"The Unnamable"

[w h pugmire esq]

I have just learned, accidentally, that Thomas Ligotti chose the contents for the Centipede Press book, MASTERS OF THE WEIRD TALE: H. P. LOVECRAFT, & thus it was Tom who -- strangely -- excluded "The Hound" and "The Unnamable" from the book's contents. I wanted that Centipede edition to be the ideal edition of Lovecraft, but that honour must some day belong to the Barnes & Noble edition, once the errors of that edition are completely eradicated.

"The Unnamable" was penned in September 1923, and thus I consider it an early tale. By the time of its composition, Lovecraft had firmly found himself as an author and had penned at least three masterpieces: "The Outsider," "The Music of Erich Zann," and "The Rats in the Walls." He had experimented with the prose poem ("Nyarlathotep," "What the Moon Brings") and perhaps investigated the idea of working at novel length ("Azathoth"). With the exception of one novel-length work, his "Dunsanian" phase was behind him. The tales were set in the "real" world, and revealed that haunted world and the haunted mortals who inhabited it -- for a little while.

"The Unnamable," slight though it perhaps may be, is one of my favourite tales by Lovecraft. I love its Gothic mood, and I love what we learn of the character "Carter," who certainly must be Randolph Carter, Lovecraft's fictive personae. The tale is set in that antient witch-town, Arkham. (I was very disappointed, during my one brief stay in Salem, that we did not find the Charter Street Burying Ground -- unless, indeed, that was the expanse of cemetery sod that we investigated in pitch darkness, surrounded by the squeals of drunken sods and the spinning festive lights of carnival. A photo of the dark yet festive place wherein we stood is in my photo scrap book. It is in ye Charter Street Burying Ground where stands the slate for one Caleb Pickman -- & we know, from "Pickman's Model," that the Pickman brood of Arkham (Salem) have sinister history.)

Lovecraft has been condemned for not being able to create character, and that is nonsense. Character was not something he was interested in conveying as a weird artist, and yet his characters have, from the very first, fascinated me. And Randolph Carter is one of the most fascinating of them all. Perhaps I am especially fond of and intrigued by him because it is assumed by many that he represents Lovecraft's fictive self-portrayal. This story gives credence to that assumption when we combine with Carter the character of Joel Manton, almost certainly based on Maurice W. Moe. It is interesting to compare Carter as revealed in this tale as opposed to Carter as revealed in "The Statement of Randolph Carter." They seem, almost, two separate individuals. Of course, the Carter of the initial tale was based on Lovecraft's image of himself in the dream from which that story is derived; the Carter in "The Unnamable" perhaps is the HPL of Lovecraft's correspondence, who is sure-footed and in control. Carter is the master of this story -- until, of course, he faints. He is the poet, and thus intimate with a supernaturalism he can sense if not comprehend.

The story has one point of real genius, that wonderful moment when Carter begins to explain, "You did see it--until it got dark." How delicious. And it describes a part of one reason why H. P. Lovecraft wrote macabre fiction -- he seems to have enjoyed scaring people, putting them on edge. We need but recall another graveyard scene, in Providence:

"It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said." (Helen V. Sulley, "Memories of Lovecraft: II, Arkham Collector No. 4, page 119.)

How queerly close that real life incident matches the tone of "The Unnamable"!

The climax of the story is undoubtedly melodramatic, and the work cannot be considered "serious" in any way. Who cares? The first and foremost thing a weird tale must do is be weird, raise a sense of foreboding, scare us for one moment of rare phantasy. This story has enchanted me as a delightful example of the Gothic tale. The character of Randolph Carter continues to beguile me, and I shall one day write my own story of Carter and his life as a writer of supernatural horror fiction.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Poor Helen Sulley!

Your essay largely coincides with my own impressions of this story. The dialogue between Carter and his interlocutor is of abiding interest, I think, for the exposition of Lovecraft's thoughts on what China Mieville likes to call 'the bad numinous'. The horror which is, ultimately, unnamable is a powerful concept, and more true to Lovecraft's vision than the codifying approach of some writers who have worked in what they though was a Lovecraftian mode.

One aspect that interests me in your essay is the fertile suggestion Lovecraft's work seems to contain for the receptive, creative mind. Not puerile, literalistic suggestions of unholy cults and unwholesome deities necessarily, but cues for one's own thoughts on the literature of the uncanny and, for the more gifted amongst us, cues for our own contributions to said literature. Even a minor Lovecraft tale can be a fount of inspiration and suggestion.

The story itself, is an example of a sort of trick-tale which is by and large not my favourite variety of horror story, and the melodrama in the end does let it down a bit, but I agree that it deserves a place in a definitive edition of Lovecraft's tales.

 

[Tinsel]

His characters are victims that often do not escape from harm, and he talks in retrospect of events that already took place in a number of his stories. He wrote differently than the current writers, and they don't understand how he wrote like that, so they end up criticizing their own stories.

 

[j d worthington]

I can't say that I see "The Unnamable" as a particularly good story (in the usual sense of that word); there is too much exposition, not enough "plot" to build such a structure on, and the melodramatic, overblown conclusion simply does not work all that well (not an entire failure, but certainly lacking the amount of impact it should have).

Nonetheless, it remains one I find very interesting on various levels. His expansion on the (very genuine) passage in Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana is (Joel Manton's comments to the contrary notwithstanding) very good, and explores again one of Lovecraft's favorite themes: that the human race is not a truly separate species, and that we may at the least deviation once more descend the evolutionary ladder... though generally producing some truly monstrous prodigy as a result.

Also, Lovecraft's exploration of the theme of what constitutes genuine horror (or terror), and how such is actually around us all the time, just below the surface of our general perception. The horrors that lie locked away in the past, unperceived by us because, unlike Mather, we are not capable of being "laconically unamazed" by the bizarrerie and strangeness of life itself; that more-than-awareness of the powerful associations and linkages behind seeming normality, but whose "faint scratchings" we are too "dulled by the daily routine" to catch.

There is also the similarity to the "dark wonder" in so many of Machen's best tales in this respect; the "ecstasy" to be found in life and art... something he gives, I think, a direct nod to in the following passage:

It was his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any aesthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of every-day affairs.

Making Manton's position utterly antipodal to that of both Machen and Lovecraft (at least at this stage).

And his skill in weaving the genuinely historical and the created history into a perfectly seamless whole (something which many a modern writer could learn from) which only a fair amount of searching can definitely separate out each from the other....

So, while not a genuine success as a story, I think it offers a great deal more than first appears on the surface... something I also think is the case with so much of what Winfield Townley Scott dismissed as his "eighteenth century rubbish" among his verse....

 

[Lobolover]

I always considered that this particular story was not written to be entierly serious . I always saw it as a sort of self-parody on Lovecraft's part .