A far more fruitful view of the story may be entertained in terms of Jungian-archetypal criticism.
45 Indeed, the story fits the pattern of the Jungian quest through the psyche to an uncanny degree.
The Outsider, in the beginning of the tale, may be regarded as an undifferentiated psyche, a being in quest of a balanced ego not yet having its form. The castle’s depths are the collective unconscious, in Jungian theory that deepest psychic level of being in which the race’s primordial beginnings still repose, and in which are found the genetically coded archetypes of the deep psyche—the archetypes that represent psychic “images” or potentialities that will make the individual what he is, and will link him with his species, when they are “fleshed in” by the experience of life. Indeed, the castle’s deep-lying “maddening rows of antique books” are these very archetypes—repositories of profoundly seated collective lore which the Outsider carries within him. The castle’s depths are without light, that is, without conscious knowledge, for the patternings of the collective unconscious lie at levels too deep for conscious recognition. There are no mirrors, for the Outsider has not yet undertaken the psychic quest necessary for self-knowledge. He must embark upon a “well-nigh impossible climb” up the tower to the light—to conscious awareness, to the psyche-fulfilling realm of worldly experience to do so.
The Outsider finally reaches the dark chamber at the top of the tower, a chamber serving as a parallel for that higher yet still darkened level of the psyche, the personal unconscious—the realm of dreams and suppressed memories (“odious oblong boxes”); the room is “many aeons cut off from the castle below,” for the personal unconscious is without complete and free access to the immemorially old collective unconscious. The Outsider proceeds to open the door to light, to consciousness, and ventures out into the conscious world in the oldest and most universal of all quests, the quest for psychic wholeness and balance, for individuation or integration of the psyche, and for the Self.
In the outer world, the protagonist by “a kind of fearsome latent memory” finds himself, in his wandering steps, making “progress not wholly fortuitous”; he is guided by archetypal patternings too deep for conscious understanding. When he finds, in a wooded park “maddeningly familiar,” the ivied castle of mirth “ablaze with light,” he has come close to the Self, to the possibility of finding and understanding himself. However, the sought-after balance and integration of his psyche are not to be, for he cannot absorb or accept what he finds. In the “putrid, dripping eidolon” that he espies in the archway and discovers to be a reflection in the mirror, he has encountered the Jungian counter-ego or Shadow, that “dark brother” that one carries within oneself, which it can be madness to confront but which one must confront and come to terms with to achieve psychic wholeness. It is a much-repeated dictum of Jungian criticism that pre-Renaissance questers through the psyche tend to come back whole and balanced and individuated, while post-Renaissance questers tend not to (see, for example, the medieval account of Sir Gawain’s successful encounter with his Shadow in the form of the Green Knight, as compared with the unsatisfying encounter of Conrad’s Marlow in The Heart of Darkness, with his Shadow in the form of Kurtz), and Lovecraft’s post-Renaissance account of the Outsider is no exception. This hapless wanderer is decimated by the “unwholesome revelation” that the hideous and putrescent apparition in the glass is himself—is the dark side of his deep psyche, inseparable from the light side of his ego. Lovecraft’s assessment of his own descriptive prose as “baroque” is perhaps too harsh; the violence of the language is a reflection of the gripping emotional reactions of an understandably shocked narrator, to whom the ultimate psychic encounter indeed must be “a compound of all that is unclean.” The Outsider returns only to find the stone trapdoor closed immovably, for once the archetypes in the collective unconscious have been borne out in conscious experience—once the ego archetype has become an actual ego, however imbalanced—there is no returning to the formless “ignorant bliss” of the undifferentiated deep psyche, to the realm where there are no mirrors for self-understanding. The Outsider can find “nepenthe” only in madness: “Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night wind.” The story is a veritable model of the epic Jungian quest through the psyche for the wholeness of the Self, whether or not Lovecraft, who in any case was familiar with the psychoanalytical theories of Carl Jung, so intended it.
In 1923 Lovecraft wrote another tale of psychological horror reminiscent of Poe, “The Rats in the Walls.”
46 This story, Lovecraft remarked many years later, “was suggested by a very commonplace incident—the cracking of wall-paper late at nights, and the chain of imaginings resulting from it.”
47 The story deals with the themes of cannibalism and of dark heritages in a person’s past which survive atavistically and unthinkably into the present and engulf the modem scion of the family, who discovers to his horror who or what he is (a theme later worked out more thoroughly, but much differently, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). The first-person narrator of the tale is an American named Delapore who comes to inherit an ancestral home, Exham Priory, in England, a great Gothic pile “resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly.” Lovecraft in real life had a fascination with, and a love for, continuity with the past and rootedness in ancient local traditions, and this imagery of a castle built on a succession of ever older foundations metaphorically shows the extent to which he could channel this fascination for horrific effect.
The priory, Delapore learns, is a relic much loved by antiquarians but shunned by the country folk, who remember ghastly things about Delapore’s ancestors there. Delapore is ignorant of his family’s past because a grandfather who was supposed to pass down an envelope containing certain family traditions, perished at Carfax in the Civil War, the envelope perishing with him. Delapore’s son Alfred (probably an echo of the childless Lovecraft’s young friend Alfred Galpin) has served as a World War I aviation officer in England and has discovered the family seat through a friend, Captain Edward Norrys; the father buys the priory and, upon his son’s death in 1921 (interestingly, the date of Lovecraft’s mother’s death), moves to the environs of Anchester, England to restore the ruins. He meets Captain Norrys, who—in a delectable bit of foreshadowing—is described as “plump.” Delapore soon finds that Norrys is his only friend, for the peasants of the region sullenly resent him for his plans to restore “a symbol so abhorrent to them.”
Slowly Delapore pieces together the history of Exham Priory, which stands “on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge” and whose subcellar contains inscriptions hinting of the Magna Mater and suggesting worship of Cybele and Atys following ancient traditions from Asia Minor held as heretical by Romans of the third Augustan legion who had camped nearby. The priory is described as having housed a strange monastic order in 1000 a.d. with “extensive gardens which needed no walls to exclude a frightened populace.” The place was not destroyed in the Norman Conquest of 1066, but was granted by Henry III to Gilbert de la Poer in 1261. (In choosing the ancestral name de la Poer, Lovecraft is indulging in a borrowing from aspects of New England history dear to him, for de la Poer was an ancestral form of the name of Sarah Helen Power Whitman, who lived at one time on Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island, and whom Edgar Allan Poe courted unsuccessfully and honoured with one of his two poems titled “To Helen”; Poe traced his and Sarah’s name back to a common source: de la Poer.)
Delapore learns that his family, who built their castle on the foundations of the old temple, has long been of ill repute. The family seems to have had an inner cult, embracing some family members and excluding others, apparently on the basis of temperament. Grotesque legends have been whispered about this cult; Delapore (characteristically enough of Lovecraft’s a
rtfully vague narration) is regaled with legends of witchcraft, and there are
vaguer tales of wails and how lings in the barren, windswept valley beneath the limestone cliff; of the graveyard stenches after the spring rains; of the floundering, squealing white thing on which Sir John Clave’s horse had trod one night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the priory in the full light of day.
In making the colour white a vague generator of impressions of horror, Lovecraft is following such literary forebears as Melville (see “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dick); and Lovecraft is powerfully tantalising when he declines to describe what the servant saw.
Delapore also learns that a family member outside of the inner cult made some shocking discovery and murdered all of the members of the family in their sleep; the act was condoned by the country people and so slackly treated by the law that this person, Delapore’s own lineal progenitor, was allowed to escape to Virginia; he was Walter de la Poer. (In this name one discerns not only a borrowing from Poe’s and Sarah Helen Power Whitman’s ancestral name, but also probably an echo of the name Walter de la Mare, a poet whom Lovecraft much admired.) After the castle’s desertion, a great army of ravenous rats poured forth into the countryside, devouring everything in their path.
The protagonist finally finishes the restoration of the castle, after two years, and moves in with his cat Nigger-Man
48 and eight other cats, “of which latter species,” he comments autobiographically of Lovecraft, “I am particularly fond.” He has adopted the original form of his name, de la Poer; this fact pointedly symbolises his tending toward the reversion that is to come. Almost immediately after moving into the castle, he is beset with a curious problem: the sound of rats unaccountably present in the stone walls of his bed chamber—significantly, a sound to which only the cats and he are sensitive, for the horror to come is, characteristically of Lovecraft, de la Poer’s own private horror; Lovecraft is here making early use of his skills at character isolation. The motion of the rats seems to be a sort of beckoning spiral down into the subcellar of the priory, and de la Poer is much vexed. His sleep is disturbed by a singular dream that foreshadows later developments:
I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.
In his use of the imagery of “nodding,” Lovecraft has made this description truly dreamlike.
De la Poer and Norrys explore the Roman subcellar, noting ancient inscriptions and oddly stained altars, and resolving to spend the night there. De la Poer’s dream about the swineherd recurs, but this time he sees, in his dream, a foreshadowing detail which causes him to awake screaming, and which is not disclosed until the story’s end. The sound of the rats persists, though only for the ears of de la Poer and the cats, beckoning still farther downward. The men notice that there is a draft of air from beneath, near one of the altars, and, fascinated to think that there could be some still deeper and older vault, they plan to call in professional archaeological help, travelling to London to procure it.
Upon their return, de la Poer has another dream, the description of which shows Lovecraft in 1923 to be already a master of the art of restraint: “There was a vision of a Roman feast like that of Trimalchio, with a horror in a covered platter. Then came that damnable, recurrent thing about the swineherd.” In referring merely to “a horror in a covered platter,” Lovecraft has made the scene much more lastingly horrific than he could have made it by any specific description; the reader is left to fill the platter with whatever horrors can be dredged up from the depths of imagination, and the effect thus grows in potency with rereading. The feast of Trimalchio refers to the Latin work Cena Trimalchionis, part of the Satyricon of Petronius; and, incidentally, if Lovecraft could read this orgiastic piece and retain a sufficiently favourable impression of it to refer to it this way in his fiction, he evidently was not always the prude that he is often assumed to have been.
When the explorers manage to move the altar in the subcellar, they find a bone-strewn flight of steps leading downward, steps which, they are amazed to notice, “must have been chiseled from beneath.” At this point Lovecraft inserts a most effective dramatic pause: “I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words.”
At the bottom of the stone steps the men behold a huge, cavernous space apparently lighted by some filtered sunlight from fissures in the cliff. Thornton, one of the investigators, who has a psychic bent and has earlier remarked to de la Poer that the rats have shown him the way to what he was meant to see, faints at the sight; he later faints again, and these touches seem a bit melodramatic (an occasional fault of which Lovecraft himself was aware). The men survey the scene: “It was a twilit grotto [de la Peer’s dream coming true] of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see.” The grotto contains prehistoric tumuli, countless bones, a Roman ruin, a Saxon edifice, and an English structure of wood. The bones are human; some of them are of very low order of evolution, some are of higher order, and all are rat-gnawed. Some of the low-order human remains are quadrupeds kept and fattened in pens for evident purposes of cannibalism. Lovecraft’s narrator remarks that the underground realm is “an area so hideously foreshadowed by my dreams”; this is perhaps to belabour the obvious.
The team turns to explore the deeper recesses of the cavern; in Lovecraft there is generally a “further horror.” The men find “carrion black pits” of picked bones; at the yawning brink of one of them de la Poer almost slips, and he has a moment of “ecstatic fear”—psychologically, a most intriguing phrase, but one that Lovecraft may well have intended in its strict etymological sense, ecstasy meaning literally displacement or distraction (by any powerful emotion). At this point reality seems to become increasingly blurred for de la Poer, who is led on by his privately perceived sound of rats—his personal horror unfolding, his eminent discovery of what he is, what a de la Poer still must be. The rats, he says, are determined to lead him on into “those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.” (This description is nearly identical to that which he gives, in later writings, to his god Azathoth, reserving other characterisations for Nyarlathotep; at this early point in his career, Lovecraft’s celebrated Mythos is beginning to take form in his mind but without its later near-consistencies. )
De la Poer’s mind grows ever more clouded; he is only dimly aware of something bumping into him, “something soft and plumb”—clearly, his companion Norrys. He thinks, however, “it must have been rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living.” His thoughts, spoken aloud as it turns out, lapse into a regression. He protests, hopelessly, “No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys’ fat face on that flabby fungous thing!” His outbursts then run through successively more archaic language: “Curse you, Thornton, I’ll teach you to faint at what my family do!” and “’Sblood, thou stinkard! I’ll learn ye how to gust” and “wolde ye swynke me thilke wys?” with a resort to Latin (“Magna Mater!”) and finally to Gaelic: “Dia ad aghaidh ’s ad aodann . . . agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas ’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa!” The linguistic regression, of course, symbolises de la Peer’s own reversion to type, to the cannibalistic horror of his ancestry—for the men find him “crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys ‘ and take him away to an asylum.
The burst of Gaelic in the final scene is one that Lovecraft, not realising that for the intended locale’s linguistic history Cymric would be more logical, copied from Fiona MacLeod’s The Sin Eater, where it is a curse
meaning “God against thee and in thy face—and may a death of woe be yours. Evil and sorrow to thee and thine!”?
49 The philosophical discrepancy is not one that mattered to most readers, but it did bring Lovecraft into a long correspondence with writer Robert E. Howard, who pointed out the inconsistency to him.
The story ends with one of the most stylistically Poesque passages in all of Lovecraft’s work, a passage resonant in its anaphora—its repetition of the word “rats”:
When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.
By placing the protagonist in the asylum during the telling of his tale, Lovecraft has provided the reader with a rational “out”—with the prosaic interpretation that the narrator is mad and that the story is, therefore, not to be believed; the rats, the madness, after all, have followed him even into the padded cell. However, the total narrative impact of the tale is such as to make the reader want to believe it, and not want to partake of the “out.” Such is the interpretative tension that Lovecraft is already skillfully managing to set up in his readers’ minds.
Possible interpretations of the tale, given that one does not simply put the narration down as madness, are various. The rats, of course, are potentially symbolic of the inevitability of de la Poer’s atavistic return to the nature of his ancestry; when in his dreams they “rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike,” the symbolic suggestion is, since de la Poer is the swineherd, that he is to be consumed in his rediscovery of his family traits. From a slightly different point of view, the rats are de la Poer; they are the ineluctable retrogression of a mind sliding back to an unthinkable horror of the past.
H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1) Page 8