On Lovecraft
The Mule Speaks! - Science Fiction Analysis (Genetic/Body/Cosmic Horror Ontology)
This is my attempt at exploring the major motifs H.P. Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) uses in his stories and how he used them to explore his own writing philosophy. There are three motifs I will explore in this essay, and they will be presented as follows: hereditary degeneration, body horror/snatching/swapping, and cosmic horror.
Many of Lovecraft’s stories center around a character who comes from some proud and old family that’s been well established somewhere in New England (typically Boston, Providence, or Lovecraft’s fictional Providence stand-in, Arkham) and is of considerable fortune and social standing that is able to trace their heritage back to Europe (and sometimes beyond) as a mark of their lay-nobility. How the degeneration first starts isn't always the same. It usually starts with the next generation (the perpetrator of the original sin’s child(ren) or grandchild(ren)) and continues all the way down to the character we find ourselves reading as he slowly becomes aware of his generational fate as well, always after the reader does, adding to the suspense and dread we feel for the character as he helplessly makes his way to his own destruction. This degeneration manifests across the generations in the family members as the story unfolds and we learn the true extent of their decline (in exchange for something the ancestor gained, and what was sacrificed to achieve it). Members may be deformed, physically and/or mentally, and are secluded from the public, lest they reveal the true extent of what will fate all its members someday (some people have more expressive genes than others).
In Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, the degeneration is introduced to the Jermyn family by Arthur’s great-great-great some odd grandfather interbreeding with a princess from an ancient species of white apes unknown to science (who are sophisticated enough to have a royalty and live in stone cities in the remote Congolese jungles). For Lovecraft personally, an unabashed racist, this adds the extra horror of miscegenation, of the dilution and tainting of the bloodline by something of African origin (hmmm…) leading the pure and noble heritage culminating in the latest offspring in the line, Arthur Jermyn, to have to turn to self-immolation as the only resource for redemption; a literal burning away of the impurities that is the family’s degeneration and ancestral original sin. No other story of Lovecraft’s better portrays degeneration on an individualized level than in The Shadow over Innsmouth where all members of the accursed family devolve into fish humanoid creatures that live in the bay of the fictional town the story gets its name from that prey on its townspeople at night and who are the antagonist the protagonist must hide from while he visits the strange coastal place. After the protagonist leaves Innsmouth, he looks into his own family’s past and comes to discover its ties to Innsmouth. The circle becomes complete when he awakens to see he also now the infamous “Innsmouth look” (picture someone looking very fishlike with large bulbous eyes, wide lips, etc.) and he begins to maddeningly crave the sea and to worship eldritch gods beneath its murky depths in underwater cities older than Man. The story ends with the protagonist plotting to break his cousin out of an insane asylum, who has been exhibiting behaviors, urges, and thoughts now akin to those of the protagonist who, earlier in the story, regarded him as insane. His cousin, like him now, has the infamous Innsmouth look too.
Called “the culmination of the hereditary degeneration theme in Lovecraft '' by renowned Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, The Rats in the Walls, is the story of a man learning of family heritage by renovating and moving into his ancestral home in England after his ancestor immigrated to Virginia following some tragic, horrific event befalling his family centuries ago. As the story unfolds, the protagonist and his pet cat are frequently terrorized by hordes of rats inside the walls of the house, scratching moving behind the panels. The cats especially are bothered and frequently run up to the walls, sniffing at and seemingly just staring at the wall, trying to locate where the rats might be on the other side, so close but always out of reach. While this may be another example of the trope of pets being able to sense supernatural phenomena, the fact that a cat, not another human plagued with bias, also senses that which elicits dread in the protagonist and reader, gives credence to his experience (he’s not crazy!). Here, the degeneration culminates with the protagonist learning of the nature of what his ancestor was fleeing from, what he moved to by what he finds in his basement: evidence of an eldritch tradition of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and what can only be described as human farming and cross-breeding with lower degenerate sub-species for experimental and esoteric ends that his family has at the center of for untold eons. Realizing that this is his heritage and what his ancestor was fleeing, he goes insane, and in a way embraces his heritage and destiny. In his madness, he begins to identify with and to sympathize with his family’s pastime, fully embracing the madness and horror of it all, and finally waking up in a padded cell and is told he killed one of his colleagues and was found eating his corpse. Even in his cell he still hears the rats in the walls and their incessant, maddening scurrying and clawing.
There is also the motif of body horror and body “snatching” or possession that Lovecraft plays with in several of his stories. I’ll be focusing primarily on the latter. Us not being the prime mover in our flesh and blood is a disturbing and unsettling idea. The idea of our bodies controlled by other forces or sentient non-human entities is doubly so. (Our conatus has been hijacked!) Ignorance is bliss and if this is going to be our fate, we can only hope to not even be aware it’s happening. Recoil into a new dark age, as Lovecraft himself would say. Films like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are influenced by this idea, but have the added visual medium to really make the horror hit home.
But where do we go when we are victims of a possession of cosmically horrific proportions? Are we prisoners inside our own bodies, helpless spectators witnessing whatever the possessing forces choose to do with us, or are we whisked away to some psychic jail cell outside Space and Time? In The Shadow out of Time, the protagonist gets body-snatched by creatures who visited Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. They learn about other civilizations and beings by traveling through time, swapping bodies with other sentient beings to learn about their society and acquire as much knowledge as possible before swapping back. While held hostage in the distant past (their present) in one of the creature’s bodies, the protagonist is forced to write down all he can about his own time and race. He is, in turn, allowed access to their libraries where they have cataloged all they have gathered across time, knowledge of all the species they have swapped with. A Faustian exchange, of sorts, in exchange for his cooperation. When they are done, the protagonist is swapped back into his own body, and is left thinking of the whole ordeal (the last several years living as an alien in Earth’s ancient past) as a hazy nightmare. Convinced what happened to him wasn’t just a dream, he sets out to find proof, leading him into the remote Australian Outback. There, he discovers an ancient underground library made by the body-swapping creatures of texts where he recognizes one text in his own handwriting despite not being able to read the language it’s written in. His experience has been validated, but at what cost? Is this the freedom that the truth is supposed to give us? This truth won’t get him his job back. It won’t rebuild his family either. Was the protagonist better off just writing the event off as one prolonged fugue state, then continuing on with the rest of his life? Since we are defined by our memories, the protagonist chooses to define himself this way, as someone who experienced unworldly horrors at the hands of cold, indifferent intelligences wantonly inflicting trauma upon those they select in the pursuit of knowledge.
We find another example of a victim’s experience from body-swapping validated in The Thing on the Doorstep where Dan, the protagonist, helplessly watches the slow decline over the years of his close friend Edward Derby at the hands of his wife who plans on permanently switching bodies with her husband in a plan to live forever. It turns out that Ed’s wife is really her father Ephraim Waite who swapped bodies with his daughter when she was younger. She was his first victim and Ed is to be his next. Ed eventually discovers this and kills her/him to save himself. Unfortunately, he missed the final crucial step of burning the body, Ephraim’s soul’s connection to this world, allowing the permanent swap to occur. Where did Ed go? Well, in past swaps, he and his wife did just that. This time was no different, except now his wife was a three-month-old corpse. Miraculously, Ed is able to use his wife’s corpse to write a note and hand deliver it to Dan, a decaying abomination of a sight that finally collapses on his doorstep, hence the story’s title. In the note, Ed explains his fate and requests, as his dying wish, that Dan kill Ephraim, now in permanent possession of Ed’s body. Dan does and is arrested where the story begins. It is the sense of helplessness that we see Ed Derby express throughout the story as his fate begins to unfold. Both him and the reader slowly realizing what is being planned for him and how there is nothing he or anyone can do to prevent its culmination is the same sensation of dread elicited when watching a prisoner be walked ever so slowly to his own execution.
Herbert West - Reanimator is Lovecraft’s Frankenstein story in which a scientist revives human remains (decapitated head, severed limbs, headless bodies, etc.) back to some semblance of, or a state imitating, life. The reanimated are thrown into a cursed living death. They are the “living” embodiment of the Natural Law in violation; unholy creatures that have had their divine nature stripped from them through the natural process of death, but still walk the earth after their divine nature has transcended, leaving their material forms behind. Because of this, they are like animals, material beings incapable of communing with the Divine, especially since their divine spark has gone out and their very existence violates the Natural Order. They are locked out from Paradise a second time, and they have done nothing wrong. What else are they to do? They are left with one option: vengeance upon the man responsible for their suffering. They are successful in executing their revenge. They tear West apart in front of his friend, the narrator, while he is left unscathed, showing an intention in who they are killing and that the reanimated are not simply a horde of mindless zombies indiscriminately attacking anything they see.
Both of the last two stories discussed (The Thing on the Doorstep and Herbert West - Reanimator) deal with retribution for the afflicted, where all the other stories mentioned in this essay leave the character victimized without recourse. The reanimated kill the man responsible for reviving them and Ed Derby is avenged by his friend Dan as his dying wish, but they both end differently regarding whether their retribution has been fully carried out. The reanimated in Herbert West - Reanimator kill West. They then descend into the underground. What left is there for them to do? On the other hand, the ending of The Thing on the Doorstep, leaves Dan in police custody praying that Ed’s body be cremated, ending Ephraim’s plans, finally killing him. Otherwise, him committing a capital crime and the fate of Ed would have all been for not. It is the uncertainty here that makes the horror experienced in its totality. “What if it doesn’t work?” is always the question we ask ourselves before endeavoring to accomplish anything that can make or break us in a given moment. Here, the question carries a special weight.
All the characters in the abovementioned stories that went through a body swap/snatch were victims. It was something that happened to them that was done by someone or something else. Lovecraft inverts this in Through the Gates of the Silver Key where the protagonist Randolph Carter snatches the body of an snouted, insectoid-like alien being who is also a previous incarnation of Carter’s. Called the wizard Zkauba of the planet Yaddith, he (Lovecraft refers to the being as a “he” so I will too) begins to have nightmares of “an entity of absurd, outlandish race called “Randolph Carter'' on a world of the future not yet born” as the first signs of possession. Zkauba does just as the protagonist from The Shadow out of Time does in response to the same affliction (nightmares of someone else possessing them), he researches the matter and concludes that this Randolph Carter is not only a future incarnation of himself, but now also inhabits his own body alongside him. For untold eons, they struggled for control of Zkauba’s body with Carter at times being the dominant force, allowing him the time to find a way to get back to Earth and in his own form. At other times Zkauba was in control, during which he would endeavor to destroy Carter. Eventually, Carter remained in control for a long enough time to journey back to Earth and time his arrival to place him back in his original time. While on Earth, Carter disguises himself as an Indian swami and meets up with several of his confidants and associates to explain his story as well as to reclaim his estate, as it is thought Carter has died. At the end of his recollection, Carter reveals himself, but Zkauba suddenly re-establishes control over his body and returns to Yaddith, leaving Carter’s friends horrified at their encounter. A year passes after the incident and Carter’s fate is still left unknown. It is not by cosmic horror, malevolent forces, or even indifferent forces for that matter that does Randolph Carter in, but his own hubris. It is he who starts this ordeal that ends with his own (presumed) destruction. He is even warned, “to be sure of his symbols if he ever wished to return from the remote and alien world he had chosen, and he radiated back an impatient affirmation.” Like Icarus, Carter flew too close to the Sun.
Lastly, the motif Lovecraft is most famous for is cosmic horror. It represents the combination of the ideas of sentient beings existing elsewhere in the Grand Cosmic Order (includes our universe, other universes, other dimensions, and the dreamworlds) and the cruel indifference of Mother Nature taken to its logical conclusion. As shown in The Shadow out of Time, Through the Gates of the Silver Key, and At the Mountains of Madness, there are whole species of eldritch, alien beings more powerful than humanity whose individual members live longer than the human species has existed. Sentient entities like the ones presented in these stories show a cold indifference to human life in general. It’s nothing personal, they might tell us. Is it personal when we eradicate an ant hill from our backyards to make it safe for our kids to play? Do we consider the relationships the ants formed with each other and the work they all collectively put into creating their hill and keeping their queen safe? Do we even care? The indifference we show the ants and how we treat them is the same as how these entities show and treat us. Part of the horror also stems from how vastly different and foreign these entities are, in both anatomy and psychology, to human beings and our conceptions of life. Even if these entities were to master the English language, we still wouldn’t be able to communicate with them because our frames of reference are just so different. Having been shaped by biologies, socio-cultures, psychological profiles, and histories so different from ours they may as well be considered different fields of knowledge entirely.
Lovecraft himself gives us a definition for what cosmic horror is in a 1927 letter to the editor of Weird Tales magazine where most of Lovecraft’s stories were published during his lifetime: “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large… To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.” At its core, it is this “essence of real externality” that Lovecraft uses to elicit the reactions and feelings from us that we label cosmic horror. In the “vast cosmos-at-large,” there are forces that by whose very existence we can only account for calling them gods and pray we do not draw their attention. These forces, by simply existing and manifesting their nature, is enough to bring annihilation. They do not think about the consequences of their actions. They do not act out of spite or pity or from some code. To even think such things is a fruitless attempt at projecting human traits on things that are not human, to say the least. Simply by coming into contact with these forces or entities is enough to induce psychosis and sometimes even death. They were, are, and always will be.
A part of a science fiction writing series titled “The Mule Speaks!”
Sources
H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction. Barnes & Nobles, Inc., 2011.