H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1)

by Donald R. Burleson

  “The Rats in the Walls,” like “The Outsider,” lends itself to the discernment of archetypal patterns as well, for the Jung at heart. Clearly, de la Poer’s ancestral curse may be regarded as equivalent to the counter-ego or Shadow, that dark side of oneself that one dares not but must somehow face; indeed, the duality of the spellings of the name (Delapore, de la Poer) symbolically suggests the opposing sides of the psyche--Delapore the ego, de la Poer the counter-ego. In the Jungian-archetypal interpretation, the protagonist, strictly speaking, does not undergo change or atavistic reversion to what his family used to be, but rather discovers what he still carries within him, what he has been all along: a bestial creature beneath the veneer of civilisation, a carrier of primordially dark heritage which the passage of no amount of time can eradicate—a multifaceted psyche in agony to integrate and balance itself, and ultimately unable to do so. Like the Outsider, de la Poer cannot come to terms with his Shadow, and he is destroyed.

  The story is replete with references and types of imagery that serve to suggest the interpretation of quest through the psyche. The priory itself is a potent symbol, containing as it does various levels, the oldest parts of which are at the lowest levels, in parallel with the Jungian conception of the psyche; the reconstructed castle’s nethermost regions are the deep archetypal content of the mind—the collective unconscious—obtruding on the conscious mind, albeit in a manner not at first understood by the protagonist, who is guided or lured by the rats first down to the subcellar (the personal unconscious), then lower to the level of the primordial archetypes, which are suggested by the strewn bones and ancient structures redolent of the cannibalistic heritage that is the lot of de la Poer’ s family. The descent to the collective unconscious is foreshadowed by dreams of that very “grotto,” which—containing the archetypal roots of the ultimate horror called the Shadow—is “knee-deep with filth.” The passageway down is “chiseled from beneath”; the collective unconscious leads its own ancient archetypal life and obtrudes on the personal unconscious in the form of symbolic dreams. The bones of this lower level stretch around like a “foamy sea,” suggesting man’s collective past in the primeval oceans, a past that in effect still sloshes within his cells. This imagery of liquescence and the sea is repeated when toward the end the privately discerned scurrying of the rats rises in de la Poer’s ears or mind “as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea,” and when the rats are described as “viscous.” De la Poer is awash in the undeniable nature of his past and of himself; he has encountered the Shadow. Conceivably, he could have absorbed and accepted this dark side of himself; Lovecraft could have had him merely sickened at the grotto’s revelations but not overcome by them. The protagonist’s psychic wholeness, however, is not to be; as in the case of the Outsider, he can only react to the Shadow by becoming (like Hawthorne’s minister in the black veil) all Shadow; he escapes into insanity.

  Astonishingly enough, Carl Jung himself once actually had a dream that “The Rats in the Walls” parallels closely, up to a point. Jung relates that in his dream, he was in a sitting room of eighteenth-century style, wondering what the lower floor looked like; descending, he found it to be darker and of sixteenth-century furnishing, and he resolved to explore still lower. Descending to the cellar, he found “a door opening onto a flight of stone steps that led to a large vaulted room” evidently of Roman origin. Pulling up a stone slab, he saw “yet another flight of steps leading to a kind of cave, which seemed to be a prehistoric tomb, containing two skulls, some bones, and broken shards of pottery.” At this point Jung woke up.

  50

  Jung proceeds to interpret the dream-house and its underlying structure as symbolically representing the levels of the psyche; in fact, the dream played a major role in lung’s development of his archetypal theory of the collective unconscious. The amazing thing is that a full account of the dream was not published until 1961 (in Memories, Dreams, Reflections), twenty-four years after Lovecraft’s death. Thus, one cannot literally speak of Jung’s account as a source; perhaps this remarkable coincidence, ironically enough, can only be explained in Jung’s own archetypal terms; dreams and their symbolism are rooted in the commonality of the collective unconscious, and patterns of imagery recur, as when widely separated peoples generate closely similar mythologies.

  In any case, “The Rats in the Walls” is yet another Lovecraftian quest for the Self through the labyrinth of the deep psyche, a quest tragically unfulfilling for the protagonist. Even tinged as it is with some melodrama, the story is a powerful one, one in which Lovecraft, though somewhat reflecting the manner of Poe, is seen to be developing into an artist with highly individual narrative powers.

  “The Music of Erich Zann”

  In late 1921 Lovecraft wrote a very singular tale called “The Music of Erich Zann,”

  51 the only Lovecraft story to use music as a major motif, and the only one set in France. Soon after the writing Lovecraft remarked of the story, “It has horror—the horror of the grotesque and visionary—but it does not ‘grip’ like ‘Randolph Carter.’ It is not, as a whole, a dream, though I have dreamt of steep streets like the Rue d’ Auseil.”

  52 Years later he would write, “In my opinion, my best tale is ‘The Colour out of Space’ (1927). Second comes ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ (1921), & after that my own preferences are very vague.”

  53 Editorial opinion was much in keeping with Lovecraft’s own relatively high regard for the tale, because it was reprinted several times during his lifetime.

  Stylistically, and in its French setting, the story shows something of the influence of Poe; yet it is no slavish imitation in that regard by any means. “I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care,”

  54 the narrator, a student, says in the story’s opening lines, “yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil.” (The city, presumably, is Paris, though this is never stated.) Thus, the story concerns a sort of haunting elusiveness, a motif much used in more thorough development by Lovecraft in such later works as “The Shadow out of Time.” The narrator has lived on the Rue d’Auseil and certainly should be able to find it again, but cannot; although it was within a short walk of the university and was marked by distinctive neighbouring features, he even must admit, “I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.” This enigma, of course, raises the question of whether the narrator is of reliable mentality; he even says, “my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’ Auseil.” The whole telling of the tale, however, is designed to convince the reader that the experience actually occurred, and thus there is established in the reader’s mind, the tension of dubiousness versus credibility that is so characteristic of both Lovecraft and Poe.

  The Rue d’Auseil in the story

  55 is a narrow and steep street with houses leaning crazily at all angles, and the narrator comes to lodge in the third house from the top, a nearly empty edifice where he takes a room on the fifth floor. Soon he hears strange music, and he learns from the concierge Blandot that the source is “an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann.” The musician lives in the lofty garret room at the top of the old house, a room whose gable window commands a unique view over the street’s terminating wall. The narrator regularly hears Zann playing late at night, and is “haunted by the weirdness of his music.” The old man’s strangeness—his being a foreigner (a German among Frenchmen), his being mute, and his being obsessed with spectral music—is effectively symbolic of the alienage implicit in the story’s climax, and indeed of the surrealistic nature of the narrator’s whole experience.

  When the narrator makes Zann’s acquaintance and asks to hear him play, he is somewhat grudgingly invited to Zann’s room, where Zann plays for him, for over an hour, strains of music apparently of his own composition: “They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most
captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.” When the narrator asks Zann to play the weird strains and whistles a few of them, Zann covers the youth’s mouth to silence him and casts a fearful glance at the curtained gable window. To assuage the narrator’s indignation, he writes a note, in “execrable French,” to the effect that he cannot play his weird strains, nor hear them from another; he arranges with Blandot to have the youth moved to a lower room.

  Nevertheless, the narrator surreptitiously continues to listen to Zann’s nocturnal performances, which fill him with “vague wonder” and impress him as having an unearthly and symphonic quality, as if more than one player were performing. Lovecraft leaves this point enticingly ambiguous; the reader is not certain whether this symphonic impression is attributable to Zann’s musical genius, or to less explicable causes—perhaps Zann has accompaniment from beyond the window. When, one night, the narrator hears the shrieking viol “swell into a chaotic babel of sound” and hears Zann utter “the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter,” he rushes to investigate. Zann is heard closing the shutter and sash before opening the door, and he begins to prepare a long written account of his circumstances, falling back on his native German to tell “of all the marvels and terrors which beset him.”

  Perhaps an hour later, as Zann still writes, the narrator thinks that he hears an “exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note” beyond the window; and Zann, dropping his pencil, begins to “rend the night” with transcendently wild music, “to ward something off or drown something out.” Indeed, the narrator hears, or thinks that he hears, “a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.”

  56 Zann’s playing grows increasingly frenetic, emitting seemingly impossible sounds, and Zann’s eyes become “bulging, glassy, and sightless” while the shutters rattle and the glass breaks to admit a rush of chill wind. As so often will happen in Lovecraft’s later works, the evidence or explanation is lost; Zann’s papers are caught up in the wind and carried out into the darkness. (Lovecraft had to make Zann a mute, of course, in order for this loss of explanation to work.) The narrator finally gets a look out the mysterious window:

  I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth.

  Turning back to the room of screaming blackness and the “night-baying viol,” he finds Zann, though still playing with unutterable frenzy, ice-cold, glassy-eyed, and unbreathing. Perhaps Zann is no longer Zann, but the advent of whatever has intruded from beyond the window. In any case, the narrator flees mindlessly out into the city, finding only a windless, moonlit, ordinary night. He concludes the tale cyclically with a reiteration of the opening statement that the Rue d’Auseil is no longer to be found.

  Interpretations of the story may abound; one may speculate that Erich Zann’s music is the ultimate chaos, in Lovecraft’s fictive (and personal) Weltanschauung, of the universe—that Zann’s national, physiological, and temperamental alienage may symbolise cosmic alienage in general, and that the narrator’s experience has been to glimpse the ultimate cosmic chaos in a manner not to be repeated. One of the most engaging ways to look at the story is to be found in its thematic form. Lovecraft mentions the word “fugue” in the tale, and in thematic terms the story can be thought of as being a fugue.

  57 It is highly unlikely that Lovecraft consciously contrived to give the tale a fugal structure, but such structure may be discerned there nevertheless.

  Fugal structure, as the work of Bach alone demonstrates (particularly in The Art of Fugue), may be quite variegated, but there is a nucleus of morphology common to virtually all fugues. A fugue generally has two or more themes or subjects which interact contrapuntally. The initial theme is always introduced as a brief melodic line by itself in a first voice which then continues with a second theme, while the first theme is repeated in a related key by a second voice. A third voice may then appear with a third utterance of the original theme, while the second theme is being repeated to the introduction of a third theme, and so on; thereafter, the various themes can be reiterated, exchanged, interwoven, and transmuted in many different ways, often interspersed with “episodes” or passages that break temporarily with the interplay of subject and countersubjects but usually echo and foreshadow them in some fashion. Toward the end of a fugue one usually encounters the device of “stretto,” a crowding or condensation of thematic material for heightened effect. In particular, the closing section or coda commonly contains a rather tight stretto played over a sustained bass note called a pedal point.

  Such structure can also exist in verbal patterns of narration. In “The Music of Erich Zann” (in which it will be convenient, for purposes of this argument, to number the paragraphs), one may discern three distinct subjects or themes:

  Theme A: the setting itself, the mysterious Rue d’ Auseil and the house, a setting so ponderous as practically to constitute a character or an aspect of plot

  Theme B: Erich Zann and his music

  Theme C: the weird externality of whatever lies beyond the garret window

  In characteristic fugal fashion, Theme A, of the elusive street and house, is introduced by itself, the further themes not yet to be imagined. The first four paragraphs dwell on this theme, a tonally rising one by analogy with the street’s steep ascent and the verticality of the house; the theme comes to focus on the house in paragraph 5. In paragraph 6, Theme B enters, the theme of Erich Zann and his music, while Theme A continues in modulation to a higher key (up to the dominant or fifth tone, as it were, by reference to the fifth floor of the house, matching the usual fugal pattern perfectly). Themes A and B interplay until the first inchoate strains of Theme C appear in paragraph 10, the mysteriousness of what lies beyond the curtained window.

  Two paragraphs later one comes to the first episodic passage; the mute Zann pauses to write a letter of explanation to the narrator. The episode is echoic of Theme B, in that Zann writes of his music, and it foreshadows both the further development of Theme C and the later and longer episode (which is modulated to a different key, as it were, by the change from French to German). Hereafter the themes interweave for several paragraphs; Theme A is modulated to a lower key by the narrator’s being moved to a lower room, and Theme B darkens in mood to become suggestive of the mysterious Theme C, as Zann’s music grows ever wilder and weirder until by paragraph 17 it becomes quite grotesque; hints of Theme C are present because of the open shutters, which, however, Zann closes.

  At this point there is a second and longer episodic passage, echoic of the first, when Zann undertakes to write a lengthy explanation to the narrator of what it really is that besets the old man. The episode is enigmatic in nature, for one never learns what is written, except that the message is one of “marvels and terrors,” anticipating the coming full development of Theme C, the mystery of what lies beyond the curtains.

  Theme C in paragraph 19 is a little further unveiled--some sound is heard from the window—but as Zann plays wildly (Theme B in crescendo) to overpower it, this tantalisingly vague thematic development is still kept hidden, though always threatening to break through into full articulation. As Zann’s Theme B continues, growing ever more frantic, there is a suggestion in paragraph 21 of the appearance of Theme C in ominously clearer form: “a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.” As the shutters rattle and the window breaks, Theme C in paragraph 22 finally enters in full expression and begins to participate in real contrapuntal form, interweaving complexly with the ever more hysterical Theme B of Zann’s screaming viol. When the narrator takes his momentous look through the window, the dark and spectral Theme C swells to great intensity. Since Zann, while continuing to play, has become cold and unbreathing and
is apparently possessed by or infused with whatever he has dreaded from beyond the window, one may regard Themes B and C as completely coalescing now, by paragraphs 24 and 25, while at the same time from the sable melodic line of Theme C (which, after all, has contained an “exquisitely low” note) there has issued a pedal point, an underlying bass note sustained to the end by virtue of the psychological impact of what the narrator has seen.

  With paragraph 26, Theme A of the Rue d’ Auseil setting, which has been very subdued in all the contrapuntal interplay of Themes Band C, weaves back in with increased tempo and intensity in an inverted, tonally descending mode—a tonal reversal of its original form—as the narrator flees down through the house, out into the street, and down to the lower streets, leaving Zann’s music behind, a fading coalescence of Themes B and C. Finally, in the closing paragraph, a brief coda, there is a restatement of Theme A in its original tonality but condensed into a very close stretto: “Despite my most careful researches and investigations, I have never yet been able to find the Rue d’ Auseil”—a thematic expression that in its original statement required three paragraphs, here contracted to a striking final articulation over the pedal point to bring the piece to its close. The text of “The Music of Erich Zann” supports this interpretation to a remarkable degree; the tale amounts to nothing less than a verbal fugue in which form is beautifully wedded to sense.