"There are more things
in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
It is 1926.
The TV is demonstrated:
Mussolini is in power:
The General Strike takes place in
the world's biggest empire:
The First War is
a painful and recent memory of machines crushing men like insects and a whole
generation of Europeans is raised almost fatherless. Communism has beaten off
an international coalition and Stalin reigns supreme now that Lenin is dead.
Oswald Spengler has already proclaimed in the wunderbuch of 1917 Decline of
the West that the artistic and political culture of the West has petrified
into an unalterable form of civilisation, of numbers and law-tables. Max Weber
has identified the West’s administrative science of bureaucracy as an iron cage
of an unfeeling, impersonal age. Franz Kafka has populated the iron cage with fictive
victims. Freud sees cocks and fannies everywhere. Already more than forty years
has passed since Nietzsche wrote the immortal warning, ‘God is dead.’ So to
1926: an American writer of pulp fiction named Howard Phillips Lovecraft writes
a short story in the Gothic horror genre, called The Call of Cthulu.
Its publication
in 1928 is not an historical event, but then works of genre – horror, romance,
even science fiction – have never been historical events. Invariably genre
works drop out of all but the history books of film, literature and stage as
soon as the print is dry on the reviews. Whereas the near-contemporaneous Ulysses is talked about very much in
terms of the historical context in which it was published; whereas the
admittedly somewhat older Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon is pointed at as a fateful ‘kink’ in art history’s path – so genre
works are analysed generally without reference to the historical context in
which they are created. Ulysses
concatenates Freud, the death of god, the plethora of modern man’s leanings and
his consequent exhaustion – it is timely; rechtzeitig.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon conjures up
feelings of fragmentation and perspective which were thought – perhaps only
subconsciously – but not yet expressed so forcefully. Perhaps that is the clue
– art begets art. Cubism emerges from painting, bleeds into writing
(Apollinaire, Faulkner, Wyndham Lewis); writing captures dream analysis and
commits it to the canvas (Dali, Magritte); the news reels find their way into
Dos Passos’s USA. Each cross-pollination
provides extra momentum when viewed as Art with a capital ‘A,’ creating a sense
of its own relevance and historicity.
But horror – a
genre – remained mere entertainment, outside of the boundaries of serious art
and a mere reflection of the times,
not a commentary on them, as if entertainment could only unwittingly catch the
diseases of the age and not diagnose them.
Works which have
history on their side are specifically and consciously new pieces of work which challenge the canon; this is the way of
art since at the latest the Romantic period in the late eighteenth century. A
serious work of art separates its cause from its effect. By contrast, Chekhov’s
Lady with the Little Dog, which
Nabokov called the greatest short work in all Russian literature, is on the
face of it a simple tale of forlorn attraction between strangers – a simple
set-up which tells us that this story is not about new sensations or
contraptions or geographies or creatures. To stretch the use of two of our
ordinary terms, Lady with the Little Dog
is ‘about’ forlorn attraction; its ‘proper sensation’ concerns something
deeper, something which critics find more difficult to agree upon: modern
alienation, perhaps; or hopes; or fate. It is this indeterminable quality which
separates art from genre. It is quality
which then separates accomplished works of art and genre from works which
merely aspire to be art or genre, and which is outside of the ambit of this
essay.
The horror genre
– like all genre – is self-limiting. Its tropes almost anyone can enumerate
with the minimum of fuss – and this in all probability is the cause of its
being excluded from the serious arts. Horror plays to something primal and
pre-existing in the human experience: horror is about what’s lurking in the
shadows; it is about our fear of death; it is about our fear of the ugly and
deformed. Lovecraft himself said that the ‘criterion of authenticity’ for a
work of horror is ‘the creation of a given sensation,’[i] in which ‘proper
sensations are excited.’ How? Through the creation of newer, weirder forms of
dread. The history of the serious arts tells us that these are themes which
need not do anything new in order to function correctly. Horror’s function is to
create a sense of fear and foreboding, and sometimes terror. As a genre, it is
autotelic. In beginning, middle and end, cause and effect are melded together
into an alloy whose sole purpose is to ‘horrify’ the observer. The variety of
modes and effects are what provides the genre its depth. The dread of a vampire
– a charming parasite capable of reason, but cursed to live forever – and the
terror of a zombie – Westernised as a fallen man, devoid of all reason and
impelled by the slimmest residue of brute instinct – are qualitatively
different modes and effects of horror. Crossover has long been part of the
horror genre – theoretical battles set out by enthusiasts in a game which is
not different in form from a debate between two philosophers about essence. What
better represents the essence of horror – Frankenstein or the Wolf Man? Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, Dracula versus Frankenstein – these
two-for-ones are pitched like The Big Fight, each one a battle between different manifestations of the 'given sensation' of horror, each fight able to be settled only by the director's preference and the sympathies of the audience.
As a piece of
Gothic horror fiction, this preamble is designed to show that the historicity of The Call of Cthulu is not in question – so why call it to account? The introduction is necessary because
Call of Cthulu is as attuned to the
spirit of the age as the invention of TV is the age in which it is created, and
it has been ignored as such. Only if we understand the historical context in which it was written will
be able to appreciate the subtleties of The
Call of Cthulu – subtleties which, as will be shown, are ever more relevant
as we moderns in our everyday lives sink ever deeper into fantasy worlds coloured more by rationality and, conversely, simulacra than by danger and risk and the weird.
