“At the Mountains of Madness” provides one of the most beautiful examples of such oneiric precision. All place-names are cited, topographic indications abound; each of the settings in the drama is precisely sited by its altitude and longitude. It would be easy to follow the characters’ peregrinations on a large-scale map of Antarctica.
The novella’s heroes are a team of scientists, which allows for an interesting shift in perspective: Lake’s descriptions will encompass animal physiology, those of Pabodie, geology… HPL even allows himself the luxury of including an ardent fan of weird fiction among the team members who regularly quotes passages from Arthur Gordon Pym. He is no longer afraid to measure himself up against Poe. In 1923, he was still describing his productions as “gothic horror” and asserting that he was faithful to “invariably the older writers, especially Poe.” But he has since moved on. By forcefully introducing the language and concepts of scientific sectors that seem to him to be the weirdest into his tales, he has exploded the casing of the horror story. In any case, that his first published works in France appear in a science-fiction collection seems simply one way of proclaiming him unclassifiable.
It is not just the clinical vocabulary of animal physiology and the more mysterious lexicon of paleontology (Archaean strata that have survived since middle Comanchian times…) that Lovecraft annexed to his universe. He was quick to understand the appeal of linguistic terminology: “The individual, dark-skinned with somewhat reptilian features, expressed himself with hooting emissions and a rapid succession of consonants that brought to mind certain proto-Akkadian dialects.”
Archeology and folklore play an equal part in the project from its inception. “We must review all our knowledge, Wilmarth! These frescoes are seven thousand years older than the most ancient Sumerian necropolis!” And HPL never fails to impress as he slips in an allusion to “certain ritual and particularly repugnant customs of the indigenous inhabitants of North Carolina.” But what is more astonishing is that he does not limit himself to the human sciences—he tackles the “hard” sciences as well; the most theoretical, those that, a priori, are the farthest from a literary universe.
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” may be the most frightening of Lovecraft’s tales; it is built entirely upon the idea of a “frightful and almost unnameable” genetic degeneration. At first affecting the texture of the skin and the manner of pronouncing vowels, its effect is then felt on the general shape of a body, the anatomy, the respiratory and circulatory systems… The predilection for details and the logic of dramatic progression make this truly excruciating reading. Also, notably, genetics is used not merely for its evocative terminology here, but also as the theoretical framework to the story.
Next, HPL plunges swiftly into the then-unexplored resources of mathematics and the physical sciences. He is the first to have understood the poetic impact of topology, to have shuddered in the face of Gödel’s work on incomplete systems of formal logic. The vaguely repulsive implications of such strange axiomatic constructs were undoubtedly necessary for the dark entities of the Cthulhu cycle to emerge.
“One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative…” This bizarre synthesis of Einstein’s work, extracted from “Hypnos” (1922), is but a timid preamble to a theoretical and conceptual unraveling whose apogee is to be found ten years later in “The Dreams in the Witch House,” where an attempt will be made to explain the abject circumstances under which an old seventeenth-century woman has “insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.” The angles of the house the unfortunate Walter Gilman inhabits exhibit unsettling peculiarities, inexplicable within the framework of Euclidean geometry. Gilman neglects all the disciplines taught at university other than mathematics, where his genius for resolving Riemannian equations stupefies Professor Upham, who “especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.”
Lovecraft, in passing, annexed the equations of quantum mechanics (only barely discovered at the time he was writing) and immediately qualified them as “impious and paradoxical.” Walter Gilman dies, his heart devoured by a rat hailing from regions of the cosmos “outside the given space-time continuum.”
In his final stories, Lovecraft uses the multiform descriptive methods of science: the obscure memory of fertility rites practiced by a degenerate Tibetan tribe, the baffling algebraic particularities of pre-Hilbertian spaces, an analysis of the genetic derivations of a population of semi-amorphous Chilean lizards, the obscene incantation of a work on demonology compiled by a half-mad Franciscan monk, the unpredictable behavior of a group of neutrinos undergoing exposure to an ever-expanding magnetic field, the hideous and never-before-exhibited sculptures of an English decadent… These all serve to evoke a multifaceted universe where the most heterogeneous fields of knowledge intersect and converge to generate the poetic trance that accompanies the revelation of forbidden truths.
The sciences, in their massive effort to describe the real objectively, furnished him with the tools he needed to transmit his vision. Indeed, HPL’s aim was objective terror. A terror unbound from any human or psychological connotations. He wished, as he said himself, to create a mythology that “would mean something to those intelligent beings that consist only of nebulous spiraling gases.”
Just as Kant hoped to set the foundation of a valid ethical code “not just for man but for all rational beings,” Lovecraft wanted to create a horror capable of terrifying all creatures endowed with reason. Apart from this, the two men had commonalities; both were extremely thin and had a weakness for sweets, both were suspected of perhaps not being fully human. Be that as it may, what the “loner of Königsberg” and the “recluse of Providence” have in common is the heroic and paradoxical desire to go beyond humanity.
That Will Be Lost in the Unnameable Architecture of Time
The style of scientific reporting adopted by HPL in his later stories operates according to the following principle: the more monstrous and inconceivable the events and entities described, the more precise and clinical the description. A scalpel is needed to dissect the unnameable.
Hence all impressionism must be banished to build a vertiginous literature; and without a certain disproportionality of scale, without the juxtaposition of the minute and the limitless, the punctual and the infinite, there can be no vertigo.
Which is why, in “At the Mountains of Madness,” Lovecraft fairly insists on conveying the latitude and longitude at each point in the drama. While, at the same time, he brings to life entities well beyond the boundaries of our galaxy; at times even beyond our space-time continuum. He wants to create a sense of precarious balance; the characters move between precise coordinates, but they are oscillating at the edge of an abyss.
This has its exact complement in the temporal domain. If distant entities that are several hundred million years old appear in the course of our human history, it is vital to document the exact moments of their appearance. Each is a point of rupture, and their purpose is to allow the unutterable to erupt.
The narrator in “The Shadow Out of Time” is a professor of political economy who comes from an old, “altogether normal” Massachusetts family. Thoughtful, well-balanced, there is nothing predisposing him to the transformation he undergoes on Thursday May 14, 1908. When he gets up, he feels a headache; nonetheless, he goes to his classes as usual. Then the event takes place.
“The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.
My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely am
iss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.”
After a sixteen-and-a-half-hour faint, the professor regains consciousness, but his personality appears to have undergone a subtle change. He exhibits a most stunning ignorance of the most rudimentary daily realities, while demonstrating an elaborate knowledge of supernatural events from the farthest past; at times he speaks of the future in terms that elicit the greatest fear. The ironic tone of his remarks at times hints at a secret and complete knowledge of things that lie beneath the surface. Even the play of his facial muscles has completely changed. His family and friends instinctively display a certain repugnance toward him, and his wife finally asks for a divorce, alleging that an alien is “usurping the body of her husband.”
Indeed, Professor Peaslee’s body has been colonized by the spirit of a member of the Great Race, a race of rugose cone-shaped beings that ruled the planet long before the apparition of man and who are capable of projecting their minds into the future.
The reintegration of the spirit of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee back into its earthly envelope occurs on September 27, 1913; the transmutation begins at a quarter past eleven and is completed by noon, approximately. The professor’s first words after a five-year absence are the exact continuation of the lecture in political economics he was giving his students at the start of the story… a great symmetrical effect, a perfect story structure.
The juxtaposition of “three hundred million years ago” and “at a quarter past eleven” is equally typical. The scale factor, the vertigo factor. Again, procedures borrowed from architecture.
Every weird story presents in it the collision of monstrous entities hailing from unimaginable, forbidden worlds with the plane of our ordinary existence. In Lovecraft’s work, the trajectory of this collision is traced by a precise and firm line that becomes more dense and more complex as the story progresses, and it is this narrative precision that converts us into believers of the inconceivable.
At times, like in “The Call of Cthulhu,” whose structural complexity is surprising and impressive, HPL uses several convergent lines. After a night filled with nightmares, a decadent artist creates a particularly hideous statuette. In this figurine, Professor Angell recognizes a new incarnation of the anthropoid monster that had made such a disturbing impression on the participants of the Archaeological Society in St. Louis seventeen years prior. A police inspector had brought the specimen, which he had discovered following an investigation into the persistence of certain voodoo rituals requiring human sacrifice and mutilations. Another participant at the Congress had alluded to the marine idol adored by a certain degenerate Eskimo tribe.
After Professor Angell dies “accidentally,” carelessly jostled by a negro sailor in a Providence port, his nephew picks up the threads of the investigation. He collects press clippings and finally, in the Sydney Bulletin, he comes across an article that recounts the tale of a shipwrecked New Zealand yacht and the inexplicable death of its crew. The only survivor, Captain Johansen, has gone mad. Professor Angell’s nephew travels to Norway to question him; Johansen has died without having regained his sanity, and his widow gives the Professor a manuscript in which he tells of their encounter at sea with an abject and gigantic entity the exact likeness of the statuette.
The action unfolds on three continents in the novella, and HPL multiplies the narrative procedures, aiming to give an impression of objectivity: newspaper articles, police reports, accounts of the work of scientific organizations… These all converge toward the final paroxysm: the encounter between the Norwegian captain’s unfortunate companions and the grand Cthulhu himself: “Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.”
Between 4:00 p.m. and 4:15 p.m., a breach occurred in the architecture of time. And through the fissure created, a terrifying entity manifested itself on our earth. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wagah’nagl fhtagn!
The great Cthulhu, master of interior depths, Hastur the destroyer, he who walks on the wind and who must not be named. Nyarlathotep, crawling chaos. The mindless and amorphous Azathoth, which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity. Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth’s co-ruler. “All-in-One and One-in-All.” Such are the principle elements of Lovecraft’s mythology that were to mark his successors so forcefully and that continue to fascinate today. These are the coordinates of the unnameable.
This is not a coherent mythology, precisely drawn; it is unlike Greco-Roman mythology or this or that magical pantheon whose very clarity and finitude is almost reassuring. These Lovecraftian entities remain somewhat tenebrous. He avoids precision with regards to the distribution of their powers and abilities. In fact, their exact nature is beyond the grasp of the human mind. The impious books that pay homage to them and celebrate their cult only do so in confused and contradictory terms. They remain fundamentally unutterable. We only get fleeting glimpses of their hideous power, and those humans who seek to know more ineluctably pay in madness or in death.
PART THREE
HOLOCAUST
The twentieth century may come to be recognized as the golden age of epic and fantasy literature, once the morbid mists of feeble avant-gardes dissipate. It has already witnessed the emergence of Howard, Lovecraft, and Tolkien—three radically different universes. Three pillars of dream literature, as despised by critics as they are loved by the public.
Who cares? In the end critics always recognize their mistakes; or, to be more exact, in the end critics die and are replaced by others. So, after thirty years of scornful silence, “intellectuals” decided to take an interest in Lovecraft. They concluded that as an individual he was endowed with a truly astonishing imagination (they did after all have to attribute his success to something) but that his style was abominable.
That’s a joke. If Lovecraft’s style is deplorable, one might as well conclude style is inconsequential in literature, and then move on to some other subject.
All the same, this idiotic point of view can be explained. It must be noted, however, that HPL does not cater to the elegant, subtle, minimalist, and restrained notions of style that, generally speaking, moves these suffragettes. Here is an extract from “Under the Pyramids,” for example:
“I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably through subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside which a man is as a fly, and offering unnameable sacrifices to indescribable gods. Stone colossi marched in endless night and drove herds of grinning androsphinxes down to the shores of illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me in the darkness.”
Such emphatically inflated passages evidently present a stumbling block to erudite readers, but it is imperative to point out that it is these very passages that true fans prefer. Lovecraft has never been rivaled in this register. His way of using mathematical concepts, of precisely indicating the topography of each location of a drama, his mythology, his imaginary demoniac library, have all been borrowed; but no one has ever attempted to imitate these passages where he sets aside all stylistic restraint, where adjectives and adverbs pile upon one another to the point of exasperation, and he utters exclamations of pure delirium such as: “Hippopotami should not have human hands and crazy torches… men should not have the heads of crocodiles…” And yet this is the true aim of the work. One might even say that the only reason for the often subtle and elaborate structure
of Lovecraft’s “great texts” is to lay the groundwork for the stylistic explosion of these passages. Like the hallucinatory confession of Zadok Allen, the alcoholic, half-mad nonagenarian in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”:
“Hheh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin’ to see, hey? Mebbe ye’d like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o’ my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye, little pitchers hev big ears, an’ I wa’n’t missin’ nothin’ o’ what was gossiped abaout Cap’n Obed an’ the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa’s ship’s glass up to the cupalo an’ seed the reef a-bristlin’ thick with shapes that dove off quick soon’s the moon riz? Obed an’ the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water an’ never come up… Haow’d ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupalo a-watch-in’shapes as wa’n’t human shapes?… Hey?… Heh, heh, heh, heh…”
What opposes Lovecraft to the representatives of good taste is more than a question of details. HPL would probably have considered a story a failure if in writing it he did not have a chance to go overboard once at least. This can be proven a contrario by his pronouncement regarding the work of a peer: “[Henry] James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realise [sic] fully all the wild and devastating horror in his situations…”
This is all the more striking given that throughout his life Lovecraft was the epitome of the discreet, reserved, well-educated gentleman. Never one to utter a horror, nor to rant in public. No one ever once saw him angry, nor crying, nor laughing out loud. His was a life pared down to the bare minimum, whose only animus was literature and dreams. An exemplary life.
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