In the
previous post, three factors that determine the believability and effectiveness
of a narrative text were discussed.
These included its verisimilitude, the degree to which readers are
willing to suspend disbelief about its contents, and whether there is
sufficient novelty or “cognitive estrangement” to produce a change in the
reader’s understanding of the world.
Given
the outlandish content of weird or speculative fiction, how do readers know
what they know of the fictional reality depicted in the story? How does the author persuade readers, at
least for a time, that what he or she is narrating is the truth? How does it come about that a terrifying idea
can be experienced as a visceral reality by the reader? The latter would seem to be a reliable gauge
of the author’s effectiveness.
H.P.
Lovecraft’s well-known proto-science fiction story, “The Whisperer in Darkness”
(1931) was used in the last post as an example of the author’s skill in using a
number of conventional techniques to produce an effect on the reader. These techniques underpinned the elements of
verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief, and cognitive estrangement, producing
in the receptive reader a feeling of growing paranoia and alarm. Lovecraft accomplished this by degrees,
relying on the following traditional approaches in horror fiction:
•Using
a narrator who is an expert on the subject.
•Appealing
to the presumed authority and veracity of members of the upper class.
•Compiling
written evidence. The assumption here is that what is written
or published has greater weight than the spoken word. (Those of us in the health care field know “If
it isn’t written, it didn’t happen.”)
•Using
the Necronomicon and similar
resources that have wide credibility or notoriety, and fearful respect.
•Making
objective measurements of disturbing
phenomena using some type of instrumentation.
These
are all essentially appeals to authority.
In fiction, as in reality, not just anyone can say that some proposition
or finding is true. Mere eye witness is
insufficient. Either a matter of truth
is decided consensually, or better, by some recognized authority, who gives his
or her approval to what is already suspected by others. Reality,
like history, is written by the victors, the ones who won the war or the
debate, by those who have assumed the authority to say what is true and useful
to believe. But I digress.
It was
also noted in the previous post that these conventional props of believability—an
expert narrator, written documentation, and so forth—are less effective now
than they were in Lovecraft’s time. These
days, we are much more likely to question the authority and veracity of our social
betters, our experts, our institutions and other sources of received truth. This is having an effect on our perception of
what can now be considered the truth—a development accelerated by our advancing
communications technology.
Another
of H.P. Lovecraft’s most important and influential stories is “The Call of Cthulhu”,
which was published in 1928. S.T. Joshi
notes that the work demonstrates “the greatest structural complexity” of
anything Lovecraft had written up to this time. Readers know that “The Call of
Cthulhu” is the first substantive contribution of backstory to what some would
later call the “Cthulhu Mythos”. (“The
Mound”, a Lovecraft-Bishop collaboration written in 1929 but published in
abridged form in 1940, is also a key source of mythos material.)
Elsewhere
Joshi praises “the rich texture of this substantial work: its implications of cosmic menace, its
insidiously gradual climax, its complexity of structure and multitude of
narrative voices, and the absolute perfection of its style—sober and clinical at
the outset, but reaching end heights of prose-poetic horror that attain an
almost epic grandeur.” It is one of
Lovecraft’s best stories, and displays his considerable strengths as a
writer. It should be considered mandatory reading.
Francis
Wayland Thurston, the increasingly anxious narrator of “The Call of Cthulhu” is
already dead at the start of the story.
Ominously, it is his testimonial Found
Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston that readers first encounter
at the beginning. Thurston is “sober and clinical at the outset”, as he begins
a systematic presentation of the facts gathered from a variety of sources. His objective and disinterested approach to
the material makes his cautious deliberations more persuasive.
Like
Wilmarth, the narrator of “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931), Thurston “connects
the dots” by perusing a variety of written sources. These include newspaper reports, his uncle’s detailed
notes and manuscript—his uncle being the renowned Professor Angell, another “expert”—and
the “postfacto diary” of a traumatized Norwegian sailor. Thurston also conducts an interview with the
troubled artist Wilcox, who he comes to see as a credible, though unusually psychic
witness to the unfolding horror.
But the
most substantive evidence comes from a police
report, the gruesome discovery by Inspector LeGrasse of an active Cthulhu
cult operating in the swamps of Louisiana.
LeGrasse receives the imprimatur of the American Archaeological Society,
whose expertise he consults regarding the origin of a frightful statuette and
the translation of a barbarous chant, the infamous ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu
R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’
It
seems quaint now, but the reliance on law enforcement—often in combination with
local academia and possibly the military—was a frequent motif in horror
entertainments well into the 1960s. Men
in uniform or men with advanced degrees once had the unchallengeable authority
to investigate, explain and eventually control terrifying phenomena on behalf
of a frightened citizenry. These days,
not so much.
What is
noteworthy about Lovecraft, and consistent with his grim, cosmicist world view,
is that Inspector Legrasse, Professor Angell, and the narrator of “The Call of
Cthulhu”, despite their brilliant insightfulness, are powerless to do much
about the horror they have uncovered. (In the case of the two or three
academics, they succumb fairly rapidly to it.)
Here Lovecraft was prescient about the true extent of our understanding
of the world, and of our ability to control it.
There
is one additional way in which Lovecraft establishes credibility in “The Call
of Cthulhu” and in several other stories he wrote—“The Horror at Red Hook”
(1927) comes to mind. It is an ugly method also utilized by his
colleague Robert E. Howard, though remarkably not so much, if at all, by Clark Ashton Smith. That is, Lovecraft’s ample use of racial and
ethnic stereotypes, a set of assumptions that was probably consistent with many
of his readers’ attitudes toward people of other races.
If
indeed there was a conspiracy, a secret cult bent on resurrecting earth’s
greatest evil circa the late 1920s, wouldn’t it have involved foreigners,
people of other races, “a nautical-looking negro”, “half-castes and pariahs”, “mulattoes”,
“West Indians”, “Brava Portuguese”, “an immensely aged mestizo named Castro”—in
other words, the poor?* One of the most
powerful means of establishing credibility, both in fiction and in some provisional
version of reality, is to confirm and support the prejudices and assumptions of
the reader. This technique is still as
effective today as it was in Lovecraft’s time.
Given
our emerging romantic and post-fact
world, it seems there is less and less desire to retain clear boundaries between
traditional categories like objectivity and subjectivity, fact and opinion, science
and religion, and other classifications once thought, or perhaps hoped, to be
mutually exclusive. The next and final
post of this series will apply some of Lovecraft’s attempts at verisimilitude,
suspension of disbelief, and cognitive estrangement to larger philosophical
questions about the nature of truth in a post fact world.
********************
*In
contradistinction to Legrasse’s report of the activities of Cthulhu worshippers
in Louisiana, Richard Cavendish, in his book The Black Arts (1967), reports of an actual Caucasian cult, the “Adamites”
of Oroville, California. The priestess
and her husband, believing themselves to be avatars of Eve and Adam, practiced
nudity, bonfire dancing, orgies and animal sacrifice—not necessarily in that
order. In 1925 they reportedly burned a
lamb alive, possibly as a deliberate act of blasphemy—nearly as horrifying as
the events witnessed by Inspector Legrasse, and another instance, if one were
needed, of life imitating art.
''Post fact'' era. So The Post Modern Condition by Lyotard may be the key text to understanding horror today. About Lovecraft, it seems necessary to point out that the racist terms he uses to describes the fiends in The Horror of Red Hook and so many other tales are used by the stories narrators, so maybe he is using terms the characters would use. The Lovecraft story that deals directly with racism may be The Temple, an early (1920) effort that has been mostly forgotten. It is about the encounter of a German WW1 submarine commander with an ancient artifact that leads him into a doomed journey. The officer, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein is described as a rabid racist fanatic, an uncanny portrait of what the Nazis would become shortly after. The issue of racism and Lovecraft may be more complex than we can imagene. At least it is to me.
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