In the Apartment at Redlands the Platypus Waits Reading: The Platypus Reads Part XXIX

I'm giving a lecture in less than a month on the evolution of Gothic and Horror literature. I've gone through reams of Poe, some Hawthorne, and jumped the Atlantic to pick up some Charles Williams. As it comes down to the wire, I have finally launched into that master of horror, H. P. Lovecraft.

My initial brush with Lovecraft in the form of "Dagon" and "The Call of Cthulhu" left me surprised. I don't know quite what I expected, but my first thought was "this is just like Poe." Indeed, it seems like that was what Lovecraft was going for. After reading a little bit of the critical commentary by S.T. Joshi, I learned that Lovecraft was conscious of being Poe's inheritor and sought to further refine and develop the genre of the American Gothic short story, or "weird tale." On that level, I think he succeeds more than admirably.

Moving from Lovecraft's technique to his content, I find further similarities with Poe. Both authors bombard the reader with constant insinuations that if there is something behind the physical world than it is either weak, indifferent, or evil. As to the state of the world itself, Lovecraft and Poe again seem to agree: it is decaying. In both writers, mental degradation is a key motif. Lovecraft develops this in typical fin-de-siecle fashion by adding "racial" degradation. In the worlds of Poe and Lovecraft, everything is decaying; people, places, civilization, the world itself. Only the select few realize this, however, and have to heroically struggle against the madness and despair that follows. This is a battle that the protagonists seem to lose with unnerving frequency. In what may be a case of life imitating art, both authors died young.

In spite of their artistic pessimism, Lovecraft and Poe display a deep longing for creative beauty. In a way eerily reminiscent of Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy," both authors seem to see the proper human response to the despair and hopelessness of the universe as acts of creation. The call of Cthulhu, after all, falls flat on the men of science and speaks most powerfully to the poets and dreamers. It is the human will to create something beautiful, however brief, that stands against the chaos and insanity of life. Whether this is heroic defiance, or opium dream, is left to the reader.