Scott:
Quote:Joshi has revised his opinion of CAS in the latter's favor since writing those remarks, and has done invaluable work in unearthing CAS' juvenile fiction.
I figured that this must be the case, and I'm glad to hear it. I've read somewhere--perhaps in this forum--that Joshi was first exposed to CAS's stories via the science fiction in
Tales of Science and Sorcery--one of CAS's poorest collections--and that this initial negative impression somewhat tainted his opinion of CAS's tales as a whole. No matter. It would be nice, though, if, for the forthcoming reprint announced above, Joshi would revise his comments according to his current perspective. I suspect, though, that such revisions may be too expensive to undertake, even if Joshi were inclined to do so.
Quote:Regarding weird fiction and skepticism: Bierce was also a skeptic, as were REH, George Sterling and of course CAS (who was even skeptical of skepticism itself! William Hope Hodgson was also a free thinker. As for Machen and Blackwood: while both were believers, neither was by any means a conventional believer, while IMO the ghost stories of M. R. James reveal a tension between an outward semblance of belief and inner doubts as to the existence of a just and loving deity overwatching mankind. James also stated for the record that he had no particular belief in ghosts, although once again this is subject to some doubt.
Perhaps I should have stated my point more clearly. Lovecraft claims, in essence, that mechanistic materialists write better weird fiction than do believers in the "occult" and the like because, for the former, the violations of the "laws" of ordinary space and time seem more stupendous to those who believe in them, as opposed to those whose sense of reality is more fluid. For the latter, there is no real sense of the "weird", because the "weird" depends first upon a norm, and then on a violation of that norm. In any case, I was not referring to "skepticism" as it pertains to conventional religious belief, at all. In addition, the point isn't to array the materialists against the non-materialists, but to demonstrate the patent absurdity of Lovecraft's formulation. I haven't the slightest doubt that mechanistic materialists write excellent weird fiction--Lovecraft, for instance!--but I would hardly draw a line between the quality of work of either party based upon of their view of the nature of reality, as Lovecraft does.
A propos of the particular authors in question:
Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood believed in occult phenomena and in a spiritual dimension of existence. Both inveighed often in their writings against the persistent materialism of the age.
M.R. James stated for the record that he was open-minded on the subject of ghosts' existence, and that he would impartially consider any evidence on the subject brought before him. As the preface to the Oxford U.P. collection
Casting the Runes indicates, however, in private, James may well have admitted to believing in ghosts. Further, as a practicing, believing Xtian, he would also have to accept, among other dogma, the doctrines of the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, either of which by itself would suffice to place him within the non-mechanistic materialist camp.
As for CAS himself, he was certainly a skeptic of any conventional dogma, but that includes mechanistic materialism, as his letters and essays make abundantly clear. (It's too bad that, as his letters reveal, CAS was so reluctant to debate with HPL on the subject. Perhaps CAS realized that, if he did so, he would receive a twenty-page screed on the subject via return mail, and preferred simply not to bother!). CAS's open-mindedness on the nature of reality itself makes me quite reluctant to place him among the "non-believers" as I have used the term here (again, defined as materialists who believe that the universe proceeds according to fixed, natural laws discernible by human reason, and that that is all there is to the matter).
Daniel:
Quote:HPL churned out some pretty mediocre stuff under his own name, as well [...]
And Joshi would be the first to acknowledge that fact, as his biography of HPL makes plain. Joshi even goes so far as to state that (I'm paraphrasing from memory here), if HPL had stopped writing before 1926, he would most likely scarcely be known today--much
too harsh a judgment, in my view. In the end, though, I gather Joshi feels that HPL wrote enough stellar fiction over his entire career that, overall, the balance is very much in HPL's favor. At the time Joshi wrote his comments on CAS in the Lovecraft biography, he seems not to have felt that way about CAS's fiction. I'd be interested to know what proportion of CAS's fiction Joshi had read when he wrote these comments.
A propos of Lem and CAS:
Solaris is all that I've read of Lem, so, as I mentioned, I cannot comment on any other works of his. If the books and tales you mentioned are even closer in theme to CAS than
Solaris, however, then I'll eagerly seek them, as the parallels between
Solaris and CAS's perspective are extremely obvious to me.
An aside regarding
Solaris and Tarkovsky's film of the book: Tarkovsky's compulsion to change the entire theme of
Solaris from the possibility of understanding of, and contact with, something utterly alien and inhuman to a study of--once again--human relationships suggests that either some individuals simply have no understanding of the theme of the cosmic and the non-human, or find it so alien, and perhaps terrifying, to their sensibilities that, when they get their hands on a work dealing with that theme, they must mutilate it almost beyond recognition.