I'm not completely satisfied with it, if in the end the character just ends up in a sick bed. The same can be said for "Rats in the Walls".
Well, I'm inclined to agree with you there; but Lovecraft leaves a "rational out" not only for the sake of the readers who prefer that (and, of course, it is a hallmark of the true Gothic tale,
a la Radcliffe & Co.) but also because this is part of his idea that such a story must work so that it leaves that doubt in the reader's mind that such a thing just might have happened in the "real world"... it can't have such overt aftereffects that it would be noticeable to the rest of the world (at least at present, though with some things, such as "The Call of Cthulhu" the idea is that eventually it will), but a doubt is left in the reader's mind -- at least on an emotional level -- that perhaps there are corners of reality we simply aren't aware of....
I'd rather see this character join the cult although at least the Necronomicon puts some resolution together.
I think that would defeat the whole purpose, really, were he to take that action. The purpose here was, as with "Dagon" to isolate the character completely, cut him off from the rest of humanity yet without losing his own humanity (which, of course, the narrator of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" eventually does)... making the horror both outside and inside, cosmic
and personal.
There is just one last thing. It looks like the word festival is interchangeable with the word feast, so the title could just as easily be "The Feast". It was a strange adventure. Can you imagine entering some white church and being lead through an underground passage way full of caves and to some tributary. In that sense the story might have done well without the winged creatures (especially as mounts for riding upon), but those creatures are not out of context with the rest of his stories. Instead of the winged creatures what might have worked is more details about the ceremony which was too vague, and unfortunately sounded somewhat interesting. It was altogether too mysterious, but there was a hint of something interesting, and I don't see why that the festival was banned, or why his kinsman would be hung other than perhaps that this festival was more trouble than it was worth.
The reason his kinsman was hanged ties in with the history of the Massachusetts-Bay Colony... specifically the witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century. And while it is true, as you note further on, that paganism and witchcraft are by no means the same, this was not a point the Puritans would have particularly agreed with you on... as seen by what happened with Thomas Morton and the celebrants of Merry Mount... something Lovecraft may have had in mind when writing the story, given his knowledge and love of the history of New England. As Peter H. Cannon pointed out, there are distinct similarities between HPL's "The Festival" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown", which may help to make some of the obscurities mentioned in this thread a bit clearer.... And, once again, the creatures themselves are the Lovecraftian equivalent of the witch's mounts as depicted in early engravings at times... and look forward in some ways to that odd fragment "Of Evill Sorceries Done in New-England, of Daemons in No Humane Shape":
But in respect of generall Infamy, no Report more terrible hath come to Notice, than of what Goodwife Doten, Relict of John Doten of Duxbury in the Old Colonie, brought out of the Woods near Candlemas of 1683. She affirmed, and her good neighbours likewise, that it had been borne that which was neither Beast nor Man, but like to a monstrous Bat with humane Face The which was burnt by Order of the High-Sheriff on the 5th of June in the Year 1684.
-- Collected Essays 5, p. 286
Certainly that's the common pattern that emerges in most of Lovecraft's tales, at least those which I have read so far. But what bothers me is the fate of the narrator(s). The story always ends to certain extent unresolved, and narrator ends up either a mental patient or a lost soul. Why isn't that these characters ever, after having "seen the light", turn their life around? I mean for example in Festival, if the man believe what he saw was real, wouldn't that invoke some sort of desire to seek the truth, maybe even try to join his "ancestors" in their sacred rituals? I mean with Lovecraft, it is about digging deep into the mysteries of the world and the universe right? In that sense, wouldn't it be more comforting for the narrator to blindly follow that which he observed as the truth? I hope it makes sense.
In part, I think the answer is the same as above, but with this addition: Lovecraft wanted to evoke the sensation of genuine nightmare in such tales; and nightmares are seldom comforting in any degree.
[/quote]That mounting the creatures part didn't sit well with me either, but I guess that was part of the ambiguity when it came to the ritual itself, along with that mysterious column of fire and the supposed destination of the worshipers.[/QUOTE]
See my comment above concerning "Young Goodman Brown" and its relation to "The Festival". While Lovecraft is not specifically using, he is by inference drawing upon the associations with some very old traditions of New England witch lore, combining them with his own symbology of enormous caverns as places of eeriness and terrible potentiality (perhaps derived in part from classical literature, but also based on the fact that he himself had what he called an odd cross between agoraphobia and claustrophobia, a fear of large enclosed spaces... not, as he notes, that such ever threw him into a panic, but they tended to create in him a sensation of creeping menace and shadowy terror) as well as his ambivalence toward the sea.
It also said that the creatures were tame. Anyway this character should be happy that he escaped, rather than all this meloncholy arrangement. Not only that but he should throw out the Necronomicon or do something to put some from of victory upon the situation, otherwise he should have rode with the rest of the festival party and been positive about it.
Again, HPL isn't offering comfort... and to do so in such a situation would be completely false, following a stereotyped formula of hack magazine fiction. A person genuinely faced with such a situation would not be likely to have such a reaction as you suggest, but rather find themselves caught between the poles of reality and unreality, and fighting for their reason, as well as both terrified and forever scarred by what they have been through. As Lovecraft himself noted many times, conventions of popular fiction are almost always antithetical to true art, which at very least attempts to express such genuine human emotions as one would encounter in a given situation. Which leads us to:
Too bad HPL wasn't reading Bram Stoker in his youth.
I'm not sure how much Stoker you've read, but frankly, thank heavens he wasn't influenced by the man! Dracula is a fine book in some ways, but the best thing about it is the titular character and his menacing presence throughout. On other levels, it is often less than inspired, and the writing varies from rather good to quite pedestrian.... As for his other works, even the oft-reprinted "The Judge's House" and "The Squaw" (among the better of his short stories), at best the same can be said for them; at worst, they are unbelievably crude, simplistic, and inane....
However, the statement about Aladin is interesting, given Lovecraft's fascinating with the Arabian Nights as a youth, and the connection to Abdul Alhazred and his
chef d'oeuvre...
There should be forums here for the classis if they are the fountain head of Western literature.
By all means, begin such a thread (a separate forum would have to be the result of enough interest to have at least several threads of discussion on such a topic... not terribly likely, really, but one can hope....). But, realistically, this is a science fiction and fantasy forum, not one devoted to the classics or literature in general, so such a thing is unlikely to be found here, however important these works are in the larger realm....
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