‘ … Miles of the rustling secret corn’: nature, cosmic and autonomy in American cosmic horror literature
2023; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2023.2259347
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Modern American Literature Studies
ResumoABSTRACTThis paper investigates the autonomy of Nature in American cosmic horror literature. We have divided the American cosmic horror canon into two parts: the Lovecraftian and the post-millennial. The Lovecraftian phase, prefaced by the texts of Lovecraft himself, posits Nature as a corruptible and subservient entity, subdued by the alien cosmic and redeemed only by a rationalist agent/outsider, focusing on the late-twentieth century texts by Stephen King, T. E. D. Klein and Robert R. McCammon. In the post-millennial phase, rather than serving the cosmic, Nature becomes the cosmic, transcending the moulds of rationality and comprehension, becoming inscrutable and ‘agential’ in the process. Our case studies will include the works of Thomas Ligotti, Michael Wehunt, T. E. Grau and John Langan. While discerning Nature’s autonomy, we will also discuss how a ‘rational’ Nature falls within the ambit of anthropocentrism, whereas an ‘irrational’ Nature, often mistaken as misanthropic, adopts absolute indifference towards the anthropos.KEYWORDS: Naturecosmic horrorautonomyanthropocentrismLovecraftAmerican literature Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Anthony Camara, ‘Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”’, Horror Studies, 4.1 (2013), p. 44.2 Sean Moreland, ‘The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius’, in Sean Moreland (ed.), New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 35.3 We are using Leo Marx’s condensation of the wide significance of ‘pastoralism’ in 20th century American literature which is ‘less an expression of thought than of feeling … the idyllic and the rustic as antidotes to processes of modernization and alternatives to modern society’s increasing complexity, artificiality, and sophistication’. Pastoralism is a term that represents a hermetic ideal: malleable, unchallenging and jejune. It is also pliant and fawning on the human beings’ impression of it as a nurturing, uncomplicated and pre-civilizational domain. See Catrin Gersdorf, ‘Imaginary Ecologies: Landscape, American Literature, and the Reconstruction of Space in the 21st Century’, Anglia, 124.1 (2006), p. 45.4 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, The H.P. Lovecraft Archive, (2009), https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx [Date accessed: 23 September 2022].5 Ibid.6 Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 169.7 Eugene Thacker, In The Dust of This Planet [Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 1] (Croydon: Zero Books, 2011), p. 98.8 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), p. 20.9 Ibid., p. 21.10 Brooks E. Hefner, ‘Weird Investigations and Nativist Semiotics in H. P. Lovecraft and Dashiell Hammett’, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 60.4 (2014), p. 672.11 In the tradition of ecocriticism, Christanity has often been described as the source of the modern man’s hubris regarding Nature, as elucidated by Lynn White who accuses the western world enamoured by the orthodox Christian superiority of human beings: ‘no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes’. See Lynn White, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science, 155.3767 (1967), p. 1205.12 Jonathan Newell, A Century of Weird Fiction 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020), p. 49.13 Ibid., p. 49.14 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, The H.P. Lovecraft Archive, (2009), https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx [Date accessed: 23 September 2022].15 Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, in Ancient Sorceries and Other Strange Tales (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), Loc 1308, Kindle edition.16 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, ‘The Colour Out of Space’, in The Complete H.P. Lovecraft Collection (Irvine, CA: Xist Publishing, 2014), p. 357.17 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales (London: Vintage Books, 2011), p. 353.18 Graham Garman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), p. 36.19 Kálmán Matolcsy, ‘Knowledge in the Void: Anomaly, Observation, and the Incomplete Paradigm Shift in H. P. Lovecraft’s Fiction’, Lovecraft Annual, 2 (2008), p. 181.20 Ibid., p. 176.21 Ibid., p. 167.22 Lovecraft, The Complete H.P. Lovecraft Collection, p. 360.23 Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales, p. 361.24 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum Books, 2008), p. 3.25 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 30.26 Cheryll Glotfelty, ‘Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis’, in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. xx.27 Foucault argues in his influential essay ‘Of Other Spaces’ that heterotopias are ideological manifestations of a society mirroring the culture at large: ‘kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. The post-war cosmic horror narrators similarly remove the aberrant rustic from their conscious space. It may or may not haunt them, but the very action of the resolution or removal of the eldritch experience establishes a triumph of rationalism over the inexplicable. See Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2004), p. 7.28 Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales, p. 489.29 Glotfelty, ‘Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis’, in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, p. xviii.30 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), p. 3.31 Grady Hendrix, Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2017), p. 81.32 Ibid., p. 100.33 Stephen King, ‘Children of the Corn’, in Night Shift (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), p. 282.34 T.E.D. Klein, Ceremonies (New York: Bantam Books, 1985), p. 69.35 See Stephen King, It (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011).36 Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song (New York: Open Road Media, 2011), p. 561.37 Georg Simmel, talking about the difference between the urban and the rural spirit, advocates for a reverse migration of the conscientious citizen to the village, because life blooms better in the village, nature and away from the urban entropy. See Dibyakusum Ray, Postcolonial Indian City-Literature: Policy, Politics and Evolution, Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2022), p. 25.38 Eugene Thacker, ‘Meditations on the Weird’, in Tentacles Longer Than Night [Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 3] (Croydon: Zero Books, 2015), p. 124.39 Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2011), p. 8.40 Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night [Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 3], p. 125.41 Ibid., p. 125.42 Ibid., p. 126.43 The informed reader of Lovecraft must know that in spite of the author’s advocacy for ‘indifferentism’, his stories are invariably entrapped in tangibility and culpability of the cosmic intent. According to Lovecraft, the purest cosmic horror does not care, but the evil of ‘Dagon’ (1919), ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927), ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) often possesses, controls and lays waste to human establishment with prejudice. While there are stories of a human stumbling on the cosmic entities perchance (and going insane in the process, like in ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924)), one cannot deny that partly because of the imaginative aporia of envisioning the ineffable, and partly because of racial phobia, Lovecraft majorly gives his evil a voice, features, motive and as a result, humanity. To be belligerent is to care, and ‘caring’ is anthropic.44 Dominic Thompson, ‘“ … Town That Doesn’t Keep Showing up in Books”: Genre Reflexivity in Post-Millennial Metafictional Horror’, Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS), 3.4 (2020), p. 91.45 Martin Randall, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 3.46 Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2011), p. 3.47 Ibid., p. 3.48 Ibid., p. 3.49 Keith Makoto Woodhouse, The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. xiii.50 Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, p. 32.51 The ‘new weird’, apart from the authors mentioned in the main text, is also exemplified by China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, K. J. Bishop and Steph Swainston etc.52 Carl H. Sederholm, ‘The New Weird’, in Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (eds), Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p. 162.53 Marco Caracciolo, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen, and David Rodriguez, Narrating Nonhuman Spaces: Form, Story, and Experience Beyond Anthropocentrism (New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 36–7.54 Ibid., p. 3.55 Thomas Ligotti, ‘The Red Tower’, in Teatro Grottesco (London: Virgin Books Ltd., 2008), p. 76.56 Ibid., p. 72.57 Ibid., p. 72.58 Ibid., p. 68.59 Ibid., p. 77.60 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 141.61 Immanuel Kant, ‘The Critique of Judgement’, in Richard Kearney and David M. Rasmussen (eds), Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001), p. 25.62 Michael Wehunt, ‘Beside Me Singing in the Wilderness’, in Greener Pastures (Massachusetts and Pennsylvania: Shock Totem Publications, 2016), p. 14.63 Ibid., p. 14.64 Ronald McIntyre and David Woodruff Smith, ‘Theory of Intentionality’, in William R. McKenna and J. N. Mohanty (eds), Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Textbook (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1989), p. 5.65 Joseph Sramek, ‘“Face Him like a Briton”: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800–1875’, Victorian Studies, 48.4 (2006), p. 659.66 Jacques Pouchepadass, ‘Colonialism and Environment in India: Comparative Perspective’, Economic and Political Weekly, 30.33 (1995), p. 2061.67 John Langan, ‘The Shallows’, in The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013), pp. 160–2.68 Ibid., p. 164.69 Ibid., p. 168.70 T. E. Grau, ‘Return of the Prodigy’, in The Nameless Dark (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2015), p. 92.71 Ibid., p. 83.72 John Langan, ‘Bor Urus’, in Sefira and Other Betrayals (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2019), p. 304.73 Ibid., p. 309.74 Ibid., p. 311.75 Ibid., p. 323.76 Adrian Tait, ‘Seeking Signs Amongst “Sylvan Phenomena”: Trees in the Work of Thomas Hardy’, Green Letters, 25.4 (2021), p. 381.77 Timothy Chandler, ‘Reading Atmospheres: The Ecocritical Potential of Gernot Böhme’s Aesthetic Theory of Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 18.3 (2011), p. 559.78 Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night [Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 3], p. 125.
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