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54 pages

English

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Rhode Island-born writer H.P. Lovecraft is regarded by many as one of the most significant figures in the genre of horror literature. In this lengthy and engaging essay, Lovecraft sets out his own views on horror and "weird fiction," and details the techniques and methods he employs to evoke spine-tingling terror in readers in renowned stories such as "The Call of Cthulu."

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 octobre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776672097
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
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H. P. LOVECRAFT

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Supernatural Horror in Literature First published in 1927 Epub ISBN 978-1-77667-209-7 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77667-210-3 © 2016 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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I - Introduction II - The Dawn of the Horror Tale III - The Early Gothic Novel IV - The Apex of Gothic Romance V - The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction VI - Spectral Literature on the Continent VII - Edgar Allan Poe VIII - The Weird Tradition in America IX - The Weird Tradition in the British Isles X - The Modern Masters
I - Introduction
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THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest andstrongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts fewpsychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish forall time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as aliterary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of amaterialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions andexternal events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates theæsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" thereader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of allthis opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attainedremarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound andelementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, mustnecessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisitesensitiveness.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because itdemands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacityfor detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough fromthe spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, andtales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimentaldistortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place inthe taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course theseordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But thesensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancyinvades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount ofrationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrillof the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involveda psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded inmental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coevalwith the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, andtoo much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potencyover a very important, though not numerically great, minority of ourspecies.
Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environmentin which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and paingrew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood,whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemedwith them in the early days—were naturally woven such personifications,marvelous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hitupon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. Theunknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitiveforefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamitiesvisited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons,and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we knownothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewisehelped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and ingeneral, all the conditions of savage dawn—life so strongly conducedtoward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at thethoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has becomesaturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as amatter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent sofar as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; forthough the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting forthousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs mostof the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inheritedassociations clings round all the objects and processes that were oncemysterious; however well they may now be explained. And more than this,there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in ournervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were theconscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly thanpleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of theunknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventionalreligious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and moremaleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popularsupernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by thefact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus makingany kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonderand curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keenemotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessityendure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraidof the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse willalways tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds ofstrange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or presshideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead andthe moonstruck can glimpse.
With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literatureof cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and nobetter evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulsewhich now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to trytheir hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their mindscertain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickenswrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem Childe Roland;Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel ElsieVenner; F. Marion Crawford, The Upper Berth and a number of otherexamples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, The Yellow WallPaper; whilst the humorist, W. W. Jacobs, produced that able melodramaticbit called The Monkey's Paw.
This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a typeexternally similar but psychologically widely different; the literatureof mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to besure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical orhumorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removesthe true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not theliterature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale hassomething more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted formclanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless andunexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and theremust be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becomingits subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—amalign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Naturewhich are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and thedaeligmons of unplumbed space.
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to anytheoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabricshave their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work isunconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through materialwhose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is theall-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not thedovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say,as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach orproduce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finallyexplained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear;but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolatedsections, atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of truesupernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale notby the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by theemotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If theproper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on itsown merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is laterdragged down. The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether ofnot there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and ofcontact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awedlistening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching ofoutside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And ofcourse, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmospherethe better it is as a work of art in the given medium.
II - The Dawn of the Horror Tale
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AS may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primalemotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speechthemselves.
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of allraces, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chroni