jfa v18n3 lovecraft and the sublime by ralickas

EXAMPLES OF H. P. LOVECRAFT’S USE OF MOTIFS COMMON TO THE BURKEAN AND

Kantian notions of sublimity abound in his fiction: phenomena whose princi-pal characteristics are their formlessness, infinite expanse, or superhumanmight; a subject’s encounter with the negative or, put another way, symbolicpresentation of what would be described in the fiction of a humanist as itsnoumenal self; and the limits of language1 to represent adequately both theawe-inspiring spectacle and the subject’s experience of the violation of thelimits of being. Lovecraft’s pronouncements on “cosmic horror,” the effect heaimed to convey in his stories, seem to encourage a sublime reading of hiswork. Cosmic horror—that fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenom-ena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow fieldof human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance—compels the expansion ofthe experiencing subject’s imagination. Two recent studies, moreover, elabo-rate on the relevance of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes, respectively, inLovecraft’s myth cycle. In “Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime” (1991), DaleJ. Nelson defends the idea that cosmic horror is coeval with religious feeling inBurke. In “Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime” (2002), Bradley A.Will argues that the force of cosmic horror is based upon Lovecraft’s presenta-tion of the unknowable rather than merely the unknown in his fiction.

Beyond superficial, thematic comparisons, however, can we really speak ofsublimity in Lovecraft? Regarding the Burkean sublime in his fiction, does thesubject’s imagination partake in the ascending movement of the phenomenonin question, and is the phenomenon itself an index of a life-affirming notion ofthe absolute? With relation to the Kantian sublime, is the subject’s supremacyover nature affirmed by its ability to reason in Lovecraft? In other words, is thesublime turn, a commonplace and pivotal aspect of the aesthetic category ofsublimity, discernable in the Lovecraft Mythos? The pitfalls of both Nelson’s

“Cosmic Horror” and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft

Vivian Ralickas

Vol. 18, No. 3, Journal of the Fantastic in the ArtsCopyright © 2007, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

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and Will’s essays hinge on this last question. While the strength of Nelson’sanalysis lies in its convincing elaboration of the pertinence of certain aspectsof the Burkean sublime to Lovecraft’s cosmic viewpoint, he is reluctant toacknowledge Burke’s and Lovecraft’s valorizations of objective properties thatemphasize the heterogeneity of the experiencing subject.2 This in turn leadshim to provide an interpretation of the sublime in Lovecraft that fails toaccount satisfactorily for the experiencing subject, and uncritically conflatesthe religious awe attendant on Burkean sublimity with Lovecraft’s anti-humanist category of cosmic horror.

Although Will’s essay develops a more thorough examination of the aes-thetics of the sublime in question (Kantian) and its manifestation in Love-craft’s fiction, it nevertheless presents significant lacunae that any analysis ofthe Kantian sublime in Lovecraft must answer: What does the sublime meanto an atheist who denies not only the humanistic context of Kant’s Idealistposition, the a priori structure of cognition on which Kant bases his epistemol-ogy, and the idea of the noumenal, but, more importantly, the notion of freewill upon which our relation to the noumenal is contingent? If, as Will con-tends, “Lovecraft demands that we recognize our own limitations and our rel-atively insignificant place in the cosmos” (20), then this recognition inLovecraft is not counterbalanced by an awareness of our moral vocation,which, in Kant, places us above nature.

In Lovecraft, the subject suffers from a violation of its sense of self, but itis graced with no consolatory understanding of the human condition to mol-lify its fragmented psyche. With its identity and the foundations of its culturedestroyed, the subject who experiences cosmic horror always succumbs to oneof three comparably dreadful fates, judging from the standpoint of a balanced,rational mind: insanity, death, or the embracing of its miscegenated and nolonger human condition. Nelson’s and Will’s essays consequently demonstratethat Lovecraft’s fiction presents readers with the outward manifestations ofsublimity prior to the sublime turn, but falls short of providing the subjectivereconstitution concomitant to either the Burkean or Kantian notions of sub-limity.

For Lovecraft, not one of the motifs associated with sublimity gives way toa reformulation of the subject’s integrity, asserting both our humanity and re-affirming the culture that makes an experience of the sublime possible. If thehuman self remains fragmented, then it is because Lovecraft’s fiction, particu-larly the effect of cosmic horror he aimed to convey in his stories, underscoresthe shortcomings of the humanistic mode of subjectivity upon which the sub-lime is predicated. Contrary to Nelson and Will, therefore, I argue that Love-craft’s fiction performs a collapse of signification that amounts to an implicitsubversion of the sublime, the roots of which are to be found in his cosmic out-

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look. In denying humanism and revealing the ostensible unity of the humansubject to be a fallacy, I contend that what Lovecraft’s work affirms, albeit neg-atively, is a subjective crisis specific to the modern condition. It is a crisis,moreover, whose trajectory aligns itself with the abjection of self elaborated byJulia Kristeva in her psychoanalytic notion of subjectivity. In focusing exclu-sively on the impossibility of the sublime in Lovecraft’s fiction in the first partof my analysis and in pointing to the interpretative possibilities offered by anabject reading of his notion of cosmic horror in the second portion of thisessay, I hope to have provided a roadmap for future study of Lovecraftian aes-thetics.

Part 1: The Impossibility of a Sublime Reading of Lovecraft’s Fiction

The profound influence of two interconnected aspects of Lovecraft’s view onexistence can be discerned in his fiction: “cosmic indifferentism” and mecha-nistic materialism. Their combined impact on his fictional writings and poet-ics negates any possibility of the sublime in his Mythos. Lovecraft’s position asa self-proclaimed “cosmic indifferentist” unites a metaphysical, ethical, andaesthetic position defined, respectively, in terms of “an awareness of the vast-ness of the universe in both space and time”; “an awareness of the insignifi-cance of human beings within the realm of the universe”; and “a literaryexpression of this insignificance, to be effected by the minimizing of humancharacter and the display of the titanic gulfs of space and time” (Joshi, ADreamer 182). The mechanistic materialist foundation of Lovecraft’s cosmicindifferentism is evident in both his rejection of teleology and the idea of adivinity it implies as well as in his pronouncements on free will as a product ofour (idealist) delusions. Lovecraft considers “the idea of deity” as “a logicaland inevitable result of ignorance, since the savage can conceive of no actionsave by a volition and personality like his own” (Misc. Writings 165). In a strik-ingly anti-humanist stance, he views religion as a fiction that masks human-ity’s baser instincts. In “In Defence of Dagon,” he affirms that “all religiousdemonstrativeness and ceremony is basically orgiastic” (Misc. Writings 166), aproduct of our inadequate sublimation of primitive compulsions. He holdsinstead that “all volition is merely a neural molecular process—a blind mate-rial instinct or impulse,” and that “all organisms” possess “no conscious desire,no intelligent aspiration, no definite foreknowledge” (Misc. Writings 160, 161).The only aspect of Lovecraft’s deterministic viewpoint that endows humanitywith the illusion of freedom is chance. If life is “a process of stumbling in thedark—of recoiling from greater to lesser discomforts and dangers, and of grop-ing for an increased amount of pleasures faintly tasted” (Misc. Writings 160),then chance provides us with the only potential for any kind of deviation from

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a determined course. It assumes greater significance in his later tales, wherein“Lovecraft permitted mankind no defense, except luck, against the unknown”(Leiber 54). Nevertheless, although chance and determinism are two notionsnecessarily at odds with each other, the assertion of the former in Lovecraft’sfiction does not amount to freedom3 for the subject. In Lovecraft, “chance” isthe name those who cannot see all ends4 give to events that they neither pre-dicted nor foresaw. In denying the human subject freedom, an idea crucial tothe aesthetics of sublimity, Lovecraft’s worldview necessarily makes an experi-ence of the sublime impossible.

As a pragmatic critical theory, cosmic horror further denies the humanis-tic basis requisite to any theory of sublimity by marginalizing human protago-nists. Lovecraft’s chief aim in his fiction, his attempt to lend credibility to themood of cosmic horror he aspires to communicate, demands very little interms of character development. The purpose of cosmic horror is to commu-nicate an effect: “A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dreadof outer, unknown forces” (“Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Dagon 368).This mood originates in a fear of the unknown, which Lovecraft posits as thefoundation of all weird literature (“Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Dagon365). Cosmic horror therefore issues from the same source as the sublime,which in part explains their likely conflation in the minds of some readers: anexperiencing subject faced with phenomena that overwhelm its senses andcognitive faculties. Contrary to either Burkean or Kantian sublimity, however,which asserts the centrality of the human subject, the poetics particular to cos-mic horror relegates it to the sidelines by reversing the order of priority thatsublimity establishes between the subject and its objects, privileging the latterover the former. “The true ‘hero’ of a marvel tale,” expounds Lovecraft, “is notany human being, but simply a set of phenomena” (Misc. Writings 118). Love-craft is consequently interested in the development of individual identitiesonly insofar as they serve the poetics of “cosmic horror.”

On the one hand, his characters require neither individual personalitiesnor a complex psychology; “the possession of sensory apparatus in good work-ing condition will suffice them” (Houellebecq 65, my translation). On theother hand, his fiction develops human protagonists just enough for theirhumanity to act as a liability, contributing to the alienating impact of cosmichorror. In “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” “the very attributes that affirmWilmarth’s humanity are what render him vulnerable and alone in the domainof the fungi” (Dziemianowicz 181). As this story demonstrates, in Lovecraft’sfiction our human perspective—what the sublime affirms—not only is severelylimited in scope as a result of its anthropocentrism, but also poses a genuinethreat to our existence in an environment dominated by alien beings far supe-rior to us in might and intellect who are indifferent, if not outright hostile, tohumanity. The human subject’s estrangement is thus not simply spatial but



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also metaphysical: “One’s sense of isolation is not merely a function of geo-graphic space, but also of mental space; it can occur just as easily amongst acrowd and in the ‘light’ as in solitary out-of-the-way places if one is possessedof a knowledge that is sufficiently disorienting” (Dziemianowicz 186). Thisshift in focus evident in the poetics of cosmic horror from the human subjectto a set of phenomena whose properties could give rise to a sense of the sub-lime, albeit in a different context (one in which the subject’s humanity isaffirmed at the sublime turn), suggests an implicit subversion of sublimity inLovecraft’s fiction.

The sublime, both Burkean and Kantian, appeals to a common sensewhose basis in shared beliefs and practices makes our experience of sublimitypossible. In spite of the divergent philosophical premises of their respective for-mulations of aesthetics (Burke’s empiricism and Kant’s Idealism), Burke andKant acknowledge that our sensibility to sublimity is in large part extrinsic—the product of acculturation. Although Burke reasons that “the standard bothof reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures” since we all possess thesame sensory organs and are roused by stimuli in similar ways (14, 11), he nev-ertheless concedes that our taste can be improved upon by “extending ourknowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise” (25).Likewise, Kant acknowledges that taste has no fixed standard. As a judgment,it “is not determinable by means of concepts and precepts” (Kant 163,§32:5:283).5 It is of paramount importance, in other words, that we train ourminds in “the cultivation of the moral feeling” (230, §60:5:356): “Without thedevelopment of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call sublimewill appear merely repellent to the unrefined person” (148, §29:5:265).“Among all the faculties and talents,” therefore, Kant reasons that “taste isprecisely the one which […] is most in need of the examples of what in theprogress of culture has longest enjoyed approval if it is not quickly to fall backinto barbarism” (164, §32:5:284). In binding Western culture by naturalizingits moral values and social bonds, the cultivation of taste is necessarily ofsupreme importance to the sublime (or to any aesthetic judgment). If the poet-ics of cosmic horror presages the collapse of culture into brutishness so fearedby Kant, an analysis of its fictional expression in Lovecraft further demon-strates to what extent cosmic horror stands in stark contrast to the sublime: itdestroys all aspects indispensable to the integrity of Lovecraft’s white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and predominantly male characters’ sense of selfhood—their traditions, morality, race, psyches, and bodies.

The thematic thread that unites Lovecraft’s fiction, revealing not onlywhat he saw as the false foundations of Christian humanism but also the West-ern subject’s misplaced faith in its moral values, underscores the inherent,anti-humanist critique of sublimity cosmic horror performs. If a collective’sonly shared experience is one of perpetual horror and shock, then no appeal



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to a common sense requisite to the sublime is possible. In Lovecraft’s Mythos,the Earth is but a small, insignificant planet among countless other habitableworlds, scarred by wars waged by aliens long before the birth of humanity.Lovecraft’s fiction consequently denies our planet a place of importance in theuniverse and revokes the human privilege of having been the first species ofhigher intelligence to populate it. The direst critique of humanism in Love-craft’s mythology, however, is evident in the human characters’ perception ofthe omnipotent alien races as gods. In light of the aliens’ either complete dis-regard or seemingly malevolent intentions towards human beings, such a beliefis ironic on two levels. First, as illustrated in “At the Mountains of Madness,”the human race is the by-product of an accidental, biological alien experimentand is of little consequence to the Old Ones. Chance, and not divine grace,brought us into being. Just as Arthur Jermyn’s ancestor played god to Con-golese white apes in the “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and HisFamily,” these formidable aliens are perceived as deities by the characters inLovecraft’s fiction, which says little of our apparently sophisticated culture andhumanity. “As inheritors of a simian past,” remarks Bennett Lovett-Graff of“Arthur Jermyn,” “we are the subjects of a determined and determiningNature, members of the very animal world to which we human beings havedenied any vestige of free will” (Lovett-Graff 375). Second, where aliens inter-vene in human affairs, their intrusion is motivated by the kind of cold and cal-culating scientific self-interest we display in our interactions with earth’s“lesser” life-forms (non-mammalian species such as reptiles, insects, and sea-creatures whose forms resemble those of Lovecraft’s pantheon).6 In the best ofscenarios, notes Houellebecq, we eat earth’s creatures of lesser intelligence;often, however, we destroy them for the mere joy of killing (15–16, my trans-lation). Cosmic horror therefore not only dethrones the human subject whosepre-eminence sublimity affirms, but also questions the ethics of Western cul-ture, the basis of the common sense that makes sublimity possible.

If some of Lovecraft’s texts make reference to an ethical framework (forinstance, texts that thematize witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, and other blackarts), it is a product of the limited human characters’ misguided attempts tounderstand and contextualize the phenomena they confront. In these stories,Lovecraft presents a more direct critique of the moral values of Western cul-ture that underpin the common sense indispensable to the sublime. The nar-rator of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” describes (albeit through Ward’sfocalization) Joseph Curwen, Ward’s maternal uncle and alleged witch accord-ing to the ignorant townsfolk, as a man of science ahead of his time: “Not evenEinstein, [Ward] declared, could more profoundly revolutionize the currentconception of things” (Mountains 161). Similarly, as “The Rats in the Walls,”“The Festival,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” and “The Haunter of the Dark” makeevident, religious rituals in Lovecraft—usually affiliated with worship of the



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Old Ones—are depicted as the sadistic and barbaric practices of amoral,racially inferior beings whose humanity has been eroded almost beyond recog-nition. Their religion, a parody of traditional forms of worship that celebratelife and creation, is akin to an infection, seeking to destroy the cohesion of thebody politic from within. It conflates and inverts the Christian beliefs in theresurrection and the second coming of Christ: “[The Great Old Ones] all layin stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mightyCthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might onceagain be ready for them” (Dunwich 140). The day of reckoning of the GreatOld Ones, elucidates Castro in “The Call of Cthulhu,” “would be easy toknow, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free andwild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all menshouting and killing and revelling in joy” (Dunwich 141). Transcendence of thehuman condition and the ascension to a divine state entail what amounts toa psychological regression. In encouraging the unchecked gratification of thedeath-drive, the worship of the Old Ones culminates in the subject’s descentinto the abyss of the id: “Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them newways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth wouldflame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom” (Dunwich 141). Sublimity, thehighly acculturated aesthetic category that depends upon and champions thedivide between good and evil or reason and madness, perishes in the amoralsoil of Lovecraft’s Mythos.

If Lovecraft’s characters enjoy a false sense of security as a result of theirfaith in their ancestral heritage, whose foundations often prove to subvert thevery values they profess, then the dramatization of Lovecraft’s anxieties aboutrace miscegenation and the devolution of the species further undermine thesublime by illustrating the erosion of the Western subject’s identity at the verycore of being. In texts such as “The Rats in the Walls” and “Arthur Jermyn,”which ostensibly are marginal to Lovecraft’s myth cycle,7 the white, aristo-cratic protagonists’ respective confrontations with the horror of their misce-genation destroy both de la Poer and Arthur Jermyn. The sole survivingmember of the de la Poer line loses his sanity upon ascertaining that his pred-ecessors were vermin, both literally and metaphorically. Since the origin of hisfamily line, his ancestors have been affiliated with the most perverse cultsknown to humanity and ignoble rites beyond description, of which cannibal-ism is only a token. Contrary to de la Poer,8 who is overwhelmed by his ances-try and devolves into a rat, Arthur kills all his children and sets himself on fireupon discovering that he is part simian: the wife of his great-great-great-grandfather, one of the first explorers of the Congo region, was a white Con-golese ape to whose community Sir Wade Jermyn played god. Arthur’salienation is total, regardless of his intellectual learning and sensitive poetictemperament. This text suggests that personal efforts and merits are meaning-



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less in Lovecraft’s universe. Jermyn’s act of setting himself on fire may be con-strued as a symbolic attempt to purify himself and therefore atone for hisancestor’s transgression. It can be interpreted as an attempt to identify hisabject genealogy as sinful and thus to re-inscribe it in a moral framework,thereby weaving the story of his lineage into the fabric of his Western, Judeo-Christian cultural narrative. In the hands of another writer, perhaps Arthur’sstory would have been penned as a tragedy; in Lovecraft, his fate is far worse.Arthur is relegated to non-being by his peers: “Members of the Anthropolog-ical Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and some ofthem do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed” (Dagon 82). Both textsoffer analogous radical solutions to stem the threat of contamination to thebody politic that de la Poer and Arthur Jermyn represent: similarly to de laPoer, whose fantastic transformation into a rodent erases him from humansociety, Arthur is expunged from the collective memory of his culture.

A comprehensive reading of Lovecraft’s fiction encourages the reader todraw a parallel between the fate of ostensibly blueblood white, Anglo-Saxon,Protestant male characters such as de la Poer and Arthur Jermyn and the“evil” human beings of lowly class status and mixed blood. The defilement ofthe formers’ individual identities is only a step removed from the debasementof the social body perpetrated by the rituals of the “singular tribe or cult ofdegenerate Esquimaux” who practiced “a curious form of devil-worship” (Dun-wich 135) or of New Orleans’ “men of very low, mixed-blooded, and mentallyaberrant type”—“negroes and mulattoes, largely of West Indian or Brava Por-tuguese from the Cape Verde Islands”—who were members of the “blackestAfrican voodoo circles” (Dunwich 139). On a moral scale, neither the bestial-ity of Arthur Jermyn’s ancestor and his transgression of the species boundarynor de la Poer’s immoral, rodent relatives’ cult practices are any different fromthe kind of evil perpetrated by the lower castes who collectively worship aliensas gods. In Lovecraft’s Mythos “evil,” be it psychical, in terms of the drive todestruction, or genetic, in terms of ruinous hereditary traits, is within each ofus, and the disintegration of our humanity on an individual basis heralds thecollapse of social integrity. Within Lovecraft’s myth cycle, in other words, weare all, in some sense, inherently debased to the level of those races and cul-tures Lovecraft considers inferior.

It is significant to note, however, that this collective debasement does notamount to a perverse affirmation of equality among human beings of differentraces and cultures. The degeneration of the other—any entity that is not male,white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant—is always more apparent in Lovecraft,suggesting, often explicitly, that those who are not members of this gender andidealized racial group not only possess an inherent susceptibility to moral, psy-chical, and physical corruption, but are deemed as being less able to repress orcontrol instinctive, animalistic urges. For example, in “The Colour out of



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Space,” it is a woman, Mrs. Gardner, who first succumbs to the vampiricdesigns of the alien color, loses her mind, and assumes the gothic role of the“madwoman in the attic.” In “Arthur Jermyn,” the crossing of species bound-aries in the defilement of the Jermyn line points to a barely veiled and exceed-ingly offensive commentary on race miscegenation in which one’s Africanancestry is defined as a kind of atavistic “contamination” whose symptomsinclude brutishness, idiocy, and vice. Not surprisingly, moreover, such pollu-tion originates from Jermyn’s maternal line, once again aligning the femininewith the monstrous and the irrational. As an abject mother, the Congolesewhite ape is similar to Lavinia Whateley, “the somewhat deformed, unattrac-tive albino” (Dunwich 159) in “The Dunwich Horror”: both give birth toabominable creatures. Taken together, the motif of the already corrupted andhence barely human other and the debasement of the Western subject’s senseof self make evident that it is our collective iniquity and not our moral voca-tion which serves as the basis for any shared experience in Lovecraft. In otherwords, Lovecraft’s Mythos offers an implicit parody of the notion of commonsense necessary to the sublime.

Undoubtedly, in a fictional context that undermines both the humansubject and the culture necessary to sublimity, the dramatization of charac-ters’ encounters with objects whose attributes ought to inspire the sublimeunderscores instead their experience of cosmic horror and the concomitanterosion of their subjective integrity. In particular, Lovecraft sabotages the tra-ditional function of landscape in an experience of sublimity, popularized ineighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic fiction. To cite two canoni-cal texts as contrasts with Lovecraft’s subversion of the sublime in nature,both Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein (1818) offer exemplary instances of the kinds of conciliatoryexperiences of the human condition the Romantics sought in their practiceof what can be deemed “sublime tourism.” Tellingly, Udolpho opens with alandscape description that, in alluding to nature’s might and formlessness,cites aspects prevalent to sublimity in nature: the “tremendous precipices” ofthe “majestic Pyrenées,” “whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibitingawful forms, [were] seen, and lost again as the partial vapours rolled along”(Radcliffe 5). Most significant, however, is the taste for natural sublimity cul-tivated by the story’s protagonist, Emily St. Aubert. Emily’s father educatesher to possess the kind of self-restraint requisite to an aesthetic judgment: heinstructs her “to acquire that steady dignity of mind, that can alone counter-balance the passions,” and “cultivate[s] her understanding with the mostscrupulous care” (Radcliffe 9). Moreover, in a novel that champions theintegrity of the human subject,9 the acute development of Emily’s taste isbrought about by her initiation into the canonical works and ideas valued byWestern culture during her epoch.10 Such an upbringing cannot fail to inspire



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in Emily a proclivity for certain types of natural phenomena, whose contem-plation elevates her mind:

It was one of Emily’s earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes of nature;nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she most delighted; she lovedmore the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more themountain’s stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitudeimpressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GODOF HEAVEN AND EARTH. (Radcliffe 9-10, capitalization in original)

Echoing Burke’s notion of sublimity, particularly the categories of infinity andobscurity,11 this excerpt reveals how nature acts as a vehicle through whichEmily contemplates the Divine. Such an affirmative experience of phenomenawhose objective properties could, under different circumstances, induce a feel-ing of horror as a result of the sense of self-loss the subject experiences, canonly be possible to a heroine whose trials confirm her faith in humanity. Inother words, she is one for whom the sublime turn is possible. In spite ofEmily’s suffering at the hands of her captor Signor Montoni, neither her moralnor physical purity is ever compromised. By means of Emily’s characterizationand the life-affirming narrative in which she figures, Radcliffe casts Emily asboth the inheritor and perpetuator of the Western, patriarchal system of val-ues essential to the sublime.

In a manner analogous to Udolpho, the contemplation of landscape inMary Shelley’s Frankenstein fills the subject “with a sublime ecstasy that gavewings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light andjoy” (Shelley 75). That is to say, it raises the human being’s spirits and weavesits humanity into the fabric of Divine creation. Following the murder of Vic-tor’s youngest brother, William, at the hands of the monster the former cre-ated, Victor’s experience of sublimity in nature affords him with a measure ofsolace and a temporary respite from the thoughts that burden his conscience.After a family excursion to the valley of Chamounix, Victor relates the fol-lowing regarding the scenery’s positive emotional impact upon his tormentedpsyche:

We visited the source of the Arveiron, and rode about the valley untilevening. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest con-solation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littlenessof feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tran-quilized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughtsover which it had brooded for the last month. I returned in the evening,fatigued, but less unhappy, and conversed with my family with more cheerful-ness than had been my custom for some time. (Shelley 74)



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In spite of Victor’s fragmented sense of self and increasing estrangement fromhis family, he is nonetheless capable of being roused by certain natural specta-cles that alert him to the intrinsic nobility of the human mind. If Victor diesan alienated and broken man or, put another way, if, in recounting how Vic-tor’s Promethean pursuit claims his sanity, life, and the bonds that tie him tosociety—in short, in describing how he loses his subjective integrity—Frankenstein seemingly presents a bleaker view of the human condition thanUdolpho, then it does so only marginally. As the rousing speech Victor deliv-ers to Robert Walton’s sailors to “be men, or be more than men” (Shelley 183)shortly before his death confirms, his faith in the human quest for transcen-dence remains unshaken in spite of his wretched condition at the end of thenarrative. Furthermore, Victor believes his “purpose” in destroying the mon-ster to have been “assigned to [him] by heaven” (Shelley 183). Both hisdescription of Robert’s Arctic expedition as a heroic journey of epic grandeurand his belief in a pre-ordained, divine plan are products of his immersion inand upholding of a cultural context that fosters sublimity, similar to that elab-orated in Udolpho. Finally, although Victor may vanish from the world thatproduced him, he lives up to his name: his efforts to annihilate the monsterensure that the society from which he originated continues to exist and thusto perpetuate its values. While Frankenstein dramatizes the destruction of theexperiencing subject of the sublime, in other words, contrary to Lovecraft’sfiction it nevertheless defends the culture that makes sublimity possible.

“At the Mountains of Madness” offers the most thematically contiguousexample in the Lovecraft Mythos to the edifying mountainous landscapes thesubject encounters in Radcliffe and Shelley. The story dramatizes a New Eng-land scientific team’s exploration of the continent of Antarctica, one of theearly twentieth century’s last remaining terrestrial frontiers, whose peaks ofboundless height and subterranean, aquatic abysses of limitless depth seem tooffer propitious vehicles for the human subject’s experience of the sublime innature. Approaching Antarctica by sea, the narrator, Professor Dyer, geologistand faculty member of Lovecraft’s fictional Miskatonic University, recountsthe “thrill of excitement” he and the expedition members felt “at beholdingthe vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and coveredthe whole vista ahead” (Mountains 7, emphasis added). According to theOxford English Dictionary, even when used literally the adjective “lofty”exceeds the bounds of a simple, objective description to include both the ele-vating emotional impact that the object in question compels from the vieweras well as a reference to the rhetorical category of sublimity (OED). It wouldseem, therefore, that the narrator and crew’s observation of the imposingmountain range incites in them a feeling of ennoblement analogous to the sub-lime after the turn. Comprising what the reader can presume are white, edu-cated men (on the one hand, in his fiction Lovecraft usually makes a point of



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noting the race of characters who are not white, Anglo-Saxon, and of Protes-tant faith; on the other hand, the narrator describes the party as being madeup of New England scientists, graduate students, and skilled mechanics), thegroup’s cohesive response to the natural spectacle before them is plausible inlight of their probable shared Western, humanistic values: they have beenacculturated to experience the sublime in nature.

Nonetheless, contrary to Frankenstein and Udolpho, only when in a state ofignorance can the subject in Lovecraft feel dignified by its viewing of any nat-ural phenomenon, and such an emotion cannot be sustained for long. As sug-gested by the use of the modifier “madness” in the story’s title to qualify“mountains,” the text dramatizes the defilement of human protagonists’ sub-jective integrity, particularly in terms of their loss of faith in reason and scien-tific progress. A key transition point in the text further corroborates thehumbling turn of cosmic horror in “Mountains”:

Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollec-tion because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age offifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possessesthrough its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature’s laws.Thenceforward the ten of us—but the student Danforth and myself above allothers—were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors whichnothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from shar-ing with mankind if we could. (Mountains 28)

This passage points to the erosion of an intelligible cultural narrative that sit-uates the human being at its center as constituting the fundamental breakwith sublimity of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror in “Mountains.” With the over-throw of “that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses” and their“accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature’s laws” proven false,a sublime turn becomes impossible for the surviving explorers. In Burkeanterms, no Supreme Being (whose existence collapses once the culture thatmakes such a belief possible ceases to function) guarantees the subject’sintegrity during the imagination’s dynamic ascent. Likewise, from a Kantianperspective, with the foundations of reason destroyed, no supra-sensible fac-ulty of the mind checks and supersedes the imagination’s boundless extensionas it contemplates a “hideously amplified world of lurking horrors.” Contraryto sublimity, in “Mountains” nothing directs the subject back into itself; theobservation of natural phenomena acts instead as a vehicle for the subject’spsychical unhinging.

The impossibility of an experience of the sublime in Lovecraft, intrinsicallytied to characters’ coming into awareness of Western culture’s failure to repre-sent the world as it really is, becomes apparent in Lovecraft’s juxtaposition of



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protagonists’ initial, aesthetic responses to natural spectacles in “Mountains”with descriptions of their uncultivated, instinctive sense of repulsion towardsthe same objects. For instance, Lovecraft follows the narrator’s elevatingreflection on the Antarctic mountains with an elaboration of the menacingimpressions the last part of his approach to the world’s southernmost conti-nent makes upon his imagination:

Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terribleantarctic [sic] wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of awild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a widerange, and which for some subconscious, mnemonic reason seemed to me dis-quieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me ofthe strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich,12 and of thestill stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau ofLeng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab AbdulAlhazred. (Mountains 7, emphasis original)

At this juncture “Mountains” takes a decidedly Lovecraftian turn, foreshadow-ing the narrator and Danforth’s ominous discoveries of the abject, accidentalorigin of human life as well as of the Shoggoths and their visceral decimationof the superior, humanized Elder Ones.

On the one hand, the reference to the fictional Necronomicon, a “dreaded”and “monstrous” book the narrator was sorry to have “ever looked into”(Mountains 7) is significant. Invariably described as having been written by a“mad Arab” and featured in a number of Lovecraft stories to presage the sub-ject’s impending experience of cosmic horror, the Necronomicon13 underscoresa fear in Lovecraft of all things eastern as symptomatic of the irrational,morally corrupting, and emasculating influence of the feminine upon the“rational” and “civilized” white, Western male subject. Of import here, more-over, is how “Mountains” both attributes what would be deemed by a rationalmind as undue importance to the Necronomicon and implicitly privileges itscosmic indifferentist narrative of existence over any affirmative understandingof creation. The mental association Dyer draws between the “desolate sum-mits” he espies and the “evilly fabled plateau of Leng,” purportedly located inAsia and alluded to in the notorious Necronomicon, is later corroborated by hisexploration of the extra-stellar Old One’s ancient city: “The conviction grewupon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateauof Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to dis-cuss” (Mountains 70). In suggesting that the Necronomicon—a cryptic bookwritten by a madman, whose revelations necessarily undermine the founda-tions of Western culture—is a reliable source of knowledge about the world,the existence of the mythic plateau of Leng challenges the value system that



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makes sublimity possible. From a meta-textual standpoint, the specific connec-tion the Antarctic scene invokes in the professor’s mind with a landscape inthe Necronomicon undercuts the sublime by framing the crew’s epic mission topenetrate and conquer unknown, virgin territories into a narrative of horror,where the only possible outcome of their ill-fated quest is the debasement oftheir human subjectivity.

On the other hand, the sound of the Antarctic wind, whose horror is pred-icated on the fact that it is the Shoggoths, in imitation of the Old Ones, whoproduce it, rouses an “unconscious, mnemonic”14 (Mountains 7) sense of alarmin Dyer or, elsewhere, stirs up “a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion” in thehuman listener (Mountains 43) that further confirms the anti-sublime turn ofcosmic horror in “Mountains.” Intrinsically connected to “the racial memoryof man—or of his predecessors” (Mountains 29), this kind of unconscious,inherited memory trace is allied to the instinctive side of human nature and ishence antithetical to reason. The narrative’s validation of this type of atavis-tic memory as a form of knowledge based upon the true outlines of the worldand of the human condition is ultimately humiliating to the human subject ontwo fronts. First, in superseding rational, scientific methodology—one of theexemplary products of Western culture—as a means of gaining knowledge ofthe world, the instinctive memory trace champions humanity’s animalistic,primitive side and casts “Mountains” as a reactionary tale against scientificpositivism. Second, it reveals the false foundation of humanism in its hintingof our unconscious awareness of the cosmic indifferentist truth about thehuman condition, a reality of which the professor becomes (consciously) cog-nizant when he reads the bas-reliefs of the Cyclopean city: we are not the firstintelligent species to have populated the Earth; we were made by accident bysuperior, alien entities; and, in a manner similar to our interaction with specieswe deem to be inferior to ours, these beings used us for “food and sometimesas […] amusing buffoon[s]” (Mountains 65). Rather than validating Dyer’s ini-tial sublime experience of the Antarctic mountains, natural phenomena—thelandscape’s fantastic outlines and the sound of the wind—thus function asindexes of “cosmic horror,” presaging the corrosion of the human subject’ssense of self at the crux of Lovecraft’s work.15

Before turning to an explication of “The Rats in the Walls” and “Dagon,”two exemplary texts that further elucidate the implicit subversion of sublimitythat cosmic horror performs, one last aspect of “Mountains” merits analysis forits trenchant critique of the human condition: the saga of the Old Ones. InLovecraft, the all-pervasive, ignominious force of cosmic horror spares noentity; the defilement of the human subject finds its parallel in the history ofthe magnanimous Old Ones, whose atavistic physical decline, growing culturaldecadence, and obliteration at the hands their slaves, the Shoggoths, expungethe heroic grandeur observable in their civilization’s early stages. The narrative



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of the Old Ones’ race, particularly the debasing fate that befalls them, there-fore acts as a transforming mirror that reflects the human condition in a cos-mic indifferentist universe. First and foremost, it compels the professor toacknowledge that no culture, however sophisticated and idealistic in its socialpractices, can withstand permanently the chaos existing within and without.Second but equally important, the Old Ones’ annihilation by the Shoggothspresents a mise en abîme of a dominant leitmotif in Lovecraft’s fiction: humanprotagonists’ abhorrence and dread of inassimilable alterity.

Initially, the Old Ones represent a radical otherness from a human stand-point: they smell foul, possess a hybrid, part vegetable, part animal morphol-ogy, and are monstrous in appearance. Moreover, they constitute a source of“soul-clutching horror” (Mountains 31) to Dyer for their seemingly savage dev-astation of Lake’s camp. Nevertheless, in spite of the ostensibly insurmount-able obstacles such facts present to the narrator’s human capacity to feelempathy towards them, his exposure to their culture neutralizes his apprehen-sions. In a narrative turn indicative of Lovecraft’s later tales that appears toecho his adoption of a more progressive outlook on the world,16 the geologyprofessor develops a feeling of kinship towards the Old Ones as a result of hisdeciphering of the bas-reliefs that adorn the walls of their city. His recognitionof the Old Ones’ “historical-mindedness” and aesthetic appreciation of theirart, whose technique “was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved tothe highest degree of civilized mastery” (Mountains 56, 57), culminate in hiscomplete identification with them. Unlike texts such as “The Shadow overInnsmouth,” in which the human subject’s affiliation with the other results inthe loss of its humanity, in “Mountains” a reverse dynamic occurs in which thealien entity is humanized, compelling Dyer to excuse its brutal murders of hiscolleagues and to elevate its race above the “white simians” of Earth:

They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature hadplayed a hellish jest on them—as it will on any others that human madness,callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleep-ing polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming. They had not evenbeen savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in thecold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically bark-ing quadrupeds, and with a dazed defence against them and the equally fran-tic white simians with queer wrappings and paraphernalia…poor Lake, poorGedney…and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they donethat we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and per-sistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen andforbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables,monstrosities, star-spawn—what ever they had been, they were men! (Moun-tains 95–6)



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The professor’s emotional connection with the Old Ones is further reinforcedby his discovery of their biological and psychical vulnerabilities. Their geneticmakeup, however diverse from and superior to our own, is predisposed to “ret-rogression from forms still more complex” (Mountains 25). Furthermore, theytoo are susceptible to experiencing fear: “The denizens of that city had them-selves known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a sombre and recur-rent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn [sic] in the act ofrecoiling affrightedly from some object—never allowed to appear in thedesign” (Mountains 73). In a manner similar to human beings, therefore, theOld Ones are finite and fallible.

No longer a source of trauma for the human subject, the alien is absorbedinto the humanistic signifying system that fosters sublimity. In particular, theprofessor situates their civilization within a utopian, Platonic framework. Fromwhat he discerns of their purely asexual reproduction; unparalleled educa-tional system, which “produces a tenaciously enduring set of customs andinstitutions” (Mountains 64); the historical, and therefore rational, purpose ofartistic creation; and the organizing of households based on “congenial men-tal association” (Mountains 64); the Old Ones’ mode of existence represent akind of ideal, socialist society governed exclusively by reason. The white,Western male subject’s overcoming of its aversion of the Old Ones’ physicalform and feeling of affinity towards their societal structure implicitly suggestthat, in Lovecraft, acceptance of other races is possible only when their prin-ciples and behavior echo Western ideals. Nevertheless, not even under such afortuitous circumstance—the discovery of an alien civilization whose culturalcontext is comparable to that shared by the explorers—can an experience ofthe sublime occur in the Lovecraft Mythos. The feeling of sympathy Dyerexpresses towards the Old Ones only serves to augment the shock of cosmichorror by making the human subject complicit in their fate, and nowhere isthis more evident than in the professor’s failure to feel edified when lookingupon the ruins of the Old Ones’ metropolis.

In terms that parallel Dyer’s inability to sustain a sense of the sublime inhis observation of nature in “Mountains,” the contemplation of ruins, a motifprevalent in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature that drama-tizes the sublime, fails to rouse the concomitant sense of awe in the viewer. Asvehicles of sublimity, vestigial traces of civilization affirm the humanity of theexperiencing subject in a manner analogous to the mathematically anddynamically sublimes in Kant. On the one hand, we feel pain in our imagina-tion’s extension and subsequent contraction, brought on by its incapacity topresent positively either the ceaseless, infinite passing of time or a situation inwhich we could defend the finite products of our culture against the blind, all-pervasive onslaught of nature. In both cases, we are made aware of the limita-tions of our sensible faculties and of our mortal condition. However, at the



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sublime turn our ability to reason alerts us to the power of our moral vocation,which surpasses every standard of sense. In spite of the transient status ofhuman life, we are called upon by our moral faculty to champion the productsof our culture and to carry on our creative endeavors since both the objectsthemselves and the drive at the heart of cultural production are representativeof human freedom.

In appealing to Burke’s categories of vastness and magnitude in buildingor to the mathematical sublime in Kant, the Old Ones’ city—its “incalculableextent,” inestimable age, and the “Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism” ofits architectural design (Mountains 45, 56)—is seemingly designed to rouse asense of sublimity in the viewer. The professor’s admission that his “imagina-tion sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantasticassociation” (Mountains 47) as he flew over the metropolis appears to sustainsuch a reading. More importantly, in light of the compassion Dyer feelstowards the Old Ones and his humanizing of both their alien form and culture,his contemplation of the city’s ruins ought to inspire a sobering reflection uponthe human condition and a subsequent affirmation of creative freedom.Instead, his observation of the city produces a sense of dread in him: hedescribes the “giganticism” of the metropolis’ architecture as “curiously oppres-sive” (Mountains 56), continuously refers to its existence as “blasphemous,”and confesses that the “ridgy, barrel-shaped designs” of its headlands “stirredup oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances” (Mountains 48) inhim analogous to those roused by the “half-sentient musical piping” sound ofthe wind. Both the subject’s inability to feel an ennobling awe in the face theruins of the alien city and the sense of revulsion they inspire instead in theviewer therefore indicate that the traces of the Old Ones’ highly sophisticatedcivilization function as indexes of cosmic horror.

The professor’s coming into awareness of the fate that befalls the human-ized Old Ones at the hands of their monstrous slaves not only offers one of themost perverse critiques of humanism in Lovecraft, but it also substantiates theimpossibility of an affirmative sublime turn in “Mountains” by uncovering thesource of the horror felt by human protagonists in their contemplation of thealien city. In spite of their dignity of spirit and unequalled cultural achieve-ments, the god-like Old Ones, “makers and enslavers of life on earth” (Moun-tains 59), are impotent against the Shoggoths, and it is this discovery thatunhinges the minds of Dyer and Danforth. As the antithesis of the virile, eru-dite, socially-refined, rational, and humanized Old Ones—avatars of Love-craft’s prized white, Western male subject in an alien universe—the soft,plastic, amorphous, anarchistic, innately perverse, and infinitely adaptableShoggoths encapsulate a form of radical, inassimilable alterity that poses athreat to any ordered civilization. Created as “ideal slaves to perform theheavy work of the community” and controlled by “hypnotic influence,” the



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Shoggoths have neither a culture of their own nor an intrinsic bodily form,since, as “entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutina-tion of bubbles,” “their tissues” can be molded “into all sorts of temporaryorgans” (Mountains 67, 62). Thus, when, by means of their acquisition of a“stubborn volition” that “echoed the will of the Old Ones without alwaysobeying it” (Mountains 67), the Shoggoths eventually overpower and decimatetheir masters, their actions are not motivated by an affirmative desire todefend their traditions or to create a new society predicated on emancipationfrom bondage. Instead—and this is the true horror of “Mountains”—they aredriven to deface the civilization of the Old Ones and their nobility as a speciesby performing an ironic mimicry of their morphology and culture. For exam-ple, “they seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking their voices—a sort of musical piping over a wide range” (Mountains 75). Likewise, the“coarse, bold,” and adulterated art Dyer and Danforth find in an area whose“glistening floors” (Mountains 92, 91) point to the Shoggoths’ recent passagereveal their mode of being to be predicated on a subversive emulation of theOld Ones’ culture: significantly, their art is marked by a “subtly but profoundlyalien element […] added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique” oftheir superior creators, and “seemed more like a parody than a perpetuation”of their masters’ pictorial tradition (Mountains 91, 92).17

Without a doubt, moreover, the reader is given to understand that the“vital freaks” that come into being at the twilight of the Old One’s civilizationare indeed Shoggoths passing for Elder Ones (Mountains 77). As simulacra oftheir masters, the Shoggoths’ only purpose is to undermine the integrity of theoriginal upon which they are modeled. They simultaneously represent chaos,the death-drive, the unchecked rule of the id, or the oppressive feminine.18 Iftheir creative potential fills the professor with “horror and loathing” (Moun-tains 67) when he observes mere representations of them in the bas-reliefs ofthe alien city, then his coming face to face with a member of their speciesinduces a trauma from which he never recovers: “But there are some experi-ences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit healing, and leave onlysuch added sensitiveness that memory inspires all the original horror” (Moun-tains 93).

The fate of the Old Ones thus presents an allegory of the human condi-tion in a cosmic indifferentist universe: beings greater than men succumb to afall that is anything but epic. As the “total decapitation” of the surviving mem-bers of their race suggests, the rationality that the Old Ones represent isimmersed in chaos as their heads are violently incorporated by means of “somehellish tearing or suction” into the gelatinous matter that constitutes theShoggoths (Mountains 94). The unmistakably visceral emphasis of a death by“suction” heralds the violent return of the body and its concrete, revoltingmateriality in a culture that privileges rational sublimation. Thus, in offering



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indexical traces of the Old Ones’ brutal absorption by a phenomenon (theShoggoth) whose ontology is founded on the usurpation of their power anddebasement of their identity—a phenomenon whose existence necessarilydestroys the common sense that forms the basis for sublimity—the ruins of theOld Ones’ city fail to inspire a sense of the sublime in the human subject bydenying the affirmative turn of sublimity that grounds the subject back intoitself. What’s worse, in introducing the parasitic Shoggoth, a devastating, inas-similable, horror-inducing entity whose ontology is predicated on the perverseassimilation of another identity, “Mountains” expands the scope of the threatit poses to encompass all human life, foreshadowing the obliteration ofhumanity.

In “Mountains,” Lovecraft’s references to objective properties in natureand architecture that ought to give rise to a feeling of sublimity underscoreinstead his fiction’s departure from the conventions requisite to the dramati-zation of such an experience that are commonplace in canonical gothic fictionsuch as Frankenstein and Udolpho. Two other texts merit elucidation for theirdecisive negation of sublimity along parallel lines: “The Rats in the Walls” and“Dagon.” In “The Rats in the Walls,” the formal properties of the “subter-ranean world of limitless mystery” (Dunwich 41–2) that the investigative partydiscovers beneath the de la Poers’ family estate in Exham Priory ostensiblyappeal to the Burkean category of infinity and to Kant’s mathematically sub-lime. Its “boundless depth,” “infinity of pits,” and immeasurable age—the party“tr[ies] to keep for the nonce from thinking of the events which must havetaken place three hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand years ago” (Dun-wich 41–2, 43)—inspire the expansion of de la Poer’s imagination to such anextent that the “twilight grotto” permits comparison only with the epic, myth-ical landscape of hell. He refers to it as both the “antechamber of hell” and a“grisly Tartarus,” and makes reference to the “sightless Stygian worlds” it con-tains (Dunwich 42, 44, 43).

Nonetheless, Lovecraft implicitly undercuts the sublime in “Rats” by par-odying the affirmative scope of the turn integral to both Burkean and Kantiansublimity, the notion of common sense that makes the sublime possible, and byproviding the experiencing subject with no objective distance from which toenjoy the spectacle in question. The full disclosure of the mystery surroundingExham Priory and de la Poer’s ancestry at the text’s dramatic conclusion nei-ther induces the subject’s awareness of its moral vocation (what Kant identi-fies as the sublimity of the human mind), nor does it enable the subject’ssharing in the dynamics of ascent of the Burkean sublime, permitting the sub-ject to cognize and to participate in the power of the Creator (Burke 59, sec-tion 5, “On Power”). The ancestral residence of the de la Poers was the site ofnameless horrors involving primordial, unholy rites; barbaric acts of tortureagainst animals and human beings; cannibalism; and, perhaps most revolting



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of all, human devolution into giant, rapacious rats. To make matters worse, thesite’s pernicious influence over its residents still lingers, denying its explorersthe objective distance necessary to an experience of sublimity. While inspect-ing the grottos’ vaults, the narrator yields to an unprecedented fit of madnessand half devours the face of his friend Norrys as his speech regresses into inco-herent grunts. Upon witnessing this abhorrent spectacle, moreover, Thornton,a member of the search team, immediately loses consciousness and subse-quently goes mad. The failure of both characters to recover fully from theirmental collapse is a testament to the power of cosmic horror. Even after hisinternment in Hanwell asylum19 in a cell next to Thornton’s, de la Poer fails toacknowledge his guilt and confesses to auditory hallucinations: “They mustknow that it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering willnever let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behinds the padding in this roomand beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats theycan never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls” (Dunwich 45).

Instead of uncovering a secret that validates their humanity and ensuresthe continuity of their shared cultural heritage, de la Poer and his team con-front the intrinsic bestiality of human nature and succumb to the devastatingforce of cosmic horror. Ironically, “Rats” dramatizes the conceited, fallaciousbasis of Western culture by staging, on the one hand, the most radical exam-ple of atavism in the story’s purportedly most civilized character: de la Poer,who boasts of a noble family line dating back earlier than the twelfth centuryCE. On the other hand, in responding to their pragmatic, visceral aversion toExham Priory by shunning the locale and chasing after its rats, respectively,the simple country folk and de la Poer’s cat possess more wisdom that the edu-cated search team (who at first express an objective, scientific appreciation ofthe building’s antiquity and archaeological history) and “the antiquarians whosurrounded and aided” (Dunwich 31) de la Poer in the restoration of his ances-tral home. The dynamic tension produced in “Rats” by Lovecraft’s explicitcitation of motifs common to Burkean and Kantian sublimity in describing thephenomena in question, juxtaposed with his denial of essential aspects of thesublime—objective distance, the sublime turn, and the notion of commonsense—once again define cosmic horror in terms of an ironic inversion of sub-limity.

In comparison to other stories in the Lovecraft canon, “Rats” presents asubtle critique of sublimity that is less comprehensive in its implications, sincethe text overtly limits the scope of the subject’s susceptibility to the particulartype of moral corruption it details by asserting that individual temperament,immediate proximity to Exham Priory, or a combination of both rouse thedrive to degeneracy in characters. As a point of contrast, “Dagon” offers a suc-cinct example of the dynamics of descent characteristic of Lovecraft’s fiction,and its provocative critique of the sublime entails, like “Mountains,” the



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degradation of the whole human race. Both Lovecraft’s reference to a naturaldisaster20 in terms of a great, “unprecedented volcanic upheaval” of the seafloor (Dagon 15) and his description of the “slimy expanse of hellish blackmire” that is uncovered as “extend[ing] about [the narrator] in monotonousundulations as far as [he] could see” (Dagon 15, emphases added) appeal toBurke’s notions of might and infinity as well as to Kant’s categories of dynam-ical and mathematical sublimity. Nonetheless, Lovecraft subverts once morean element crucial to sublimity: objective distance. The narrator awakes only“to discover [him]self half-sucked” into “the nasty mud in the unendingplain,” upon whose “rotting soil” he is later compelled to walk in search of “thevanished sea and possible rescue” (Dagon 15–6). It is no revelation to thereader, therefore, to find that although the narrator’s reason is stimulated asone would expect in Kantian sublimity, for instance, he affirms surprise at notfeeling “wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery,”and confesses that he “was in reality more horrified than astonished” (Dagon15). The source of his horror has its roots not only in the landscape’s offenceto his senses, “putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish” (Dagon 15), but alsoin his contemplation of certain of its properties that Burke and Kant wouldconsider as apt vehicles for sublimity if viewed from a safe distance:

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideous-ness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was noth-ing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yetthe very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscapeoppressed me with a nauseating fear. (Dagon 15, emphases added)

His bodily immersion in the horrid natural phenomenon in question bars himfrom gaining a sense of objective perspective necessary to the sublime. Ratherthan providing him with a means to contemplate the sublimity of his ownmind (Kant) or the absolute power of the Godhead (Burke), the landscapeengulfs him: it forces the narrator to focus on his material conditions and hisstruggle for survival.

The navigational ineptitude which the narrator avows prior to the onsetof the symbolic portion of his narrative stands as the single most importantaspect of his characterization pertaining to the sublime, since it betrays a fun-damental vulnerability in his character: his inability to discern the boundaries,both physical and psychical, that simultaneously constitute our understandingof self-object relations and make possible the objective distance demanded byany aesthetic judgment. Upon waking, the narrator’s two chief aims, his searchfor “the vanished sea and possible rescue” (Dagon 15) (objectives that amountto a struggle for survival, and which, from a formal standpoint, serve to drivethe plot forward), express his urgent need to discern the geographical margins



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of his current position. Put another way, they communicate his yearning toanchor his fantastic experience within the context of the rational, ordered uni-verse to which he belonged prior to escaping from the Germans and fallingasleep at sea. Symbolically, however, his attempt to find out where he isequates to a desire to uncover who he is. It reveals the narrator’s yearning fora differentiated identity whose objective existence is validated by society in amanner similar to a given position on a map. In synonymous terms, he longsto assert a self that is separate from and that will permit him to exit, with asense of finality, the primordial muck that “half-sucked” him (Dagon 15). Thenarrator’s intertextual reference to an epic, allegorical tale, his “curious remi-niscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb though the unfath-omable realms of darkness” as he stood at “the summit of a mound and lookeddown the other side into an immeasurable pit” (Dagon 16), further enhancesthe symbolic scope of this portion of “Dagon” by underscoring the momentous-ness of its significance in relation to the narrator’s sense of self. The analogyLovecraft encourages readers to draw between the deluded narrator of“Dagon” and Milton’s Satan, whose pride and extreme narcissism obfuscate hisjudgment and contribute to his erroneous understanding of himself and hisrelation to God, anticipates the shocking revelation about humanity at thetext’s conclusion. The narrator’s implicit belief in humanism not only provesto be groundless, but, in leading him to develop a false sense of self and there-fore ill-preparing him to face the truth of cosmic horror, it contributes to thedisintegration of his identity.

The protagonist’s encounter with a “vast, Polyphemus-like, and loath-some” creature at the bed of a precipice, in “an abyss which had yawned at thebottom of the sea since the world was young” (Dagon 18, 17), highlights hisfailure to extricate himself from the slimy muck and presages his ensuing men-tal collapse. From the broader vantage point of the Mythos, the motif of themonstrous alien god, inferred by the story’s title and the obelisk the creatureworships, offers a disquieting association between the protagonist and the fish-like, humanoid entities that Lovecraft elaborates fully fourteen years later in“The Shadow over Innsmouth”: it presents the narrator with the monstrousfoundation of his humanity. In addition to the creature’s suggestively anthro-pomorphic features, “its gigantic scaly arms,” “hideous head,” and uttering ofsounds whose “measured” quality implies his use of language (albeit oneincomprehensible to the narrator), the bas-reliefs on the obelisk wittinglyallude to humanity’s grotesque miscegenation “eras before the first ancestor ofthe Piltdown or Neanderthal man was born”:

I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sortof men; though the creatures were shown disporting like fishes in the watersof some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which



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appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare notspeak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesquebeyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human ingeneral outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabbylips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. (Dagon 18)

Whether or not readers believe that the narrator actually encounters an alienbeing is extraneous to the question of his quest for identity, since each posi-tion’s interpretation of the narrator’s fate differs only in the degree of his alien-ation from human culture it concedes: the narrator either goes mad or is theillegitimate progeny conceived by a primordial pollution of the human race. Inboth cases, the affirmative turn of the sublime is denied in “Dagon.” The nar-rator’s viewing of what should not be seen, the antediluvian obelisk and theanthropomorphic alien, acts as a catalyst prompting the breaching of limitswithin his psyche and the irremediable fragmentation of his identity.

From this symbolic context, therefore, the narrator’s description of thesudden change in the sea’s characteristics in terms synonymous with Burkeanand Kantian sublimity discussed above relates to aspects integral to the sub-lime before the turn: the subject’s sense of self-displacement and heterogene-ity concomitant to the expansion of its imagination, and which give rise to afeeling of pain. In Burke, “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that itcannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object whichemploys it” (Burke 53). Similarly, in Kant the imagination labors and extendsitself (in vain) to provide a positive presentation of the absolute. The subject’sexperience of sublimity prior to the turn is thus akin to the narrator’s sensa-tion of being lost in the seemingly infinite expanse of the sea or being mired inthe endless, “monotonous undulations” (Dagon 15) of a fantastic landscape. Inboth instances, his sense of self is displaced as he attempts to resist being swal-lowed up by a devastating spectacle of nature. In the fiction of a humanist, thissubjective crisis would be resolved through an affirmative turn towards cul-ture, reason, an ordered universe, and a unified, autonomous sense of self. InLovecraft, however, the aesthetics of cosmic horror that governs his fictionaluniverse erodes culture, subverts reason, champions chaos, and destroys theintegrity of the human subject. As “Dagon” illustrates, the subject is over-whelmed by a power of superhuman might and by a landscape of infiniteexpanse without being offered any form of belief system or conciliatory knowl-edge that can reconstitute his integrity. The narrator’s navigational incompe-tence thus unfailingly foreshadows his subsequent collapse into madness,expressed by his yearning for an apocalypse that will herald the end of humanculture: “I dream of a day when [the aliens] may rise above the billows to dragdown in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst



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universal pandemonium” (Dagon 19). To rephrase in synonymous terms, thenarrator communicates his desire to be swallowed up by an abyss where theboundaries separating self and other are non-existent: a gulf whose conditionspreclude an experience of sublimity or any form of aesthetic judgment.

In the morally sterile world of Lovecraft’s tales, the knowledge charactersgain unveils the fallacy of their humanistic notions of subjectivity, permanentlybarring them from experiencing the Burkean and Kantian sublimes. As Kantexplains, to a viewer whose culture has not trained him to face the sublimewithin an affirmative context—or, in Lovecraft’s case, to a disillusioned viewerwho has lost faith in his humanity—the spectacle whose formal attributesought to give rise to sublimity will instead inspire pain. Furthermore, the sub-ject “will see in the proofs of the dominion of nature given by its destructive-ness and in the enormous measure of its power, against which his own vanishesaway to nothing, only the distress, danger, and need that would surround theperson who was banished thereto” (Kant 148, §29:5:265). In its ironic subver-sion of sublimity, cosmic horror not only denies the subject a safe vantagepoint from which to witness the spectacle in question, but also converts thesublime turn into a dynamics of descent. Unlike sublimity, which reconstitutesthe integrity of subjects displaced in its expansive movement prior to the turn,cosmic horror irreparably erodes protagonists’ individual bodies and the bodypolitic, barring humanity from fostering the common sense upon which sub-limity depends. Contrary to the humanism that grounds the sublime, there-fore, the fictional expression of cosmic horror remains true to its cosmicindifferentist foundation. In a universe devoid of Godhead, nothing guaran-tees the significance and continuity of human existence; furthermore, moral-ity and the duality between good and evil it implies do not exist, given thatthey are necessarily products of our human subjectivity. After enduring thedevastating shock of cosmic horror in the Lovecraft Mythos, the experiencingsubject is alienated from itself and its world without any ballast to confermeaning to its truncated existence, since its (Western) cultural narrativeproves to be built on false foundations. Thus, if the cosmic indifferentism ofLovecraft’s fiction strips modern Western culture of the illusions fostered by itssolipsistic subjectivity, then sublimity amounts simply to another humanisticillusion it dismantles.

It is of paramount significance that protagonists’ inextricable engulfmentin the devastating spectacle—their inability to separate themselves from it,both physically and psychically—underscores the fact that their identities arealways already defiled in the Lovecraft Mythos. Cosmic horror dramatizes thesubject’s momentous encounter with phenomena that not only limit theboundless expansion of the ego, but that destroy the subject-object boundariesrequisite to any kind of knowledge and cultural production. Lovecraft’s poet-ics of cosmic horror and its literary mise-en-scène therefore unveil a crisis spe-



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cific to modernity. In the face of the great social upheavals of the modern age,the subject experiences a radically disorienting sense of being truncated frominherited belief systems, without being granted the luxury of objective distancefrom which to negotiate these changes and perhaps develop a new under-standing of life. The Lovecraftian subject thus undergoes an existential crisiswhose fictional resolution, from a humanistic standpoint, amounts to a nega-tion of life.

Part 2: Towards a Psychoanalytic Reading of Cosmic Horror

If my analysis of the impossibility of a sublime experience in Lovecraft alludesto a psychoanalytic reading of his work, then it does so for a specific reason.Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, particularly what she identifies as thedefilement of the subject’s “clean and proper body”21 in the throes of abjection,informs what I identify as the immutable fragmentation and pollution of sub-jective integrity that cosmic horror performs. Abjection, the archaic, pre-objectal dynamics of psychical and physical boundary negotiation infantsengage in prior to assuming an identity as speaking subjects, haunts usthroughout life. It comes into being whenever we confront something we per-ceive as inassimilable; allied with perversity, it is manifest in the defilement oftaboos, the subversion of laws, or the transgression of any culturally-delineatedfrontier (Kristeva, Powers 2–4). In Powers of Horror, Kristeva briefly sketchesthe common ground shared by abjection and sublimity as well as their funda-mental differences:

In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through subli-mation, I keep it under control. The abject is hedged with the sublime. It isnot the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bringthem into being. For the sublime has no object either. […] the sublime is asomething added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here,as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossiblebounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination. (11–12)22

The implications underlying her assertions merit explanation. First, both thesublime and the abject originate in the subject; in other words, the termsthemselves operate as mediatory principles existing only in relational struc-tures. An object cannot properly be called abject, but it can inspire a sense ofthe abject. The intolerable spectacle that both fascinates and repels us ismerely a vehicle that reminds us of the permeability of our own subjective bor-ders. Formally speaking, this trajectory runs parallel to Burkean and Kantiansublimity, wherein the subject confronts a phenomenon whose might or infi-nite extension exceeds limits. For Burke, these restrictions are empirical: nei-



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ther can the eye take in what appears to extend infinitely, nor can our bodiesresist prodigious strength. For Kant, these borders are cognitive and concernour powers of presentation. In both cases, the sublime evokes, like the abject,a strong emotional outburst characterized by an initial feeling of pain; a turnfollows, culminating in a sense of pleasure that is analogous to the “jouissance”the subject feels in the abject. Hence the abject and the sublime are both neg-ative presentations of being that challenge the limits of selfhood, and both ina sense constitute moments of self-revelation for the subject.

In spite of their shared trajectory, however, the sublime and the abjectserve opposite functions. While both overwhelm the experiencing subject, intranscending the sensible the sublime elevates and affirms our humanity (or,in Kant’s case, our connection with something beyond the world of phenom-ena); conversely, the abject diminishes us by forcing us to confront a material-ity that cannot be signified. It compels us to come to terms with thepermeability and finitude of being by presenting us with a limit we cannotincorporate. The imagination is compelled to represent a void—the same voidthat constitutes the experiencing subject. Hence, if, in asserting our humanity,the sublime also buttresses our culture (particularly in Kant, it separates usfrom nature by underscoring the mind’s ability to reason), then the abject, onthe other hand, subverts it by reminding us not only that are we inseparablefrom that nature we seek to dominate, but that our culture, from which ouridea of mastery originates, is simply a fiction, a story we tell ourselves to anchorour identities. In a manner similar to Lovecraft’s protagonists who face “cos-mic horror,” such as the narrator of “Mountains,” Arthur Jermyn, de la Poer,and the narrator of “Dagon,” in abjection the subject is humbled. Its sense ofself is unhinged.

If viewed from the perspective afforded by the (albeit brief) comparative,critical analysis of abjection and sublimity elaborated above, then neither the“vague horror” and “nauseating fear” that “oppressed” the narrator of “Dagon”when he contemplated the “unbroken monotony of the rolling plain” (Dagon16, 15), nor the “ecstatic fear” de la Poer experiences at the moment when his“foot slipped near a horribly yawning brink” of the abyss below his estate (Dun-wich 44) functions as an index of sublimity prior to the turn that each Love-craftian narrative subsequently subverts. The type of alienating horror ArthurJermyn experiences during his devastating moment of self-recognition in thecarcass of his simian ancestor offers instead a more apt parallel to theirpredicaments. I contend, in other words, that the dread de la Poer and the nar-rator of “Dagon” endure, along with that borne by all of Lovecraft’s characterswho face cosmic horror, is a symptom of the “abjection of self,” or “the culmi-nating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all itsobjects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of itsown being” (Kristeva, Powers 5).23 The idea that cosmic horror is synonymous



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with Kristeva’s notion of abjection thus constitutes the premise grounding myanalysis of Lovecraft’s implicit subversion of the sublime in his fiction.

In light of the suggestive parallels and marked divergences between theBurkean and Kantian sublimes and Kristeva’s notion of abjection, I maintainthat Lovecraft’s uncompromising erosion of the white, Western male subject’sidentity is not limited to what I hope to have outlined as his perverse assaulton its culture, race, gender, moral beliefs, psyche, and physical integrity. Tomake my case more compelling, it is worth referring to another aspect of Love-craft’s fiction that points to the defilement of the subject’s “clean and proper”self: the loss of language. “Rats” presents one of the most telling examples ofthe kind of regression inherent in the degeneration of a character’s speech fac-ulties.24 As Joshi observes in his note explaining the comprehensive progres-sion of languages de la Poer speaks prior to being committed to Hanwell (hejumps from archaic English, middle English, Latin, Gaelic, to bestial grunts),“the purported effect is the narrator’s sudden reversal on the evolutionaryscale” (Joshi, Annotated 54n53). While Joshi’s perspective addresses a macro-cosmic view of de la Poer’s diminishing linguistic competence that impacts thehuman race as a whole, from a microcosmic, individual outlook that considershis exploration of the vaults beneath Exham Priory in terms of his discovery ofthe abject roots of his lineage, his loss of language suggests the collapse of hissubjectivity to a pre-symbolic, undifferentiated state of being, or what Kristevaidentifies as the realm of the maternal.

Cosmic horror thus induces, to borrow the words Kristeva uses to describeabjection, “‘something maternal’ […] to bear upon” (Kristeva, Powers 5) thecharacters in Lovecraft’s fiction, as all motifs tied to the feminine in Lovecraftunveil an archaic abyss into which the self is condemned to plummet. As Imentioned before, a female ancestor defiles Arthur Jermyn’s sense of self.Thus, the brute, animal nature of the feminine, conveyed through her embod-iment as a Congolese white ape, not only underscores the horror of race mis-cegenation in Lovecraft, but further testifies to the abject scope of thematernal in his fiction. Likewise, the narrator of “Dagon” loses himself in theamniotic undulations of two oceans: a real and a symbolic one. The Old Onesof “Mountains” are violently absorbed (and by extension emasculated) by theviscous, feminine contours of the Shoggoths. In “Rats,” de la Poer cites theworship of Cybele, a pagan earth goddess, as the source of his ancestors’ inhu-man bestiality since time immemorial. De la Poer, a father to his “motherlessboy” named Alfred (Dunwich 28) who dies from war-related injuries, regressesas a result of his contact with the feminine, represented by his investigation ofthe caverns beneath the estate that once belonged to his paternal forbears.This process completes the dethroning of their reason and the irremediablealienation from the symbolic that cosmic horror carries out in the case of Dan-forth and Dyer in “Mountains,” the Old Ones, Jermyn, de la Poer, and the nar-



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rator of “Dagon”; or, to articulate the same idea from the opposite perspective,the maternal’s incursion into the orderly fortress of culture. Both underscorethe conflict at the heart of Lovecraft’s fiction as a loss of self-mastery atten-dant on the subject’s confrontation with the dynamic, devastating force thatis modernity.25 In allying cosmic horror with the abject realm of the maternaland the psychical regression it implies, Lovecraft’s stories call for a renegotia-tion of identity that must adapt to the new, disorienting experiences of themodern subject.

As I hope to have made clear, cosmic horror dramatizes a crisis in subjec-tivity whose dynamic force leads to an epiphany incommensurate with theaffirmative scope of sublimity. Cosmic horror makes evident that not only isthe culture that reconstitutes the subject’s integrity at the sublime turn nolonger viable, but no alternative has yet been found to replace it. In his letters,Lovecraft addresses both the discontinuity between the historical past and theimmediate present that characterizes modernism and the impossibility of art toprovide a positive presentation of this truncation: “Our mechanical and indus-trial age is […] so far removed from […] ancestral conditions as to makeimpossible its expression in artistic media” (Selected Letters 2: 103–104). Whenthe unintelligible cannot be absorbed into culture and we consequently losefaith in the compensatory value of symbols, the foundation of being is threat-ened. If no language exists to contextualize modernity in Lovecraft’s fiction,then what is left to articulate but the shock of alienation? In realizing that its“clean and proper” body is always already defiled, the Lovecraftian subject dis-covers that all of its safeguards—culture, tradition, race, ancestry, language—are forfeited. “Cosmic horror” therefore unveils to the subject that it issimultaneously abject and abjected by the same universe in whose center itwas erroneously placed by the efforts of humanism. All is not lost, however. Ifabjection is tied to the maternal, and the subject of abjection is one perpetu-ally displaced, compelled to construct its limits anew, then there is a hope ofrebirth for the human protagonist in Lovecraft. Nonetheless, in a “cosmicindifferentist” universe, it is likely that, in a manner analogous to the “far vio-let line” Dyer espies during his frantic, aerial escape from the Shoggoths(Mountains 103), this new horizon and its promise of beauty would offer theLovecraftian subject only greater, inconceivable horrors.

Notes1 Lovecraft’s style, generally characterized by his extravagant use of adjectives,

Byzantine descriptions, and archaic vocabulary, has been one of the focal points ofcriticism since the publication of his works. In the 1990s, poststructuralist and decon-structionist approaches have reversed the derogatory judgments presented by early



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studies of Lovecraft’s style and underscored its significance to his aesthetics. For twosympathetic and thematically proximate critical studies, see John Langan’s “Naming theNameless: Lovecraft’s Grammatology” for an elucidation of Lovecraft’s “approximatelanguage,” which “relates the effect and not the thing itself” (29); and DonaldBurleson’s “Lovecraft and Adjectivitis: A Deconstructionist View” for an elaboration ofLovecraft’s strategy of “narrative impressionism,” in which the narration of a character’sperceptions of a scene or event are more important than an objective depiction (24).

2 The most salient example pertains to Burke’s defense of “excessive bitters andintolerable stenches” as capable of producing “a grand sensation” akin to the sublime,provided that they “are moderated, as in a description or narrative” (Burke 78). In myview, gaining objective distance from a foul smell or repugnant taste does not suggestsublimity, nor is “the whole composition supported with dignity” if the abject smell ortaste is associated with “images of an allowed grandeur” (Burke 78). Instead, a dialec-tical tension is produced, akin to that found in the grotesque. Furthermore, the illus-trations Nelson provides from Lovecraft’s fiction in support of Burke’s notion that foulsmells can give rise to sublimity are in fact representations of characters in the midstof an experience that violates their subjective integrity. Overcome by the impressionmade upon their sense of smell, their reactions are in no way comparable to the aweand religious respect the sublime inspires; our reading of their sensations, moreover,does not make them any more sublime in light of our objective distance.

3 This assertion needs to be qualified. In “Lovecraft’s Ethical Philosophy,” Joshiexplains that Lovecraft’s determinism did not turn into fatalism, since he was tookeenly aware of the fallacy inherent in such a position. He cites from Lovecraft’s“Some Causes of Self-Immolation” in the Marginalia to illustrate his point: “We haveno specific destiny against which we can fight—for the fighting would be as much apart of the destiny as the final end” (“Lovecraft’s Ethical Philosophy” 24). Joshiremarks that this line of reasoning can serve to defend a “sort of free will”: “Since des-tiny is enmeshed in the fabric of existence, it is for that reason undetectable; and wecan continue engaging in any actions we please because those activities would be asmuch (or as little) a part of destiny as the failure to act” (24). However, it is simply theillusion of free will that Lovecraft’s viewpoint concedes; our inability to discern thelarger pattern of destiny does not preclude its existence.

4 This applies primarily to human beings, although with the exception of theGreat Race of time travelers in “The Shadow out of Time,” who, in having the capa-bility to foresee the annihilation of their species, project their consciousness into pastand future life forms to escape their predicament, Lovecraft’s aliens are also bound bythis fate.

5 All citations to Kant include the page followed by the section (§) then the vol-ume and page in accord with the standard notation for Kant’s work.

6 “The Whisperer in the Darkness” comes to mind as a fitting example. The fungicut up Henry Akeley’s body and place his still living brain in a canister from whichthey can, with the help of special devices, communicate with him.



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7 Some scholars maintain that a distinction between his earlier and later texts interms of characterization justifies the exclusion of certain titles from the Lovecraftmyth cycle. (See David E. Schultz’s “From Microcosm to Macrocosm: The Growth ofLovecraft’s Cosmic Vision” for an elaboration of this outlook.) In light of the thematicand stylistic continuity observable in Lovecraft’s work, however, I am sympathetic toGeorge T. Wetzel’s assertion in “The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study” that individual textsmake up fragments of a larger narrative constellation whose power becomes evidentthrough a cumulative reading. At the extreme, he interprets the Lovecraft Mythos asa lengthy novel in which individual stories make up its many chapters.

8 Lovecraft also suggests an implicit connection between “Jermyn” and “vermin”:both the perfect rhyme shared by the two words and the salience of vermin as a motifin his fiction encourage the association.

9 In Udolpho’s penultimate paragraph, the narrator affirms succinctly the moral ofthe story: “O! Useful may it be to have shewn [sic], that, though the vicious can some-times pour affliction upon the good, their power is transient and their punishment cer-tain; and that innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience,finally triumph over misfortune!” (Radcliffe 632).

10 Emily’s learning of “Latin and English” from her father, “chiefly that she mightunderstand the sublimity of their best poets,” and her developing “a taste for works ofgenius” “in her early years” (Radcliffe 9) are suggestive of the notion of sublimity elab-orated by Longinus, whose positing of the sublime as an innate quality of the humanmind (and thus necessarily beyond the bounds of rhetoric) sets the groundwork forsubsequent formulations of sublimity as an aesthetic category (see Longinus’s On Sub-limity, 1st century CE).

11 The etymology of the adjective “stupendous,” employed by Emily to describethe mountain’s recesses, uncovers the subjective, impressionistic basis of her reactionto these particular phenomena in nature. More importantly, it is a response condi-tioned by Burkean sublimity. “Stupendous” originates from the Latin stupendus “that isto be wondered at,” which is a gerundive form of stupe–re “to be struck senseless, beamazed at” (OED). In other words, the view of the mountain afforded by “the wildwood-walks” (Radcliffe 9) suggests that Emily’s mind is, to borrow Burke’s phrasing,“so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by conse-quence reason on that object which employs it” (Burke 53). Moreover, the “silenceand grandeur of solitude” (Radcliffe 9) Emily experiences when she contemplates themountain’s hollows echoes Burke’s category of privation, which includes “Vacuity,Darkness, Solitude, and Silence” (Burke 65). (In my view, privation can be subsumedunder “obscurity.” The inability to see implies spatial and metaphysical disorientationin Burke, and the subject’s loss of sensory reference points, necessary to its gaining asense of perspective from which it can then distinguish itself from the world, can havethe same effect.)

12 Lovecraft makes a total of seven references in “Mountains” to the Asian paint-ings of Russian painter and writer Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich (1874–1947),



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whose works he had seen in New York at the eponymous museum in 1934 (see Joshi’sintroductory comments to the footnotes of the Penguin edition of “Mountains,” 420).Interestingly, Roerich’s visual works encouraged some of his contemporaries to drawanalogies with music: “The original force of Roerich’s work consists in a masterly andmarked symmetry and a definite rhythm, like the melody of an epic song” (Nina Seli-vanova, qtd. in http://www.roerich.org/index.html). The series of paintings to whichLovecraft makes reference are likely those inspired by Roerich’s journey, beginning in1923, to what were then uncharted regions of Chinese Turkestan, Altai, Mongolia andTibet: In Kanchenjunga, Sikkim Pass, His Country, The Great Spirit of the Himalayas, andThe Banners of the East (http://www.roerich.org/index.html). It seems ironic (and per-haps even perverse) that Lovecraft cites Roerich’s work from this period to emphasizethe narrator’s cognitive estrangement from his environment and to foreshadow thedestructive revelation that awaits the explorers; Roerich’s Asian paintings, particularlythe Himalayan series, are renowned for the “loftiness of spirit” they convey(http://www.roerich.org/index.html). In my view, the ominous references to Roerich’sAsian paintings in “Mountains” betray instead characters’ immersion in a cosmicindifferentist worldview that necessarily bars them from appreciating the grandeur ofhis work.

13 “The Ritual” is one of the stories that best exemplifies the indexical functionthat the Necronomicon plays in Lovecraft’s fiction.

14 This type of recollection, triggered by a sensory stimulus, appears frequently inLovecraft’s fiction, and always denotes the subject’s impending ontological crisis.

15 Other references to sublimity in nature fail to ennoble the human subject andinstead anticipate its debasement: “The ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and thequeer state of [Lake’s] sensations at being in the lee of vast pinnacles whose ranks shotup like a wall reaching the sky at the world’s rim,” are counterbalanced by the “noteof subconscious alarm” the narrator detects “in his words” (Mountains 15). Subse-quently, Lake and his party discover the subterraneous network of caves and unearththe still living bodies of the Old Ones, two actions that spell the crew’s violentdestruction.

16 Scholars have cited Lovecraft’s increasing liberalism in his later years in aneffort to obfuscate the extent of his racism and the profound impact it had on his writ-ing. For instance, both Donald R. Burleson and S. T. Joshi problematically make aneffort to excuse Lovecraft’s racism by explaining that it was focused on abstract collec-tives rather than individuals, and they mention his marriage to a Jewish woman as evi-dence of his tolerant attitude. Burleson comments that “Lovecraft in his letters oftengave vent to seemingly horrendous ‘racist’ remarks against Jews, black people, andothers, yet habitually treated individual people with warmth and kindness, even mar-rying a Jewess” (H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study 11). In Lovecraft’s defense, Joshiremarks that “many of his closest friends, including his wife, were not of the pureNordic stock that he so concerned himself with” (“H. P. Lovecraft: His Life and Work”14). I cannot see how Lovecraft’s vituperative descriptions in his letters of New York



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City’s non-white inhabitants constitute only “seemingly” racist commentary. To hiscredit, Joshi changes his view in A Dreamer and a Visionary: Lovecraft in His Time; Joshiacknowledges that, in light of Lovecraft’s avowal in a letter of taking pride in beingknown as an anti-Semite in high school, those who, like himself in the previously citedwork, sought “to exculpate Lovecraft on the grounds that he never took any directactions against racial or ethnic groups he despised but merely confined his remarks topaper” can no longer do so (55).

17 Given his antiquarian proclivities, perhaps Lovecraft’s depiction of the Shog-goths’ bastardization of the Old Ones’ art was inspired by the pictorial style introducedin Ancient Egypt during the reign of Akhenaten, “commonly known nowadays as the‘heretic king’” and whose “reign was excised from public record” after his death(Eaton-Krauss). The subversive nature of the artistic novelties introduced duringAkhenaten’s reign and their marked contrast to traditional Ancient Egyptian pictorialconventions would surely have captured Lovecraft’s imagination: “Of the innovationsintroduced in the visual arts, the manner in which the king himself was depictedretains its shock value down to the present. The king’s physiognomy (his hangingchin, thick lips, sunken cheeks and slanting eyes) and ‘effeminate’ body (narrow shoul-ders, fleshy chest, swelling thighs, pendulous abdomen, and full buttocks, in markedcontrast to spindly limbs and a scrawny neck) […] have raised questions about hisphysical and mental health. But aberrations from previously accepted norms need notreflect his actual appearance. They are better understood as stylistic and iconographicdevices chosen to stress Akhenaten’s uniqueness” (Eaton-Krauss).

18 The professor likens their piping speech to the lethal call of the femme fatalewhen he declares that he wished “that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses’ men off theSirens’ coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness” (Mountains104). Another interpretive possibility also comes to mind: does the relationship Love-craft establishes between the Shoggoths and the Old Ones function as a type of racistcommentary on slavery and race-relations in pre-World War II USA?

19 The Hanwell Asylum actually exists. It was established in 1831 in MiddlesexCounty, England. As S. T. Joshi remarks in the annotated edition of “Rats,” Lovecraftlikely became aware of it from his reading of Lord Dunsany’s “The Coronation of Mr.Thomas Shap” (The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft 55n54).

20 Lovecraft believed what he describes in “Dagon”—the upheaval of the seafloor—to be scientifically possible (see “In Defence of Dagon” 149).

21 I adopt Leon S. Roudiez’s translation of Kristeva’s original French expression“corps propre,” which signifies a body that is both one’s own and clean—a body bear-ing no traces of its debt to nature: “Le corps ne doit garder aucune trace de sa detteenvers la nature” (Kristeva, Pouvoirs 121).

22 In the original French text, the citation reads as follows: “Dans le symptôme,l’abject m’envahit, je le deviens. Par la sublimation, je le tiens. L’abject est bordé desublime. Ce n’est pas le même moment du parcours, mais c’est le même sujet et lemême discours qui les font exister. Car le sublime, lui non plus, n’a pas d’objet. […] Le



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sublime est un en plus qui nous enfle, qui nous excède et nous fait être à la fois ici, jetés,et là, autres et éclatants. Écart, clôture impossible, Tout manqué, joie: fascination”(Kristeva, Pouvoirs 19).

23 In the original French text, the citation reads as follows: “La forme culminantede cette expérience du sujet auquel est dévoilé que tous ses objets ne reposent que surla perte inaugurale fondant son être propre” (Kristeva, Pouvoirs 13).

24 This erosion of the enunciating subject’s speech also occurs in other Lovecraftstories: See “The Haunter of the Dark,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Outsider,” TheColour out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “TheWhisperer in the Darkness,” and “The Shadow out of Time,” which are all found inThe Dunwich Horror and Others.

25 Of the texts cited, the description of the Shoggoth as an on-coming subwaytrain in “Mountains” offers the most telling, dynamic parallel between modernity and“cosmic horror”: “It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s‘thing that should not be’; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrush-ing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front loomingcolossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely coloredlights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder” (Mountains 101).

Works CitedBurke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime

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Decades of Criticism. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Athens: Ohio UP, 1980. 79–95.Will, Bradley A. “H. P. Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime.” Extrapolation:

A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 43 (2002): 7–21.

AbstractIn drawing from Lovecraft’s pronouncements on “cosmic horror” in his essays and itsdramatization in his stories, I argue that an experience of the sublime is impossible inhis fiction since cosmic horror denies four fundamental aspects of the Burkean andKantian aesthetics of sublimity: freedom; the primacy of the human being; the notionof common sense upon which an aesthetic judgment is based; and the objective dis-tance requisite to the sublime. To underscore further how cosmic horror implicitly sub-verts sublimity in Lovecraft, in the coda I elaborate on how cosmic horror is coevalwith the modern subject’s abjection of self, a notion defined by Julia Kristeva in Pow-ers of Horror.



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