Monday, January 06, 2014
Wild Shoggoth
Some quickly jotted down thoughts after finishing Madness...
At the Mountains of Madness works surprisingly well as SF rather than horror or fantasy or weird tale, though it is all of those things.
The focus is heavily on the science (as Lovecraft understood it, of course) and on reason and on the limits of the same when our faculties are challenged and our certainties are undermined.
After reading At the Mountains of Madness, I'm not sure whether Lovecraft has any room for the "supernatural" at all. Lovecraft's project seems to be a naturalizing of "myth" by plugging it into an evolutionary/materialist framework (another kind of "myth").
The way that Lovecraft does this is to introduce "natural" creatures that are more strange and frightening than we are accustomed to, hopefully shocking us into an openness to "cosmic fear". There is something more strange and wonderful and downright scary to the fabric of the world. I'm not sure yet what to make of the narrator's claim that he is writing to prevent others from experiencing the horror of the Antarctic. Is it such that in Lovecraft's horrid world, it is better to remain ignorant than to embrace truth?
I'd rather be eaten by a wild shoggoth.
Some quickly jotted down thoughts after finishing Madness...
At the Mountains of Madness works surprisingly well as SF rather than horror or fantasy or weird tale, though it is all of those things.
The focus is heavily on the science (as Lovecraft understood it, of course) and on reason and on the limits of the same when our faculties are challenged and our certainties are undermined.
After reading At the Mountains of Madness, I'm not sure whether Lovecraft has any room for the "supernatural" at all. Lovecraft's project seems to be a naturalizing of "myth" by plugging it into an evolutionary/materialist framework (another kind of "myth").
The way that Lovecraft does this is to introduce "natural" creatures that are more strange and frightening than we are accustomed to, hopefully shocking us into an openness to "cosmic fear". There is something more strange and wonderful and downright scary to the fabric of the world. I'm not sure yet what to make of the narrator's claim that he is writing to prevent others from experiencing the horror of the Antarctic. Is it such that in Lovecraft's horrid world, it is better to remain ignorant than to embrace truth?
I'd rather be eaten by a wild shoggoth.
Posted by trawlerman at 11:30 PM
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