Group Sex with Ugly People

Now there's a title that should generate an interesting set of referrals...

Sorry, fetishists, this post is about one of the least erotic books ever written, a collection of Lovecraft tributes called The Starry Wisdom and published by Creation Books.

I picked it up for free on a Christmas-gift trade-in - given the choice between the gibbering madness of the Great Old Ones and Phil Jackson's autobiography, I'll take Shub-Niggurath any day, thank you - because it features the work of some of my favorite authors and because I've been interested in Lovecraft ever since Doug got me hooked via the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game back in high school. (By the way, I'm the reason he's called Dead Allen, thank you very much.) The anthology is well worth reading for the contributions by comics superstars Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, as well as some fine if old and oft-reprinted tales by Brian Lumley, J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, and others. And therein lies the problem.

Because the rest of the book is a brimming bucket of swill, a collection of aggressively artless nonstories by people who write in all-caps and sign their work "Rotting Pig." People who think prose-poem transcriptions of "sex-ritual invocations" are as fascinating to us as to them. People who spell "magic" with a "k."

Reading this book - no, touching this book, the simple act of contemplating the purchase of this book - is like being invited to have group sex with ugly people. Sure, there may be one or two attractive folks present, but you'll have to wade through all the twig-bearded Ren-festers to get to them, and frankly even the pretty ones are a little suspect if they're running with this crowd.

Look, I realize that we are dealing with H.P. Lovecraft here, that by definition any tribute anthology is going to be produced by and for a certain morbid and donnish slice of fandom, but these guys surely are the furries of the Lovecraft set. They take this stuff entirely too seriously, not as art but as a cosmology. With Fritz Leiber or Robert Bloch or even poor, talentless Clark Ashton Smith you don't get the sense that they believed in this shit and they certainly wouldn't have liked it if they did.

And this brings me to the sleaziest part of Creation Books' unwelcome come-on, its insinuation that the Great Old Ones somehow represent forces of sexual and psychological liberation. That if you resist the raising of sunken Ry'leh then you're just a hopeless square, a conformist, a patriarch, or a foolish rationalist in the face of the absolute void of reason. (A lot of great stories have been written on this last theme. "Extracted from the Mouth of Rotting Pig" is not one of them.)

These ideas wouldn't be a bad basis for a psychological criticism of the Lovecraft canon, and in fact the authors of some of the anthology's worst fiction contribute a couple of interesting essays to this effect at the back of the book. But such pretensions fall apart in the stories, where the authors have to act as if (and many of them seem to genuinely believe) Lovecraft's creations are real. Is there truly anything liberating about the mass death, horror, and rape that figure so prominently in so many of these stories? (It's particularly galling to see the authors and editors of these rape fantasies crowing about how antipatriarchal their little book is.) Are they really preferable to the "patriarchal vision of order, logic, and reason" at which so many of the lesser contributors go out of their way to sneer?

Much of the book's revolutionary posturing appears to be based on, I would submit, a fundamental misapprehension of Lovecraft's work. The Mythos stories derive their power from Lovecraft's terror at the loss of reason and patriarchal order, but do not offer any viable or particularly attractive alternatives to them. They cannot, if they're going to be truly horrific.

There was the blueprint of an intriguing book somewhere in The Starry Wisdom. There must be room for some more sensible reading of Lovecraft that acknowledges or even reverses his obvious horror at the feminine, the nonwhite, the Other (what is "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" if not a paranoid fear of miscegenation?) without also uncritically accepting his entirely negative metaphors for them. If you really wanted to mount a "progressive" reaction to Lovecraft - and I'm not sure that such a project would be worthwhile, as it might completely undermine the ethos of the whole Lovecraft mythos - wouldn't you be better served by changing the terms of those metaphors?

Some contributors try, and some even succeed (Morrison's "Lovecraft in Heaven"). Others, like Alan Moore, accept Lovecraft's universe at its most grotesque but don't try to prettify it with a couple of first-semester grad-school arguments. The anthology is worth reading.

If you don't mind buying half a book.

Comments

[Reese]

I would argue that the Cthulhu Mythos is, by its very nature, asexual and bereft of any eroticism. The lead character of the majority of Lovecraft's tales is some stodgy New Englander, stiff and upright within a society that takes its tea at a particular time of day. Upon discovering that his basement is full of three anthropomorphised ducklings, he inevitably goes mad, and embarks on some attempt at explaining the cause of his lunacy to an outsider (usually the reader, or perhaps a skeptical friend). It's highly formulaic, really, but to suggest that there is any sexuality in this xenophobia seems to be a stretch to me. The fact that the lead characters typically only glance at the horrors before going mad seems to illustrate how completely removed from intimacy the character is. They rarely interact with the horror, and if so, it is only to be further repulsed by it. If the horror is supposed to represent a repressed sexuality, one would think that the madness would be caused by the lead character's subversive /need/ to interact with the horror, rather than simply the knowledge that it exists.

I would instead argue that the various cthulhoid ducklings are actually symbols of an individual's insignificance. That is, the lead character (we'll call him "Alex" for convenience) is being shown a truth which is too vast in scope and breadth for him to accept. Perhaps that truth is the fact that beyond death, there is nothing. Perhaps it is the fact that the meaning of life is to consume life. Perhaps he is merely seeing the darkness within himself, and proves unable to withstand or accept it. Ultimately, though, all of Lovecraft's characters could not embrace the horror, but only loathe and flee it. There is never a possibility of attacking it, or defeating it (a truly patriarchal reaction to the unknown and one which would certainly lend itself to sexual allusions). There is no hope of reasoning with it, and to my knowledge, few of Lovecraft's characters ever embraced it as some newfound fate for themselves (Herbert West and perhaps Charles Dexter Ward being notable exceptions).

Even Herbert West's Frankenstein-like attempts at revivification always seemed very sterile and stoically removed from the darkness of the results (though the movie, as I recall, had the obligatory naked woman that seemed necessary in all horror movies of the eighties). His cadavers were not expressions of a need to procreate, as Frankenstein's was, but instead an attempt at proving his dominance over death, which is very alpha-male of him, but not especially sexual.

[ezrael]

Arguing that it's not very erotic I could agree with. Arguing that it's asexual doesn't wash. It's flooded with images of writing tentacles, gaping maws, diseased hybrids who stalk the earth and will in time sweep over it in a tide of mongrel frenzy...Lovecraft's very disdain for sexuality infuses the work, and it is that disdain that provides a great deal of the horror of it. (As does the racism. Lovecraft's fear of those mongrel hordes he ran into when he moved to New York shows up a lot.) The whole central plot to 'The Dunwich Horror' is all about alien monstrosities using sexual reproduction to force their way into our world, and 'The Shadow over Innsmouth' is a mammoth forced breeding program. Lovecraft's work swims in sexual imagery and sexual issues, if you care to see them.

I won't even get started on Shub Niggurath, who is often portrayed as some kind of twisted fertility goddess, the hideous bloated impersonal birthing impulse.

Unfortunately, the book Marc describes sounds as if it buys into Kenneth Grant's wholesale adoption of the Yog-Sothoth Cycle (as Lovecraft himself called it) into his 'Typhonian Magick'. Kenny did a lot to create this notion that Lovecraft was just too uptight to accept that the creatures of the mythos would free everyone (for more on that, see Colin Wilson's introduction in George Hay's book on the Necronomicon, an interesting but ultimately failed attempt to prove the book existed and that HPL's dad had a copy) and I think it's regrettable. When Lovecraft's stories work, they work because of the sheer alienation they cause. Embracing the creatures of Lovecraft's vision just renders them impotent, really, just another group of squamous critters waiting to end up in a Roger Corman film.

[Kevin J. Maroney]

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" isn't about a "forced breeding program", or about miscagenation; it's about being overwhelmed by a betrayal of reality that one cannot even fight because the fight was lost before one was born.

I do think that there is reproductive and/or sexual imagery in a lot of Lovecraft's work, but it's not central; there are a great many stories where it doesn't figure at all.

There's something to Kenneth Grant, at least as you present him here. Probably the single greatest failure of Lovecraft's ouevre is the "horror" of "The Whisperer in Darkness", where the shocking revelation is that people's minds can be transplanted into alien bodies which can roam between the stars, to which my reaction was, "How is this a horrible thing?" But Grant misses the effect of, say, "The Shadow out of Time", where the entire point of the story is that even the terrible and powerful Old Race is tiny, meaningless, empty in the face of the vastness of the universe. One can, if one chooses, decide that Lovecraft was just being a fuddy-duddy, but Lovecraft didn't create the stories he did by accident.

[ezrael]

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" isn't about a "forced breeding program", or about miscagenation; it's about being overwhelmed by a betrayal of reality that one cannot even fight because the fight was lost before one was born.

I'd agree that it isn't just about it, but the forced breeding aspect of the story is right up front. You can certainly see it as a metaphor for several different things (your idea is certainly a valid one) but it certainly can't be said to lack the surface theme just because there's a metaphoric power lurking behind or beneath it.

Probably the single greatest failure of Lovecraft's ouevre is the "horror" of "The Whisperer in Darkness", where the shocking revelation is that people's minds can be transplanted into alien bodies which can roam between the stars, to which my reaction was, "How is this a horrible thing?

Well, they don't exactly ask. The great horror in the mythos was, to me, the idea that humanity is utterly powerless (as you yourself pointed out above) and ultimately not much different than cattle. The Mi-Go might put your brain in a metal can to take into space with them, or the Elder Race might use your body as a tool to interface with our time and space. Lloigor might harvest your pain for food. You ultimately have no more chance to prevent your fate or choose it than the lowliest insect in the face of the unknowable vastness of existence.

[Marc]

I'm with Matt on this one; just because "The Shadow over Innsmouth," for example, contains other thematic elements doesn't mean that themes of miscegenation aren't there. In fact, they're the whole dynamic of that particular story. As Kevin says:

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" isn't about a "forced breeding program", or about miscagenation; it's about being overwhelmed by a betrayal of reality that one cannot even fight because the fight was lost before one was born.

Right. And the fight was lost before the narrator was born because he is the product of miscegenation.

The larger ontological dilemmas are unquestionably there in all of Lovecraft's fiction, but that doesn't negate the social, racial, and sexual dilemmas that Lovecraft places hand in hand with them.