Lovecraft, H.P. (Howard Phillips), "Cthulhu" (1934). Howard P. Lovecraft
collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:926697/
Not least among its many contemporary uses, ’Lovecraftian’ describes a kind of satire peculiar to pop culture, in which banal expressions - especially those emerging from moribund historical subcultures - are analysed and reconstructed for serious consideration.
Lovecraft’s great formal achievement was revisioning subjects of sentimental pop songs and composing prodigious, monolithic backstories for these long-lived fictions of the ever-longer 19th century: death narratives, twisted scientific romances, deep sentiment, and speculative histories and anthropologies. Lovecraft’s versions ventured to the origin story of all origins - reverse Darwinism turning evolution ideas inside out - tracing evidence of panspermia and utter antiquity of demonic influence on humanity. Elevating and expanding narrative strands beyond their ability to bear the weight of reworking, he unbalanced the originals and delighted in collapsing these into his own fiction-world. And the originals persist, relieved of the burden of saying what they cannot say.
In this endeavour Lovecraft was, of course, inspired by alt-history fictions of the English Gothic school and most notably by Bram Stoker, whose writing into being immortal, aristocratic Count Dracula creates a parallel narrative to the blood-fiend that preceded Dracula, the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire. In the 2020s, backstory and character-heavy melodrama dominates fiction, especially in cinematic reanimations of moribund intellectual properties.
Lovecraft's career as a published writer began in the year after the Titanic sunk, and spanned a period during which horrors of current events were distributed as they happened through global news media: the Hindenburg burning; the Russian revolution and civil wars; the first world war; the flu pandemic; economic depressions; the Spanish civil war; and the rise of fascism. In the early years of the 20th century, it wasn’t just Lovecraft seeking out morbid tales of terror to match real-life horrors.
Thoughts about unknown ocean deeps, bitter-sweetness of memory and persistence of dreams were established in popular fiction and popular music. And Lovecraft joined a growing gang of writers of tales of terror and the weird milieu continued to flourish in the 1900s, as the influence of the Yellow Book persisted and the revival by Surrealists of the works of Isidore Ducasse (aka the Comte de Lautréamont) got underway.
Lovecraft’s great formal achievement was revisioning subjects of sentimental pop songs and composing prodigious, monolithic backstories for these long-lived fictions of the ever-longer 19th century: death narratives, twisted scientific romances, deep sentiment, and speculative histories and anthropologies. Lovecraft’s versions ventured to the origin story of all origins - reverse Darwinism turning evolution ideas inside out - tracing evidence of panspermia and utter antiquity of demonic influence on humanity. Elevating and expanding narrative strands beyond their ability to bear the weight of reworking, he unbalanced the originals and delighted in collapsing these into his own fiction-world. And the originals persist, relieved of the burden of saying what they cannot say.
In this endeavour Lovecraft was, of course, inspired by alt-history fictions of the English Gothic school and most notably by Bram Stoker, whose writing into being immortal, aristocratic Count Dracula creates a parallel narrative to the blood-fiend that preceded Dracula, the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire. In the 2020s, backstory and character-heavy melodrama dominates fiction, especially in cinematic reanimations of moribund intellectual properties.
Lovecraft's career as a published writer began in the year after the Titanic sunk, and spanned a period during which horrors of current events were distributed as they happened through global news media: the Hindenburg burning; the Russian revolution and civil wars; the first world war; the flu pandemic; economic depressions; the Spanish civil war; and the rise of fascism. In the early years of the 20th century, it wasn’t just Lovecraft seeking out morbid tales of terror to match real-life horrors.
Thoughts about unknown ocean deeps, bitter-sweetness of memory and persistence of dreams were established in popular fiction and popular music. And Lovecraft joined a growing gang of writers of tales of terror and the weird milieu continued to flourish in the 1900s, as the influence of the Yellow Book persisted and the revival by Surrealists of the works of Isidore Ducasse (aka the Comte de Lautréamont) got underway.
Lovecraft
leapt ahead of the Surrealists and sidestepped the trend for revised
historicisms and geopolitical long-termism in popular fictions,
exemplified by Stoker and HG Wells, for example. In seeking new
locations for horror, beyond nations states’ accomplishments in the
field of death, he contextualised popular culture within utter history -
from the point of view of a representative of belaboured humanity, the small gathering of more or less conscious specks able only to address the cosmic infinite in imagined speculations.
In the final part, I'll set to loading up the jukebox with the songs that might have attracted his morbid attention, as listed in Part 1. A speculative pop-panspermia soundtrack to horror that began in a teenage boy’s fever dream of a song of a lost, doomed sailor humming to himself, clear-eyed in one last glimpse of life in the grainy murk.
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