Re: HPL & Nightmares -my essay
Posted by:
jdworth (IP Logged)
Date: 30 October, 2011 12:40AM
Gavin -- My apologies for taking so long to get back to you with the promised comments. As I noted, it has been a hellish week, and this has played hob with my own writing, let alone everything else. However, as this also served as something of a busman's holiday at times, I thank you for giving me something of this nature to relax with.
First, I suppose I should issue a disclaimer that I tend to be rather wary of examinations such as this, for a number of reasons. One is simply that so much is theoretical; theory which is encountering challenge to various aspects (as I understand it) from more recent findings in the fields of neurology and particularly brain development and its role in various functions psychologically. Another is that, from my point of view, they tend to run the risk -- and all-too-often succumb to it -- to become too constrictive or dogmatic in their focus, with the attendant danger of at times forcing (or appearing to force) certain facts to fit a predetermined mold, rather than, at such times, positing their points tentatively, with an acceptance that other explanations may, at least in these instances, be more applicable.
That being said, and (again, given that I am a layman) within the limits of my own understanding of such analyses, I will say that, though there are points at which I disagree or feel the above cautions apply, overall this is a fascinating and thought-provoking essay which deserves to see print (not to mention discussion), and one which I hope will eventually do so.
As for specific points, pro and con:
"Lovecraft’s fictional style may be restrained and traditional in the extreme, but the nightmares within, like bodies preserved in formaldehyde, still preserve within them the outward forms of a genuine and troubling life: even if their meaning, and their inspiration, was ultimately understandable only by Lovecraft himself."
I think this is one of the reasons why Lovecraft's work is so endlessly rereadable: the elusiveness of the underlying significance, which nonetheless is so deftly hinted at.
One thing, though... as I have said earlier in other posts, I think Lovecraft's impulses, and his vision, cannot be reduced too much; the more I read of him, the more complex and fascinating an individual he becomes. Flawed -- at times terribly so -- but nonetheless fascinating.
One point on which I would disagree with you is concerning the essay "Cats and Dogs". I agree with the classification of the essay itself to a great degree, but I would have to remind you that HPL himself notes in his letters that the piece was done more than a little tongue-in-cheek, especially when it comes to such striking contrasts between the two species of animals. While there is no doubt concerning his love for cats, he also notes elsewhere, as I recall, his generally favorable encounters with dogs... perhaps due to his friendly relation with Ms. Guiney's dog, Bronte; and that his comments on the superiority of cats was taken up to feed the controversy which spawned the essay in the first place (given that the majority of those involved were dog-lovers); and that he was fully aware that psychologists placed the two very much on a level as far as intelligence, etc.
I would also that you are stretching things more than a bit in relating the sexual and excremental; not that there isn't a valid connection there to some extent, but I would argue (again) that that "fear of the viscous" goes beyond that, into the repulsion of the amoebal, the undifferentiated, the reduction or "devolution" of "evolved mankind" into a primal substance from which life emerged and diverged. The two are connected... but not always the same; and in especial such strained relations as "sinus/anus" and "vapor/flatulence", it simply strikes me as pushing the analogy further than it will reasonably go. I will not argue entirely against the shoggoth having such a relationship; but, as I said, I think it is reductionist to see it as merely that, rather than also tying in with his obsession about degeneracy and reverse evolution (especially given his views on blacks; as well as his comments about the right to indulge in alcohol: "the 'liberty' and 'right' of a man voluntarily to transform himself to a beast, and in the end to degrade himself and his descendants permanently in the scale of evolution, is equivalent to his 'right' to rob and murder at will" (CE5.18)... all of which also ties in with such imagery as the shoggoths, the animalism, and so on. It is a matter, in my view, of the tendency of such approaches to reduce things to a far too simplistic level.
I would also argue that that "erasure of the line of demarcation" between human and animal is finding more than a little support from evolutionary biology, behavioral studies, neurology, etc., in various ways, indicating that, as many evolutionists tend to state now, there is no difference between human beings and apes; human beings are a subset of apes (or, for that matter, monkeys). Reason may not be as unique to us as we have tended to think, either; it may (or may not) be more highly developed (it is certainly more highly developed in certain regards) in us, but much of the psychological/emotional aspects which go into making up reason, creativity, etc., is present to a lesser or greater degree in a large variety of animals, if usually in somewhat different form than we see it in homo sapiens. While I would certainly not argue for a strictly literal view of the "cult" Lovecraft mentioned as part of the theoretical background for "The Rats in the Walls", there may be less of an improbability (in a wider sense) than the citations from Jones, or your essay, tend to indicate.
Again, while the "digestive trouble" may indeed be related to toilet training, given his family's tendency toward neurotic disorders, serious problems with dyspepsia, abdominal cramps, and the like, is not all that far off as a possibility, either... in fact, it is more firmly supported, I would say. (This does not, of course, mean that the two are mutually exclusive.) This also relates to your quotation concerning the origins of the night-gaunts, for the elided passages make it quite evident that the connection was more likely to his digestive troubles rather than sexual stimulation:
"When I was 6 or 7 I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare in which a monstrous race of entities (called by me "Night-Gaunts" -- I don't know where I got hold of the name) used ot snatch me up by the stomach (bad digestion?) and carry me off through infinite leagues of black air over the towers of dead and horrible cities. They would finally get me into a grey void where I could see the needlelike pinnacles of enormous mountains miles below. Then they would let me drop -- and as I gained momentum in my Icarus-like plunge I wuold start awake in such a panic that I hated to think of sleeping again. The "night-gaunts" were black, lean, rubbery things with bared, barbed tails, bat-wings, and no faces at all.
Undoubtedly I derived the image from the jumbled memory of Dore's drawings (largely the illustrations to Paradise Lost) which fascinated me in waking hours. They had no voices, and their onlyh form of real torture was their habit of tickling my stomach (digestion again) before snatching me up and swooping away with me."
Though you do address this dimension later on, I feel that this may be one of the weaker aspects of the essay, as it again seems to me to occasionally force things into a pigeonhole where they may not rightly belong.
I would also be dubious about Lovecraft not making the connection between such gigantism and the concept of deity, given his reading of such works as Fiske's Myths and Myth-Makers and other explorations of the origins of beliefs and superstitions, not to mention Burke's "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". True, I don't know of any direct evidence he read the latter, but he did apparently read some of Burke's essays, quoted from him, Burke was one of the more notable figures of his beloved eighteenth century, and the connection of that essay with the Gothic, all make it quite likely that he did. (I also don't recall Fiske addressing such gigantism directly, but I would need to go back through the book to be certain. Burke, of course, uses such immensity as one of the keys to the sense of the sublime.)
I think you are on sounder ground with the relationship between the voluptuousness and horror of the nightmare; this seems to me a very strong element in Lovecraft's work, and many of your choices ring true. (There are, however, a couple of points I question. That "lady of the pyramid" was not Lovecraft's, but Thomas Moore's, from "Alciphron", a piece he uses both there and later in "The Nameless City" as referent and resonance; hence Lovecraft's choice of that phrase here is also likely to be for purposes of calling on the eeriness and exoticism of that poem. Also, there is no evidence whatsoever that he ever knew W. V. Jackson was having such affairs with blacks. He may have done, of course, and this may be why she suddenly disappears from his letters, essays, etc.; but so far as I know, such a conclusion is entirely speculative; hence not really "likely".)
In the passage discussing how Susie Lovecraft may have influenced HPL's love of cats, the story mentioned should, of course, be "The Colour Out of Space", not "The Dunwich Horror". (By the way, I'd like to see "Arsenic and Pale Face"; has this one seen print and, if so, where might I find it?)
"Robie" is the correct form here, at least according to the records (see, for instance, the "Ancestor Table", entry 7, in Kenneth W. Faig's "Quae Amamus Tuemur: Ancestors in Lovecraft's Life and Fiction", in The Unknown Lovecraft, p. 30).It is difficult to say when it comes to the tickling here, given HPL's other descriptions of Mrs. Phillips, which present her as something of a "grand old lady"; an image which certainly jars with the idea; yet such grandmothers have been known to "unbend" enough to play in this fashion with their grandchildren. It may, however, be more likely that his mother or -- even more likely -- aunts (as they would not be suffering from the complex addition of having a husband suffering from paresis to color their interactions with their nephew) would have been the source of the tickling, perhaps even at the period where the mourning was ongoing, since a child -- especially a nervous child such as Lovecraft became at that period -- would need, more than ever, affection, comforting, and distraction from the oppressive atmosphere. It need not have been Robie herself who did the tickling for such an association as you posit; for such to feature any female authority figure, at the same time as a mourning for the grandmother was ongoing, would be enough to enable the unconscious mind to conflate the two, as I understand it.
The connection with the Eddy collaboration, though, is problematic, as we have no way of knowing how much of this was Lovecraft's, and how much was Eddy's. Even the phraseology is not certainly HPL's, as Eddy's own writing apparently bore certain similarities. With the Price collaboration we can be certain, having the original; here, it becomes much shakier to use this in such a way.
As a technical point, Zann is not a violinist, but a viol-player; it was not the violin, but the older instrument, the viol, which he played... an instrument which, of itself (as has been pointed out elsewhere) bears some sexual significance. (It is curious to think that his own connection to the violin may have perhaps led -- again an example of deliberate archaism -- to the by-then mainly discarded viol; but one must also not forget Poe's "The City in the Sea": "the viol, the violet, and the vine", l. 23.)
By the way... I think this may be the first time I've come across someone referring to "the maternal nurse" in "The Outsider"... usually, if referred to at all, this figure is seen as male; so this bit adds another layer to a reading of Mollie Burleson's suggestion that the titular figure is a woman.
As for the question concerning "Red Hook"... one might posit that this, too, is an example of Lovecraft's inversion of typical religious iconography -- in this case, the religious doctrine learned "at our mother's knee" which he often disparaged in his letters.
I am somewhat surprised, given the focus on incest and the horrors the unconscious mind breeds from such impulses and ambivalencies, that you didn't mention that part of "A Cycle of Verse" titled "Mother Earth", especially the final lines: "I AM THE VOICE OF MOTHER EARTH, / FROM WHENCE ALL HORRORS HAVE THEIR BIRTH" (ll. 39-40). In fact, that piece itself would be a rich source for some speculations along these lines.
A problem with the later section dealing with coprolalia, etc.: The statement that the cries to the Magna Mater " eventually give way to meaningless jargon: 'Dia ad aghaidh ‘s ad aodann…’†is a bit confusing, if not outright misleading. The Gaelic used there is anything but "meaningless jargon", nor are the phrases which precede it, until we reach the (supposed) pre-human sounds. Nor are they of a coprolatic nature, but rather grounded (as St. Armand and others have demonstrated; see, in particular, chapter V of St. Armand's The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft) in religious or spiritual associations involving damnation, etc. Interestingly, some of this, such as the concentration on blood in one instance, would relate very well to some of your other points, as it refers back to the biblical story of Cain and Abel, which also has some possible interesting relations to what you are saying elsewhere.
In the matter of the tiqueur being a "talented actor", it might be well to bring in Lovecraft's tendency to act out (with his mother, for example) scenes from the drama, often (if my memory of de Camp is correct) with such flair that the neighbors thought they were quarreling.
I question the use of the term "onset of puberty" when dealing with such a period as 1908-09, when he was already 18-19 years of age. This strikes me as stretching things more than a little to support the point. He did, however, have earlier (as well as later) breakdowns, as I recall (and as you in fact mention); perhaps one placed very near the genuine onset of puberty (I would need to look this up to be certain). It also remains very dubious that HPL knew of the connection of sex and his father's illness. There is, at any rate, no evidence to support the idea he was aware of it, hence any such association as you draw here is, while not impossible, shaky at best. I also question the inclusion of the fire incident, as its connection here seems highly speculative, not to say attenuated.
His suicidal ideation also strikes me as much less likely to be connected to this and more likely to be the result of a severe feeling of displacement, a disorientation (as he himself notes) of the structure of his own identity and identity-formulation ("what was HPL without...."). It strikes me much more as a case of rejection of that which was supposed to "feel like" the "real thing" but was not; that which bore (at least in many ways) the facade, but the interior life of which was alien... a description which tallies very closely with his vivid memories of the experience. Infantile these feelings may have been, but I am extremely sceptical it had anything to do with the causes to which you assign it. Such, at least, certainly does not fit the sorts of emotions he connects to that period or those thoughts surrounding the ideation, with the sole exception of the sensual/sexual tone concerning his absorption into the scene: "I liked to think of the beauty of sun & blue river & green shore & distant white steeple as enfolding me at the last -- it would be as if the element of mystical cosmic beauty were dissolving me" (SLIV.358)
On the enlistment... actually, this particular issue continued to rankle him for a very long time indeed, well beyond the writing of "Polaris" a year later; even to the point of noting on his copy of the Tryout (April, 1918) containing his "The Volunteer" (written as a response to a verse by Sgt. Hayes B. Miller): "It is not my fault that my 'military service' was with pen rather than sword. I did my best to enlist in the R. I. Nat'l Guard in the spring of 1917, but could not pass the physical examination. Have been in execrable health -- nervous trouble -- since the age of two or three" (A Winter Wish, p. 171).
I particularly like your discussion of this interrelationship later on (from, say, the paragraph beginning "And while Lovecraft was able to affirm..."). This is both well-argued and strongly supported by Lovecraft's own words, as well as what we have been able to gather through various channels; yet I think you bring some interesting insights to it as well, things which I, at least, have not encountered before, nor have considered in quite the way you address here.
On the subject of HPL's writing being "therapeutic" for him... have you read Levy's H. P. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic? He argues this as well, albeit from a somewhat different angle (focusing more on the ethnophobic and outright racist aspects of Lovecraft's views and writings). If you haven't read it, I would highly recommend it as a fascinating examination. In any case, I tend to agree with this idea, though I think that therapeutic function was a very complex and multilayered one.
The passage from Howard's book, it seems to me, is almost eerily reflective of Lovecraft's views (in "More Chained Lightning") concerning the effects of alcohol on the physical condition not only of the imbiber, but his or her offspring, as mentioned above....
As a side note: I can't help but wonder about certain aspects of such interpretations of these things, given Lovecraft's asexuality in general. It has now been estimated that roughly 1% of the population may be classed as genuinely "asexual"; some of these may have periods of sexuality (usually earlier in their lives), but many do not; and even those that do apparently lose any inclination toward sexuality they possessed earlier. This aspect of things is only just beginning to be accepted as a "normal" (whatever that means) part of the spectrum of human sexuality, and how it affects the development of such symbology in our psychology has yet to be examined with any degree of comprehension.
I suppose that is really all I have to offer at this point. I did enjoy the essay, and would like to see more of your work -- such as those mentioned in the body of this one -- if any have been made available (preferably via print publication). While, as I say, there are some portions where I think things are a bit shaky here and there, the whole is a very interesting and provocative view; and for me the latter portions are almost a model of how to write of such things in a way to pique a reader's interest and engage him in an analysis of the writings in question. I also think that, despite the reservations mentioned, there is a great deal of truth to many of your claims here; and this is something to keep in mind when reading Lovecraft in future (for me, at any rate).
Thank you for a very enjoyable and challenging time.