"The Outsider" by H.P. Lovecraft, another creepy gem from the Penguin trove THE CALL OF CTHULHU AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES edited by S.T. Joshi. If IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE can be viewed as the first true episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, "The Outsider" could easily have been the first story in the premiere issue of TALES FROM THE CRYPT, it has that certain slant of bite. In his notes Joshi observes the story "makes little sense...if it (the castle) is truly underground, how is it that the creature spends time in the 'endless forest' surrounding it?" As I read this before the story itself I thought I had wrecked it for me. I didn't want to read a story with a great big goof in it. But as I read, everything went smoothly and I realized the whole castle didn't need to be underground, only parts of it. The fact it has a "putrid moat" and tall towers over which grew "terrible trees" which blocked out the sun seemed to suggest this. With HPL, another story saved is another story savored.
Actually these by no means suggest only portions of the castle are underground. The
whole would have to be, as there is only
one tower which grows beyond the trees, and it is this the Outsider climbs, only to emerge at "nothing less than the
solid ground, decked and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight" (p. 46). There is also the frequent reiteration of how the castle and its surroundings are in perpetual twilight, to the point that his attempt to climb the tower was motivated, despite the danger of falling to his apparent death, "since it was better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day" (p. 44). Thus the entire world he has known, not only the castle but all the grounds surrounding, must be subterranean. For the story to hang together at all, the castle must be underground; but this very fact leads to the problems with reading the story on a strictly literal level. It is obviously a tale which works on many other levels, but a strictly literal reading is simply rife with problems of this sort.
However, I don't see this as a problem, and (given his working methods) the likelihood that this would be, in any sense, a "goof", is frankly nonexistent. That Lovecraft was fully aware of the contradictions here is obvious, given the dreamlike (or nightmarish) air of the piece, with its perfervid diction (much more so than the majority of his nonparodic work of the period), and the requirement that the narrator himself be unaware of his actual state -- itself very much the sort of shock experienced in a nightmare.
Joshi has mentioned Wetzel's relating this to the Hawthorne fragment, "Journal of a Solitary Man", as well as Fulwiler's very intriguing piece viewing the tale both as a dream-narrative and an hommage to one of Lovecraft's favorite poets, John Keats (the centennial of whose death may well have partly inspired the piece --
vide the use of a bit from Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" as the motto).
There may also be something which has not been mentioned (at least, to my knowledge) which has a bearing here, and that is John Ury Lloyd's peculiar book,
Etidorpha, which Lovecraft had read some years before, and the bulk of which takes place in a cavern world which almost certainly also inspired portions of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar stories (or, rather, descriptions of Pellucidar itself)....
At any rate, though having (quite intentionally, I think) such contradictions on a literal level, on the metaphoric level it is one of the most richly rewarding of Lovecraft's tales, and there have been numerous interpretations of it, most of which are in themselves fascinating, thought-provoking, and well-written. Donald R. Burleson, in fact, used that central image from "The Outsider" as the lens through which to view Lovecraft's fictional
oeuvre in his excellent "On Lovecraft's Themes: Touching the Glass" (
An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, pp.135-47), with that wonderful final paragraph:
In literary theorist M. H. Abrams's well-known The Mirror and the Lamp, the mirror is a metaphor for mind, mind viewed (in pre-Romantic or Neoclassical terms) as a mimetic reflector of externality, in contrast with the "lamp" metaphor of mind as a radiant contributor to what it perceives. For Lovecraft (in such a scheme decidedly the pre-Romantic) the mind is more mirror than lamp. But for Lovecraft the mirror is also a metaphor for the cosmos itself that reflects back humankind's true face, the face of a lost and nameless soul. Self-referentially, Lovecraft's career-long text itself is a sprawling hall of mirrors, mirrors mirroring mirrors, a labyrinth of iterated thematic reflections through which wanders the Outsider who forever reaches forth, in hope against hope, to touch the glass.
