"It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three know dimensions.“
- H. P Lovecraft The Dunwich Horror (1929)
This
month, in the season of haunting, I’ve been reading HP Lovecraft again, this
time delving into a couple of his more mature works; The Dunwich Horror (1929) and Dreams
in the Witch House (1933). I had
promised myself earlier in the summer that I would return to HPL in the hopes
of better understanding him and his craft.
I’d had a bad taste in my mouth from reading a few of his earlier tales,
and then had been fairly impressed with The
Color out of Space (1927). I wanted
– and still want – to know what drove him as a writer, as well as what makes
him so influential in horror literature and film.
Reading
these two tales left me with some of the same questions and confusion as to his
method, intentions and philosophy as did the earlier ones. Each story was well constructed in its way;
each had a drive to a conclusion that the narration eventually reached. Each tale had its own interesting details and
some swaths of vivid description that did not spill over into the purple
vein. But then there is, in each story,
a variety of ambiguities; there are ideas that seem to be at cross-purposes to
each other—leaving me as the reader unsure of what the overall narrative impact
is supposed to be. What am I supposed to
take away from stories such as these?
The Dunwich Horror (published in Weird Tales in
1929) was the story of a village off-the-beaten-track where something
horrendous happened in 1928 that has left the area in such a desolate state
that travelers avoid it. The horror
(attention: spoiler alert!) that took place involved a creature from another
dimension breaking through into our four-dimensional world via the workings of
an old wizard, his albino daughter and her ill-begotten son. These occultists are portrayed as being
basically ignorant of the effect of their practices; they chant words from old,
moldy, brown-paged books, believing they are calling on ancient supernatural
forces; their ‘deities,’ perhaps? But
what they are really doing is opening a portal between worlds that allow
monstrous aliens to come through into our own world, and these aliens would
destroy everything in our world if their invasion were to be successful.
At
least_ this is what I think I am getting from the story, at one level.
It
is interesting that the wizard (Old Whateley) and his daughter (Lavinia) are
portrayed as ignorant and foolish. I
have read that, while widely read in the occult, HPL was not a believer, and this story seems to bear that out. HPL uses occultism – accoutered with all the
old trappings (esp. old books, decaying and fallen apart and barely readable)
as the vehicle for the horror that ravages the locality of Dunwich and threatens
the existence of our entire world. The
wizard’s daughter becomes pregnant and gives birth to a strange boy (Wilbur)
who grows preternaturally fast into maturity.
No one, of course, knows who the father of the child is; and the locals
believe it is some version of ‘the devil.’
HPL makes clear by the end of the story, however, that the father of
Wilbur Whateley is none other than one of these aliens from another dimension
that is trying to gain access to our four-dimensional world.
On
the one hand, this sounds like a (by now) familiar science fiction theme. The monsters are not supernatural, but
trans-dimensional. The occultists are
unaware of the evil they are unleashing on our world. They end up dead by the end of the story, and
the world is saved by erudite professors from Arhkam’s famous Miskatonic
University. These academics had been approached by Wilbur in his obsessive
desire to obtain copies of rare occult texts (ones that are not moldy, brown
and falling apart). In the course of
Wilbur’s researches at the library, one of the academics overhears what he is
muttering, is able to translate what he says and later what he is reading, and
realizes that something horrendous in unfolding in the little town of
Dunwich. The academics go to Dunwich
after Wilbur’s death and use the old occult text to drive “Yog-Sothoth” back
across into its own dimension.
At
one level, this seems a fairly ‘enlightened’ tale about educated people
overcoming an alien threat to our world; it even ‘demythologizes’ the workings
of occult practitioners and shows them to be ignorant of the real nature of
their practices. On this level, the
story reads fairly well, despite quite a lot of stilted descriptive prose and
what seems to me, at least, as a very sluggish pace. The prose reminds me of dull-written research
papers; first this happens, then this happens, then this happens, then this
happens, then this happens_ you get the idea?
The plot seems to be lethargically embedded in this
pseudo-‘journalistic’ or perhaps banal ‘objectivist’ description of what is
happening. It is almost a ‘clinical’
account, at some level, and stultifies me as a reader; I want it to be over—I want to get to the point of the
story. Perhaps, as a long-time reader of
horror, I get it_ I know what is
going on and what’s going to happen, before the narrator ever tells me. I’m not in suspense about it. Yet I do find some of the details of the plot
to be interesting.
Beyond
this, some of the trappings of the story are off-putting. The tale plays out like a scenario from the
superstitious era of the Witch Trails.
HPL obviously knows the details of ‘Witchcraft’ (as portrayed in the
propaganda of the superstitious Christian Middle Ages) very well; he had done a
lot of reading in occult sources and often quotes famous occult texts in his
epigraphs. HPL uses tropes and images
from the Witch Craze Era as the set-dressing for his tale. Everything happens in the round of the old
“Witches’ Sabbats” at places where circles of standing stones or table stones
(attributed to ‘the Indians’) – stand on blasted heaths where nothing will
grow. The story has all the trappings of
mediaeval superstition, including bloody rites, orgies, human sacrifice,
including the sacrifice of infants, the baying of dogs and foul weather as a
bad omen, .
What
is off-putting in all of these trappings is the association of atrocities with
the four primary festivals of Candlemas, Beltaine, Lughnassadh and Samhain –
the cross-quarters days of the Pagan Year.
Of course, when HPL was writing, there was no Neo-Pagan Revival; Gerald
Gardner’s work and that of his followers was still two decades in the future,
not to mention the repeal of the Witchcraft Laws that made it possible for
people to openly practice and revive genuine versions of the old Nature
religions of Pre-Christian Europe and the Mediterranean region. While there were Pagans in the first half of
the 20th century, working in secret in traditional covens, and while
there was popular interest in spiritualism and such, all HPL could possibly
have known – without initiation into a genuine Pagan coven – about the eight sabbats
was what he learned from annals of the Witch Trials of the late Middle Ages.
Still,
I think it must be hard for someone involved in modern day Paganism or Wicche
to read a story like this one, where the four most wonderful sabbats of the
year are associated with atrocities and an insipid occultism that has as its
cloak and heart the worldview of a less-than-enlightened Christianity. Talk of “unhallowed rites and conclaves of
the Indians” betrays an ethnocentrism that, while understandable (given HPL’s
sociocultural context), makes this story difficult to digest. HPL’s repeated emphasis on “wild orgiastic
rites” and “blood rites” and “foul odours” associated with “hill crowning
circles of stone pillars” simply repeats the superstitions of a by-gone (even
in HPL’s era) time. The first reference
to a ‘sabbat’ comes at the beginning of part II, where Wilbur Whateley is said
to have been born on Candlemas (2 February); a day associated with weird noises
in the hills, strange, foul odors and the baying of dogs. Wilbur has all the usual marks of a “devil’s
child,” including goatish features. HPL
then ponders what strange and wild things must have been going on nine months
earlier, when Wilbur was conceived; on Beltaine – 1 May – up on one of the
strange hills (heaths) topped by standing stones or pillars. For someone who loves lithic structures (like
dolmens and cromlechs), large stones and rock outcrops as symbols of the Earth
and of the intersection of the human and divine dimensions of Earth &
Cosmos, this constant harping on the ‘wickedness’ associated with such
beautiful places must seem unenlightened; as it is.
This
all reads to me like mediaeval Christian superstition re-worked for a 20th
century audience. How anyone can read
this and not laugh – or groan with unease – is beyond me. The whole story at this level is a
reiteration of pre-Enlightenment religious nonsense. There is nothing really new or interesting
about HPL’s use of mediaeval Witch rhetoric, nor does it further his narrative
purpose. The use of the Witch Craze
rhetoric makes it seem like the story is about something supernatural that
should have happened in the 16th century. Yet, when you read closely, the story is
actually about aliens and a trans-dimensional invasion from another realm. Wouldn’t he have been better to just drop the
superstitious veil and write science fiction?
The only reason I can think of for all this Witch Craze rhetoric is that
HPL was poking fun at superstitious, uneducated country folk (such as those
portrayed as living in Dunwich) for not realizing what was really happening
around them. Was he doing this?
If
so, he can be read as a critic of superstition and even of religious belief,
while also seeming somewhat racist (e.g., consider all his comments about “the
Indians”), if not actively then unconsciously.
_And I don’t approve of making fun of people just because they are
uneducated or ‘from the country.’ However,
in other places (e.g., his essay on Supernatural Horror that I read last
summer) he rails against people who are so ‘sophisticated’ that they cannot see
the evil lurking amongst them. But
doesn’t he extol education and don’t those who defeat the evil in Dunwich come
from a university? Yes, but the
‘academics’ in this tale who manage to defeat Yog-Sothoth are able to do so
only because they have a library full of old occult books and are able to read
obscure foreign languages that no one else pays attention to. They are not your (in HPL’s eyes) ‘run-of-the-mill
academics;’ they are versed in ancient lore and therefore able to see what
other ‘educated’ and ’sophisticated’ are unable to see.
There
is much more to be said about this story; a close reading would explore various
narrative and ideological problems.
However, I’ve said enough to show how and why I am confused and
perplexed by HPL’s tale. Some of the
same problems that I first found in his earlier stories persist (e.g., purple
prose, lack of description at some points and over-description at others) while
others have cropped up, especially this ambiguity as to what he is ultimately trying
to say, especially regarding the educated versus uneducated characters in his
tale. Yet there are themes in this story
– especially that of ‘horrors beyond description’ and the confusion of aliens
with supernaturalism – that I can see as common in the horror and science
fiction genres today. To some extent,
HPL, while perhaps not a great writer himself, set in motion ideas that later
writers have brought to better fruition?
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