable surroundings, etc.?

How about CAS?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 20 Aug 23 | 08:00PM by Dale Nelson.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I wrote something awkwardly -- I wrote
>
> " a scenario in which (to begin with) the
> characters in their settings -- the scholarly,
> independent bachelor gentlemen -- are in harmony"
>
> What I meant was that in a given story like this,
> the scholarly, independent bachelor gentleman is
> in harmony with his pleasant setting, whether or a
> university campus or his private residence, etc.;
> and that Lovecraft, as I remember the stories,
> seems to have setups like this in several
> stories.

I agree and I'd go so far as to say that when HPL brings in reference to Miskatonic U, he is in fact bringing the profound reassurance that scholarly (maybe independent) gentlemen, in harmony, are working on Problem A. And this is both reassuring and carries with it University conference rooms in ivy covered buildings, such as the room at Vassar where the senior honors were awarded to my daughter's volleyball team.

Medium sized trunion windows, fireplace and bookshelves.

How much more comfortable, in a strongly traditionalist way, does it get? ;^)


>
> And then he works it so that characters like these
> are in settings and situations with which they are
> very much not in harmony.

With the situation as it develops, or with each other?

>
> M. R. James does this initial setting-thing even
> more than Lovecraft, and I am certain that this is
> an important part of the appeal of his stories.
> MRJ's characters usually survive their encounters
> with the "disharmonious" entities, their sanity is
> usually intact, and no threat to the survival of
> the human race is expected -- since MRJ doesn't
> deal in "cosmic horror," at least not anything
> like so overtly as HPL does.

Yes.

Sorry to say this, but while I *like* individual James stories, they can be overwhelmingly similar, stultifyingly so.

Now, the *idea* of sitting by a fire on a stormy night and reading James is very much the "comfortable" image we're talking about, in some degree.

>
> REH never writes stories with scenarios like this,
> does he? -- scholarly gentlemen, comfortable
> surroundings, etc.?

Not that I'm aware of but I'm not the reader to ask. I have worked at trying to appreciate him--and I'll admit that he has established a certain niche, but it's not one I enjoy.

>
> How about CAS?

I don't see that he does this.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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As far as I remember, CAS' stories never have a comfort-setting. Many of his tales take place in alien worlds or fantastic landscapes, with the aim of making the reader feel dazzled, awed, or frightened.

When he does write stories that take place (or begin) in modern earthly society, his protagonists are usually outsiders, outcasts, eccentrics, self-exiles, explorers, or just very practical men who live in the remote countryside. All of this, of course, expresses some part of him which didn't like proper modern society.

Of the three writers listed in this thread's title, I dare say CAS was the closest to a misanthrope.

The only modern, earthly comfort I can remember in CAS' tales are the loving kisses of beautiful young women, but even these can be twisted into something weird, sometimes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 21 Aug 23 | 12:34AM by Hespire.

Hespire Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> As far as I remember, CAS' stories never have a
> comfort-setting. Many of his tales take place in
> alien worlds or fantastic landscapes, with the aim
> of making the reader feel dazzled, awed, or
> frightened.
>
> When he does write stories that take place (or
> begin) in modern earthly society, his protagonists
> are usually outsiders, outcasts, eccentrics,
> self-exiles, explorers, or just very practical men
> who live in the remote countryside. All of this,
> of course, expresses some part of him which didn't
> like proper modern society.
>
> Of the three writers listed in this thread's
> title, I dare say CAS was the closest to a
> misanthrope.
>
> The only modern, earthly comfort I can remember in
> CAS' tales are the loving kisses of beautiful
> young women, but even these can be twisted into
> something weird, sometimes.


I don't think he and Robert E. Howard were essentially anti-social so much as antagonistic; I think they cherished a disliking for people who regarded them as strange and eccentric. Their works are stylisically bolder than Lovecraft's, and probably attracted more criticism. Robert Bloch openly panned Howard's Conan tales in the Weird Tales letter column, and there was a running feud in a column of one of the sci-fi pulps, started by Forrest J. Ackerman's criticisms of Smith. Although, to your point, Hespire, some of his criticism was over Smith's cavalier misanthropy. But I think the more overt belittling of mankind in Smith is in the same vein we can find in Poe and Theophile Gautier, two of his favorite writers. Humans are insignificant dolts who degrade the beautiful and the imaginative. Gautier's famous tale "One of Cleopatra's Nights" begins with a description of the queen's barge on the Nile, described almost sensuously, like the clothes she wears (Lafcadio Hearn's short novel "Chita" has a similar opening passage describing the winding Mississippi bayou country). There is less characterization by design because Smith believed that too much characterization weakens the effect of terror. He referred to Blackwood and Walter de la Mare as exemplifying this drawback. Arthur Machen articulated the aesthetics of fantasy in brief by calling "Character-drawing" 'the great vice of literature'" in his 1890s notebook. So I think Smith was no more misanthropic than Howard or HPL, but all three derided the shallowness of the average American. -- "Nothing is less poetic than the life of the average American"-- Alexis de Tocqueville

jkh

DN: > And then he works it so that characters like these
> are in settings and situations with which they are
> very much not in harmony.

Sawfish: With the situation as it develops, or with each other?

The situation... probably they characters are pretty well isolated by then!

I'll probably be away a bit from ED for a while, though this is a good discussion.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> DN: > And then he works it so that characters like
> these
> > are in settings and situations with which they
> are
> > very much not in harmony.
Harmoniousness is incompatible with serious horror fiction. Smith handles his situations vis-a-vis his characters more skillfully than Lovecraft, with the exception of "The Shadow Out of Time". Robert E. Howard and Henry S. Whitehead, at their best, also were better than Lovecraft in this regard. Howard's more ambitious tales were not successful (they are collected in The Sword Woman and other Historical Advetures). The difference between these 4 authors is in the superior prose styles of Lovecraft and Smith, and in Smith's more wide-ranging imagination.

jkh

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Platypus, would you develop this thought a bit?
> "he sensed that rationalistic pride and
> positivist ambitions were in conflict with modern
> science"?

Merely that reason, rationalism and positivism are wonderful things that are responsible for much of what Western Civilization has achieved. But, in the final analysis, men are not gods. Our capacity for reason, both individually and collectively, is finite. The promises of the age of reason, to the extent that people hoped too much from them (and many did) led to a backlash of nihilism and postmodernism.

I think HPL both mourned and welcomed the collapse of the age of reason and the realization of the puniness of man. This was tied to an aesthetic feeling, that was in some way akin to a religious feeling. Philosophically, HPL was not religious, so he saw it as aesthetic, and it prompted him to write supernatural horror with "cosmic" themes.

It's interesting, Kipling, to imply -- as I think you do -- that Lovecraft is, implictly, a critic of the WEIRD mindset:

Western
Educated
Industrialized
Rich
Democratic

[news.harvard.edu]

But Lovecraft's also an adherent of some of these elements. He probably knew and cared more about Classical history than the great majority of his readers. Anyway, possibly there's something worth discussing as regards Lovecraft and maybe the other Weird Tales writers, and the WEIRD.

Quote:

Platypus
The promises of the age
> of reason, to the extent that people hoped too
> much from them (and many did) led to a backlash of
> nihilism and postmodernism.

This implies something significant, I think...

When reason replaced God in the age of enlightenment, all that really happened was that the enlightened thinkers of the era switched out "God" and swapped in "(mankind's) Reason". They replaced God with their ideal selves. We didn't need any pronouncements from a deity, we could figure *all* of it our, ourselves. Therefore, anything was possible. Mankind was limitless in its potential attainments.

Like anything new, it had a period of energy and excited speculation, but after a while people of all sorts recognized that all was not indeed possible, as it had been when there was still a God, who, if you believed, could do *anything*. In fact, the further along the road to rationalism, as it is influenced by scientific discovery, the more insignificant mankind becomes.

Now, roll in a couple of world wars, which due to the numbers of participants involved, and the increased ability to report the events to the broad public, and you have the rise of nihilism and post-modernism.

Which appears to me to be right where we are now.

HPL as a front edge post-modernist...

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Platypus Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> HPL was somewhat attracted to 18th century / 19th
> century rationalistic positivism, but was not
> Christian enough to modify that with a dose of
> Christian humility. At the same time he was
> attracted to the supernatural through his love of
> ghost stories and horror stories. He sensed that
> his love of the supernatural was in some sense in
> conflict with rationalist pride and positivist
> ambitions. At the same thing, he sensed that
> rationalistic pride and postivist ambitions were
> in conflict with modern science when viewed though
> an atheist/materialist lens.


Lovecraft is regarded by the kind of people who write academic articles and news media pieces as terribly different from Us, what with his various attitudes.

In fact he and they are in fundamental agreement. They're both sterling examples of the characteristic modern person, Psychological Man, in Philip Rieff's view -- man who wants nothing more than to be pleased as an individual. Rieff wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1967. Lovecraft and the academics and journos stand together over against Rieff's Religious Man, who (as an admirer of Rieff summarized it) "looks to sources of meaning and conduct outside of himself, whether a religion or some other transcendent code."

Lovecraft is regarded by many as a conservative. In some sense, he was, and yet fundamentally he was about as conservative as the Bay Area paraders who wear leather underwear and dog masks. They are in agreement that one doesn't just "discover who one is" (the Sixties formulation) but one "creates" who or what one is: whether an 18th-century Gentleman born out of time, or something superficially very different.

Alex Braun Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I completely agree with you that HPL's belittling
> of humanity was at the core of his cosmic horror.
> I also appreciate the differentiation that was
> made between the ways in which HPL belittled
> humankind, and how CAS illustrated our place in
> the cosmos. However, I don't feel that Robert E
> Howard did this as often, or that was central to
> his work. Conan, Solomon Kane and other human
> heroes in Howard's writings face evil forces from
> beyond head on and would usually triumph. His
> tale: The Thing On The Roof in particular comes to
> mind, when an everyman meets a Lovecraftian evil
> but summons the courage to destroy it. Overall his
> work was about the strength of humankind when
> facing larger and more powerful cosmic forces. I
> know I've read his horror tales that end in doom,
> but I still feel that his theme of the strength of
> man and woman is more central to his work.
Yes, but you are talking about what Roland Barthes, the well-,known Structuralist critic, calls the "action code", only one of several codes that together create the meaning of a text. Howard's heroic characters are, in the authorial view, ultimately futile because they don't fit in a world destined to sink into the depravity of the buffered self. Now, in referencing Taylor's concept of buffered vrs porous selves discussed at great length on another thread, I beg your forbearance, but I think we should weave these two threads together before leaving them aside. We have safely assumed that Smith, Lovecraft and Howard shared the objective of belittling humanity, which you have disputed with regard to REH (more on that later). Their shared perspective of humanity might be called the Outsider's perspective, and it tends to brand these three authors as being nay-saying porous Selves. I think this has contributed to their lasting popularity as well, and I definitely think each of them was really what Taylor defined as the porous self. Dale recently disagrees completely with regard to Lovecraft, by the way. Nevertheless, HPL was too conscious of his cultural and aesthetic traditions to see his own mannerisms as anyhing more than a pose. The same goes for the other two, obviously much more than countless others who wrote for the pulps before fading into relative obscurity. And in their letters we see the relationship between their common sense rejection of humanity in the abstract and the estrangement of the humanistic concerns of realism which their work demanded. Robert E. Howard was if anything even more concerned with belittling humanity than Lovecraft and Smith, if you separate what I've referred to as the action code from the overt criticisms of humanity sprinkled throughout the stories you're referencing, and others.
To support this, consider "The Valley of the Worm", which title alone is emblematic of his main theme of the futility of human existence, as opposed to your idea of good triumphing over evil. In short, Howard's cynicism limits our sympathy for his characters, heroic or otherwise, which is where I see his close affinity with Clark Ashton Smith. The tale is presented as the ancestral memories of James Allison, a modern and transparently buffered self, but Howard practically soliloquizes on Allison's memories of all his past lives as paralleling the inevitable decline and failure of the entire human race. Niord is the name of the mighty warrior-savage whose slaying of a ghoulish, colossal monster is related in purple prose, and who dies of his wounds as Allison's ancestral memory fades out, leaving him in the present day world. Niord's strength and Allison's weakness are in stark contrast, yet, as Howard writes, "His blood is your blood." The descent from an age of Aryan heroism to civilized mediocrity and final weakness and decay is the story of humanity itself. Howard describes the Picts who were slaughtered by the monster as "indisputably white men", and the monster is "white and pulpy", with tentacles, a long proboscis, and "forty eyes". A reference to Lovecraft, maybe? What fascinates me is how this "nauseous whiteness", or in other words the disgusting modern man, undergoes in dying a "transfiguration", a "blasphemous, unnatural transmutation of form and substance, shocking and indescribable", before the walls come tumbling down. What was Howard trying to say here exactly? Is humanity to be despised and belittled precisely because it has surrendered its better nature to the foulness of what Howard can only describe as "cosmic filth"? Yes, which makes Howard even more Ambrose Bierce-like than Smith, I think. Definiely an extreme nay-sayer, and a porous self.

jkh