THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL HORROR OF H.P. LOVECRAFT: DREAM AND NIHILISM, FASCINANS AND TREMENDUM
Essay by Leni Remedios, translated into English by Leni Remedios with the supervision of Jane Broadhurst.
You can find the original in Italian in Critica Impura - letteratura, filosofia, arte e critica globale http://criticaimpura.wordpress.com/
Amongst the prejudices, literary ones are undoubtedly the most
resistant.
I’ve always harboured a strong reluctance towards Lovecraft’s writings:
as I’m more prone to the psychological side of weird tales, I’ve never relished
the prospect of facing the tentacular creatures of the writer from Providence.
But I had to give up, before a man who influenced every kind of
artists and not just writers, like the Swiss Giger in the visual arts and every
genre of musicians (from Metallica to Vision Bleak and Iron Maiden, or the
progressive H.P. Lovecraft); a man who led philosophers to hazardous
comparisons with Husserl phenomenology and who, dulcis in fundo, together with
the Welsh Arthur Machen and the English Algernon Blackwood represents what I
call “the pre-Kinghiana triad”: for anyone fond of weird, horror, thriller, etc
it’s the trio of authors of reference that precedes the advent of Stephen King[1].
I wondered what does of Lovecraft an unavoidable point of reference, a
sort of phenomenon – on the same level of the creatures born by his imagination
– not devoid of contradictions, first considered with a snobbish marginalisation
by literary criticism, then with a nearly fanatic enthusiasm by his readers,
finally recently included in the American Literary Canon.
What is, in his works, the element that is attractive and repulsive at
the same time, the alchemical “quid” that elicits astonishment, metaphysical
stupor or, on the contrary, embarrassment and distance, if not an ill-concealed
attitude of ridiculing his writings?
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in
1890 and in Providence he died in 1937.
His works appeared in the period of time ranging from 1917 (when Dagon was published) until 1935/36, in a historical time crucial for the
first half of the twentieth century, namely between the first World War in
progress and the Great Depression with its aftermath.
The author’s biography offers us fundamental and interesting hints to
understand his literary output: both his parents ended their days in a lunatic
asylum (first his father, several years later his mother); his mother used to
seclude him at home considering him
“ugly” and since he was a young boy he had suffered from terrible headaches and
was of very delicate health; his
maternal grandfather encouraged him to read the gothic classics such as Edgar
Allan Poe and timeless works like The
Arabian Nights and The Odyssey,
while his maternal grandmother influenced his passion for astronomy, an element that had a
great influence on his writing, to the point of applying it the definition of cosmicism.
We have to add to all that the innate passion of young Lovecraft
towards chemistry and his love for philosophy, esoteric sciences and occultism unites
him to the other authors of the triad, Machen and Blackwood.
We might consider Lovecraft’s output under many points of views: from
a mere technical point of view of plot development and literary devices; under
the point of view of emotions that his tales evoke in the reader; finally from
the point of view of the underlying issues of the general sci-fi narrative structure. For me the latter is the most charming and
philosophically meaningful.
Yet all these aspects are intimately interconnected one to each other
and to do an orderly analysis can be a very hard enterprise. Well, let’s try to do it.
A GEOMETRIC AND CYCLIC WRITING
What’s immediately striking about Lovecraft’s writing is the accuracy,
the extreme, glacial precision with which he relates the details of improbable
imaginary events: with a maniacal rigour he cyclically turns back on the same
theme of a tale never giving a definitive explanation, creating a continuous
and cyclic “pre-climax” that keep the reader glued to his seat. Masterly
on that –although threatened by the risk of prolixity – is one of the few
novels by Lovecraft, At the Mountains of
Madness, in my opinion one of the Genius of Providence’s most perfect
works.
Furthermore, one of the devices most used by the author is in
recalling in different tales, recurring characters or themes, like pseudo deities
(Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth) or imaginary occult texts, like the terrifying Necronomicon, written about in 730 a.D. by “the mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred. This device
can create the risk of certain monotony in the narrative on one side, but on
the other side raises in the reader a kind of familiarity: Lovecraft’s
imaginative world becomes a very tangled labyrinth in which however it’s not difficult
to get orientated.
Cyclopean proportioned buildings with unusual geometries, smelly
caves, teams of scholars ready to accomplish a dangerous mission, dogs barking
wildly in the proximity of negative presences, negro or mulatto attendants[2] to name a few, are recurrent like the refrain
of a well-known melody.
We might say this, giving a panoramic glance on his output: we have
the feeling that there is a sort of run-up of the author, in which Dagon is nearly preparatory to The Call of Cthulhu and The Call of Cthulhu is nearly
preparatory to At the Mountain of Madness,
just to follow a line.
Lovecraft is recurring even in the absent themes: his is an asexual
imaginative world, in which women appear very little and, if they do, they are
mostly instrumental to evil’s development, like Lavinia Whateley, Wilbur’s
twisted and albino mother in The Dunwich
Horror or the old witch Keziah in Dreams
in the Witch House.
The other resounding absent is the psychological depth of the
characters: about protagonists we just know they are scholars or men attracted
by mystery whose hunger for knowledge or an obscure, evil past in their family
life leads them to trespass extra-sensory limits or to face uncanny experiences.
In short, what is enough to develop the story plot But going deep inside the
psychology of every single character is something that doesn’t matter at all to
Lovecraft.
Sometimes the impression gained is that, throughout all his stories,
you deal with only one character, of which just few details change. At best the
recurring characters are two: the leading role, who “chooses” to be led through
the magic and who most of the times succumbs, and a co-protagonist (usually a
specialist like a scholar, a psychiatrist, etc. or a team of similar subjects),
who attempts, on the same events, a more rational scientific investigation,
without being emotionally involved, often ending in failure or compromising their mental health (The Rats in the Wall, At the Mountains of
Madness, The Dunwich Horror, The case of Charles Dexter Ward).
It seems that Lovecraft doesn’t care about the individual and his
specific psychological features but
rather the archetype and what it represents.
What he cares about is getting in the dream, going “beyond the
spheres”, at any rate.
The objective of the author is the suspense component, the creation of
a magical claustrophobic atmosphere[3].
Instrumental to this research is – together with the characters, mere
instruments – the accurate description of the landscapes, yet in their aberrant
and fascinating deformity, like the bleak lands of Dunwich, that mirror the
sulky and distrusting figures of its inhabitants; or in their fantastic
inhumanity, like the cyclopean cities that spread on before the eyes of the
protagonists. Cities that often, with their tall minarets and majestic domes,
wrapped in a silence and in a light devoid of any human presence, much resemble
the Arab cities in the middle of the desert, by which fascination maybe young
Lovecraft had been subjected through the reading of The Arabian Nights.
On the other hand Lovecraft candidly admitted, in his letters, not to
foster any sort of empathy towards the human race, but rather that all his
interest and will of investigation went towards the landscape, towards the
ravines of mystery that Nature offers. He claimed this to the point of
asserting a sort of identification towards the landscape that was inspiring to
him- first of all the context in which he was born – and the extreme,
well-known assertion of this identification lays in the statement “I AM
PROVIDENCE” carved in the commemorative slab in the town cemetery. Here we are
in one of the beautiful contradictions of this author: from the macrocosm of
cosmicism to the microcosm of his native identity; from endless sidereal spaces
to the small American reality of his own town[4].
To say the truth, if one looked at this with a different glance, he
wouldn’t speak about contradictions, but rather about a unity of the opposites,
the very same who animated Paracelsus and the alchemists whom Lovecraft recalls
in his tales.
METHAPHISICAL
STUPOR AND HORROR: FASCINANS ET TREMENDUM
The short novel
(or long tale) At the Mountains of
Madness, written in 1931 and edited afterwards[5],
narrates about the adventure of a team of scientists in the still unexplored
Antarctic lands; here the range of themes that run throughout the lovecraftian
output is perfectly exposed: cyclopean and
non-Euclidean architectures; the existence of a pre-human race whose origins
date back to millions of years earlier, long before any scientific knowledge
about hominids; madness generated by the confrontation with terrible truths and
the consequent will of “protecting” the rest of human race from such truths
(the explorers keep updated “the rest of the world” – University and press –
through wireless reports, in which they decide accordingly to omit many
gruesome details about the expedition).
The meticulousness,
with which Lovecraft reports the details of the expedition, from geographic
coordinates to the cold radio wireless reports, makes the reader really believe
for a moment to what he’s reading: in short, Lovecraft can turn plausible the implausible. It’s not by chance that the author’s works
deserved the definition of “weird realism”.
Here we’re going
to the second point of our analysis.
In a curious
article appearing in the philosophical magazine Collapse, Graham Harman makes an interesting parallel between
Husserl phenomenology and Lovecraft’s literature[6].
At first you might
think that the usual reductive impertinence of Western philosophy, especially
the contemporary one, tends to trace back all the knowledge – even Lovecraft’s quirky
imaginative world - to its own theoretical, conceptual categories. In a sense
it’s true, but, as they say, you have to be careful not to throw the baby out with
the bathwater: Lovecraft, as Harman underlines, far from being a “pulp-author”,
was an intellectual, a deep connoisseur of philosophical movements; he declared
himself a materialist and an atheist. Among his favourite authors he
contemplated two philosophers of decadence such as Spengler and Nietzsche.
The “still unknown”
which he evokes and the terrifying truths coming from cosmic spaces or from the
deepest ravines of the Earth, don’t belong to a transcendental “beyond” or to a
Kantian noumenal (philosophical term) realm: they are perfectly immanent to the
space-time dimension we live in.
However much the described
architectures are “non-Euclidean” or obey to laws unknown (till now) to the
human mind, they don’t come from a transcendental dimension.
The black holes in
the space or the centre of the Earth are phenomena that we know (as far as we
know) only indirectly; it doesn’t mean that they don’t belong to our dimension:
“The terror of Lovecraft is not a noumenal horror, then, but a horror of
phenomenology”[7].
This is what links
him to Husserl: what the phenomenologist “brackets”, in a temporary suspension
of knowledge, “(...) lays entirely within human consciousness”[8].
Up to now we’re
dealing with the centuries-old philosophical issue about confrontation between
knower and object known.
I’d like to
venture on another level: the emotional/experiential one.
Which are the
emotions evoked by such visions of world? Which impressions are raised by these
merely rational disquisitions?
“I choose weird
stories because they suit my inclination best – one of my strongest and most
persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange
suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural
law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite
cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis”[9].
If philosophy is
impertinent and unscrupulous enough to make Lovecraft drawn to a comparison
with Husserl, I don’t want to be less impertinent and anyway the following
remark arouse, as to say, instinctively: the feelings of terror and fascination
towards a so far completely unknown universe (tremendum et fascinans), the
sense of awe and complete subordination towards a mysterious cosmic otherness
(mysterium tremendum) led me to think at once to the definition given by
Rudolph Otto[10]
to the Holy. Ironically, Otto came out from the very phenomenological school of
Husserl, from which he left because of his neo-kantian positions.
It’s At the Mountain of Madness again to
offer the perfect paradigm also in this case: Lovecraft is particularly skilful
in creating a sort of suspension of the soul, in which we, the readers, are
right there, in the small aeroplane’s cockpit, together with geologists and
scientists, holding our breath on the edge of the world, waiting for the unspeakable
located beyond the Antarctic peaks[11].
The merely
physical sensation is your accelerated heart beating, your sternum rising: as
we were physically lifted, in a prolonged state of anxiety and excitement.
It’s this sense of
looming, well described by Giuseppe Genna on his essay[12],
that recurs in Lovecraft’s tales and captures the reader in a sort of stupor. In
reality, because of the issue of the recurring themes, the reader used to
lovecraftian imagery already foresees what’s expecting him beyond the edge of
the world. It seems that this stupor is actually premeditated, a rapture that
the reader is waiting for and yet it
surprises him every single time.
The massive
architectures that unravel to the sight, immersed in the inhuman silence of the
icy lands, create a totally praeterhuman dimension and a strong fascination
towards which explorers can’t resist (beyond their terror, they will thrust
themselves more and more forward into the burrows of the ancient city, animated
by their hunger of knowledge); but also an undeniable disturbing feeling.
The truths evoked
by this tale and by the other ones are terrible truths, which contact generates
an unavoidable insanity in many fragile minds. Better not to know, the author seems to suggest.
And this
suggestion sounds familiar, for example in the light of psychoanalytic theories
that at the time of Lovecraft were in full development and which brought to
light a disturbing undergrowth of unconscious material.
Again, during that
time scientific community were discussing the hypothesis of the existence of
another planet (namely Pluto, the “dwarf planet”, discovered in 1930): this
hypothesis was enthusiastically supported by Lovecraft, as revealed by his
early letter of 1906 to the magazine Scientific
American and it gives more support to his idea of human being as a miserable
meaningless presence, before a boundless cosmos about which we know quite
little and whose dynamics are indifferent to human sufferings.
The incipit of The Call of Cthulhu, not accidentally pretty
much quoted, is relevant from this point of view and nearly represents an
epistemological manifesto, a philosophical declaration of intent: “We live on a
placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should voyage far”[13].
Further: in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward he talks
about “obscure cosmic relationships and unnameable realities behind the
protective illusions of common vision”[14].
Ignorance is restricting
, but it’s protective. Knowledge bursts the
gates of the incommensurable open and if it’s made by a weak mind the result is
the loss of rational faculties.
Fascinans et
tremendum, attraction and repulsion coexist in the very same experience,
exactly like Rudolph Otto described the strongest and overwhelming experiences
of contact with the Holy.
But the parallel
ends right here: in the end, the mysterious side of cosmic and pre-human
otherness by which the individual is totally awed, takes shape in the creatures
sprung out by the author’s imagination, projections and materialisations of the
most negative forces of the (immanent) cosmos; a negative degeneration against
redemption and ecstasy, positive culmination of the (transcendent) experience
of the Holy.
Here we have to
highlight another of the author’s contradictions and I have to say that I
particularly love contradictions, as bearer of vitality and drive: one of the
most recurring adjectives of the atheist and materialist Lovecraft, related to
the negative presences and energies of his tales, is “blasphemous”: what we’re
induced to wonder is “blasphemous in respect to what?”
The other
underlying subject is actually a terrific question which the author takes the
wraps off and according which his alien creatures represent just a literary
device: the idea that there isn’t a somewhat positive, edifying further
dimension, a whatever cosmic order that counterbalances and gives a sense to
the chaos of human misery and meanness, a dimension bearing each time the
features of the various deities, beliefs
or philosophical systems.
Instead the
fundamental idea is that this further dimension is a mere immanent malignant
dimension or, at best, completely indifferent to human paths.
The authentic,
philosophical question underlying the totally improbable creations of Lovecraft
is a terrible question.
The feeling is
that of the ground removed from under the feet.
The atheist
“pantheon” of Lovecraft is a place of desolation and nihilism. There’s no
salvation at all.
Even love for
knowledge can turn out dangerous, as demonstrated: the only salvation for
humanity is given by the impossibility of connecting all the kinds of
knowledge, in a way that the ultimate truth is perennially slipping away. The
hypothesis of reaching and enjoying that truth - even if for a moment - leads
directly to the disintegration of the “I”.
“The most merciful
thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate
all its contents”[15].
That is the
opposite of what all the mystical-esoteric approaches of every age and place
had been teaching: a homogeneous vision and a holistic knowledge, that create a
harmony between micro and macrocosm, are the necessary premises to the enlightenment
achievement and liberation of a human being, leading then to his integration/individuation
instead of his disintegration.
Not that in these
approaches – religious, mystic or, in the case of Jungian theories,
psychological – there’s no risk of a potential break-up or loss of control:
they take it into consideration, so much so that they promote a gradual and
esoteric knowledge, in which the individual must be from time to time prepared
to face the following step of awareness.
But sooner or
later there’s supposed to be a positive outcome or it’s taken for granted that
it exists.
Not in Lovecraft:
there’s no possibility of redemption, whether laic or religious.
There’s no “way of
salvation”, there’s just a way of escape and the only authentic way of escape
is, regarding the author, imagination.
An escape from his
own gloomy private reality, made of illness, isolation and marginalisation
during his childhood and later of financial difficulties that harassed him more
and more, till the end of his years.
But also an escape
from a contemporary society that he saw ineluctably doomed to a tragic
decadence. “It is my belief, and was so long before Spengler put his seal of
scholarly proof on it, that our mechanical and industrial age is one of frank
decadence"[16].
The background
behind the man and intellectual Lovecraft, behind his sick and uncanny imaginative
world, is a horizon devoid of horizons of sense. It’s the horizon of the man of
the early twentieth century, who contemplates the inexorable doom of modernity
and embraces, with cold awareness, Nietzsche’s death of God and the world
secularisation.
He does it coolly
and consciously: that is the salvation of Lovecraft as a man, in comparison to
the personal adrift to insanity of the master Nietzsche. Lovecraft poured all
his magma of madness into his imaginative world that is, objectively, sick and
twisted. But he remained cynically sane till the end of his days, though
devoured by a degenerating disease[17].
A TRUE SOLITARY?
Yet “the solitary
of Providence” was not a lonely one separated from the contemporary life in
which he was living. If one reads between the lines he will discover that some
of his tales in particular are not at all a mere escape from reality.
It’s true that
there are hundreds of letters, addressed to many friends and men of letters (he
was not so much solitary as he seemed) in which he amply described his own
socio-political position, but I don’t care
reporting here his dissertations about Marx, Engels and the impact of their
ideas on society.
I’d rather analyse
two tales that are very similar one to each other: The Dunwich Horror and The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
In both cases the
protagonists are social outcasts, rejected. In the first case Wilbur is a very
odd child who grows up frightfully rapidly (at ten years old he looks like a
young adult), whose grandfather introduces him to the reading and studying of
mysterious manuscripts, apprenticeship followed by experiments made especially
on the barn next to the house in which they live.
In the second case
a psychiatrist elucidates the birth and development of the insanity of his
patient, Charles Dexter Ward: at a certain point Charles followed the footsteps
of an ancestor who lived a hundred and fifty years earlier, Joseph Curwen,
whose sorceries upset much of the local community of the time. Curwen used to
make dreadful experiments of dead resurrection in the farm that he rented, on
purpose, outside his town (because the horror has not to be accomplished in
your own home).
In both the tales
the local community is aware of the oddities of these individuals, in some way
people identify and recognize the uncanny element, but they don’t talk about
it, better: the inhabitants of Dunwich and Providence limit their selves to
whisper, without giving actual importance to their doubts. Yet there’s a
crescendo of tension and misgiving, corroborated by other strange and appalling
events.
But it’s as though
they want to shut their eyes every time, for the sake of a quiet life .
Horror is under
everybody’s eyes. Horror is muted by
everybody’s silence.
Until a point of
reaching an utmost saturation, in which the horror is not bearable anymore and
consciences feel the urgent moral obligation of going into action. This happens
when the cancer has by then already exploded and the situation is so
unmanageable to force the community to have to turn
to an external agent (a specialist, whether doctor or archaeologist, etc)
or to the unity of forces, namely villagers expeditions aimed not only at the physical
elimination of the maleficent cancer, but also at its ontological
nullification, at the elimination of his sense, forcing to pretend that a
similar aberration has never existed, such is it being unspeakable.
Genial is a short
passage where, after the raid to Curwen’s farm, in which in reality its
elimination is never described if not in its lateral events, two frightened
messengers arrive to the farm of a neighbour asking for some rum “One of them
told the family that the affair of Joseph Curwen was over, and that the events
of the night were not to be mentioned again”[18].
The mechanism of
removing the maleficent and dark evil goes on also after its elimination,
through an indifference that is converted, physically, in an abandonment of the
places where the horror has been taking place: Curwen’s farm lays there
untouched after the raid and will be reanimated only a hundred and fifty years
later, when his heir, Charles, will act again his ancestor’s deeds.
Something similar
happens to the house of old witch Keziah, in Dreams in the Witch House: after the tragic end of the story with
the protagonist’s death, the house is completely forsaken, wrapped in a
tenacious will of oblivion till time and
exposure to elements make it inexorably collapse, bringing to light horrible
evidences linked to black magic.
But in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, written
by the way two years earlier than The
Dunwich Horror, there’s a further element, that makes the novel a very
interesting exemplar and I dare say unique in the lovecraftian production there’s
a further bond that links, in an indissoluble way, the gruesome character of
Joseph Curwen to the community that points indignantly at him, namely the bound
of money.
Curwen manages a
gigantic business of import/export of raw materials, necessary to sustain the
high costs of his experiments, through ships that come and leave continuously from
the docks on his commission. Therefore all the businesses of the town depend on
him. Further, the smart Curwen used to land small amounts of money to his
workers, in exchange of their silence over any of their misgivings about his
movements at the farm.
Every now and then
he lends himself even to charity towards important local institutions (such as
schools, libraries, etc), inducing the community, more and more diffident, to
quieten its own conscience and to look at him only under the guise of notable
and benefactor of society.
He copes even to
marry a young local lady, with a grotesque arranged marriage whose ceremony
counts the presence of all the town notables.
Which and how many
horrors can society tolerate within itself to assure the surviving of its
superstructures?
That is what
Lovecraft seems to mean.
Agonizing screams
are heard, dozens of sailors disappear, dogs bark wildly: numerous are the
clues and glaring is the truth for anyone who wants to see it.
But we want to
continue and prefer shutting our eyes, because recognising the truth means
disintegration of the society of which we are part?
Horror doesn’t
belong only to the odd and murky Joseph Curwen or to his descendant Charles
Ward, manifestations of a shadow projected outside ourselves: it’s a horror
that affects anyone, where everyone, under a disguise of contempt, is somehow a
silent accomplice.
No need to go back
approximately sixty years (for us), to the unusual dust that, from the
chimneys, laid on anywhere in Auschwitz or Birkenau, upsetting inhabitants
already perplexed by the comings and goings of suspicious trains: also our
contemporary age is full of horrors, it’s enough thinking to the big
pharmaceutical multinational corporations – just to be closer to the narrative
– that in laboratories located in the outskirts of the Western world (South
America, Mexico, etc) exactly like Joseph Curwen in his farm far from the town,
make their worst atrocities, to the point of sacrificing human lives or
mutilating, torturing animal species for the sake of scientific research[19].
Except for few
associations and individuals who denounce them, the majority of human society
is inclined to incorporate those elements within itself, as parts of a vague
progress that cannot be renounced.
Finally I would
agree with Joshi in saying that Lovecraft’s success, compared with other
writers of that time who were labelled as “pulp”, lays in the fact that he was
an intellectual, a scholar with “ (…) tremendously potent and bizarre
imagination. It is this that initially fascinates
readers in their teenage years; only later do some readers go on to perceive
the intellectual substance behind the imaginative force of Lovecraft's work”[20].
As often happens
about writers of genius, his works lay themselves open to a double level of
reading, in which the great evocative power, that instantaneously catches our
most emotive side, takes its nourishment from a vast symbolic cultural
reservoir.
A worthy gloss to
this essay is a quotation from one of “the masters of doubts”, Carl Gustav
Jung: his Liber Novus (or Red Book) has recently been published,
after its author and his heirs reticence because of its contents, considered
potentially destabilizing for humanity, still not ready for similar truths or
even, as he himself wrote, it can appear as craziness to a superficial
reader. Right like the imaginative Necronomicon, I dare say ironically...
The quotation,
taken from Jung’s biography, well remarks the nihilist background of the writer
from Providence and detects the (non)sense of his escape in the imaginary: a
fantasy background that yet, paradoxically, was his own horizon of sense, his
own cosmos in which to situate himself:
“The need for
mythic statements is satisfied when we build up a view of the world that gives
satisfactory explanation about the meaning of man in the cosmos, a view that
rises by our psychic wholeness (...). The lack of meaning restrains the
fullness of life, therefore is equivalent to illness. The meaning turns
bearable many things, perhaps everything”[21].
[1]It’s Stephen King himself to regard these authors among
his masters.
[2] To avoid the
risk of prolixity I can’t indulge here on Lovecraft’s racist hints: for that I
refer to the considerations of S.T. Joshy, leading figure of lovecraftian
scholars, who says that racism on Lovecraft is undeniable and not completely
ascribable to the social context of the time; I limit myself to add here that
Lovecraft’s racism (however contradictory) has purely
psychological-biographical roots.
[3] T.S. Joshi speaks about “incantation” and “a
mesmerizing atmosphere of horror and awe”. See
Interview to S.T. Joshi By Wil Forbis, June 16th http://www.forbisthemighty.com/acidlogic/stjoshi.htm
[4]In reality this statement hides, quite ironically, a
semantic double meaning: “I am Providence”, sentence that Lovecraft quotes in a
letter addressed to James F. Morton in 1926. The quotation is a Satan’s phrase
taken from a Christian text, The Life of
St. Anthony by St. Athanasius: “Once a demon exceeding high appeared with
pomp, and dared to say, ‘I am the power of God and I am Providence, what dost
thou wish that I shall give thee?’"
[5]The Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is struggling
for years with Hollywood productions for a movie version of this novel. .
[6]
Graham Harman, On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl, in Collapse
Volume IV. Philosophica Research and Development, 2008, Urbanomic,
Falmouth, UK, electronic version 2009.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] H.P. Lovecraft, Notes
on Writing Weird Fiction, Kindle edition.
[10] Rudolph Otto (1869-1937) German theologian and
historian of religions. His ideas about the Holy, marked by concepts like the
numinous, the totally Other, fascinans et tremendum, etc, enormously influenced
the following philosophy/history/sociology/psychology of religion.
[11]By the time in which Lovecraft was writing there were
several expeditions in Antarctica, that left many parts still unexplored: right
these ones roused the author’s overwhelming
imagination.
[12] See Giuseppe Genna, Il Personaggio Vuoto - 3: Lovecraft, ovvero
l'Autore Vuoto e l'Opera Vuota http://www.giugenna.com/diario_riflessioni/il_personaggio_vuoto_3_lovecra.html
[13] H.P. Lovecraft, The
Call of Cthulhu, Kindle edition.
[14] H.P. Lovecraft, The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Kindle edition.
[15]
H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, Kindle edition.
[16]From a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, 1927.
[17]He even kept a diary, The Death Diary, in which reported the progression of his illness
for his doctors.
[18]
H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Kindle Edition.
[19] In January of this year the Argentine newspaper La Nacion reported news about the
sentence pronounced on the English corporation Glaxo SmithKline and two of its
doctors guilty of the death of 14 argentine babies, followed to pharmaceutical
experiments (anyway notice that, although the multiple murder, Glaxo was fined
400.000 pesos, nobody was sentenced to imprisonment; and still is unknown the
results of other laboratories in Panama and Colombia), The experiments should have
tested a new vaccine against the pneumococcal bacteria. Reality is more uncanny
than Lovecraft’s tales.
And http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/88922/gsk-lab-fined-$1m-over-tests-that-killed-14--babies.
[20]
Interview
to T.S. Joshi, op.cit.
[21] See A. Jaffè, Sogni, ricordi, riflessioni di C.G. Jung,
(1961-62) , Rizzoli, Milano, 1978, p. 399 (translation to english by Leni Remedios).
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