© Edward Moore 2015
patristics@gmail.com
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
~ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.
~ Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.003
The study of philosophy offers many gifts, not least the ability to wax abstruse on any given topic. Exotic jargon that often sounds like (and usually is) a foreign language, and is sometimes poetical -- in a Dada-Surrealist fashion -- enables the philosophical adept to raise even the most mundane topic to the sublunar sphere, where misty daimons dwell, if not to the Ogdoad itself. At its best, philosophy offers a virtually inexhaustible mine of highly elastic tropes, which the creative thinker may use for the sake of elucidating difficult topics, or to make boring ones seem worthy of intellectual engagement. In rare instances, philosophy, or philosophical tropes, may be used to demonstrate the artistic depth of a writer working in a genre traditionally considered "low brow" or at least not up to the standard of literature (whatever that means in our age of thumb-tapping textese productions). Traditionally, horror, science fiction, and fantasy (with rare exceptions) have been ignored by academic critics and theorists, while tales of individual men and women and their often petty trials and tribulations -- works presenting the private troubles of mediocre individuals with all the gravity of world-historical significance -- are still being produced, read, and discussed. The reading of such works does not -- is not meant to -- produce disorientation or the sense of another world pressing upon the consciousness of the reader, demanding comprehension and the bestowal of meaning. Such an experience would require critical engagement with the work resulting in an interpretation (not mere commentary or "book chat," as Gore Vidal was fond of calling the superficial jawing about boilerplated volumes by M.F.A.s at cocktail parties) producing a communicable meaning that goes beyond the familiar, the accepted, the comfortable. Of course, the would-be critical reader requires works that produce that disorientation, make that demand for engagement.
Back when the French "New Novel" was new, Nathalie Sarraute, in the seminal texts Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion (English translations 1964) called for a compositional technique that would "[plunge] the reader into the stream of those subterranean dreams of which Proust only had time to obtain a rapid aerial view ... [and] would give the reader the illusion of repeating these actions himself, in a more clearly aware, more orderly, distinct and forceful manner than he can do in life." H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) went beyond any previous writer in his genre, except perhaps Poe, in achieving the type of technique described by Sarraute. (Of contemporary writers of weird fiction, only Thomas Ligotti has succeeded in enveloping us in his soft, dark, decaying, insane universe.) Talented writers of weird fiction (or "dark fantasy," as I have seen a recent volume of Lovecraft's tales labeled) compose works that lead our consciousness away from the familiar, the mundane, and place upon us the burden of meaning; of not being shown or told, but being involved in the unfolding of an idea generated by the author for the sake of those who come after: the craftsmanly readers who will work up the idea into a discursive structure extending beyond the author into the realm of perpetual creativity. Works by such authors, as Sarraute puts it, "break away from all that is prescribed, conventional and dead, to turn towards what is free, sincere and alive, [and] will necessarily, sooner or later, become ferments of emancipation and progress." The responsive reader of such works is caught up in the act of creation, of experiencing meaning privately, and then expressing this meaning publicly, through discourse -- that is, criticism and interpretation.
Theory is of little help in this endeavor (unless we approach theory as just another form of creative writing or, at its best -- as in certains works by Derrida, for example -- literature), for meaning is not discovered but bestowed; analysis of a linguistic structure will not reveal meaning, it will only display the operation of linguistic signifiers. It is only through intellectual engagement with a work of art that meaning is bestowed; and this is accomplished by the reader when he chooses the themes that inspire him emotionally and motivate him intellectually, and then give voice to the experience. According to Wittgenstein, certain inspirational or motivational themes cannot be expressed logically -- such as ethics, religion, and metaphysics -- and are therefore uncommunicable and hence "nonsensical." But these supposedly unsayable and silly things are precisely the potent themes of literature: themes that draw the reader forth, into the realm of communication and creativity, and demand what Emerson called the "power to connect ... thought with its proper symbol [and] to communicate it without loss" (Nature, chapter IV). If philosophy in our time has "suppressed its own creativity," as Lavine once remarked, and is now overly technical and largely irrelevant, disconnected from the transcendent, or at least escapist, yearnings of humankind, I believe philosophy -- or philosophical tropes -- can still be used creatively for the elucidation of literary art -- for the extension of that art into the realm of perpetual discourse (the "ongoing conversation of Western Civilization," in Rorty's memorable words) where it belongs. Art for art's sake; philosophy for art's sake.
One of my favorite tropes is found in Plato's so-called Unwritten Doctrines (teachings that he communicated in private lectures to his best students, and which were recorded only by his successors in the Academy) -- the metaphysical schema of the One and the Indefinite Dyad, and the active creative force called the Demiurge (craftsman) or World-Soul. I spent some of the best years of my life studying and interpreting the various forms of Platonic philosophy (no pun intended) from the early Academy to the Neoplatonic schools of both pagans and Christians. While the discipline of this specialization kept my mind sharp, despite my devotion to the rites of Bacchus, the only intellectual benefit I received from this recondite occupation was a fund of tropes that continue to ring in my mind like silver coins (as someone said of the poetical lines of T. S. Eliot). So I shall put some of them to use, as I discuss here one of my favorite writers of fiction, H. P. Lovecraft. Here I am, about ten years ago, giving an academic account of Plato's metaphysics, in an article on "Middle Platonism" that I wrote for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (www.iep.utm.edu/midplato/):
Drawing upon Pythagorean mathematical theory, Plato began his metaphysical schema with a pair of opposed first principles, the One and the Indefinite Dyad. The One is the active principle which imposes limit on the indefinite or unlimited Dyad, thereby laying the ground for the orderly construction of the cosmos. Through this influence of the One upon the Dyad numbers are generated, that is, the Decad, which in turn generates all other numbers. The most important of these primordial numbers is the tetraktys, numbers one through four, the sum total of which is ten, the Decad. The tetraktys also was interpreted by Plato as generating the four mathematical dimensions, with the number one corresponding to the point, two to the line, three to the plane, and four to the solid. Between the Ideal-Numbers or Decad Plato places the World-Soul, corresponding roughly to the Demiurge of the Timaeus. The World-Soul mediates between the Ideal realm and matter, projecting the four dimensions on base matter in order to form the four elements, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth.
The Indefinite Dyad -- to get right to the trope -- is the unruly or partially formed idea that the author, or One, must bring under some type of control, for the sake of communication. The idea, once articulated through careful consideration and revision, shows itself to be not a monumental concept, but a discursive structure, quite like Plato's mathematical -- or, more precisely, geometrical -- dimensions. This structure, despite the efforts of the author, is -- due to intrusions of intertextuality and the anxiety of influence -- constantly shifting in a maddeningly elusive fashion, as related ideas and notions are brought in for clarification or accentuation; sometimes adopted, sometimes rejected; at other times (and this most interestingly) faced up to and "exorcised" in an agon with a highly influential predecessor, for the sake of the author's originality and continued development (a process that Harold Bloom has mapped out so well). If the author stays the course, and does not get frustrated, he or she will produce a unified text that is readable and interpretable, and does not wander lamely in a solipsistic sphere of endless self-referentiality; but this requires the author to acknowledge -- even agonistically -- his influential predecessors and to relinquish some meaning-generating control to the reader (the Demiurge or World-Soul).
A Platonist (or Neoplatonist) of the third century C.E., Plotinus, considered the One (author), however, to be quite the solipsist. Alone with itself, the One "overflowed" its overabundant power, and the Intellect (a sort of mediator between the mad genius of the One and its sober interpreter, the World-Soul) set about arranging the primal cosmic ideas into some type of orderly whole. Here is Yours Truly in academic mode again, in another article, on "Neoplatonism," for the same publication (www.iep.utm.edu/neoplato/):
Plotinus declares that the One is 'alone with itself' and ineffable (cf. Enneads VI.9.6 and V.2.1). The One does not act to produce a cosmos or a spiritual order, but simply generates from itself, effortlessly, a power (dunamis) which is at once the Intellect (nous) and the object of contemplation (theôria) of this Intellect. While Plotinus suggests that the One subsists by thinking itself as itself, the Intellect subsists through thinking itself as other, and therefore becomes divided within itself: this act of division within the Intellect is the production of Being, which is the very principle of expression or discursivity (Ennead V.1.7).
It is at the level of Being -- that is, the state of existence in which each existent is fully engaged in contemplating reality and acting in accordance with its predetermined end or telos -- that the World-Soul or Demiurge (or reader, to maintain the trope) goes beyond simple contemplation and enters upon the more arduous and personal task of creating. The Intellect, in Plotinus' schema, is rather like an editor, arranging material to achieve the greatest clarity possible; this involves, as Plotinus writes, thinking as an other -- that is, the author. Every fully engaged reader is both editor and critic / interpreter. In order to bestow meaning upon a literary work, we choose the themes -- expressed through dialogue, action, and occasionally direct commentary from the narrator -- that resonate most powerfully with us; and by contemplating the embedded metaphors, metonymic or synecdochal entwinings, and lurking whispering symbols, we arrive at a personal meaning, or set of meanings, which, when communicated effectively, becomes an authoritative reading -- a work of literature in its own right.
The idea that literary criticism is itself a form of literature was put forth by Geoffrey Hartman, in his quite literary scholarly study, Criticism in the Wilderness (1980), which had an immense influence upon me as an undergraduate majoring in Comparative Literature. It is now commonplace to consider every act of reading as a creative act. When one critically interprets a text, one is not only clarifying whatever meaning one has found there; one is also extending the boundaries of that text to include other related ideas and concepts -- including one's own moral, ethical, and aesthetic judgments -- and thereby producing a new text that is a work of literary art in its own right. Meaning, here, is not discovered through a careful reading of the text; rather, it is bestowed upon the text by the creative reader / critic / interpreter. The classic, or Classical, notion of interpretation, in Aristotle's sense of tekhnê hermêneutikê ("art of interpretation") does not reveal the meaning of ideas or events, but provides an understanding of how these ideas or events are formed and come to appear before us. This notion of interpretation is not creative or artistic, but scientific; and art, especially literature, is not science: a lesson we should have learned long ago when the New Critics -- "fundamentally mechanics," as Gore Vidal labeled them -- attempted to separate the author from the text, "solemnly playing with what has been invented by others for use, not analysis" (Vidal, "Novelists and Critics of the 1940s." 1953) -- in short, these "critics" reduced the text to a scientifically observable object, not a vital expression of a creative mind. As Paul Ricoeur explained, in The Conflict of Interpretations (1974), interpretation (hermeneutics) is a set of discursive statements leading to a grasp of the real through meaningful expression, not a description of impressions coming from the things themselves. Description is the task of philosophers and scientists; literary artistists -- including critic-interpreters -- engage in truth-saying, they express meaning.
We are becoming aware now, with the advent of the "digital humanities," that a scientific approach to literature can only reveal historical trends, statistics, not insight into the meaning of texts, which is always personal -- and personally creative, or demiurgic. For those with a certain critical mindset (I am being kind) in which texts are viewed as artifacts to be studied instead of works to be contemplated -- while the persons who produced these texts are relegated to the status of cultural scribes instead of prophets of their own unique vision -- the impersonal or even anti-personalistic program of "computational criticism" or the "digital humanities" will have great appeal. Indeed, in our technocratic age, where reading and writing is largely confined to text messages and "tweets," any "discipline" in which a computer -- not a thinking, feeling, desiring person -- does the "thinking" is guaranteed a wild success. In the March 2014 issue of The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman dealt critically with the guru of this new zombifying fad (at least I hope it's a fad), Professor Franco Moretti of Stanford University, who has written two predictably successful books on the subject. Rothman summarizes Moretti's "critical" attitude:
Viewed from Moretti’s statistical mountaintop, traditional literary criticism, with its idiosyncratic, personal focus on individual works, can seem self-indulgent, even frivolous. What’s the point, his graphs seem to ask, of continuing to interpret individual books -- especially books that have already been interpreted over and over? Interpreters, Moretti writes, 'have already said what they had to.' Better to focus on 'the laws of literary history' -- on explanation, rather than interpretation.
I have never read, nor have I ever produced, an interpretation of a text that was not also an explanation (apparently, artificial distinctions are not the sole property of philosophers). But of course, laws are for scientists (not for artists or politicians or police officers), and Moretti is, perhaps, a frustrated or failed scientist who disregards the humanistic tradition of private interpretation offered up for public edification in favor of a cool analytical approach that has little or nothing to do with art. The act of personal creation that is private interpretation or criticism of a text may, of course, at times be "idiosyncratic" (but that implies that there are interpretations that are idiomatic), self-indulgent, or even downright solipsistic. When, however, the interpretation or criticism -- however odd, puzzling or Unheimlich it may be -- is written down, it extends the discursive structure initiated by the authorial One, who is "beyond being," into the realm of active engagement, or "becoming," where meaning, in all its equivocal force, passes from contemplation to action -- from private thoughts to public utterance. This is a great, an invaluable aid to the author, who will gain an understanding of him or herself not in private, introspective moments, as a solitary mind, but as an agent of meaning in a world where some people, at least, seek an ever more intimate intellectual and emotional connection with their fellows. This is one of the functions art, after all, especially literature.
Gertrude Stein, in her essay "What are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them" (1935) put it quite well, in her eccentric manner:
When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing ...
When one hearkens to the voice of one's readers, one will become aware of the accretions that have obscured one's true form, like the sea-god Glaukos in Plato's Republic. Interpretation and / or criticism often serves the purpose of clearing away those parts of a writer's work that simply do not yield a clear conception. Many times a writer will consider the unguarded, or what T. S. Eliot called the "unconscious," moments of his text as those that are the most personal, and hence, the most valuable. To create an authentic work of art, one that inspires the various dêmiourgoi to extend the discourse, the author must not impose his private existence -- rendered in partially legible symbols -- upon the craftsmanly readers; he or she must, rather, deliberately compose a text that demonstrates a comprehension of the events being recounted, and not merely provide a description of the emotions produced by the events. "Poetry," as Eliot wrote (and I take poetry here to include all literature), "is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." The personality he is referring to is not, of course, what I would call the authentic self, or the 'I', but the un- or partially processed (I hate that metaphor but I'll use it anyway) emotions that we readily take to be indicative of our true self merely because they are immediate, or more precisely, unmediated by that pesky intellect that so many contemporary denizens of this globe strive so assiduously to avoid. This is not to say that literature should not deal with emotions and personality; it means only that the unprocessed (there it is again, damnit) buffetings of a private psyche should be articulated in a polished style that invites response and communication. If this involves a temporary escape from one's personality for the sake of a humanistic art, so be it. "But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things" (T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 1919). I have always loved that rather acerbic aside.
Reasons for desiring escape are as numerous as the persons who have them. In many "semi-autobiographical" novels (a label usually indicating that the writer has written a desired meaning into his life) we as readers are asked to empathize with a character that is being shown to us for one purpose only: to edify the writer. An appeal to our escapist and voyeuristic tendencies is what causes the pages to get turned; Schadenfreude is the usual 'moral' response to those bildungsroman in which the subject-author is finally thwarted, and left to a life he never intended, or worse. In the best of these "coming of age" novels, for example Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, and Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, the moral temperament of the reader will lead him to decide whether a victory -- or at least a desired end -- was achieved at the end of the narrative. Maugham's novel has the semi-autobiographical Philip Carey proposing marriage, successfully, to a young lady he barely knows, except for a romp in the bushes at a hop field. That he proposes in an art museum is rather aesthetically pleasing and, of course, symbolic (Philip is a failed artist). (Never mind that Philip thought his lady to be pregnant; he desired both marriage and a life of adventure, and chose the latter.) Unless one shares with Philip the wanderlust that made him desire a life of world travel and exotic adventure (which marriage forced him to abandon), his winning the hand of a beautiful young lady is not exactly a tragic end. In both of these works we are asked to care about the details of rather inconsequential lives; especially in Lucian's case: the manuscripts left behind by the poor guy weren't even legible, making even posthumous recognition an impossibility. The reader will feel pity here, if he or she is but a tad sensitive. However, in Machen's tale, Lucian the failed lover and writer is shown to be a deliriously devoted and sincere lover; he is obsessed with one young lady, whom he fails to win because of his morbid attachment to a dreamscape that is ever before his eyes. His belief in the sanctifying power of beauty (or Beauty) is deeply moving. Life in the stark gray world, however, holds no place for Lucian, and he dies from an overdose of laudanum, a sacrifice to his art. This, to me, is authentic tragedy (a term, like "hero," that is so often over- and mis-used in our day as to be virtually meaningless). And we all know, along with Aristotle, that tragedy is the most satisfying of all literary escapes from our tedious narcoleptic reality. Catharsis and all that.
In the works of H. P. Lovecraft, we find only one novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, containing a minor autobiographical touch. The general personality, or rather characteristics, of the eponymous main character likely resembles Lovecraft, as he saw himself as a youth: a pallid young scholar, shy and reclusive, yet not easily given to embarrassment or lack of confidence in his mental powers, with an almost morbid attachment to things of the past. But that is a description of a character type not a personality, and in a work of literary art such description serves only to provide occasion and motive for the action of the narrative. The autobiographical reminiscences are confined largely to external details: recollection of his first youthful impressions of his beloved hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, and the powerful aesthetic sway it held over him; his antiquarian rambles about Stampers Hill and surrounding environs; and, of course, his redemptive return to his native ground -- and all the dreams and inspiration it harbored for him -- after his ill-starred marriage and soul-sapping two-year exile in New York City (symbolized in the story by Charles's visit to an incredibly aged necromancer in Transylvania, where Charles is initiated into dark secrets of an ancient and terrible sorcery). But the psychological import of these experiences is never explored -- indeed, how could it be; he was composing a work of "weird fiction" or "dark fantasy" (I rather prefer the latter appellation) and such a genre will only get bogged down in the sucking mud of the common day if inner experience is given too much ink. And besides, Lovecraft himself confessed to an indifference regarding human aspirations and, indeed, to the ultimate fate of our race. In a letter written in 1929, when he was approaching his fortieth year, Lovecraft wrote that the universe does not "[give] a damn one way or another about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy." Yet we know that he read deeply in history, science, some philosophy, and of course his beloved dark fiction, especially Poe, Lord Dunsany, Machen, and R. W. Chambers. He also traveled a bit later in life, visiting historical towns in New England and elsewhere in the States (he never went to Europe, though he did visit Quebec) that served as inspiration for many of his tales. The few friendships he maintained were mostly carried on through letters, of which he wrote volumes. At the end of the day, Lovecraft was only happy when he was alone with his fantastic thoughts. He even went so far, when he lived in New York City, to keep the lights in his apartment turned off while he read in the closet by the light of a candle, to avoid any knocks at the door. His belief in the pointlessness of human life was not a decadent affectation, it was certainly sincere. He did, however, care about advances in science and psychology, but mostly to the extent that they served as fodder for his fiction, or bolstered his own belief in the ultimate vanity of existence.
* * * * *
In his tales, mostly short stories, Lovecraft followed Poe's dictum that a story writer must strive for a single powerful effect. Poe had no patience for long, rambling, "human interest" stories; he felt that a story or poem that could not be read in a single sitting was likely to fail in its intended effect. Notoriously, Poe even went so far as to state that Paradise Lost is uneven in its effects, and reads less like a single poem and more like a collection of short powerful poems connected by less interesting material. Like Poe, Lovecraft did not attempt to make statements, in his fictional writings, about his contemporary world -- for the understandable reason that everyday life and people simply did not interest him. In an essay written early in his career, when he was thirty-one (1921), Lovecraft distanced himself from the literary naturalism of his time:
I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos -- to the unknown -- which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric [sic] pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.
So Lovecraft's "pose" became that of a mental voyager in the "infinite immensity of space" that so frightened Pascal; a chronicler of fantasy, dreams (especially nightmare), and the strange and malign superstitions that perhaps still linger in the darkest corners of our world. The person is a small and inconsequential thing in the "vast cosmos-at-large." Those misty daimons that trouble people in the course of their mundane existence, and cause them to ask unanswerable questions about the purpose of life; fate and predestination; the efficacy of religious faith; the progress of history; and the redemptive power of art, are of little interest to Lovecraft. Rather, the blind forces of a cosmos that knows nothing of us and therefore cares nothing for us, and yet "may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of [the human race]," is Lovecraft's concern -- and paradoxically the locus of his escape from an intolerable existence. As One-author, Lovecraft remained alone with his thoughts (indeed, he was a recluse for most of his life) as he read widely and pondered deeply, always finding more material -- not to gather up into a scholarly work [his impressive and still useful scholarly essay Supernatural Horror in Literature is the one exception] or a realist novel, but to transform through the power of his imagination into an ever-growing discursive structure with a dark, unstable, and infinitely loathsome cosmos as its foundation.
Where does this leave his readers? Are we his creative partners, dêmiourgoi, in communicating the ineffable, as he might say? One of the reasons for reading horror, or "dark fantasy," is to gain escape from ordinary life through the thrill of fear -- from the safety of one's sitting room. This is voyeuristic and cathartic and ultimately aesthetic. But it fades, and leaves behind only emotional impressions, if even that. What raises Lovecraft's work above run-of-the-mill hack writers, and even to the level of Literature (a selection of his tales have been enshrined in a Modern Library edition, and now an annotated scholarly edition of his Complete Works is available), is the philosophical stance he takes in the best of his stories. The stance is never obtrusive, but serves to provide the reader with something intellectual to carry away, something more than just "chills and thrills." If the philosophy expressed is less than edifying, that is because the world as seen by Lovecraft offered nothing to cling to for emotional and intellectual gratification, much less growth. And so Lovecraft invited his readers to join him as "colonizers of dreams," to use Peter S. Beagle's phrase, in reference to Tolkien (a vastly different writer and thinker). Of course, these dreams are nightmares -- and that, for Lovecraft, and for many of us, is reality.
Lovecraft was an atheist, a materialist, and had little patience for religious sentiments. Yet he created a troop of "gods" whose provenance extends into the pre-human past, and whose concerns are so far beyond the life of humanity as to make the latter of little consequence -- except as unwitting tools to further the supra-cosmic schemes of these deities. The terms "gods" and "deities" are used for convenience; these beings are, in Lovecraft's fiction, "extraterrestrials from the depths of space," as prominent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi puts it, "and their encounters with human beings are largely a product of chance." Of course, they have their human worshippers, or partners, who seem to be seeking some kind of vicarious power of their own by aiding these supremely lofty beings; the ancient witch Keziah (in "Dreams in the Witch House") and the death-defying necromancer Joseph Curwen (in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) are two memorable examples of individuals who trafficked with Those from Outside and gained real, albeit temporary, power. Significantly, in the context of Lovecraft's art, the gods and their devotees are not merely characters in horror stories; they serve "a largely symbolic function -- they [are] metaphors for the essential unknowability of a boundless universe that human science, for all its tremendous advances, can never fully grasp" (S. T. Joshi, Introduction to H. P. Lovecraft, The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales, New York: Fall River Press 2013).
Of the dominant themes in Lovecraft's fiction, transference of consciousness, or "mind exchange," is the most effective, for these tales speak directly to a concern with personal identity in an increasingly de-personalized world -- a concern as urgent and troubling in Lovecraft's time as it is in our own (but, alas, ignored by our society of zombified petty technocrats who happily "tweet" their way to dusty death). In "The Thing on the Doorstep" an old wizard, Ephraim Waite, to achieve a sort of immortality, uses magical arts to transfer his consciousness to the body of his daughter, Asenath. But finding a female body unsatisfactory, Ephraim / Asenath preys upon Edward Derby, an awkward, studious youth with a brilliant mind -- and interested in all things occult. Unsuspecting Edward falls in love with the not uncomely Asenath (dark and pretty, but with rather bulging eyes), also an occultist -- but of a rather more enterprising kind -- and they eventually marry. The narrator, named Upton, who is Edward's closest and only real friend, soon becomes concerned over the strange behavior of the uxorious Edward, who seems to be under Asenath's control, in a less than salubrious manner. At first she seems simply to wear the pants in the family, but after a while it is clear that she controls, literally, Edward's very thoughts and speech, and even actions. After a series of disturbing and dangerous incidents -- including a harrowing late-night car ride from a remote region where some devilry was taking place, during which Edward is possessed by Asenath / Ephraim in mid-trip -- it becomes clear that Asenath / Ephraim is slowly taking total possession of Edward, and will soon inhabit his body completely. Due to what appears to be the behavior of a mentally disturbed person, Edward is confined to an asylum; of course, no asylum can thwart the wizard, despite the fact that Edward, in a desperate effort to save himself, had already killed Asenath -- that is, her body. Her mind, or rather the mind of Ephraim (able to remain intact, so to speak, even after the destruction of the body), manages to transfer to Edward's body, and send his (Edward's) consciousness into the dead body of Asenath, which Edward had dumped in a cellar of an abandoned house. Through an immense effort of will, Edward (in Asenath's decaying body) drags himself to his friend Upton's doorstep, where the extent of the horror is finally revealed. Upton, to rid the world of the threat of Ephraim, goes to the asylum where he "[sends] six bullets through the head of [his] best friend." Of course, it is his best friend's body with Ephraim's mind inside.
Lovecraft has been criticized for the absence of wholesome women in his tales. Indeed, the only female characters we encounter are wicked old crones, like Keziah, degenerate backwood bumpkins (hapless Lavinia, in "The Dunwich Horror"), or a female body with an evil male mind (Asenath). In an effort to account, psychologically, for the absence of desirable female flesh -- or at least intelligent, capable women -- in his tales, the details of Lovecraft's life and love have been exhaustively sifted and recorded by scholars, for those who are interested: his upbringing by coddling female relatives; relocation to New York City and a two-year marriage to an attractive, upwardly mobile woman, Sonia Haft Greene, who was, apparently, too much for the studious and retiring Howard to handle (although she did offer, in an interview given when Lovecraft had attained posthumous fame, the rather odd compliment that he was "an adequately excellent lover"); and his eventual retreat back to his beloved Providence, where he dwelt in seclusion (excepting the occasional road trip), alone with the fantastic thoughts that filled his poetic mind. It was at this point, arguably, that he produced his best work.
I do not consider a tale like "The Thing on the Doorstep" to be an expression of misogyny or a fear of powerful, confident women. Rather, I find in that story a genuine concern with personal intellectual integrity, even a fear of losing that unique cast of mind that makes one a person -- a unique, unrepeatable entity, as purveyors of personalist philosophy like to say. The experience of falling in love -- and this is an experience that Lovecraft surely had, regardless of his inability to cultivate that love -- is jarring, to say the least: we feel dislocated, albeit in a blissful way, and when we regain some power of self-reflection we find that we are changed; our focus is on the beloved and our private thoughts and desires are transformed through union with another person who, to resort to a cliché, completes us. Those of us with an artistic temperament may soon feel the burden of our attachment to this "other," and strive to re-assert our uniqueness, the solitary power of our intellect. If we feel that we are really losing something essential to our self, through an all-consuming love, a crisis occurs, and a decision must be made. The power of Lovecraft's tale, the potent symbolism, resides in Edward's inability to escape and regain his selfhood, his personhood. Unhappy marriages, where one (or both) of the spouses feels trapped and hopeless, are unfortunately a common occurrence in our society. When one succumbs to the social pressure to marry and breed children, at the expense of one's loftier desires -- to perhaps create something from the store of private ideas waiting to find a partner-demiurge to bring them into the realm of being -- one has indeed lost oneself. It is worth noting that some of Lovecraft's most claustrophobic and morbidly desperate tales, such as "He," and "The Horror at Red Hook" were products of his marriage experience.
Lovecraft worked with the general theme of transference of consciousness in several other tales such as "The Call of Cthulhu," in which a "psychically hypersensitive" youth named Wilcox (a sculptor of rare talent) succumbs to a seizure, during the aftermath of which he enters a "delirium" and experiences strange dreams of "some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice ... shouting ... two sounds ... 'Cthulhu' and 'R'lyeh'." Wilcox, deliriously inspired, makes a clay bas-relief of a "monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind." He shows this bas-relief to an aged and highly respected anthropologist, Professor Angell, who studies it "with almost frantic intensity," but is slow to recognize the "hieroglyphics and pictorial design." (The good professor dies after being jostled by "a nautical-looking negro" who apparently had a connection to the ancient cult whose blasphemous intentions the good professor was on the way to exposing.) The image, of course, is of the fabulously ancient god Cthulhu, who is not dead but sleeping, and ready to rise from the depths of ocean when the stars are right. The hieroglyphs, as is later discovered, are the prophetic words: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." Whatever doubts the skeptical narrator (Thurston, nephew of Professor Angell) had about the ancient -- or more properly, interstellar -- provenance of the young sculptor's obviously modern production are shaken by the discovery of an almost exact replica, of undeniable antiquity and perhaps even extraterrestrial origin, discovered by a New Orleans detective during a raid on a particularly vicious and loathsome cult (apparently the one responsible for rubbing out the nosey Professor). What's more, it is discovered that the sculptor was not alone in his delirium and visions; from March 22 to April 2 (the period of his delirium) others reported similar experiences. A laborious review of newspaper cuttings from those weeks revealed that average people reported nothing, and men of science were only slightly affected, if at all, but: "It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came." These answers corroborated the growing suspicion that some sort of intra-cosmic event had occurred, or was about to occur, that would lead to the rejuvenation of Cthulhu, and the overwhelming and domination of the earth. The transference of consciousness in this tale does not involve a malignant human being on a personal quest for immortality or ultimate magus status (as in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward); it is rather a cosmic transference, a visitation of a wholly alien consciousness upon sensitive souls capable of communicating the message of this usurping consciousness in the most effective manner possible -- hence the preference of the supra-cosmic entities for artists or other sensitive, introspective types that we find in other tales, such as "The Shadow out of Time."
"The Call of Cthulhu" ends, rather disappointingly, with the octopoid monstrosity, emerged from his deep sea tomb, assaulting a wayward Norwegian vessel and "like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus ... [but] bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency." But alas, Cthulhu, the deathless god of immemorial age, ends up getting smashed apart by the ship, when the brave captain makes a final, desperate move to escape. The prose here at the finale is as finely crafted and attuned to the action as anything Lovecraft ever wrote; but the defeat, albeit temporary, of a being so potent that it can not only never truly die, but use its mental power to influence the actions of humans through dreams, amnesia, and delirium -- the defeat of such a formidable aeon-defying entity by getting a ship rammed through it (of course, Cthulhu immediately "recombines" himself, but his prey nevertheless escapes) is too much like the ending of a cheesy contemporary horror film, and not worthy of Lovecraft. For someone who had read and deeply admired the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the phantasmal, oneiric, feverishly ecstatic closing of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym should have been revisited for inspiration.
Another transference tale, which is quite worthy of Lovecraft -- in fact, I consider it his best work -- is the novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Here we encounter a young man who has spent his life reveling in the antiquities of history-drenched Providence, wandering and daydreaming up and down its precipitous streets, and in the narrow lanes and hidden courtyards, the atmospheres of which change suddenly and almost magically with the shifting of the sun, producing a mesmeric dance of shadows and light. I have been to Providence, several times -- unfortunately it is now built up into a rather cluttered and bustling business and consumer center -- and followed in Lovecraft's footsteps. I watched the sunset wash with pale gold the Christian Science dome at the top of Stamper's Hill, and felt a luxurious melancholy as the street lamps began to twinkle in the deepening dusk. The gentle trickle of the Providence River accompanied me as I traversed the little park adjacent to the magisterial State House, seeking the spot that was once Olney Court (according to the records I consulted at the Athenaeum) where the alchemist and necromancer Joseph Curwen built his first house after wisely relocating to tolerant Providence from witch-crazed Salem. There is nothing there now, except an overpass; so I wended my way along Benefit Street and up "vertical Jenckes Street," making a right onto "sleepy Congdon Street" and finally to Prospect Terrace, with its statue of Roger Williams, founder of the colony, at which point I stood at the railing as the sun began to set, and gazed out over the gently rolling country beyond Federal Hill, imagining, like Lovecraft, vistas of faery wonder and shuddering delight just beyond the edge of sight. When darkness fell, I strolled slowly up the precipitous lanes to stately Brown University, where the John Hay Library preserves the manuscripts and typescripts of our illustrious scribe of squamous blasphemies.
Yes, the atmosphere of the town is enough to stimulate poetical fancies -- and elaborate Lovecraftian diction. To know that Poe himself sat in St. John's Cemetery and composed inebriate love letters to Sarah Helen Whitman makes one -- at least it made me -- feel literary, romantic, and decadent, all at the same time. I sat in that cemetery at midnight, with a bottle of Scotch and a fine cigar, and wrote a cute little poem to my sweetheart of the moment. I can't recall what she said when I read it to her; but I am sure it contributed something to the fading of our summer. It is fitting, then, that the most subtle and disturbing transference of consciousness in Lovecraft's oeuvre should have occurred in this ancient town.
Charles Dexter Ward, we are told, had always been an antiquarian, living more in the past than in the present; he had few friends, and eschewed the sports and other boyish amusements of his fellows in favor of books and daydreams, with the result that he was often alone -- and preferred it that way. At one point during his genealogical researches, he came across the name Joseph Curwen, and discovered, quite by accident (two sheets of an old journal had been pasted together, and the pages re-numbered, to hide the record of Curwen's marriage to an ancestor on Charles's mother's side) that this man, who had died under mysterious circumstances shortly before the Revolutionary War, was great-great-plus grandfather to Charles. So, as was "natural," he began an exhaustive and rather obsessive search for more information on this elusive person, whose activities had been systematically struck from the city's records. Intoxicated by the mystery, Charles went in full force gale -- and his efforts paid off.
After discovering, in a record left accidentally intact, that Curwen had built a house in Olney Court shortly after his relocation from Salem to Providence, Charles goes to investigate that house (still standing in Lovecraft's time) and discovers that a portrait of Curwen had been executed by a famous painter of the day, on a panel above a fireplace in what had been the drawing room. Excited beyond all reason, Charles engages the help of a qualified expert to uncover and restore the portrait, which had been painted over many years ago, and discovers, to his shock and delight, that Joseph Curwen is Charles's spitting image -- indeed, it is like looking in a mirror. Charles's father is equally impressed, and pays to have the painting restored and given to Charles as a present, against the protestations of Charles's mother, whose intuition was operating at full capacity (she is the only female character in Lovecraft's oeuvre to display natural intelligence and even a bit of courage; but her part is quite small). So the entire fireplace is removed (the tenants of the house properly reimbursed) and installed in Charles's study. But wait, there's more. In a small cubby hole discovered after the removal of the fireplace, Charles finds a bundle of papers, most of them in cipher; but one notebook catches his attention, and provokes him to secrecy. The title of the little book is "To the One Who Shall Come After." This cache contains Curwen's journal, and instructions on how to utilize certain alchemical and necromantic arts for the purpose of raising the dead, specifically the long-departed Curwen.
All of this, we come to discover, has been brought about through a spell that Curwen cast before his demise; a spell that would filter through the centuries, and fasten upon the proper victim -- that is, poor Charles -- whose mind would then be turned to old things. Under the spell's influence Charles unwittingly did the bidding of Curwen; he sought out and found Curwen's grave, dug up his remains, and following the instructions in the cryptic texts discovered behind the fireplace in the house in Olney Court, resurrected the ancient necomancer. Now Curwen is back again, ready to reconnect with his two old cronies (still alive after numerous centuries, biding their time in Prague and Transylvania) and begin again their ghoulish rifling of the world's ancient tombs in a quest for supreme knowledge which will unlock secrets no mortal could possibly comprehend -- except to know that ultimate purpose of this bone-swapping bodes no good for the human race.
Whatever illusions Charles may have harbored of a glorious partnership with his undead ancestor are quickly shattered when Curwen begins vampirizing the neighborhood (apparently to get his strength up) against Charles's weak and impotent protestations; duly cowed, Charles can only sit by helplessly when Curwen digs up the grave of an old enemy, resurrects the fellow, and exacts a horrible revenge. Eventually, irritated with Charles's "squeamishness," Curwen murders the lad, stuffs him inside the cupboard of the very fireplace above which his picture once stared out at the world (it had crumbled to dust at the moment of Curwen's resurrection), and sets about posing as Charles, purchasing a bungalow in a nearby town, right above the spot where Curwen once had his farmhouse and subterranean dungeon and wizard's workshop back in the eighteenth century. (The farmhouse is, of course, long gone, but the dungeon and alchemist's workshop remain.) This attempt at subterfuge leads to problems: the handwriting is different, raising eyebrows at Charles's bank; "Charles's" memory is quite impaired, being more acute in matters of antiquarian interest than in the normal business of the contemporary world in which he suddenly found himelf. Feeble efforts by Curwen / Charles to play "catch-up," as it were, by reading contemporary newspapers and magazines, did little to prevent his removal to an asylum. Confident, and rightly so, that this removal would only be temporary, given his extraordinary intelligence, "Charles" quietly acquiesces, and is soon free again, after demonstrating normal mental function, apart from the inexplicable memory loss and altered penmanship.
Back at the bungalow, the necromantic operations resume in earnest. The climax of this tale is what S. T. Joshi refers to as a "conventional good versus evil battle" between a valiant human (Charles's physician) and the demented Curwen, intent on ... Well, intent on what? We get references to entities from "Outside," but their role is never really clear. All we know is that Curwen, and his buddies in Prague and Transylvania, are practicing a very ancient and powerful form of necromancy that involves the gathering of bones of illustrious men of old, the reduction of these bones to their "essential salts," and by some alchemical operation the resurrection, in full bodily form, of these long-dead prophets, seers, and sages of the ancient world, for the purpose of gaining -- by persuasion, gentle or otherwise -- all the knowledge that they possess. It is left to the reader to imagine what these death-defying wizards will do with all that accumulated wisdom. In any case, the physician, Dr. Willet, who unlike his colleagues still has a spark of imagination, unravels the mystery, discovers Charles's corpse stuffed inside the cupboard, and sets out to destroy Curwen.
Lovecraft's description of Dr. Willett's trek through the noisome dungeon beneath the bungalow is a droning dirge of horror, in which darksome chords of ancestral memory are relentlessly struck. The sickening, vaguely humanoid, though "incomplete," creatures imprisoned in oubliettes -- these creatures, we are told, have been shrieking and bellowing in those lightless tombs since Curwen's demise over a century ago -- inspire both nausea and pity. They are the result of experiments carried out by Curwen as he was perfecting his art; they cannot die, and they do not even need to eat -- but they want to, desperately. Curwen's cruelty shocks Dr. Willett, and drives him on to his goal. Eventually, after discovering the formulae for raising up and putting down, Willett memorizes the latter, and pays Curwen a visit at the asylum, where he is once again being held (apparently one cannot have the bones of illustrious men delivered to one's home in a quiet suburban neighborhood without attracting negative attention). We know what is going to happen. After a brief but effective upbraiding, Willett speaks the magic words, and Curwen crumbles into a fine bluish-gray dust, and is swept out the window by a refreshing breeze. The End.
My synopsis, of course, cannot do justice to the starkly realized atmosphere of this mini-masterpiece. The middle section, a flashback to the pre-Revolutionary era, tells us of Curwen's life; his efforts to hit upon the formula that would enable him to return as another, in the event of his death; and the manner in which his increasingly bold experiments in the black arts led finally to the mustering of a posse to either bring him to justice, or destroy him if necessary. Despite the efforts of the well-armed and seasoned colonists who marched on his farmhouse, it was by no human hand that Curwen was undone. He called upon, we are told, something that demanded too much of him. But the spell had been cast, and the fate of Charles Dexter Ward sealed, long before his birth. In this section, Lovecraft puts his wide reading in colonial American history -- especially that of his beloved Rhode Island -- to excellent use as he conjures the style and texture of both seventeenth and eighteenth century life in that New England colony, founded and occupied by bold dissenters -- at least some of whom might have had interests not unlike Curwen's.
While this tale does not, strictly speaking, involve a one-to-one transference of consciousness, it is a subtle and well-wrought variation on that theme. The mind of Curwen never actually enters Charles, but the influence of Curwen's spell, or, to de-mythologize the tale, his will, takes complete control of Charles's life, rendering him an unwitting slave to Curwen. The much-discussed "cosmic perspective" of many of Lovecraft's tales, particularly those in the so-called Cthulhu Mythos cycle, is barely present in this tale. The focus is on a single terrible individual; one who had managed to extend his life far beyond the natural length, and then return to continue his unholy occupation. Whatever nebulous entities outside the space-time continuum that he may have trucked with is of little concern in this tale of fascinating morbidity and curdling ghoulishness.
As a work of literature, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward succeeds precisely because its focus is not on "cosmic" terrors, but on a disruption of natural human existence in a single place, involving a small group of people. The perspective is temporal, not cosmic. Curwen's long life, which extended from the late seventeenth century well into the eighteenth -- making him nearly a century old when he finally succumbed to his own dread allies -- and the persistence of his will well into the twentieth century, is, in my opinion, a more unsettling thing to contemplate than ancient extraterrestrial "gods" sleeping beneath the sea waiting patiently for the time when they will be able to re-conquer the world. Evil that is brought about by, and centers upon, a single person is always more disturbing and worthy of moral reflection than evil wrought by un-human beings that occupy an entirely different sphere of reality than our own. Lovecraft asks, in this tale, rhetorically: What antiquarian, given the knowledge of an ancestor like Curwen, would have done anything less than embark upon an exhaustive research of that person? And we may ask, after reading this text: Possessed of Curwen's abilities and ancient knowledge, would I have done anything less than pursue my power to the utmost end? The hope and joy of a scholar is to learn as much as possible in the short time we have on this "placid island of ignorance"; and if one is an atheist who does not believe in the continuation of our life or consciousness after the shedding of this mortal coil, then the fantasy of prolonging our life through ghoulish means for the sake of boundless knowledge does not seem so dark.
* * * * *
The materialist Lovecraft did not believe in the concept of salvation, at least not in the traditional, religious sense. Yet in some of his later tales, the transference of consciousness theme is less terrifying than awe-inspiring, if unsettling; however, for those of us who desire knowledge above all else, I think we would gladly submit to the type of transference that occurs in "The Shadow out of Time," and consider it salvation, a redemption from post-literate panderers of unprocessed data and their diarrhetic devices. In this tale we encounter an extraterrestrial "Great Race," wondrously advanced beings who value knowledge and a peaceful way of life; they do not seek a dominion of chaos like Cthulhu and others of his ilk, but only the perpetuation of their race. These beings are capable of casting their minds forward and backward in time, and they have the ability to exchange minds with certain intellectually gifted beings from various epochs of our world and others, for the sake of acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the entire life and history of the solar system. When the mind of a member of the Great Race occupies the body of a person in the past or future, the displaced mind, now occupying the conical body of his displacer, is gently pressed into service as an historian in the Race's vast archives.
From their outpost on planet earth, 150 million years in the "past" (linear time has no meaning for these achronological entities), the Great Race maintains an ever-growing library that is a scholar's wet dream, where displaced minds from numerous ages, past and present, copy out the histories of their respective ages. The narrator, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee (Lovecraft had quite a way with names), after emerging from a five-year bout of amnesia, during which time his mind was wafted down the corridors of time to the Great Race's headquarters in the Mesozoic age, begins -- despite the mental block set in place before his return -- to have increasingly vivid dream-recollections of his stint as a scribe for the aliens. If there is such a thing as salvation for a scholarly atheist, this would be it:
In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves ... There were horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being. And I learned chapters of human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever expected.
Peaslee also has conversations with minds from stupefyingly remote epochs of our world, which one might compare with the heaven envisaged by the Neoplatonic Christian philosopher Origen of Alexandria (185-254 C.E.), in which deserving souls will be educated little by little, over the course of numerous aeons, until at last they reach God, in whose presence they will contemplate the infinite mysteries of creation (cf. Origen, On First Principles 2.11.6-7). In Lovecraft's vision, however, the education does not inspire hosannahs but rather a mute absorption of "shocking secrets and dizzying marvels."
I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi ... with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000 ...
And many others, including an Egyptian who told him "the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep" and later, a recollection of "a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future." The vast gulfs of time that the Great Race are capable of traversing and, most importantly for the impact of the tale, the immense number and variety of lives and cultures and civilizations that will come into being long after our own has passed away, are to me less inspiring of fright than of awe, or what Longinus or Edmund Burke would call "the sublime." As S. T. Joshi has written of this tale, "Lovecraft has shifted his focus from horror to awe and wonder, and this is the most unequivocally science-fictional of his later narratives." That these strange, amoral, but benign beings are taking the trouble to record "the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum" makes them the greatest of humanists -- or perhaps we should call them "super-humanists." At this point in the tale there is nothing really frightful, apart from the growing realization that what Peaslee wishes to take for a psychological malady is, in fact, all too real. But even then, would an atheist and materialist really be shocked or frightened to discover that other, more highly developed beings exist in our immeasurable universe?
The more I contemplate this story -- and it is one of Lovecraft's most artistically polished and thought-provoking -- the more I am struck by the unreasonable fear that grips Peaslee, the narrator, who had the great fortune (in my view) to have been chosen to make the mental -- and at the end of the tale, physical -- journey to the center of learning of the Great Race. Granted, the Great Race were not alone in their Cyclopean (to use a Lovecraftian adjective) city; there were evil "Elder Things" that had been subdued, aeons ago, by the Great Race, and relegated to underground caverns -- only there were dark hints that these terrible beings would eventually break free and exact a hideous revenge. But even this rather remote danger would not, I think, be sufficient to curb the investigative enthusiasm of a genuine scholar.
During the climax of the story, when Peaslee journeys to a place in Australia where monolithic blocks have been discovered that are identical to those he has dreamed about for years -- the building blocks of the megalithic city of the Great Race -- he succumbs to an urge to descend into an underground cavern that is the ruined but still recognizable city of his dream flashbacks (the evil Elder Things apparently had their revenge). He knows every twist and turn of the place, and makes his way to the archives, where he seeks confirmation of the reality of his experience.
There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum -- written by captive minds from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course -- but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I?
On the way he glimpses the dark, windowless basalt towers that were associated with the feared Elder Things. He presses on and at last discovers the section of the library he was seeking. Grabbing hold of a familiar volume, bound in a metal case, he takes a look inside -- and loses control. In a frenzy, he takes off for the surface. On the way, he hears the piping voices of the terrible Elder Things, and at his back there is a wind that seems to be tugging at him, "like a noose or lasso." With great effort he makes it out of the cavern -- after losing the metal-bound volume, of course -- and staggers, half senseless, to his camp. The revelation that he finds so mind-blastingly horrible is what we had anticipated: "I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages [of the volume in the metal case] were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth. They were, instead, the letters of our own familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting."
Throughout this tale, we are given to understand that the Great Race, while utterly alien and in possession of powers beyond human comprehension, are not at all evil; they are scientists, artists, and rather enlightened politicians. (Lovecraft describes their form of government as "a sort of fascistic socialism," but it seems more like an oligarchy or perhaps a meritocracy with some Marxist principles thrown in. Lovecraft was, as is well documented, extremely naive in matters of politics, when he was not downright bigotted and racist.) While there is something less than ethical in their mental invasions of unsuspecting bodies, we are told that the Great Race treated displaced minds with the utmost kindness. Peaslee himself was returned safely to his own age, mental faculties unimpaired -- except, of course, for the dreams, which were only terrifying because he apparently had a rather neurotic attachment to the safety zone of his own circumscribed spatio-temporal existence. This neurosis is revealed in the following outburst, after he had emerged from the "abyss":
Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe's secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives?
The Great Race were indeed strange, but I fail to see them as "shambling horrors." Here, perhaps, is Lovecraft's well-known xenophobia coloring a tale that is far less of horror than of a triumph of human knowledge -- or at least could have been if it had been written from a different set of assumptions. A salvation from ignorance, a redemption from the limitations of our humanity -- this is something for which all true scholars strive. As a materialist and atheist myself, I would gladly exchange (hypothetically, for we are dealing with myths -- one modern and the other originating in the Bronze Age) an eternity of singing praises to a genocidal dictator of a god for a mere afternoon in the titanic archives of the Great Race. To spend an eternity contemplating "the universe's secret past and present" ... well, I would face an army of Elder Things to achieve that salvation. And perhaps I would meet, in that library of libraries, the great humanist Origen, a Christian in spite of himself.
There is one fear, however, that would prevent me from seeking the secrets of the cosmos; and that is having my brain removed, placed in a canister, and shipped across the vast universe to the home of aliens that I do not entirely trust. Such is the theme of "The Whisperer in Darkness." This story is not, strictly speaking, a transference of consciousness, or mind swap, tale; the human who agrees to have his brain sent across illimitable gulfs of the universe, to a dark planet where promises of great revelations will somehow be fulfilled, will be entirely at the mercy of rather dubious aliens. As a literary work, intended to produce an unsettling effect, it succeeds quite admirably. The atmosphere of northern New England (specifically Vermont) is evoked with superb clarity and provides an excellent aesthetic backdrop for the real physical danger that besets both the narrator and the hapless fellow whose brain ends up in a canister.
As a writer, Lovecraft was caught between two worlds, as it were: that of the pulp magazines -- which demanded sensationalism and a goodly dose of "chills and thrills" -- in which most of his stories were published, and his private world of fantasy that was not mere capricious daydreaming but an intellectual milieu where he grappled with an ever-shifting personal philosophy that had atheistic materialism at its base. But Lovecraft also clung to notions of otherworldly beauty accessed in dreams and revealed partially in the pastoral landscapes of his beloved New England, where remnants of the colonial era could still be found in hidden courtyards and untended gardens of ancient houses.
In some ways, Lovecraft was a Romantic, despite his avowed preference for the poetry of the Augustan age, with its heroic couplets that he attempted (painfully) to imitate in his younger years. His mature prose poems, however, are worthy accomplishments, notably "Nyarlathotep," an eschatological nightmare of wreckless abandonment in a dying world, written immediately after emerging from a dream; "Ex Oblivione," an effusion of stark cosmic pessimism in the face of a bland infinity; and especially the haunting, elegiac "Azathoth," which tells of "a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world's dreams had fled." Alone in his quest, in an aged world in which "wonder [had gone] out of the minds of men," the solitary seeker dwells in a sad room that looks out upon "a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair." Knowing that such a grim environment would soon drive him to madness, the lone quester begins to lean far out his window and call upon the stars by name,
And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge with the close air of his room and make him part of their fabulous wonder. ... [A]nd for days not counted in men's calendars the tides of far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed; the dreams that men have lost. And in the course of many cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore; a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes.
This is fine poetry, in the Romantic mood. Note the subtle alliteration and the hint of dactyls amidst the iambs, providing a dreamy lilting quality that is prose poetry (a rare form in our day) at its best. This brief masterpiece is indeed a deeply personal elegy for the past glory of a childhood that lasted well into adulthood, as many commentators have noted (often unkindly); it is also an expression of salvific hope by a writer who wandered long in "a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE -- out of TIME" (Poe, "Dream-Land").
