(cache)Is W. Scott Poole Right to Claim Lovecraft's Monsters Are "Without Antecedent"?

Is W. Scott Poole Right to Claim Lovecraft's Monsters Are "Without Antecedent"?

3/1/2017

Yesterday I started discussing W. Scott Poole’s views on H. P. Lovecraft from his recent book In the Mountains of Madness, and I mentioned that I took issue with his allegation that Lovecraft’s stories, his monsters, and his cosmic vision were unique and unprecedented. Today I’d like to talk about why I disagree so vehemently with Poole. To do so, we need to take a look at how he frames the issue:

Lovecraft created horror tales without precedent and monsters without antecedent. It’s become common in books on Lovecraft to describe the influence of Poe or to talk about his reading of writers in the tradition of “weird” fiction, all little known names like Dunsany, Crawford, and Machen. Although these writers contributed much to Lovecraft’s malignant vision, none of them constitute anything like a direct influence on the monsters he imagined. Chasing influences can become a never-ending game that would draw us away from this singular man’s nightmares. These Things came to him in his dreams just as now—after we’ve read him—they come to us in ours.

Not only did he not simply borrow directly from any of these past masters, he also seemed little moved by the long history of human monster obsessions.

Stop and consider this for a moment. Yesterday I talked about how Poole purposely and purposefully distorted Lovecraft’s borrowings from Poe to try to cast Lovecraft as self-created, and here we see that he is purposely undercutting the classics of the weird fiction genre in the name of raising Lovecraft above them. Arthur Machen is hardly a little-known name in literary circles, and his work formed a clear template for Lovecraft’s own. The borrowings are too numerous to name here, but “The Great God Pan” colors “The Dunwich Horror,” just as “The Novel of the Black Seal” provided the template for “The Call of Cthulhu” and some of the plot for “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Machen’s theme of ancient folklore referring to real horrors that return when we investigate history too deeply is one Lovecraft acquire wholesale for his own fiction. Walter de la Mare’s The Return provided the template for The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Lovecraft’s tales are therefore not “without precedent.”

Even the cosmic vision of millions of years of aliens and lost civilizations fighting over the Earth can be found, sometimes wholesale, in Theosophy. Lovecraft makes this quite plain in referencing (albeit from secondhand knowledge) Theosophy by name in “The Call of Cthulhu,” and in speaking of Theosophy’s prehistoric claims in “The Diary of Alonzo Typer”: “I learned of the Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilise our planet.” This line is taken indirectly, but nevertheless almost verbatim, from Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater.

But it is Poole’s question of Lovecraft’s monsters that interests me more. What does it mean to say that a monster has no antecedent? For Poole, he means that Lovecraft’s Old Ones are not part of the preexisting folklore tradition, and therefore do not continue the Gothic use of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and the other traditional beings. He is right that Poe, Machen, and other Gothic authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not make use of blob-like amorphous monsters of strange power. But Lovecraft wasn’t drawing only on Gothic literature. He also drew on mythology, pseudoscience, and science fiction.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Lovecraft’s monsters weren’t particularly unprecedented. What was different was the use he made of them. Consider, for example, the description H. G. Wells gave of the Martians in The War of the Worlds, a description that bears a striking resemblance to Lovecraftian creatures:

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

I mean, come on, like that wouldn’t pass for a description of Cthulhu-spawn. And we know that Lovecraft read the War of the Worlds, and he possibly also read its pseudo-sequel Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett Serviss, which had the Martians building the Great Sphinx. The red plants that take over Earth in Wells’s book echo the strange “Colour Out of Space,” and the Martians’ travel by cylinder echoes again the brain cylinders in “The Whisperer in Darkness.”

But this is hardly the only Lovecraftian creature found in literature prior to Lovecraft. Although there is no record of Lovecraft having read Jack London’s “The Red One,” that story of an indescribable alien sphere on a Pacific Island that is worshiped as a god anticipates “The Call of Cthulhu” by a decade. Similarly, while Lovecraft probably never read J.-H. Rosny’s “The Xipéhuz,” its story of utterly inhuman cones terrorizing prehistoric humans could not be more Lovecraftian in its cosmic vision. I need not mention that the pulp fiction of the 1920s contained monsters of various sizes and shapes, some of which approached some of the same themes that Lovecraft’s creatures touched upon. Lovecraft’s version was the most successful, but not the only one.

I want to pause here to note that Lovecraft himself offered another clue as to where some of his creatures came from. His first Mythos-style monster, Dagon, bears a very specific name. Dagon is today known as a Philistine god of fertility, but in Lovecraft’s time, due to a translation error in the Biblical text of 1 Samuel 5:2-7, Dagon was wrongly believed to be a fish-man. As a result, images of Oannes, the Babylonian fish-man, were accepted as images of Dagon. Lovecraft’s creature is a fish-man and draws on this tradition and the iconography associated with it.

Similarly, Lovecraft had seen many an old book with its engravings of various medieval and early modern monsters. Consider this Lovecraftian engraving from the 1665 edition of Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstris:

But in a more sedate manner, we might also consider the Classical images of the Gorgon and Typhon, who have tentacle-like snakes emerging from their head and nether-regions respectively. The ancient images of these creatures, familiar to Lovecraft, are rather clear precedent for some of the shapes he recombined into his rogue’s gallery of creatures.

Ancient Greek depiction of a Gorgon / theoi.com

Zeus (left) battles Typhon / theoi.com

So, while Lovecraft put an indelible stamp on the monster genre by bringing together history, pseudoscience, Theosophy, mythology, Gothic horror, and science fiction, his monsters are not unique, only superlative.

25 Comments

Aristarchus

3/1/2017 11:28:43 am

Then there's of course stories with similar feeling of dread and mystery such as Guy De Maupassant's "The Horla", mentioned by Lovecraft in his famous essay.

Mike

3/5/2017 10:02:01 pm

This is the first article I have read that mentions H.G.Wells as an influence on Lovecraft's work. The Island of Dr. Moreau has a lovecraftian feel to it.

Nice article.

Paul King

3/1/2017 11:50:55 am

I would think that William Hope Hodgson could be considered another predecessor.

Martin A

3/5/2017 11:43:09 am

But one with little influence on Lovecraft, since Lovecraft discovered Hodgson as late as 1934.

Bob Jase

3/1/2017 12:02:12 pm

Have you ever paged through a medieval bestiary? Even now well known animals like crocodiles and rhinos were depicted as monstrous creatures.

And seriously, http://www.hieronymus-bosch.org/ , no one made monsters like HB did.

Shane Sullivan

3/1/2017 01:27:01 pm

I thought of him when I saw the little monster collecting the other's feces.

3/1/2017 12:34:21 pm

Let's not forget Chambers' The King in Yellow. I don't just mean the direct references Hali and Hastur (which were Beirce's creations anyway) or to silken masks, but even the way Chambers describes the church's night watchman in The Yellow Sign. I haven't surveyed Lovecraft's stories to determine when it was that he started describing every monster as "bloated", but he sure does it a lot after he read KiY in 1927.

3/1/2017 02:00:38 pm

HPL started describing his monsters as bloated about when Sonya refused to buy him any more cans of spaghetti.

3/4/2017 01:29:04 am

*Rimshot*

DR HALSEY

3/1/2017 01:46:25 pm

One would think that Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature" would show he was exposed to plenty of weird and strange tales. He hardly wrote in a vacuum.

Jason Colavito link

3/1/2017 01:55:42 pm

Poole wants us to believe that Lovecraft developed his ideas subconsciously from Neo-Freudian anxieties percolating up through dreams, rather than through a formal process of researching and learning from other writers in the field. He seems to want to come right to the edge of suggesting that the Old Ones have some sort of psychic reality, at least in the subconscious realm.

Americanegro

3/1/2017 02:59:15 pm

And it's available for free online.

Parenthetically, Theosophy's "Dzyan" looks to be a corruption of the Sanskrit "dhyana" which to move us along we'll say means "meditation" and came into Chinese as "chan" and Japanese as "zen". Similarly, Theosophophy's "Devachan" is a corruption of the Tibetan "Dewajan" which is the name of Buddha Amitabha's Pure Land, Sukhāvatī (Skr.) Wikipedia gets this wrong, they think it's a Sanskrit Tibetan hybrid.

A Buddhist

3/1/2017 04:05:34 pm

Given the Theosophical love for mixing Indian and Tibetan motifs in its teachings, I am not surprised that people would think that Devachan is a Sanskrit/Tibetan hybrid. Linguistic hybrids between prestige languages exist, such as the term homosexual, with its mixture of Greek and Latin elements.

Note 1: Dewajan is also transcribed as Dewachen, or, if you want to get extremely technical and use the Wylie orthography for writing written Tibetan in Latin, bde ba can.

Note 2: I deliberately said Indian Sources rather than Sanskrit sources because Blavatsky also used some Pali sources during her spiritual development. Pali is an Indian language that is closely related to yet distinct from Sanskrit; see, as evidence, e.g., https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=26426

3/1/2017 06:24:44 pm

Calma te, Special, it's not a contest. ;) "Given the Theosophical love for mixing Indian and Tibetan motifs in its teachings, I am not surprised that people would think that Devachan is a Sanskrit/Tibetan hybrid." -- The important point is that it's completely made up.

By a writer (HPB) who can't read either language and just willfully misunderstands native informants. What's not a surprise is that almost almost at every turn Theosophy just makes up some crazy nonsense, some of it kind of sourced, most of it not. Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine are enormous wastes of time. I'm aware of Turrell Wylie's system but tried to come up with something pronounceable for བདེ་བ་ཅན་. Yes, Pali is a Prakrit.

3/1/2017 08:24:54 pm

Americanegro,

Why do you call me "Special"? Do you know a commentator by that name?

I am glad that you are no longer persisting in the extremely bizarre claim that Pali and Sanskrit are one language.

Blavatsky was a confidence trickster, yet an interesting one, since her concoctions reveal, indirectly, so much about Orientalism and a European-American movement that was willing to go beyond Christianity but not willing to go beyond racism.

And I would quibble with your claim that she made it up completely. Certainly, Devachan may be applied in a new, theosophical context that she made up, but as you admitted the term is Tibetan, and the use in Tibet refers to a paradise/source of wisdom ruled over by the Buddha Amitabha (Tib. Chenrezig, Jap. Amida).

3/1/2017 09:38:03 pm

"I am glad that you are no longer persisting in the extremely bizarre claim that Pali and Sanskrit are one language."

"Pali is nothing more than Sanskrit misspelled" is what I said and true In the same sense as the three Scandinavian languages; this broad generalization provides context.

"And I would quibble with your claim that she made it up completely. Certainly, Devachan may be applied in a new, theosophical context that she made up, but as you admitted the term is Tibetan, and the use in Tibet refers to a paradise/source of wisdom ruled over by the Buddha Amitabha (Tib. Chenrezig, Jap. Amida)."

"Quibble" might be a well-chosen word. It's totally made up and she appropriated the name.

I didn't "admit" anything, I SAID it. First.

Now we come to the Special part: "Buddha Amitabha (Tib. Chenrezig, Jap. Amida)."

Let's be clear, repeat after me: Amitabha ≠ Chenrezig. Jeez Louise!

3/2/2017 08:34:20 am

Americanegro,

So you are using special as a euphemism for mentally retarded. Does this mean that you think me to be mentally retarded?

I admit that I made an error, misremembering Chenrezig as the Tibetan name for Amitabha rather than Avalokiteśvara. Usually, I do not make such an error. What caused the error this time was that I was thinking of Amitabha Buddha, who is mentioned in Nagarjuna's Letter to a Friend in close proximity to Chenrezig. My mind, working without text, assumed erroneously that Chenrezig was a term in Tibetan for Avalokiteśvara. I am more familiar with Theravada than Mahayana Buddhism.

There is a big difference between being two different languages and being one language spelled in different ways. Why are you such an eel-wriggler about the linguistic status of Pali?

I used the term admitted to juxtapose two contradictory elements of your claim.

1. Blavatsky completely made up Devachan.

2. Blavatsky derived the term Devachan from Tibetan Buddhism.

The contradiction, as I see it, is that if she had completely made up Devachan, she would have given it a name that she made up. Rather, what I think would be a better way of phrasing it would be to say that she made up most of Devachan, except for the name, which she took from Tibetan.

3/2/2017 05:07:42 pm

No, I wouldn't call you retarded, but you obviously have something going on. Often when you set out to teach here you make an error, get caught on it, and then come up with an excuse. Maybe don't be so quick to teach. Coupled with your name it's not a good look.

3/2/2017 05:14:34 pm

Now that I think of this, error of the day: items 1 and 2 are not contradictory, because the thing is not its name; the thing's name is not the thing.

We're probably boring people so I'll stop here but of course you're free to have your final say.

3/2/2017 05:51:20 pm

Americanegro,

If you must know, these are the diagnoses that I have:

cerebral palsy (bilateral), which confines me to a wheelchair.

depression

phimosis, which I had to get corrected through surgery

Aspergers, with a fixation upon religion, history, etc.

Severe hearing loss from birth, which I must correct using hearing aids.

All of these factors have made it difficult for me to interact normally with people, and create many challenges for me as a person, as a Buddhist, and as an interlocator. Yet I hope that through my accumulation of merit, I may be reborn in a body and location in which it would be easier for me to better study Buddhism and advance swiftly towards nibbana.

You raise an interesting point about the distinction between the name and the object.

We were both talking about Blavatsky's Devachan.

However, we understood Devachan in different ways.

I understand Devachan to be the name (Devachan) and the concept (esoteric realm in Theosophy). From this perspective, Devachan cannot be purely Blavatsky's, since the name which she used for it came from Tibetan.

You, however, understand Devachan to be the concept (esoteric realm in Theosophy), separated from the name. From this perspective, Devachan can be purely Blavatsky's, since she came up with that concept, and the name us separate.

I wonder which one of us has a more "normal" way of thinking about objects.

G. Anderson

3/1/2017 02:55:31 pm

From Wikipedia:
His oeuvre is sometimes seen as consisting of three periods: an early Edgar Allan Poe influence; followed by a Lord Dunsany–inspired Dream Cycle; and finally the Cthulhu Mythos stories. However, many distinctive ideas and entities present in the third period were introduced in the earlier works, such as the 1917 story "Dagon", and the threefold classification is partly overlapping.[18]

3/1/2017 03:07:56 pm

H. P. Lovecraft was greatly impressed by Dunsany after seeing him on a speaking tour of the United States, and Lovecraft's "Dream Cycle" stories, his dark pseudo-history of how the universe came to be, and his god Azathoth all clearly show Dunsany's influence.

Lovecraft once wrote, "There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany' pieces—but alas—where are my Lovecraft pieces?"[17]

Also from Wikipedia - in his own words.

3/1/2017 04:00:17 pm

This Lovecraft's cat had forgotten about Lord Dunsany, so thanks!

Residents Fan

3/2/2017 05:21:11 pm

You may find this interesting: an essay by China Mieville on early weird fiction writers. I especially like his insightful comment about M.R. James' "Count Magnus", with the titular villain (an old-style
ghost) employing a proto-Lovecraftian tentacled monstrosity as
"his sidekick".

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/m-r-james-and-the-quantum-vampire-by-china-mieville/

Canon Jeff

3/6/2017 01:59:13 am

Jason, one minor comment-- Although some older books commenting on I Sam. 5:2-7 repeat the older view about Dagon being a fish-man-deity, in no major translation of the Bible I am aware of, old or new, is the fish-man theory supported; all the 15 versions I checked referred to the idol of Dagon having a head and hands with palms, all of which shattered from the body when the idol fell over; this remainder part is variously translated translated as “stump”- KJV, ASV, GNV, KJ21; “trunk”-ESV, RSV, NRSV, NASB, OJB, AMP; “body”- NIV; “torso”-CJB, HCSB, NKJV; “stock”- WYC. Only a couple of idiosyncratic, not-widely-accepted translations by individuals from the 1860's had the fish-error in them: Young's translation ("fishy part") and Darby's translation ("fish-stump"). Perhaps they were trying to read the fish theory into the vague Hebrew original, literally "flat part."

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Is W. Scott Poole Right to Claim Lovecraft's Monsters Are "Without Antecedent"?

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