Ralickas CosmicHorrorQuestion 2007

"Cosmic Horror" and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft
Author(s): Vivian Ralickas

Source: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , 2007, Vol. 18, No. 3 (71) (2007), pp. 364-
398
Published by: International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
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"Cosmic Horror" and the Question
of the Sublime in Lovecraft
Vivian Ralickas
Examples of h. p. lovecrafts use of motifs common to the burkean and

Kantian notions of sublimity abound in his fiction: phenomena whose princi
pal characteristics are their formlessness, infinite expanse, or superhuman
might; a subject's encounter with the negative or, put another way, symbolic
presentation of what would be described in the fiction of a humanist as its
noumenal self; and the limits of language1 to represent adequately both the
awe-inspiring spectacle and the subject's experience of the violation of the
limits of being. Lovecraft's pronouncements on "cosmic horror," the effect he
aimed to convey in his stories, seem to encourage a sublime reading of his
work. Cosmic horror—that fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenom
ena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field
of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance—compels the expansion of
the experiencing subject's imagination. Two recent studies, moreover, elabo
rate on the relevance of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes, respectively, in
Lovecraft's myth cycle. In "Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime" (1991), Dale
J. Nelson defends the idea that cosmic horror is coeval with religious feeling in
Burke. In "Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime" (2002), Bradley A.
Will argues that the force of cosmic horror is based upon Lovecraft's presenta
tion of the unknowable rather than merely the unknown in his fiction.
Beyond superficial, thematic comparisons, however, can we really speak of
sublimity in Lovecraft? Regarding the Burkean sublime in his fiction, does the
subject's imagination partake in the ascending movement of the phenomenon
in question, and is the phenomenon itself an index of a life-affirming notion of
the absolute? With relation to the Kantian sublime, is the subject's supremacy
over nature affirmed by its ability to reason in Lovecraft? In other words, is the
sublime turn, a commonplace and pivotal aspect of the aesthetic category of
sublimity, discernable in the Lovecraft Mythos? The pitfalls of both Nelson's
Vol, 18, No. 3, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Copyright © 2007, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts,

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"Cosmic Horror" and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft • 365
and Will's essays hinge on this last question. While the strength of Nelson's
analysis lies in its convincing elaboration of the pertinence of certain aspects
of the Burkean sublime to Lovecraft's cosmic viewpoint, he is reluctant to
acknowledge Burke's and Lovecraft's valorizations of objective properties that
emphasize the heterogeneity of the experiencing subject.2 This in turn leads
him to provide an interpretation of the sublime in Lovecraft that fails to
account satisfactorily for the experiencing subject, and uncritically conflates
the religious awe attendant on Burkean sublimity with Lovecraft's anti
humanist category of cosmic horror.
Although Will's essay develops a more thorough examination of the aes
thetics of the sublime in question (Kantian) and its manifestation in Love
craft's fiction, it nevertheless presents significant lacunae that any analysis of
the Kantian sublime in Lovecraft must answer: What does the sublime mean
to an atheist who denies not only the humanistic context of Kant's Idealist
position, the a priori structure of cognition on which Kant bases his epistemol
ogy, and the idea of the noumenal, but, more importantly, the notion of free
will upon which our relation to the noumenal is contingent? If, as Will con
tends, "Lovecraft demands that we recognize our own limitations and our rel
atively insignificant place in the cosmos" (20), then this recognition in
Lovecraft is not counterbalanced by an awareness of our moral vocation,
which, in Kant, places us above nature.
In Lovecraft, the subject suffers from a violation of its sense of self, but it
is graced with no consolatory understanding of the human condition to mol
lify its fragmented psyche. With its identity and the foundations of its culture
destroyed, the subject who experiences cosmic horror always succumbs to one
of three comparably dreadful fates, judging from the standpoint of a balanced,
rational mind: insanity, death, or the embracing of its miscegenated and no
longer human condition. Nelson's and Will's essays consequently demonstrate
that Lovecraft's fiction presents readers with the outward manifestations of
sublimity prior to the sublime turn, but falls short of providing the subjective
reconstitution concomitant to either the Burkean or Kantian notions of sub
limity.
For Lovecraft, not one of the motifs associated with sublimity gives way to
a reformulation of the subject's integrity, asserting both our humanity and re
affirming the culture that makes an experience of the sublime possible. If the
human self remains fragmented, then it is because Lovecraft's fiction, particu
larly the effect of cosmic horror he aimed to convey in his stories, underscores
the shortcomings of the humanistic mode of subjectivity upon which the sub
lime is predicated. Contrary to Nelson and Will, therefore, I argue that Love
craft's fiction performs a collapse of signification that amounts to an implicit
subversion of the sublime, the roots of which are to be found in his cosmic out
JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS

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366 • Vivian Ralickas
look. In denying humanism and revealing the ostensible unity of the human
subject to be a fallacy, I contend that what Lovecraft's work affirms, albeit neg
atively, is a subjective crisis specific to the modern condition. It is a crisis,
moreover, whose trajectory aligns itself with the abjection of self elaborated by
Julia Kristeva in her psychoanalytic notion of subjectivity. In focusing exclu
sively on the impossibility of the sublime in Lovecraft's fiction in the first part
of my analysis and in pointing to the interpretative possibilities offered by an
abject reading of his notion of cosmic horror in the second portion of this
essay, I hope to have provided a roadmap for future study of Lovecraftian aes
thetics.
Part 1: The Impossibility of a Sublime Reading

of Lovecraft's Fiction
The profound influence of two interconnected aspects of Lovecraft's view on

existence can be discerned in his fiction: "cosmic indifferentism" and mecha
nistic materialism. Their combined impact on his fictional writings and poet
ics negates any possibility of the sublime in his Mythos. Lovecraft's position as
a self-proclaimed "cosmic indifferentist" unites a metaphysical, ethical, and
aesthetic position defined, respectively, in terms of "an awareness of the vast
ness of the universe in both space and time"; "an awareness of the insignifi
cance of human beings within the realm of the universe"; and "a literary
expression of this insignificance, to be effected by the minimizing of human
character and the display of the titanic gulfs of space and time" (Joshi, A
Dreamer 182). The mechanistic materialist foundation of Lovecraft's cosmic
indifferentism is evident in both his rejection of teleology and the idea of a
divinity it implies as well as in his pronouncements on free will as a product of
our (idealist) delusions. Lovecraft considers "the idea of deity" as "a logical
and inevitable result of ignorance, since the savage can conceive of no action
save by a volition and personality like his own" (Misc. Writings 165). In a strik
ingly anti-humanist stance, he views religion as a fiction that masks human
ity's baser instincts. In "In Defence of Dagon," he affirms that "all religious
demonstrativeness and ceremony is basically orgiastic" (Misc. Writings 166), a
product of our inadequate sublimation of primitive compulsions. He hold
instead that "all volition is merely a neural molecular process—a blind mate
rial instinct or impulse," and that "all organisms" possess "no conscious desire,
no intelligent aspiration, no definite foreknowledge" (Misc. Writings 160, 161).
The only aspect of Lovecraft's deterministic viewpoint that endows humanity
with the illusion of freedom is chance. If life is "a process of stumbling in the
dark—of recoiling from greater to lesser discomforts and dangers, and of grop
ing for an increased amount of pleasures faintly tasted" (Misc. Writings 160),
then chance provides us with the only potential for any kind of deviation from

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a determined course. It assumes greater significance in his later tales, wherein

"Lovecraft permitted mankind no defense, except luck, against the unknown"
(Leiber 54). Nevertheless, although chance and determinism are two notions
necessarily at odds with each other, the assertion of the former in Lovecraft's
fiction does not amount to freedom3 for the subject. In Lovecraft, "chance" is
the name those who cannot see all ends4 give to events that they neither pre
dicted nor foresaw. In denying the human subject freedom, an idea crucial to
the aesthetics of sublimity, Lovecraft's worldview necessarily makes an experi
ence of the sublime impossible.
As a pragmatic critical theory, cosmic horror further denies the humanis
tic basis requisite to any theory of sublimity by marginalizing human protago
nists. Lovecraft's chief aim in his fiction, his attempt to lend credibility to the
mood of cosmic horror he aspires to communicate, demands very little in
terms of character development. The purpose of cosmic horror is to commu
nicate an effect: "A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread
of outer, unknown forces" ("Supernatural Horror in Literature," Dagon 368).
This mood originates in a fear of the unknown, which Lovecraft posits as the
foundation of all weird literature ("Supernatural Horror in Literature," Dagon
365). Cosmic horror therefore issues from the same source as the sublime,
which in part explains their likely conflation in the minds of some readers: an
experiencing subject faced with phenomena that overwhelm its senses and
cognitive faculties. Contrary to either Burkean or Kantian sublimity, however,
which asserts the centrality of the human subject, the poetics particular to cos
mic horror relegates it to the sidelines by reversing the order of priority that
sublimity establishes between the subject and its objects, privileging the latter
over the former. "The true 'hero' of a marvel tale," expounds Lovecraft, "is not
any human being, but simply a set of phenomena" (Misc. Writings 118). Love
craft is consequently interested in the development of individual identities
only insofar as they serve the poetics of "cosmic horror."
On the one hand, his characters require neither individual personalities
nor a complex psychology; "the possession of sensory apparatus in good work
ing condition will suffice them" (Houellebecq 65, my translation). On the
other hand, his fiction develops human protagonists just enough for their
humanity to act as a liability, contributing to the alienating impact of cosmic
horror. In "The Whisperer in the Darkness," "the very attributes that affirm
Wilmarth's humanity are what render him vulnerable and alone in the domain
of the fungi" (Dziemianowicz 181). As this story demonstrates, in Lovecraft's
fiction our human perspective—what the sublime affirms—not only is severely
limited in scope as a result of its anthropocentrism, but also poses a genuine
threat to our existence in an environment dominated by alien beings far supe
rior to us in might and intellect who are indifferent, if not outright hostile, to
humanity. The human subject's estrangement is thus not simply spatial but

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also metaphysical: "One's sense of isolation is not merely a function of geo

graphic space, but also of mental space; it can occur just as easily amongst a
crowd and in the 'light' as in solitary out-of-the-way places if one is possessed
of a knowledge that is sufficiently disorienting" (Dziemianowicz 186). This
shift in focus evident in the poetics of cosmic horror from the human subject
to a set of phenomena whose properties could give rise to a sense of the sub
lime, albeit in a different context (one in which the subject's humanity is
affirmed at the sublime turn), suggests an implicit subversion of sublimity in
Lovecraft's fiction.
The sublime, both Burkean and Kantian, appeals to a common sense
whose basis in shared beliefs and practices makes our experience of sublimity
possible. In spite of the divergent philosophical premises of their respective for
mulations of aesthetics (Burke's empiricism and Kant's Idealism), Burke and
Kant acknowledge that our sensibility to sublimity is in large part extrinsic—
the product of acculturation. Although Burke reasons that "the standard both
of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures" since we all possess the
same sensory organs and are roused by stimuli in similar ways (14, 11), he nev
ertheless concedes that our taste can be improved upon by "extending our
knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise" (25).
Likewise, Kant acknowledges that taste has no fixed standard. As a judgment,
it "is not determinable by means of concepts and precepts" (Kant 163,
§32:5:283).5 It is of paramount importance, in other words, that we train our
minds in "the cultivation of the moral feeling" (230, §60:5:356): "Without the
development of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime
will appear merely repellent to the unrefined person" (148, §29:5:265).
"Among all the faculties and talents," therefore, Kant reasons that "taste is
precisely the one which [...] is most in need of the examples of what in the
progress of culture has longest enjoyed approval if it is not quickly to fall back
into barbarism" (164, §32:5:284). In binding Western culture by naturalizing
its moral values and social bonds, the cultivation of taste is necessarily of
supreme importance to the sublime (or to any aesthetic judgment). If the poet
ics of cosmic horror presages the collapse of culture into brutishness so feared
by Kant, an analysis of its fictional expression in Lovecraft further demon
strates to what extent cosmic horror stands in stark contrast to the sublime: it
destroys all aspects indispensable to the integrity of Lovecraft's white, Anglo
Saxon, Protestant and predominantly male characters' sense of selfhood—
their traditions, morality, race, psyches, and bodies.
The thematic thread that unites Lovecraft's fiction, revealing not only
what he saw as the false foundations of Christian humanism but also the West
ern subject's misplaced faith in its moral values, underscores the inherent,
anti-humanist critique of sublimity cosmic horror performs. If a collective's
only shared experience is one of perpetual horror and shock, then no appeal

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to a common sense requisite to the sublime is possible. In Lovecraft's Mythos,

the Earth is but a small, insignificant planet among countless other habitable
worlds, scarred by wars waged by aliens long before the birth of humanity.
Lovecraft's fiction consequently denies our planet a place of importance in the
universe and revokes the human privilege of having been the first species of
higher intelligence to populate it. The direst critique of humanism in Love
craft's mythology, however, is evident in the human characters' perception of
the omnipotent alien races as gods. In light of the aliens' either complete dis
regard or seemingly malevolent intentions towards human beings, such a belief
is ironic on two levels. First, as illustrated in "At the Mountains of Madness,"
the human race is the by-product of an accidental, biological alien experiment
and is of little consequence to the Old Ones. Chance, and not divine grace,
brought us into being. Just as Arthur Jermyn's ancestor played god to Con
golese white apes in the "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His
Family," these formidable aliens are perceived as deities by the characters in
Lovecraft's fiction, which says little of our apparently sophisticated culture and
humanity. "As inheritors of a simian past," remarks Bennett Lovett-Graff of
"Arthur Jermyn," "we are the subjects of a determined and determining
Nature, members of the very animal world to which we human beings have
denied any vestige of free will" (Lovett-Graff 375). Second, where aliens inter
vene in human affairs, their intrusion is motivated by the kind of cold and cal
culating scientific self-interest we display in our interactions with earth's
"lesser" life-forms (non-mammalian species such as reptiles, insects, and sea
creatures whose forms resemble those of Lovecraft's pantheon) .6 In the best of
scenarios, notes Houellebecq, we eat earth's creatures of lesser intelligence;
often, however, we destroy them for the mere joy of killing (15-16, my trans
lation). Cosmic horror therefore not only dethrones the human subject whose
pre-eminence sublimity affirms, but also questions the ethics of Western cul
ture, the basis of the common sense that makes sublimity possible.
If some of Lovecraft's texts make reference to an ethical framework (for
instance, texts that thematize witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, and other black
arts), it is a product of the limited human characters' misguided attempts to
understand and contextualize the phenomena they confront. In these stories,
Lovecraft presents a more direct critique of the moral values of Western cul
ture that underpin the common sense indispensable to the sublime. The nar
rator of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" describes (albeit through Ward's
focalization) Joseph Curwen, Ward's maternal uncle and alleged witch accord
ing to the ignorant townsfolk, as a man of science ahead of his time: "Not even
Einstein, [Ward] declared, could more profoundly revolutionize the current
conception of things" (Mountains 161). Similarly, as "The Rats in the Walls,"
"The Festival," "The Call of Cthulhu," and "The Haunter of the Dark" make
evident, religious rituals in Lovecraft—usually affiliated with worship of the

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Old Ones—are depicted as the sadistic and barbaric practices of amoral,

racially inferior beings whose humanity has been eroded almost beyond recog
nition. Their religion, a parody of traditional forms of worship that celebrate
life and creation, is akin to an infection, seeking to destroy the cohesion of the
body politic from within. It conflates and inverts the Christian beliefs in the
resurrection and the second coming of Christ: " [The Great Old Ones] all lay
in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty
Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once
again be ready for them" (Dunwich 140). The day of reckoning of the Great
Old Ones, elucidates Castro in "The Call of Cthulhu," "would be easy to
know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and
wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men
shouting and killing and revelling in joy" (Dunwich 141). Transcendence of the
human condition and the ascension to a divine state entail what amounts to
a psychological regression. In encouraging the unchecked gratification of the
death-drive, the worship of the Old Ones culminates in the subject's descent
into the abyss of the id: "Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new
ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would
flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom" (Dunwich 141). Sublimity, the
highly acculturated aesthetic category that depends upon and champions the
divide between good and evil or reason and madness, perishes in the amoral
soil of Lovecraft's Mythos.
If Lovecraft's characters enjoy a false sense of security as a result of their
faith in their ancestral heritage, whose foundations often prove to subvert the
very values they profess, then the dramatization of Lovecraft's anxieties about
race miscegenation and the devolution of the species further undermine the
sublime by illustrating the erosion of the Western subject's identity at the very
core of being. In texts such as "The Rats in the Walls" and "Arthur Jermyn,"
which ostensibly are marginal to Lovecraft's myth cycle,7 the white, aristo
cratic protagonists' respective confrontations with the horror of their misce
genation destroy both de la Poer and Arthur Jermyn. The sole surviving
member of the de la Poer line loses his sanity upon ascertaining that his pred
ecessors were vermin, both literally and metaphorically. Since the origin of his
family line, his ancestors have been affiliated with the most perverse cults
known to humanity and ignoble rites beyond description, of which cannibal
ism is only a token. Contrary to de la Poer,8 who is overwhelmed by his ances
try and devolves into a rat, Arthur kills all his children and sets himself on fire
upon discovering that he is part simian: the wife of his great-great-great
grandfather, one of the first explorers of the Congo region, was a white Con
golese ape to whose community Sir Wade Jermyn played god. Arthur's
alienation is total, regardless of his intellectual learning and sensitive poetic
temperament. This text suggests that personal efforts and merits are meaning

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less in Lovecraft's universe. Jermyn's act of setting himself on fire may be con
strued as a symbolic attempt to purify himself and therefore atone for his
ancestor's transgression. It can be interpreted as an attempt to identify his
abject genealogy as sinful and thus to re-inscribe it in a moral framework,
thereby weaving the story of his lineage into the fabric of his Western, Judeo
Christian cultural narrative. In the hands of another writer, perhaps Arthur's
story would have been penned as a tragedy; in Lovecraft, his fate is far worse.
Arthur is relegated to non-being by his peers: "Members of the Anthropolog
ical Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and some of
them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed" (Dagon 82). Both texts
offer analogous radical solutions to stem the threat of contamination to the
body politic that de la Poer and Arthur Jermyn represent: similarly to de la
Poer, whose fantastic transformation into a rodent erases him from human
society, Arthur is expunged from the collective memory of his culture.
A comprehensive reading of Lovecraft's fiction encourages the reader to
draw a parallel between the fate of ostensibly blueblood white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant male characters such as de la Poer and Arthur Jermyn and the
"evil" human beings of lowly class status and mixed blood. The defilement of
the formers' individual identities is only a step removed from the debasement
of the social body perpetrated by the rituals of the "singular tribe or cult of
degenerate Esquimaux" who practiced "a curious form of devil-worship" (Dun
wich 135) or of New Orleans' "men of very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally
aberrant type"—"negroes and mulattoes, largely of West Indian or Brava Por
tuguese from the Cape Verde Islands"-—who were members of the "blackest
African voodoo circles" (Dunwich 139). On a moral scale, neither the bestial
ity of Arthur Jermyn's ancestor and his transgression of the species boundary
nor de la Poer's immoral, rodent relatives' cult practices are any different from
the kind of evil perpetrated by the lower castes who collectively worship aliens
as gods. In Lovecraft's Mythos "evil," be it psychical, in terms of the drive to
destruction, or genetic, in terms of ruinous hereditary traits, is within each of
us, and the disintegration of our humanity on an individual basis heralds the
collapse of social integrity. Within Lovecraft's myth cycle, in other words, we
are all, in some sense, inherently debased to the level of those races and cul
tures Lovecraft considers inferior.
It is significant to note, however, that this collective debasement does not
amount to a perverse affirmation of equality among human beings of different
races and cultures. The degeneration of the other—any entity that is not male,
white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant—is always more apparent in Lovecraft,
suggesting, often explicitly, that those who are not members of this gender and
idealized racial group not only possess an inherent susceptibility to moral, psy
chical, and physical corruption, but are deemed as being less able to repress or
control instinctive, animalistic urges. For example, in "The Colour out of

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Space," it is a woman, Mrs. Gardner, who first succumbs to the vampiric

designs of the alien color, loses her mind, and assumes the gothic role of the
"madwoman in the attic." In "Arthur Jermyn," the crossing of species bound
aries in the defilement of the Jermyn line points to a barely veiled and exceed
ingly offensive commentary on race miscegenation in which one's African
ancestry is defined as a kind of atavistic "contamination" whose symptoms
include brutishness, idiocy, and vice. Not surprisingly, moreover, such pollu
tion originates from Jermyn's maternal line, once again aligning the feminine
with the monstrous and the irrational. As an abject mother, the Congolese
white ape is similar to Lavinia Whateley, "the somewhat deformed, unattrac
tive albino" (Dunwich 159) in "The Dunwich Horror": both give birth to
abominable creatures. Taken together, the motif of the already corrupted and
hence barely human other and the debasement of the Western subject's sense
of self make evident that it is our collective iniquity and not our moral voca
tion which serves as the basis for any shared experience in Lovecraft. In other
words, Lovecraft's Mythos offers an implicit parody of the notion of common
sense necessary to the sublime.
Undoubtedly, in a fictional context that undermines both the human
subject and the culture necessary to sublimity, the dramatization of charac
ters' encounters with objects whose attributes ought to inspire the sublime
underscores instead their experience of cosmic horror and the concomitant
erosion of their subjective integrity. In particular, Lovecraft sabotages the tra
ditional function of landscape in an experience of sublimity, popularized in
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic fiction. To cite two canoni
cal texts as contrasts with Lovecraft's subversion of the sublime in nature,
both Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein (1818) offer exemplary instances of the kinds of conciliatory
experiences of the human condition the Romantics sought in their practice
of what can be deemed "sublime tourism." Tellingly, Udolpho opens with a
landscape description that, in alluding to nature's might and formlessness,
cites aspects prevalent to sublimity in nature: the "tremendous precipices" of
the "majestic Pyrenees," "whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting
awful forms, [were] seen, and lost again as the partial vapours rolled along"
(Radcliffe 5). Most significant, however, is the taste for natural sublimity cul
tivated by the story's protagonist, Emily St. Aubert. Emily's father educates
her to possess the kind of self-restraint requisite to an aesthetic judgment: he
instructs her "to acquire that steady dignity of mind, that can alone counter
balance the passions," and "cultivate [s] her understanding with the most
scrupulous care" (Radcliffe 9). Moreover, in a novel that champions the
integrity of the human subject,9 the acute development of Emily's taste is
brought about by her initiation into the canonical works and ideas valued by
Western culture during her epoch.10 Such an upbringing cannot fail to inspire

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"Cosmic Horror" and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft ■ 373
in Emily a proclivity for certain types of natural phenomena, whose contem

plation elevates her mind:
It was one of Emily's earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes of nature;
nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she most delighted; she loved
more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the
mountain's stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude
impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GOD
OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. (Radcliffe 9-10, capitalization in original)
Echoing Burke's notion of sublimity, particularly the categories of infinity and

obscurity,11 this excerpt reveals how nature acts as a vehicle through which
Emily contemplates the Divine. Such an affirmative experience of phenomena
whose objective properties could, under different circumstances, induce a feel
ing of horror as a result of the sense of self-loss the subject experiences, can
only be possible to a heroine whose trials confirm her faith in humanity. In
other words, she is one for whom the sublime turn is possible. In spite of
Emily's suffering at the hands of her captor Signor Montoni, neither her moral
nor physical purity is ever compromised. By means of Emily's characterization
and the life-affirming narrative in which she figures, Radcliffe casts Emily as
both the inheritor and perpetuator of the Western, patriarchal system of val
ues essential to the sublime.
In a manner analogous to Udolpho, the contemplation of landscape in
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein fills the subject "with a sublime ecstasy that gave
wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and
joy" (Shelley 75). That is to say, it raises the human being's spirits and weaves
its humanity into the fabric of Divine creation. Following the murder of Vic
tor's youngest brother, William, at the hands of the monster the former cre
ated, Victor's experience of sublimity in nature affords him with a measure of
solace and a temporary respite from the thoughts that burden his conscience.
After a family excursion to the valley of Chamounix, Victor relates the fol
lowing regarding the scenery's positive emotional impact upon his tormented
psyche:
We visited the source of the Arveiron, and rode about the valley until
evening. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest con
solation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness
of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tran
quilized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts
over which it had brooded for the last month. I returned in the evening,
fatigued, but less unhappy, and conversed with my family with more cheerful
ness than had been my custom for some time. (Shelley 74)

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In spite of Victor's fragmented sense of self and increasing estrangement from

his family, he is nonetheless capable of being roused by certain natural specta
cles that alert him to the intrinsic nobility of the human mind. If Victor dies
an alienated and broken man or, put another way, if, in recounting how Vic
tor's Promethean pursuit claims his sanity, life, and the bonds that tie him to
society—in short, in describing how he loses his subjective integrity
Frankenstein seemingly presents a bleaker view of the human condition than
Udolpho, then it does so only marginally. As the rousing speech Victor deliv
ers to Robert Walton's sailors to "be men, or be more than men" (Shelley 183)
shortly before his death confirms, his faith in the human quest for transcen
dence remains unshaken in spite of his wretched condition at the end of the
narrative. Furthermore, Victor believes his "purpose" in destroying the mon
ster to have been "assigned to [him] by heaven" (Shelley 183). Both his
description of Robert's Arctic expedition as a heroic journey of epic grandeur
and his belief in a pre-ordained, divine plan are products of his immersion in
and upholding of a cultural context that fosters sublimity, similar to that elab
orated in Udolpho. Finally, although Victor may vanish from the world that
produced him, he lives up to his name: his efforts to annihilate the monster
ensure that the society from which he originated continues to exist and thus
to perpetuate its values. While Frankenstein dramatizes the destruction of the
experiencing subject of the sublime, in other words, contrary to Lovecraft's
fiction it nevertheless defends the culture that makes sublimity possible.
"At the Mountains of Madness" offers the most thematically contiguous
example in the Lovecraft Mythos to the edifying mountainous landscapes the
subject encounters in Radcliffe and Shelley. The story dramatizes a New Eng
land scientific team's exploration of the continent of Antarctica, one of the
early twentieth century's last remaining terrestrial frontiers, whose peaks of
boundless height and subterranean, aquatic abysses of limitless depth seem to
offer propitious vehicles for the human subject's experience of the sublime in
nature. Approaching Antarctica by sea, the narrator, Professor Dyer, geologist
and faculty member of Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University, recounts
the "thrill of excitement" he and the expedition members felt "at beholding
the vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered
the whole vista ahead" (Mountains 7, emphasis added). According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, even when used literally the adjective "lofty"
exceeds the bounds of a simple, objective description to include both the ele
vating emotional impact that the object in question compels from the viewer
as well as a reference to the rhetorical category of sublimity (OED). It would
seem, therefore, that the narrator and crew's observation of the imposing
mountain range incites in them a feeling of ennoblement analogous to the sub
lime after the turn. Comprising what the reader can presume are white, edu
cated men (on the one hand, in his fiction Lovecraft usually makes a point of

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noting the race of characters who are not white, Anglo-Saxon, and of Protes
tant faith; on the other hand, the narrator describes the party as being made
up of New England scientists, graduate students, and skilled mechanics), the
group's cohesive response to the natural spectacle before them is plausible in
light of their probable shared Western, humanistic values: they have been
acculturated to experience the sublime in nature.
Nonetheless, contrary to Frankenstein and Udolpho, only when in a state of
ignorance can the subject in Lovecraft feel dignified by its viewing of any nat
ural phenomenon, and such an emotion cannot be sustained for long. As sug
gested by the use of the modifier "madness" in the story's title to qualify
"mountains," the text dramatizes the defilement of human protagonists' sub
jective integrity, particularly in terms of their loss of faith in reason and scien
tific progress. A key transition point in the text further corroborates the
humbling turn of cosmic horror in "Mountains":
Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollec

tion because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of
fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses
through its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature's laws.
Thenceforward the ten of us—but the student Danforth and myself above all
others—were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which
nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from shar
ing with mankind if we could. (Mountains 28)
This passage points to the erosion of an intelligible cultural narrative that sit
uates the human being at its center as constituting the fundamental break
with sublimity of Lovecraft's cosmic horror in "Mountains." With the over
throw of "that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses" and their
"accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature's laws" proven false,
a sublime turn becomes impossible for the surviving explorers. In Burkean
terms, no Supreme Being (whose existence collapses once the culture that
makes such a belief possible ceases to function) guarantees the subject's
integrity during the imagination's dynamic ascent. Likewise, from a Kantian
perspective, with the foundations of reason destroyed, no supra-sensible fac
ulty of the mind checks and supersedes the imagination's boundless extension
as it contemplates a "hideously amplified world of lurking horrors." Contrary
to sublimity, in "Mountains" nothing directs the subject back into itself; the
observation of natural phenomena acts instead as a vehicle for the subject's
psychical unhinging.
The impossibility of an experience of the sublime in Lovecraft, intrinsically
tied to characters' coming into awareness of Western culture's failure to repre
sent the world as it really is, becomes apparent in Lovecraft's juxtaposition of

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376 • Vivian Raiickas
protagonists' initial, aesthetic responses to natural spectacles in "Mountains"

with descriptions of their uncultivated, instinctive sense of repulsion towards
the same objects. For instance, Lovecraft follows the narrator's elevating
reflection on the Antarctic mountains with an elaboration of the menacing
impressions the last part of his approach to the world's southernmost conti
nent makes upon his imagination:
Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible
antarctic [sic] wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a
wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide
range, and which for some subconscious, mnemonic reason seemed to me dis
quieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of
the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich,12 and of the
still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of
Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred. (Mountains 7, emphasis original)
At this juncture "Mountains" takes a decidedly Lovecraftian turn, foreshadow

ing the narrator and Danforth's ominous discoveries of the abject, accidental
origin of human life as well as of the Shoggoths and their visceral decimation
of the superior, humanized Elder Ones.
On the one hand, the reference to the fictional Necronomicon, a "dreaded"
and "monstrous" book the narrator was sorry to have "ever looked into"
(Mountains 7) is significant. Invariably described as having been written by a
"mad Arab" and featured in a number of Lovecraft stories to presage the sub
ject's impending experience of cosmic horror, the Necronomicon13 underscores
a fear in Lovecraft of all things eastern as symptomatic of the irrational,
morally corrupting, and emasculating influence of the feminine upon the
"rational" and "civilized" white, Western male subject. Of import here, more
over, is how "Mountains" both attributes what would be deemed by a rational
mind as undue importance to the Necronomicon and implicitly privileges its
cosmic indifferentist narrative of existence over any affirmative understanding
of creation. The mental association Dyer draws between the "desolate sum
mits" he espies and the "evilly fabled plateau of Leng," purportedly located in
Asia and alluded to in the notorious Necronomicon, is later corroborated by his
exploration of the extra-stellar Old One's ancient city: "The conviction grew
upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau
of Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to dis
cuss" (Mountains 70). In suggesting that the Necronomicon—a cryptic book
written by a madman, whose revelations necessarily undermine the founda
tions of Western culture—is a reliable source of knowledge about the world,
the existence of the mythic plateau of Leng challenges the value system that

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makes sublimity possible. From a meta-textual standpoint, the specific connec

tion the Antarctic scene invokes in the professor's mind with a landscape in
the Necronomicon undercuts the sublime by framing the crew's epic mission to
penetrate and conquer unknown, virgin territories into a narrative of horror,
where the only possible outcome of their ill-fated quest is the debasement of
their human subjectivity.
On the other hand, the sound of the Antarctic wind, whose horror is pred
icated on the fact that it is the Shoggoths, in imitation of the Old Ones, who
produce it, rouses an "unconscious, mnemonic"14 (Mountains 7) sense of alarm
in Dyer or, elsewhere, stirs up "a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion" in the
human listener (Mountains 43) that further confirms the anti-sublime turn of
cosmic horror in "Mountains." Intrinsically connected to "the racial memory
of man—or of his predecessors" (Mountains 29), this kind of unconscious,
inherited memory trace is allied to the instinctive side of human nature and is
hence antithetical to reason. The narrative's validation of this type of atavis
tic memory as a form of knowledge based upon the true outlines of the world
and of the human condition is ultimately humiliating to the human subject on
two fronts. First, in superseding rational, scientific methodology—one of the
exemplary products of Western culture—as a means of gaining knowledge of
the world, the instinctive memory trace champions humanity's animalistic,
primitive side and casts "Mountains" as a reactionary tale against scientific
positivism. Second, it reveals the false foundation of humanism in its hinting
of our unconscious awareness of the cosmic indifferentist truth about the
human condition, a reality of which the professor becomes (consciously) cog
nizant when he reads the bas-reliefs of the Cyclopean city: we are not the first
intelligent species to have populated the Earth; we were made by accident by
superior, alien entities; and, in a manner similar to our interaction with species
we deem to be inferior to ours, these beings used us for "food and sometimes
as [...] amusing buffoon[s]" (Mountains 65). Rather than validating Dyer's ini
tial sublime experience of the Antarctic mountains, natural phenomena—the
landscape's fantastic outlines and the sound of the wind—thus function as
indexes of "cosmic horror," presaging the corrosion of the human subject's
sense of self at the crux of Lovecraft's work.15
Before turning to an explication of "The Rats in the Walls" and "Dagon,"
two exemplary texts that further elucidate the implicit subversion of sublimity
that cosmic horror performs, one last aspect of "Mountains" merits analysis for
its trenchant critique of the human condition: the saga of the Old Ones. In
Lovecraft, the all-pervasive, ignominious force of cosmic horror spares no
entity; the defilement of the human subject finds its parallel in the history of
the magnanimous Old Ones, whose atavistic physical decline, growing cultural
decadence, and obliteration at the hands their slaves, the Shoggoths, expunge
the heroic grandeur observable in their civilization's early stages. The narrative

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of the Old Ones' race, particularly the debasing fate that befalls them, there
fore acts as a transforming mirror that reflects the human condition in a cos
mic indifferentist universe. First and foremost, it compels the professor to
acknowledge that no culture, however sophisticated and idealistic in its social
practices, can withstand permanently the chaos existing within and without.
Second but equally important, the Old Ones' annihilation by the Shoggoths
presents a mise en abime of a dominant leitmotif in Lovecraft's fiction: human
protagonists' abhorrence and dread of inassimilable alterity.
Initially, the Old Ones represent a radical otherness from a human stand
point: they smell foul, possess a hybrid, part vegetable, part animal morphol
ogy, and are monstrous in appearance. Moreover, they constitute a source of
"soul-clutching horror" (Mountains 31) to Dyer for their seemingly savage dev
astation of Lake's camp. Nevertheless, in spite of the ostensibly insurmount
able obstacles such facts present to the narrator's human capacity to feel
empathy towards them, his exposure to their culture neutralizes his apprehen
sions. In a narrative turn indicative of Lovecraft's later tales that appears to
echo his adoption of a more progressive outlook on the world,16 the geology
professor develops a feeling of kinship towards the Old Ones as a result of his
deciphering of the bas-reliefs that adorn the walls of their city. His recognition
of the Old Ones' "historical-mindedness" and aesthetic appreciation of their
art, whose technique "was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to
the highest degree of civilized mastery" (Mountains 56, 57), culminate in his
complete identification with them. Unlike texts such as "The Shadow over
Innsmouth," in which the human subject's affiliation with the other results in
the loss of its humanity, in "Mountains" a reverse dynamic occurs in which the
alien entity is humanized, compelling Dyer to excuse its brutal murders of his
colleagues and to elevate its race above the "white simians" of Earth:
They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had
played a hellish jest on them—as it will on any others that human madness,
callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleep
ing polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming. They had not even
been savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the
cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically bark
ing quadrupeds, and with a dazed defence against them and the equally fran
tic white simians with queer wrappings and paraphernalia...poor Lake, poor
Gedney...and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done
that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and per
sistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and
forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables,
monstrosities, star-spawn—what ever they had been, they were men! (Moun
tains 95-6)

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The professor's emotional connection with the Old Ones is further reinforced
by his discovery of their biological and psychical vulnerabilities. Their genetic
makeup, however diverse from and superior to our own, is predisposed to "ret
rogression from forms still more complex" (Mountains 25). Furthermore, they
too are susceptible to experiencing fear: "The denizens of that city had them
selves known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a sombre and recur
rent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn [sic] in the act of
recoiling affrightedly from some object—never allowed to appear in the
design" (Mountains 73). In a manner similar to human beings, therefore, the
Old Ones are finite and fallible.
No longer a source of trauma for the human subject, the alien is absorbed
into the humanistic signifying system that fosters sublimity. In particular, the
professor situates their civilization within a Utopian, Platonic framework. From
what he discerns of their purely asexual reproduction; unparalleled educa
tional system, which "produces a tenaciously enduring set of customs and
institutions" (Mountains 64); the historical, and therefore rational, purpose of
artistic creation; and the organizing of households based on "congenial men
tal association" (Mountains 64); the Old Ones' mode of existence represent a
kind of ideal, socialist society governed exclusively by reason. The white,
Western male subject's overcoming of its aversion of the Old Ones' physical
form and feeling of affinity towards their societal structure implicitly suggest
that, in Lovecraft, acceptance of other races is possible only when their prin
ciples and behavior echo Western ideals. Nevertheless, not even under such a
fortuitous circumstance—the discovery of an alien civilization whose cultural
context is comparable to that shared by the explorers—can an experience of
the sublime occur in the Lovecraft Mythos. The feeling of sympathy Dyer
expresses towards the Old Ones only serves to augment the shock of cosmic
horror by making the human subject complicit in their fate, and nowhere is
this more evident than in the professor's failure to feel edified when looking
upon the ruins of the Old Ones' metropolis.
In terms that parallel Dyer's inability to sustain a sense of the sublime in
his observation of nature in "Mountains," the contemplation of ruins, a motif
prevalent in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature that drama
tizes the sublime, fails to rouse the concomitant sense of awe in the viewer. As
vehicles of sublimity, vestigial traces of civilization affirm the humanity of the
experiencing subject in a manner analogous to the mathematically and
dynamically sublimes in Kant. On the one hand, we feel pain in our imagina
tion's extension and subsequent contraction, brought on by its incapacity to
present positively either the ceaseless, infinite passing of time or a situation in
which we could defend the finite products of our culture against the blind, all
pervasive onslaught of nature. In both cases, we are made aware of the limita
tions of our sensible faculties and of our mortal condition. However, at the

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380 • Vivian Raiickas
sublime turn our ability to reason alerts us to the power of our moral vocation,
which surpasses every standard of sense. In spite of the transient status of
human life, we are called upon by our moral faculty to champion the products
of our culture and to carry on our creative endeavors since both the objects
themselves and the drive at the heart of cultural production are representative
of human freedom.
In appealing to Burke's categories of vastness and magnitude in building
or to the mathematical sublime in Kant, the Old Ones' city—its "incalculable
extent," inestimable age, and the "Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism" of
its architectural design (Mountains 45, 56)—is seemingly designed to rouse a
sense of sublimity in the viewer. The professor's admission that his "imagina
tion sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic
association" (Mountains 47) as he flew over the metropolis appears to sustain
such a reading. More importantly, in light of the compassion Dyer feels
towards the Old Ones and his humanizing of both their alien form and culture,
his contemplation of the city's ruins ought to inspire a sobering reflection upon
the human condition and a subsequent affirmation of creative freedom.
Instead, his observation of the city produces a sense of dread in him: he
describes the "giganticism" of the metropolis' architecture as "curiously oppres
sive" (Mountains 56), continuously refers to its existence as "blasphemous,"
and confesses that the "ridgy, barrel-shaped designs" of its headlands "stirred
up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances" (Mountains 48) in
him analogous to those roused by the "half-sentient musical piping" sound of
the wind. Both the subject's inability to feel an ennobling awe in the face the
ruins of the alien city and the sense of revulsion they inspire instead in the
viewer therefore indicate that the traces of the Old Ones' highly sophisticated
civilization function as indexes of cosmic horror.
The professor's coming into awareness of the fate that befalls the human
ized Old Ones at the hands of their monstrous slaves not only offers one of the
most perverse critiques of humanism in Lovecraft, but it also substantiates the
impossibility of an affirmative sublime turn in "Mountains" by uncovering the
source of the horror felt by human protagonists in their contemplation of the
alien city. In spite of their dignity of spirit and unequalled cultural achieve
ments, the god-like Old Ones, "makers and enslavers of life on earth" (Moun
tains 59), are impotent against the Shoggoths, and it is this discovery that
unhinges the minds of Dyer and Danforth. As the antithesis of the virile, eru
dite, socially-refined, rational, and humanized Old Ones—avatars of Love
craft's prized white, Western male subject in an alien universe—the soft,
plastic, amorphous, anarchistic, innately perverse, and infinitely adaptable
Shoggoths encapsulate a form of radical, inassimilable alterity that poses a
threat to any ordered civilization. Created as "ideal slaves to perform the
heavy work of the community" and controlled by "hypnotic influence," the

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Shoggoths have neither a culture of their own nor an intrinsic bodily form,
since, as "entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutina
tion of hubbies," "their tissues" can be molded "into all sorts of temporary
organs" (Mountains 67, 62). Thus, when, by means of their acquisition of a
"stubborn volition" that "echoed the will of the Old Ones without always
obeying it" (Mountains 67), the Shoggoths eventually overpower and decimate
their masters, their actions are not motivated by an affirmative desire to
defend their traditions or to create a new society predicated on emancipation
from bondage. Instead—and this is the true horror of "Mountains"—they are
driven to deface the civilization of the Old Ones and their nobility as a species
by performing an ironic mimicry of their morphology and culture. For exam
ple, "they seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking their voices—
a sort of musical piping over a wide range" (Mountains 75). Likewise, the
"coarse, bold," and adulterated art Dyer and Danforth find in an area whose
"glistening floors" (Mountains 92, 91) point to the Shoggoths' recent passage
reveal their mode of being to be predicated on a subversive emulation of the
Old Ones' culture: significantly, their art is marked by a "subtly but profoundly
alien element [...] added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique" of
their superior creators, and "seemed more like a parody than a perpetuation"
of their masters' pictorial tradition (Mountains 91, 92).17
Without a doubt, moreover, the reader is given to understand that the
"vital freaks" that come into being at the twilight of the Old One's civilization
are indeed Shoggoths passing for Elder Ones (Mountains 77). As simulacra of
their masters, the Shoggoths' only purpose is to undermine the integrity of the
original upon which they are modeled. They simultaneously represent chaos,
the death-drive, the unchecked rule of the id, or the oppressive feminine.18 If
their creative potential fills the professor with "horror and loathing" (Moun
tains 67) when he observes mere representations of them in the bas-reliefs of
the alien city, then his coming face to face with a member of their species
induces a trauma from which he never recovers: "But there are some experi
ences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit healing, and leave only
such added sensitiveness that memory inspires all the original horror" (Moun
tains 93).
The fate of the Old Ones thus presents an allegory of the human condi
tion in a cosmic indifferentist universe: beings greater than men succumb to a
fall that is anything but epic. As the "total decapitation" of the surviving mem
bers of their race suggests, the rationality that the Old Ones represent is
immersed in chaos as their heads are violently incorporated by means of "some
hellish tearing or suction" into the gelatinous matter that constitutes the
Shoggoths (Mountains 94). The unmistakably visceral emphasis of a death by
"suction" heralds the violent return of the body and its concrete, revolting
materiality in a culture that privileges rational sublimation. Thus, in offering

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382 ■ Vivian Ralickas
indexical traces of the Old Ones' brutal absorption by a phenomenon (the

Shoggoth) whose ontology is founded on the usurpation of their power and
debasement of their identity—a phenomenon whose existence necessarily
destroys the common sense that forms the basis for sublimity—the ruins of the
Old Ones' city fail to inspire a sense of the sublime in the human subject by
denying the affirmative turn of sublimity that grounds the subject back into
itself. What's worse, in introducing the parasitic Shoggoth, a devastating, inas
similable, horror-inducing entity whose ontology is predicated on the perverse
assimilation of another identity, "Mountains" expands the scope of the threat
it poses to encompass all human life, foreshadowing the obliteration of
humanity.
In "Mountains," Lovecraft's references to objective properties in nature
and architecture that ought to give rise to a feeling of sublimity underscore
instead his fiction's departure from the conventions requisite to the dramati
zation of such an experience that are commonplace in canonical gothic fiction
such as Frankenstein and Udolpho. Two other texts merit elucidation for their
decisive negation of sublimity along parallel lines: "The Rats in the Walls" and
"Dagon." In "The Rats in the Walls," the formal properties of the "subter
ranean world of limitless mystery" (Dunwich 41-2) that the investigative party
discovers beneath the de la Poers' family estate in Exham Priory ostensibly
appeal to the Burkean category of infinity and to Kant's mathematically sub
lime. Its "boundless depth," "infinity of pits," and immeasurable age—the party
"tr [ies] to keep for the nonce from thinking of the events which must have
taken place three hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand years ago" (Dun
wich 41-2, 43)—inspire the expansion of de la Poer's imagination to such an
extent that the "twilight grotto" permits comparison only with the epic, myth
ical landscape of hell. He refers to it as both the "antechamber of hell" and a
"grisly Tartarus," and makes reference to the "sightless Stygian worlds" it con
tains (Dunwich 42, 44, 43).
Nonetheless, Lovecraft implicitly undercuts the sublime in "Rats" by par
odying the affirmative scope of the turn integral to both Burkean and Kantian
sublimity, the notion of common sense that makes the sublime possible, and by
providing the experiencing subject with no objective distance from which to
enjoy the spectacle in question. The full disclosure of the mystery surrounding
Exham Priory and de la Poer's ancestry at the text's dramatic conclusion nei
ther induces the subject's awareness of its moral vocation (what Kant identi
fies as the sublimity of the human mind), nor does it enable the subject's
sharing in the dynamics of ascent of the Burkean sublime, permitting the sub
ject to cognize and to participate in the power of the Creator (Burke 59, sec
tion 5, "On Power"). The ancestral residence of the de la Poers was the site of
nameless horrors involving primordial, unholy rites; barbaric acts of torture
against animals and human beings; cannibalism; and, perhaps most revolting

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of all, human devolution into giant, rapacious rats. To make matters worse, the
site's pernicious influence over its residents still lingers, denying its explorers
the objective distance necessary to an experience of sublimity. While inspect
ing the grottos' vaults, the narrator yields to an unprecedented fit of madness
and half devours the face of his friend Norrys as his speech regresses into inco
herent grunts. Upon witnessing this abhorrent spectacle, moreover, Thornton,
a member of the search team, immediately loses consciousness and subse
quently goes mad. The failure of both characters to recover fully from their
mental collapse is a testament to the power of cosmic horror. Even after his
internment in Hanwell asylum19 in a cell next to Thornton's, de la Poer fails to
acknowledge his guilt and confesses to auditory hallucinations: "They must
know that it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will
never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behinds the padding in this room
and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they
can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls" (Dunwich 45).
Instead of uncovering a secret that validates their humanity and ensures
the continuity of their shared cultural heritage, de la Poer and his team con
front the intrinsic bestiality of human nature and succumb to the devastating
force of cosmic horror. Ironically, "Rats" dramatizes the conceited, fallacious
basis of Western culture by staging, on the one hand, the most radical exam
ple of atavism in the story's purportedly most civilized character: de la Poer,
who boasts of a noble family line dating back earlier than the twelfth century
CE. On the other hand, in responding to their pragmatic, visceral aversion to
Exham Priory by shunning the locale and chasing after its rats, respectively,
the simple country folk and de la Poer's cat possess more wisdom that the edu
cated search team (who at first express an objective, scientific appreciation of
the building's antiquity and archaeological history) and "the antiquarians who
surrounded and aided" (Dunwich 31) de la Poer in the restoration of his ances
tral home. The dynamic tension produced in "Rats" by Lovecraft's explicit
citation of motifs common to Burkean and Kantian sublimity in describing the
phenomena in question, juxtaposed with his denial of essential aspects of the
sublime—objective distance, the sublime turn, and the notion of common
sense—once again define cosmic horror in terms of an ironic inversion of sub
limity.
In comparison to other stories in the Lovecraft canon, "Rats" presents a
subtle critique of sublimity that is less comprehensive in its implications, since
the text overtly limits the scope of the subject's susceptibility to the particular
type of moral corruption it details by asserting that individual temperament,
immediate proximity to Exham Priory, or a combination of both rouse the
drive to degeneracy in characters. As a point of contrast, "Dagon" offers a suc
cinct example of the dynamics of descent characteristic of Lovecraft's fiction,
and its provocative critique of the sublime entails, like "Mountains," the

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degradation of the whole human race. Both Lovecraft's reference to a natural

disaster20 in terms of a great, "unprecedented volcanic upheaval" of the sea
floor (Dagon 15) and his description of the "slimy expanse of hellish black
mire" that is uncovered as "extend[ing] about [the narrator] in monotonous
undulations as far as [he] could see" (Dagon 15, emphases added) appeal to
Burke's notions of might and infinity as well as to Kant's categories of dynam
ical and mathematical sublimity. Nonetheless, Lovecraft subverts once more
an element crucial to sublimity: objective distance. The narrator awakes only
"to discover [him]self half-sucked" into "the nasty mud in the unending
plain," upon whose "rotting soil" he is later compelled to walk in search of "the
vanished sea and possible rescue" (Dagon 15-6). It is no revelation to the
reader, therefore, to find that although the narrator's reason is stimulated as
one would expect in Kantian sublimity, for instance, he affirms surprise at not
feeling "wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery,"
and confesses that he "was in reality more horrified than astonished" (Dagon
15). The source of his horror has its roots not only in the landscape's offence
to his senses, "putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish" (Dagon 15), but also
in his contemplation of certain of its properties that Burke and Kant would
consider as apt vehicles for sublimity if viewed from a safe distance:
Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideous
ness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was noth
ing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet
the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape
oppressed me with a nauseating fear. (Dagon 15, emphases added)
His bodily immersion in the horrid natural phenomenon in question bars him
from gaining a sense of objective perspective necessary to the sublime. Rather
than providing him with a means to contemplate the sublimity of his own
mind (Kant) or the absolute power of the Godhead (Burke), the landscape
engulfs him: it forces the narrator to focus on his material conditions and his
struggle for survival.
The navigational ineptitude which the narrator avows prior to the onset
of the symbolic portion of his narrative stands as the single most important
aspect of his characterization pertaining to the sublime, since it betrays a fun
damental vulnerability in his character: his inability to discern the boundaries,
both physical and psychical, that simultaneously constitute our understanding
of self-object relations and make possible the objective distance demanded by
any aesthetic judgment. Upon waking, the narrator's two chief aims, his search
for "the vanished sea and possible rescue" (Dagon 15) (objectives that amount
to a struggle for survival, and which, from a formal standpoint, serve to drive
the plot forward), express his urgent need to discern the geographical margins

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of his current position. Put another way, they communicate his yearning to
anchor his fantastic experience within the context of the rational, ordered uni
verse to which he belonged prior to escaping from the Germans and falling
asleep at sea. Symbolically, however, his attempt to find out where he is
equates to a desire to uncover who he is. It reveals the narrator's yearning for
a differentiated identity whose objective existence is validated by society in a
manner similar to a given position on a map. In synonymous terms, he longs
to assert a self that is separate from and that will permit him to exit, with a
sense of finality, the primordial muck that "half-sucked" him (Dagon 15). The
narrator's intertextual reference to an epic, allegorical tale, his "curious remi
niscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan's hideous climb though the unfath
omable realms of darkness" as he stood at "the summit of a mound and looked
down the other side into an immeasurable pit" (Dagon 16), further enhances
the symbolic scope of this portion of "Dagon" by underscoring the momentous
ness of its significance in relation to the narrator's sense of self. The analogy
Lovecraft encourages readers to draw between the deluded narrator of
"Dagon" and Milton's Satan, whose pride and extreme narcissism obfuscate his
judgment and contribute to his erroneous understanding of himself and his
relation to God, anticipates the shocking revelation about humanity at the
text's conclusion. The narrator's implicit belief in humanism not only proves
to be groundless, but, in leading him to develop a false sense of self and there
fore ill-preparing him to face the truth of cosmic horror, it contributes to the
disintegration of his identity.
The protagonist's encounter with a "vast, Polyphemus-like, and loath
some" creature at the bed of a precipice, in "an abyss which had yawned at the
bottom of the sea since the world was young" (Dagon 18, 17), highlights his
failure to extricate himself from the slimy muck and presages his ensuing men
tal collapse. From the broader vantage point of the Mythos, the motif of the
monstrous alien god, inferred by the story's title and the obelisk the creature
worships, offers a disquieting association between the protagonist and the fish
like, humanoid entities that Lovecraft elaborates fully fourteen years later in
"The Shadow over Innsmouth": it presents the narrator with the monstrous
foundation of his humanity. In addition to the creature's suggestively anthro
pomorphic features, "its gigantic scaly arms," "hideous head," and uttering of
sounds whose "measured" quality implies his use of language (albeit one
incomprehensible to the narrator), the bas-reliefs on the obelisk wittingly
allude to humanity's grotesque miscegenation "eras before the first ancestor of
the Piltdown or Neanderthal man was born":
I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort
of men; though the creatures were shown disporting like fishes in the waters
of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which

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appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not
speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque
beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in
general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby
lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. (Dagon 18)
Whether or not readers believe that the narrator actually encounters an alien
being is extraneous to the question of his quest for identity, since each posi
tion's interpretation of the narrator's fate differs only in the degree of his alien
ation from human culture it concedes: the narrator either goes mad or is the
illegitimate progeny conceived by a primordial pollution of the human race. In
both cases, the affirmative turn of the sublime is denied in "Dagon." The nar
rator's viewing of what should not be seen, the antediluvian obelisk and the
anthropomorphic alien, acts as a catalyst prompting the breaching of limits
within his psyche and the irremediable fragmentation of his identity.
From this symbolic context, therefore, the narrator's description of the
sudden change in the sea's characteristics in terms synonymous with Burkean
and Kantian sublimity discussed above relates to aspects integral to the sub
lime before the turn: the subject's sense of self-displacement and heterogene
ity concomitant to the expansion of its imagination, and which give rise to a
feeling of pain. In Burke, "the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it
cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which
employs it" (Burke 53). Similarly, in Kant the imagination labors and extends
itself (in vain) to provide a positive presentation of the absolute. The subject's
experience of sublimity prior to the turn is thus akin to the narrator's sensa
tion of being lost in the seemingly infinite expanse of the sea or being mired in
the endless, "monotonous undulations" (Dagon 15) of a fantastic landscape. In
both instances, his sense of self is displaced as he attempts to resist being swal
lowed up by a devastating spectacle of nature. In the fiction of a humanist, this
subjective crisis would be resolved through an affirmative turn towards cul
ture, reason, an ordered universe, and a unified, autonomous sense of self. In
Lovecraft, however, the aesthetics of cosmic horror that governs his fictional
universe erodes culture, subverts reason, champions chaos, and destroys the
integrity of the human subject. As "Dagon" illustrates, the subject is over
whelmed by a power of superhuman might and by a landscape of infinite
expanse without being offered any form of belief system or conciliatory knowl
edge that can reconstitute his integrity. The narrator's navigational incompe
tence thus unfailingly foreshadows his subsequent collapse into madness,
expressed by his yearning for an apocalypse that will herald the end of human
culture: "I dream of a day when [the aliens] may rise above the billows to drag
down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—
of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst

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universal pandemonium" (Dagon 19). To rephrase in synonymous terms, the

narrator communicates his desire to be swallowed up by an abyss where the
boundaries separating self and other are non-existent: a gulf whose conditions
preclude an experience of sublimity or any form of aesthetic judgment.
In the morally sterile world of Lovecraft's tales, the knowledge characters
gain unveils the fallacy of their humanistic notions of subjectivity, permanently
barring them from experiencing the Burkean and Kantian sublimes. As Kant
explains, to a viewer whose culture has not trained him to face the sublime
within an affirmative context—or, in Lovecraft's case, to a disillusioned viewer
who has lost faith in his humanity—the spectacle whose formal attributes
ought to give rise to sublimity will instead inspire pain. Furthermore, the sub
ject "will see in the proofs of the dominion of nature given by its destructive
ness and in the enormous measure of its power, against which his own vanishes
away to nothing, only the distress, danger, and need that would surround the
person who was banished thereto" (Kant 148, §29:5:265). In its ironic subver
sion of sublimity, cosmic horror not only denies the subject a safe vantage
point from which to witness the spectacle in question, but also converts the
sublime turn into a dynamics of descent. Unlike sublimity, which reconstitutes
the integrity of subjects displaced in its expansive movement prior to the turn,
cosmic horror irreparably erodes protagonists' individual bodies and the body
politic, barring humanity from fostering the common sense upon which sub
limity depends. Contrary to the humanism that grounds the sublime, there
fore, the fictional expression of cosmic horror remains true to its cosmic
indifferentist foundation. In a universe devoid of Godhead, nothing guaran
tees the significance and continuity of human existence; furthermore, moral
ity and the duality between good and evil it implies do not exist, given that
they are necessarily products of our human subjectivity. After enduring the
devastating shock of cosmic horror in the Lovecraft Mythos, the experiencing
subject is alienated from itself and its world without any ballast to confer
meaning to its truncated existence, since its (Western) cultural narrative
proves to be built on false foundations. Thus, if the cosmic indifferentism of
Lovecraft's fiction strips modern Western culture of the illusions fostered by its
solipsistic subjectivity, then sublimity amounts simply to another humanistic
illusion it dismantles.
It is of paramount significance that protagonists' inextricable engulfment
in the devastating spectacle—their inability to separate themselves from it,
both physically and psychically—underscores the fact that their identities are
always already defiled in the Lovecraft Mythos. Cosmic horror dramatizes the
subject's momentous encounter with phenomena that not only limit the
boundless expansion of the ego, but that destroy the subject-object boundaries
requisite to any kind of knowledge and cultural production. Lovecraft's poet
ics of cosmic horror and its literary raise-en-scene therefore unveil a crisis spe

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cific to modernity. In the face of the great social upheavals of the modern age,
the subject experiences a radically disorienting sense of being truncated from
inherited belief systems, without being granted the luxury of objective distance
from which to negotiate these changes and perhaps develop a new under
standing of life. The Lovecraftian subject thus undergoes an existential crisis
whose fictional resolution, from a humanistic standpoint, amounts to a nega
tion of life.
Part 2: Towards a Psychoanalytic Reading of Cosmic Horror

If my analysis of the impossibility of a sublime experience in Lovecraft alludes
to a psychoanalytic reading of his work, then it does so for a specific reason.
Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject, particularly what she identifies as the
defilement of the subject's "clean and proper body"21 in the throes of abjection,
informs what I identify as the immutable fragmentation and pollution of sub
jective integrity that cosmic horror performs. Abjection, the archaic, pre
objectal dynamics of psychical and physical boundary negotiation infants
engage in prior to assuming an identity as speaking subjects, haunts us
throughout life. It comes into being whenever we confront something we per
ceive as inassimilable; allied with perversity, it is manifest in the defilement of
taboos, the subversion of laws, or the transgression of any culturally-delineated
frontier (Kristeva, Powers 2—4). In Powers of Horror, Kristeva briefly sketches
the common ground shared by abjection and sublimity as well as their funda
mental differences:
In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through subli
mation, I keep it under control. The abject is hedged with the sublime. It is
not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring
them into being. For the sublime has no object either. [...] the sublime is a
something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here,
as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible
bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination. (11-12)22
The implications underlying her assertions merit explanation. First, both the
sublime and the abject originate in the subject; in other words, the terms
themselves operate as mediatory principles existing only in relational struc
tures. An object cannot properly be called abject, but it can inspire a sense of
the abject. The intolerable spectacle that both fascinates and repels us is
merely a vehicle that reminds us of the permeability of our own subjective bor
ders. Formally speaking, this trajectory runs parallel to Burkean and Kantian
sublimity, wherein the subject confronts a phenomenon whose might or infi
nite extension exceeds limits. For Burke, these restrictions are empirical: nei

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ther can the eye take in what appears to extend infinitely, nor can our bodies
resist prodigious strength. For Kant, these borders are cognitive and concern
our powers of presentation. In both cases, the sublime evokes, like the abject,
a strong emotional outburst characterized by an initial feeling of pain; a turn
follows, culminating in a sense of pleasure that is analogous to the "jouissance"
the subject feels in the abject. Hence the abject and the sublime are both neg
ative presentations of being that challenge the limits of selfhood, and both in
a sense constitute moments of self-revelation for the subject.
In spite of their shared trajectory, however, the sublime and the abject
serve opposite functions. While both overwhelm the experiencing subject, in
transcending the sensible the sublime elevates and affirms our humanity (or,
in Kant's case, our connection with something beyond the world of phenom
ena) ; conversely, the abject diminishes us by forcing us to confront a material
ity that cannot be signified. It compels us to come to terms with the
permeability and finitude of being by presenting us with a limit we cannot
incorporate. The imagination is compelled to represent a void—the same void
that constitutes the experiencing subject. Hence, if, in asserting our humanity,
the sublime also buttresses our culture (particularly in Kant, it separates us
from nature by underscoring the mind's ability to reason), then the abject, on
the other hand, subverts it by reminding us not only that are we inseparable
from that nature we seek to dominate, but that our culture, from which our
idea of mastery originates, is simply a fiction, a story we tell ourselves to anchor
our identities. In a manner similar to Lovecraft's protagonists who face "cos
mic horror," such as the narrator of "Mountains," Arthur Jermyn, de la Poer,
and the narrator of "Dagon," in abjection the subject is humbled. Its sense of
self is unhinged.
If viewed from the perspective afforded by the (albeit brief) comparative,
critical analysis of abjection and sublimity elaborated above, then neither the
"vague horror" and "nauseating fear" that "oppressed" the narrator of "Dagon"
when he contemplated the "unbroken monotony of the rolling plain" (Dagon
16, 15), nor the "ecstatic fear" de la Poer experiences at the moment when his
"foot slipped near a horribly yawning brink" of the abyss below his estate (Dun
wich 44) functions as an index of sublimity prior to the turn that each Love
craftian narrative subsequently subverts. The type of alienating horror Arthur
Jermyn experiences during his devastating moment of self-recognition in the
carcass of his simian ancestor offers instead a more apt parallel to their
predicaments. I contend, in other words, that the dread de la Poer and the nar
rator of "Dagon" endure, along with that borne by all of Lovecraft's characters
who face cosmic horror, is a symptom of the "abjection of self," or "the culmi
nating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its
objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its
own being" (Kristeva, Powers 5).23 The idea that cosmic horror is synonymous

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with Kristeva's notion of abjection thus constitutes the premise grounding my

analysis of Lovecraft's implicit subversion of the sublime in his fiction.
In light of the suggestive parallels and marked divergences between the
Burkean and Kantian sublimes and Kristeva's notion of abjection, I maintain
that Lovecraft's uncompromising erosion of the white, Western male subject's
identity is not limited to what I hope to have outlined as his perverse assault
on its culture, race, gender, moral beliefs, psyche, and physical integrity. To
make my case more compelling, it is worth referring to another aspect of Love
craft's fiction that points to the defilement of the subject's "clean and proper"
self: the loss of language. "Rats" presents one of the most telling examples of
the kind of regression inherent in the degeneration of a character's speech fac
ulties.24 As Joshi observes in his note explaining the comprehensive progres
sion of languages de la Poer speaks prior to being committed to Hanwell (he
jumps from archaic English, middle English, Latin, Gaelic, to bestial grunts),
"the purported effect is the narrator's sudden reversal on the evolutionary
scale" (Joshi, Annotated 54n53). While Joshi's perspective addresses a macro
cosmic view of de la Poer's diminishing linguistic competence that impacts the
human race as a whole, from a microcosmic, individual outlook that considers
his exploration of the vaults beneath Exham Priory in terms of his discovery of
the abject roots of his lineage, his loss of language suggests the collapse of his
subjectivity to a pre-symbolic, undifferentiated state of being, or what Kristeva
identifies as the realm of the maternal.
Cosmic horror thus induces, to borrow the words Kristeva uses to describe
abjection, '"something maternal' [...] to bear upon" (Kristeva, Powers 5) the
characters in Lovecraft's fiction, as all motifs tied to the feminine in Lovecraft
unveil an archaic abyss into which the self is condemned to plummet. As I
mentioned before, a female ancestor defiles Arthur Jermyn's sense of self.
Thus, the brute, animal nature of the feminine, conveyed through her embod
iment as a Congolese white ape, not only underscores the horror of race mis
cegenation in Lovecraft, but further testifies to the abject scope of the
maternal in his fiction. Likewise, the narrator of "Dagon" loses himself in the
amniotic undulations of two oceans: a real and a symbolic one. The Old Ones
of "Mountains" are violently absorbed (and by extension emasculated) by the
viscous, feminine contours of the Shoggoths. In "Rats," de la Poer cites the
worship of Cybele, a pagan earth goddess, as the source of his ancestors' inhu
man bestiality since time immemorial. De la Poer, a father to his "motherless
boy" named Alfred (Dunivich 28) who dies from war-related injuries, regresses
as a result of his contact with the feminine, represented by his investigation of
the caverns beneath the estate that once belonged to his paternal forbears.
This process completes the dethroning of their reason and the irremediable
alienation from the symbolic that cosmic horror carries out in the case of Dan
forth and Dyer in "Mountains," the Old Ones, Jermyn, de la Poer, and the nar

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rator of "Dagon"; or, to articulate the same idea from the opposite perspective,
the maternal's incursion into the orderly fortress of culture. Both underscore
the conflict at the heart of Lovecraft's fiction as a loss of self-mastery atten
dant on the subject's confrontation with the dynamic, devastating force that
is modernity.25 In allying cosmic horror with the abject realm of the maternal
and the psychical regression it implies, Lovecraft's stories call for a renegotia
tion of identity that must adapt to the new, disorienting experiences of the
modern subject.
As I hope to have made clear, cosmic horror dramatizes a crisis in subjec
tivity whose dynamic force leads to an epiphany incommensurate with the
affirmative scope of sublimity. Cosmic horror makes evident that not only is
the culture that reconstitutes the subject's integrity at the sublime turn no
longer viable, but no alternative has yet been found to replace it. In his letters,
Lovecraft addresses both the discontinuity between the historical past and the
immediate present that characterizes modernism and the impossibility of art to
provide a positive presentation of this truncation: "Our mechanical and indus
trial age is [...] so far removed from [...] ancestral conditions as to make
impossible its expression in artistic media" (Selected Letters 2: 103-104). When
the unintelligible cannot be absorbed into culture and we consequently lose
faith in the compensatory value of symbols, the foundation of being is threat
ened. If no language exists to contextualize modernity in Lovecraft's fiction,
then what is left to articulate but the shock of alienation? In realizing that its
"clean and proper" body is always already defiled, the Lovecraftian subject dis
covers that all of its safeguards—culture, tradition, race, ancestry, language—
are forfeited. "Cosmic horror" therefore unveils to the subject that it is
simultaneously abject and abjected by the same universe in whose center it
was erroneously placed by the efforts of humanism. All is not lost, however. If
abjection is tied to the maternal, and the subject of abjection is one perpetu
ally displaced, compelled to construct its limits anew, then there is a hope of
rebirth for the human protagonist in Lovecraft. Nonetheless, in a "cosmic
indifferentist" universe, it is likely that, in a manner analogous to the "far vio
let line" Dyer espies during his frantic, aerial escape from the Shoggoths
(Mountains 103), this new horizon and its promise of beauty would offer the
Lovecraftian subject only greater, inconceivable horrors.
Notes
1 Lovecraft's style, generally characterized by his extravagant use of adjectives,
Byzantine descriptions, and archaic vocabulary, has been one of the focal points of
criticism since the publication of his works. In the 1990s, poststructuralist and decon
structionist approaches have reversed the derogatory judgments presented by early

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studies of Lovecraft's style and underscored its significance to his aesthetics. For two
sympathetic and thematically proximate critical studies, see John Langan's "Naming the
Nameless: Lovecraft's Grammatology" for an elucidation of Lovecraft's "approximate
language," which "relates the effect and not the thing itself" (29); and Donald
Burleson's "Lovecraft and Adjectivitis: A Deconstructionist View" for an elaboration of
Lovecraft's strategy of "narrative impressionism," in which the narration of a character's
perceptions of a scene or event are more important than an objective depiction (24).
2 The most salient example pertains to Burke's defense of "excessive bitters and
intolerable stenches" as capable of producing "a grand sensation" akin to the sublime,
provided that they "are moderated, as in a description or narrative" (Burke 78). In my
view, gaining objective distance from a foul smell or repugnant taste does not suggest
sublimity, nor is "the whole composition supported with dignity" if the abject smell or
taste is associated with "images of an allowed grandeur" (Burke 78). Instead, a dialec
tical tension is produced, akin to that found in the grotesque. Furthermore, the illus
trations Nelson provides from Lovecraft's fiction in support of Burke's notion that foul
smells can give rise to sublimity are in fact representations of characters in the midst
of an experience that violates their subjective integrity. Overcome by the impression
made upon their sense of smell, their reactions are in no way comparable to the awe
and religious respect the sublime inspires; our reading of their sensations, moreover,
does not make them any more sublime in light of our objective distance.
3 This assertion needs to be qualified. In "Lovecraft's Ethical Philosophy," Joshi
explains that Lovecraft's determinism did not turn into fatalism, since he was too
keenly aware of the fallacy inherent in such a position. He cites from Lovecraft's
"Some Causes of Self-Immolation" in the Marginalia to illustrate his point: "We have
no specific destiny against which we can fight—for the fighting would be as much a
part of the destiny as the final end" ("Lovecraft's Ethical Philosophy" 24). Joshi
remarks that this line of reasoning can serve to defend a "sort of free will": "Since des
tiny is enmeshed in the fabric of existence, it is for that reason undetectable; and we
can continue engaging in any actions we please because those activities would be as
much (or as little) a part of destiny as the failure to act" (24). However, it is simply the
illusion of free will that Lovecraft's viewpoint concedes; our inability to discern the
larger pattern of destiny does not preclude its existence.
4 This applies primarily to human beings, although with the exception of the
Great Race of time travelers in "The Shadow out of Time," who, in having the capa
bility to foresee the annihilation of their species, project their consciousness into past
and future life forms to escape their predicament, Lovecraft's aliens are also bound by
this fate.
5 All citations to Kant include the page followed by the section (§) then the vol
ume and page in accord with the standard notation for Kant's work.
6 "The Whisperer in the Darkness" comes to mind as a fitting example. The fungi
cut up Henry Akeley's body and place his still living brain in a canister from which
they can, with the help of special devices, communicate with him.

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7 Some scholars maintain that a distinction between his earlier and later texts in
terms of characterization justifies the exclusion of certain titles from the Lovecraft
myth cycle. (See David E. Schultz's "From Microcosm to Macrocosm: The Growth of
Lovecraft's Cosmic Vision" for an elaboration of this outlook.) In light of the thematic
and stylistic continuity observable in Lovecraft's work, however, I am sympathetic to
George T. Wetzel's assertion in "The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study" that individual texts
make up fragments of a larger narrative constellation whose power becomes evident
through a cumulative reading. At the extreme, he interprets the Lovecraft Mythos as
a lengthy novel in which individual stories make up its many chapters.
8 Lovecraft also suggests an implicit connection between "Jermyn" and "vermin":
both the perfect rhyme shared by the two words and the salience of vermin as a motif
in his fiction encourage the association.
9 In Udolpho's penultimate paragraph, the narrator affirms succinctly the moral of
the story: "O! Useful may it be to have shewn [sic], that, though the vicious can some
times pour affliction upon the good, their power is transient and their punishment cer
tain; and that innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience,
finally triumph over misfortune!" (Radcliffe 632).
10 Emily's learning of "Latin and English" from her father, "chiefly that she might
understand the sublimity of their best poets," and her developing "a taste for works of
genius" "in her early years" (Radcliffe 9) are suggestive of the notion of sublimity elab
orated by Longinus, whose positing of the sublime as an innate quality of the human
mind (and thus necessarily beyond the bounds of rhetoric) sets the groundwork for
subsequent formulations of sublimity as an aesthetic category (see Longinus's On Sub
limity, 1st century CE).
11 The etymology of the adjective "stupendous," employed by Emily to describe
the mountain's recesses, uncovers the subjective, impressionistic basis of her reaction
to these particular phenomena in nature. More importantly, it is a response condi
tioned by Burkean sublimity. "Stupendous" originates from the Latin stupendus "that is
to be wondered at," which is a gerundive form of stupere "to be struck senseless, be
amazed at" (OED). In other words, the view of the mountain afforded by "the wild
wood-walks" (Radcliffe 9) suggests that Emily's mind is, to borrow Burke's phrasing,
"so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by conse
quence reason on that object which employs it" (Burke 53). Moreover, the "silence
and grandeur of solitude" (Radcliffe 9) Emily experiences when she contemplates the
mountain's hollows echoes Burke's category of privation, which includes "Vacuity,
Darkness, Solitude, and Silence" (Burke 65). (In my view, privation can be subsumed
under "obscurity." The inability to see implies spatial and metaphysical disorientation
in Burke, and the subject's loss of sensory reference points, necessary to its gaining a
sense of perspective from which it can then distinguish itself from the world, can have
the same effect.)
12 Lovecraft makes a total of seven references in "Mountains" to the Asian paint
ings of Russian painter and writer Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich (1874-1947),

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whose works he had seen in New York at the eponymous museum in 1934 (see Joshi's
introductory comments to the footnotes of the Penguin edition of "Mountains," 420).
Interestingly, Roerich's visual works encouraged some of his contemporaries to draw
analogies with music: "The original force of Roerich's work consists in a masterly and
marked symmetry and a definite rhythm, like the melody of an epic song" (Nina Seli
vanova, qtd. in http://www.roerich.org/index.html). The series of paintings to which
Lovecraft makes reference are likely those inspired by Roerich's journey, beginning in
1923, to what were then uncharted regions of Chinese Turkestan, Altai, Mongolia and
Tibet: In Kanchenjunga, Sikkim Pass, His Country, The Great Spirit of the Himalayas, and
The Banners of the East (http://www.roerich.org/index.html). It seems ironic (and per
haps even perverse) that Lovecraft cites Roerich's work from this period to emphasize
the narrator's cognitive estrangement from his environment and to foreshadow the
destructive revelation that awaits the explorers; Roerich's Asian paintings, particularly
the Himalayan series, are renowned for the "loftiness of spirit" they convey
(http://www.roerich.org/index.html). In my view, the ominous references to Roerich's
Asian paintings in "Mountains" betray instead characters' immersion in a cosmic
indifferentist worldview that necessarily bars them from appreciating the grandeur of
his work.
13 "The Ritual" is one of the stories that best exemplifies the indexical function
that the Necronomicon plays in Lovecraft's fiction.
14 This type of recollection, triggered by a sensory stimulus, appears frequently in
Lovecraft's fiction, and always denotes the subject's impending ontological crisis.
15 Other references to sublimity in nature fail to ennoble the human subject and
instead anticipate its debasement: "The ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the
queer state of [Lake's] sensations at being in the lee of vast pinnacles whose ranks shot
up like a wall reaching the sky at the world's rim," are counterbalanced by the "note
of subconscious alarm" the narrator detects "in his words" (Mountains 15). Subse
quently, Lake and his party discover the subterraneous network of caves and unearth
the still living bodies of the Old Ones, two actions that spell the crew's violent
destruction.
16 Scholars have cited Lovecraft's increasing liberalism in his later years in an
effort to obfuscate the extent of his racism and the profound impact it had on his writ
ing. For instance, both Donald R. Burleson and S. T. Joshi problematically make an
effort to excuse Lovecraft's racism by explaining that it was focused on abstract collec
tives rather than individuals, and they mention his marriage to a Jewish woman as evi
dence of his tolerant attitude. Burleson comments that "Lovecraft in his letters often
gave vent to seemingly horrendous 'racist' remarks against Jews, black people, and
others, yet habitually treated individual people with warmth and kindness, even mar
rying a Jewess" (H. P Lovecraft: A Critical Study 11). In Lovecraft's defense, Joshi
remarks that "many of his closest friends, including his wife, were not of the pure
Nordic stock that he so concerned himself with" ("H. R Lovecraft: His Life and Work"
14). I cannot see how Lovecraft's vituperative descriptions in his letters of New York

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City's non-white inhabitants constitute only "seemingly" racist commentary. To his

credit, Joshi changes his view in A Dreamer and a Visionary: Lovecraft in His Time; Joshi
acknowledges that, in light of Lovecraft's avowal in a letter of taking pride in being
known as an anti-Semite in high school, those who, like himself in the previously cited
work, sought "to exculpate Lovecraft on the grounds that he never took any direct
actions against racial or ethnic groups he despised but merely confined his remarks to
paper" can no longer do so (55).
17 Given his antiquarian proclivities, perhaps Lovecraft's depiction of the Shog
goths' bastardization of the Old Ones' art was inspired by the pictorial style introduced
in Ancient Egypt during the reign of Akhenaten, "commonly known nowadays as the
'heretic king'" and whose "reign was excised from public record" after his death
(Eaton-Krauss). The subversive nature of the artistic novelties introduced during
Akhenaten's reign and their marked contrast to traditional Ancient Egyptian pictorial
conventions would surely have captured Lovecraft's imagination: "Of the innovations
introduced in the visual arts, the manner in which the king himself was depicted
retains its shock value down to the present. The king's physiognomy (his hanging
chin, thick lips, sunken cheeks and slanting eyes) and 'effeminate' body (narrow shoul
ders, fleshy chest, swelling thighs, pendulous abdomen, and full buttocks, in marked
contrast to spindly limbs and a scrawny neck) [...] have raised questions about his
physical and mental health. But aberrations from previously accepted norms need not
reflect his actual appearance. They are better understood as stylistic and iconographic
devices chosen to stress Akhenaten's uniqueness" (Eaton-Krauss).
18 The professor likens their piping speech to the lethal call of the femme fatale
when he declares that he wished "that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses' men off the
Sirens' coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness" (Mountains
104). Another interpretive possibility also comes to mind: does the relationship Love
craft establishes between the Shoggoths and the Old Ones function as a type of racist
commentary on slavery and race-relations in pre-World War II USA?
19 The Hanwell Asylum actually exists. It was established in 1831 in Middlesex
County, England. As S. T. Joshi remarks in the annotated edition of "Rats," Lovecraft
likely became aware of it from his reading of Lord Dunsany's "The Coronation of Mr.
Thomas Shap" (The Annotated H.E Lovecraft 55n54).
20 Lovecraft believed what he describes in "Dagon"—the upheaval of the sea
floor—to be scientifically possible (see "In Defence of Dagon" 149).
21 I adopt Leon S. Roudiez's translation of Kristeva's original French expression
"corps propre," which signifies a body that is both one's own and clean—a body bear
ing no traces of its debt to nature: "Le corps ne doit garder aucune trace de sa dette
envers la nature" (Kristeva, Pouvoirs 121).
22 In the original French text, the citation reads as follows: "Dans le symptome,
l'abject m'envahit, je le deviens. Par la sublimation, je le tiens. Labject est borde de
sublime. Ce n'est pas le meme moment du parcours, mais c'est le meme sujet et le
meme discours qui tes font exister. Car le sublime, lui non plus, n'a pas d'objet. [...] Le

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sublime est un en plus qui nous enfle, qui nous excede et nous fait etre a la fois ici, jetes,
et la, autres et eclatants. Ecart, cloture impossible, Tout manque, joie: fascination"
(Kristeva, Pouvoirs 19).
23 In the original French text, the citation reads as follows: "La forme culminante
de cette experience du sujet auquel est devoile que tous ses objets ne reposent que sur
la perte inaugurate fondant son etre propre" (Kristeva, Pouvoirs 13).
24 This erosion of the enunciating subject's speech also occurs in other Lovecraft
stories: See "The Haunter of the Dark," "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Outsider," The
Colour out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," "The Shadow over Innsmouth," "The
Whisperer in the Darkness," and "The Shadow out of Time," which are all found in
The Dunwich Horror and Others.
25 Of the texts cited, the description of the Shoggoth as an on-coming subway
train in "Mountains" offers the most telling, dynamic parallel between modernity and
"cosmic horror": "It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's
'thing that should not be'; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrush
ing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front looming
colossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored
lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder" (Mountains 101).
Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful. 1757. Oxford: Oxford UP 1998.
Burleson, Donald. H. P Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Westport: Greenwood, 1983.
. "Lovecraft and Adjectivitis: A Deconstructionist View." Lovecraft Studies 31
(1994): 22-24.
Dziemanowicz, Stefan. "Outsiders and Aliens: The Use of Isolation in Lovecraft's
Fiction." An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor
of H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. David E. Schultz and S. T Joshi. London: Associated
University P 1991. 159-187.
Eaton-Krauss, Marianne. "Akhenaten." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt: E
Reference Edition. Ed. Donald B. Redford. Oxford UP University of Toronto
Libraries. 31 March 2008.
http://www.oxford-ancientegypt.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/
Houellebecq, Michel. H. P Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie. New York:
Editions du Rocher, 1999.
Joshi, S. T., ed. The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Dell, 1997.
. A Dreamer and a Visionary: Lovecraft in His Time. Liverpool: Liverpool UE
2001.
. Introductory Note. "At the Mountains of Madness." The Thing on the Doorstep
and Other Weird Tales. New York: Penguin, 2001. 420-21.

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. "Lovecraft's Ethical Philosophy." Lovecraft Studies 21 (1990): 24-39.

, ed. H. P Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. Athens: Ohio UR 1980.
, ed. "The Rats in the Walls." The Annotated H. P Lovecraft. New York: Dell,
1997.
Joshi, S. T., and Kenneth W. Faig. "H. R Lovecraft: His Life and Work." H. P
Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. S. T Joshi. Athens: Ohio UR 1980.
1-19.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. 1790. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric
Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UR 2000.
Kristeva, Julia. Pouvoirs de I'horreur: Essai sur 1'abjection. Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1980.
. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:

Columbia UR 1982.
Langan, John R "Naming the Nameless: Lovecraft's Grammatology." Lovecraft Studies
41 (1999): 25-29.
Leiber, Fritz Jr. "A Literary Copernicus." 1944. H. P Lovecraft: Four Decades of
Criticism. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Athens: Ohio UR 1980. 51-62.
"Lofty." Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford UR 2008. University of Toronto
Libraries. 2 March 2008.
http://dictionary.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/
Longinus. On Sublimity. Trans. D. A. Russell. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. Ed. S. T.
Joshi. Sauk City: Arkham, 1985.
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Novels. 3-106.
. "Dagon." Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. 14-19.

. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. Ed. S. T Joshi. Sauk City: Arkham, 1986.
. The Dunwich Horror and Others. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Sauk City: Arkham, 1982.
. "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family." Dagon and Other
Macabre Tales. 73-82.
. H. P Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1925-1929. 5 vols. Ed. August Derleth and
Donald Wandrei. Sauk City: Arkham, 1968-76.
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. Miscellaneous Writings. Ed. S. T Joshi. Sauk City: Arkham, 1995.
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Lovett-Graff, Bennett. "Life is a Hideous Thing: Primate-Geniture in H. R
Lovecraft's Arthur Jermyn.'" Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 8.3 (1997):
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Nelson, Dale J. "Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime." Lovecraft Studies 24 (1991):
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Honor of H. P Lovecraft. Ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi. London:
Associated University P 1991. 199-219.
Selivanova, Nina. The World of Roerich. Paris: Presse Franco-Russe, 1923. New York:
Corona Mundi, International Art Center, 1924. 7 February 2008.
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Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford UR 1993.
Wetzel, George T. "The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study." 1955. H. E Lovecraft: Four
Decades of Criticism. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Athens: Ohio UR 1980. 79-95.
Will, Bradley A. "H. P Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime." Extrapolation:
A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 43 (2002): 7-21.
Abstract
In drawing from Lovecraft's pronouncements on "cosmic horror" in his essays and its
dramatization in his stories, I argue that an experience of the sublime is impossible in
his fiction since cosmic horror denies four fundamental aspects of the Burkean and
Kantian aesthetics of sublimity: freedom; the primacy of the human being; the notion
of common sense upon which an aesthetic judgment is based; and the objective dis
tance requisite to the sublime. To underscore further how cosmic horror implicitly sub
verts sublimity in Lovecraft, in the coda I elaborate on how cosmic horror is coeval
with the modern subject's abjection of self, a notion defined by Julia Kristeva in Pow
ers of Horror.

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"Cosmic Horror" and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft

Author(s): Vivian Ralickas

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Examples of h. p. lovecrafts use of motifs common to the burkean and

Vol, 18, No. 3, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

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Part 1: The Impossibility of a Sublime Reading

The profound influence of two interconnected aspects of Lovecraft's view on

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a determined course. It assumes greater significance in his later tales, wherein

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also metaphysical: "One's sense of isolation is not merely a function of geo

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to a common sense requisite to the sublime is possible. In Lovecraft's Mythos,

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Old Ones—are depicted as the sadistic and barbaric practices of amoral,

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Space," it is a woman, Mrs. Gardner, who first succumbs to the vampiric

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in Emily a proclivity for certain types of natural phenomena, whose contem

Echoing Burke's notion of sublimity, particularly the categories of infinity and

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In spite of Victor's fragmented sense of self and increasing estrangement from

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Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollec

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protagonists' initial, aesthetic responses to natural spectacles in "Mountains"

At this juncture "Mountains" takes a decidedly Lovecraftian turn, foreshadow

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makes sublimity possible. From a meta-textual standpoint, the specific connec

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indexical traces of the Old Ones' brutal absorption by a phenomenon (the

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