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Master of disgust

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Zodiac
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« on: March 15, 2008, 04:24:15 pm »

Lovecraft's biography offers some clues as to why his fiction isn't particularly good at inspiring fear but can powerfully convey another emotion: disgust. The revulsion tends to constellate around smaller details, usually associated with biological forces gone wrong. The doings in "The Shunned House" involve ghostly manifestations and a spectacular possession scene, but the sole detail that reliably provokes a shudder is the diseased "white fungeous growths" that sprout in the house's accursed cellar; they rot quickly and, when cut by the narrator's shovel, ooze a "viscous yellow ichor." The "singular person" detained in the insane asylum in "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" is described as having skin in which "the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit."

In what even Lovecraft considered his most successful story, "The Colour out of Space," the narrator learns what happened to an unfortunate farmer and his family after a mysterious meteorite lands near their well. The crops looked lush but turned out to be bitter and inedible. The vegetation took on a strange, unearthly color similar to that of a disturbing "globule" found inside the meteorite. Then it began to turn gray, dry and crumbly. The farmer's wife went mad and had to be confined to the attic. The livestock was struck with an affliction in which "certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shriveled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages -- and death was always the result -- there would be a greying and turning brittle."

As Joyce Carol Oates has written, "The Colour out of Space" succeeds in creeping us out where much of Lovecraft's fiction fails because it is "subtly modulated" instead of merely sensational. A whisper works much better than a shriek. The story also feels closer to the heart of Lovecraft's own fears than some of its more cosmic brethren. Although the parallel to radiation poisoning seems obvious, "The Colour out of Space" was written in 1927 and really reflects a more deeply rooted dread of contamination, disease and degeneration. These are the predominant motifs in Lovecraft's imaginative life.

The ugliest way this preoccupation appears in Lovecraft's fiction is in his depiction of nearly everyone not of upper-class Anglo-Saxon descent. The Library of America collection includes "The Horror at Red Hook," the tale of a policeman's efforts to get to the bottom of cult activities in a section of Brooklyn (a poor immigrant neighborhood where Lovecraft himself had lived). The investigation leads him from meditations on the "swarthy, sin-pitted faces" of the inhabitants to a plunge into feverish visions of subterranean devil worship. He perceives these visions to be "the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding."

It was race mixing in particular that seemed to most horrify Lovecraft. His fiction is rife with scenarios of evolution working in reverse, human beings mating with fish people and producing revolting "mongrels." He clung to the idea of himself as a holdover from a past era, an 18th century "gentleman." It's the kind of comforting fantasy common in old families who have nothing left to distinguish themselves but their breeding, but it's inexcusable in someone who claimed to place his ultimate faith in science. Like a lot of people who proudly declare themselves to inhabit the territory of pure reason, Lovecraft had difficulty policing the borders.

At root, all of Lovecraft's phobias seemed to come down to an elemental dread of the human body: the tentacles and gaping abysses with their obvious genital associations (hence Stephen King's comment), reproduction's disorderly tendency toward mutation and of course the horror writer's primal muse -- the death and decay that lie in store for every living thing. If not all of us share the specific racial and sexual manifestations of that dread, we all feel some version of it. Lovecraft, in his fiction at least, abandoned himself to it with a kind of warped gallantry.

If Lovecraft, unlike Poe or King, hasn't the psychological acuity to get under our skin and make us feel real fear, he does offer us the spectacle of his own unfettered morbidity. And as part of the irony that Lovecraft detected in all great horrors, that morbidity proved to be spectacularly fecund. The energy of his psychopathology fueled the creation of the vast, visionary Cthulhu Mythos, an invention big enough for other writers and artists to crawl into, inhabit and expand upon. There's exhilaration in witnessing that energy allowed to run loose, without shame, without self-consciousness and without limit. Which is not to say it's healthy, let alone wholesome. No, I wouldn't call it wholesome at all.

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