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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The great size, tremendous age and general indifference to humanity of Lovecraft's invented gods is meant to be terrifying in the same way that the contemplation of the infinite and empty reaches of space were to a Western culture shaking off the comforts of religion. Lovecraft intended Cthulhu and company to be utterly alien -- hence the unpronounceable name, the writhing tentacles, and the wonderful detail that the architecture of Cthulhu's city, R'lyeh (usually sunk to the bottom of the ocean, but briefly emerging in "The Call of Cthulhu"), is based on a non-Euclidean geometry that is "loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours." Lovecraft's human characters, when afforded a glimpse of such things, tend to "scream and scream and scream," faint or go stark raving mad.
The truth, however, is that hardly any reader finds Cthulhu frightening. In fact, by all indications, the public is very fond of the creature. You can check in regularly at the Cthulhu for President site ("Home Page for Evil"), purchase a cuddly plush Cthulhu or behold the adventures of Hello Cthulhu, a cross between Lovecraft's "gelatinous green immensity" and the adorable, big-eyed Sanrio cartoon character. Sauron never inspired this kind of affection.
Cthulhu isn't scary partly because it's difficult to imagine the unimaginable, and partly because it's hard to convey the terror of limitless nothingness via an entity that, however bizarre, is nevertheless something. Then there's the stylistic problem: The language Lovecraft uses to describe this and other horrors is so overwrought that the words themselves distract you from the subject. "The Lurking Fear," a story about a man who unearths a tribe of cannibalistic "dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes" holed up in a decrepit Catskills mansion, culminates in a hysterical, hallucinatory outpouring that makes Edgar Allan Poe sound like Jane Austen:
"Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scenes; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation ..."
This is, as Wilson protested, too much, and yet it is just what the Lovecraft fan lives for, and chortles over and quotes with glee to other fans. Without a doubt, a significant part of Lovecraft's appeal for today's readers is camp. And, as Susan Sontag famously pointed out, true camp is a blend of mockery and love.
To be fair, if the sheer verbiage of Lovecraft's stories does occasionally bog things down, most of his tales maintain the suspense necessary to all pulp fiction. (Lovecraft originally published, when his stories were accepted, in the early pulp magazines of the 1920s.) There is a delicious and inimitable inevitability to the progression of these tales, from the sober first line ("From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceeding singular person") to the florid, thesaurus-taxing convulsions of the denouement (once these were rendered in italics; that format has not been reproduced in the Library of America edition).
Still, the combination of purple prose and ripping yarns isn't enough to earn Lovecraft's work the immortality it has genuinely attained. There is a ferocious imaginative power driving these tales, and all the more so for being, to cop a favorite Lovecraftian word, unwholesome. In the Freud-crazed '50s and '60s it became fashionable to denounce Lovecraft's fiction as "neurotic," to which the only conceivable reply is: Duh. How could anyone think of presenting such an observation as an insight when neurosis lies palpitating on the surface of the work? These tales are veritable carnivals of anxiety, repression and rage; that's the source of their appeal. They aren't in any sense healthy, but then neither is the poetry of Baudelaire.
The kernel of Lovecraft's neurosis is a hopeless tangle of sex, race and bodily decay, fed by the tragedies and frustrations of his private life. He was the scion of an old New England family (he boasted of coming from "pure" English stock) that plunged from affluence into genteel poverty during his childhood. His parents both suffered from mental illness (his father's was possibly syphilitic in origin) and as a teenager he endured a nervous breakdown that interfered with his schooling and any conventional socialization. He was tall, thin, pale and extremely bookish, the pet and the target of a mother who was both smothering and critical, particularly of his physical appearance. A brief marriage to an older woman eventually fell apart and after a disastrous try at living in New York, he retired to his native and beloved Providence to live with two elderly aunts.
