Saturday, December 26, 2015

HP Lovecraft / A brief survey of the short story

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

A brief survey of the short story part 2:

HP Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft was a master of fantastic horror tales, but the hate which drove his work was all too real.

Chris Power
Wednesday 7 November 200708.00 GMT

It seems at once germane and perverse, when still within a grave's length of Halloween, to dedicate the next post in my survey of the short story to a man who traded in horror, yet whose creations won't ever be costumes clothing the world's trick-or-treaters. That said, if anyone rang my bell dressed as the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath - writhing masses of ropy black tentacles with multiple puckered mouths - or any other spawn of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's furiously dark imagination, I wouldn't be dilatory in dishing out the sweets.

Lovecraft's fictional oeuvre - more than 50 stories written between 1905 and his death in 1937 - is unremittingly bleak. Heavily influenced by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft went several rungs lower than his forebears by eradicating any shred of optimism from his tales of what he called "cosmic horror".

Lovecraft's world, now known as the "Cthulhu Mythos" has gone on to be a common source for Jorge Luis Borges and a host of other, lesser authors. This is a world where humanity exists in the shadow of ancient, monstrous, slumbering extraterrestrial beings who are occasionally woken and to whom we are as insignificant as microbes in a petri dish.

From a purely stylistic perspective, the weight of dread Lovecraft can summon is extraordinary, although when excerpted certain passages can seem preposterously overblown. In their proper context, however, his hallucinatory moments erupt to shocking effect from prose otherwise characterised by its dry, scholarly tone: in this manner, time and again, reason is invoked only to be torn to shreds and tossed into a midden, which is pretty much what Lovecraft thought the world amounted to.

This monomaniacal vision results in a great deal of repetition throughout the stories, both thematically and at the level of the sentence. Discovered journals reoccur; moons are invariably "gibbous" and horrors "eldritch", "unnameable" or "unspeakable", while every character is either headed for a padded cell, disappearing into a gaping maw or recording their final thoughts as murderous cultists descend on them.

But rather than being tedious, these repetitions become instead something insidiously ritualised. The real horror, one that multiplies if several stories are read in succession, is generated by their obsessive reaffirmation of life's mindless cycle. But rejecting Lovecraft's toweringly bleak outlook doesn't preclude appreciation of these compellingly weird fictions.

The most successful of Lovecraft's stories, such as The Whisperer in Darkness (1930) or The Call of Cthulhu (1926), are elaborate in construction and measured in their revelations, generating atmospheres of dread that are difficult to shake off. Add to this their interconnectedness, from the fictional New England settings of Arkham and Miskatonic University (Alma Mater to numerous doomed students and professors) to the rites, tentacled beasts and visions of alien, non-Euclidian cities that recur. What emerges is a unique blending of place and theme similar to Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Paris of Balzac's Comédie Humaine.

In the best traditions of science fiction, Lovecraft was also quick to incorporate contemporary discoveries into his work. At the Mountains of Madness (1931) makes use of continental drift theory, still controversial at the time, while the discovery of Pluto in 1930 was immediately accorded an ominous relevance in The Whisperer in Darkness. Similarly, Planck's quantum theory and Einsteinian relativity were rapidly co-opted into his work and squared with his beliefs, just as youthful readings of Darwin had proven to him the non-existence of the human soul.

There is another aspect to this strange body of work, however, much less discussed than its horror. Following an unhappy period in the mid-1920s living amid New York's immigrant community, Lovecraft's previously amorphous racism became focused and rabid. Michel Houellebecq believes this shift is what impelled the "mad rhythmic pulse of cursed sentences" that streak his greatest works, beginning with The Call of Cthulhu. In these stories the sects that worship his monstrous creations are invariably non-whites or uneducated, rural whites, and Lovecraft asserts - in terms uncomfortably close to contemporary fascist rhetoric - that through their actions these "lower breeds" are hastening humanity's end.

It's a repugnant viewpoint, and presents a difficulty with which anyone who can be said to "enjoy" Lovecraft's work must tussle. Because the forms lurking in his work, albeit draped in phantasmagorical disguise, aren't really beings from beyond, but manifestations of a very human hatred.

THE GUARDIAN