"Ye blind idiot, ye noxious Azathoth...

...shal arise from ye middle of ye World where all is Chaos & Destruction where He hath bubbl'd and blasphem'd at Ye centre which is of All Things, which is to say Infinity...." (August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft, The Lurker at the Threshold)

The texts we’ve focused on in class have been predominantly in the Modernist tradition, but it strikes me that there’s been very little said as to what exactly that means. In doing my own research, I’ve found that no one really knows what it means either, but it’s a convenient divider, and while there may not be a specific definition there are certainly common threads:

“In instances like this there is a tone of lament, pessimism, and despair about the world which finds its appropriate representation in these ‘fractured’ art forms… In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation.” (Peter Barry in Beginning Theory, 84)

Considering the period, fragmentation has been a very real thing in the lives of many of these authors – two World Wars within twenty years, political and economic upheavals and arguments, a world that’s becoming smaller and smaller and smaller…

There’s a sense, I think, in which many of these authors can be identified by an identity crisis of sorts that is more societal and existential than it is strictly personal. In studying H.P. Lovecraft independently, I’ve read much about his consideration of himself as a “nonentity” and a “machine” – Lovecraft is relevant because he is a postmodern among modernists, but the modernists are still reacting to the same situations and trials as Lovecraft. In a move that is strikingly similar to this dissociative master of weird fiction, Ernest Hemingway creates in The Snows of Kilimanjaro a character who’s identity is defined by his own achievements – like Lovecraft, Harry’s identity, or lack thereof, is formed within his writing and his validation as an author. He is acting in a world where things are becoming more and more subjective and the concept of truth is becoming harder and harder to verify because the whole world is becoming defined by its own fragmentations – if he cannot be validated through his own experiences, how can his identity be considered concrete?

Similar sentiments crop up in T.S. Eliot’s poetry:

“Would it all have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ –

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.’” (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1579)

The “overwhelming question” is a reoccurring motif in Love Song… and that question is never ultimately answered, yet it is clear that the narrator’s identity is wrapped up in either the answer or the act of answering that question. As long as that question remains unanswered, what is he, really? An old man or a young man? Living or dying or dead? A social entertainer or a drowning autistic? His place is undefined, and so is his person.

And even as his identity is being threatened, language and therefore self-expression itself takes a blow as his companion admits, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” The ability to have interpersonal communication is also in jeopardy, the door for deconstruction is open and so long as that “overwhelming question” remains unanswered there will never be any complete understanding, no complete discourse, and therefore no agreement which can verify truth.

So we return to the lament which Barry describes – Hemingway’s Harry dies with no identity, and Eliot begs for an answer to the “overwhelming question” that can perhaps reunify the fragmenting world as it loses definition.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft the non-entity drifts ever forward, perhaps resigned and perhaps even a little excited, over the Mountains of Madness into unknown Kadath and the realm of Yog-Sothoth as the world is given over to the crawling chaos…

It leaves me wondering how, exactly, Eliot would have reacted had he ever read Lovecraft’s work.