Friday 23 January 2015

The Jamesian and the Lovecraftian

HP Lovecraft is, in a sense, a modernist writer. Not stylistically, but philosophically: the horror is senseless, unknowable, beyond our ken. It's not ghosts from beyond the grave, devils, and curses. It's alien gods with strange motives, indifferent to human suffering. In this sense Lovecraft is a classic post-WWI writer. On the one hand, the message is that what was once certain no longer is. On the other, the message is that you can create something completely new. No more devils: let's talk Cthulhu.

This is what makes Lovecraft particularly interesting, of course, but what's a strength can just as much be a weakness. What you gain in otherworldly, alienating horror, you lose in cultural resonance. You really notice this when you read MR James, who was probably the last great pre-modern horror writer - in the sense of having Victorian rather than modernist sensibilities. James's universe is one where things make a kind of sense, even though he was expert in keeping things hidden. The ghosts, spirits, demons who his protagonists encounter are products of Christianity; it's a vicious, vengeful, Old Testament Christianity, where sins are punished rather than forgiven, and it's a Christianity which comes more from the Apocrypha (The Testament of Solomon, Knights Templar, medieval Jewish magic) than from the Bible, but it's still a universe people from the Western world are familiar with. It's in many ways a quid pro quo universe - you get what's coming to you - but more importantly it's one that's horribly familiar, especially if you have had a church upbringing. Words like Baphomet, Satan, King Solomon, hell, the afterlife, altar, pew, prayer book, etc., have meanings to us which extend beyond the immediate story or what the writer can conjur up, and reach into our shared Judeo-Christian cultural past. This gives them a sense of weight, a sense of meaning, that made-up words like Hastur do not.

This capacity for cultural resonance is underrated. You don't have to be religious to appreciate that certain shared myths, stories and artefacts can take on a sense or feeling of the numinous, despite your own agnosticism: they get it not from the fact that they're true, or genuinely 'spiritual', but from something deeper - they've been around a long time, thousands of years in some cases, and when something is around a long time, it tends to grow roots. The Testament of Solomon is spellbinding because these are stories which have their roots in extreme antiquity, and something that old can't help but feel significant. And if you really object to accepting that is true of Judeo-Christian religions, it is just as much true of Greek myth, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, which also have that quality of numinousness arising from their great age and survival, and the meanings and connotations that inevitably accrue whenever something is truly old.

10 comments:

  1. Nice piece -- and I agree about the psychological resonance of ancient beliefs. I think a lot of Jack Vance's work is thoughtful on this topic. Though I may as well be the first to wonder how much difference there is between peoples' feelings about actually ancient cultural concepts (Solomon and Grendel) and concepts that are only perceived to be ancient (native American horsemanship? sorry -- no great examples are coming off the top of my head, though I know there are many).

    As an aside, I'm a little surprised at your use of the concept/term "Judeo-Christian," which I associate exclusively with the American right. Just jarring to see it used in a different context.

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    1. Yeah, I know what you mean, although native American horsemanship has been around for hundreds of years. With "Judeo-Christian" I just mean the largely shared mythology of the two religions, really.

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    2. Those questions you have when reading something like Aleister Crowley, modern Wicca, Theosophy, or even the Book of Mormon where you can see the "seams" of where the ancient tradition was assembled in a relatively recent time period.

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  2. I definitely agree, though I think the power of the familiar and culturally resonant can be further compounded with an element of surprise -- Think the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a story previously grounded mostly in worldly, materialist sensibilities (albeit with an adventurous and fanciful tone) suddenly dives into the overtly supernatural. A medieval romance with a traditional Biblical perspective is fine, but the "Yikes! It's all true!" shock value could be heightened in a noir-ish crime drama or science fiction setting.

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    1. Yes, that's a good point. Could be quite a good bait-and-switch for a game.

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  3. Lovecraft appeared to be a writer influenced by his time. The horror of the first WorldWar with murder on an industrial scale erases all notions of honorable warfare, and undid the creaking remains of the feudal system.
    But on the other hand, theortical physics at the time was opening up concepts of the quantum, multi dimensions, and the first hints of a weapon that would dominate the power plays of the remaining world powers for the second half of the century.
    In short, the 'romance' of horror was over, because humanity had created horrors beyond imagination.

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    1. Yes, that's why I was saying he's a modernist. His character was very conservative but the stories are philosophically modern.

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