Monday, September 28, 2015

Conrad, Lovecraft, and Achebe

Some may be tempted to give Joseph Conrad (and other authors) a kind of benefit of the doubt. That is, to read Heart of Darkness, preferring not to think on Chinua Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa.” “Surely,” we say, “taking into consideration that he is a canonized author, it couldn’t have been his intention to create the narrative Achebe accuses him of,” or on the other hand, and finding no fault with the author: “Conrad was clearly a genius,” another will say, convinced that in Heart of Darkness, Conrad is, in fact, objectively providing a commentary on the actions of white Europeans in Africa:
“Why, it’s obvious that interpreting the setting in such a superficial way was Conrad’s point entirely!”
It seems highly unlikely that the latter reading was part of the author’s original design. I agree with Achebe, this would perhaps give Conrad too much credit. However, texts survive their author’s and their author’s intentions. We can, in fact, read this into Heart of Darkness, if it is helpful to us.
I can contest nothing about Achebe’s essay. Therefore, I have nothing else to say in this respect. What I would rather explore is how much I’ve noticed how H. P. Lovecraft’s body of work bears a significant resemblance to that of Joseph Conrad’s.
Lovecraft is another such writer fixated on mysteries and what he considers unknowable things. There are numerous stories in which Lovecraft displays his fear of the Other—in the form the Otherworldly Beings. The only setting of which seemingly gave Lovecraft comfort was that of his puritanical home. He often describes, at length, the Euclidian, predictable architecture of Providence, Rhode Island and the pillars of virtue in his community—such as the Masonic Lodge. He contrasts it, with non-Euclidean horrors, obelisks, and “Horror[s] in Clay.”
In his “Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft talks of strange, “undecipherable” things, “bacchanals,” and “tom-toms.” These were seemingly as much of a source of anxiety to him, as they were to Conrad. “There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song…”
Similarly, Lovecraftian stories have much in common with Heart of Darkness and the subsequently derived APOCALPYSE NOW (1979). All three of these stories feature characters that fancy themselves skeptics—being therefore initially believable by the audience—they bring with them an air of doubt in regards to all they encounter, until being driven mad after coming into contact with some indescribable force. Doing so leaves them with no choice, but to question the very bedrocks on which their entire belief systems are founded. 
In Lovecraft’s case, the sheer gulf between the point of view character and the Ancient Evil Other is so completely insurmountable—that he can only flee in terror from the source.
Shall we conclude this was Lovecraft’s point entirely? Is he, in fact, describing the anxieties he faced from new (and less legitimate—in his own opinion) peoples immigrating to America—a country to which, he was proud to claim—his ancestors had arrived via the Mayflower? It’s possible we could be reading too much into this. Perhaps he really was just afraid of the horrors he described. The protagonist is, after all, interacting with an entity that is literally from another world.
Regardless, Lovecraft stories function for the reader because there is a perceived idea of the norm and there are boundaries of which the protagonist can (and cannot) cross.
 In the “Cult of Cthulhu,” New Orleans serves the function of Conrad’s Africa:
“In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire.”
Lovecraft’s persons involved in praising the god Cthulhu “were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.” Can there be any doubt now of the similarities between Conrad and Lovecraft?
There can be no place further in the US from Lovecraft’s native New England than New Orleans. Lovecraft even refers to the people of New Orleans in terms similar to those of which Conrad uses to refer to the people living along the banks of the Congo. Despite all this, I continue to enjoy the work of Lovecraft to this day. To interpret the text in this way is no different than the subsequent addition of footnotes and annotations. They all serve essentially the same purpose—the addition of a context—a lens of skepticism through which guilty pleasures can be further enlightening and therefore, not guilty.

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