Lovecraft and atheism
- Thread starter k-punk
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luka
Well-known member
http://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2018/01/hyper-carbolating-furtive-gates-of.html?m=1
"It all started this time with two strange books, widely different and seemingly unrelated, both containing pivotal references to an even stranger third book.
The first two books are A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna. Each, somewhat surprisingly, give significant mention to H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction story, Through the Gates of the Silver Key. The three, taken as a set, illuminate one another. Each is a gate unlocked by the same key, gates beyond space and time and comprehension."
"It all started this time with two strange books, widely different and seemingly unrelated, both containing pivotal references to an even stranger third book.
The first two books are A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna. Each, somewhat surprisingly, give significant mention to H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction story, Through the Gates of the Silver Key. The three, taken as a set, illuminate one another. Each is a gate unlocked by the same key, gates beyond space and time and comprehension."
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yes thank you I do realise it's not quite as literal and direct a process as that. :slanted:
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
'The Colour out of Space' is by far and away his best, but the disparity between and his other stories might make the rest seem like a let-down if you read it next, I dunno.
'At the Mountains of Madness' and 'The Shadow out of Time' are really well developed sci-fi stories, and absolutely key in the development of the modern 'ancient aliens' mythology. 'The Haunter in the Dark' is a nice effective supernatural horror story without much in the way of links to his wider mythos, and 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward' is a quite effective short novel - catch a decent modern adaptation of it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06spb8w
Plus the 'Silver Key' stories mentioned in the podcast.
Luka's over-egging how bad HPL was as a writer. Sure, it's over-blown and he doesn't really do characters as such, but I think his poverty as a writer is overstated. Some of his passages are actually genuinely affecting.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
It's not really 'my' interpretation, it's the usual view of HPL among people who've widely read him and know a bit about him as a person. It's shared by S. T. Joshi, for example, who probably knows more about Lovecraft than anyone else. Houellebecq too, I think (Mark quotes him in the first post).
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
His book on Lovecraft is pretty insightful, I thought - but if you hate Lovecraft as a writer, have no interest in him as a person and only like the wacky hyperspace stuff inasmuch as it can be linked to D&G, LSD, Blake, Joyce and all the other stuff you like, I imagine it doesn't hold much appeal, so fair enough.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Is this not an HG Wells story? I'm sure I've read one by Wells that has a very similar plotline to this.
Speaking of Wells, 'The Time Machine' has a section set in the unimaginably distant future that gave me more of a sense of 'cosmic horror' than anything I've read by Lovecraft.
It is interesting, this obsession people have with Lovecraft. In part I think it's to do with the idea of these ancient gods lurking just beyond our view being so titillating. It's the substitution of a higher meaningfulness for a higher meaninglessness.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I remember watching True Detective and wanting it to end in the Cthuluesque. It would have thrilled me more. It's a version of the Romantic sublime, isn't it? The thrill of confronting something vast and implacable. The Gothic romantic.
Having read a biography of Eliot recently, I'm struck by how American Lovecraft's disgust towards life (particularly its sexual aspect) is - how it derives from a culture that was from the off Puritanical.
Eliot saw the artist as being an articulate lunatic - saved from uselessness by his articulacy. I think there's something clinical about the fascination of Lovecraft's stories - particularly something like 'The Shadow over Innsmouth', which gives you an insight into his disgust towards sex and 'lower' races.
Definitely go for his later stories, he became a better writer as he escaped Poe's shadow.
Having read a biography of Eliot recently, I'm struck by how American Lovecraft's disgust towards life (particularly its sexual aspect) is - how it derives from a culture that was from the off Puritanical.
Eliot saw the artist as being an articulate lunatic - saved from uselessness by his articulacy. I think there's something clinical about the fascination of Lovecraft's stories - particularly something like 'The Shadow over Innsmouth', which gives you an insight into his disgust towards sex and 'lower' races.
Definitely go for his later stories, he became a better writer as he escaped Poe's shadow.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
There's a few possibilities here, including
1. His 'content' is fascinating, despite the hair-raising style, making the stories last longer than any number of badly written schlock-shockers
2. His style and content are indivisible, and what's more the style is one of the things that makes his stories last longer than any number of badly written schlock-shockers
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Obviously (and sadly) Mark isn't here to tell me himself but I wonder how sympathetic he was to Lovecraft's atheism/nihilism, and - if he was - how he could square that with political activism. After all, if we're all nothing but electrons deluded by egotism, what matters it if Tories are destroying the state infrastructure?
luka
Well-known member
Although Mark did try to square these aspects of himself my feeling is that at root he was no more a harmonious unity than any of us and that essentially those aspects were at war within him, the balance of power continually tipping one way and the next.
What I wrote on this thread at 24 still seems true to me now, 100 years later
What I wrote on this thread at 24 still seems true to me now, 100 years later
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
That's an interesting take, in that Lovecraft despised Romanticism and, while he was obviously strongly influenced by earlier generations of 'gothic' writers, he was very much a Classicist. The two eras he felt he'd have been at home in were pagan Rome and the pre-independence Colonies, or better still England, in the 18th century.
Which series of TD are you talking about, btw? The first series was pretty Lovecraftian, with a lot taken from R. W. Chambers too, and I haven't watched the third series yet but I understand it's closer in feel to the first (less said about the second, the better, I think).