Article by Sebastiano Fusco.
Originally posted on Antarès, HP Lovecraft # 2 - The cosmic horror of the Master of Providence n. 8/2014, and subsequently on the place of the ed. Bietti.
The last time I tried to get a copy of the Necronomicon - the occult book which contains the knowledge capable of opening up worlds and making monstrous creatures break into a reality unprepared to welcome them - was some time ago, in the ancient library of an Italian city of art, famous for its collection d'incunabula (you will allow me to remain vague, for the reasons that will become clear immediately). A "courteous librarian", as Lovecraft would have said, after some hesitation told me that, yes, he remembered the presence of the volume in the august shelves of that temple of knowledge, but that unfortunately, in an indefinite period, it had been lost, stolen or destroyed. And, as proof, he showed me the registers of the venerable institution in which the book was duly marked with a bibliographic record complete with all the necessary elements, and with the words "Removed" next to it. I expressed my regret that such a fearful work could have ended up in imprudent hands, and the courteous librarian agreed.
Upon exiting the historic library building, I was not particularly surprised. I know well that theΒ Necronomicon it does not exist and has never existed, because it is a pure and simple literary invention of Lovecraft. But I also know that the sinister volume has a marked and disturbing propensity not to take into account its own non-existence, unduly manifesting itself in the real world in the most unexpected ways and with the most unpredictable effects. Answers similar to those the kind librarian had given me come to me about once in five in the investigation I have been conducting for years on the persistence of Lovecraft and his most famous invention, namely the Necronomicon, in popular culture and in the elaborations of mass media. Apart from the general and unshakeable belief of readers, according to which the cursed book exists, despite all the denials, whoever wished to verify its existence would in fact find plenty of proofs: reviews published by well-known periodicals, citations as "consulted work" in bibliographies of authoritative essays, inclusions in catalogs of book collections, truthful testimonies of those who were about to buy it but at the last moment saw it get out of hand, reports of mysterious disappearances connected to strange misfortunes, sales offers at odd figures in bookstore bulletins antique dealers, mentions in the price lists of prestigious auction houses, in hereditary bequests and so on. In addition, of course, to the repertory cards present in a growing number of libraries all over the world, in which Abdul Alhazred's book invariably appears as "unavailable for consultation", "out of place" or "stolen".
This inextricable intertwining of reality and fantasy is the most striking feature of Lovecraft's fiction, in which the dividing line between fantastic invention and concrete data is blurred and imprecise. The stories of the author of Providence take place in a territory that does not belong entirely to the common world, but not entirely to the fictitious one: they exploit a "no man's land" that acts as a border between the two worlds and on which frightening shadows are projected that they come as much from one as from the other.
This overlap is continuous, and manifests itself in the most unexpected ways, even well beyond the responsibility of Lovecraft himself. Ulrich's Periodicals Directory is the most authoritative world directory of specialized journals. An extremely serious tool, for use by libraries and educational institutions, in which specialized magazines from all over the globe are described through continuously updated cards, divided by nationality, subject and circulation. In its editions - from 1992 until at least '97 - his own Users's Guide, that is the manual with the instructions for the user, shows a particular βstandard formβ as a model for drawing up the information relating to new magazines. In this form, the periodical taken as an example is the "Journal of Antarctic Archeology and Protolinguistics", published by the Department of Archeology and Proto-Linguistics of the Miskatonic University of Arkham (Massachusetts) and directed by Professor AH Whateley. In Europe its diffusion is curated by Editions d'Erlette. Anyone wishing to publish advertisements there should contact Mr. Arthur Dunwich at the editorial address (7 Old College Walk, Arkham, Mass.).
In the file everything is correct, down to the smallest details: the Dewey decimal classification is precisely that attributable to such a magazine, the format of the microfilm version is authentic, the international codes Issn and Coden are compiled as it should be. There is even the mandatory classification number at the US Library of Congress: DZ991. Whoever, inexperienced with Lovecraft, did not realize that the title and subject of the magazine, the publisher, the editor and all the names mentioned are purely fictitious, taken from his works, would have no reason to believe that the magazine does not it exists, but it is instead an invention elaborated by whoever drew up the sample card (it seems to have been the American bibliophile Henry Wessells). Once I tried to ask for a copy of it from the university library of a prestigious Italian university, showing the card of the Β«UlrichΒ». They replied that the magazine was unavailable for the moment, but they would certainly order the latest issue from the United States.
Moreover, those wishing to attend the Antarctic Proto-Linguistics courses at Miskatonic University should not necessarily move to Arkham: on the Internet they would find the forms for enrolling in the authoritative institute and could attend its teachings. on line, taking related exams and graduating in a range of disciplines ranging from Antarctic archeology to literature of the pseudo-biblical (with a particular seminar on Necronomicon). All the information necessary for the student, the details of the cursus studiorum, handouts, exercises and teaching aids. There is even the list of graduates cum laude.
Where instead you want to reach the campus miskatonic university, detailed maps of New England are available in which all the locations indicated by Lovecraft are inserted with precision, in the exact context indicated by our author. There is also that famous crossroads in central Massachusetts, after Dean's Corners, where the distracted traveler, taking the wrong direction, would end up in the gloomy and infamous town of Dunwich, a sorcerers' nest surrounded by low, sinister looking hills on the whose top stand out disturbing megaliths. Dunwich does not exist, but the hills do, together with the megaliths, which constitute one of the unsolved puzzles of Proto-American archeology.
Everything in Lovecraft is like this. It is never clear where the real ends and where the fantastic begins: the two territories are not separated but superimposed, in a shadow cone in which the appearances of both are mixed.
Lovecraft continually played on the juxtaposition between true and untrue, evoking and expressing the ambiguity of the conceivable thanks to two extraordinary means with which nature had endowed him: an exuberant fantasy, nourished by an amazing dream world, and an exceptional ability to learning, through which he was able to acquire, as a self-taught, a practically boundless erudition.
He had a particular method to systematize his knowledge: an endless correspondence (about one hundred thousand letters have been attributed to him in the span of just over twenty years) in which, by answering the questions posed by acquaintances scattered throughout the United States and beyond, he wrote real treatises on all conceivable disciplines. To compose them, he took days and days, he documented, sifted through data and compared texts, thus increasing his knowledge and fixing them in his formidable memory through writing.
Alongside the displays of culture, in the letters there are also manifestations of his free storytelling imagination. Lovecraft lived the contradiction of being a man of the twentieth century, rationalist, materialist, incredulous towards anything supernatural, and at the same time the owner of a prodigious imagination, protagonist of lush and baroque dreams, anxious to open the spirit to whatever there is. beyond the constraints imposed by the laws of space and time. He resolved this contradiction ("dissonance," in terms of Jungian psychology, as Dirk W. Mosig, the most acute Lovecraftian critic ever, pointed out) by sublimating his nightmares into art.
In Lovecraft's correspondence a minute and detailed diary unfolds, in which the facts of common life are mixed with extraordinary otherworldly digressions, so that the banality of everyday life becomes the bait that ignites an incredible visionary fantasy.
Oneiric storytelling and lived experience come to mix in an inextricable intertwining, to form a fabric similar to certain mandala in the East where, trying to follow the lines traced in the drawing with your eyes, you end up losing the sense of the figure, passing from its real image to another, emerging from the unconscious and a vehicle for unknown emotions and sensations. Followers of transcendental meditation techniques employ i mandala to move with one's conscience into different "worlds", using them as doors to unknown universes. With his writing method, Lovecraft implements exactly such a procedure. It begins in a totally realistic context, precise to the point of scruple, and gradually, following arcane clues, one finds oneself immersed in a hazy territory, in which the dreamlike fantasy integrates the real, assuming all its characteristics. When he realizes that he has crossed the fleeting and invisible "threshold" between the two worlds, it is too late: the nightmare is already above us.
On the other hand, the spies of this nightmare are different in his narrative: taking the wrong road at a crossroads; to cross one door instead of another; opening a book and discovering that it is not what it should be; catching subtle changes in a person's way of speaking; realizing that the scratching of rats in the walls is more intense than normal; hearing the distant howl of a dog following us everywhere. In this way, certain pieces of the mosaic of reality progressively crumble, being replaced by other pieces which, as a whole, change the meaning of the whole figure.
Books are one of the most important spies. Alongside well-known and well-known works, others appear, whose pages open whirlwinds of delirium. Lovecraft is very skilled in making purely invented texts appear but which have all the verisimilitude of reality, alongside volumes that appear completely fantastic, but which are true.
In the library of the sorcerer Curwen, dedicated to the search for immortality through complex alchemical operations, there is obviously the unreal Necronomicon, but alongside texts with unlikely titles such as Turba Philosophorum, Chemicus Thesaurus, Ars Magna and Ultima, which, however, are not only all authentic but also dedicated to the creation of the elixir of life: a sign of the meticulousness with which Lovecraft inquired and of the precision with which he created his own references, leaving nothing to chance or approximation. Conversely, in the library discovered by the unhappy Robert Blake inside the gloomy church atop Federal Hill, all the lyrics are invented except for one: le Dzyan's rooms, which is assumed to be authentic. But it is only so for the followers of theosophy, because in reality it was also invented by Helena Blavatsky, who, however, perjured on the actual existence of her.
The whole Lovecraftian lexicon is characterized by analogous mixtures of the real and the fantastic. The dark plateau of Leng in central Asia, home to monsters, is defined icy desert: in Chinese, soundΒ it means precisely "icy". The death of Abdul Alhazred, a fictional character like hisΒ Necronomicon, is described by the Arab historian Ibn Khallikan, who actually existed on the contrary, and wrote a text entitled Death of eminent men. Pope Gregory IX, who burned the nonexistent Necronomicon because he was stained with witchcraft, he is also the pope who, by establishing the Court of the Inquisition, paved the way for witch hunts and the burning of forbidden books together with their owners. The culmination of this superimposition is reached with the mention of the Book of Thoth: a true Egyptian magical text that everyone believes was invented, within the Necronomicon, an invented magical text that everyone believes to be true.
Few authors have been able to mix perception, representation and storytelling on the same level as skillfully. Only Jorge Luis Borges seems to me to have succeeded with equal effectiveness. The global effect is that of an immanence of the absurd, which undermines the roots of reality. A feeling similar to what Roger Caillois calls uncertainty qui vient des rΓͺves. Welcoming it means entering a labyrinth of mirrors, in which some faithfully reflect your image, others deform it, erase it or replace it with another - or they are not even mirrors but doors that open onto mysterious elsewhere, where everything is different.
Making such a sensation by writing is a supremely difficult undertaking, and Lovecraft was the first to realize how he himself had succeeded only a limited number of times. However, the fact that he has tried it is the testimony of an extraordinary intellectual courage, of the ability to question not only all the conventions of fiction, but the very logical foundations of rational thought. In this, he was a writer of extraordinary modernity, because the ambiguity of reality is the labyrinth in which scientific and philosophical thought gropes today, which quantum physics has deprived of the last surviving certainties of Einstein's relativity. With astoundingly anticipating intellect, the son of Providence realized that the description of reality, as perceived by the senses and evoked by feelings, in no way exhaustes the representation of a universe infinitely vaster than our mind and our heart can conceive. He understood that our logic is inadequate to imprison in exact formulas certain phenomena that ignore the Aristotelian categories, do not take into account the laws of causality and follow temporal sequences very different from those of common experience.
Physicists, with a still slow and hesitant reworking process, are realizing how the so-called "standard model" of reality - which with so much difficulty only partially managed to unify Bohr's atomic doctrine with Einstein's cosmology - is only a rough approximation of the truth, valid within limited parameters, like the universe-clock conceived by the mechanism of Descartes and Newton. In the real world, outside the limited scale offered by our senses and by rational and instinctive processes, there are no certainties, only probabilities. Time is not linear, but branches out, returns to itself, flows backwards. And above all, perception is not a pure act of registration of the existing, but what in fact determines the plane of reality on which we are acting. Phenomena are defined and completed as we perceive them, otherwise they remain in a state of probabilistic uncertainty - non-living and undead, like Schroedinger's cat.
How much this reevaluates the conscience and the spirit towards pure materialism is difficult to express. Old scientists, conceptually inadequate to consciously deal with this state of affairs, continue to elaborate everything in formulas based on the usual models, cutting out the variables that they do not know how to take into account. Philosophers, unfamiliar with mathematics and steeped in nineteenth-century rationalism, however, perceive that something is changing and, unable for lack of ingenuity to grasp the new, they resort to βweakβ architectures to mask an inability to face the revolution in progress. The literati, fasting everything but their own ego, have not yet understood anything of what is happening and have reduced the modern narrative to pamphlet political or assembly line for escape exercises, when not psycho-masturbatory practice.
Lovecraft instead sensed the isolation of contemporary thought in a sea of ββenigmas and a piercing shiver of fear ensued. His nightmares are a reflection of this anguish, but they have opened a path on which so far no one in the world of culture has had the courage to set out. This is why he had no heirs: he is unique and, I fear, will remain so for a long time to come.
Knowingly or not, Lovecraft evoked the Necronomicon, the cursed book whose reading generates madness. A very evident symbol: whoever wants to face, with a spirit free from prejudices, the contradictions in front of which contemporary science has placed us must completely abandon the usual thought patterns, leave behind all rationality, every logical paradigm and determinism. In fact, he must become, in the eyes of those who continue to think in the usual way, like a mad prisoner of their own visions. Only in this way will he be able to open the mysterious "two hundred and thirty-one doors" invoked by the Kabbalists, to look out on a further reality (or an infinite number of realities) that is not necessarily to be liked. However, to do this it takes superhuman courage: once again the attribute of madmen.
He posted it back up NIGRICANT.
very interesting article ...
Fantastic, with Lovecraft you are giving yourself crazy joy (in a good way), I see