A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.” – Stephen Crane
In the comment thread of a recent column, there was a discussion on the relative merits of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction. Now, obviously everyone is different and has different literary tastes; just before writing this I was involved in a Twitter discussion wherein I expressed the unpopular opinion that Stephen King “isn’t a bad writer, but doesn’t know when to stop” (i.e. his novels are hopelessly bloated). I say “unpopular” not because people jumped on me for the opinion, but because of the obvious fact that King is a multi-millionaire precisely because a very large number of people like his work. Similarly, a very large number like Lovecraft’s work, among them Stephen King. There is, as the saying goes, no accounting for taste; for any given thing there are those who adore it, those who like it well enough, those who don’t have any opinion, those who actively dislike it and those who run screaming from the room when it’s as much as mentioned, with an infinite number of gradations between those points. And that’s a wonderful thing; it would be a boring world if everyone had exactly the same preferences.
However, I must take exception to a factual point several commenters raised; it was opined that the chief horror in Lovecraft’s fiction derives from ill-defined monsters, or from the unknown. But actually, that isn’t true; all of the horror in the best of Lovecraft’s mature oeuvre derives not from monsters (ill-defined or otherwise) or from fear of the unknown, but rather the opposite: the recognition of the utter, total, complete insignificance of not only any given individual, but of the entire human race and all of its works. This is why Lovecraft harps upon dizzying time-scales and immense objects or creatures, and why his Outer Gods are so often mischaracterized even by casual readers: it isn’t that these beings are malevolent (as we understand the term); it’s simply that neither they nor the universe as a whole has any concern whatsoever for Mankind. His beings aren’t plotting and planning to destroy humanity; few of them even recognize that the human race exists, except in the sense you recognize that soil bacteria exist. In Lovecraft’s cosmos humans were merely the accidental byproduct of an ancient and long-lived race’s industry, and when we’re wiped out by unimaginably powerful entities it will be with the nonchalance of a cook wiping down the kitchen counters prior to preparing a meal. Now, you may be of the opinion that he does a poor job of getting that point across, or that he wrote too many tales exploring lesser or more idiosyncratic fears (such as his thoroughly racist horror of miscegenation), or that his pacing is tedious and his use of adjectives excessive, or whatever, and you are certainly entitled to that opinion just as I am entitled to mine. But I think it’s important to be clear and honest about why one dislikes something, rather than carelessly hurling inapplicable or inadequate insults at it.
On several occasions, I’ve made similar points about insults directed at me; I will listen to sensible criticism, and if it’s witty I’ll laugh right along with everyone else. But if it’s childish, tinned and factually incorrect, you must forgive me if I just wipe it off the counter. One valid criticism is that I’m often verbose: guilty as charged. After all, how many writers would take the time to write almost 800 words just to introduce a few links they’d had floating around for a while? Not many, I’ll wager. But that’s exactly what this is: merely a long (and I hope somewhat entertaining) introduction to three related websites which I hope you’ll find as fascinating as I did. The first is the largest webpage in existence, an online scale model of the solar system; the second is a set of bar graphs, each a small fragment of the one below it, which may give you some idea of the immensity of Time and the microscopic fragment of it we occupy (I prepared a similar chart for my students when I taught world history back in 1987). And the third is quite possibly the coolest thing on the internet: an interactive size-comparison chart of the universe, all to scale (don’t click on this one until you have a good bit of time to explore it). Together, they may help you to get a sense of what Lovecraft was trying to say about our utter and complete insignificance to the big picture, only without so many words. Just the same, I think he would’ve enjoyed seeing them.
Gives me a great deal of comfort that their is so much still to be explored and understood.
perfectly marvelous. Thank you, Maggie. Now we just ought to be able to transcend our innate limited awareness of time and space, and we might really get an enlightened sense of how irrelevant our civilization’s currently inflated sense of self-importance must be to the grand scheme of things. I always find it a relief to think that the grand scheme of things has no conscience, no idea of distinction, and therefore no opinion on world wars, genocides, dalai lamas, mother theresas or human rights. We all fit in the grand scheme, don’t we? It’s a scary thought, too, but that’s our problem.
Whatever your thoughts on Lovecraft and King are – I’ll adopt them as my own since I’ve never read them!
I just don’t read many novels. When I was a kid I read all the GOR series – but that simply because I was young man crazy about dominating sex. To be honest – I can’t remember much of that series and that’s the problem …
Any work of fiction I read – I quickly forget it. Years later someone will ask me if I’ve ever read a book – and I might say … “Yeah” … then when they ask me what it was about or what I thought of it … I have to say … “Shit I don’t remember.”
Now – this is EXACTLY opposite from history books – which is mostly what I read. I am reading, right now, the “Knights of Bushido” – which is a short history of Japanese war crimes during WWII. It’s written by Lord Russell of Liverpool. I’ll remember everything in this book almost indefinitely – and by the way, this book changed my opinion of Al Qaeda being the most barbaric group of idiots to visit mankind in the last 100 years. No, I’m now convinced the Imperial Japanese were 100 times worse and this book has completely explained to me the utter contempt and outright racism I’ve seen displayed by most WWII vets toward the Japanese people.
So I don’t know what it is – but I don’t retain ANY knowledge from fiction books so it seems a waste of my time. I also don’t retain much knowledge from movies … but strangely, I can remember just about every second from the movie “Braveheart” … but then again … it’s kind of historical while at the same time being completely inaccurate for the most part …
So I am quite the confused individual! LOL
In F. Paul Wilson’s Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack series, the two all-powerful factions are the Ally and the Otherness. Often they are described as “indifferent and inimical”. The Otherness wants to destroy humanity. The Ally is an ally only in the sense that it opposed the Otherness: it doesn’t really care about the world, per se, but sentience is valuable to it. When the avatar of sentience is extinguished, the Ally loses interest and leaves the Earth to its fate.
That last chart was amazing. Spent a good hour clicking back and forth in kiddie glee. 😀
“One valid criticism is that I’m often verbose: guilty as charged. After all, how many writers would take the time to write almost 800 words just to introduce a few links they’d had floating around for a while? Not many, I’ll wager.”
Now that you mention your writing, Maggie, it occurs to me that two of the very best writers I see online are yourself and Amanda Brooks. A small sample, admittedly, but it makes me wonder whether there’s some systematic correlation between proficiency at sex work and proficiency with the language. Somebody stop me before I make a probably-unwelcome offer to the next attractive woman I meet who writes well!
Brooke Magnanti, Melissa Gira Grant and Charlotte Shane also write very well; I link all of them frequently in TW3 columns.
Don’t worry about the accusations of verbosity: sometimes it requires a great number of words just to ensure you aren’t misunderstood when dealing with complex subjects. Especially when so many–although fewer on this page–are at very best semi-literate in terms of history, philosophy, sociology, science and literature, to name a few subjects.
A correlation between a profession that involves frequent face-to-face communication, frequently with people who said professional has never seen before but must nonetheless have some degree of enjoyment of the professional’s company in order to facilitate the transaction, and proficiency with language? Perish the thought.
(run-on sentences! how to tell someone’s an engineer…)
Seriously, what is it with engineers/programmers and run-on sentences? I haven’t thought of that before, but it is absolutely true.
Spitball guess: engineers and coders are pretty well conditioned to avoid ambiguity, since neither compilers nor any other planning/execution platform – from CAD to whatever you’re using to plan complex chemical reactions for a heat exchanger – will operate properly unless you’ve got every variable in its properly assigned spot. It’s just the way we think.
Unfortunately, we tend to dump the entire gestalt when we’re trying to communicate. This leads to paragraphs of dense text, which means most people’s eyes glazing over, so we try and compress. This… sometimes doesn’t work out terribly well, grammatically speaking.
Just a guess.
In my experience, most everyone writes in run on sentences, regardless of profession. I suspect it is more due to lack of the knowledge of proper comma use and clause distribution than anything else.
Shh… I used to get straight As in English, let me blame my job. 😉
I am an engineer, and I abhor run on sentences.
Run-on sentences don’t bother me as much (unless it’s just ridiculously long) as the long, unbroken wall of text. Breaking it up into paragraphs is a good thing to do, and too many don’t do it.
The most amazing run-on sentence I’ve read is the eleven-page rendition of Theresienstadt Camp in W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz” (2001) – breathtaking, heartbreaking. Only after having arrived at the one and only, final period (a real period) I became aware I had been immersed in a calmly running mighty river.
And then there is of course the final chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly’s interior monologue. Takes me about four hours to read. But gosh, what experiences (both) …
I doubt whether there is a direct connection between good at sex work and being a ‘good’ writer, when a ‘good’ writer is one whose thoughts are easily accessible, whose style is elegant, and whose conclusions are logical. You might argue that the emotional intelligence (if this really exists) involved in sex work makes some people sensible to the feelings of others, and therefore makes them better communicators. Yet there are plenty of people who write well who aren’t sex workers; and even more people who are good at their jobs who are dreadful writers. Rather, I’d say we’re looking at a small subset of people who are good at sex work and who can write well.
King and Lovecraft don’t really resemble each other as writers, despite the fact that Lovecraft influenced King. I’d compare King more to Ray Bradbury because both are very sentimental writers. I also agree with you about King needing a quite ruthless editor, one of the reasons why I prefer his movies to his books (an unpopular opinion with the man himself.). Of course, King hated the movie version of the Shining, to which I tend to think, “Be thankful that a great artist like Stanley Kubrick saw something of value in your book…” but that’s kind of mean.
With Lovecraft I’d have a harder time. Early Lovecraft is sometimes similar to Poe, and he was obviously influenced by Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, in which ones man’s arrogance in the face of great universal mysteries leads to his horrible fate. (At the end, Frankenstein is on board a ship headed for the arctic, as he searches for the Creature, and he fears that in searching for the source of magnetic north the scientific expedition may be repeating his mistake in prying into things humans weren’t meant to know.) Oh, and unless Guillerme del Toro gets his “Mountains of Madness” made (and we all pray to Azathoth he will) I think the best Lovecraftian movie is John Carpenter’s The Thing. The ending is as hopeless as you could wish for! (Oh, and the 1970s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is quite good along these lines too.)
I like the title of your article, from Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide books/radio show etc. Adams rather cold view of the Universe resembles Lovecraft, but his glossing over FTL travel to me makes his stuff much more hopeful to me.
I personally think that a better Carpenter adaptation of Lovecraft is _In the Mouth of Madness_. It’s a very Lovecraftian movie that doesn’t reference any specific piece of work. The HPL Society’s movie of _The Call of Cthulhu_ is also very good, and evokes what a movie made during Lovecraft’s life may have looked like. _Dagon_ is a fun romp that is also loosely based on Lovecraft’s story, and has one of the most legitimately scary sequences that I’ve seen on film.
I’ve been a fan of Lovecraft’s works since my early teens. One thing to note; he was a pioneer. HPL did his best to create a new type of horror fiction, one not dependent on supernatural ‘evil’ and malevolence. (Derleth, for all that fans of HPL owe him for preserving HPL’s works, did the master a great dis-service by attempting to re-incorporate the concept of evil in the Mythos.) Like many pioneers, HPL made some stumbles in his efforts; but the mark of his influence is the ubiquitousness of the Mythos in popular culture. In some ways, HPL was the genre equivalent of Kafka.
For new readers, I recommend ‘The Colour Out of Space’. Generally acknowledged as HPL’s finest work, it sums up the various concepts of HPL’s horror in a very readable package.
This reminds me of a great scene in Supernatural where Death talks with one of the main characters Dean Winchester on the eve of Armageddon:
There’s more to the scene as well in which Death talks about God, which one may be older, and the fact that in the end, Death will reap God too.
“in the end, Death will reap God too.” that seems more Norse than Christian, actually. Ragnarok.
I think the Supernatural philosophy is that the Christian God is often described as a “living God”, and all living things are subject to Death.
The living God was the Son/Jesus aspect of God in the Trinity, who supposedly did “die.” The God on Mt. Sinai who said to Moses “I Am That I Am,” is a God of History, the Eternal Father, Undying and Unborn, according to Erich Fromm in his book “Ye Shall be as Gods.”
I hate theology, it gives me a headache.
To that I respond- I’m significant enough to be worth arguing with, apparently. Also- I would be fascinated by a snarky bacterium.
Not me. I like my bacteria quiet and helpful. They know when to keep their lips zipped.
“Shut up, you rude streptococcus! Don’t make me get out the Levaquin!”
Oh they weren’t arguing in the least. Dean thought he was going to sneak up and kill Death with his own weapon and Death was telling him exactly why that was a bad idea.
But… bacteria can kill!
It has been my observation that, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, cats have no adverse reaction whatsoever to being placed in the total perspective vortex.
Now I need to decide whether this is good or bad….
That depends entirely on whether or not you are smaller than a cat. 😉
Don’t get me started on cats. One of mine chewed through my laptop power cord. I am in a felinicidal state of mind right now. 🙁
Face it, if it chewed through you power cord and lived, what do you think you could do to it?
Valid points all, and you knowledge of lovecraft is in far excess of my own.
However, there is one important criticism I have of lovecraft you have missed. His fiction is only scary if you are intimidated by the vastness and unpredictability, and yes, incomprehensibility of the universe. The idea that we are insignificant to something that is incomprehensible is… not scarier than a hurricane or tornado, which are far more likely events. We are insignificant to the weather as much as it is possible to be insignificant.
Accidental obliteration, whether by asteroid or elder god, is equally not worth worrying about.
And as a final point, I would say that fear of our own insignificance is not so unlike fear of the unknown- both fears are predicated on the belief that we are somehow mystically entitled to be masters of the universe.
Most people are (to some degree) egoists; we tend to believe that we are important, that there is some essential justice and fairness in the world, and ‘bad things don’t happen to good people’. Add to that a long cultural history (in the West) of being told that we have been granted mastery, and HPL’s appeal becomes a little more understandable.
Since you are a big fan of Lovecraft, there are two writers I’d like to recommend to you. The first is Laird Barron. He is a horror writer whom you will either like or you won’t. His stories don’t shock you so much as they get underneath your skin, and Lovecraft is a huge influence on his work. Here’s a quote from his latest compilation of short stories, The Imago Sequence:
The other writer I recommend is David Wong. If that name sounds familiar he’s the editor-in-chief of the humor web site Cracked.com. (Maggie will remember when Cracked used to be a competitor to Mad magazine.) Anyway, Wong has written a terrific book that I cannot recommend highly enough—John Dies At The End. Don’t shy away from it when I tell you it is a horror comedy. Many people mistakenly believe that a true horror film can’t be a comedy. (Those people should watch Shaun of the Dead. The scary parts of that movie are as terrifying as any straight horror movie you’ll ever see.) Wong proves that not only is this not the case, but comedy can actually make the horror parts scarier and gut-wrenching. A baseball analogy would be the curve ball or change-up that makes the fastball that much harder to hit. There are parts of JD@TE where you will laugh your ass off and then your blood will run cold on the next page. And the horror in this book is definitely inspired by Lovecraft.
Anyway, check out these books at your local library or at Amazon.com!
One more thing. That book I was telling you about—John Dies At The End—was made into a movie last year but I missed it in theatres. It’s available now on DVD and for streaming on Netflix:
Another Lovecraft-inspired author to consider is Charles Stross. ‘On Her Majesty’s Occult Service’ is a collection of novels, where Stross combines the Mythos with espionage/intelligence services, with great results.
Interesting, I got exactly this sense of existential horror from Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men”.
One theme in Lovecraft’s stories that keeps recurring is the idea that mankind is better off not knowing the truth about the universe, and that anybody who suceeded in learning this truth would become mad by the knowledge itself. Antis tend to act as if the truth of human sexuality was a Lovecraftian horror that nobody should know about. When confronted with this truth, they refuse to change their views to reflect this reality—maybe men have differing sex drives than women; maybe masturbation is actually necessary; maybe men are simply biologically driven to seek sexual variety—and instead call everybody doesn’t hold their views “evil.” I think this may be the foundation of their deep-seated misandry and misogyny.
Most of what I would say on Lovecraft and the existential dread of being inherently meaningless has been said already. One thing I can add is that I do have a friend who is a happy nihilist. She accepts that everything is random and directionless, and in response said “why not enjoy ourselves, then, and make our meaning?” Fittingly, Lovecraft wasn’t ‘horror’ to her.
Also, I really want to know where I can read that comic.
Yes, Lovecraft tries to make this point in almost every novel.
It gets rather tedious the tenth or twentieth time and I hardly see it as a particularly effective source of horror anyway. Earthquakes, tsunamis, etc are prone to making the point somewhat more effectively and while the sense of helpless insignificance they induce sure can be traumatising they aren’t the ingredients of suspense or drama.
Thomas Disch does the whole thing much better in ‘The Genocides’ – then he moved on. The moving on is the bit that Lovecraft and his fans never got to.
I stand by my original statement that Lovecraft was a hack whose one trick consisted of failing to describe his ‘horrors’ in a manner that allows readers to fill the gaps from their own darkest fears. Or with cartoons of them at least. A good enough stunt for one novel maybe, but it gets old fast.
Quite.
I read some Lovecraft, because after all he’s this big God of Horror. Only one story grabbed me, and it was one outside the Mythos which some high school kid co-wrote with him.
Whether or not this has anything to do with my perspective on my own insignificance I don’t know, and I suspect that it has more to do with me just not much reading a lot of horror.