The Innsmouth Look: Further Intimations of the Kingdom in H.P. Lovecraft

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species — if separate species we be — for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.

H.P. Lovecraft

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

In a recent post, Twinglebrook-Hastings wrote:

"Many readers of Lovecraft have been struck by his motivation of banal facts of geology, architecture, genealogy, history and science combined with repeated cliches about "unutterable horror" to provide a truly upsetting result...
"Madness and death are in Lovecraft two views on one thing, for the materialist message of the Ancient Wisdom is that to understand something is to be it, thus his narrators are constantly discovering the horrible truth lies in their own biological history, either as the foundation for all human life on earth or in their genealogy."

I hope here briefly to elaborate on the status of lineage and history in Lovecraft's work.

While contemplating a photograph of the Great Pyramid at Giza taken during the ill-fated Cuddler-Shelton expedition of 1894 I, too, was struck by Lovecraft's morbid fascination with genealogy and his horror of duration.  The image of Shelton, in native dress, staring purposefully at the great enigmatic mass of stone as Cuddler squats balefully half out of the frame always evokes poignant meditations on the discontents of permanence and heredity; four months after this photograph was taken, Shelton's body was forever lost down a previously unknown vertical shaft within the Great Pyramid which has yet to be re-discovered, and Cuddler had disappeared up the Blue Nile searching, it later emerged, for his illegitimate half-breed son.  These two features of Lovecraft's work substantiate the impression that he is, if not a proto-symbologist, at least profitably interpretable by the same critical structures which have been evolved for understanding symbology.

Lovecraft's protagonists are often engaged in genealogical research, and it is typically this activity which leads them to the hideous revelations they uncover (whether directly, as in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Rats in The Walls, and Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, or indirectly as in The Picture in The House).  While the hapless genealogist of Picture finds himself sheltering in the home of a freakish pre-revolutionary cannibal seemingly by chance, more often than not the unwitting researcher is drawn into ultimate horror necessarily by his investigation.  He discovers not only that the fabric of reality is infinitely more horrifying than he could ever have supposed, but that he is implicated in the newly discovered unspeakableness by heredity.  Arthur Jermyn is the miscegenated progeny of a man and a white ape; Delapore's forebearers were the cannibal shepherds of domesticated anthropoids; the narrator of Innsmouth realizes that he is slowly turning into an blasphemous amphibian.  This leads one to suspect that the protagonist of Picture's position vis a vis his cannibal host is not, in fact, coincidental to his engagement with genealogy, but that the pursuit of lineage per se draws one inexorably towards nightmare and madness.

Lovecraft also reserves a special and incongruous loathing for long spans of time.  Examples are too ubiquitous to bother enumerating here.  The antique is invariably "hideously" old.  This initially seems strange, since permanence was regarded by most authors of the period as a positive, or at worst neutral, characteristic.  I want to suggest, however, that the "hideousness" of age and the irrepressible horror of genealogy are both products of an attitude towards historicism and diachrony in general has clear analogues in the epistemology of the symbological novel.

Modern symbology, particularly as exemplified by Dan Brown, functions efficiently to generate the illusion of knowledge production at the same time as it operates to constrain knowledge and contain potentially threatening avenues of inquiry.  Most recently, in The Lost Symbol, Brown proffers "The Ancient Mysteries" and "Noetic Science" as immensely fecund, esoteric fields of study which have the power to generate truly efficacious knowledge that will fundamentally change the social, economic, political, intellectual, and physical world.  In the course of the novel, however, the ostensible object of inquiry bifurcates; the cacognostic continues to pursue the literal truth of the Code and is utterly destroyed, and the symbologist, choosing orthognosis, opts for an epistemology in which the esoteric knowledge (which for Brown includes anything not comprehended in the discursive world of USA Today) is replaced by trite ideological commonplaces which, through a kind of legerdemain, retain investiture with the mystique originally accorded the esoteric knowledge they have replaced.  Common sense is thereby substantiated and rejuvenated, and the subject of ideology re-contained.

Lovecraft's attitude to time and lineage can be seen to produce an analogous result.  His stories open with the suggestion that genealogical research is intrinsically fascinating and worthwhile; after all, the well-educated and sympathetic young protagonist is travelling all over New England doing it.  But invariably, it leads to the sort of revelation to which self-immolation is the only conceivable response, and after which we long only "to flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."  Likewise the hideousness of age; the only products of inquiry into the remote past are the remnants, and the revenants, of beings who as merciless and hostile as they are powerful and alien.

Just as the symbological novel gives the illusion of being a source of knowledge and intrigue while functioning as an abattoir for both, Lovecraft gives the impression of antiquarianism, but on examination his stories uniformly imply that the only possible result of historical inquiry, genealogical or otherwise, is the discovery of things whose concealment was the condition of the investigator's existence.

All of the foregoing may be read as a further articulation of Twinglebrook-Hastings' astute observation that "Kingdom's characters are Brownian people in a Lovecraftian universe."  Nancy Kelly is a character more Brownian than Brown himself has yet produced.  Katherine Solomon is a pale emanation of her determined orthognosis (or, "orthognosis(f)" as we should probably call it in order to distinguish the permanent, natural orthognosis of the female subject of symbological knowledge from the vulnerable and hard-won orthognosis(m) of the male subject).  Indeed, it is difficult to resist the conjecture that Kingdom is a programmatic exploration of what a symbological novel in which the only protagonist is constantly orthognostic(f) might look like.  But where does her quest for her surrogate father lead her?  Towards a horrifying realm of unimaginable antiquity where, in fact, human immolation is a regular and hallowed practice, which occupies precisely the relation to humanity that Nature (broadly construed to include Nyarlathotep, Chthulhu, etc,) does, and whence the object of her quest was drawn by the search for his own father.

Thus Martin, ever the synthetic genius, draws together the anti-epistemological function of the classic symbological novel and Lovecraft's anti-diachronism to produce, in our final view of Nancy Kelly, a subject who has successfully rejected both knowledge and diachrony and can bask eternally in a present which is identical with ideology and simultaneously considers itself utterly sui generis.  He has achieved the final object which Brown and Lovecraft indicate: idiocy ex nihilo.