A brief discourse on H.P. Lovecraft.

I'm interested in a lot of strange things, I can't deny that. Of late I've been reading H.P. Lovecraft. I admire a lot of Lovecraft's work, at least in terms of its creativity and antiquarian weirdness. Ancient cults, dream realities, dusty codices hidden and shunned by men. I love all of that. But what I find disagreeable about Lovecraft and his work is gnosticism. The Lovecraftian view of reality is almost wholly negative. Creation is evil and meaningless and the gods who rule over that creation are themselves either ambivalent about men or hostile towards them. For the characters who inhabit this world, the only means of escape is through a sort of gnosticism. They attempt to escape the created world to challenge the gods or seek out a reality that is free from the drab, meaningless earthiness of the physical realm.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath may be said to have gnostic overtones, particularly in that it centers on an escape from reality into a dream-world where the protagonist searches for a beautiful city which the fickle gods have only shown him in fleeting glimpses. The protagonist, Randolph Carter, struggles with the gods of the world of men and the dream world so that he might attain to his gnostic vision of a heavenly city. But in a sense the story comes round to an affirmation of the beauty of "reality," with Carter coming to realize that the city he has seen in brief visions is in fact Boston. The saga of Carter, however, continues in other stories, where he ultimately devises a means to escape reality for the world of dreams through a silver key. But Lovecraft won't let his protagonist win, for in escaping he encounters the horror at the center of the universe, a place where identity is obliterated.

The gods of Lovecraft's cosmology, like those of gnosticism, are malignant beings. Lovecrafts's gods do not draw near to men, but flee from them, so that they might cavort and dance on unknown mountaintops as they did in days of old when men were less adventurous and curious as to their nature. And those are the "good" gods. The bad gods, the "Other" gods are horrible to behold and go by titles such as "Nyarlathotep, The Crawling Chaos." There is nothing good about the gods or their creation; no benign king, no loving God, nothing of that sort. In Lovecraft's world men are pitted against the gods and the meaningless, dread reality which they rule over.

The "world," tangible reality, in Lovecraft's estimation, was something approaching evil, although he does not apply to it the same categorical condemnation that gnostics would apply to it. For the most part we find a certain ambivalence towards the mundane. In places his characters grow alienated from the "real" world - nothing seems fully real to them, but all fake, as if all of it were a veil thrown over some other reality. In "The Silver Key," Randolph Carter grows weary of the "earthiness" of his friends and acquaintances. Carter attempts a career in writing but fails because "the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore." When Carter is transported beyond this world into the Other Realm by means of the Silver Key, he encounters a cadre of beings who are like ascended masters. Their leader explains to him that, "the man of Truth has learnt that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an impostor."

One gets the sense that Lovecraft was certainly a conservative in his view of history and society. His view of progress was, I believe, somewhat negative. He once said of the past: "The past is real. It is all there is. The present is only a trivial and momentary boundary-line." His racial attitudes weren't exactly enlightened - he even wrote a story that was based upon his horror at the non-white immigrants streaming into New York, which he imagined were coalescing into a sinister cult ("The Horror at Red Hook"). He was also an atheist, and rejected the notion that reality could be meaningful in the Christian sense. But neither was he a fan of science. It's clear that he dreaded the advance of science, particularly as it related to its pronouncements on the meaning of life. He viewed the theory of relativity as reducing existence to a cosmic jest. Stories such as "From Beyond" hint at a fear of what science might uncover and what was best left alone.

I wonder to what extent Lovecraft believed that life and reality were meaningless? Or was he simply reacting in horror at the movement of all human inquiry and experience (inexorably, as he perceived it), towards the belief that it was meaningless? I almost feel like Lovecraft's character's retreat into dreamworlds is a sort of personal defense mechanism. The only way to salvage reality, consciousness, existence, was to escape into some beautiful other world - such as the past, which was real, or dream-worlds where men might live by their dreams. But those other worlds were just as cruel. So ultimately, in Lovecraft's world, there is no escape.

Lovecraft's life, which was by no means wholly pleasant, helps to explain his outlook. His father and mother both suffered from some form of mental illness, and all through his life H.P. suffered from night terrors, which were often the inspiration for stories. He died of cancer, largely unknown and with very little to his name.

My favorite moment from all of Lovecraft's stories is from "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath." For an individual with such a negative view of the world, Lovecraft was inordinately fond of felines, and I also happen to enjoy them much more than hounds. Randolph Carter can talk to cats and is able to call on an army of them to save him in times of trouble. While being carried away by a group of toad-like horrors across the surface of the moon (if you need further explanation I can only suggest that you read the story), he cries out for the cats to come to his aid:

It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before seen so many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common, Persian, and Manx; Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian; all were there in the fury of battle, and there hovered over them some trace of that profound and inviolate sanctity which made their goddess great in the temples of Bubastis.

After a pitched battle, Carter awakes to a scene that made me laugh with delight upon initially reading it:

At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was upon a strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times greater than that of the moon as we see it, had risen with floods of weird light over the lunar landscape; and across all those leagues of wild plateau and ragged crest there squatted one endless sea of cats in orderly array. Circle on circle they reached, and two or three leaders out of the ranks were licking his face and purring to him consolingly.

The cats then lift Carter up and leap back to earth, with him securely held within their host like a kind of furry cocoon.

Lovecraft's work is worth reading for fantastical moments like this.

Up next on my reading list is a collection of the works of Flannery O'Connor. I think I'll have a lot to say about her also.

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Came across this today, and it's interesting because Philip K. Dick was not only a science fiction author who dealt with reality and perception, but he also became a full-on gnostic late in life. He believed everything that he wrote was communicated to him through the Holy Spirit to reveal that the true underlying reality of all things was the Book of Acts, and that it was in fact the year A.D. 50, but that somehow Satan had fooled us into thinking that it was the 20th century. Dick's beliefs may have been inspired by chemicals, though.