#the human necessity of storytelling is a Very Charged Topic 4 me as are the carter stories in themselves

[antiquery]

the other day kit, camille and i were having a discussion on twitter about the bacchae that eventually swung toward nietzsche by way of lovecraft, and long story short cam dug up this essay, which is someone’s university of stockholm ma thesis about the randolph carter stories (which, huge mood, but i digress), and it got me thinking about narrative necessity. let me explain.

so the problem karlson is addressing is, namely, why carter, uniquely of lovecraft’s protagonists, brushes up against the strange and otherworldly time and time again, and still gets a happy ending. that doesn’t happen in any other stories, for obvious reasons— for lovecraft everything outside the human purview is soul-shattering, so incomprehensible that even partial knowledge of it breaks us. why? because, if it is so fundamentally not meant for us, it is a marker of our own cosmic insignificance (excellent essay on this in the context of plato and classical philosophy). it is a proof of the fact that we are less epicurean atoms and void and more one single atom, infinitesimally small, and therefore our existence is meaningless. to understand, really and truly, such meaninglessness— that’s what it means to go mad. that’s what madness is, a comprehension of the truth. (it’s all very modernist; last year i wrote a mock conference paper on the correlations between lovecraft’s external, universal nihilism and joseph conrad’s internal, civilizational treatment of the same philosophy.)

ergo, even to brush up against the supernatural is to gain a fragment of that understanding, however small, and correspondingly to skirt along the edge of madness. lovecraft’s protagonists who experience this kind of thing, who come into contact with the other, they’re never the same— either they die horrible deaths, or they go entirely insane, or they live out the rest of their lives haunted, like marlow in heart of darkness or lockwood in wuthering heights, eternally set apart from the rest of humanity by the burden of the truth they know as a result of their experiences. 

but the thing is— excluding “through the gates of the silver key” on account of its status as work originated by another author & therefore closer to the derleth contributions than anything else (e. hoffman price you can publish your dream cycle fanfiction on ao3 like the rest of us schmucks)— randolph carter, lovecraft’s most frequently recurring human character, the person in the mythos who has brushes with the supernatural more frequently than anyone else— is the exception to that rule. he doesn’t go mad, he’s not killed, he— well, it wouldn’t be quite correct to say he isn’t set apart from the rest of society, but it isn’t in that specific, quintessentially gothic way. the worst that ultimately happens to him is that he has to suffer through a couple decades of ennui, and that’s due to his removal from contact with the supernatural, rather than the inverse. and! not only does he not suffer from his contact with the outside in the way every single one of lovecraft’s other protagonists does, he actively benefits from it! the dreamlands are a profoundly beautiful and wondrous place, an escape from the dull mundanity of the waking world; the silver key proves the ultimate solution to his ennui, though it produces the sort of time distortion lovecraft will later consider as a source of horror in stories like “the shadow out of time.” ruthanna emrys, in her write-up of the story for tor’s lovecraft reread series, calls the story (and, by extension, carter’s arc as a whole) “the flip side of cosmic horror,” and she’s right. here, the scales of fear and wonder tip to the latter side in a way they do precious few times in lovecraft; here, we see the supernatural as a source of awe and enlightenment, as an almost voltairean embrace of the vastness of the cosmos not as a thing to be feared, but as a thing to wonder at, and even be joyful of. 

(it’s a very enlightenment idea, this sense of the illumination of the infinite, but that’s a subject for another time.)

the question we have to ask, then, is why? why does it make sense for there to be an exception to the rule of truth-as-madness that permeates lovecraft’s work; why, in a universe that everyone characterizes— that lovecraft himself characterizes— as vast and cold and despairingly empty, soul-crushingly apathetic; why there, of all places, do we find this astronomically improbable happy ending? why should randolph carter get to become king of a dream-city, why should he get to wonder wholeheartedly at a cosmos that we’ve been told over and over again should instill fear and dread? (a secondary question: why him specifically?) why? where did the formula go wrong? what are we missing?

to be entirely honest, i don’t know. i don’t think most critics do, and the thesis that inspired this post doesn’t really seem sure of itself either. it’s not, i don’t think, about carter himself; as much as i like him (and i do like him a great deal) lovecraft was never very good with characters and carter is a protagonist off of the same basic template of most of his peers who find themselves with far worse fates: white male upper-class new-englander gentleman-scholar of financial means, a predilection for the occult, and a profound lack of genre savvy. (this type of protagonist didn’t originate with lovecraft, to be sure, but it’s the one he wrote almost exclusively.) in horror fiction, these are a dime-a-dozen. master dreamer though he is, it’s nothing— nothing specific about carter the character, that demands a happy ending. no, i think it’s something else, and i find myself coming back over and over again to this terry pratchett quote, from a slip of the keyboard:

Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.

lovecraft’s universe is— it is dark and hostile, immensely so. it is a place of ultimate chaos and despair and horror, wherein we are insignificant and meaningless. it is all of those things, profoundly. it is the most unlikely place in the world in which to find a happy ending. 

but we do.

we do, because we have to. we do, because we are human, and we very simply cannot abide stories in which there is no hope. stories in which we are told that we do live in vain, stories in which all is black and cold, form and void with no reason, no light— we recoil from those, because we do, to quote terry again, need fantasy to be human. even in the worst timeline! even when we live vulnerable to creatures that would like nothing more than to eat us for lunch, even when we spend our tiny ephemeral lives doing and experiencing awful things— even if humans are mean creatures in both senses of the word,, even when we cannot see the light, even then. even then, it has to be there— if not in the world around us, then in our stories. a universe where randolph carter died at the end of dream quest of unknown kadath or spent the rest of his life stuck in the waking world would be as deeply, unconscionably cruel as the universe in which james bond didn’t manage to disarm the nuclear bomb, or where the third brother wandered in the wood forever.

in my mind, the takeaway from the carter stories (one of many takeaways, really) is this: in the darkest of universes, there is that tiny glimmer of light. it is a grim, thin hope, but it is there, because it has to be. no matter what lovecraft says, no matter what the rule of his cosmos, it is there. and because it is there, we are not bound to horror— we can have a happy ending, we can push past fear and into wonder, we can find that arthurian sword in the most dim and unlikely of places, glowing faintly in the light of the sunset. 

we ought to remember that.