Lovecraft Annual 1

by S. T. Joshi (ed. )

  D’Agati, Deborah. “The Problems with Solving: Implications for Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft Narrators.” Lovecraft Studies Nos. 42/43 (Autumn 2001): 54–60.

  Dansky, Richard E. “Transgression, Spheres of Influence, and the Use of the Utterly Other in Lovecraft.” Lovecraft Studies No. 30 (Spring 1994): 5–14.

  Fléche, Betsy. “The Art of Survival: The Translation of Walter Benjamin.” SubStance 28, No. 2 (1999): 95–109.

  Jaén, Didier T. “Mysticism, Esoterism, and Fantastic Literature.” In The Scope of the Fantastic—Theory, Technique, Major Authors: Selected Essays from the First International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, ed. Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. 105–11.

  Joshi, S. T. “Lovecraft Criticism: A Study.” In H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 20–26.

  ———. “H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West.” In The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. 168–229.

  Katz, Steven T., ed. Mysticism and Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

  Langan, John P. “Naming the Nameless: Lovecraft’s Grammatology.” Lovecraft Studies No. 41 (Spring 1999): 25–30.

  Leiber, Fritz, Jr. “A Literary Copernicus” (1949). In H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 50–62.

  Matilal, Bimal Krishna. “Mysticism and Ineffability: Some Issues of Logic and Language.” In Katz, Mysticism and Language. 143–57.

  Price, Robert M. “Lovecraft’s ‘Artificial Mythology.’” In An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991. 247–56.

  Will, Bradley A. “H. P. Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime.” Extrapolation 43 (2002): 7–21.

  * * *

  1. By the same token, Lovecraft’s work in itself is disquieting art, forcing readers to reconsider their worldview.

  2. From the Old English god, meaning “good,” and spell, meaning “tale.”

  3. As above, but formed the Old English mah, meaning “bad.”

  4. For a much more thorough account of Lovecraft and Romanticism addressing at least some of the concerns listed here, see Donald R. Burleson’s “Lovecraft and Romanticism” in Lovecraft Studies Nos. 19/20 (1989): 28–31.

  5. The article that addresses this function that is the most correspondent with a reading of Lovecraft is Barthes’ “Textual Analysis of Poe’s Valdemar,” a reading of the Poe short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Poe uses detail to a similar effect in the story.

  * * *

  Briefly Noted

  Timothy H. Evans has recently written several impressive pieces of Lovecraft scholarship. The most notable is “A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft,” Journal of Folklore Research 42, No. 1 (January–April 2005): 99–135. An earlier article is “Tradition and Illusion: Antiquarianism, Tourism and Horror in H. P. Lovecraft,” Extrapolation 45, No. 2 (Summer 2004): 176–95. Professor Evans has also written a cordial review of Robert H. Waugh’s The Monster in the Mirror in Extrapolation 47, No. 1 (Spring 2006): 164–66.

  Lovecraft continues to be fodder for academicians. Several articles have appeared recently in academic journals, but they have not been seen. These include: Wouter J. Hanegraaf, “Fiction in the Desert of the Real: Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos,” Aries 7, No. 1 (2007): 85–109, and James Kneale, “From Beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the Place of Horror,” Cultural Geographies 13, No. 1 (January 2006): 106–26. Any readers who have had access to these articles are advised to contact the editor, who is preparing an exhaustive revision and updating of his 1981 bibliography of Lovecraft and Lovecraft criticism.

  Unity in Diversity:

  Fungi from Yuggoth as a Unified Setting

  * * *

  Philip A. Ellis

  Enough words have been spent on looking at Fungi from Yuggoth as a coherent and linked narrative, both pro and contra, and not enough have been spent looking at the wider issues of unity within a more general sense. To what degree, we may ask, are the sonnets unified, and how does this unity create a sense of a singular narrative to the sonnets? By looking at how the sonnets are unified, and, in a sense, why, we can begin to understand the basis behind seeing the sonnets as a narrative. We can begin to see why the unity displayed in the sonnets stimulates this reaction. Further, we can begin to ask further questions of both the sonnets, and the other poems of H. P. Lovecraft.

  S. T. Joshi, in his essay “Lovecraft’s Fantastic Poetry” (203), points out that the sonnets display an “utter randomness of tone, mood and import.” He goes on, in the same place, to state that they “have miniature horror stories . . . cheek by jowl with autobiographical vignettes . . ., pensive philosophy . . ., apocalyptic cosmicism . . ., and versified nightmares,” and that he “cannot see any ‘continuity’ or ‘story’ in this cycle as R. Boerem and Ralph E. Vaughan purport to do.” This question of continuity, story, within the sonnets is, though ultimately unimportant, integral to a better understanding of them. Is it possible that they are unified, while lacking such a continuity? Quite clearly, in no sense is there a unified “I” behind the poems. The “I” of the first three sonnets, who writes “I entered, charmed, and from a cobwebbed heap / Took up the nearest tome” (“The Book,” AT 64, ll. 9–10), is not the same who writes, in “The Gardens of Yin” (AT 71, ll. 13–14): “I hurried—but when the wall rose, grim and great, / I found there was no longer any gate.” Even if it were the case that each “I” of the sonnets was the same, not all the sonnets are in the first person: some sonnets, such as “Zaman’s Hill,” “Nyarlathotep,” and “The Elder Pharos,” dispense with the narrative “I,” being in the third person, for example. The overall impression is, surely, a collection of disparate poems, unified by factors other than a simple or complex narrative. There is no unity among them that can account for an overarching narrative structure beyond the initial three sonnets, which are an aborted, failed narrative.1

  To look more closely at the initial sonnets, we can see clearly the point at which a supposed narrative breaks down. It is true that the first three sonnets are coherent, and a clear narrative is present. All three have a unified “I,” and all three give us the start of a first-person narrative: the narrator enters a bookshop, steals a book, and returns home, followed by a mysterious being. Then, immediately, the scene switches, in “Recognition.” The setting is not the same as that of the earlier sonnets, but Yuggoth. Here the narrator sees himself consumed by alien beings that (AT 66, l. 10) “were not men”; the shift here is too great, too abrupt, for a coherent narrative, and thus any attempt to find one will fail. We see these abrupt shifts, in mood, in tense, in voice, and in narrative thereafter, through the entire sequence. No attempt is made to unify or link the sonnets on the level of narrative or symbology. Clearly, what we have here is a collection of disparate sonnets, though unified by other, differing factors. It is to these factors that we must now turn our attention, to see why the problem of a narrative seems so attractive to scholars.

  Yet there is a question as to why there is unity in the first place. What factors in these sonnets make us see the collection, as a whole, as a tight, close-reading experience? Briefly, there are four main areas that demand investigation, and which lead to greater unity. There are, of course, others, but these four should serve for the moment. The first is a shared body of allusions and references outside of the sonnets themselves. The second is a shared vocabulary, which creates a greater sense of unity through both word choice and mood. Third, shared tone helps unify various sonnets, though not all, within the greater collection. Fourth, the question of the sonnets’ creation leads to closer ideas of unity. All four interact
and help create a unified setting for the individual sonnets. All four, furthermore, help contribute in their own way to the magnificence that is the achievement of the cycle as a whole. Therefore, it is important to look at the first of these areas, the question of shared allusion.

  There are two ways in which the shared allusions of the sonnets can be categorised. First are those allusions to the external world, second are those to an external body of writings. Of these first allusions, the process is such that the reader and narrator relate the details of the sonnet to a shared experience of a world, and thereby help create the sonnet’s import. The use of Egypt and Egyptian motifs is illustrative. Briefly, by referring to Egypt, certain sonnets create a relationship with the author’s “real” Egypt and the narrator’s “assumed” Egypt. For example, “The Lamp” (AT 66, l. 2) has a “chiselled sign no priest in Thebes could read,” and the later reference in the same poem of “forty centuries” relates the lamp to a perceived antiquity. There is no precise date for the events of the poem; we can assume that it is set, as so many others of the cycle seem to be, in contemporary times, although the use of the word “priest” leads me to see it as set in antiquity. Thus, although in this way the setting leads away from a unified narrative, it leads to further unity with another, later sonnet. This is “Nyarlathotep.” The first line sets the scene: Nyarlathotep “himself” has come from “inner Egypt” (AT 72). This shared allusion to the real Egypt is important. Both “The Lamp” and “Nyarlathotep,” then, rely in part on our personal construction of what is Egyptian, in order to convey its intended meanings. This process of external allusion then lends an air of reality, whereby we in some measure see the events and features of the sonnets as related to real, external phenomena and places, and, henceforth, as somehow more plausible. Thus, we receive a notion of antiquity, through the line (“The Dweller,” AT 76, l. 1) “It had been old when Babylon was new”; and we can easily imagine from our own experiences the “old farm buildings” of “Continuity” (AT 79, l. 10) that help make more vivid that particular sonnet. By referring in these ways, and others, to the “real” world, Lovecraft makes the sonnets as a whole more unified, and creates in many of them a sense that the events depicted are, or could be, as real as the world in which they seemingly occur.

  This leads in turn to the allusions to a shared body of writing. In various sonnets, we find references to various places and beings of Lovecraft’s wider writings. Thus, we have Arkham in “The Port” (AT 67, l. 1), Innsmouth in “The Port” (AT 67, ll. 4, 9) and “The Bells” (AT 72, l. 7), night-gaunts and shoggoths (“Night-Gaunts,” AT 72), Thok (again in “Night-Gaunts,” l. 9), and Yuggoth in both “Recognition” (AT 66, l. 12) and “Star-Winds” (AT 70, l. 10). We also have the wider use of a shared vocabulary. Thus, for example, the word “fantastic” appears not only in the sonnets “Star-Winds” (AT 70, l. 5) and “The Dweller” (AT 76, l. 7), but also in other poems, such as “The Eidolon” (AT 38, l. 14) and “Clouds” (AT 41, l. 3), and other fiction and letters. This sharing of places, beings, and other vocabulary bring to mind the concept of intertextuality, and it unifies further these sonnets into the larger body of Lovecraft’s work. Thus, they achieve a form of unity by their shared essence with other works, leading us to read them as part of a wider body of writing, where aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction, for example, can be expected in the sonnets.

  The aspect of the shared language in general with other texts leads necessarily to the shared language within the sonnets as a whole. As we have seen, both Innsmouth and Yuggoth appear twice within the sonnets. Since, for example, we encounter Innsmouth in “The Port,” the later appearance in “The Bells” leads us to read these two sonnets as unified by setting, and thereby enabling us to postulate a unity of setting in the other sonnets. Similarly, in the more general language of the sonnets themselves, terms recur, leading us to associate the sonnets with each other. Thus, taking again the example of “fantastic,” we read “Star-Winds” and “The Dweller” as unified in some closer way, even if subconsciously. Of course, there will always be an amount of shared vocabulary that fails to gain significance. Such basic words as the various articles, or prepositions, among others, are shared by most English texts; they remain structural words, around which more significant words, such as various substantives or adjectives, are set. It is only through such a tool as a concordance that a fuller understanding of the sonnets’ shared vocabulary can be made.2

  These questions of vocabulary lead in turn to other aspects of the poems, namely, mood and tone. Neither aspect is uniform. The poems themselves vary considerably, and some seem more pensive, for example, than others. Thus, we find that the mood and tone of “Background” is pensive, philosophical, being concerned with the poet’s worldview upon old things that “cut the moment’s thongs and leave [him] free / To stand alone before eternity” (AT 76 ll. 13–14). “Azathoth,” on the other hand, is both cosmic in its outlook and lacks pensiveness; it is concerned, basically, with conveying a sense of unease, disquiet. Yet each poem has a degree of relationship with other poems. The mood and tone of any one poem is shared to a degree by others. Thus, the pensiveness of “Background” is taken up not only in the expected “Continuity,” also similar in subject and a fitting end to the cycle as a whole, but also in the immediately preceding “Nostalgia,” which is, however, more fantastic and elegiac in tone. The first three sonnets are also a case in point. Their prominence from the bulk of the later sonnets, despite similarities of tone and mood with many of them, is highlighted by their relationship as a multi-sonnet narrative. This narrative is heightened by the unity of both tone and mood, and this unity helps lead us to expect that the relationship between the later sonnets is as close and involved as that of the first three. These considerations of how unity is achieved lead into the final ones, those involving the composition of the sonnets. These considerations, these questions of creation, need to be addressed before we can look at why the unity creates the reaction that the sonnets are a unified narrative.

  Briefly, the bulk of the sonnets of Fungi from Yuggoth were written between December 27, 1929, and January 4, 1930. This brief time period is, I feel, significant toward looking at the unity of the sonnets. As a poet, I find that work produced in a very short burst, over a matter of days rather than weeks or months, tends to have a higher degree of unity than other works separated over a period of time. Thus, it is not surprising that, producing an average of four poems a day for over a week, there is a higher degree of unity than otherwise. Indeed, it is possible to speculate that the initial three sonnets are the product of the first day of writing, stimulating in turn the following days’ work on the others. Of the sonnets, only “Recapture” was not produced in this burst of writing. Its presence in the sonnets, and the ease with which it assumes its place, speaks more for the sonnets as a product of a general period, rather than a specific one: they share much, that is, with the other poems created around that time, and should be seen more readily within that wider context.3 As a result, then, of the short period of creation, the poems share a degree of similar vocabulary, mood and tone, since these are factors of the author at the time of creation. Just as vocabularies and concerns develop and change over time, so too do the basic productions of an author. What the sonnets represent is, rather than a wide period and diversity of an author’s output, a detailed segment, a slice of life centred closely upon one highly creative period, caught between the older creations and what will become his later, more mature work.

  So, then, why does this unity lead scholars to read the sonnet as a unified narrative? Briefly, the first three sonnets lead us to expect a unified narrative, since they set up this expectation within the reader. As the second and third follow on, clearly and unambiguously, from their predecessors, then the others must have a similar relationship to those preceding them. Thus, for example, R. Boerem’s attempt to find in the sonnets a sequence of seven groupings that make the sonnets as a whole a “dream journey which in tur
n, reflects upon reality to give it a new appeal” (224). However, although such attempts are interesting, they nonetheless fail, because the simplest and best explanation for the sequence as a whole is that, although initially started as a narrative, as evinced by the first three sonnets, the sequence as a whole is a disconnected collection of poems unified by such factors as allusions, vocabulary, tone, and mood, and that this unity lends the air of a greater unity of narrative, such that it remains tempting to construct such a narrative from the poems. What we are seeing, then, is the propensity of the human mind to seek order in disconnected fragments, in this case, the sonnets.

  What, then, can we gather from the sonnets, looking at this question of unity, and applying what we learn to other aspects of Lovecraft’s work? Clearly, we understand that the circumstances of a work’s creation can play a part in our construction of its meaning. Where we know the circumstances of a given group of poems’ creation, we can gain a degree of understanding of their relationship other than that purely derived from superficial similarities of theme and authorship. We can, further, look more closely at the prose works and see their relationships in a similar manner, how texts produced in close proximity relate to and reflect upon each other, especially in regard to the development of Lovecraft as a writer. Further, we can better understand the relationships between the various works of Lovecraft, such as his poetry, fiction, essays, and letters, in relation to each other, and not just to themselves. If we start to do this, a wider understanding, not only of Lovecraft, but his works, is possible. Demonstrating that such a unity is possible here, on a microscopic scale, is important before demonstrating it on a macroscopic scale.