Review: "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," H. P. Lovecraft

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The H. P. Lovecraft short story “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” was first published in the October 1919 issue of Pine Cones, and then reprinted in the March 1938 issue of Weird Tales (cover at left). It’s a striking effort: trapped in cliché and pulp absurdity at times, particularly in the narrative’s framing, but the imagination at play within that frame is often quite remarkable.

The story’s first half may have one sighing with impatience. Lovecraft can be slavishly derivative of Edgar Allan Poe at times, and he again makes use of Poe’s convention of employing a narrator of rather dubious sanity. The fellow here is an intern receiving his training at a mental institution. At one point, the institution's head doctor prescribes him "a nerve-powder" and sends him on six-month paid vacation to recover from nervous strain, but one will be doubting his psychological health long before then. The intern is fascinated by a backwoodsman who had been committed after gruesomely beating a man to death. The backwoodsman has fits during which he relates hallucinations of “great edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys.” These hallucinations are especially preoccupied with an adversary described as “some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him.” The intern cannot reconcile these spectacular descriptions with the backwoodsman’s illiteracy, and he becomes convinced the man is representative of something beyond normal comprehension. To better understand the man’s visions, the intern hooks the two of them up to--believe it or not--an apparatus that enables a telepathic rapport. One may be a bit taken aback by the goofiness of all this, but what comes next more than redeems it.

In “Dagon,” Lovecraft made use of myth-derived material to set the stage for the story’s more visionary moments, and here he relies on rather junky science fiction. But to a much greater degree than with “Dagon,” Lovecraft plays to the essential appeal of his work. He promises an opportunity described in a line from Poe’s “Eleonora”: to “obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awaking, to find they have been upon the verge of the great secret.” The central passage of “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” in which the intern joins the backwoodsman in his hallucinatory journey, lives up to the promise--it approximates the more spectacular sections of Dante’s Paradiso. And in the climax, Lovecraft dispenses with “the verge of the great secret,” and more or less presents it head-on. He plays notes similar to the revelation material in “Dagon,” but in a different key: the supernatural beings do not stand apart from humanity. They are an aspect of it: in part subordinate, and in part transcendent. With “Dagon” and its portent of conflict between humanity and a race of gods, Lovecraft turned the Romantic ideal of unity with the divine on its head. Here, he sets it up straight again, but with a particular spin: humanity and the divine are unified in some respects, but ultimately exist apart.

Lovecraft relies on hackneyed material, but only as a starting point. He uses it in the way a good jazz musician uses a pop standard: as a springboard for his own unique presentation. The dross in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” may take one back a bit, but it’s also the foundation for an imagination that at its best is quite visionary. In art, one is always happy to take the bad as long as the good comes with it.

Fiction Review: "Dagon," H. P. Lovecraft

This review was first published on Pol Culture.

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awaking, to find they have been upon the verge of the great secret.”

-- Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora”

The short story “Dagon” was H. P. Lovecraft’s second effort as a professional writer. Drafted in 1917, it initially saw print in the November 1919 issue of The Vagrant. It’s a major step up from “The Tomb,” his first effort. Edgar Allan Poe is a conspicuous influence on these stories, and in “The Tomb” Lovecraft let that influence overwhelm him. As ersatz Poe goes, it’s fine, but one may find it not worth much discussion beyond that. “Dagon,” on the other hand, shows him going beyond the Poe influence. The conventions of the earlier writer’s work serve as a springboard into territory that seems much more Lovecraft’s own.

In “Dagon,” Poe’s influence can certainly be seen with the story’s protagonist and framing device. As in “The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” and other Poe stories, the narrator is a disturbed, paranoid misanthrope. Lovecraft provides plenty of indications that his perspective is not necessarily trustworthy: he’s a morphine addict, he’s prone to waking dreams even without the drug, and the story’s central episode could very well be a memory of a hallucination. Lovecraft also follows Poe’s frequent conceit of having the story be the protagonist’s written account of what has happened.

The most profound debt is stylistic. The success of “Dagon,” as with a good deal of Poe’s work, relies on the reader’s sympathy with the attitude expressed in the epigraph above. The reader has to want to believe in the narrator’s madness--that the narrator’s perspective will take one into uncharted experience, and perhaps to the most sublime epiphanies. Towards that end, both writers employ a headlong, even feverish prose of considerable urgency. One is made to feel the narrator continues in the path he goes because his compulsions give him no choice.

The protagonist of “Dagon” certainly fits into this mold. His tale is presented in the context of a suicide note, and the reason for his self-destructiveness is his inability to put the memories he relates behind him. He was a sailor whose ship was captured by the Germans in the early days of World War I. He escaped the Germans, but he was effectively a castaway: alone on the sea in a small boat with provisions. After many days and perhaps weeks, he awoke one morning to find his boat grounded. It was on an island developing from hardening muck. He assumed it to be an upheaval from the ocean floor, and after a few days he set off on foot in hopes of rescue. During his trek, he came across totems from what appeared to be an underwater civilization. His journey ended after he discovered a horrifying truth about the members of that civilization. That discovery is the memory that dogs him. It’s hard to imagine a tale in which the stakes are higher for the protagonist. He began with a quest for survival, and ends trying to flee horrors he cannot escape.

Lovecraft’s handling of that quest and its climactic epiphany is where he breaks from Poe and moves into his own territory. Poe was a key figure in American Romanticism. With regard to aesthetics, the movement valued the imaginative over the rational, and a key aspect was seeing nature and the other trappings of life in spiritual terms. In Poe’s work, places, objects, and landscapes are often imbued with a sense of the uncanny; they’re sources of awe and wonder, but in a way that frequently translates them into harbingers of portent and fear. But for all of Poe’s flirtations with the supernatural, he rarely took the leap all the way into fantasy. Lovecraft, on the other hand, takes the fear-charged trappings to a new level of intensity. He also makes fantasy a central aspect of his material. One might say he even moves beyond fantasy and into myth.

The landscapes of the island in “Dagon” are just one example of Lovecraft taking Romantic conventions and giving them his own subversive spin. The plains and canyons he describes recall the vast expanses characteristic of a Romantic artist such as Doré. But they only recall the grandeur of that imagery in the most general way. Doré’s grandeur is a trope for the presence of the divine. Lovecraft’s functions as a trope for the unholy and the forsaken. The island is an utterly arid environment, and the sun, so often a symbol of life and hope in Romantic work, is here a pummeling enemy to be shunned. The ground is the stuff of revulsion: slimy, coagulating muck, teeming with rot, and “putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish.” One can only imagine the smell; the only thing that distracts from the stench might be the presence of bile on one’s throat and tongue. Romantic imagery typically promotes a rapport with Nature; Lovecraft’s emphatically evokes alienation.

The most distinct feature of “Dagon” (and one gathers it continued as a central aspect of Lovecraft’s work) is his venturing into mythic material. When one reads a post-classical/pre-modern work such as The Divine Comedy, one cannot help but wonder what happened to the pagan gods of classical literature. Dante has several figures from Greek and Roman legend appear in his poem, but the gods are nowhere to be found. The major Romantic writers and artists might include those figures in their work, but they did so in a way that evaded the question--the gods would be presented in the context of the original material, or in settings contemporaneous with it. In the climax and closing of “Dagon,” Lovecraft addresses the question head on. The god he presents is one he created, but it stands in for all of them. (Lovecraft also indirectly identifies the god with one mentioned in the Old Testament, so it’s not one entirely removed from those in classical literature.) The story doesn’t quite say why the gods disappeared, but it makes clear that while absent, they are still very much out there. And on a strikingly portentous note, the story suggests they are looking to return with less than peaceful intentions. Lovecraft not only turns the Romantic embrace of Nature on its head, he subverts its ideal of unity with the divine as well. The relationship he sees is one of antagonists and conflict.

Lovecraft’s suggestion of gods exiled to a world apart from humanity, and planning to return in the future, is perhaps the most resonant aspect of “Dagon.” It’s a feature the story shares with the fiction of Robert E. Howard, who became a peer and friend to Lovecraft over a decade later. Howard, though, presents the idea in the context of heroic adventure fiction, so one pretty much knows any development he offers is ultimately going to prove reactionary. With Howard, the idea’s fascination is in seeing how Conan the Barbarian or another hero handles a situation in which he’s way over his head. But the conventions of the heroic adventure genre will prevail: the hero will triumph over the less-than-benevolent gods, or if he falls, he will do so ensuring the gods will be permanently contained. Lovecraft offers no such reassurance; the implication of “Dagon” is that an apocalypse is coming. In Lovecraft's hands, the basic idea could well prove a visionary one. He plays on myth in the story, and sets the stage for a powerful fictional mythology of his own.

He also sets the stage for becoming a figure of comparable stature to Poe. With “Dagon,” Lovecraft takes the crucial step of becoming a significant artist in his own right. He confronts a powerful and admired predecessor, begins with the premises of that predecessor’s game, and then finds his own game by changing the rules. Settings charged with fear give way to those that embody alienation and revulsion. Hints of the supernatural are transformed into the presence of an antagonistic divine. I’m not sure I would call “Dagon” a great story, but it’s definitely an example of an author finding and articulating an individual vision. If it isn’t great, it comes very close.

Fiction Review: "Kew Gardens," Virginia Woolf

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

For the text of "Kew Gardens," click here.

In what may be the greatest of her short stories, Virginia Woolf creates a structured, encompassing view of existence, one which includes people's thoughts and emotions, nature and human society, and even the movement of a random snail in a flower bed.

“Kew Gardens” is a great short story, perhaps Virginia Woolf’s finest, and certainly the best of those in the Monday or Tuesday collection. She starts with what may seem like the homeliest and most disparate of particulars--a snail moving along the ground, a man taking his senile father for a walk--and she binds them together to create a larger whole. In his poem The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot described his reflections on life as a “heap of broken images” and the “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In “Kew Gardens,” Woolf finds the underlying order of the fragments she renders and builds them into an encompassing vision of life, one that unifies the worlds of humanity and nature.

At first glance, the story appears to be a series of juxtapositions between scenes of nature and moments of human interaction. The setting is the Royal Botanic Gardens in London in July, and the story begins and ends with descriptions of a flowerbed. There are five episodes in between. The first features a married couple with children walking along the paths; the husband and wife think back on the most emotionally significant moments of their past--moments that, ironically, have nothing to do with each other or their children. The third features the aforementioned man with his senile father, who are followed along the paths by a pair of working-class women. The men are oblivious to what the other is saying, and while neither of the women is impaired, they talk past each other as well. In the fifth episode, the characters are a young couple who are courting, but who have yet to make the breakthrough to a deeper relationship. The second and fourth episodes depict a snail as it crawls through the flowerbed.

Woolf seems to identify nature with movement. The snail is always moving, of course, and everything else she depicts in the flowerbed moves as well. The people, though, all seem caught in a state of psychological stasis. The young couple, particularly the man, is trapped by desire for the other and the uncertainty of what to do next. Woolf even creates a trope for their predicament: his hand is atop hers as, together, they push the end of her resting parasol into the ground. The emotional significance of this is unmistakable, and Woolf duly renders it in rhapsodic terms:

The action and the fact that his hand rested on the top of hers expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded them, and were to their inexperienced touch so massive, but who knows (so they thought as they pressed the parasol down into the earth) what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side?

The young couple are frozen in their anxieties, as is the old man in his senility, his son in the helplessness the senility’s presence creates, and the two women in their combined affinity and indifference to one another. However, the young man and woman are most complemented by the married couple, who are as trapped in their anxieties about the past as the unmarried pair is in thoughts of the future. The portrayal of the married couple is also where Woolf makes the dichotomy between nature and people most explicit. The husband is caught in his thoughts about times gone by, specifically how stymied he felt proposing to a woman he was involved with before meeting his wife. Contemplating the situation, he finds an analogue to his circumstances in the flight of a dragonfly that was there at the time. As long as the dragonfly is flying--in movement--the man is frustrated by the woman’s unwillingness to say yes to marrying him. However, if the dragonfly lands on her shoe, i.e., comes to a stop, that means she’ll assent, his thoughts and feelings will flow freely again, and their life together can progress. (The dragonfly, of course, never landed.) For Woolf, rendering nature means showing it in motion; depicting people involves showing them at some sort of standstill. The ironic trope for this is nature halting when people progress.

The greater irony of the story, though, is that nature, at least in the garden, is caught in a stasis of its own--a stasis created by humanity’s actions and humanity’s world. The nature in the story is the gardens, a man-made construct built within the larger man-made construct of the city of London. Woolf, in a brilliant (and subtle) stylistic choice, emphasizes the constructed aspect of the gardens by rendering her imagery of its fauna and flora as if she was describing painting it. It is all depicted in terms of shapes and colors, with verbs such as “marked” and “staining” appearing throughout the passages. Man and nature always contain each other, just as Woolf’s perceptions of nature are so conspicuously contained by her words. She finds a superb analogue for this state of existence near the story’s end: life is like a series of Chinese boxes, one within the other within the other and so forth, “on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air.” At the center is the (Wordsworthian) view that people’s thoughts, feelings, and memories are contained by their perceptions of nature. However, nature as people know it is contained by the world humanity has created, just as the gardens are contained by London, where, as Woolf puts it, “the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear[...].” It’s left unsaid, but the box of the city is contained by the larger box of the surrounding world. What isn’t left unsaid is that even the city can once again be contained within people’s perceptions and feelings. The series of boxes can begin again and extend unto infinity.

The genius of the story is the structured view of existence it presents. Woolf captures the assorted chaos of life--internal ones like anxieties and disappointments, and outer ones like the comings and goings of the city and the natural world--and she finds the structure within it. She highlights where everything exists relative to everything else, and further, she recognizes that the only limits to one’s perception of things are the limits the person imposes. Thinking back to The Waste Land, one is struck by the contrast between Eliot’s vision and Woolf’s. Looking for the encompassing order in life, he dramatizes his inability to find it in what he presents, ultimately resigning himself to faith that, regardless of the chaos, God has an order in mind. In “Kew Gardens,” Woolf finds the order Eliot misses. Her peace, unlike his, doesn’t “passeth understanding”; hers contains it.


Other reviews of works by Virginia Woolf

• "Blue & Green"
• "A Haunted House"
• "The Mark on the Wall"
• "Monday or Tuesday"
• "A Society"
• "The String Quartet"
• "An Unwritten Novel"