The Quandary of
Quoting Lovecraft
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| http://www.counter-currents.com |
Madness rides the star-wind... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses... dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial.–H.P. Lovecraft
What glorious text!
I am a strangely
haphazard reader, and as crazy as it sounds, had never encountered the work of the 19th, early 20th century
writer H.P. Lovecraft until I began searching for chapter opening quotes for my
second Daughter of Time novel, Writer.
Like Reader,
its predecessor, Writer is a
metaphysical-philosophical-speculative-fiction roller-coaster ride (or so say
reviews and Amazon’s algorithms placing the novel in the “science fiction” and
“metaphysical” categories). Like with Reader, I like to find samples in
the writings of others that reflect some of the ideas and images in the novel in
a slightly different light and angle.
Google searching
with appropriate key words, I suddenly found myself in the hundred year-old
dark, horror, speculative writings of Lovecraft. The quote above sucked me in,
and I felt I had a kindred visionary soul I was just discovering. Then I read
this one:
What do we know of the world and the universe about us?
Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of
surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed
to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble
senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other
beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see
very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of
matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with
the senses we have.– "From
Beyond", H.P. Lovecraft
How many times had
I had such thoughts? Spoken such thoughts? The very novel I was working on had
that theme running through it frequently. A true kindred soul!
And yet such
thoughts are so rare to hear. In a world of certain religious believers and
certain atheists, the radical doubt of the true agnostic lacks respect, is
mocked, ignored, and silenced. I suspect that the reason for this is due to fear.
People want surety, damn the truth. People abhor uncertainty, especially in the
nature of reality, themselves, and their fates. The old quote is wrong: there are
atheists in foxholes, just no agnostics.
But here was a
voice from the past that truly understood the limitations of our nature. A
voice that also could speak with such terrible ferocity and poetry.It was the
birth of a serious intellectual crush.
“NOT SO FAST,”
smirked the wily internet.
In this age, it
only took me a few minutes of online searching to find my joy smashed and my sense
of self undermined. This man who spoke so clearly to my mind and heart, who I
was so excited to meet as a true brother in spirit despite our separation by
nearly 100 years, who I was now planning to quote in my new novel in several
key chapters was
a die-hard, despicable, racist
son-of-a-bitch.
[Cue melodramatic “Nooooooooo!” from favorite cinema
example]
I couldn’t believe it. How was it possible that someone that
resonated so deeply with me on things I thought were absolutely fundamental
could differ so diametrically on other things I considered equally fundamental?
Beyond the confusion, I felt tainted. What did it imply
about me that I felt such affinity to a man that dehumanized so many human
beings? Of course, I can play intellectual games of “man of his time” (which he
wasn’t in other things) etc, but like most intellectual games, they are
superficial. I will never completely come to terms with that contradiction
within him and the concern about what it means for myself.
And yet I will use his quotes in my novel.
“Whoa! Say what?”
Yes, I feel that way too, but my response is two-fold: (1)
the things I respond to in his work are just too powerful, too synergistic with
my own writings to discard because of (seemingly) unrelated aspects of his
personality (the close your eyes to the “bad” of the artist approach), but,
more significantly for me (2) the evil in the soul of Lovecraft all the more
injects the horror of his writings with a certain legitimacy.
Let me explain. Lovecraft wrote monstrous things about
monsters in a way really no one had before. Even today there are groups focused
on his strange mythologies. His work is a powerful statement on the dark and
monstrous in the universe.
What better man to faithfully represent that than one who
had so much of that darkness within him? When I read Lovecraft, when I quote
him in my novels, I am doing so in the context of horror, of terrible things.
My novel journeys through significant darkness, and in the times of the least
light, Lovecraft’s insight into horror helps frame the nightmare in the chapter
to come.
That’s my excuse, anyway. I’m sure it can be deconstructed
and reconstructed (and ignored) in one hundred ways. Yet even with that
justification, I feel uneasy about it. But I feel uneasy about a lot of
monstrous things, or even less monstrous things (oh, say sex) when I write them.Even if my stories deal with
horror and darkness in the context of seeking light, it is hard to write
terrible things, to think of others reading them. As for the sexual hang-ups, I
fully blame American culture.
In the end, unlike his nightmarish creations, Lovecraft is
human: good, evil, flawed, and talented. That sums up the situation for all of
us, and in that light, especially when the going gets dark, he is a worthy
representative of our decidedly complicated species.
--Erec
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--Erec
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