Cosmic Terror From Poe to Lovecraft

Sandro D. Fossemò

Cosmic terror from Poe to Lovecraft

The fear of unknown from the abyss of the soul to cosmic chaos

Traduzione di Rossella Cirigliano“

Life and dreams are leaves of the same book:reading them in order is living,

skimming through them is dreaming

”.

Arthur Schopenhauer

When the master of the

ghost story

M.R. James reads Lovecraft’s essay “

Supernatural Horror in Literature

”, he does not make out the deep meaning of the term “cosmic” and naivelyends up by ridiculing it to a friend of his

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. James makes a sensational mistake, for he does notrealize that adjective is the access key to the core of the fantastic literature where man is often toface, with his own might only, an awfully chaotic world and, for this, unlikely to be understood by human rationality. As Roger Caillois justly writes in his essay “De la féerie

à la

science-fiction”, the fantastic «reveals a scandal, a laceration, an unusual, almost unbearable, invasion inthe real world. […] With the fantastic a new bewilderment, an unknown panic appears.»

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Insuch a dramatic and psychologically decentralized condition, reality is unknown and untamable,for supernatural forces rule it to the prejudice of the cosmic or earthly system we believestructured and rational. Therefore, because of a foreign and adverse environment, a psychic“

laceration

” arises which, according to Edgar Allan Poe, comes out of an ill soul and, accordingto Lovecraft, of a crazy universe but, for both, such an inner gash is a passage to the horror, bound to come to death or psychological delirium

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.In such a context, it is easy to guess the deepnature of terror within the fantastic as a direct manifestation of a blind and cruel Nature that iscalled “cosmic terror”. It describes the terrible fear the unknown causes, where human conditionis literally subject to indecipherable events. The link between fear and incomprehensible occurswhen the characters are not the human beings but those supernatural events which devour theanthropocentric element in favor of colossal and anonymous occult agitations, coming from

1

See

L’enciclopedia della paura. La letteratura horror dalla A alla Z

, Mauro Boselli ed., Sergio Bonelli publ., 1991, Milano, p.40.Pamphlet enclosed to Dylan Dog.

2

see Roger Caillois,

De la féerie

à la

science-fiction

, Paris, Gallimard, 1966.

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Unlike Poe, Lovecraft tends to end his stories mainly with the protagonist’s mental destabilization.

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beyond

. Lovecraft himself thinks it is important to give room to what we have left behind, if wewant to express the nature of the fantastic. «The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for Icannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.Pleasure to me is wonder – the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and thechangeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.»

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Thus it is a question of freeing andinterpreting an

inner

and fantastic-

inherent

expression, which is firstly amplified to thedetriment of the anthropocentric element and then changed into a horror sense under theinfluence of the unknown, which may have a

metaphysical

or

materialistic

direction, dependingon the author’s cosmic philosophy.Poe and Lovecraft, in their common passion for the noble science of astronomy, have both developed a cosmogony influenced by opposed philosophical currents: in fact Poe’scosmic terror is metaphysical, while Lovecraft’s is merely materialistic. Yet, it is necessary toconsider that Lovecraft’s scientific materialism recalls the figure of a “horror poet”, as it is sosecret and impenetrable in its unreal dimension that

barely touches

and

goes beyond

metaphysics in an almost mimetic and assimilated way, through a mechanistic analysis.Before shortly analyzing the differences, we must make the point that great writers suchas Poe and Lovecraft never show, in their fiction, a well defined and easily identifiable trendwithin a given “philosophical system”, just because no reductive schematism falls within thenatural and variegated existential expression of literature.

Idealism

The two well-known American writers are great masters of “nightmare” with completelydifferent, if not even opposed, cultural backgrounds; but sometimes, in spite of their obviousdifferences, they both have in common the same horror expression. They both share the idea of “life as a dream”, but

they do not provide the same

oneiric interpretation of the world,

sincePoe’s thought, unlike Lovecraft’s, partly inherits the philosophical development of the Germanromantic idealism, dating back to early 19th century, which tends to believe in the existence of aharmonious relationship between finite and infinite, that is an

indissoluble link

between Manand God. The idealist Schleiermacher (1768-1822)’s statement

the world is not without God,God is not without the world

is totally in tune with the theocentric cosmogony in “

Eureka

”,where Poe asserts that everything has been created by “God’s Will”

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. Obviously, asserting thateverything is created by God does not absolutely mean that “everything is God”, but on thecontrary it might mean that “everything is

controlled

by God”. Short stories such as “

Thecolloquium of Monos and Una”

and “

Mesmeric Revelation”

clearly show Poe’s spiritual aspect.

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p. 53, in H. P. Lovecraft,

Collected Essays,

Vol. 5, Hippocampus Press, 2006.

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See E.A.Poe,

Eureka,

Bompiani, 2001.

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In romantic idealism the concept of the universe is totally transcendent, as nothingescapes God’s omniscience and nothing goes beyond God’s almightiness. In the world the mostmicroscopic organism is structurally chained to the macroscopic material dimensions, with aninfinite net of links which do not escape, even in the least part, God’s Will.The new

metaphysical myth

of German romantic aesthetics is a unitary art that overtakesthe dualism between finite and infinite. Poe’s fantastic assumes a basic metaphysical structure,as it is also connected to such principles. Metaphysics is that unknown sphere where horror often spreads out. Fear gains ground in a hallucinative dimension, in which the material and physic universe magically melts into the immaterial and metaphysical universe of the dream. «If matter is the last step of a spirit descending from high above in order to ascend again to itsoriginal place, then in a perspective like ours we can certainly talk about “metaphysical horror”,due to the exact influence of the spiritual world into matter, a sort of transfiguration of reality,that is the indissoluble pivot of any metaphysical concept.»

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Thanks to the concept of spiritualmetaphysics as all the same with natural physics, the writer is able to create a harmony of fantastic effects, deeply connected to metaphysical horror.To better understand the mystery relating Poe’s art to horror, in my opinion it is necessaryto take partly into consideration Schelling

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(1775-1854), who considers God as an “irrationalwill” dictated by a negative, blind and obscure principle, in everlasting contrast with a positiveand rational one

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.

Materialism

Lovecraft’s cosmogony is a completely different thing: drawing inspiration partly fromSchopenhauer

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(1788-1860), he considers the world as a dream devoid of a divine guidance, butrather at the mercy of

blind and irrational forces,

ready

to unchain a crazy and imperturbableuniverse, which is not by nature against, but

unaware,

of man. Lovecraft goes deeper intocosmic philosophy, starting from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1844-1900) and thenoutstripping them because of a concrete scientific materialism,

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concerning an inscrutablecosmos that appears mysterious, inflexible, oneiric, multiform, multicolored and, at the sametime, indifferent and chaotic. This recalls, more or less, the Epicurean mechanistic materialism,

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Transl. by Rossella Cirigliano from Giorgio Ghidetti,

Poe: l’eresia di un americano maledetto

, Arnaud editore, Firenze, 1989, p.104.

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God is not

only

Spirit, but it also

penetrates

Nature.

8

The victory of positive over negative is the evidence of God existence.

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Yet it is necessary to consider that Schopenhauer is, in turn, influenced by Schelling about that “irrational will” inside Poe’s art. Asa consequence, we can say that Schelling’s thought is at the basis of that cosmic fear that in Poe and Lovecraft will find a commonground with radically different developments. It is also to be cleared that even though Poe sometimes planned a cosmic terror in ametaphysical sense, he influenced Lovecraft’s imagination only marginally.

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Orig. title:

H.P. Lovecraft: the Mythos of Scientific Materialism,

Strange Magazine

, transl. by PietroGuarriello in

H.P. Lovecraft sculptus in tenebris

, edited by Michele Tetro, Nuova Metropolis Publ., Novara, 2001, pages 25-30. Seethe important article on scientific materialism.

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