Re: Azathoth gnawing hungrily
Posted by:
Gavin Callaghan (IP Logged)
Date: 5 October, 2009 05:01PM
from: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath:
"...that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes."
HPL's use of the "gnaws", here, in relation to his ostensibly "cosmic" Azazoth, is both typical, and revealing. Throughout HPL's corpus, we find things like eating, hunger, and most especially cannibalism (very often of portly men), are used to denote both HPL's supposedly "outside" entities, as well as HPL's more "prosaic"/mundane lycanthropic Ghouls. Thus we have the fat chef sacrificed to Cybele in "The Moon Bog", the portly Suydham, sacrificed to Lilith in "Red Hook", and the portly Cpl. Norrys, eaten by de la Poer in "The Rats in the Walls".
Thus, De la Poer’s literal descent into madness in “The Rats in the Walls†is presaged by nightmares/dreams about eating, not only the nightmare about attacking/consuming the shepherd in “the twilit grotto†(in which an almost sexual desire and loathing are equally intermixed) but also in de la Poer‘s “vision of a Roman feast like that of Trimalchio, with a horror in a covered platter†-Lovecraft here combining the late-Roman themes of the cannibalistic Seneca, and the homosexual excesses of Petronious Arbiter -a writer who, Lovecraft says elsewhere, “shews effectively vulgar patois of Imperial Rome.†(MW 426) (It is significant here, that by citing the Semitic Trimalchio, HPL is able to combine his usual anti-Jewish polemic with his overarching polemic against incipient modernism and resulting chaos/decay.) Lovecraft will mention a similar such murderous feast in “Imprisoned with the Pharaohsâ€, in which he cites a myth to the effect that “subtle Queen Nitocris….once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water gates…â€
In Lovecraft’s abominable, but very revealing essay, “Cats and Dogsâ€, too, we find that much of HPL’s loathing of dogs likewise stems in part from their eating habits. As Lovecraft observes: “watch a cat eat, and then watch a dog… The dog… is wholly repulsive in his bestial and insatiate greediness; living up to his forest kinship by ‘wolfing’ most openly and unashamedlyâ€. (MW 551). HPL’s association of dogs, cannibalism, and cosmicism, finds its most complete early expression, perhaps, in the climax of Lovecraft‘s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohsâ€, in which the ghoul-Queen Nitocris, along with her husband Kephren, pray before a cannibalistic sphinx-like god who, Lovecraft writes, licks “its chops in the unsuspecting abyss, fed morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist.†It is but a small step from there to the cosmic Azazoth.
Lovecraft’s cannibalistic Martense descendents in “The Lurking Fearâ€, too, when they are not cannibalistically preying on others, or breeding underground (a mixture here, as elsewhere of sexual and eating themes), then they eat each other. And it is interesting, given HPL’s repeated citing of (an almost sexual) desire for (often cannibalistic) food in his writings, that this idea represents an almost textbook example of what Ernest Jones, in his book On the Nightmare (rev. edition, 1951), terms the "second, oral stage of infantile sexuality" (pp. 148-151, passim).
Indeed, nearly every recurring symbol or theme in Lovecraft’s fiction: night flights, attic trapdoors or secret basement doors, thunder and lightning, -even the “tickling†of the Night Gaunts in HPL’s childhood nightmares (with its mixed notions of sensuality, childish titillation, and loathing) has its counterpart in what Jones terms the “infantile stage†of sexuality. It is almost as if HPL was frozen at this infantile stage, somehow- perhaps by the death of his grandmother Robie Phillips in 1896, a death which HPL somehow transferred to the “shadowy†figure of his father. (It is striking that HPL will seemingly refer back to this incident as late as the writing of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth†in the 1920’s, in which the “immortalâ€, 80,000-year old grandmother figure of “Pth’thya-l’yiâ€, haunts the narrator’s dreams.) And it is striking that Lovecraft -despite his outward mannerism and rigidly realistic narrative form- is able to encapsulate whole even the most basic archetypes of nightmares, and even their unconscious infantile-sexual bases, on the written page- almost as if spat there, without digestion, directly from his seething unconscious.