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References to Mythology in Weird Fiction

One great literary device used to relate concepts to readers or to provoke a memory is the allusion. In Weird Fiction, allusions to classical mythology are often used to show how the author has twisted the reference or element for their own Weird narrative. In other places, the mythos may have been eroded entirely to create a more confusing and upsetting universe.

H.P. Lovecraft created his own mythos but ensured there was no all-encompassing theology to go with it. He intentionally left questions about the inner workings of his pantheon unanswered so that there would be no rational discourse regarding our relationship to these beings. We have no clear idea of what Cthulhu and other Great Old Ones have in store for us, nor what their goals are. One could compare it to the aliens in War of the Worlds (2005) – the giant Tripods walk like insects over the Earth, with no indication of their goals or communication with the humans below (except in the form of murder). Lovecraft uses this absence of theology to enhance his narratives of cosmic indifferentism – reminding us that humanity is as insignificant to the universe as a blade of grass would be to us.

In Franz Kafka’s works, there is no overarching mythos whatsoever – his works are largely unconnected, designed to thrust us into an unfamiliar world and force us to learn the rules or perish. While he may refer to a myth that we recognize, it becomes twisted under his narrative. One great example is the apparatus from In the Penal Colony. Kafka describes this device with a bed, inscriber, and harrow – a torture device made to tattoo a criminal with the description of their crime over a 12-hour period before executing them. It can be read as a reference to the Procrustean Bed in classical mythology. Procrustes was a character in Greek mythology who would demand that people conform to the length of a bed so that they would fit perfectly. If they were too tall, they would be beheaded, and if they were too short, they would be stretched to fit. The apparatus in Kafka’s tale also demands conformity in an extremely violent manner, but instead of conformity to a size, it is conformity to the law (often unjust, and without trial).

Another example of a mythology allusion in Weird Fiction is the musicians in Thomas Ligotti’s The Music of the Moon. The four musicians seem to be a sort of Siren. In classical mythology, Sirens were a sort of bird-person hybrid which would sing beautiful music to entice sailors to their doom. Ligotti puts his own Weird twist on the classic, recognizable Siren to be a group of spider-like creatures which cocoon their victims. There is also the possibility that the “four” musicians are actually one being manifesting as a group. The way they ask Tressor about his eyesight, one after another, and all parting to make room for him in unison strikes me as a hive-mind symptom. The man who gave Tressor the paper acts as a sort of lure, like those that hang off the faces of Anglerfish. In Ligotti’s tale, the musicians do not just lure insomniacs to their doom like the classical sirens, but they also steal their eyes for some unknown purpose – perhaps the ultimate release for those whose eyes refused to close.

#weird fiction #kafka #lovecraft #ligotti #mythology

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it-stops · 6 years

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Weird Fiction and Overlaps with Other Genres

Weird Fiction is its own genre, but it often has overlap with other (more well-known) genres. The results are new and interesting twists on familiar tropes, with the introduction of tropes that are specific to Weird Fiction as well.

Weird + Horror

While most Weird fiction has elements of horror to it, heightening the reader’s state of anxiety, some tales stand out above the rest as especially poignant blends of the two genres. The two that stand out most to me are The Death of Halpin Frayser by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito. The Death of Halpin Frayser stands out due to its dream-states, inclusion of a lich, and the mysterious circumstances of Frayser’s death. The Enigma of Amigara Fault is highly horrific due to its sheer body horror, especially combined with the artistic rendering.

Weird + Sci-Fi

Combining Weird fiction with Sci-Fi brings many opportunities to prey on our fear of technology, aliens, and the cosmos. Two great examples of this are The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis by Clark Ashton Smith and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis portrays a science expedition into an ancient Martian civilization, playing on the fear of aliens with brain leeches. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, while it was written prior to the age of the Internet, it resonates with a modern audience in its pinpoint accuracy of the fear of technology and Artificial Intelligence.

Weird + Historical Fiction

Weird Fiction is able to put an interesting twist on anything, and when combined with Historical fiction you get Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald. Gaiman twists the classic Sherlock Holmes story to reverse the roles of the traditional protagonists and antagonists, working in the Cthulhu mythos and pantheon of Lovecraftian gods.

Weird + Crime/Mystery

One of the best examples of the blending of Weird Fiction and Crime Fiction is The Autopsy by Michael Shea. The tale unfolds like a crime drama, walking the reader through the investigation of a cave-in that killed several miners. The twist comes in with the alien that inhabits one of the dead miners, revealed during the autopsy.

Weird + Romance

Romance is often a secondary aspect included in other genre fiction as part of the motivation of the protagonists. When combined with Weird Fiction, the result is tales like The Ice Man by Haruki Murakami. This is not a frequent combination, but when it occurs, it preys on our fear of abandonment and being changed by forces outside of our control.

Weird + Gothic Fiction

Gothic Fiction is one of the great predecessors to Weird Fiction and they are often grouped together under the same genre term (or Gothic Fiction is included as a subgenre of Weird Fiction). The combination of the two results in tales like The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, wherein the Weird events occur in the enclosed space of a Gothic house. This particular tale includes tropes such as the vampire, Gothic architecture, and the concept of claustrophobia.

Weird + Politics

This sort of blending is a little harder to describe, but it is best summarized as “anything written by Franz Kafka”. Kafka writes primarily about bureaucracy and socialism, but in a way that gives off a Weird atmosphere. Kafka’s The Imperial Message and In the Penal Colony contain these political messages and generated their own tropes that were so influential, they created a new genre – Kafkaesque.

Weird + Metafiction

Metafiction may be considered less of a genre and more of a trope, but it’s the best way to describe the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, which are highly self-referential and deal in concepts more than narratives. His works Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and The Library of Babel both deal in the trope of the Labyrinth, the Weird library, and the infinite. Blending these genres gives authors the opportunity to do worldbuilding and provoke philosophical thought in their audience.

Weird + Magic Realism/Fantasy

While Fantasy tends to be an immersive genre – clear rules and tropes with which the reader is familiar and can accept easily within the narrative – Magic Realism is a slightly different concept. It incorporates fable and folklore elements into the fiction but without emphasizing the magical aspects of them, as if to say that they have become everyday occurrences. The writings of Gabriel García Márquez showcase this overlap the best, as in The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. Márquez deals in themes of the missed encounter with the Weird and alienation from the miraculous.

#weird fiction #genre fiction

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it-stops · 6 years

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Nihilism and the Trope of the Call

Nihilism is the philosophical viewpoint that the universe is inherently meaningless and there is no point in trying to assign our own meaning to it. It eschews religion and morality to form an existence which exists only for the sake of existing, and nothing more. Recently, some people have opted for this viewpoint on life but with a more positive spin, citing “Optimistic Nihilism” – the belief that the universe has no meaning or goal for us as humans, so we get to decide what is important. Personally, I believe this viewpoint is closer to Existentialism or Absurdism, especially in the context of Weird Fiction, where Nihilism permeates many writers’ narratives.

One author who writes a great deal of Nihilism into his tales is Thomas Ligotti. Examples such as The Clown Puppet and The Last Feast of Harlequin are rife with nihilistic tendencies in the narrators. In the former, the narrator is plagued by “nonsense” (which could be interpreted as a dissociative disorder) and the clown puppet which visits him is simply a force of nature which he cannot control. Although he has made attempts to communicate with it and glean information from it, it is ultimately fruitless, contributing to the nihilistic outlook of the tale. With The Last Feast of Harlequin, the narrator suffers from seasonal depression, a mental illness which may inflict him with a nihilistic view on life. The other place nihilism manifests itself in this tale is in the Call.

The trope of the Call is essential to Weird Fiction – it’s the unseen force that pulls the protagonists and/or narrators further into the Weird. Like the Sirens of classical mythology, the characters are drawn against their better judgement, unable to fight against Fate pulling them to their doom. It can be seen as a metafictional element, referencing us as the readers being drawn to Weird Fiction as a genre (regardless of whether a fixation on the macabre is healthy). In The Last Feast of Harlequin, the narrator is called by the rituals associated with the depressed clowns in the festival, ultimately bringing him into a cult ritual which secures his place among those he studied. Another Ligotti tale which demonstrates the Call is The Music of the Moon, in which an insomniac is drawn into the lair of a group of creatures who harvest the eyes of those who listen to their – literal – siren-song.

Another great example of the Call is in the short graphic novel The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito. It is a short, but disturbing, tale about the discovery of a collection of human-shaped holes in the side of a mountain after an earthquake. Upon seeing them on the news, people recognize the holes as being “made for them”, and when they find their hole, they are compelled to enter – never to return.

The reason the Call in Weird Fiction feels so nihilistic is that it’s inescapable. In another genre, the hero might have a chance of escape, but in Weird Fiction, this is not the case. Even if they manage to escape its grasp, they’re pulled back into the Weird in one way or another.

#weird fiction #the call #nihilism #ligotti #junji ito

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it-stops · 6 years

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On Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”

The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft is steeped in Gothic and Decadence imagery. The architecture, the tropes, the morbid themes: they all create this mournful, excessive, and tense atmosphere. Lovecraft gives loving description to this castle in which the narrator “grew up,” and immerses the reader in a world of darkness so that by the time the narrator finally reaches the light, it feels as though we, too, have never been bathed in it either. The library is a projection of the place where Lovecraft himself grew up as an angsty, reclusive lich himself! And when the twist finally occurs, and it is revealed that the narrator was a monster all along, there’s a sudden shift from Gothic imagery to… Egyptian. Out of nowhere, we are made to believe that this European-style castle has been buried in Egyptian sands all along. It made it difficult to picture what sort of home the narrator lived in, but my first thought was this:

A mastaba. An Egyptian-style tomb with space at the top for the family to honour the dead and visit the statue in which their ka (spirit) resides. It doesn’t quite account for the scale of the library and castle described earlier, but this is the first place my mind goes when Lovecraft starts mixing images. It also influenced my idea of what the narrator might look like (as I’ve illustrated below) to be a sort of decaying mummy-like play on the lich form.

“I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world—or no longer of this world—yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.” - H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

But there’s something about this shift in imagery that bothers me. Maybe this is Lovecraft trying to augment the “otherness” of his narrator by shifting from more familiar European imagery to “exotic” language. Or maybe he’s just… racist. Exoticism is a strange side-effect of being xenophobic where one romanticizes the “other” which they fear. What makes it extra weird is how Lovecraft frames himself as the Other in this tale. In the end, the narrator accepts his identity (where he would have tried to escape the pain of existence in a traditional Gothic tale) and finds his own community among the ghouls of the night. This could be a nod toward his writing community, but doesn’t it sound like someone who’s found a home in other bigots? A similar story could be written by a modern-day xenophobe lamenting “PC culture” and people’s unwillingness to allow them to spout off racist slurs. Of course, there’s something to be said about the time he lived in, but this is truly no excuse. While Lovecraft’s work is significant to the Weird Fiction genre, we cannot excuse behaviour which we find abhorrent simply because someone was influential. It would be easy to talk about Lovecraft’s bigotry in the context of The Rats in the Walls (that cat’s name – yikes), but there’s something about the subtlety in The Outsider that makes it more insidious. The context of stories matters, and it is important when examining literature from before our time to acknowledge the values of the author.

#weird fiction #lovecraft #racism

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it-stops · 6 years

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Weird Fiction Stories as the Four Temperaments

Here I’ve compiled a list of a few Weird Tales and what their most likely or clear associations are with the classical temperaments. While arguments could be made for some belonging in other categories, or for some having more than one temperament, I’ve provided brief explanations as to my reasoning for each.

SANGUINE – HOT, MOIST, SOCIABLE

The Summer People – Shirley Jackson

With Summer ending and Autumn on the horizon, the setting of this Weird tale is an excellent fit for the Hot and Moist category. Add in the social anxiety settling in throughout the narrative, and you have yourself a Sanguine tale.

Young Goodman Brown – Nathaniel Hawthorne

With Young Goodman Brown, there’s a sense of heat and sweat from the frantic nature of Goodman Brown’s vision in the forest at night. Upon seeing his community (and dear Faith) in this compromising position, his sociable nature shifts to pure cynicism.

In the Penal Colony – Franz Kafka

The general atmosphere of heat bearing down on the characters gives this tale a hot, moist temperament. The social aspect of the Sanguine comes from the overbearing nature of the Officer – eagerly talking with the Traveller about his machine, demanding his attention and approval, and putting the Traveller in such an uncomfortable position.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream – Harlan Ellison

In Ellison’s tale, AM puts his victims in a sort of pressure cooker, making them starve, sweat, and suffer punishment at his whim. The simulation is like a sauna from which they can never escape, except in death. AM’s victims are his only entertainment, and the social aspects of the characters seem strained and forced.

CHOLERIC – HOT, DRY, MANIC

The Rats in the Walls – H.P. Lovecraft

While the time of year isn’t highly established in this tale, none can doubt the mania that ensues as the narrator delves deeper into his family’s crypt (and by extension, their hereditary past), culminating in his complete loss of mental facilities and control. The penultimate paragraph shows the narrator’s heightened Choleric state as his language regresses and he (allegedly) eats his friend in the crypt.

The Clown Puppet – Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti creates the atmosphere of a migraine in The Clown Puppet. The dry warmth suffocating the narrator’s mind as he tries not to focus on neon signage across the street, and the slow onset of the “nonsense” running through his mind create this brain fog to emphasize the unreliability of the narrator. The titular character is where the mania comes in – its frantic movement and sense of urgency demanding the narrator’s attention and aid adds to the anxiety of the tale and gives it a Choleric temperament.

The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis – Clark Ashton Smith

Any story set on Mars is bound to have the hot, dry atmosphere associated with the Choleric temperament, and The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis does not disappoint. Mania truly sets in as a brain leech left behind by this ancient civilization latches onto Octave’s face, sending him into a possessed frenzy.

Street-Cleaning Day – Welcome to Night Vale, Episode 15

Welcome to Night Vale is an excellent example of the Weird in podcast/radio show form. While every episode has an inherently hot and dry atmosphere (as it is set in a desert town), this particular example has a manic sensibility as the warning regarding street-cleaners sets the tone for the episode. Even the music during the segment on clouds has an urgency to it, adding to the Choleric nature of the episode.

MELANCHOLIC – COLD, DRY, DEPRESSED

The Last Feast of Harlequin – Thomas Ligotti

Set mostly in mid-December, The Last Feast of Harlequin contains a cold, dry atmosphere that sends chills down a reader’s spine. The mystery sets in slowly, with small hints giving glimpses to the full horror of the situation. The narrator makes several references to his own seasonal depression, portraying an honest account of the melancholy which plagues him (and many others) during the holiday season.

The Outsider – H.P. Lovecraft

The narrator in The Outsider has been cut off from light for as long as he can remember, immersed in a dark, cold, dry library. His depressing surroundings and desperation for human contact sends him out in search of just that, but instead, he comes to the disheartening realization that he can never truly join humanity.

The Ice Man – Haruki Murakami

Even the title of this tale has a cold, dry sensibility to it, but the Melancholic state truly sets in as the narrator becomes alienated from her husband and community, forced to live among the Ice people in the South Pole through a perpetual Winter. The reader’s heart breaks for her as she says, “I’m completely alone, in the coldest, loneliest place in the world.”

The Music of the Moon – Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti once again represents the Melancholic state in a beautiful, poignant, and Weird way. The reader feels the chill of being out late at night, unable to sleep, cold, dry wind against their face. His writing of insomnia feels honest and harrowing as we are subjected to the fears associated with such wakefulness.

PHLEGMATIC – COLD, MOIST, LETHARGIC

The Shadow Over Innsmouth – H.P. Lovecraft

One of Lovecraft’s favourite tropes plays on the horror of what lurks in the depths of the ocean, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth is no exception. The element of water is very present in the setting and in the features of the town’s inhabitants. There also seems to be a slow, sleepy atmosphere in the town, as the run-down bus coughs its way through its route and ultimately breaks down when the narrator needs it most.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass – Bruno Schulz

Schulz’s tale is one of the best examples of the Phlegmatic temperament that I have encountered. The Sanatorium has some kind of spell laid over it, causing the residents to sleep away all their time, while time itself seems to have stopped (“’Here everybody is asleep all the time. Didn’t you know?’ she said, looking at me with interest now. ‘Besides, it is never night here,’ she added coyly.”). The reader is weighed with a sense of heaviness, of the cold environment (ideal for sleeping), and of the dampness associated with having just woken from an unplanned nap.

The Yellow Sign – Robert W. Chambers

Reading The Yellow Sign, it is easy to see where Lovecraft took his influence. There is a clammy air that permeates the tale, especially in descriptions of the watchman which plagues the narrator. The Phlegmatic nature sets in when the narrator and his model are compelled to read The King in Yellow – a cursed text within the narrative of the tale (and also the name of the collection in which this tale was published). As the two have their eyes opened by the text, a sense of apathy washes over their characters, adding to the lethargic, Phlegmatic nature of the narrative.

Lazy Day – Welcome to Night Vale, Episode 35

While I mentioned above that Welcome to Night Vale tends to have a more hot and dry atmosphere in its setting (and this episode is not necessarily an exception), I cannot resist mentioning this episode for its portrayal of lethargy which plagues a whole town. Some kind of force has settled over the entire town (excepting Carlos) making it nearly impossible to muster the energy to do anything for the whole day. Not only are the citizens affected, but certain aspects of the environment as well (including the Sun, which can no longer be bothered to provide heat and energy to the planet).

#weird fiction #humours #four temperaments #wtnv

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The Science of Weird – Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Uncanny Valley

Stephen King describes 3 types of fear and the different reactions they induce. The first is Revulsion, or gross-out. This is body horror, the basis of the Saw franchise and many other horror tales and movies. The second is Horror: the portrayal of the unnatural or unbelievable. Here there is a rational, subjective fear which we are confronting, like in Ridley Scott’s Alien. The last is Terror: different from horror, this is the fear that Weird fiction thrives on. This is the uneasiness induced by seeing a stranger in a mask, or a mannequin that’s too detailed in all the worst ways. The fear played out by your imagination when seeing something that’s wrong – but you can’t quite explain why.

Two major contributors to the genre of Weird fiction, H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, play on the last 2 kinds of fear. Lovecraft tends toward Horror (although he does edge on Terror in other ways) and Ligotti is primarily in the Terror department. This can be described in terms of a spectrum of Subjective Weird to Objective Weird.

This list is far from comprehensive, but gives one a general idea of this spectrum. On the Objective side, we have traditional Horror: actual monsters which we have a logical reason to fear or feel threatened by. The Subjective side is harder to explain, but YouTube channel Vsauce has an excellent video on the topic. The Terror type of fear described by Stephen King might be better mapped to a different graph: The Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley is a well created in a graph which displays human likeness in objects or creatures compared to their familiarity (as shown below).

Some of the values on this graph could be adjusted as well, depending on the elements making up each object. For example, a stuffed animal is less humanoid, and is on the upswing of familiarity right before the plunge into Uncanny Valley. But if you gave it a set of human teeth?

Instantly falls into Uncanny territory. Look at that, it’s terrifying. Same thing with humanoid robots. For example, Sonny from I, Robot has enough mechanical elements to ensure his spot outside the valley. But how about Sophia, the lovable AI internet sensation? Isn’t there something a little… unsettling about her? (Especially when she’s joking about destroying humanity.)

Now, when it comes to Lovecraft’s Old Ones, it’s hard to map them here. He deliberately described Cthulhu as a combination of elements that were meant to be unrelatable to humans. There are too many eyes, tentacles hanging from his face, scaly skin, etc. With just enough human elements to call him “humanoid”, I’d place Cthulhu on the Zero axis on the moving line, before Zombies. On the other hand, the people living in the titular town in Lovecraft’s Shadow Over Innsmouth may be better placed on the right-hand side of Zombies on this graph. Still in the valley, but having just enough aquatic elements to make them frightening.

Thomas Ligotti tends to think of himself as Lovecraft’s successor in Weird Fiction, and he certainly delivers. One of Ligotti’s favourite tropes is the Creepy Clown, but he writes them very differently from Stephen King. He has a knack for putting fresh twists on the trope and coming up with new ways to make the clown truly terrifying. Many people find clowns scary enough to begin with (which may be because their makeup tends to mask the actor’s true identity and intentions), but this doesn’t stop Ligotti from giving them that extra layer of upsetting. In The Last Feast of Harlequin, I’d place his “festive” clowns on the upswing of Uncanny Valley, and the “depressed” clowns closer to the bottom of the well (especially when they’re being turned into worms). In The Clown Puppet, I’d place the puppet a little before the Bunraku Puppet on the graph, certainly lower in familiarity for its sudden manifestation and strange sense of urgency.

#weird fiction #ligotti #lovecraft #stephen king #uncanny valley

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Dadaism and Kafka

Dada was an artistic movement in the early 20th century which resonates with absurdism. The movement worked to eliminate meaning from art, citing that art is defined by the artist, and value cannot be determined by the audience. Notable works include Fountain (which was literally just a detached urinal with a signature on it) and L.H.O.O.Q. (a rendering of the Mona Lisa with a moustache, the title of which is a crass French sentence when spoken aloud), both by Marcel Duchamp. These works were received with mixed criticism, but the Dadaist movement was important at the time as it embraced chaos and irrationality in a rejection of the bourgeois capitalist society that had caused the first World War. Absurdism is the philosophy that the universe has no intrinsic meaning but seeking meaning out is an inherent waste of time, and thus this should be both accepted and rebelled against by embracing what life has to offer. Dadaism truly resonates with this notion in its flinging of meaning to the side in the search for true expression.

Franz Kafka also embraces the absurdist philosophy in his writings (which were composed around the time of this movement). In A Hunger Artist, he composes this harrowing tale about a person who participated in public fasting as a sort of performance art. All throughout, the reader is wondering why the Hunger Artist chooses to starve himself: is he seeking fame and recognition in his craft? Is he criticizing religion and religious acts? Or perhaps it is an act of piety in its own way and he seeks truth of the soul? But it is none of the above! In the end, it is revealed that the Hunger Artist starved himself simply because he never found a food he enjoyed. He was dissatisfied with life and alienated from his craft, realizing the meaningless of it all. And isn’t that the most Absurd? This points out how pointless the universe has been and how foolish we have been to try and seek meaning in it! The sort of letdown at the end of the tale is very Dada: proving that there was no meaning all along except what the artist set out to do.

Kafka writes tales with a Parable structure to them, but it is often not easy to discern what the great Truth is that he is trying to relate. In this case, it could be read that self-denial doesn’t lead to any greater understanding, and that we are simply bodies. Flesh. Animals. Kafka’s works tend to eschew the traditional Weird Revelation and leave the reader feeling like they missed something, or that they’ve been disappointed. The revelation is imminent, in the sense that it has been all around us, and it does not transcend or bring us to a higher plane of understanding. Kafka says that that’s how life is: disappointing and ultimately meaningless.

It is worth noting that A Hunger Artist was written while Kafka was suffering from laryngeal tuberculosis and edited after his throat had closed to the point of being unable to eat food. Since parenteral nutrition hadn’t been developed yet, Franz Kafka died June 3, 1924, of starvation. While A Hunger Artist can most certainly be read with many nuanced understandings of its meaning, this context may make it apparent that it was primarily self-expression in the way Kafka did best: Weird Fiction.

#weird fiction #kafka #dada #dadaism

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Architecture in Weird Fiction

Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu

While good Weird Fiction tends to leave more things unsaid than said, good stories still require some semblance of a setting, implied or otherwise. One of the best ways to describe a place is to describe its architecture, and Weird Fiction has two types of architecture it likes most – Gothic and Cyclopean.

Gothic architecture grew and developed alongside the Gothic artistic movement in the 12th century as a reaction against the heaviness and stoicism of Romanesque architecture. Despite its innovations in bringing light and air into buildings, it has this aesthetic of an imposing, all-seeing monster – the Catholic church looming above you and judging your actions. The ceilings vaulted to lift your gaze to the heavens and look the cosmos in the face, the flying buttresses sticking out like so many spider legs, the pointed rooftops like stakes on which to impale the gods, and completely encrusted in relief sculpture warning you of your imminent doom unless you repent, repent, repent.

During the Protestant Reformation, many Gothic buildings were plundered and left to ruin. This gave them a social association with decay and the fall of Europe’s nobility. Gothic Fiction writers, years later, use that association to write about supernatural events occurring in enclosed spaces, like castles and crypts. This is where we get stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. Fall of the House of Usher shows this descent into the dark recesses of the human mind as we watch the narrator enter this house of claustrophobic dread and become infected with Roderick’s own mental state. The house itself is mostly intact, asides from the long fissure that runs from foundation to rooftop (which would later break open entirely with the collapse of the building, symbolizing the end of the Usher family line and the disintegration of nobility). Poe describes the house in vague detail:

“I looked upon the scene before me — upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain — upon the bleak walls — upon the vacant eye-like windows — upon a few rank sedges — and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees…”

He also mentions that none of the masonry has fallen (though individual bricks have crumbled) and there is a sort of fungus growing over the whole building. This description of decay, but with the building still clinging to life with all its might, is a parallel to Rodrick’s sister, Lady Madeline. Diseased, decaying, but still living in the final scene. One interpretation of the story is that she is a vampire, which would be an excellent comparison to the “living dead” nature of the house (and would also explain why the narrator knew nothing of this twin sister, despite being Roderick’s “only personal friend”). Poe’s tale is an interesting one as we get a glimpse of the deep horror that intrigued and inspired H.P. Lovecraft years later.

Cyclopean architecture is a style of masonry found in Mycenean structures which consists of rough-hewn slabs of stone stacked on top of one another without the use of mortar. The name comes from classical myths about the Cyclopes – a race of one-eyed giants who would have had the strength and size to build these structures. One of the best examples of a cyclopean building was an unrealized design for a Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton by Etienne-Louis Boulleé.

It was an enormous dome with small perforations in the ceiling and a giant lantern hung from the apex. By day, light would shine through the perforations to simulate the night sky, and by night, the lantern would be lit up to simulate the sun (these representing his contributions to astronomy and astrophysics). While it was never built, illustrations of its proposal show scale figures which emphasize how small and insignificant a person would feel next to this monument.

The feeling invoked by Boulleé’s Cenotaph is similar to the fear that H.P. Lovecraft seeks to elicit from his own audience. Lovecraft has this obsession with horror immersed in a deep time and has a tendency to circle around the object of the horror without allowing us to fully look upon it. As such, he likes to leave as much as possible unsaid to allow the reader to fill in each horrific blank. But in the case of The Call of Cthulhu, he gives loving description to the setting and architecture. When describing the city of R’lyeh the narrator mentions awe at the “unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs,” and frequently references Cyclopean architecture and things that couldn’t have possibly been made by human hands. These implications elevate the Weird in his tales by emphasizing the insignificance of humanity in an uncaring universe.

#weird fiction #lovecraft #poe #architecture

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