Latest
HP Lovecraft Time, Duality and Identity Crisis
HP Lovecraft wavered between seeing human existence as being totally meaningless, lost in the vastness of the cosmos (see also Douglas Adams and The Total Perspective Vortex, in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy as a portrayal of the same thing ) and ego building certainty from the historical stance. In other words his racism as seen in his support of The Color Line, by William Benjamin Smith and identification with his ancestral family home, Providence, Rhode Island must be weighed against his scientific realism on the futility of human life, when measured against the vastness of space and the immensity of time.
This personal and racial identity crisis shows in his work and perhaps his life (both his parents ended up in an insane asylum and he suffered night terrors. This condition is where the dreamer has nightmares that they carry over to waking, screaming in terror, sitting bolt upright in bed and not responding to the real world when mobile in this state but running around in fear).
H P Lovecraft’s main protagonist in several stories, wander vast alien landscapes or discovers alternative realities, co-existing within our own as in Dagon or At The Mountains Of Madness. If his heroes don’t lose their lives they may lose their minds, becoming crushed wrecks , whose world view is shattered by their discoveries. Only the modern horror / science fiction films of directors like Ridley Scott, have managed to capture these strange vistas of alien worlds, full of hostile life forms and the changeling angle of people not being what they seem / were (Kafka’s Metamorphosis also comes to mind in this context ). An example of Lovecraft’s attempt at this, includes The Rats In The Walls, where the hero sinks deeper and deeper into recidivism, the further he explores the secrets in his ancestral home ( the psychoanalytic movement would explore this area of the unconscious through the works of Freud and Jung, in dreamwork and relaxed recall on a couch). In The Shadow Over Innsmouth the hero discovers that he is tainted with the very genetic make-up he feared in the locals (Ridley Scott’s Prometheus harks back to this).
Lovecraft’s horror of coloured people and his fear of having ‘tainted blood,‘ has been disclosed as a possible reality in a scientific study which showed that people can indeed appear white but have genetic characteristics, revealing African ancestry. In psychological terms his reaction could be categorised as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), behind which lies the phobia of being contaminated by external forces, most notably germs but also other poisonous materials. In the film Coming To America, Eddie Murphy donned make-up that turned him from a coloured man into a caucasian. Imagine how Lovecraft or other racists would react to this trick being played on them and how it would shatter their certainty of superiority?
This whole question of identity (who are we really?) was also covered by Edgar Allan Poe in the story William Wilson and in the Roger Moore film, The Man Who Haunted Himself. Even Peter Sellers portrayal of Dr Strangelove , disclosed a man at war with himself. These two sides of reality or primitive versus civilised (past versus present) was explored by Robert Louis Stephenson in his book and various film versions . In the film by Amicus, From Beyond The Grave, David Warner faced this mirror image self or alter ego and in the end was replaced by it: two way mirrors can hide an unseen, unconscious predatory self which makes the conscious self, paranoid prey or victim of this unknown being.
Returning to Lovecraft, the 1993 film The Necronomicon, based on three of his stories, had a segment called Whispers, where one of the characters explained very eloquently to the female lead that once her human consciousness was replaced by one of the creatures she faced, she would see them in a whole new light and her old self likewise. Poe himself carried this theme forward in Ligeia, where the main protagonist’s second wife dies, coming back to life but with the personality of his first wife, reborn.
Even in our own lives is to be seen this dual nature of reality; the child, a clean slate out to fill the emptiness of experience, its primitive mind yearns for and at the other end of life, the wrecked body and mind of the worn out explorer (the shuffling zombie): the child comes from this state of nothingness and the old return there. Ouroborus or the mythical snake eating its own tail, reflects the future feeding off the past. In between lies lies normal life or continuation of existence. This conveyor belt of growth, leads us into the world with wonder and out of it, in the horror of knowing it is all going to end and not necessarily pleasantly. Horror is this dissolution of the body (the destruction of form) or the loss of our faculties.
Awareness is that blank slate, which records everything as it goes along (the camera, the observer, the learner, the child). It is the mindless dreamer, swimming in a sea of new experiences as opposed to the old person, drowning in a plethora of memories – a mobile library of saved information from the past, slowly rotting back into the dust it came from. Here we see in Lovecraft and others of that ilk, a fear of sleep as being that little death that takes us away, however temporarily, from the certainty of the created world around them and into the palette, where creativity can make hell in all its fear (the symbolism of dreams as envisioned by the psychoanalysis movement).
Those who saw Lovecraft only from the point of view, of schlock horror missed the dreamscapes and alternative realities, featured in his other stories. Freud would have understood the nightmare terror and Jung the archetypal figures, haunting those vast, alien landscapes. Lovecraft feared dissolution of the self (existential angst), not physical death so much as loss of identity. His horror at the idea of a sophisticated self being replaced by a more primitive version is not totally racial but one whose faculties have been lost through old age.
The past is the only thing we can be certain of as recorded time, whether individual memory or written archives by society. In memory is to be found a sense of identity (belonging) but the change that movement brings, erodes that certainty, however slowly and replaces it with a quicksand of sensory doubt. It is what leads to sleep deprivation, where fear of loss takes over from wakeful certainty. Ironically this cannot be avoided as hallucinations drags us screaming and shouting back into the world of dreams and visions (fluid reality), where nothing is what it seems – hence perhaps Lovecraft’s night terrors and powerful imagination.
3 reactions 
