Friday, January 30, 2015

Lovecraft, England, and Cats

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Part 5)

This story shows Lovecraft at perhaps his most nostalgic – and, in some ways, his most non-horrifically eloquent.  Consider the description of King Kuranes: “For though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstacies and delights, novelties and excitements at his command, he would gladly have resigned forever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient beloved England, which had moulded his being and of which he must always be immutably a part.”

 
Sure, this story is weighted down with elaborate and elegiac prose, but it’s worth it.  And the haughty tone is continually undermined, and enlivened, by both horror and humor.  Amid all the splendor is the echo of the daemon-sultan Azathoth’s apocalyptic insanity and the creeping, sprawling incoherence of Nyarlahotep.  And prancing through the pomposity are the absurd cats – feline chiefs, warlords, Mafiosi… dangerous but so very cuddly.  Even the most sullen or prosaic mind should endeavor to endure the stilted glories of the Dream Lands to find at the bazaar of the sheep-butchers, in Celephaïs, a “grey and dignified being… sunning himself on the onyx pavement” that “extended a languid paw as his caller approached.”  Meow.


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