Re.: Lovecraft and Blackwood; Blackwood, like the early/youthful Lovecraft, was a convinced pagan, but whereas for Lovecraft this early tentative Hellenism was replaced almost immediately with a cynical/satirical Roman conservatism, for Blackwood this paganism was deep, mystical, and abiding. According to Blackwood biographer Mike Ashley, Blackwood’s “The Willows” had its roots in Blackwood’s superstitious belief, expressed in his essay “The Psychology of Places”, that he always found it necessary while traveling to go “through a ritual-like process when establishing camp as if to appease the gods”. And while Blackwood’s menacing atmosphere in “The Willows” -particularly the idea of the threatening/otherworldly aspects of foliage- will likewise pass directly into Lovecraft’s fiction (i.e., in the form of the revenge-device of the falling branch in “The Tree“, and the vampiric/seemingly-conscious foliage in “The Hound“, “The Lurking Fear“, and “The Colour Out of Space“), in Lovecraft, this idea of the alien menace and the pagan sovereignty of nature will be transformed instead into one of the inherent corruption and decadence of nature, and the related corruption of those who would, in the form of Bacchanalian/Herm/fertility rites, attempt to propitiate it.

Re.: “The Colour Out of Space“; “The Colour Out of Space” is, along with “The Shadow Out of Time” and “Dagon”, one of Lovecraft’s premier cosmic works, it is true. But even here you can see inverted examples of Lovecraft’s earlier Hellenism, and evidences of his overriding concern with the topics of "hybridism" or animalistic degeneration: the ostensibly “cosmic” degeneration which affects the Gardner family, for example, manifesting itself in imagery of female corruption, speechlessness, and walking “on all fours” -all aspects of Lovecraft’s “loping”, semi-lycanthropic, cannibalistic ghouls- while the initial vegetative fecundity of the Gardner farm is revealed, in an inversion of pagan fertility imagery, to contain nothing but decay and corruption. It is this overriding -one might say “morbid”- concern with decadence and decay, which reveals the ostensibly “cosmic” Lovecraft as a direct, if unacknowledged, forerunner of such “mundane” horror writers as Robert Bloch and Stephen King.

It is interesting to note that several classical features are also found in Lovecraft’s forerunner to “The Colour Out of Space”, namely “The Green Meadow”, which also features a meteor coming down to earth -this meteor, however, not bringing corruption, per se, but rather a prehistoric “rock-book”, written in Greek of the “purest classical quality”. It is also interesting to note that Lovecraft’s “collaborator” on this tale, Winifred Jackson, was also married to a black writer, and that Lovecraft himself was, it seems, somehow involved with Jackson, whether platonically or romantically. This fact may have some bearing, one thinks, on Lovecraft’s later association of “blacks” with “women” throughout his written corpus -whether in his view of “blacks” and “women” as twin “troubles”, which infested/corrupted the colonies after their introduction to America (“In 1619, wives were sent out for the colonials, and in the same year the first cargo of African blacks arrived-- proving that troubles never come singly” [MW 336]); his association of the “screaming” of “women” with the “howling and praying” of “Negroes” in the context of the destruction of a Southern plantation at the hands of Northern soldiers in “The Rats in the Walls” (“The Federal soldiers shouting, the women screaming, and the Negroes howling and praying”); his association of sexually-active “women“, here described, as Lovecraft was often wont, as “nymphs”, with “a Harlem flat”, in his “humorous” poem, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Modern Businessman” (1917); Lovecraft’s personification of this “blacks”/“women” relation in the person of the “negress” Madeleine de Russy, in his collaborative “Medusa’s Coil” -and his ultimate linkage of “blacks” with “women” in the form of the black/eye-filled (i.e. feminine) Shoggoths, which are responsible for the corruption and Palmyrean decay of the Old Ones’ civilization in Lovecraft’s parable for Western racial/societal decay, “At the Mountains of Madness.” (Lovecraft’s father, too, seems to have been overtly concerned with “blacks” and “women”, cf. Lovecraft’s father Winfield’s bizarre hallucinations that “’three men-- one a Negro-- in the room above [were] trying to do violence to his wife’”. [JOSHI 14])

Re.: “Life is a hideous thing”; To consider only Lovecraft’s statement,

“Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer demoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousand fold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species--if separate species we be-- for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.”

The context in which we find this statement -Lovecraft’s loathsome, extremely xenophobic/racist story of feminine/Eastern decay, “Arthur Jermyn”- is very telling, the “shocking revelations” which Lovecraft hints at, above, not being cosmic at all, but rather mundane- being related solely to the origins of the human species, “if separate species we be”. Lovecraft expressed a similar idea in a 1923 letter of his to Frank Long, in which Lovecraft is discussing the “anthropological background” of Lovecraft’s cannibalistic story of feminine decay, “The Rats in the Walls”:

“No line betwixt ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ organisms is possible, for all animate Nature is one-- with differences only in degree; never in kind… I know that the tendency is to give a separate classification to the Neanderthal--Piltdown-Heidelberg type-- using the flashy word ‘Eoanthropus’-- but in truth this creature was probably as much a man as a gorilla. Many anthropologists have detected both Negroid and gorilla resemblances in these ‘dawn’ skulls, and to my mind it’s a safe bet that they were exceedingly low, hairy Negroes existing perhaps 400,000 years ago and having perhaps the rudiments of a guttural language. Certainly, it is not extravagant to imagine the existence of a sort of sadistic cult amongst such beasts, which might later develop into a formal Satanism. It is all the more horrible to imagine such a thing, on account of the intimations of extra physical malignancy in such a thought. Indeed, I think that certain traits in many lower animals suggest, to the mind whose imagination is not dulled by scientific literalism, the beginnings of activities horrible to contemplate in evolved mankind….” (SL I 258)

Lovecraft’s reference to a “sadistic cult amongst such beasts”, is recapitulated elsewhere, viz. Lovecraft‘s “apes danced in Asia” image in “The Horror at Red Hook”. The phrase, meanwhile, “activities horrible to contemplate in evolved mankind…”, in his letter to Long, above, is directly paralleled by his language in the “Arthur Jermyn” passage also quoted, where he writes of a “reserve of unguessed horrors“ -the phrases “activities horrible to contemplate” and “reserve of unguessed horrors” being equivalent to each other, and both referring, apparently, to sadistic/cannibalistic and/or sexual activities. This cannibalistic concern is reinforced by the initial words in Lovecraft’s “Arthur Jermyn” declaration itself, namely, that “Life is a hideous thing, …”, phraseology which directly parallels that other “hideous thing” referred to in the sub-human and cannibalistic climax of “The Rats in the Walls”, where it functions as a circumlocution for the degenerate de la Poer’s apparent eating of the "plump" Corporal Norrys.

A similar, and closely related, confounding of the cosmic and the mundane, can be found in Lovecraft’s earlier story of mundane cannibalistic devolution/decay, “The Lurking Fear”, in which Lovecraft refers, however incongruously, to “demon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us merciful immunity” -language which prefigures both the “rat”/“scratching” language of Lovecraft’s cannibalistic Atys/Cybele story, “The Rats in the Walls”, as well as the much-celebrated and supposedly “cosmic” introduction to Lovecraft’s (xenophobic/racist) “The Call of Cthulhu“, where Lovecraft writes,

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

Indeed, whereas as a child I had always been inclined to think of Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” as the summit of cosmicism, I was shocked upon rereading it as an adult to find less of cosmicism than I remembered, the story instead being more in the vein of a paranoid/xenophobic/racist rant, a Conservative apocalypse, an aristocratic lament for Western and racial decay. And it is a striking aspect of Lovecraft’s fiction that his earlier work “Dagon” -which in many ways is a forerunner in several respects of “Call of Cthulhu”- is also far more cosmic than its successor; and this is due, primarily, to the absence of Lovecraft’s distracting socio-racial conservative/white supremacist polemic from the narrative.

Cthulhu himself -although ostensibly a cosmic entity, he apparently has a gender- has his origins in Lovecraft’s earlier story of cannibalistic, rural decay, “The Picture in the House” -more specifically, in Thomas Huxley’s erroneous description of Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo, which Lovecraft himself had never seen, Huxley describing a “winged, two legged, crocodile-headed dragon” in the woodcut illustrations, language which parallels Lovecraft’s later description of Cthulhu himself, as being bi-pedal (a ”human caricature“ with “vaguely anthropoid outline“), with “rudimentary wings” or with “long, narrow wings behind“. Significantly, as in Huxley’s original description and in Lovecraft’s later redaction, where they both speak, respectively, about “the imagination” of the cannibalistic plate’s illustrators, Lovecraft will likewise, in “The Call of Cthulhu”, call attention to the “somewhat extravagant imagination” of the narrator in his description of Cthulhu. Noteworthy, too, is the presence of this “proto-Cthulhu” sysygy in relation to the White/Black/Indian-like men and half-man/half-monkey-like creatures in the cannibalistic woodcuts -all images, again, which will be recapitulated in the hybrid/syzygies symbolic of human devolution/decay found throughout the Lovecraftian canon.

Cthulhu’s “hybrid” nature (Cthulhu being described as being akin to “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature”, possessing “vaguely anthropoid outline”) functions both as a caricature and projection of his equally “hybrid”/“mongrel” orgiastic/Bacchanalian/ animalistic followers -as well as a reflection of the traditionalist Lovecraft’s favoring of the Roman, the ordered and the Classical to the chaotic modernism of the early 20th century -Lovecraft using the word “autochthonous” in 1935, in his essay “Heritage or Modernism: Common Sense in Art Forms” (MW 194), to describe the “error” made by modernists in supposing that the “ordered” art of past ages was an artificial construct produced by the genius of each age from modern materials, Lovecraft contrasting modern forms, unrooted in tradition (i.e., “autochthonous”), with Greek art, which “possessed root in Cretan, Egyptian, Persian, and Mesopotamian art.” For Lovecraft, in other words, unrooted, untraditional, and autochthonous art was symbolic of Western modernism and therefore decay.

The “rectangular block or pedestal”, meanwhile, upon which the hybrid/caricatural/ chaotic syzygy Cthulhu “squatted evilly” in “The Call of Cthulhu“, is earlier found, too -this time in a firmly Classical, feminine, and cannibalistic context - in the form of the “carved golden pedestal” upon which the nude sea-nymph Lilith likewise and similarly “squats” in “The Horror at Red Hook” (Cf. “..naked phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background…”; and Cf. “by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently,….” ). Predictably, Lovecraft has this Lilith -the female prototype for those feminine and corruptive “witches” who carry on her traditions- preside over an cannibalistic ceremony of “Dionysiac fury” involving the slaying of the corpulent occult scholar Suydham -a counterpart to the sacrifice of the "corpulent" Cpl. Norrys in “The Rats in the Walls”, and the killing of the fat cook by Cybele in “The Moon Bog”. Needless to say (although I do try to, at length, in my Dark Arcadia), the xenophobic nature of Lovecraft’s narrative in “The Horror at Red Hook” is as implicit and central to Lilith’s Bacchanalia, as it is to Cthulhu’s “hybrid” orgy in the later “Call of Cthulhu”. Lovecraft has simply learned to better disguise the polemical and caricatural origins of his Cthulhu “pantheon” in the latter narrative.

This nude Lilith with her pedestal, is probably another variation on “Shub-Niggurath”, who Lovecraft describes, I think in “The Mound”, as “the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named” -i.e., a consort of Cthulhu -this “Not-to-Be Named” terminology being yet another variation, it would seem, on Lovecraft’s “unnamable” or “hideous thing” terminology used in relation to cannibalistic/Bacchanalian rites. Analogous examples of this male/female consort relation can be found throughout the Lovecraft canon in relation to Bacchanalian/cannibalistic rites, whether the Pharaoh Kephren and his Ghoul Queen Nitocris, the Atys/Cybele myth in “The Rats in the Walls”, the female witches and masculine ghouls of Arkham, the pairing of the Black Man of Arkham with the female witch Keziah Mason, etc., etc., etc. Significantly, Lovecraft, in “The Mound”, refers to Shub-Niggurath as “a kind of sophisticated Astarte”, whose worship, Lovecraft goes on, consists of “subtle orgiastic rites” -i.e. the same cannibalistic/sexual Bacchanalia which we find in "Call of Cthulhu".

Ultimately, then, Lovecraft’s ostensibly “cosmic” entities are less cosmic than caricatural, rooted in the teetotaler/White supremacist Lovecraft’s conservative/anti-Bacchanalian socio-/racial polemic. Earlier and similar examples of such attempts at caricatural transformation -by which Lovecraft attempted to elevate mundane, lycanthropic, or cannibalistic horror to a cosmic/trans-dimensional form- can be found in the early stories “The Shunned House” and “The Unnamable”, stories which reveal the caricatural/ polemical origins of his Cthulhu “pantheon.” The “unnamable” entities in “The Unnamable”, for example, are actually “psychic projections” of hybrid/“sub-human” individuals, described as “apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible.” This psychic projection of the horned, cloven-hoofed creature in “The Unnamable”, is doubly significant, since the creature is a clear caricature/inversion of the Hellenic Pan -a caricature which Lovecraft will build upon via Wilbur Whately in “The Dunwich Horror”. Lovecraft is slowly learning, here, in "The Unnamable”, finding his true idiom of horror in an inversion of his previously beloved Bacchanalian/sensuous Hellenic deities. ( I go ad nauseum into the slow degrees by which he completed this process of polemical/ symbolic inversion in my [in progress] essay, Dark Arcadia: From Arcadia to Arkham.)

I think it is a testimony to Lovecraft’s power as a writer that he was able to communicate his own xenophobic fears and paranoia so seamlessly to the reader without the reader even being aware, and that he was able to elevate that mundane horror which he felt at foreigners and so-called “mongrels”/"hybrids" etc. to a seemingly cosmic level. Indeed, some readers (Anton La Vey, Darrick Dishaw, the Cult of Cthulhu, et al.) have even found themselves able to create an actual “religion” from Lovecraft’s caricatures. But simply because Lovecraft was able to transform his obsession with cannibalism and his Puritan teetotalerism to the rim of infinity, does not mean that they belong there.



Edited 26 time(s). Last edit at 21 Oct 08 | 06:12PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Yes, like I said.

Gavin:

This is a fascinating post. I am guessing from both its length and from the number of edits that it is at least a partial preview of the Lovecraft essay you are writing.

1. While I agree with you that Lovecraft's horror fiction is itself largely a "hybrid" of pure cosmic horror and horror of degeneracy, I do not agree that one can discount the former in favor of the latter. Of course, one element or the other may predominate in a given tale, but I am leery of stating that Lovecraft is "primarily" this or that, or that his concerns are "primarily" this or that. I believe that one reason why Lovecraft endures as a major author who transcends genre (pace Edmund Wilson and others of that ilk) is because of the irreducible complexity of his outlook and concerns.

On the other hand, you seem to be making a case--a good one--for your particular reading of Lovecraft's principal themes and concerns, and that is fine, so long as that case does not reduce Lovecraft to a one-dimensional figure ("Puritan teetotaler", or the like).

2. In your portrayal of Lovecraft as a xenophobe, rather than a cosmicist, I think that you should be wary of reading too much into the themes of degeneracy and xenophobia, or of trying to stretch their definitions too far. Horror, by definition, requires something to be afraid of. To introduce the element of fear into his cosmic conceptions, Lovecraft drew on his own deepest fears. While I would agree that this choice might vitiate the purely cosmic aspect of Lovecraft's horror, I am not sure how else an evocation of horror would be possible. If I understand your argument, however, you question critically the form that Lovecraft's particular mingling of the cosmic and the horrific assumes. Still, isn't the foundation of almost all horror a fear of that which is alien and other, on some level?

3. Although I might draw different conclusions from yours, I like the way that you explore the relationship between Lovecraft's boyhood paganism and his later views. I am hardly expert on Lovecraftian scholarship, but this aspect of his life and thought seems to me to have been somewhat neglected.

4. It is not apparent to me that you give sufficient weight to the aspects of the cosmic and the alien that attract and fascinate Lovecraft on a personal level. Examples abound in the letters. Forgive me for not providing specific references (I am at work and at lunch), but I am sure that you know the passages that I mean: Those that refer to his desire for cosmic detachment, for an over-arching view of the universe from a non-human perspective, as well as those that allude to the "allure of unplumbed space and unfathomed entity" [quoting from memory], etc. A mere provincial, racialist xenophobe would not, I think, express such sentiments, nor would he reflect those aspects of the theme in his fiction.

5. Finally, as an indication of what Lovecraft himself considered to be cosmic horror (and to bring the discussion back in a roundabout way to the subject of this very forum), let's read what Lovecraft himself has to say on the subject:

"A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space".

"Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as the California poet, artist and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith [...]. Mr. Smith has for his background a universe of remote and paralysing fright-jungles of poisonous and iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil and grotesque temples in Atlantis, Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of spotted death-fungi in spectral countries beyond earth's rim. His longest and most ambitious poem, The Hashish-Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; and opens up chaotic and incredible vistas of kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces between the stars. In sheet dæmonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by, any, other writer dead or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale?".

The extent to which Lovecraft's own fiction embodies these stated concepts of cosmic horror will, I think, be a subject for endless debate. After all, some even question Ashton Smith's cosmicism. See, for instance, Steve Behrends' interesting but, in my opinion, ultimately misguided article "Clark Ashton Smith: Cosmicist Or Misanthrope". As I mentioned in my previous post, I suspect that critiques of the cosmicism of others simply reflect the difficulty that we poor, pathetically conditioned and socialized creatures experience when we try to exit "the human aquarium", even conceptually, and for a moment.

Still, based upon Lovecraft's own "canonical" statement regarding cosmic horror, above, mightn't one interpret interspecies breeding, for instance, as a violation of a law of nature, and therefore to embody at least an aspect of cosmic horror, as Lovecraft defines it?

Anyway, to conclude.... For my part, and with all due respect, I am wary of any critical position that creates dichotomies and then demands that we choose between them, however well they articulate the case for their particular view of the matter. That said, I hope that you have found, or will find, a publisher for your stimulating and interesting essay.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 22 Oct 08 | 01:56PM by Kyberean.

Here, here!..I agree.

There is much to be gleaned by deeper analysis of the themes Mr. Callaghan highlights for us, and I look forward to seeing such. To that end it may be worth (if I recall correctly) examining Octavio Paz work on Eroticism and Gastrophony. A more methodical exploration using structuralist or semiotic oppositions would be fascinating.

I am working my way through the essays in the Lovecraft Annuals (Hippocampus Press) and the related Primal Essays, and have recently revisited Mosig's Psychological portrait and Mariconda's Reader Response study. I agree that the theme where "pagan sovereignty of nature will be transformed instead into one of the inherent corruption and decadence of nature, and the related corruption of those who would, in the form of Bacchanalian/Herm/fertility rites, attempt to propitiate it..." is not well explored and deserves to be so.

Peculiarly though, the argument that HPL's cosmicism is somehow a clever means to further a socio-/racial polemic feels like the pot calling the kettle black here. At least the way it is argued above lends itself to that possibility, if Mr. Callghan is indeed the Gavin Callaghan at MySpace with the enormous blog on judeo-christian terrorism (which I found curious). If not, it may simply be that the case for abandoning the cosmicism in HPL needs further development as it is close to a staple of Lovecraft scholarship.

A possible means to avoid "reducing Lovecraft to a one-dimensional figure" , as Kyborean suggests, is to treat the problem at a higher level. If I recall correctly, Tristan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre has much to offer in this regards. Surely violating or exceeding boundaries unifies both the generally accepted role of cosmicism in Lovecraft and the understudied (perhaps underlying?) theme of corruption.

Just today I read the essay on Astronomical Motiffs in HPL's work (Lovecraft Annual 2) and note HPL himself struggled with accepting Relativity precisely because it exceeded the boundaries of day-to-day experience of time and space. Gradually he came to understand and accept the implications and we see them emerge in his work. I don't suspect though that the underlying purpose of incorporating relativity into his later writings was to support xenophobia (especially since "cultural relativity" is denounced today by xenophobics).


Steve

PS. In respect for, and support of, underlying aspects of Mr. Callaghan's premise, I do admit that the work of Garcia Lorca "Poet in New York", written just two years after HPL left NYC, reminded me of HPL's reactions (e.g. Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes)...again there is much to be explored in a multi-dimensional view of HPL. I also have a suspicion HPL was familiar with the Prolegomena To Greek Religion. There are several interesting possibilities here such as the notion of the blood curse and the physical infection of the earth, the relationship of the keres to disease and ghosts (and connections to the flesh), treatment of violations of law and curses, and a wealth of material worthy of further investigation of corruption themes in Lovecraft.

Some great responses here. Am too numb/brain-dead from cashiering all day at work to respond, will write more later...

>>"Peculiarly though, the argument that HPL's cosmicism is somehow a clever means to further a socio-/racial polemic feels like the pot calling the kettle black here."

You are very right.... I think I'll have to tone down my ascerbic reaction to some (or all) of HPL's ideas; after all, the fact that HPL has a polemic (or so I argue) gives me something to write about! But I don't agree with HPL at all. One might say I disagree strongly.

I put up that myspace essay because I was sick of it, and couldn't stand writing it anymore; it's nowhere even near good writing. I wrote it as a response to the anti-Islamic Clarion Fund DVD ("Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West") that I was sent through the mail, and the essay just snowballed. I thought it important to temper all the recent Islamo-Terrorism rhetoric with some notice of Judeo-Christian terrorism through the ages. These things ebb and flow....

A good counter to HPL's reaction to NYC is Vincent McHugh's novel I Am Thinking of My Darling. McHugh was the same generation as Lovecraft, actually kind of resembled him in a way: same pale looks, neat hair, somber black dress. Like HPL, McHugh had dietary issues, too (he seems to have survived purely on milkshakes -surely an analogue to HPL's ice cream fetish) and, like HPL, McHugh was a Providence, RI native. Unlike HPL, though, McHugh was a devoted fan of every aspect of NYC and NYC-life. There are some lovely passages in I Am Thinking of My Darling devoted to that love, which I can't quote from, because my Dad sold the book, unfortunately.

I'm a big fan of Lorca; his NYC poems are noted for their Surrealism. Haven't done a sustained reading of them, though.

Ahh, thanks for the clarification on MySpace content. Out of context it looked a bit like its own polemic.

There are three aspects of your original post that stick with me: HPL's treatment of purity and corruption deserves more attention, it has antecedents and linkages with his classical interests, and the perceived cosmicism may be a technique for furthering an agenda emerging out of his xenophobia which informs his classical/corruption interests and themes.

It is only the latter that seems a stretch - but forge on, by all means. That is how new scholarship emerges.

I enjoyed the McHugh reference.

Lorca - genius. Worth studying in terms of the concept of Duende "The duende that I speak of, shadowy, palpitating, is a descendant of that benignest demon of Socrates, he of marble and salt, who scratched the master angrily the day he drank the hemlock; and of that melancholy imp of Descartes, little as an unripe almond, who, glutted with circles and lines, went out on the canals to hear the drunken sailors singing."


Steve

>>"A more methodical exploration using structuralist or semiotic oppositions would be fascinating."

My main model in my Lovecraft research has been Robert Eisenman's work, particularly his reading of the polemical inversion of the Dead Sea texts in the Pauline New Testament.

>>"but I am leery of stating that Lovecraft is 'primarily' this or that, or that his concerns are 'primarily' this or that. "

My division of Lovecraft's work into "cosmic" vs. "mundane" actually derives from the earlier work of Joshi, who is quick to differentiate between "cosmic" and "mundane" in his reading of the Lovecraft canon, Joshi usually preferring those stories which fall on the "cosmic" side. My research actually began as a study of Lovecraft's use of the "werewolf" motif in his tales, and, as I became increasingly aware of how central the werewolf/lycanthropic/cannibalistic was to Lovecraft's fiction, I began to see my essay as a way to perhaps redress the balance between "mundane" and "cosmic", and to tilt the scale more to the "mundane" side. I'm now convinced, however, that most of Lovecraft's work is non-cosmic/"mundane", concerned with biological (racial) aspects of his socio-political polemic.

>>"I am wary of any critical position that creates dichotomies and then demands that we choose between them, however well they articulate the case for their particular view of the matter."

Of course, we are free to ask the question: can't the mundane itself be cosmic? And that, of course is a philosophical/aesthetic discussion. But strictly in terms of Lovecraft's own definition of the cosmic, the greater balance of his work did not fit his own definition -and so in that sense, if there is a dichotomy in Lovecraft's work, it is Lovecraft's own.

For my part, I do not see Lovecraft's work as dichotomous, but rather revealing a slow progression between two extremes: Lovecraft beginning as a far more cosmic, even progressive, writer ----his fictional polemic, however, gradually increasing as his own fictional and symbolic skills increased in sophistication. His earlier works were more cosmic, in other words, because he had not yet learned to fully integrate his fictional and his political polemics. That is why, in "The Beast in the Cave", Lovecraft is able to declare the loping, lycanthropic hybrid to be "a man!!" -whereas in his later dystopian parable, "At the Mountains of Madness", this recognition is reserved for his civilized Old Ones alone, and not their maleable and bestial slaves.

Don't forget, too, that HPL himself was quick to divide his early stories thematically, lamenting, "These are my Poe pieces, these are my Dunsanian, pieces, but which are my Lovecraft pieces?" (Rough paraphrase from memory.) For my part, in my essay, I tend to divide Lovecraft's writings into two halves: his "white" writings (his early, pro-Hellenic and "poetic"/Dunsanian pieces) and his "black" fiction (his morbid, anti-Hellenic, lycanthropic, and Cthulhu stories). There are of course many tentative steps between these two extremes. I do think, for the record, that Lovecraft's most "Lovecraftian" pieces will someday be found to be those pieces in which one finds an inversion/reversal of Hellenic figures and myths, which seems to be something unique to Lovecraft, and not his cosmic works, which have clear antecedents.

>>"Horror, by definition, requires something to be afraid of. To introduce the element of fear into his cosmic conceptions, Lovecraft drew on his own deepest fears. While I would agree that this choice might vitiate the purely cosmic aspect of Lovecraft's horror, I am not sure how else an evocation of horror would be possible. "

In my essay, I try to introduce examples of horror/weird writers whose choices of symbols and topics mirrors/parallels HPL's own, and yet whose fictional polemic is completely opposite. A good example in Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think, which is written from a bestial/pagan/Dionysian point of view, as well as Dion Fortune's theosophical stories of the occult. But you're right, science fiction/horror does have a strong xenophobic/sexual element. I haven't even begun to analyze the whole field yet.

>>"'Puritan teetotaler'"

I use those words not satirically or nastily, but quite strictly, in reference to HPL's sexual and anti-Bacchanalian/anti-alcohol views, which (I think) are essential to his stories. Wine, as well as cannibalism, as well as lascivious women (and men!) underlay that Bacchanalia which HPL made the summit of degredation in his fiction.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 23 Oct 08 | 08:15PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Quote:

"Puritan teetotaler": I use those words not satirically or nastily, but quite strictly, in reference to HPL's sexual and anti-Bacchanalian/anti-alcohol views, which (I think) are essential to his stories. Wine, as well as cannibalism, as well as lascivious women (and men!) underlay that Bacchanalia which HPL made the summit of degredation in his fiction.

I understand. My point was merely that Lovecraft should not be reduced to such a figure. I realize that that was not necessarily your intention, but I wanted to be clear.

As an aside, Lovecraft remarks somewhere in a letter that he is able to accept Ashton Smith as a social equal, despite the latter's fondness for wine and women. From the tone of the remark, it sounds as if, for Lovecraft, that was quite a magnanimous concession!

For the rest, my view is that the main difficulties and areas of disagreement turn on the definition of "cosmic", in general, and of "cosmic horror", in particular. Having looked again at Lovecraft's comments regarding cosmic horror, and having given the matter more thought since the beginning of this thread, I am less certain than ever that, even using Lovecraft's terminology, the "cosmic" and the "mundane" are rigidly separable in Lovecraft's work. To put the matter differently, I think that the two blend into one another in ways that are messy and difficult to dichotomize (even for Lovecraft himself, who, as we know, was not a very objective or reliable commentator on his own work). Again, for me, that (Dionysian? ;-)) "messiness" merely adds to the richness, complexity, and inherent interest of Lovecraft's fiction.

Of course, that is not to say that it is unworthwhile to try to untangle the skein, a bit, and that is what I gather you are trying to do in your essay. Of course, as you know, I do differ with you in your emphases and your ultimate conclusions. I side rather with Joshi in emphasizing the originality and worth of Lovecraft's more explicitly cosmic pieces, and I remain wary of attempts at a posthumous psychoanalysis of Lovecraft via his tales, a method that veers too closely to Sprague de Camp's techniques to suit me.

That said, I do think that your work is very thought-provoking, and, again, I wish you well in placing it. Let us know where it ends up being published.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 24 Oct 08 | 10:01AM by Kyberean.

If I may digress back to the Barnes & Noble edition for a moment:

The book was out of stock in my area, with no telling when or if it would be back in, so I bought it through the B&N website, since shipping was free. I'll never make that mistake again. They sent it in a plain cardboard box with no padding/wrapping whatsoever. Corners were bumped, top of some pages bumped, dust jacket bumped and dirty...they're worse than Amazon. Luckily, the book was restocked at my local store and I was able to exchange it for a pristine copy, no questions asked. Just a word of warning if you're thinking of buying online.

That's my little rant, now back to the show...

I ordered a book of Jules Laforgue's poetry from Amazon.com once, and I came home from work when it was raining and found the package lying in a puddle of water on the front steps, and the book inside hadn't been wrapped in plastic, either. The book turned out all flooby.

>>"Having looked again at Lovecraft's comments regarding cosmic horror, and having given the matter more thought since the beginning of this thread, I am less certain than ever that, even using Lovecraft's terminology, the "cosmic" and the "mundane" are rigidly separable in Lovecraft's work."

Perhaps that's true. I'll have study HPL's own definitions of the cosmic. I was thinking that the cosmic in Lovecraft was intended purely as a study of cosmic scale- as in certain poems, like "Nemesis", or the depiction of the grand sweep of time in "Shadow Out of Time." Did he really think of his ghouls as being portents of cosmic horror? Or were they a digression/distraction? I'll have to think about that.

But ultimately my instinct is that this dichotomy in HPL's fiction, between HPL's expressed intentions to create a feeling of the cosmic, and his actual writings, which deal more with the "mundane" topics of cannibalism, etc., is not a dichtomy which I or any other critics are imposing on Lovecraft, but rather something which is implicit in his works -often obviously so.

>>"Lovecraft remarks somewhere in a letter that he is able to accept Ashton Smith as a social equal, despite the latter's fondness for wine and women. From the tone of the remark, it sounds as if, for Lovecraft, that was quite a magnanimous concession!"

That's just exactly the passage I was thinking of (with regard to HPL's sexual Puritanism)!! In my essay I try to relate HPL's further description of sexual libertines as "amoebas" or "neanderthals" in this same passage to HPL's related use of hybrid/subhuman and amoebic motifs elsewhere in his works, particularly the scene in Herbert West: Reanimator, where reptilian cell cultures (equivalent to the aforementioned "amoebas"?) are used to grow protoplasmic (proto-Shoggothian) tissues.



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 24 Oct 08 | 07:54PM by Gavin Callaghan.

One final point/clarification: I think the problem is that sometimes there is, or appears to be, a dichotomy between the cosmic horror and the visceral or "mundane" horror, and sometimes not, and that's where the complexity in Lovecraft's fiction lies. Just my perspective, though.

I feel that Lovecraft's own ambivalence about his work stems from his self-perceived inability to achieve the level of cosmic and suggestive horror to which he aspired.

I hope that you are going to deal in your essay with the interesting subject of Lovecraft and his extremely admiring, but at times also scathing, view of Algernon Blackwood's fiction. I've long suspected that part of the reason for the simultaneous fascination and irritation Blackwood held for HPL lies in the fact that both began life as pantheistic pagans, of a sort, but Blackwood, unlike Lovecraft, never "outgrew" it.

Hmm...I am thinking there is a line of investigation here on the "sacred" vs. the "profane", with Lovecraft's brand of the sacred being a sort of negative mysticism (per Lacy and Zani study) and the corruption theme dealing with the profane. The binary opposition of the sacred and profane are a staple of structuralist studies going back to Claude Levi-Strauss. I don't think a parallel really exists in the writings of REH or CAS. Speaking of which, this is a nice site with an orderly forum, I hate to be filling it up HPL centered posts.... Does anyone know a better place (different site) for us to continue pure HPL discussions?

I've been getting books from Amazon for a decade or so. Never a problem, I get maybe 20 per year from them. All of the ones shipped and supplied from them directly are shrink wrapped and have survived rain and snow on our porch. However, sometimes the books are actually supplied and shipped from third parties and these may be have different standards. So far though I have had no problems with either.

Steve

Just reading the study “Queer Tales? Sexuality, Race, and Architecture in The Thing on the Doorstep ", Joel Pace, Lovecraft Annual No. 2, 2008, Hippocampus Press

Lays out a great deal of content on the xenophobic views of HPL and their impact in his work, particularly The Thing on the Doorstep. Builds a pretty convincing case for some of the same points you were making earlier, Gavin. Takes in in some interesting directions beyond what we have discussed here, by pursuing the demonizing of the Other and how it plays out (uniting the cosmic with the mundane).

Lest we treat all this as academic, I have to tell you that I cringed as I read this and I began to wonder how much demonizing of the Other I've fallen into in the heat of the current presidential race.

Steve

sverba Wrote:
> I do admit
> that the work of Garcia Lorca "Poet in New York",
> written just two years after HPL left NYC,
> reminded me of HPL's reactions (e.g. Landscape of
> the Urinating Multitudes

Just copied out some passages from Ian Gibson’s account of Garcia Lorca in New York in 1929; Lorca’s experiences, and his reactions to them, were very different from Lovecraft’s, at least in Gibson's recounting of them. From Gibson's Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life:

“Fernando de los Rios, without whose friendly concern Lorca would not have crossed the Atlantic, must have told the poet about his experiences in the United States, which he had already visited twice, and what he might expect to find in New York. The famous socialist professor, considered by the Primo de Rivera regime one of its most dangerous enemies, had stayed at Columbia, whose size made Madrid’s Central university look like a village school, and knew Harlem and the problems of its Black population. Like all good Andalusians, Don Fernando loved the cante jondo of his native South, and as a result was appreciative of the Black music he had heard in Cuba and New York, which seemed to him to have affinities with it. We may assume that he and Lorca discussed these matters and that, before he landed in new York, the Grenadine poet was already eager to visit Harlem for himself…. (…)

“Lorca always vibrated at great speed, and soon adapted himself to the vertiginous pace of New York, living his first weeks there with great intensity, as his letters home (the only ones we have) demonstrate. The variety of races and religions flourishing on all sides fascinated him as much as they had done Paul Morand and, perhaps not surprisingly, he felt himself not only profoundly Spanish but profoundly Catholic as he strolled down the canyons of New York, between the skyscrapers….

“…..the poet blamed ‘the odious Methodist church’ for the horrors of Prohibition, and came to the conclusion that for him ‘the word Protestant is a synonym for absolute idiot.’… (…)

“As for the Sephardic Jews of New York, that was another matter, and in the synagogue of Shearith Israel (on the corner of Central Park West and 70th Street), with its impressive music and liturgy, the poet saw faces that reminded him strongly, and pleasantly, of various acquaintances back in Granada, where Semitic traits are not uncommon. The service was moving and dignified, but none the less the poet left the building, he told his parents, with the conviction that the figure of Christ was ‘too strong to be denied.’

“Lorca lost no time in starting to penetrate the world of the New York Blacks. Shortly after his arrival he met Nella Larsen, the daughter of a Black father and a Danish mother, who had just published her second novel, Passing. This likeable woman had taken the Spaniard under her wing and together they had visited Harlem. Federico had written home ecstatically on 14 July:

“‘This writer is an exquisite woman, full of kindness and with the deep, moving melancholy of the Blacks.

'She had a party at her house and there were only Negroes. It’s the second time I’ve been with her, because it interests me very much.

'At the party I was the only White. She lives on 2nd Avenue, and from her windows you could see the whole of New York lit up. It was night and the sky was criss-crossed with searchlights The Blacks sang and danced.

'What marvelous songs! Only our Andalusian cante jondo could be compared to them.
There was a boy there who sang religious songs. I sat down at the piano and also sang. And I don’t need to tell you how much they enjoyed my songs… The Blacks are a great people. When I took my leave, they all hugged me and the writer gave me copies of her books, effusively signed, something that the others considered a special favor since she doesn’t usually do it for them. At the party there was a black woman who, without exaggeration, is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. There just couldn’t be greater perfection of features or a more perfect body. She danced by herself a sort of rumba accompanied by the tom-tom (an African drum), and seeing her dance was such a pure, such a tender, sight, that it could only be compared to the moon coming out over the sea or something simple and eternal in Nature. As you can imagine I was thrilled with the party. With the same writer I went to a Black night-club, and I remembered Mother, because it was a place like the ones you see in the cinema and which frighten her so much.’

“…Perhaps remembering De los Rios’s account of his visit to a Harlem church, the poet quickly made a point of attending a service in the Black quarter, accompanied by Sofia Megwinoff, and maybe by then had begun to frequent Small’s Paradise- this was Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age- one of Harlem’s leading clubs, with the Mexican graphics designer Emilio Amero and Gabriel Garcia Maroto. The urge to express poetically the predicament of the American Black, as Lorca understood it, soon made itself felt, and he told his mother and father on 8 August that he had begun to write. ‘They are typically North American poems,’ he explained, ‘and almost all of them have a Black theme.’…

“’The King of Harlem’ was one of these early compositions, although perhaps not the first, and is dated 5 August 1929. The manuscript of the great poem is a labyrinth of crossings out and emendations, and gives the impression of high-speed composition under the impact of intense inspiration. The poem suggests that Lorca had perceived a connection, not only between Black music and cante jondo, but between the predicament of the Blacks, condemned to third-class citizenship in a situation of virtual apartheid- they were not even allowed into the Cotton Club, despite the fact that its best performers were Black- and the Gypsies of Andalusia, harassed by an intolerant society. It seems possible, moreover, that in his invention of the mythical King of Harlem Lorca may have had at the back of his mind the ‘King of the Gypsies’, Chorrojumo, who as an old man could still be seen around the Alhambra when the poet was a child….

“‘The King of Harlem’, written little more than a month after Lorca arrived in New York, constitutes a ferocious attack on the materialistic values of contemporary capitalist society and an impassioned plea on behalf of the Blacks. In its anger and denunciation it goes further than any of the poet’s previous work. Back in Spain Lorca was to say that he believed that being from Granada gave him ‘deep fellow feeling for all those who suffer. The Gypsy, the Black, the Jew…the converted Moor, that we all carry inside.’ This feeling pervades ‘The King of Harlem’ and gives it its power. And when Lorca foresees the day in which Blacks will rise against their oppressors and nature reassert her claims to the land usurped by the city we feel that he is talking not just about the liberation of the Blacks, but about that of all oppressed minorities, including his own homosexual one:

‘Oh Harlem! Oh Harlem! Oh Harlem!
There is no anguish comparable to your oppressed reds,
To your blood trembling within the dark eclipse,
To your vermillion violence deaf-mute in the shadows,
To your great King, prisoner in a janitor’s suit.’…” (pp. 247-57)

As we can see, whereas Lorca’s reaction to prohibition was that it was "Protestant" and stultifying, Lovecraft was an enthusiastic advocate for Prohibition and a lifelong teetotaler. Wheras Lorca reacted with amusement and rejected his own Mother’s racial fears and racism, Lovecraft not only did not reject his mother’s views, but embraced them for the entirety of his life, making them the basis of his fictional polemic and his scientific and social philosophy. Wheras Lorca reacted with sympathy to the Jew, the Black, the Gypsy, etc., Lovecraft regarded both the Black and the Jew as profoundly corruptive influences in the American social, racial, and political fabric. As for Lorca's reaction to the Black woman dancing to the tom-tom drums, ....one can easily imagine what a cannibalistic revel HPL would have made of such an image(as indeed he in fact did --in the form of the dances of Madelaine de Russy which "made all the yaps stare" in "Medusa's Coil".) And whereas Lorca reacted to NYC and America by writing poems composed in an apparent fit of profound and heated inspiration, Lovecraft reacted to the city with profound disgust and loathing -only afterward, when he had finally left the city, composing stories like “The Call of Cthulhu” and others, in which he could embody his paranoid cosmic vision of racial corruption and xenophobic/conservative apocalypse.

True, there is a similarity between Lorca and Lovecraft's mutually antagonistic view of materialism and commercialism, but Lorca was writing from a progressive perspective, while Lovecraft was writing from a conservative/aristocratic one, lamenting the end of royalty and the king. But I've got to read Lorca's poems firthand, my copy of Poet in NY is missing.....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 6 Nov 08 | 08:29PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Do not discard those old Arkham editions because they are becoming valuable. I really HATE the stupid dust jacket art on the new Arkham editions (except for THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM) and the newly publish'd editions lack the recently-discovered definitive text for whut many consider Lovecraft's finest tale, "The Shadow out of Time," which corrected text (from the MS that HPL gave to Barlow) is now included in the Penguin edition THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE, in the Library of America edition and the lovely (though filled with new misprints, which will be corrected in the 2nd edition) Barnes & Noble. I shall soon be ordering the super-luxurious Centipede Press edition, which is now on sale for only $325, I believe.

The definitive text of "The Shadow out of Time" was first published as single volume (with extensive introduction and notes and a jacket reproduction in colour of the art from Astounding) by Hippocampus, and it is such a wonderful wee book. I highly recommend it.

S. T. told me that he hopes the Barnes & Noble edition will, in time, become the "popular" edition, and because of its low price it is ideal for placement in libraries and schools. I wish that Arkham House would reprint their three editions with new jackets. I'd love to see some imaginative Harry O Morris Jr or Jeffrey K Potter art on the cover, each one in which there is featur'd a photo of HPL that has been aesthetically tweak'd.

My favourite editions are the Penguins. When I went on my first journey to Providence, I carry'd all three editions as S. T. gave us a walking tour of Lovecraftian sites. I held those books in my trembling claw as I stood before #10 Barnes Street as S. T. declaimed, "This should be an American literary monument site" or some such thing. I also had my wee Ballentine pb editions of FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH & OTHER POEMS, in which I wrote, "4.33 p.m., 23 Oct. 1707, standing with S. T. Joshi in front of 10 Barnes St, where HPL wrote ye FUNGI." It was a magical moment which comes back to me whenever I open yem Penguin editions, with their autumn in Providence leaves of red and amber stuck between ye pages. Ah, what a great time it is, now, to be a Lovecraftian.

"I'm a little girl."
--H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 26 Jan 09 | 05:27PM by wilum pugmire.