Cosmic Gothic

H.P. Lovecraft
 H(oward) P(hillips) Lovecraft
1890-1937

‘I AM PROVIDENCE’ – H.P. Lovecraft’s gravestone (c. 1975)

‘Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) is the very emblem of the Gothic mode in America,
connecting its European origins with the particular circumstances of New England’s history
and the beginnings of American science fiction.’ – Faye Ringel 2014
• ‘no doubt [a] racis[t]’
• ‘Lovecraft’s life was spent on the margins of society,
eking out a small inheritance and scraping an
uncertain living from journalism and amateur
publishing. Some of his attitudes may have come from
his experience of downward social mobility. There can
be no doubt of his racism, which underpinned his
detestation of what the narrator in one of his stories
described as “the polyglot abyss of New York’s
underworld”. Some of his letters invoke explicitly
racialist theories of cultural degeneration. For all his
scorn for the age in which he lived, Lovecraft embodied
some of its ugliest (and most commonplace) beliefs
and attitudes. Fortunately, the core of his work has
nothing to do with his social and racial resentments.
His real subject is the inhumanity of the cosmos.’ –
John Gray
• And an alternate high-modernist:
• ‘Though he lampooned The Wasteland [sic] at its first
appearance, in the end he came to admire T.S. Eliot. It
is time for a critical assessment of H.P. Lovecraft as a
High Modernist, whose personal mythology responded
to the dislocations of the early twentieth century just
as surely as did those of Joyce, Eliot, or Pound.’ – Faye
Ringel
A man out of time
• ‘He saw himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman, born out
of his time. […] He had Enlightenment interests – astronomy,
architecture, history – and identified with Horace Walpole,
father of the Gothic novel. Both were great letter writers. But
for Walpole’s fascination with the superstitions and romance
of the Middle Ages, Lovecraft substituted a horror of and
fascination with seventeenth-century New England.’ - Ringel
• Untiring chronicler of ‘the region’s decline from a Utopian
experiment to a backwater’, Ringel presents him as something
like Nietzsche’s ‘degenerate antiquary’, the ‘horrid spectacle
[…] of the mad collector raking over all the dust-heaps of the
past’:
• ‘Though ever conscious of New England’s fall, Lovecraft
attempted to preserve his memories of an ideal
commonwealth, as he strove to preserve the physical
remnants of New England’s past. He was a “historic
preservationist” before the concept existed. In letters to the
Providence Journal in the 1920s, he protested the destruction
of old warehouses on the wharves, even as he lamented the
swarms of foreigners who infested that neighborhood, and
even though he realized that the warehouses, like so many
things he loved, were crumbling.’ - Ringel
 Lovecraft and the Gothic tradition
• Lovecraft is the ‘inheritor’ of Poe’s
Gothic
• His ‘xenophobic’ ‘anxieties’ lead to the
‘Gothicizing’ of ‘whole new areas’ of
culture:
• ‘For his “Cthulhu” cycle, Lovecraft
concocted unimaginable creatures that
lie just outside the dimensions of
human experience, waiting to get in. His
heady style mixes prehistory and the
seventeenth-century New England past
with fears inspired by recent advances
in science and mathematics […] voicing
fears of multiplying infinitudes and the 1626 engraving from Italy,
counter-intuitive theories [of Einstein signing the devil’s book
and others].’ (Groom, The Gothic, 119)
 Modes Converge
• ‘[A] key crossing-point of the different generic forms
that develop beyond gothic forms in popular fiction
of the twentieth century: horror, fantasy and
science fiction.’ (Botting, 167)
• Lovecraft buries the old mode to define the new –
‘weird’ – one
• ‘The story [of Otranto]—tedious, artificial, and
melodramatic—is further impaired by a brisk and
prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere
permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere.
[…] [F]lat, stilted, [it is] altogether devoid of the true
cosmic horror which makes weird literature. Yet
such was the thirst of the age for those touches of
strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects,
that it was seriously received by the soundest
readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness
to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history.’
– Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ Lynd Ward, ‘Grendel’ (1933)
 Modes Converge
• But in his writing, and particularly in
the story, ‘The Dreams in the Witch
House’, modes converge:
• ‘[S]eventeenth-century witchcraft
delivers, via dream-like delirium,
the same multidimensional
knowledge as advanced
mathematics and physics. […]
Fantasy, science and gothic
fictions, along with folklore,
mythology and occult knowledge, all
conspire to tell the same, horrifying
story: humans are both insignificant
in a very material and extremely
dangerous cosmos and are barely
able to imagine the multiple
dimensions of space and time or
the beings and possibilities they
contain.’ (Botting, 167-8)
Image from http://quarterlyconversation.com/six-novels-in-woodcuts-
by-lynd-ward
 Modes Converge
‘Though the active objects of fear in his stories
may be tentacled monsters and hybrid horrors,
these are reflections of an infinite and
indifferent universe. For Lovecraft […] the infinite
universe revealed by Einstein and Heisenberg
was not silent but full of inhuman howling and
“the scratching of outside shapes and entities
on the known universe’s utmost rim” (Lovecraft
1973: 16). In Lovecraft’s new cosmology, human
evil and traditional monsters were made to seem
almost comforting in comparison to the infinite
spaces of a profoundly unknowable universe.’
(Ringel)

‘Original illustration [to Lovecraft’s ‘The Shunned House’] by Virgil Finlay

accompanying the publication in Weird Tales (October 1937, volume 30,
issue 4).’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shunned_House
Supernatural Horror in Literature
(1927)
• ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’
• Essay gives a potted history of the Gothic tradition, Eddas & Beowulf,
though Shakespeare’s witches and Walpole’s ‘dramatic paraphernalia’, to
Poe.
• Anticipates letter of November 1936 that finds ‘missing’ in even the true
‘artists’ of the Gothic tradition from Poe, a sufficient ‘sense of the cosmic’
(qtd. Joshi, p. xv)
• Gothic is a gesture of resistance against a ‘naively insipid idealism’:
• ‘Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication
which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a
naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls
for a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of
smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has
survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection;
founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if
not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to
minds of the requisite sensitiveness’.*
Supernatural Horror in Literature
(1927)
• The convergence of ‘Gothic’ paraphernalia and ‘true cosmic horror’:
• ‘The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a
terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic
and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence
whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. … [Thus] man’s very hereditary
essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a
matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious
mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been
steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most
of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings around
all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be
explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in
our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious
mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.’
 An artistic problem
• Underlying and unresolved question is the extent to which
the two modes or ‘worlds’ – the cosmic and the Gothic
(grotesque) – can actually cohere.
• Lovecraft:
• ‘The one test of the really weird is simply this —
whether of not there be excited in the reader a
profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown
spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed
listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the
scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known
universe’s utmost rim. And of course, the more
completely and unifiedly a story conveys this
atmosphere the better it is as a work of art in the given
medium.”
 An outsideness of style
• Roger Luckhurst:
• In Lovecraft’s ‘deliberate abuse of language’ (catachresis), his
willful telling not showing, there is a kind of sublime linguistic
failure that recalls the terms of Lovecraft’s own ‘test of the really
weird’ as the making-audible of the ‘scratching of outside shapes
and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim’
(‘Supernatural’):
• ‘His horror is always premised on a contradiction: the
indescribable is always exhaustively described. […] The power of
the weird crawls out of these sentences because of the awkward
style. Conceptually, breaking open the world requires the
breaking open of language and the conventions of realism […]
Lovecraft’s horror fictions employ a language that continually
stumbles against the trauma of the unrepresentable Thing, the
shards of the sublime falling back into the debris of his busted
sentences.’ (qtd. Blacklock, 1112)
Lovecraft Adapted: The Lovecraft
Investigations (2018-2020)
 Responses [T]he great enjoyment of … The Whisperer is
that [it is] fiction – drama – that seems to be
fact. [It] take[s] the familiar format and aural
style of murder-mystery podcasts – intrepid
podcast-makers following a hunch, while
telling us in real time what they’re up to and
how they’re feeling – and use[s] it to create a
world we feel we know and understand. Then,
into that familiarity, they insert something very
unfamiliar indeed…
… I’d recommend that you listen with
earphones … much of the “what was that?”
jumps and surprises come with the enveloping
intimacy of the sound … This podcast is an
example of how well it can be done. Barnaby
Kay and Jana Carpenter, who play Heawood
and Fisher, are completely natural, and every
use of recorded material is believable. There is
texture in the sound, which is properly
recorded, whether a voice on an old-fashioned
minicassette, the fizz and hiss of short wave or
the crunch of leaves underfoot.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2019/dec/08/whisperer-in-darkness-
podcastt-review-slow-burn-biggie-tupac
 Responses
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/radio-
4-s-new-h-p-lovecraft-adaptation-will-give-
you-the-chills
Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio
so far this decade, the most deranging is that the
universe is the dream of the god Azathoth. Not
unreasonably, Azathoth yearns to wake up and
visit his creation. In The Whisperer in
Darkness (Radio 4), a crusty coven of drug-addled
neopagans seek to realise this wish by
summoning Azathoth through a mystic portal
they’ve opened — just off the B1084 in Suffolk. …
Such, at least, is the premise of Julian Simpson’s
virtuosic ten-part adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s
horror novella from 1930. Simpson shifts the
action from 20th-century New England to 21st-
century East Anglia. [The] conceit is that our
heroes host a podcast called Mystery
Machine which investigates unsolved or unusual
true-life mysteries. That postmodern conceit,
effectively debunking the very narrative we are
listening to, might have been irritating but it
actually adds a layer of knowing pleasure to
everyday tropes such as cliffhangers and wrong-
footing reveals. … [The] audio effects —
shortwave crackle, creepy voices from the
netherworld, jarring noises off, sinisterly crunching
leaves as Kennedy scarpers from paranormal
forest forces — gave me the chills.
 References
• Mark Blacklock (2017) ‘Higher spatial form in weird fiction’, Textual Practice, 31:6, 1101-1116, DOI:
10.1080/0950236X.2017.1358688.

• Fred Botting, Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.

• Isabella van Elferen, ‘Sonic Gothic’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, Eds. The Gothic World. London and New
York: Routledge, 2014. pp. 429-40.

• John Gray, ‘Creatures of the deep H P Lovecraft’s philosophy of horror’, New Statesman, 24-30 October 2014.

• Paul Halpern and Michael la Bossiere, ‘Mind out of time: identity, perception, and the Fourth Dimension in h. p.
lovecraft’s “the Shadow out of time” and “the Dreams in the Witch house”’, Extrapolation 50:3 (2009), 512-33
http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/extr.2009.50.3.8

• S.T. Joshi, Ed. The Dreams in the Witch House, and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft. London: Penguin, 2005.

• Faye Ringel, ‘I Am Providence: H.P. Lovecraft’, in A Companion to American Gothic, Ed. Charles L. Crow. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2014.
 For Seminar
1. Listen to the whole podcast series, and make a note of your responses as you
listen, so that you are prepared to share your reaction when we discuss.
2. Read the story ‘The Call of Chthulu’ (LMO), and (if you have time) ‘The Whisperer in
Darkness’ (available here:
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/wid.aspx). Consider how
Simpson and the BBC team have gone about adapting these texts as a podcast.
What do you think of the approaches they have used?
3. How effectively are ‘Gothic’ and ‘cosmic’ elements combined here – in particular,
what do you think about the sci-fi element of a (real life) UFO incident inwoven into
the story? (You can read more on this here: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-
england-suffolk-55484962 and here: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-
suffolk-54649675)
4. Consider the podcast series in relation to your Gothic glossary, and the various
‘recipes’ and ‘formulas’ for Gothic that we have been considering over the past few
weeks. How well does ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ podcast fit with those ideas?
5. Look at the material on the next two slides – on sound and on time. Can you make
connections to the podcast series? How does it manipulate time, and what are the
effects? Does sound here work in the way(s) critics such as Elferen suggest, and
what does this mean for audio – podcast, radio, etc. – as a (Gothic) medium?
‘The crucial activity of the Gothic imagination was seen as inspiring terror and power, which was accomplished by
creating sublime effects based on Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry [1757]. The sublime signals the limits of rationality – the
“sleep” of reason – and was best communicated by obscurity. So in the same spirit as the recipes ”to make a romance”,
“seven types of obscurity” could be proposed for a Gothic novel:
1. Meteorological (mists, clouds, wind, rain, storm, tempest, smoke, darkness, shadows, gloom);
2. Topographical (impenetrable forests, inaccessible mountains, chasms, gorges, deserts, blasted heaths, icefields,
the boundless ocean);
3. Architectural (towers, prisons, castles covered in gargoyles and crenellations, abbeys and priories, tombs, crypts,
dungeons, ruins, graveyards, mazes, secret passages, locked doors)
4. Material (masks, veils, disguises, billowing curtains, suits of armour, tapestries);
5. Textual (riddles, rumours, folklore, unreadable manuscripts and inscriptions, ellipses, broken texts, fragments,
clotted language, polysyllabism, obscure dialect, inserted narratives, stories-within-stories);
6. Spiritual (religious mystery, allegory and symbolism, Roman Catholic ritual, mysticism, freemasonry, magic and the
occult, Satanism, witchcraft, summonings, damnation);
7. Psychological (dreams, visions, hallucinations, drugs, sleep-walking, madness, split personalities, mistaken
identities, doubles, derangement, ghostly presences, forgetfulness, death, hauntings).’
▪ “For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of
inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two
dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression of sickening descent
into disintegration.”
▪ ‘[A] Gothic tale usually takes place (at least some of the time) in an antiquated or
seemingly antiquated space – be it a castle, a foreign palace, a vast prison, a
subterranean crypt, a graveyard, a primeval frontier or island, a large old house or
theatre, an aging city or urban underworld, a decaying storehouse, factory,
laboratory, public building, or some new recreation of an older venue, such as an
office with old filing cabinets, an overworked spaceship, or a computer memory.
Within this space, or a combination of such spaces, are hidden some secrets from
the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically,
physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story. These hauntings can take
many forms, but they frequently assume the features of ghosts, specters, or
monsters (mixing features from different realms of being, often life and death) that
rise from within the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it from other realms, to
manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be buried successfully
from view.’
 SOUND
• In her chapter, Sonic Gothic, Isabella van Elferen refers to
sound in terms of ‘announcements of supernatural terror
[…] from the rustling and breathing in the labyrinths
beneath the castle of Otranto’ onwards. Elferen suggests
that ‘[t]he obtrusive uncanniness of these Gothic sounds is
caused by their seeming lack of physical origin. Upon the
sound of approaching footsteps we look around us, seeking
visual confirmation of the presence suggested by those
sounds. If the confirmation cannot be given, a fundamental
physical law seems to be thwarted.’ ‘[S]ound without
source suggests spectrality’ – though the dwelling with the
ghost (Derrida) that goes along with such ‘temporal
dislodgement’ is also more comfortable ‘than unthinkable
possibilities like the “un-blackness” of non-meaning’ (The
Gothic World, pp. 429-30).
 TIME
• Gothic texts contain time-ghosts of various kinds.
• ‘The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my
tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most
profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the
universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent
and fruitful theme in all human expression’ (Lovecraft,
‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, 1933)
• The theme is much more fully developed in Lovecraft’s
story, ‘The Shadow out of Time’. It is also the theme of
recent ‘Lovecraftian’ sci-fi films such as Interstellar and
Arrival. Here, time is ‘enemy’ and ‘weapon’ – and, with a
‘humanist’ turn away from Lovecraft’s bleak vision – the
‘element’ to be embraced and emotionally transformed.