Sunday, January 18, 2015

The Silence of Nightmares

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath  (Part 3)
 
Throughout the story, Lovecraft uses both sound and silence to express different elements of strangeness and horror.  In some of the most striking moments he juxtaposes the two in order to heighten the sense of disorientation.  For example, “Dying almost-humans screamed, and cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a sound as their stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene fungi.”

The silence of the toad monsters is noteworthy, but the quietness of the night-gaunts is even more essential to their impact on the reader.  These creatures are “noxiously thin and horned and tailed and bat-winged” yet, in flight, “They made no sound at all themselves, and even their membraneous wings were silent.”  This seems to be something more than just arcane biology – it is almost as though the world itself collaborates with the monster to create the silence – and why not?  After all, these are the Dream Lands.

 
Captured and transported by the flying night-gaunts, Carter is encouraged to share in their silence.  “He screamed again and again, but whenever he did so the black paws tickled him with greater subtlety.”  Who but Lovecraft could make a caress, a tickle, a touch, into something so alien and monstrous?  “And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed… because they had no faces at all… but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be.”  A night-gaunt is a body of silence, a blank fear, a serpentine intimacy that is dangerous to human dreams, and to human dreamers.

Image: Odilon Redon, The Monster

No comments:

Post a Comment