Holy shit.
I had never avoided H.P. Lovecraft, not the way I avoided, say, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” He
was always on the margins: part of the problem is that I have a real
tough time getting into short stories, and the majority of Lovecraft’s
output is in short stories. The other day, though, I was
at the library bookstore and—while I do not generally look at their
science fiction selections, because I do not need to read a Dune-sequel
when I have not yet read the first—I found an old paperback with a
cheesy cover that features a monster out of the movie “Yellow
Submarine.” I bought it for a dollar. I haven’t finished it. I feel premature, writing this, without having finished the collection, but at the rate I’m going…okay, I've read the first few.
The book opens with “The Colour Out of Space.” It’s about thirty pages long and I was terrified for about twenty-eight of those. (The first two pages I was still getting the hang of his serpentine, sometimes-purple prose) Stephen
King never scared me—maybe once in “’Salem’s Lot,” maybe three times in
“The Stand,” and about twice throughout all of “The Dark Tower.” A few creepy scenes. Lovecraft
manages to build on the tension—if King’s terror is about suggesting a
world gone wrong, Lovecraft’s style of horror is about suggesting that
the world has always been more horribly wrong than you can imagine, and
the discovery of that is, perhaps literally, earth-shattering.
Lovecraft is perhaps most famous for his so-called Cthulhu mythos. In pop culture forums the image is often seen of a winged, tentacle-faced green monstrosity.
More the latter than the former.
In the story Cthulhu and his minions—and his masters, the Great Old Ones—are described vividly and yet ambiguously. You get a feel for their size: for the sheer horror of the things. It’s almost like depicting them, three-dimensionally, you’re going to lose something. Lovecraft
is hard to nail down: his fictions are nightmares on a cosmic level—the
word “cosmic” is used a lot in describing him—but it’s the best word
for it.
There’s another question that’s been bothering me, and that is a question of canon. Traditionally
“the canon,” aka, “what old doddering professors think should live on
in eternity as the best literature of all time,” tends to be specific to
include the “literary” mode of “literature,” i.e., the much-maligned
old white men: Philip Roth, John Updike, that type—the kind whose novels
frequently portray old white men not unlike the author, with plots that
are frequently just excuses for a few canny meditations on modern life,
or more often, sex and mortality. The first few you read are good: then it gets old. But! It’s
possible to like old white men and get interesting stories, and there
has, from what I understand of late, been a movement to be inclusive
toward “genre” writers like Philip K. Dick, Lovecraft and Chandler.
The trouble is weeding out the good from the bad. All
art has this issue: Gerard Manley Hopkins used the term “Parnassian,”
which I think for him meant, work that are relatively mundane but
sometimes appear dazzling to a new reader: for example, the first poem
you read by a certain writer may amaze you, but that might just be the
novelty of the style. But that doesn’t just apply to genre
work—I love Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater,” but much of his work after,
say, 1970 leaves me cold.
Why should genre works count as part of the canon? Well,
for one thing—I’m not sure if other people have mentioned this—they
explore, more explicitly than a straight-up literary novel might,
certain themes such as loneliness, the paradoxes, heartaches and
meaninglessness of society. Chandler’s protagonist Marlowe
in every novel comes across people doing horrible things or committing
crimes and has to find to a way to deal with the situation that doesn’t
compromise his own moral code. Putting a dilemma into that
context makes it carry a lot more weight than you might find in an
Updike novel, where the question of, say, “should Harry Angstrom sleep
with this chick” is simply not as enthralling.
Arthur
C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick should be reserved for another column, but
Lovecraft—if for nothing else, and I’m a neophyte here—belongs for his
novelty. I have not probed deeply enough into his works to
expand much more than that, like Joyce or Burroughs (I went there) he
has such a singular style that he deserves to be read. Anyone
who does art can try to mimic, say, van Gogh, but they can’t be van
Gogh again, and just like van Gogh’s legacy has spread, so has
Lovecraft’s; they may have inspired better imitators but they are both
originals, inasmuch as you ever can be. To crib from both
Ecclesiastes and Lovecraft: There is nothing new under the sun; but the
Great Old Ones, who have been here before the stars, will be new when
they rise again to the cries of their ecstatic worshippers.
No comments:
Post a Comment