Page 26 of 30

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 2:12 am
by Stormbringer
Snowy wrote:
Wed Oct 16, 2019 4:56 pm
If we are poking holes, you missed one Doug:
H P Lovecraft wrote:After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
Now, deep breath, a 'single' vigintillion is...

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

And Cthulhu hasn't been loose for more than one of them.

According to science, planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old (I think we can discount creationist views :lol:), a whole lot less than a vigintillion.

Therefore, Cthulhu was parked in R'lyeh for an untold length of time in the place where Earth would come to be, the city's structure designed for talking apes that would come into existence in the last 60,000 - 125,000 years.

At least we know why he made all his little miniature statues - he had plenty of time on his hands!


Good find, Snowy.

Four things:

1. I am a creationist, so I don't discount those views.

2. I think one of the points of the story is that our science is actually wrong in its assumptions. I actually believe that anyway, as a creationist, but Lovecraft goes the other way (I suspect) and suggets the earth is far, far older than our science can determine.

3. You make a good point about humans being mind-bogglingly "recent" in comparison with Cthulhu. That being the case, who did The Great Old Ones bring the idols for?

4. The "vigintillians" might be an exaggerated statement for dramatic effect. In the story there are references to Cthuhlu being like a "mountain" walking (or stumbling) and even being "miles high". A creature whose head can be cut open by a steam ship and who can grab three humans in its hand is probably more likely to be the size of Big Ben, if we're being accurate.

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 9:52 am
by Stormbringer
Oh, two more things I wanted to say:

1. I forgot to mention that Lovecraft drew a picture of what he imagined Cthulhu to look like:

Image


2. Earlier I mentioned that the text identities Irem, City of the Pillars as the heart of the Cthulhu Cult. A more careful reading of the text suggests that the Cult centre might be in Arabia, where Irem is, not necessarily located in Irem itself.


Sly, do you have any thoughts on this one?

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 10:57 am
by Snowy
No offence intended Doug and apologies for any caused.

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 11:07 am
by Stormbringer
Not at all, Snowy; I accept that my views are in the minority in this country and considered laughable by most. ;)

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 4:43 pm
by Snowy
I certainly struggle on that front, but not about to rubbish anyone's views in our friendly corner of the web.

EDIT: Not intentionally anyway :)

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 8:22 pm
by Stormbringer
I wonder what Sly Boots thinks of TCoC? ¬_¬

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 8:38 pm
by Sly Boots
He's thinking he probably needs to read this again in order to go into this much detail -_-

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2019 11:39 am
by Stormbringer
So, is this happening? ¬_¬

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2019 12:02 pm
by Sly Boots
Honestly, I think move on to the next. I've tried a couple of times but I don't really have the enthusiasm for rereading a story I only read a few months back, and I don't have the recollection necessary for a detailed breakdown. I liked it; of this and the Dunwich Horror, which I also read, I prefer this one.

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2019 12:14 pm
by Stormbringer
Very well.

The next story is...

THE PICTURE IN THE HOUSE

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/tex ... on/ph.aspx

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2019 11:21 am
by Stormbringer
Bloody hell, I forgot a really important detail about The Call of Cthulhu!
...the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

This "much-discussed couplet" we have seen before in The Nameless City, where the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is first mentioned. The Necronomicon, which he wrote, has popped up here and there since, including in the Starry Wisdom church in Providence (from The Haunter of the Dark), but you may recall this book was first mentioned in the first story we read in this club, The Hound.

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2019 4:37 pm
by Snowy
The Picture In The House

Enjoyable and short, and with a few choice elements.

First off, I believe this is the story that first introduces "Lovecraft Country", his invented Miskatonic Valley and Arkham Asylum.

I also wonder if the protagonist is not Randolph Carter, a protagonist in a number of his other, later tales. The location fits, as does their being a genealogist.

I had hoped we were going to avoid any racism, but that was brutally dashed (they made the black people white, gad how terrible, rocked me to my very core...). Also not sure about the scary houses... "Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from traveled ways".

I wasn't sure what the real horror was, the Africans depicted as white or the potential cannibal old man who seems by his ancient accent, recollections and of course the blood dripping from the ceiling to definitely be extending his span upon the earth.

The lightning bolt brings a quick ending to the tale - a bit hackneyed but effective nonetheless.

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2019 3:55 pm
by Stormbringer
Snowy wrote:
Thu Oct 24, 2019 4:37 pm
First off, I believe this is the story that first introduces "Lovecraft Country"

It is indeed. Just as The Call of Cthulhu really introduces the Mythos at large (if you don't count the earlier tales which mention Alhazred and the Necronomicon), The Picture in the House, small and localised as it is, introduces us to the Miskatonic Valley area: a region of New England which Lovecraft made up as a locale for many of his later horror tales, which merges so realistically and seamlessly with actual locations it seems surprising it's not on any real world map.

Snowy wrote:I had hoped we were going to avoid any racism, but that was brutally dashed (they made the black people white, gad how terrible, rocked me to my very core...)

I wasn't sure when the sarcasm here began and when it ended? :-k

The Africans being depicted as white is due to the fact that Theodor de Bry, the 16th century illustrator to Pigafetta's African travel journal, Regnum Congo, had never actually traveled to Africa and didn't know what actual Africans looked like.

The infamous twelfth plate -- THE PICTURE (in the house) -- is this one here:

Image

The human body being chopped up in the background is the linchpin of the story.

Here's a bit of information I dug up on the subject:
De Bry’s copperplate engravings were the first comprehensive collection of images depicting the overseas world. As such, they fed a public hungry for images of exotic lands and peoples. De Bry himself had never travelled overseas, so his naturalistic illustrations were often far from accurate. Many of the figures have decidedly European appearances, and cultural artifacts are often invented and combined in fanciful ways. Nevertheless, because they were high-quality illustrations that could be easily reproduced, as they were up through the eighteenth century, they played a very important role in shaping Germans’ and Europeans’ perceptions of distant lands. Indeed, they were far more important than the texts they illustrated.

But this isn't a story about white African cannibals. It is really a story about Lovecraft's ideas concerning the Puritan mindset of rural New England, and what it might be capable of doing when combined with certain conditions. He wrote much on the subject, but here's an excerpt from Lovecraft's famous essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature (well-worth a read) on the subject:

H.P. Lovecraft wrote:America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognised as fruitful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving’s lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man’s relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival—all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare.

He repeats the above sentiment in the story:
H.P. Lovecraft wrote:Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed.

The real horror of this story is that a modern-day descendant of the Puritans, cut off from civilization through the cultural traditions of his forefathers, has got hold of an image of cannibals in Africa from an old book -- cannibals who look like him -- and he has, through staring at this picture, and unfettered by the chains of civilization, become just like them. The picture has become a reality, but not where you'd expect it to happen -- not in far-away Africa -- but right here where Lovecraft's readers live. A historical oddity has become a horrible reality. In Lovecraft's own words:
H.P. Lovecraft wrote:...the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Final thoughts:

1. I assumed that the missing district schoolmaster and Parson Clark, who the cannibal mentions as either having disappeared or mysteriously died, have both fallen victim to his hunger.

2. At first I wasn't sure if the protagonist survived the lightning bolt at the end. He says:

A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.

I thought the "oblivion" he referred to meant his own death. But then when I re-read it, I caught this line, which precedes the final one in the text, but clearly takes place afterwards:
I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins.

3. The fact that the house and its occupant were all destroyed, yet the narrator survives, in a storm which took place out of season, seemed to me -- just like the ending of The Haunter of the Dark -- almost like an act of divine judgement to prevent an evil from emerging from its place of solitude. You'll recall that the lightning bolt that destroys The Haunter (and Robert Blake with it) moments after it escapes from the church tower, does so at the very second the Italian immigrants offer up a prayer. Similarly, this horror, though much more mundane, is obliterated by lightning, just as it threatens to "consume" (perhaps literally) our narrator.

Lovecraft was a staunch atheist, but there is an interesting image used here which smacks of divine wrath (or perhaps just a convenient way to end a story).

4. I bet you thought this tale had no Dutchmen in it, right?

WRONG! Theodor de Bry, the illustraor who created The Picture (in the house), was Dutch. Now you know the answer to what the real horror of this tale is!



P.S. I don't think there's a shred of evidence the narrator is Randolph Carter.

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2019 5:48 pm
by Snowy
Very interesting Doug.

I should have known that the blasphemous Dutch were at the root of it!

My musings over whether the author was Carter were only based on geography and occupation - I searched online but while I found others who shared the suspicion couldn't find a thing to reinforce it.

Re: The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2019 6:39 pm
by Stormbringer
I don't think it is mentioned anywhere that Carter is a genealogist? Can you prove me wrong?

Hey, Sly, are you going to be reading this one? :)