The Moral of Lovecraft
Part of an ongoing discussion on the topic of whether horror is by its nature moralistic:
Zaklog the Great opines:
I would second the idea that horror is commonly (but not always) a moral genre. Fairly simple analysis of many popular horror stories and movies show that often the victims are, after a sense, punished for various sins. The punishment is usually what most of us would call disproportionate, but it is directly related to their own moral failings.
I suspect most of Lovecraft’s stories fall outside of this. But I can’t think off the top of my head of other horror fiction that generally does. (And good Lord, that man could not write a surprise ending to save his life. Not that they’re not enjoyable stories, by any means, but you always see it coming so far away even when it’s obvious he’s trying for a shocker.)
Ah, that is an interesting topic! I venture that Lovecraft did have a moral point to most of his stories, and most especially to DREAMQUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH, his last one published. It is merely not a moral a Christian or pagan would recognized, but it is one any man made uneasy about scientific progress of the trouser-wearing apes, alone in the vast and deadly void of an incomprehensible and noneuclidean cosmos would immediately recognize.
Know thyself that that thou art small.
Keep your head down.
There are some things man was not meant to know.
The universe is a horror, and life is pain, and death is oblivion in which no dreams relieve. Therefore the only pleasure, the only sanity, are in the small and utterly arbitrary and ultimately meaningless things, the simple pleasures, of a civilized man in his small and safe surroundings: the small cobbled streets of colonial towns, moss-grown thatched-roof village cottages and crofts, cats lapping cream.
The moral of all Lovecraft’s stories is as clear as an Aesop fable. It is spoken my King Kuranes of the short story “Celephaïs” (1922) when he makes his appearance as a special guest star in Dream-Quest:
“The old chief of the cats also told Carter where to find his friend King Kuranes, who in Carter’s latter dreams had reigned alternately in the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights at Celephais and in the turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian. It seemed that he could no more find content in those places, but had formed a mighty longing for the English cliffs and downlands of his boyhood; where in little dreaming villages England’s old songs hover at evening behind lattice windows, and where grey church towers peep lovely through the verdure of distant valleys. He could not go back to these things in the waking world because his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a small tract of such countryside in the region east of
the city where meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to the foot of the Tanarian Hills. There he dwelt in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea, and tried to think it was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and where thirteen generations of his forefathers had first seen the light. And on the coast nearby he had built a little Cornish fishing village with
steep cobbled ways, settling therein such people as had the most English faces, and seeking ever to teach them the dear remembered accents of old Cornwall fishers. And in a valley not far off he had reared a great Norman Abbey whose tower he could see from his window, placing around it in the churchyard grey stones with the names of his ancestors carved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like Old England’s moss. For though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstasies and delights, novelties and excitements at his command, he would gladly have resigned forever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his being and of which he must always be immutably a part.”
And, after Carter explains his quest to find his fabulous sunset city:
“Kuranes furthermore doubted whether his guest would profit aught by coming to the city even were he to gain it. He himself had dreamed and yearned long years for lovely Celephais and the land of Ooth-Nargai, and for the freedom and colour and high experience of life devoid of its chains, and conventions, and stupidities. But now that he was come into that city and that land,
and was the king thereof, he found the freedom and the vividness all too soon worn out, and monotonous for want of linkage with anything firm in his feelings and memories. He was a king in Ooth-Nargai, but found no meaning therein, and drooped always for the old familiar things of England that had shaped his youth. All his kingdom would he give for the sound of Cornish
church bells over the downs, and all the thousand minarets of Celephais for the steep homely roofs of the village near his home. So he told his guest that the unknown sunset city might not hold quite that content he sought, and that perhaps it had better remain a glorious and half-remembered dream. For he had visited Carter often in the old waking days, and knew well the lovely
New England slopes that had given him birth.At the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the early remembered scenes; the glow of Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and winding hill streets of quaint Kingsport, the hoary gambrel roofs of ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, and the blessed meads and valleys where stone walls rambled and white farmhouse gables peeped out from bowers of verdure. “
I have not read much of the work of the Edwardian fantasist and cynic James Branch Cabell, but I have been told that his themes preach a similar tale. I have read nearly everything ever written by Lord Dunsany, and you will find the same melancholy vision there: the vision of these men, and the moral of all their Aesopic fables, is the same: that life is spend chasing alluring illusions, which always turn to dust or madness upon embrace, but that life without illusions is intolerable.
They are tales told by mean who have surrendered all hope, and who will not travel to the country of joy, on the sour and cynical adage that whatever sounds too good to be true is not true.
Whether or not Poe has a similar theme hidden behind his works, I must leave to someone more versed in Poe than I to say. My passing impression from having read Poe in school is that Poe is far less sentimental than these men.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
