by Laura Miller
… K. kept feeling that he had lost himself, or was further away in a strange land than anyone had ever been before, a distant country where even the air was unlike the air at home…
The novel drifts to its end in an anticlimactic welter of talk and paralytic inaction. Finally it has not even to the energy to finish a sentence.
What should we make of the bewildering—at times horrific—“imagined world” that Kafka presents in The Castle? In fact, one must note, he did not intend to present it at all. His deathbed instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod, was that all his manuscripts (virtually the whole of what we now have as his oeuvre) should be burned after his death, unread.
“Death” is the operative word here. The Castle is Kafka’s terminal work—he was dying of incurable tuberculosis as he wrote it. What does a great author “imagine” when standing on the threshold between this world and the next?
Kafka confided to Brod in September 1922—following his return to Prague—that he would never finish the “Castle novel.” Nevertheless, he also confided a possible ending. Were he to finish the book, it would end with the death of K. and simultaneous permission from the Castle to reside, but not legally, in the village. He is to be the perennial outsider.
However, looking at the novel through a veneer of death is only one of the many ways to interpret the text. Kafka was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, until the first translations began to appear in the 1930s. For a couple of decades he was regarded as a wildly experimental writer, of interest only to the avant-garde. This changed with the rise of popular interest in French existentialism during the late 1940s and 1950s, which addressed the idea that “absurdity,” and ultimately meaninglessness, may be what the universe means after all. The existential philosopher Albert Camus, pictured it as the labor of Sisyphus: forever rolling a rock up a hill, only for it to roll back again. “A first sign of the beginning of understanding,” declared Camus, bleakly, “is the wish to die.” And, if you are Kafka, burn everything you have labored to create in life.
Many of the “imagined worlds” described in literary wonderlands are warm, comfortable places, to which one can escape from the cold realities of everyday existence. The Castle imagines an even colder world than that in which most of us live but one that, as Sartre uncomfortably reminds us, is more real.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
THE CTHULHU MYTHOS (1928–37)
The lore and legend of Lovecraft’s “Great Old One” broke new ground in the realm of fantasy fiction, and the terrifying entity of Cthulhu has influenced generations of horror writers.
Few writers have made humanity as insignificant and powerless as the American Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) in his horror stories of the Cthulhu Mythos. He wrote thirteen of these stories in all, which appeared between 1928 and 1941, mostly in the influential Weird Tales and other magazines. The last story in the sequence, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, was published posthumously.
The most influential, The Call of Cthulhu, appeared in 1928 and established Lovecraft’s conception of a vast and malevolent universe dominated by the Great Old Ones, amoral elemental deities who survived the almost inconceivably remote past—Lovecraft used the term “vigintillions of years,” a vigintillion being one with sixty-three zeros (a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion).
These monstrous and mysterious powers have been apparently dead for all that time but will one day—“when the stars are right”—awaken and ravage the earth, and occasionally encounter incautious humans. Cthulhu himself, high priest to the Old Ones, has been hidden in the sunken city of R’lyeh, and bursts out when explorers open a huge carved door into a rocky cavern on a remote and uncharted island in the South Pacific.
Earth is an infinitesimally tiny part of Lovecraft’s universe, but his descriptions of those specific parts in which his “Great Old Ones” appear establish an atmosphere of mysterious horror. Whether a remote island in the South Pacific, the relatively familiar landscape of the eastern United States, or the wastes of the Antarctic, these places are suffused with an air of menace:
Great barren peaks of mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible Antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. (At the Mountains of Madness, 1936)
A different sort of foreboding is experienced by travelers in The Dunwich Horror (1929):
The planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.
Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do.
That phrase “without knowing why” sums up the nameless, indefinable horror of Lovecraft’s work. The immense scale of the imaginary environment he created—a universe rather than simply a world—and the nightmarish, terrifying vagueness of the powers wielded by its gods, have influenced fantasy and horror writers ever since.
When The Call of Cthulhu was published, Lovecraft had already written three other stories using various aspects of what became known as his “Cthulhu Mythos.” He never intended to create a coherent vision of an imaginary world, but rather a loose and occasionally inconsistent framework of places, names, and fearsome godlike creatures—what he referred to as his “pseudomythology”—to serve as a background for his stories.
Many of the stories are set in the idyllic Massachusetts settlement of Arkham, a fictional town as is the equally fictional Miskatonic University, which holds an unrivaled collection of occult books. The books provide a gateway through which academics and adventurers can come into contact with the awesome powers of Lovecraft’s more sinister creation, usually with fatal and devastating results. In The Dunwich Horror, for instance, an attempt to steal the Necronomicon—a secret grimoire or book of ancient magic that gives access to the Great Old Ones—leads to the death of the would-be thief and the eruption of a mysterious and invisible presence that devours local people and destroys their property.
The gods who hold the ultimate power in Lovecraft’s world have an aura of implacable evil, but are rarely presented in any physical detail. Although hideous sculptures are described at the start of The Call of Cthulhu depicting a monster 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,” the creature itself is revealed only as “The Thing that cannot be described,” with witnesses remembering just a few vague details of green, sticky, writhing slime.
Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where, following the death of his father when he was eight, he was raised by his mother, maternal grandfather, and two aunts. From his childhood he suffered from terrifying nightmares, which could have been the inspiration for some of his later fiction. As a small boy, he would also listen, enthralled, to tales of Gothic horror told by his grandfather.
As he grew up, there was a growing awareness among writers and the reading public in Europe and America of the terrifying malign potential of the scientific advances that were being made—H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds appeared when Lovecraft was eight, and The Gods of Pegana, by the Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany, when he was in his mid-teens. Exploration, whether in Lord Dunsany’s fantasy world of Pegana or in the Antarctic in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936) might uncover u
nexpected horrors. In The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft wrote:
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
This idea of forbidden and dangerous knowledge is a constant theme throughout the stories.
Lovecraft maintained very close relations by letter with other horror writers of his day, including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho, and Robert E. Howard, the author of the Conan the Barbarian stories (1932–36, here). The group became known as the Lovecraft Circle, and characters, settings, and other elements of Lovecraft’s stories appeared occasionally in their works, with his consent. It was his publisher, August Derleth, who coined the phrase “the Cthulhu Mythos” to popularize the stories when he published a collection in 1939, two years after Lovecraft’s death.
The Mythos endures and is added to in books, magazines, video games, and even in popular music. However Lovecraft has also been the subject of controversy as contemporary readers have drawn attention to the recurring racism that is evidenced in much of his work.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932)
Huxley’s enduring masterpiece of a future world continues to shine a somber light on the possibilities of genetic engineering and the loss of the individual in contemporary society.
When George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949 (here), he set his bleak and brutal vision of a totalitarian world less than four decades in the future, but Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) looked more than six hundred years ahead for the setting of Brave New World. Even so, its world remains rooted firmly in the 1930s—its main characters have the names of leading industrialists and political figures of Huxley’s day, and the hypnotism, the selective breeding, and the production-line lifestyle of the World State all reflect aspects of the world as Huxley knew it.
Where Orwell, writing so soon after the horrors of Nazism and Soviet Russia, famously saw the future as “a boot stamping on a human face—for ever,” Huxley presented in Brave New World a gentler, more insidious nightmare. There is no doubting the repressive power of the state—but though there are riot police to be called out in times of trouble, they wield nothing more brutal than feel-good drugs, anesthetic gas, and gentle words. There is no freedom of thought, but it seems hardly anybody wants it; there is no political opposition to the Resident Controller, and practically everybody accepts the status quo.
When Brave New World was published in 1932, the moving assembly lines of car manufacturer Henry Ford had been bringing cheap cars to the masses for twenty years or so, and in the memorable scenes in the Central London Hatchery with which the novel opens, Huxley applied this mass-production technology to human reproduction. The characters in the novel have no mothers, no fathers, no family: They, like the thousands of embryos moving sedately along the production line, were cloned and grown in bottles to fulfill their predestined roles as ruling Alphas or subservient Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons.
Today, with Nazism behind us, it is easy to see the brutal implications of the “science” of eugenics, or selective breeding—“the self-direction of human evolution,” as it was described at the Second International Eugenics Conference in 1921—but in the early 1930s it had many influential adherents. H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and John Maynard Keynes were all known as supporters. So too was Huxley—but Brave New World presents a somber vision of what relying on the theories of the eugenicists might bring.
Thinking for oneself, passion, or originality are not only deviant and sinful in the World State, but generally inconceivable: Besides being created specifically for their role in society, the inhabitants, from Alpha-pluses to Epsilon-minus semi-morons, are subject to constant indoctrination and psychological manipulation to keep them malleable. Every aspect of their life is ordered by the central power—in this case, the mysterious ten Controllers.
In return, they live in a society of casual sex and hypnotic and mind-altering drugs, which are regularly distributed as a form of relaxation and escape. It is a world of absolute totalitarianism and unbridled hedonism, in which the traditional morality of Huxley’s day is turned on its head: Monogamy is frowned upon, the family seen as an antiquated tool of repression, and the idea of motherhood considered obscene. Illness, pain, and even aging have been abolished, although sexism has apparently survived the six centuries—women, who seem to play no part in the administration of the World State, are patted dismissively on their bottoms by their bosses, and valued exclusively for the “pneumatic” qualities of their “firm and sunburnt flesh.” Some changes, apparently, were inconceivable for an educated man like Huxley in the early 1930s.
Huxley was born in 1894 into an impeccably middle-class family, the son of a schoolmaster—but he was an intellectual aristocrat with an impressive pedigree. His grandfather was T. H. Huxley, nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his combative defense of the theory of evolution. T. H. Huxley championed the teaching of science in schools, and the works of his great-uncle the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who famously believed that culture existed “to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.”
Huxley, though, developed other ideas as he moved easily from Eton to Oxford. He loathed mass culture, and he believed that education should be the prerogative of those who could profit from it, by which he meant people like him. “Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid,” he declared dismissively. That view is clearly relevant to Huxley’s vision of a world that is organized as a bizarre updating of the Hindu caste system. His grandfather had suggested that utopias could never be achieved by humans, only by insects, and it is significant that the masses in Brave New World are frequently described as locusts, aphids, ants, and maggots.
Huxley’s conception of the World State was influenced radically by his personal experiences in the U.S.—where he shuddered at the self-conscious glitz and glamour of the film industry in California—and in the streets and factories of industrial England at the start of the Depression. The American experiment with Prohibition, just drawing to its messy close, was reflected in impractical proposals for banning soma, the drug that keeps Huxley’s masses in a state of catatonic content, while the talking pictures, “movies,” were reproduced as the “feelies,” in which the audience shares not only the sights and sounds, but the smells and sensations of the characters on the screen.
The title of Huxley’s novel comes from Miranda’s expression of naive admiration in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611, here), when she meets the shipwrecked courtiers wandering Prospero’s island: “Oh brave new world, that hath such people in’t!” Huxley, of course, is being heavily ironic in applying that line to the World State, but if the society he described was deeply flawed, he saw no hope for humanity either in the Romantic myth of the noble savage. His friend the novelist D. H. Lawrence had written passionately about the instinctive energy and vitality of the Mexican Indians in The Plumed Serpent and elsewhere—but Huxley presented a different, bleaker picture. The “savage” tribes living in Brave New World’s New Mexico reservation are without the constraints of the inhabitants of the World State, but their freedom is marked by brutality and squalor. It is only on a few remote islands that life sounds even remotely ideal. They are places where “all the people… who’ve got independent ideas of their own” are exiled.
In his 1946 foreword to Brave New World, Huxley described this lack of a positive vision of the future in the novel as a mistake. “Today, I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible,” he wrote. But much of the continuing power of the book derives from the implication that there is no escape from a world that,
with, its cultured brutality, its genetic manipulation, its psychological brainwashing, and its dozy drug-and-sex culture, lies only just beyond the limits of our own experience. He said in his foreword, “Then, I projected it six hundred years into the future: today, it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century.” More than sixty years later, it is an uncomfortable thought.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1932–36)
The enduring hero of sword and sorcery has transcended his pulp-fiction roots and been the subject of multiple film, television, video game, and comic-book adaptations.
To tell his stories of Conan, the wandering barbarian thief, outlaw, and mercenary from the far north, the Texan writer Robert E. Howard (1906–36) traveled thousands of years back to a time before any of the known great civilizations.
Howard had already written stories set in the distant past—his first published work in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, “Spear and Fang,” deals with a prehistoric battle between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal cavemen—but for his new character, he devised an entirely imaginary age of history. The stories were set in the Hyborean Age, “between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas”—between, that is, the mythical destruction of Atlantis and the emergence of the Indo-European races.
The fantasy world setting of Conan’s adventures is one of magic and sorcery, of beautiful maidens and venomous monsters, and of strange, malevolent gods and miraculous interventions, very loosely based on an adapted version of Europe and North America. The Cimmerians, for instance, of whom Conan is one, have similarities with the Celtic people; far to the east is the Kingdom of Khitai, which corresponds to China; the historical Picts appear as wild savages on the fringes of civilization; and Shem is recognizable as the area that we know as Mesopotamia, Arabia, Syria, and Palestine.