The shoggoth is one of the most memorable features of the story: "the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence... a shapeless congeries of proto-plasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light..." Since the Old Ones used shoggoths as a slave labor force, it is reasonable to presume that they constitute Lovecraft's anxieties about the working class. I think there is more to the shoggoth, however. They are, in some ways, an embodiment of collectivity -- thus, ultimately, of society, cities, and civilization. After all, they are represented in the story as "a vast onrushing subway train," evoking an image of modernity, and a location ripe for overpopulated claustrophobia.
Shoggoths are raw, savage genetics -- demonstrating the undignified origin point of humanity, in both an evolutionary and a reproductive sense. The narrator speaks of "the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their foetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles..." This is the oozing stuff of life, manifested as a living monstrosity. The horror of the shoggoth is the horror of life -- the shifting, bubbling, heaving, messy reality of human substance that can find no meaning or purpose or justification.
.jpg)
By the end of the story, the menacing reality of the shoggoth is replaced by babbling and inarticulate references to "the black pit" and "the nameless cylinder" and "the primal white jelly."
I'm not sure that this story is necessarily Lovecraft's best work. Yet I wonder whether he ever managed to produce something so acutely revealing of his own most fundamental anxieties.
Image from Unser Wissen von der Erde, available on the British Library's Flickr page.
No comments:
Post a Comment