The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (25 page)

To facilitate the plots of her essentially romantic narratives, she entrapped her heroines in castles so great and gloomy that their dungeons seem to have dungeons and their towers appear to the imagination to sprout supplementary towers into infinity. Within this gargantuan setting, these young women are terrorized by men of a wicked nature. They are also terrorized by simulacra of the supernatural. Then they are rescued by their beloveds and, presumably, live happy lives unmarred by their experiences. They are not harmed; they are not disillusioned. The shortcoming of Radcliffe’s work for someone of Lovecraft’s temperament, or for anyone more concerned with the consciousness of horror than with love stories, is that she rationalized seemingly supernatural events with natural explanations. If she did not do this, her protagonists would have to look into the face of metaphysical insanity instead of the lesser horror of having to marry some very bad man.

More disastrously, Radcliffe did not follow through on threats to her characters lives with death itself, which may please those readers expectant of happy endings but which retroactively diminishes her atmospheric set up. Like value in life, atmosphere in horror fiction flows backwards from a terminus in death.

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The next innovation in atmosphere began with Poe in the early nineteenth century. Poe was familiar with Radcliffe’s works, which pioneered the trappings of the Gothic romance genre and registered brisk sales. Possibly in reaction to Radcliffe’s world of scenic thrills and salvation, Poe turned that world on its head in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As everyone knows, the story begins at evening as the narrator approaches on horseback a secluded mansion of the grimmest design, flanked by a swampy and putrid-looking tarn. While the House of Usher may at first seem to be an estate oozing with the charm of classic Gothic atmosphere, the narrator goes out of his way to argue that this is not so. The decrepit condition of the house, with that deep crack running across its façade, is not enchanting in the manner of the ruins, both actual and man-made, that were all the rage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This place is not desolate in a sublimely cozy way—as were the settings of Radcliffe’s novels—but is plumb dispiriting, a locus of indomitable despair whose effect on the narrator is one of withering vastation. From the tenor of this beginning, the reader can expect no saving outcome, creating an atmosphere that is actually atmospheric because it is anchored in the deaths of Roderick and Madeline, the moribund brother and sister who occupy the house.

Furthermore, conditions at the House of Usher descend to the point where the structure crumbles altogether, the light of a blood-red moon shining through a widening crack in the masonry, and sinks into the noxious tarn. The narrator has earlier told us of the identification that obtains between the House of Usher and its inhabitants, and the story admirably culminates in the death of both. With this conclusion to Poe’s story, the world of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Gothic heroines is now behind us. The picturesque and sublime have been displaced by a disillusionment with life and an atmosphere flowing out of death. A new phase in the evolution of the atmospheric had begun.

It was almost a century after the 1839 appearance of “The Fall of the House of Usher”

that Lovecraft took the next great step in both the history of disillusionment and in the art of atmospherics with his “Call of Cthulhu.” Its introductory sentences, while known to every reader of horror fiction, require transcription here.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

From Lovecraft’s overture to this classic story, the reader may surmise that something worse that physical death is in the offing. While his statement is abstract, it is all the more atmospheric for being so, and we are anxious to read what “dissociated knowledge,” not a particularly evocative phrase on its own, has been pieced together by one Francis Wayland Thurston. We can only try to comprehend how, in the Year of Our Lord, 1926, it was possible for Lovecraft’s consciousness to chart the coordinates of a universe of 114

disillusionments undetected before him. His is a world of horror that makes those of former days, and days to come, seem relatively naïve. “I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror,” F. W. Thurston writes after he has connected the dots,

“and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.” In other words, he has done what no one has been in a position to do before him: sort out the worst of existence from any compensatory dividends, a process which leads him to conclude that life is a malignancy it were better had never been. Lovecraft does not bother to destroy the world, although he has put together the means for doing so in his story. But that would be too simple, too merciful. And Lovecraft’s world, like Poe’s, is neither. It is encrusted with madness, it is merciless, and it is doomed. The world of “The Call of Cthulhu” is not the place its narrator thought it was. People still innocently go about their business, but, for him, and for anyone else who knows too much, a dense and downcast atmosphere hangs over everything. This atmosphere is not hygienic for a human mind, and it was Thurston’s mistake to have ever thought it could be anything else. Life is a tale told by, about, and exclusively for idiots. And after the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge,” Thurston can no longer isolate himself from an omnipresent horror or anchor himself in the lies of his civilization, nor can he distract himself from or sublimate the revelation of a great conspiracy. Needless to say, he left no heirs, for to reproduce in such a context would be only to enrich the insanity which already exists. A true Gothic hero, Thurston would not allow himself to become party to the conspiracy against the human race . . . as if he had a choice.

THEME

The literary world may be divided into two unequal groups: the insiders and the outsiders. The former are many and the latter are few. The placement of a given writer into one group or the other could be approached by assessing the consciousness of that writer as it is betrayed by various aspects of his work, including verbal style, general tone, selection of subjects and themes, personal statements and public manifestos, etc. As any reader knows, such things do vary among authors, particularly those of the modern era. To pin any of them down within a capricious or hallucinated taxonomy of insiders and outsiders would thus seem an experiment in uselessness. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse: who is on the inside and who is on the outside? The brain reels when considering well-known works by these writers, as they seem to express sensibilities at several arms’

length from those of the ordinary person who likes to turn pages. Immediately, we recall Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” which ends with a travesty of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.” Then our thoughts turn to the collection of degenerates in Faulkner’s novels, which do not seem incorrigibly intent on showing off the nobler side, if there is one, of the human race. Nor should we forget Eliot’s hymn to meaninglessness, The Wasteland (1922), or the alienated protagonists who lead us through Hamsun’s Hunger (1890), Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1928), Sartre’s Nausea (1938), and the entire output of Beckett. Conveniently, the status of these notable authors—insider or outsider?—has been adjudicated for us by the Swedish committees that dispensed to each of them a Nobel Prize in literature, which is annually given out, in the words of its eponymous originator, to authors who produce works of “an idealistic tendency.” But does the verdict of a panel of Swedish judges really settle things for all of 115

these greats of modern literature? Are they to be classed as insiders by virtue of receiving a prize? Some would say yes, but not entirely because of the Nobel. Some would say no, despite the Nobel.1 Consequently, the job is unfinished insofar as determining the consciousness of an author to be that of an insider or an outsider. To expedite this inquest, we could use a candidate whose credentials unambiguously place him in the latter group, whose works in their entirety cast him as an outsider without qualification.

To fill this position, any number of worthy candidates could be appointed. One of them is Roland Topor, whose short horror novel The Tenant (1964) is a document that expresses the consciousness of an unimpeachable outsider. To discern with a modest confidence what places a writer on the inside or the outside, The Tenant will be compared with another short novel that substantially shares its theme, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (1926) by the Nobel Prize-winning Luigi Pirandello. In itself, theme is no giveaway of an author’s consciousness. What counts is how that theme is resolved.

Pirandello’s resolution parades the appalling symptoms of “an idealistic tendency,” while Topor’s flashes the anti-idealist position (read: pessimistic, nihilistic, or any other negative modifier one chooses to pin upon the chest of those who are not on the inside).

The theme of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand is explicitly that of the self as a falsehood born of our systems of perception and cognition. In contrast to the dogma of the many, as Pirandello’s narrator and leading character Vitangelo Moscarda comes to appreciate, the self is an insubstantial construct that we spontaneously invent to lend coherence and meaning to an existence that is actually chaotic and meaningless. While everyone has a body, we also recognize—only because we are occasionally forced to do so—that they are unstable, damage-prone, and ultimately disposable phenomena. At the same time, we tend to believe—until a malignant brain lesion or some queer life-event causes us to question this belief—that our “selves” are more sturdy, enduring, and real than the degrading tissue in which they are encased.

In One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, Moscarda is made aware of his misperception of his self, and by extension of the entire world of forms in which the self functions, by a misperception he has made about his body. Early in the story, he believes his nose to be evenly structured on its right and the left sides. Then his wife tells him that his nose is not symmetrical but is slightly lower on the left side than on the right. Being an incurably pensive individual, Moscarda is troubled by his wife’s remark; being an intellectually honest individual, he has to admit it is true. That he misperceived this single feature of his appearance leads Moscarda to investigate what other delusions he has been entertaining about his appearance throughout his life. He ascertains a constellation of them. After scrupulous self-examination of his physical person, he concedes that he is not who he thought he was. Now he believes he is an outsider to himself—a figment in the mirror that appears one way to him and other ways to other people. But Moscarda is condemned to further revelations: “I still believed this outsider was only one person: only one for everybody, as I thought I was only one for myself. But soon my horrible drama became more complicated. . . .” This occurs when our narrator makes “the discovery of the hundred thousand Moscardas that I was, not only for the others but also for myself, all with this one name of Moscarda, ugly to the point of cruelty, all inside this poor body of mine that was also one, one and, alas, no one. . . .” Fortunately for Moscarda, and 116

ruefully for the reader (at least the reader who is an outsider), he comes to accept the unreality of everything he had conceived himself to be and becomes one with all that exists: he no longer thinks but simply is. “This is the only way I can live now. To be reborn moment by moment. To prevent thought from working again inside me. . . .” The last paragraph of the novel is an exaltation of his new state of existence.

The city is distant. From it, at times, in the twilight calm, the sound of bells reaches me. But now I hear those bells no longer inside me; but outside, rung for themselves, and perhaps they quiver with joy in their humming hollowness, in a fine blue sky filled with hot sun amid the shriek of the swallows or in the cloudy wind, heavy and high over their airy spires. To think of death, to pray. There are those who still have this need, and the bells become their voice. I no longer have this need; because I die at every instant, and I am reborn, new and without memories: live and whole, no longer inside myself, but in everything outside.

End of story. Things turn out all right for Moscarda. He is now an outsider who has been saved. In his loss of a self, he brings to mind U. G. Krishnamurti and John Wren-Lewis—

those flukes who recovered from what appear to have been physiological traumas, following which their thought processes shut down, disabling the cognitive mechanisms which produce a fictive ego. In these instances, the individual who loses himself or herself are the beneficiaries of an incalculable payoff in the sweepstakes of consciousness. This is truly a “good death.” They have disappeared as so-called individuals and reborn as . . . no one. They are content just to exist, and equally content not to exist. But does anyone believe that Luigi Pirandello knew first-hand what it was to be in such a state of inert beatitude? Or is it more likely that he imagined this ending of a decidedly “idealistic tendency,” perhaps after reading the works of some mystic or psychologist? Granted, Pirandello was a genius of imagination for having pictured both the philosophical infirmity from which Moscarda suffered and the manner in which he was delivered from it, an ideal resolution for a painfully self-conscious audience of the Modernist era, or any other time. And yet it is not a resolution available to the reader, who could follow Moscarda’s process toward salvation step-by-step and never be delivered to the promised land of the ego-dead. If it were so, Pirandello would have invented the most phenomenal cure ever known for the agonies specially reserved for humankind. He would have solved every scourge we face as a species. But as one might expect, he did no such thing. Pirandello imagined a fairy-tale resolution as sure as if the prayer that Moscarda says he no longer needs were offered as a restorative for his bedeviled state—a deus ex machina for moderns. His book is a currish deceit. This is what the literary insider offers. In The Tenant, Roland Topor supplies the opposing view of the outsider.