Noah Berlatsky’s fantastic article on C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy has got me ruminating on the genre of Gothic Horror. Berlatsky is correct, of course, to point out that all good Science Fiction is an exploration of ourselves and our self-understanding, with ray-guns and aliens serving to place human beings in contexts so unfamiliar that we witness exactly how human nature breaks down when taken to the limits of human experience.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. - H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
That said, I draw the line at horror or, more accurately, at Lovecraft. Berlatsky is correct to say that: "The gothic tradition on which much of sci-fi rests is about doubling; about recognizing one’s own twisted visage in the face of infinity." What makes Lovecraft different and, I might add, truly horrifying , is the way in which he systematically subverts this convention of the genre.
Certainly, Lovecraft’s works contain the obligatory shambling and degenerate pseudo-humans — made all the more transgressive for modern readers by the author’s overtly racist agenda. The really horrible creatures, on the other hand, are merely a physical manifestation of the existential horror associated with true understanding of man’s insignificance in a pitiless and meaningless universe. As such, they represent the shattering of the liberal dream of knowledge of and mastery over nature.
Imagine, then, the sheer magnitude of ironic distance required for we enlightened moderns to get a thrill out of Lovecraft’s spooky monsters while chuckling at his self-consistent and all-too-familiar worldview. Perhaps it’s the campiness that saves us — any message is easier to ignore when contained in prose as overwrought and baroque as Lovecraft’s. Nevertheless, the fundamental point remains — all horror is a series of footnotes to staring into the black abyss of space and knowing that nothing human is staring back.
