Journeys into Darkness by James Goho

Author:James Goho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

Un-definition

To begin, what does it mean to say something is unnamable? Surely not that something is simply unnamed, without a name yet, say like K2. Nor that the name is waiting to be discovered, or the name is hidden, or secret or forbidden to be told. In The Golden Bough (1890), Sir James George Frazer illustrates the powerful taboos surrounding names and concomitant need to conceal them. “Taboos are applied not only to acts and objects but also to words, and to none more than to names”[14] in many societies. This ban is especially held for the names of sacred kings and priests. Sometimes individuals have two names, one of which is kept secret, as the knowledge of a name may give power to another, who may bring harm. That is so because in “primitive thought, the name of a person is not merely an appellation but denotes what he is to the world outside of himself.”[15]

In a more imaginative and poetic manner, Robert Graves also explores the power of names and the ancient tradition of secret or unknown names and the danger of revealing names in The White Goddess (1948). Graves traces the history of the holy unspeakable name of God. In the Jewish tradition, the name of God is sacred and not to be articulated; the Tetragrammaton is the name for the Hebrew symbols that only represent God’s name.[16] The hidden or unspeakable name of God is directly related to the essentially unknowable nature of God in religious and philosophical contexts. For example, Benedict de Spinoza argues that the ultimate nature of God is unknowable, although for Spinoza the terms God, Nature, and Substance are equivalent. Spinoza was criticized for atheism, even though he was born into a Jewish family that fled to Amsterdam from the Inquisition. He argues that God, or Nature or Substance, is that without which nothing could be, and hence is necessary, and the scope of existence is unknowable.[17]

However, the mystical nature of hidden names or secret names is not what is going on in the story. In the fiction of Lovecraft many narrators are unnamed, suggesting hidden identities for readers, or perhaps the unreliability of the narrators as witnesses to the events of the stories, or the need for a cover because of their knowledge. It is also true that the past casts a shadow over the story. And, to be sure, the past is an element in an aesthetics of dread. Horror art calls up what is buried away, reveals what is hidden, unearths, as the New York police detective Thomas F. Malone finds in “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925), “secrets more terrible than any of the sins.”[18] But the story is not centered on name hiding or name fear, or on the mysteries of religion. This is not to say that these human traditions have nothing to tell us as they speak to the fact that naming (let us say to our and the world’s identity) is caught up within the web of language.

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