An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2015-04-05T07:00:00+00:00

Lovecraft’s Cosmic Imagery

Steven J. Mariconda

H. P. Lovecraft’s weird tales are distinguished by their unique cosmic orientation—the horror stems not from traditional supernatural themes, but from the concept of an indifferent and unknowable universe. During his career Lovecraft evolved a characteristic set of imagery to convey cosmic horror, imagery reflecting his view of the universe as a vast, purposeless machine. Before we examine that imagery, let us consider how the central tenet of Lovecraft’s worldview—that the universe is governed by an immutable and only partially knowable set of laws—provided both the motivation for his art and an infinite canvas upon which to create it.

First, the laws governing the universe are fixed. There is no purpose or direction to the cosmos, for it is only a well-oiled Newtonian machine. Lovecraft accepted this concept intellectually, but found it imaginatively stifling, insisting that “a highly organised man can’t exist endurably without mental expansions beyond objective reality” (SL 3.140). He was therefore compelled to create fiction which, by incorporating his imaginings as extensions rather than negations of reality, accommodated both his intellectual and his emotional needs.

Lovecraft had the opportunity to create such fiction because of the second part of the proposition above, that the universe’s laws are only partially knowable: “Absolute reality is forever beyond us—we cannot form even the vaguest conception of what such a thing would be like, for we have no terms to envisage entity apart from those subjective aspects which reside wholly in our own physiology and psychology” (SL 2.301). This gave his imagination free reign to create the alien realms and entities that are the sources of his horror. “If one must weave cobwebs of empty aether,” he said, “let them supply a decorative element to those cosmic spaces which would otherwise be an ambiguous and tantalizing void” (SL 3.147).

Lovecraft did not seriously attempt weird fiction until he was twenty-six, when his philosophy was solidly established. It is clear from a letter of September 1932 that his aesthetic of the weird was a direct outgrowth of the worldview outlined above:

It is true that we no longer credit the existence of discarnate intelligence & superphysical forces around us, & that consequently the traditional “Gothick” tale of spectres and vampires has lost a large part of its power to move our emotions. But in spite of this disillusion there remain two factors largely unaffected—& in one case actually increased—by the change: first, a sense of impatient rebellion against the rigid & ineluctable tyranny of time, space, & natural laws—a sense which drives the imagination to devise all sorts of plausible hypothetical defeats of that tyranny—& second, a burning curiosity concerning the vast reaches of unplumbed and unplumbable cosmic spaces which press down tantalizingly on all sides of our pitifully tiny sphere of the known. (SL 4.70)

But Lovecraft the philosopher had set Lovecraft the artist a formidable task: to depict with mere words that which forever lies beyond the sphere of the known. Over the course of his twenty-year career he made great strides in his attempt to imagine the unimaginable, to describe the indescribable.

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