The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius

Moreland, Sean

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_2

Sean Moreland²

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4 Citations

Abstract

Supernatural Horror in Literature’s cosmic horror is examined via historical aesthetics, and situated as a modernist mutation of sublimity. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror contrasts sharply with earlier Victorian uses of the phrase, in part because it derives from the atomic poetics of the Roman poet Lucretius, a derivation that reveals much about the literary hierarchy Lovecraft develops with Supernatural Horror in Literature, his relationship with modernist writers including T.S. Eliot, his reaction against Romantic and Victorian modes of supernatural fiction, his conception of a non-supernatural cosmic literature grounded in speculative skepticism, and his influence on contemporary speculative philosophy and weird fiction. The chapter concludes by considering how cosmic horror is adapted by two of the most important contemporary writers of weird fiction, Caitlín R. Kiernan and Thomas Ligotti.

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Notes

1.
John Mason Good, The Nature of Things: A Didactic Poem Translated from the Latin of Titus Lucretius Carus, Accompanied with the Original Text, and Illustrated with Notes Philological and Explanatory, in Two Volumes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805), Volume I, Book III, lines 297–301.
2.
Carl Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, The Age of Lovecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 235.
3.
For a more general analysis of Lovecraft’s multifaceted reception of and identification with Lucretius, see Sean Moreland, “The Poet’s Nightmare: The Nature of Things According to Lovecraft” Lovecraftian Proceedings 2 (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2017), 31–46.
4.
Brian Stableford, “The Cosmic Horror,” Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. S.T. Joshi (Westport: Greenwood, 2007), 65.
5.
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (New York: Hippocampus, eBook version), 84.
6.
John Mason Good, The Book of Nature, Complete in One Volume (Harper’s Stereotype Edition) (Hartford: Belknap and Hamersley, 1839) 65. First published in 1826, but passing through numerous American and British editions and translations throughout the nineteenth century, Book of Nature and Good’s other writings shaped the literary visions of many of the Romantic-era writers SHL canonizes, including Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, and Poe . For the latter’s reception of Good, see Moreland, “Beyond ‘De Rerum Naturâ, Esqr’: Lucretius, Poe, and John Mason Good,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Spring 2016.
7.
Good, Book, 65.
8.
The Pall Mall Budget, Volume 31, 1883, 9. This reference was uncovered, and the following discussion was shaped, by the use of Google Ngram to search for references to “cosmic emotion,” “cosmic horror,” and related bi-grams. Notably, “cosmic horror” peaks in the 1890s, during which time all the references to it appear to be informed by Clifford via Gould. It peaks again following Arkham House’s 1939 re-publication of SHL. By this time, most uses of the phrase are directly informed by Lovecraft. By the late 1960s, the term begins a slow, steady increase in use, continuing to be widely associated with Lovecraft.
9.
The OED records this as the first use of the phrase. See “cosmic, adj,” OED Online, January 2018, Oxford University Press.
10.
William Kingdon Clifford, “Cosmic Emotion,” The Popular Science Monthly, V. 7–12, 1878, 74.
11.
Clifford, 75.
12.
Clifford, 75.
13.
Clifford, 80.
14.
Ligotti , Conspiracy, 83.
15.
George M. Gould The Meaning and the Method of Life: A Search for Religion in Biology (New York: Putnam’s, 1893), 8. Paul Di Filipo points out this usage in “Malign Universe, 13 Works of Cosmic Horror.”
16.
First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1904 and turned into a longer work in 1910. George M. Gould, “The Infinite Presence,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1904. 785–795.
Gould also wrote what he called “Biographic Clinics,” brief medical biographies of many late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century writers, including Darwin, Nietzsche , and de Quincey.
17.
Gould, “The Infinite Presence,” 787.
18.
Gould, “The Infinite Presence,” 787.
19.
Miéville , Age of Lovecraft, 235.
20.
Blackwood, “The Willows,” The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, 30.
21.
Blackwood, 31.
22.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000). Subsequent citations from this volume are indicated by in-text pagination.
23.
Stableford, “Cosmic Horror,” 66.
24.
Joshi, A Subtler Magick (Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press, 1996), 30.
25.
Mathias Clasen, Why Horror Seduces (New York: Oxford, 2017), 13.
26.
Gerry Carlin and Nicola Allen, “Slime and Western Man: H. P. Lovecraft in the Time of Modernism,” ed. David Simmons, New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 78.
27.
Norman R. Gayford, “The Artist as Antaeus,” An Epicure in the Terrible ed. S.T. Joshi and David Schultz (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson U.P, 1999) and H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters (hereafter SL) Volume 1 (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1971), 262.
28.
Lovecraft, SL 3, 195.
29.
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 1094.
30.
Eliot, 1096.
31.
Alex Houstoun, “Lovecraft and the sublime: A reinterpretation,” Lovecraft Annual No. 5 (2011): 160–180. Vivian Ralickas, “Cosmic horror and the question of the sublime in Lovecraft,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18/3 (2008): 364–398.
32.
See Dale J. Nelson, “Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime,” Lovecraft Studies 24 (1991 Spring): 2–5, and Bradley A. Will, “H.P. Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 43.1 (2002 Spring): 7–21.
33.
Ralickas, “Cosmic Horror,” 390, 366.
34.
Ralickas, “Cosmic Horror,” 387. While Clasen is among the commentators to remark on the unscientific basis of Kristeva’s influential theory (Why Horror Seduces, 16–17) one need not accept her dubious developmental metapsychology or privileging of Lacanian concepts to appreciate the value of her contribution for a historical poetics of horror. Her theory has a shared literary and philosophical ancestry with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror; Kristeva explains her formative dialectical materialism as “Hegel overturned by Lucretius, Mallarmé and Freud .” She and Lovecraft similarly draw on a Lucretian dynamics of descent and a Freudian emphasis on a physiologically determined unconscious as a means of displacing idealist philosophy.
35.
Ralickas, “Cosmic Horror,” 367.
36.
Karalis, “Disambiguating the Sublime,” 3.
37.
Karalis, “Disambiguating the Sublime,” 2.
38.
J.D. Worthington, “Queen Anne is [not] Dead,” Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors, ed. Robert Waugh (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 15.
39.
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator No. 418 (1712).
40.
Addison, The Spectator No. 418 (1712).
41.
Addison, The Spectator No. 420, July 2, 1712.
42.
Anne Janowitz, “The Sublime Plurality of Worlds,” http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/13/the-sublime-plurality-of-worlds-lucretius-in-the-eighteenth-century#footnote3_d9gftef
43.
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 147.
44.
Karalis, “Disambiguating the Sublime,” 5.
45.
Glenn Most, “The Sublime, Today,” Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism, ed. Brooke Holmes, W. H. Shearin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 240.
46.
John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, Contain’d in Some New Discoveries Never Made Before, Requisite for the Writing and Judging of Poems Surely Being a Preliminary to a Larger Work Design’d to Be Publish’d in Folio, and Entituled, A Criticism upon Our Most Celebrated English Poets Deceas’d. By Mr. Dennis (London: George Strahan, 1704), 68.
47.
Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, 87.
48.
Most, “The Sublime, Today,” 240.
49.
As S.T. Joshi explains, “the Epicurean philosophy embodied in Lucretius was a central influence in [Lovecraft’s] early thought.” S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft Volume 1 (New York, NY: Hippocampus Press, 2013), 61–2.
50.
David Norbrook, “Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and the Lucretian Sublime,” Tate Papers 13, np. http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/13/milton-lucy-hutchinson-and-the-lucretian-sublime
51.
Most, 249–50.
52.
David Norbrook, “Lucretian Sublime,” np.
53.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. William Ellery Leonard (New York: J.M. Dent, 1916), Book I, 5. Leonard was the first American English translator of Lucretius and one of Lovecraft’s contemporaries. While I’ve seen no evidence they met, both men were friends with August Derleth, and both also wrote appreciations of Frank Belknap Long’s writings. Leonard’s often incapacitating agoraphobia seems reflected in the anxious efficacy and alienation of his translation of many of Lucretius’s descriptions of immensity and the void, lending his version further resonance with Lovecraft.
54.
James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, 469.
55.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton, London 1958,152 [III.21]. For Burke’s relationship to Lucretius and Epicurean thought, see Paddy Bullard, “Epicurean Aesthetics of the Philosophical Enquiry,” Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
56.
Eric Baker, “Lucretius in the European Enlightenment,” The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 284.
57.
Lovecraft, SL2, 269; see also Joshi, Subtler Magick, 34.
58.
Ralickas, “Cosmic Horror,” 366.
59.
O Fortunate Floridian, 131–2.
60.
CE 2, 176.
61.
Ligotti , Conspiracy, 83
62.
Lovecraft, SL2, 310.
63.
Sir Walter Scott, critical introduction to The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, by Horace Walpole (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Co., 1811), xxii.
64.
Scott, introduction to The Castle of Otranto, xxvi.
65.
For a detailed discussion of the contrastive approaches of Radcliffe, Scott, and Poe to Lucretian materialism and the supernatural, see Moreland, “Ancestral Piles: Poe’s Gothic Precursors,” The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (Oxford University Press, 2018).
66.
In this respect, Lovecraft closely echoes both Scott’s explicit and Poe’s implicit criticisms of Radcliffe’s work, and the latter certainly shaped Lovecraft’s views.
67.
Lovecraft, SL 1, 89.
68.
For a detailed description of this dream, its variants and significance to Lovecraft’s literary imagination, see Byron Nakamura, “Dreams of Antiquity: H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Roman Dream of 1927,” Lovecraftian Proceedings 2, 13–30.
69.
Lovecraft, SL 2, 190; DRN V.575.
70.
DRN, trans. Leonard, V, 211.
71.
Lovecraft, SL 2, 312.
72.
Quoted in S.T. Joshi, “Poe, Lovecraft and the Revolution in Weird Fiction,” (paper presented at Ninth Annual Commemoration Program of the Poe Society, October 7, 2012), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psblctrs/pl20121.html
73.
For a discussion of the verbal parallels and their importance, see Moreland, “Not Like Any Thing of Ours,” The Lovecraftian Poe, 224–226.
74.
Lovecraft, SL 1, 89.
75.
Nakamura, “Dreams,” 28–29.
76.
Karalis, 3.
77.
Karalis, 3, quoting Kant, Observations 112.
78.
Karalis, 3.
79.
For a broad analysis of how misogyny and racial anthropology converge in Lovecraft’s thought and the eugenics movement, as well as how contemporary women writers work with and through this aspect of Lovecraft’s work, see Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Magna Mater: Women and Eugenic Thought in the Work of H.P. Lovecraft (University of British Columbia MA Thesis). For an analysis of how underlying pseudo-scientific and racial anthropological principles inform Lovecraft’s criticism and fiction, see Dan Clinton, “The Call of Ligeia: Influence and Effect in Poe and Lovecraft,” The Lovecraftian Poe, 27–50, and Jeffrey Shanks, “Darwin and the Deep Ones,” Lovecraftian Proceedings 2, 131–144.
80.
Moreno -Garcia, Magna Mater, 6.
81.
Gina Wisker, “‘Spawn of the pit’: Lavinia, Marceline, Medusa and All Things Foul: Lovecraft’s Liminal Women,” New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft, ed. David Simmons (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 31.
82.
Lovecraft amplifies an association between femaleness, materiality, and maternity, versus a masculine rationality that is traditional in Western literature and philosophy, as feminist critics at least since Simone de Beauvoir have noted. For the gendering of Lucretius’s poetics, see S. Georgia Nugent, S. “‘Mater’” Matters: The Female in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura,” Colby Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1994): 179, and Don Fowler, “The Feminine Principle: Gender in the De Rerum Natura,” Lucretius on Atomic Motion (Oxford University Press, 2002), 444–452.
83.
Ralickas, “Cosmic Horror,” 364.
84.
Lovecraft, SL 5, 408.
85.
Matthew Beach, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Optimism,” Lovecraftian Proceedings 2, 171–2.
86.
The Age of Lovecraft, 199. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock eloquently interrogates such speculative appropriations in the same volume.
87.
Kiernan, interview with Jeremy Jones: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kiernan_interview/
88.
Ligotti , Conspiracy, 272. Conspiracy includes a stark evisceration of Epicurean philosophy and Lucretius’s arguments against the fear of death.

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Moreland, S. (2018). The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius. In: Moreland, S. (eds) New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_2
Published: 09 September 2018
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