Kelling Essay Prize, T.

Pryor

Tyler Pryor
Prof. Kelly Hurley
ENGL 4026- Gothic Horror
11/27/16
The Placid Island of Ignorance: Lovecraft and Nature

Rather than rely on the tropes of “secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form

clanking chains” (Supernatural, 15), Lovecraft builds terror within his stories through a

disquieting and expansive depiction of the natural universe. He transforms nature by grafting it

to a looming cosmos that mankind can hardly sketch or describe, turning clouds into outlandish

presences. Magnified beyond analysis, nature violates human knowledge and establishes a new

hierarchy in space and time, one that favors tentacled entities to humankind. To create the

frightening atmosphere of his Weird fiction Lovecraft destabilizes the category of nature to

present what is natural and familiar to humans as unknowable. Across his tales this

destabilization can vary, ranging from the revelation of a wider bizarre cosmos in The Dunwich

Horror to the corrupting influence of an alien material in The Color out of Space that pushes the

natural beyond representation. What each story shares is natural objects that behave

incongruously to human expectations, signifying that the given category of nature is illusory and

human knowledge imperfect.

To discuss Weird fiction requires a definition of the term Weird, or at least a reasonable

outline. Howard urges that the Weird be understood as “a certain atmosphere of breathless and

unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces,” forces suggested in “the beating of black wings

or the scratching of outside shapes and entities” and exposing the “most terrible conception of

the human brain—a suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only

safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (Supernatural, 15-

16). A number of generic conventions in the Weird can be drawn from Lovecraft’s knotty

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definition. In any Weird tale there must be a division of known and unknown, a body of human

knowledge bordered by an “outer” region that is impossible for humanity to understand, resisting

all clarification. Native to and embodying this edge of human understanding is an antagonistic

force that can be both abstract energies (“chaos”) and sentient beings (“the deamons of

unplumbed space”). With this set up for the Weird the tale must bring about a contact between

humanity and these unknown forces. Humans detect these forces through the reverberations and

emanations they send out in the known world, sensing their “beating” and “scratching” from the

outside. As the presence of the outer force is perceived the “Natural law,” or what man believes

and knows to be the fundamental order of reality, must be “suspended,” “defeated,” or in other

words undermined. This revocation of accepted reality draws the reader into an “atmosphere” of

fear and anxiety. The reader should feel that the surety of their knowledge has been lost by

sensing the real presence of things that can never be known in their familiar settings. This

“sensation” of “cosmic fear” is the ultimate end of Lovecraft’s Weird fiction (16). In order for a

story to be considered Weird an existential fear must take over as human perceptions,

conceptions, laws and beliefs are ruptured and revealed to be totally inadequate on a universal

level. Weird fiction thus fixates on dismantling human knowledge by suggesting the embedded

existence of things forever beyond human knowledge, a process so troubling to the human mind

that it generates a profound anxiety.

Nevertheless Lovecraft’s Weird fiction is narrower than a deep disruption of human

knowledge. This is because the Weird specifically strives to elevate the material world beyond

human comprehension. Implicitly in his definitions Lovecraft situates the Weird’s

epistemological collapse in a strictly material setting. By emphasizing the Weird as a defeat of

“Natural law” through entities from “the known universe’s utmost rim” (Supernatural, 15-16,

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emphasis mine) Lovecraft indicates that his project is to draw attention to an essential

“strangeness of the physical world itself” (Mieville, 510). Human knowledge and all that lies

outside this knowledge resides in the physical in Lovecraft’s stories. Therefore the Weird

sensation of knowledge being cast down must therefore be drawn out from mundane material,

eschewing the supernatural and not relying on the psychological alone. Though Lovecraft’s

Weird requires turmoil in the human mind and often features themes of madness and misguided

superstition these elements alone do not tamper with the foundations of human knowledge and

reality, which is inherently atheistic and materialistic for Lovecraft. Only a collapse in

humanity’s understanding of matter can summon a Weird atmosphere because matter is all that

exists.

To make the material world Weird Lovecraft works to elevate ordinary and familiar

materials to the level of the sublime. Though the objects traditionally associated with the sublime

are the exceptional features of the world Lovecraft allows a staggering feeling of “awe and

terror” to permeate everything, even things as common as “angles, brushes … limbs, noises,

etc.,” creating a “radicalized sublime backwash” (Mieville, 511). He endeavors to frame the most

routine things in human experience as “outside” by exaggerating their features and significance

“beyond the radius of our sight and analysis,” pushing them beyond the means of human

knowledge (511). By imbuing the mundane with a sense of unintelligibility Lovecraft transmutes

the whole universe into a strange and threatening place. As Mieville shows, Lovecraft has

several techniques of achieving this transformation, ranging from treating mundane objects as

“always-already unrepresentable” to the “retro-historicization” of his mythos in the universe

(both tactics being discussed later on) (511-12). Without leaving the confines of a materialistic

setting Lovecraft undermines human knowledge and its natural laws by infecting the quotidian

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with a touch of unknowability. The illusion of our knowledge shatters by the appearance of traits

and behaviors in familiar things that exceed our understanding and expectations.

With this material fixation in the Lovecraftian Weird the category of nature offers an

invaluable source of disruption and dread. Nature is a material reality mankind is highly familiar

with, and because of that Lovecraft can exaggerate objects and laws considered natural to

undercut human knowledge. He of course refrains from depicting the usual objects of the

sublime, such as the towering mountain peaks of the Alps, and aims for more routine natural

objects to embellish. In The Call of Cthulhu Lovecraft twists the natural details of R’lyeh’s

shadows and angles to invoke the Weird through the city. As Cthulhu emerges the hapless

bystanders witness “a darkness almost material,” a shadow described as having a “positive

quality…and actually burst forth like smoke from its eon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening

the sun…” (Call, 95). Lovecraft’s description interferes with the conventions of natural shadow.

Being a “positive quality” this darkness is more than the absence of light; it appears substantial

and freely moves like smoke. Lovecraft includes a similar natural disruption as the crew of the

Emma finds “an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute,

but behaved as if it were obtuse” (96). This angle generates the Weird sensation by performing

contrary to human conceptions of angles and their properties, exhibiting obtuse characteristics

when it should act acute. The shadows and angles of R’lyeh belie our expectations of these

natural objects and are entirely new phenomena. As these material objects revoke the crew’s

understandings of nature the established order of human knowledge becomes unstable and

uncertain. This is reflected in the hesitant qualification of these strange objects, with phrases like

“almost”, “as if”, and “shouldn’t”. The inverted characteristics of these objects not only violate

given human knowledge but are impossible to categorize, occupying liminal spaces the mind

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cannot fully reconcile. Standing alongside the fabulous Cthulhu are natural forms pushed past the

limits of analysis in their stupefying behavior. Lovecraft overthrows human knowledge within

his material universe by saturating the familiar components of nature with qualities no prior

experience can account for and no investigations clarify.

Tales like The Dunwich Horror refine Lovecraft’s transformation of nature and bring

their deconstruction of human knowledge to new heights. The landscape of Dunwich itself and

its eerie whippoorwills are prime examples of Weird nature. At the tale’s start the land appears

out of proportion, the trees seeming “too large,” the tops of the hills being “too rounded and

symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness,” and crowning the hills are “queer

circles of tall stone pillars.” “Without knowing why” this ill-formed environment produces a

“strange uneasiness” and instinctual “dislike” in a given onlooker (Dunwich, 98-99). Unlike the

dramatic violation created by the angles of R’lyeh Lovecraft slightly shifts the shape of the

natural world in Dunwich so that it fails to conform to the standard image of the environment. It

is “too” off to retain a sense of “naturalness,” yet not so bewildering to fall beyond human

knowledge. Because of this subtlety the disturbed sensation the land creates is slight and sub-

rational. The whippoorwills of Dunwich have a similar effect, with the villagers claiming that the

flocks of birds “are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their

eerie cries in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath” (101). As Old Whateley dies the birds

do indeed amass and cry “their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing

gasps of the dying man,” leaving the presiding doctor with a feeling of something “uncanny and

unnatural” (108). The conspicuous behavior of the birds is atypical in its regularity and lack of

visible purpose; there is no natural reason readily available to explain the whippoorwill’s actions.

The villagers attempt to explain the birds through the supernatural, but as the narrator quickly

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dismisses this interpretation of the birds as an “obsolete and ridiculous” superstition and

maintains the bird’s inscrutability (101). Instead of veering into the categories of spirit Lovecraft

presents the birds as an enigmatic suspension of natural law, behaving outside our expectations

of any conceivable bird. By acting contrary to the well-known character of birds the

whippoorwills introduce a touch of the unknown into the natural world, and as nature becomes

mysterious feelings of anxiety result. Drawing from things so ordinary as sceneries and birds,

Lovecraft instills a slight outsider quality to these natural objects to create tension and anxiety

between the human understanding of nature and the nature found in Dunwich.

This tension is fully developed into dread at the conclusion of the Horror, where the

natural world is revealed to have an inherent connection to the unknown. After fending off

Wilbur’s brother Armitage describes what was nearly summoned as “a kind of force that acts and

grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature,” and that Wilbur’s brother

was only partially “matter in any sense we know…” (Dunwich, 134). The outer beings are

described with natural terms like “force” and “matter,” and follow “other laws” than the ones we

understand to be natural. Such analogy already fosters connections between the natural and the

outside, but this link between them becomes truly disturbing in light of the landscape and

whippoorwills. Armitage states that the standing stones on the hills are “what brought down the

beings those Whateleys were so fond of,” and as the professors cast a spell of their own the birds

combat them by “piping wildly, and in a… rhythm quite unlike that of the visible ritual” (135;

132). The land and the birds are shown serving and obeying the laws from beyond. This not only

explains their peculiar behavior but destabilizes the category of nature by aligning the outer

nature into the natural world known to man. This is an instance of Lovecraft introducing the

sublime into the mundane through the “retro-historicization” of his strange mythos (Mieville,

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512). By portraying his fabulous creatures and strange laws as co-inhabitants of our reality, and

not as total trespassers, Lovecraft’s stories have “no stable status quo but a horror underlying the

everyday” that makes a “a poisonous totality” out of reality. All of nature is found to possess a

trace of unknowability. The sudden discovery of this fact is the result of man’s “lack of

recognition” and not any invasion of these horrors; mankind only failed to notice the whole

picture of the “Weird universe” (512-13). Following his studies on the outer dimensions

Armitage discovers “the elder things” that desire to take “the solar system… into some plane or

phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago” (Dunwich, 124,

emphasis mine). Terrestrial nature and the “beyond” nature exist on the same spectrum of reality

and always have, and in realizing this connection the category of nature expands past the

confines of human knowledge into the unknowable. The Weird reaches its zenith in the Horror

as investigations into the greater cosmos divests nature of its familiarity and reveal that nature

can never be entirely known, breaking down human comprehension and inspiring helplessness.

The Color out of Space renders the natural world unrepresentable in order to create the

Weird, particularly through Lovecraft’s infamous technique of “aesthetic deferral” (Mieville,

511). The meteor in the story possesses some conventional features like its “magnetic” and

metallic properties, but it can only be conveyed in full “by analogy,” especially its “color” that is

“almost impossible to describe” (Color, 197-98). Despite some of its features adhering to

expectations of natural objects the meteor cannot be directly represented and the word “color”

acts as a place holder for a feature that is “obedient to outside laws” (198). The greater anxiety of

The Color out of Space results from infecting all of nature with this unrepresentable element of

the meteor. The produce of the Gardener family begin to show “strange colors that could not be

put into any words” and that “ought never to sprout in a healthy world” (200), sending Mrs.

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Gardener into a nervous breakdown where she used “not a single specific noun, but only verbs

and pronouns” to describe the source of her fear (202). The natural objects on the farm are being

corrupted beyond their conventional forms, rousing dread in the Gardeners, and these corruptions

defy linguistic expression, turning the natural into something sublime and impenetrable. Thus in

the face of the unknown nature-nouns lose their precision and the natural category becomes

inadequate for explaining the influence of the meteor. Even after all he has witnessed Nahum

cannot directly explain the vampirism of the color-entity around him and must construct

disconnected, vague analogies to nature: “…a kind of smoke… seeds… seeds… they growed…

evil water…” (208). Man’s capacity for describing and understanding nature is brought to its

breaking point as the meteor and the so called “color” warps the farm.

Stepping beyond the frustrated reports of the Gardeners Lovecraft gives the reader as

direct of an exposure to a Weird nature as possible at the story’s climax. Lovecraft attempts to

describe the color and its effect through his formal technique of “aesthetic deferral” where an

“asymptotic succession” of adjectives is deployed before an inherently unpresentable noun

(Mieville, 511-12). By differing to adjectives and indirect descriptors the text continually

approaches and hints at the subject without ever grasping it, choosing “obsessive qualification”

of the subject over a direct correlation between a noun and a subject (511). This technique allows

Lovecraft to suggest the unrepresentable and avoid compromising for a flat description,

providing him a method for inserting the sublime into the natural. As Amie and the Arkham

authorities escape the farm they witness a “riot of luminous amorphousness,” an “alien and

undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison form the well- seething, feeling, lapping, reaching,

scintillating, straining and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism”

(Color, 214). This barrage of adjectives and verbs is the text’s raw attempt to impart an image of

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the color-entity, and its formless exaction serves to imply that the color is too alien to be

identified by humans and their symbolic systems. It is an unknowable object and attempts to

make sense of it only cause the mind to reel and language to strain. By saturating the natural

world of the farm with this ineffable trait Lovecraft inflates the natural past man’s ability to

analyze and understand it, upsetting the entire concept and perception of nature. After witnessing

the color the survivors seem to find its inscrutability quality in parts of nature the color did not

even touch, such as the wind that now seems “to sweep down in black, fore gusts from

interstellar space,” out of the home of the color, possessing “a mad cosmic fury” that disturbs

them (215). The disruptive experience of the color endures not only in the ruins of the farm but

in the rest of the natural world, the color having placed the breeze outside human knowledge and

confidence. The Color out of Space sees Lovecraft transforming the natural world by gradually

overlapping the known world with the outside world, robbing human senses and language of

their surety and their recognition of the environment.

In all of Lovecraft’s stories triumph is superficial. Though Cthulhu sleeps, Yog-Sothoth

remains on the door step, and the Color vanishes, man has seen too much. The fact has been

made known that the material order is not as it appears, and no optimism can save the

investigators from their new dread of the beyond. The material of nature is made Weird by

impregnating the familiar shapes of shadows, angles, birds, plants and the land itself with a

sublime texture incongruous to the world as we know it. In Dunwich this is achieved through a

retroactive fusion of nature and unknowable forces into a single genus, and The Color realizes

the mundane sublime by gradually transmuting the natural into unrepresentable forms. Aside

from detailing alien gods, the Lovecraftian tale is one that meditated on how that tall, rough

edged pillar of fibrous reaching and contorted effulgence in my backyard is so unlike a “tree”.

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Bibliography

Lovecraft, Howard Philips. “The Call of Cthulhu.” The best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling
Tales of Horror and the Macabre, Del Rey, 1982, 72-97.

---. “The Color out of Space.” The best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and
the Macabre, Del Rey, 1982, 193-217.

---. “The Dunwich Horror.” The best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the
Macabre, Del Rey, 1982, 98-135.

---. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Dover Books, 1973, 15-16.

Mieville, China. “Weird Fiction”. The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark
Bould et al, Routledge, 2009, 510-515.

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