A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Now we are getting more to the crux of the matter: Lovecraft is beginning to provide a rationale for the type of weird fiction he has been writing for the past few years, which is a fundamentally realistic approach to the ‘sense of outsideness’ by the suggestion of the vast gulfs of space and time—in short, cosmicism. There is nothing here that is different from prior utterances of this idea; but Lovecraft now continues:

The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions

of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt —as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?¹⁰

This renunciation of the supernatural, as well as the need to offer supplements rather than contradictions to known phenomena, make it clear that Lovecraft was now consciously moving toward a union of weird fiction and science fiction (although perhaps not the science fiction published in the pulp magazines). Indeed, in formal terms nearly all his work subsequent to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is science fiction, in that it supplies a scientific justification

for the purportedly ‘supernatural’ events; it is only in his manifest wish to terrify that his work remains on the borderline of science fiction rather than being wholly within its parameters. Lovecraft’s work had been inexorably moving in this direction since at least the writing of ‘The Shunned House’, and such things as At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and ‘The Shadow out of Time’ (1934– 35) are only the pinnacles in this development.

At the Mountains of Madness

, written in early 1931 (the autograph manuscript declares it to have been begun on 24 February and completed on 22 March), is Lovecraft’s most ambitious attempt at ‘non-supernatural cosmic art’; it is a triumph in almost every way. At forty thousand words it is his longest work of fiction save The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Just as his other two novels represent apotheoses of earlier phases of his career—The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath the culmination of Dunsanianism, Ward

the pinnacle of pure supernaturalism—so is At the Mountains of Madness the greatest of his attempts to fuse weird fiction and science fiction.

The basic plot of the novel—the discovery by the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31 of the frozen remains of bizarre barrel-shaped entities from the depths of space, and their even more terrifying ‘slaves’, the shoggoths, who ultimately overwhelmed their mastersmed the셀is elementary; but no synopsis can even begin to convey the rich, detailed, and utterly convincing scientific erudition that creates the sense of verisimilitude so necessary in a tale so otherwise outré. We have already seen how Lovecraft’s fascination with the Antarctic dated to as early as his tenth year; indeed, as Jason C. Eckhardt has demonstrated,¹¹ the early parts of Lovecraft’s tale clearly show the influence of Admiral Byrd’s expedition of 1928–30, as well as other contemporary expeditions. And, of course, Lovecraft’s sight of the spectacular paintings of the Himalayas by Nicholas Roerich—mentioned a total of six times in the novel—played a role in the genesis of the work.

The real focal point of At the Mountains of Madness is the civilization of the alien entities, which are referred to as the Old Ones. The narrator, William Dyer, studying their history as depicted on the bas-reliefs of their immense city, gradually comes to realize the profound bonds human beings share with them, and which neither share with the loathsome, primitive, virtually mindless shoggoths. The most significant way in which the Old Ones are identified with human beings is in the historical digression Dyer provides, specifically in regard to the Old Ones’ social and economic organization. In many ways they represent a utopia toward which Lovecraft clearly hopes humanity itself will one day move. The single sentence ‘Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic’ establishes that Lovecraft had himself by this time converted to moderate socialism.