Lovecraft/The New Puritans - Sessions XI & XII - July 4 & July 11, 2007

Lovecraft it was, on 4 July, of all dates: The Colour our of Space & Nyarlathotep.

Again, I guess I could have done a better job pointing at the ways he uses his apocalyptic theme in these stories: maybe it's because I've been working with these texts for so long that I'm dumb to the fact that not everyone easily recites large quantities of L's text.

Anyway, The Colour out of Space.

The story was written 1927 - and yes, it is colour, not color. Lovecraft cultivated as a mannerism the use of English spelling, and he also cultivated himself as, really, a sort of displaced Englishman who for some reason had been cast on American shore: in his works, he is definitely American, so American Gothic that it screeches with pleasure - Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Brown, Bierce: he's tracing them all.

The Colour out of Space is generally counted as one of his strongest stories - that despite the fact that he barely does plot. Very little goes on in terms of actual action, but each scene is carried on and on to create an atmosphere. Also, there are hardly any reference points in the story for the reader to identify with, and that is also something Lovecraft had the habit of doing. You are alone, on your own in the story (and that is very much working towards the atmosphere - think of wandering alone through a haunted castle: isolation sucks when the planet is struck with terror and horror.

CoS is a sort of nuclear apocalypse - not that L thought of that explicitly, but the signs are there: the color has strange material attributes and is difficult to handle in a labaratory, it scorches the countryside and turns nature into a grey, brittle mass. Lovecraft was normally more explicit about his aliens - we looked at some images of Cthulhu with all his tentacles - and here he creates an abstract alien: destructive, completely inaccessible (you can't talk to the color or make it do things, it's just devastating the site, draining its lfe force: people go insane, and still they can't leave the place.

Apocalypse is, as we have seen, also a synonym for transformation - and the people here undergo a very curious transformation - literally one into nothingness. They are falling apart to grey pieces and chunks...without ever fighting the color in any way. This apocalypse may be secular, but it's still inevitable and cannot be halted in its course, quite like the biblical model.


Nyarlathotep -

a strange one. I admit. The story fascinates for its sheer linguistic - how would you call it? - whirliness. He's pushing the prose, tries to create a breathless stream of words that builds up into that maelstrom at the end of the story. Nyarlathotep conquers and the world goes down, while the idiot gods in the background play their drums. On an interesting note, Nyarlathotep shares many of the features that are commonly associated with Antichrist-figures in quite conventional evangelical writings on the apocalypse. I'm thinking of evangelical (or "evangelical") fiction like the Left Behind-novels (which also place a great stress on the event of the rapture: we had that today): he's extremely charismatic, very confident in his use of fashionable technics and technology, yet also very intimidating and horrific. He moves the masses at his will, and at the same time destroys their world: ain't that clever.

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Today: some Puritans return. Huh. It was for a reason it came to this, a very obvious reason: we started with the Puritans, and now we're gonna take them back to England.

The collection our story was taken from is called, All hail the New Puritans, and Puritan, as we found out, is more a description of their prose stylistics, not so much of their morals. I quote here the 10 point manifesto, as jotted down on Wikipedia -

1. Primarily storytellers, we are dedicated to the narrative form. (that's a good one - they believe in prose. I would like them even if that was the only sentence in the manfesto)
   
2. We are prose writers and recognise that prose is the dominant form of expression. For this reason we shun poetry and poetic licence in all its forms. (That's pretty much nonsense - true, prose dominates over poetry on the present literary market, and poetry has moved deep into academic discourse and out of public discourses, but that doesn't mean you have to shun poetry. It can still do things.)
   
3. While acknowledging the value of genre fiction, whether classical or modern, we will always move towards new openings, rupturing existing genre expectations. (Wow! That's so completely...unoriginal, really. That's what innovative writers have been doing for 2,500 years, and no big deal. Lovecraft did it very routinely, mixing horror and science fiction and infusing apocalypse into the two of them.)
   
4. We believe in textual simplicity and vow to avoid all devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial asides. (That is a strong announcement...it makes their prose very immediate, very firmly locked on the present, and no nonsense.)
   
5. In the name of clarity, we recognise the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing.
6. We believe in grammatical purity and avoid any elaborate punctuation. (That also sounds strong, but really it gives their prose a plainness that is not always favorable.)
   
7. We recognise that published works are also historical documents. As fragments of our time, all our texts are dated and set in the present day. All products, places, artists and objects named are real. (Interesting, isn't it? Are they writing fiction, or history? Or both? Again, they go down into the present moment, their prose has to work right here and now - much like original Puritan prose, where you also always read a clear and definite utilitarian purpose. Literature is never just expressive of beauty, it does things, it works.)
   
8. As faithful representation of the present, our texts will avoid all improbable or unknowable speculations on the past or the future.
9. We are moralists, so all texts feature a recognisable ethical reality. (But they don't promote an ethical reality by their interpretation, the way the Puritans did in their theocratic state. The New Puritans observe, first of all.)
   
10. Nevertheless, our aim is integrity of expression, above and beyond any commitment to form.

The story we read was written by Scarlett Thomas, titled Mind Control - an odd little piece of prose around the lives of three people - the narrator, male or female (we can't really tell), Mark's dad (the fish guy), Mark's mom (the ice lady). They seem traumatized, all three of them - and only later did we realize the obvious (and I was the last to do so), namely that this trauma might be based on Mark's death, as explained in the opening paragraph.

The fishman is into the apocalypse: and his daughter in law guards the radio to filter the news on the last things he might receive when listening to what's-his-name from Indiana...of course, the Indiana preacher is interesting to Mark's dad not so much when he delivers the apocalyptic message in a religious way (he doesn't listen to the Jesus-songs), but more when he's going into details on the worldly preparations that need to be taken care of (mind the water purifier).

The fish? What do the fish do? They are not religious symbols (as in loaves and fish), but still seem to hold some spiritual meaning to the dad. Maybe he also projects his son into the swarm of fish - and so when the fish go, he re-experiences Mark's death once more.

So. The world is going down (or so the Indiana guy has it), and who cares? Does it all matter? Nah. It's more a media phenomenon that you can get involved in however far you like (like, take the secular, but not the spiritual preparations), apocalypse à la carte, if you will.