Religion and pulp fiction

[brushwolf]

So I was reading this criticism of the DeCamp and Carter take on Conan. Pretty justifiable. One of the big chunks which I can remember of REH, and where I was agreeing with the criticism, is that the later authors kind of introduce a good gods vs. evil gods structure, whereas Howard's take on it is that good gods are nowhere to be found and evil gods are simply really powerful alien entities.

I'd assume that both Howard and Lovecraft were very typical in 20s and 30s atheism; gods aren't part of a world of science and technology, and where Howard's cultural background included a lot of individualism, Lovecraft's personal background included a lot of existential pessimism. I'd also wonder whether Howard was writing pagan religions from the perspective of having read a batch of sort of existentialist anthropological takes on local non-Christian religions. And by contrast I'm now realizing that Tolkien's take on a good versus evil conflict actually really fits his faith as a devout yet modern Catholic. JRRT doesn't believe God is silent, but he believes God speaks in quieter, subtler ways - which in Middle Earth is about the Istari and rings and individual choice, rather than say, about Aslan showing up and saving the day. (Tolkien's fondness for Norse stuff - Gandalf is basically Odin, etc - makes him seem to me so overtly pagan, that I'm unaccustomed to thinking of him in any other religious context.)

Later attempts to revamp HPL and REH include good versus evil struggles. This can't be informed by Tolkien (his version of a good versus evil struggle is a different yet very religious thing). I'd wonder if any of the revising folks were especially devout themselves (I think Derleth was, and I don't know enough about Mormonism to say whether Sandy Petersen's insistence on Lovecraftian stuff without Derlethian deities is actually pretty LDS). Beyond that though I'd wonder whether inserting good deities into literally godless pulp fiction is part of the gestalt of the 50s and 60s (much easier to live through if you were the right demographic), a conscious choice to be more acceptable, or simply that the duality of good gods versus evil gods playing out a struggle in the mortal realm felt more dramatically appealing to the later authors.

Comments

[citrakayah]

Honestly, I must say that I never really liked Lovecraftian horror. As far as I'm concerned, a cold uncaring universe is reality, so I wouldn't exactly be driven insane by the notion that it's run by a bunch of big ugly uncaring assholes.

I have looked in the void, and I have flipped it off.

Also, "knowledge that drives you insane because you just can't handle it with your puny mind" and "things above good and evil" are both annoying. If something drives me insane, I want to know why, and since when have we ever cared about whether or not something thought it was good or evil before labeling it?

[brushwolf]

Trying to think of how to explain this one;

First; I think the Lovecraftian "sanity-breaker" is more of a really intense dose of reality being shattered. If you can imagine the shock of finding out that what you thought you knew about physics and biology were completely wrong, as well as finding out that everything you knew about history is completely wrong, that's the horror part.

Okay, so that means more to some people than others, but also, think about what such a thing would mean to guys like Lovecraft himself, who are fairly invested in knowing what they know. Around 1900-1940ish, the alternative to a nice, safe comfortable Victorian world in which a benevolent god is looking out for you in particular, becomes a godless universe where things work in patterns you can figure out - or which someone else has already figured out and written down. Lovecraft's take on it is the unknown - throw that out the window, and maybe you hit something atavistic. It's unknown, it's icky, I don't like it. That stuff. The flip side of living in a world which is growing larger every day is living in a world which is growing larger every day.

Second, I think part of Lovecraft's appeal isn't actually horror. It's actually familiarity, identification. Lovecraft at his best is writing science fiction with this horror gloss (eg; "we ran into a completely alien civilization coming out of hibernation, they naturally attempted to figure out whatever humans they could kill by dissecting them, and what sort of thing scares the hell out of these guys?"). It's like cyberpunk in the 80s; when you're being told just how awesomely white-vinyl SCIENCE!!! the future is, having someone write about a grimy underworld, or atavistic horror, gives you something easier to relate to.

I mean, let's face it, we all live in a world where our destinies are governed by rich people and corporations who can seem completely alien (there's a huge difference between Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg - but how much difference is there between Microsoft and Facebook?). It's slightly uncomfortable to realize it, but it's familiar that all of us - from the homeless, to Latinos being slowly driven out of their city by increasing bills and rent, to the police, to even the prized programmers and marketing execs - get to deal with this. In the 1940s HPL got a big resurgence in popularity 'cause his stories got reprinted for GIs to read while they were dealing with this thing 'way bigger than any of them, alien, discompassionate. I think Lovecraft is still relevant not because he's talking about the alien and scary, but because he's talking about the familiar and scary.

[citrakayah]

Well, for the first part at least... really, everything we know isn't wrong, it's just incomplete. Gravity still exists, chemistry still functions, light still zips around at the same speed in a vacuum regardless of your velocity. All these things are true, and we know that they're true because we've tested them, and the fact that a specific set of words can make reality hiccup doesn't invalidate them, it just makes an exception. Instead of it being "the square-cube law applies" it becomes "the square-cube law applies except in very unusual particular situations."

One of the themes I've noticed in Lovecraftian fiction (as in the stuff that gets memetically transmitted like crazy) is that there are a set of rules that the universe works by, it's just that we don't know them. Given this perspective, it's kind of hard to see why we would go insane. Temporary nervous breakdown maybe, but any actual long term mental problems wouldn't be from realizing that the universe isn't what we thought it was, it would be from watching a freaking goat-tree-thing eat someone.