Question 2: What is the philosophy of cosmicism and how is it used to convey a sense of dread in both The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space?
“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the nature and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.”-H.P Lovecraft
Cosmicism is a word to describe the followers of the Cthulhu Mythos which stems from H.P Lovecraft’s world of Cosmic Horror. The philosophy of cosmic horror focuses on the general fear of mankind’s insignificance in the greater universe. According to the ethos there is no divine presence or God and humans are completely inconsequential in the greater cosmos and landscape of creation as a whole. Those who follow the Cthulhu Mythos have an underlying belief of cosmic pessimism. It is about the scale and vastness of the cosmos, filling human’s with the dread felt when we realize our limitations as human beings.
Unlike other horror genres which use, monsters, murderers and slasher modalities, cosmic horror uses anthromorphic figures that change shape and leaves slime in its wake. It is more abstract and elusive in nature. It leaves its victims unable to cope with the experience. It creates existential dread. As Stableford (2007) says, “At first glance ‘‘cosmic’’ seems to be used here merely as a replacement term for ‘‘supernatural,’’ but the substitution also implies a particular psychological attitude to the supernatural.”
In the Colour out of Space, Lovecraft (1927) he uses language to build tension and unease from very early on in the piece, “the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep’s secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.” It continues, “When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must be something which grandams had whispered to children through centuries.”
His story continues to drop in mysterious circumstances of the area with the arrival of a meteorite that was constantly warm and glowed at night. It then disappeared completely. Later the story continues by referencing a well that seems to feed on the people until it grows strong enough to fly away into the sky. “It was no longer shining out, it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.” The narrator leaves us with questions… “What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos.” This uses another aspect of cosmic horror, the unknowable.
Again there is building on tension and of the unexplained with mental anguish as a result in a quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936)“I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination.”
Furthermore the narrator discusses the otherworldly mutated and transformed population of Innsmouth, “Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity—changes involving osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull—but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole.”
In conclusion the overall sense of dread is in play in both H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space. This is done with mysterious unexplained otherworldly agents affecting earth. The narrators of both stories are left with a mental unease and sense of dread.
References:
Joshi, S. (2007) “The Cthulhu Mythos”. Icons of Horror and the Supernatural. Greenwood Publishing Group, pp97-198.
Lovecraft, H.P.(1927)The Color Out Of Space.
Stableford, B. (2007) “The Cosmic Horror”. In Joshi, S. (2007) Icons of Horror and the Supernatural. Greenwood Publishing Group, pp65-96.
Lovecraft, H.P. (1936) “The Shadow over Innsmouth” by H. P. Lovecraft. https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/soi.aspx. Accessed November 20, 2020.
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