HP LOVECRAFT AND THE HORROR OF HISTORY
The weird tales of HP Lovecraft reveal a man whose relationship to history was both complex and deeply contradictory. JAMES
HOLLOWAY explores the ways in which Lovecraft’s fictions articulated racist fears, cosmic horror and a warning to the archæologically curious...
The weird tales of HP Lovecraft reveal a man whose relationship to history was both complex and contradictory. JAMES HOLLOWAY explores the way that Lovecraft’s fictions articulated racist fears, cosmic horror and a warning to the archæologically curious... O n 14 March 1937, in Jane Brown Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, HP Lovecraft lay dying of intestinal cancer. Helpless to do anything about his condition, he had been recording his symptoms in his diary, but for days now had been too weak to hold a pencil. Looking back on his life, Lovecraft cannot have felt much sense of accomplishment. The scion of a wealthy New England family, he had lived most of his life in precarious poverty, failing to scratch out a living through writing and unable to hold down any other kind of job. Much of his work had never been published, and what had had appeared either in cheap pulp magazines or in micro-press editions printed by friends. He can hardly have thought that his literary legacy would outlive him, unless perhaps in the shape of one of the young writers he had spent so much of his time encouraging. In the early hours of 15 March, he finally died. He was 46 years old.
Lovecraft would have been surprised – pleasantly, one hopes – to learn that his writing did outlive him. Thanks to the devotion of fans and protégés, his stories survived. The post-war fantasy and science fiction boom saw his popularity grow, although critics still ignored him. Even more surprisingly, the late 20th century saw a simultaneous critical re-evaluation and surge in popularity for the once-obscure writer. Today, Lovecraft is both betterknown and more acceptable to the literary elite than he could ever have imagined. His creations appear in works by other authors, as well as films, games, toys and more. He has been embraced not only by authors and critics, but also by philosophers, who find his sense of human irrelevance more relevant than ever. “Somehow, against all odds,” Carl H Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock observe, Lovecraft “has become a 21st-century star.”
He posits that archæological knowledge could destroy mankind
The several dozen stories and novellas that make up Lovecraft’s slim body of work are varied, ranging from fantastic adventures to Gothic horror tales to stories that meld horror and science fiction. Many of them are concerned, as Lovecraft was, with history. They often feature an investigation that culminates in a deeply unwelcome revelation; this can be a revelation either about the history of humanity and the world, or a revelation about the personal history or heritage of the protagonist.
The tentacles of Lovecraft’s influence even wind their way into supposedly non-fictional accounts of humanity’s history. Jason Colavito has suggested that Lovecraft’s stories, which often feature the influence of alien beings in Earth’s early history, were a major influence on the “ancient astronauts” school of alternative archæology. But while most readers seem to find the theories of writers like Erich von Däniken exciting and intriguing, Lovecraft assumed that people would react rather differently to these ideas.
After all, Lovecraft’s fiction – and, as we will see, his personal writing – isn’t exactly optimistic about the benefits of discovering the truth. In story after story, Lovecraft posits that archæological, historical or scientific investigation could well destroy mankind.
Was he right?
PRICELESS ILLUSIONS
When most people think of Lovecraft, they think of the details of his monsters: tentacles, membranes, ichor. Enjoyable though this is, it was never, to Lovecraft’s mind, the key element of his horror fiction. Instead, his writings reveal someone fascinated not only with history but with his relationship to it. His fascination drew him in two seemingly contradictory directions: on the one hand, he perceived human experience as meaningless in the face of the vast scale of cosmic time. On the other, he was practically obsessed with history and the idea of historical continuity. For Lovecraft, history was both the foundation of a culture’s sense of identity and a merciless force that revealed that identity for the fraud it was.
This contradictory view can be seen in Lovecraft’s letters. He was fascinated by, and often bragged about, both the antiquity of his native New England and its families, and the ancestral roots of his own Phillips family in particular. He regarded this as something of a personal quirk, writing that his love for the “ancient and permanent” was one of the fundamental parts of his character, together with love of “the strange and fantastic” and “scientific truth and abstract logick”. The affectation of spelling was a common one in Lovecraft’s writing: “verily,” he once wrote, “I ought to be wearing a powdered wig and knee-breeches.” Lovecraft enjoyed poking fun at himself as a fossil, but, to him, a connection to history was vital for individuals and for civilisation as a whole. “Take a man away from the fields and groves which bred him – or which moulded the lives of his forefathers – and you cut off his sources of power altogether,” he wrote in a 1927 letter. When Lovecraft’s protagonist Randolph Carter goes looking for a magical city in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, he finds that this wondrous place is actually built from the memories of his own childhood home.
Lovecraft’s sense of history was associated with his racist views: he was only 14 years old when he wrote a poem inspired by William Benjamin Smith’s 1905 book The
Color Line, which argued that the American Civil War had been a failure because African Americans, being naturally inferior, could not survive freedom. When World War
Lovecraft’s sense of history was associated with his racist views
I broke out, Lovecraft’s sense that racial identity was destiny led him to worry about America’s prospects: “Racial factors are also against us,” he wrote in 1917. “The enemy has the preponderance of superior blood.” Like many of his contemporaries, Lovecraft was impressed by the work of Oswald Spengler, whose 1918 The Decline of the
West told a mystical, pessimistic story of the impending fall of European civilisation.
These views might seem strange for a man who thought of himself as a nihilist. After all, Lovecraft also wrote that “the emotions of the past were derived from experiences, beliefs, customs, living conditions, historic backgrounds, horizons, &c., &c., so different from our own, that it is simply silly to fancy we can duplicate them…” He even appeared to acknowledge that a rational view of culture precluded his own heartfelt racism. “As for the Semitic culture,” he wrote to Frank Belknap Long in 1926, “it is not for us to say one word either for or against it, in an absolute sense. We do not feel its impulses, and can never know its essence.” In another letter to Long, he claimed that “I have freely declared myself at all times (like everybody else in his respective way) a mere product of my background, & do not consider the values of that background as at all applicable to outsiders.”
How can these two views be reconciled? With difficulty: and it’s this difficulty that lies at the heart of Lovecraftian archæology. He tried to reconcile these views himself: “…‘good’ is a relative & variable quality,
depending on ancestry, chronology, geography, nationality, & individual temperament. Amidst this variability there is only one anchor of fixity which we can seize upon as the working pseudo-standard of ‘values’ which we need in order to feel settled & contented – & that anchor is
tradition, the potent emotional legacy bequeathed to us by the massed experience of our ancestors, individual or national, biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally & pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of ‘lostness’ in endless time & space.” Similarly, he wrote to Helen Sully in 1934 that “we must save all that we can, lest we find ourselves adrift in an alien world with no memories or guideposts or points of reference to give us the priceless illusions of direction, interest and significance amidst the cosmic chaos.”
The idea of historical continuity as a “priceless illusion” shows Lovecraft attempting to square the circle, simultaneously acknowledging that his own sense of cultural superiority was unfounded while desperately clinging to it to provide a sense of validation. On the one hand, he revelled in his genteel New England heritage; on the other hand, he knew, in the clear-thinking, scientific part of his mind, that there was nothing about that heritage that really made him special or superior. How could he think there was, confronted every day with the evidence of his own irrelevance?
History is a vital source of identity and continuity. History is an illusion. History helps us feel that we belong – but we don’t. In his fiction, Lovecraft would pick ceaselessly at this uncomfortable scab.
ARCHÆOLOGY AND IDENTITY
The idea that history and archæology give a sense of purpose and continuity was hardly some particular obsession of Lovecraft’s. Archæology has a long and chequered history when it comes to issues of national identity. Although modern archæologists might like to see themselves as objective investigators of the past, the discipline has often served to reinforce a sense of shared identity by creating national myths or providing images that represent a culture’s history. The practice of validating identities by appeals to the distant past has very old roots: Icelandic writer Snorri Sturlusson insisted that the pre-Christian Norse gods were really heroes from the Iliad, for instance, while the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath cited Scotland’s Scythian heritage in support of its claim to independence. Later historians and archæologists cut down (mostly) on the mythological references but continued to use ancient history to validate modern cultures. In England, historians like Sharon Turner insisted that “our language, our government and our laws display our Gothic ancestors in every part”. History and archæology played an important role in establishing national identities in the emerging nations of Europe; tales of Viking heroes helped to define a new sense of Norwegian national identity, for instance. It wasn’t simple national myth-making, either; archæologists ignored or denigrated the achievements of enemy or colonised cultures. Nineteenth-century white Americans hypothesised a race of vanished giants to avoid attributing the massive earthworks of the Mound Builder culture to Native Americans.
Today, archæologists, at least those in the English-speaking world, tend to view this kind of nationalist archæology as disreputable – at best, a simplistic product for the popular market and, at worst, something akin to the ‘pseudoarchæology’ that argues for ancient races of giants or aliens building the pyramids. Indeed, the two strands sometimes blend together: the famous ‘Bosnian Pyramid’ (see FT212:20) is an example of an alternative archæological find that clearly helps to advocate a sense of national importance for a nation with a troubled historical identity. But archæology as a way of bolstering national myths has not always been a fringe pursuit; indeed, for much of the discipline’s history this approach was comfortably inside the mainstream. This was definitely true in Lovecraft’s time. The Nazis funded and supported a politically driven archæology that sought to create a certain image of
Bringing the past into the present can be a very dangerous act
the German state and people, but it wasn’t completely divorced from pre-1933 German archæology; indeed, it was merely a more extreme version of a commonly-held view (see FT196:32-39).
It’s no surprise, then, that Lovecraft shared this common view of history as something that gave both society as a whole and individuals within it a sense of purpose. But Lovecraft also saw that modern science and rational thought threatened that “priceless illusion,” and the theme appears clearly in his fiction. In many of his stories, he takes this illusion-shattering and makes it intensely personal for his protagonists. GOING UNDERGROUND Like many authors, Lovecraft included characters in his fiction who represent idealised versions of himself: characters like Randolph Carter or the scholarly protagonists of “The Dunwich Horror” are bookish, genteel New Englanders like Lovecraft, but wealthier, tougher, more successful, more decisive or more conventionally heroic. Perhaps unusually for authorial avatars, though, these superLovecrafts are inevitably cast in the role of victims. And one of the ways in which they are victimised is the destruction of their sense of historical continuity. This theme runs through Lovecraft’s work during the period in which he created what French novelist Michel Houllebecq, the author of a study of Lovecraft, calls the “great texts”, the foundational works of the Cthulhu Mythos, which appeared between 1926 and 1934.
It’s particularly interesting to look at Lovecraft’s view of the past in light of archæology, especially archæology as it is portrayed in the media. In reality, archæology is a complex discipline that involves a wide range of different types of investigation. In the media, though – and in most of our imaginations – it means digging up the past. In his 2007 book From
Stonehenge to Las Vegas, Cornelius Holtorf argued that archæology is fundamentally a metaphor: archæologists dig up the past from underground. This process is closely associated with all the other ways in which we see underground (or underwater) environments as metaphors.
This multifaceted archæological/ underground metaphor runs through many of Lovecraft’s stories, so it’s worth looking at in a little detail. Archæologists in popular culture are frequently compared to detectives, piecing together (literally) clues that reveal the answers to mysteries of the past. What they dig up is from the past, of course, but it’s also often dead; and underground is the underworld, the land of the dead. The subterranean world is one of secrets: when people want to hide from the authorities, they ‘go underground’. And when we want to research or investigate something, even if it’s just using the Internet to look something up, we say we’re going to ‘do some digging’. The underground world is the unconscious, as well, and the land of dreams; in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories,
the entrance to the land of dreams is in an underground cavern reached by descending a flight of 70 steps.
Finally, of course, what archæologists dig up from the past is dangerous: there
are some things better left buried. Bringing the past into the present, the dead to life or the secrets of the unconscious into the light can be a very dangerous act. These themes appear over and over again in Lovecraft’s stories, and in the popular mythology that grew up around them after his death. But although these are common themes in stories about the past, Lovecraft’s fiction presents them with some important differences.
FOUR STORIES
Written in 1923, “The Rats in the Walls” was published in 1924. Like Lovecraft, the narrator of the story is an American of English descent. He returns to England to reclaim his family’s ancestral home, Exham Priory, and becomes obsessed with the sound of rats running through the walls, scurrying endlessly downward. When he explores the lower levels of the house, he discovers ancient ruins that reveal his family’s monstrous history – and, indeed, begins to regress into past lives until he reaches a primitive, animalistic state.
Holtorf’s archæological metaphor is on full view here: as the narrator goes further and further underground, he descends through layers of older and older strata, not only going further into the house’s – and by extension his family’s – history but further into the unconscious mind. But the tension in Lovecraft’s view of history is revealed here: discovering the truth of his family’s history destroys him.
Lovecraft wrote “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” in 1927, although it was not published until after his death. Its eponymous protagonist is an apparent escapee from a mental institution. Ward has been obsessed with his distant ancestor, Joseph Curwen, a reputed sorcerer. As Ward’s family doctor investigates, he discovers that Ward studied magic in order to resurrect Curwen, who eventually killed him and assumed his identity.
Historical obsession leads to an unsettling discovery in another Lovecraft story, but in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, the metaphor is starkly obvious. Ward literally brings his own past back to life, only to discover that it has no use for him and destroys him.
Although “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, it was not widely published before his death. Written in 1931, it was printed in 1936 in a small edition of only 200 copies. It tells the story of a visitor to a sinister New England town who learns that the inhabitants are not truly human. Over generations, they have interbred with monsters, creating hybrid creatures. After escaping, the narrator learns that he himself is descended from the inhabitants of the town. As with “Rats,” the tale focuses on a character who is fascinated by history, at first by the art and architecture of the town and eventually by the origin of its degeneracy. By pursuing that interest, however, he learns an historical fact that completely annihilates his sense of his own identity.
Written in 1931 and published in 1936, “At the Mountains of Madness” is one of the most sweeping, and most influential, expressions of Lovecraft’s historical theme. The story features a team of scientists who unearth the bodies of alien creatures frozen in the Antarctic ice. The excavated creatures return to life and kill the scientists who dug them up. In investigating the killings, the protagonists discover an ancient city built by these aliens and learn the true history of the Earth – including the fact that these ancient beings created mankind, possibly as a joke.
Although these stories vary in their treatment of historical themes, they share some basic similarities: the historical investigation is structured as a mystery, but the revelation at the end of the mystery is profoundly negative. In each of these stories, the revelation has something to do with history, either the history of a character (as
in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, “The Rats in the Walls” or The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward) or of humanity as a whole, as in “At the Mountains of Madness”). These are some of the most notable examples, but there are many others: “The Facts in the Case of Arthur Jermyn,” “The Shadow Out of Time” and others all share this theme. In each case, the character’s descent into horror is marked by an annihilation of the character’s sense of history: if your history isn’t what you thought
it was, Lovecraft seems to say, then you’re not who you thought you were.
Although the archæological metaphor runs through it, Lovecraft’s concept of the terror of archæology isn’t the same as the conventional archæological horror story. Traditional narratives of dangerous archæology are more about hubris and punishment. Consider the curse of Tutankhamun, for instance (see FT136:40-43), and the vengeful mummy films of the 1930s onwards. In these stories, supernatural powers punish archæologists for their arrogance in disturbing the resting places of ancient civilisations. In keeping with the archæological metaphor,