Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer
Читать онлайн книгу.
in a dream under the ever present moonlight. An attempt to return to the subterranean castle, to regress to the claustraum, to find total oblivion in a reversal of the individuation process, fails. The ego cannot escape from the world of consciousness and reality: the stone trap-door is immovable.
His “new freedom” is provided only by insanity, and the outsider, unable to recover from his “soul-annihilating” experience, rides now with the “mocking and friendly ghouls,” his archetypal fantasies and complexes (or perhaps his fellow inmates in the insane asylum). But in his bitterness he almost welcomes the new freedom of schizophrenia, the new wildness of breaking away from reality—of being “an outsider among those who are still men,” who are still sane and have not yet felt the icy fingers of terror and the holocaust of ego-disintegration in the ultimate confrontation with the Shadow.
Lovecraft, familiar with Jungian theory, was well aware that few, if any ever achieve any significant approximation to Jung’s idealized ego-expansion and self-realization. In his conviction that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind the correlate all its contents,’ the dreamer from Providence has painted a gloomy and devastating picture of man’s destiny: not a glorious psychic integration, but the ever imminent collapse of the ephemeral illusion of rationality.
3. AN ANTIMETAPHYSICAL INTERPRETATION: THE ABSURDITY OF POST-MORTEM DESTINY
H. P. Lovecraft, a rationalist, a logical positivist with absolutely no belief in the supernatural, used his celebrated tale “The Outsider” as medium to convey, in disguised form, his sardonic contempt for the incongruity of metaphysical beliefs and dogmata such as life after death, immortality, and resurrection. With the searing irony of the materialistic philosopher, he unleashed this piece of macabre sarcasm on the vain hopes and illusions of a gullible world.
The subterranean castle is simultaneously Lovecraft’s cynical conception of heaven and of the kingdom of Dis on the pattern of Dante’s Inferno, while the outsider is a corpse that has been dead and buried for countless years. Some uncanny psychic residue allows this “carrion thing,” this unnatural denizen of the tomb, to become an animated corpse and continue his unthinkable existence in the underground vaults of the cemetery. Lovecraft has granted, for the sake of argument, man’s survival after death, and is ready to carry this notion to its absurd implications.
The living corpse exists in the “subterranean castle,” sole survivor among the “piled-up corpses of dead generations,” while his deteriorated brain retains only vague memories of the past. The “mouldy books,” containing the traditional beliefs of his ancestors, convey to him hopes and dreams of light, of happiness, of rebirth, of future glory…. Lying in his underground crypt-vault-castle, and “unable to measure the time,” he dreams of rejoining the world of the living, the world of light and of gay figures he sees in the books and which always evoke half-memories of his mundane past. He dreamed and waited, “not knowing what he waited for.” Finally, his longing for light “grew so frantic,” that he decided to climb the single “black tower” leading “to the unknown outer sky.” With tremendous effort, the rotting and inconceivable monster manages to scale this sole avenue of escape, and achieves his unholy resurrection as he emerges from the crypt. He finds himself standing in the midst of the graveyard where his body was laid to rest in the unmeasurable past, something for him “abysmally unexpected” and producing the “most demoniacal of all shocks,” since he had fancied himself the inhabitant of a castle and not a denizen of the underworld…. Lovecraft, to show us that the metaphysical dream is sheer insanity has allowed life to linger in this disintegrating corpse, and now has resurrected it, returning it to the world of the living.
The grisly creature, still nursing a frantic craving for light, for companionship, for happiness, and even for the mythical glory of heaven, runs swiftly and eagerly under the moonlight, guided by remote recollections from his distant past. He recognizes landmarks and buildings, rivers and bridges, but he finds them all changed, altered, aged, and crumbling, an indication of the long time elapsed since the grim reaper put an end to his natural life. (Incidentally, this is an idea that was later elaborated by Lovecraft’s friend and fellow author, Clark Ashton Smith, in “Xeethra.”)
This decaying, pitiful parody of living men ultimately arrives at his destination, the “venerable ivied castle” where he once lived or reigned, noting here also the ravages of time. The castle was “maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness…the moat was filled in, and…some of the well-known towers were demolished.” But, without attempting to understand the implications of the changes that time has brought to the places he knew in the far past, he is attracted “with interest and delight” by “the open windows,” through which he observes an “oddly dressed company,” “making merry and speaking brightly to one another.” He sees in all this “gorgeous light and revelry” the fulfillment of his hopes, the glory he had only dated dream of before.
In his brightest “moment of hope” he decides to enter the castle of life and steps through one of the low windows to join the gay party…only to sink into his blackest moment of despair. At the sight of the putrefying corpse creeping in through the window, “there descended upon the whole company” a panic “fear of hideous intensity,” that Lovecraft paints in vivid and unforgettable colors. Everyone fled madly, stampeding desperately from the unthinkable apparition that now stood there, “alone and dazed,” in the throes of melancholic anguish, unable to comprehend the reason for this sudden manifestation of delirious terror. He clings to the tenuous hope that the horrified mass reaction was due to something “that might be lurking near” him….
When he sees that fateful reflection in the mirror of reality, he does not perceive the nightmarish image as his own, since in his dreams he had always conceived himself as “akin to the youthful figures” in his books…and now is confronted with the “putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation,” with a “carrion thing” that “the merciful earth should always hide.” With horror, he detects in “its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape.”
As he stumbles, he touches “the rotting outstretched paw of the monster” but feels only “the cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.” In that mind-shattering instant he realizes the truth, he remembers the past, he recognizes the “altered edifice” where he now stands, and worst of all, he becomes agonizingly aware of his own condition. Overwhelmed by this nightmarish revelation of ultimate horror, this cruel mockery of all his dreams and hopes, the outsider sinks to the most abysmal depths of despair. But in that moment of supreme anguish, his tortured mind dissociates his painful awareness, and he experiences the merciful oblivion of amnesia.
In his mordant yet morbid humor, Lovecraft shows us now this tragic and pitiful parody of immortal man running blindly and frantically back, attempting to return to the graveyard, to the earth where he belongs—only to find the slab to the subterranean vault immovable. He experiences no regret, since he can only abhor the prospect of continued and meaningless existence in the crypt. Now he rides with the “friendly ghouls,” the necrophagous scavengers who become his sole companions in a final gruesome and grotesque mockery of man’s impossible dreams.
The outsider finds not the glory of Heaven, nor even the torments of Hell, but only the “unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid….” Man’s ultimate fate, man’s final destiny, is not the glory of supernatural existence, but the feast of the maggots.
With “The Outsider” Lovecraft achieved an equally effective, yet vastly different statement on the absurdity of immortality, as Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. To cease to exist is certainly preferable to the kind of unholy survival found in the outsider, and to conceive of any other kind of personal survival in a mechanistic and purposeless cosmos was a vastly more absurd proposition for the thinker from Providence.
4. A PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION: MAN’S POSITION IN A MECHANISTIC UNIVERSE
That H. P. Lovecraft was a first rate thinker and philosopher is shown by such brilliant essays as “Materialism and Idealism: A Reflection” and “The Materialist Today,” as well as by the numerous and