The Idea of Lost Identity in Fantasy Fiction: Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft

15.07.2024

Text by professor Timo Airaksinen part. no: 5.

In fantasy literature, monsters are so terrifying that to meet one leads to insanity and suicide. However, "I am becoming a monster" must feel worse. Thomas Nagel asks, "What is it like to be a bat?"; I ask what it is like to become and be a monster – is it possible to know? To answer, we need semiotic tools. I design a Nagel Test to determine one's ability to formulate de se thoughts and beliefs during and after the monstrous transmogrification. To do this, I will discuss what I call a Perry Case and Perry Tale. Most emphatically, my goal is not to offer new interpretations of the masterpieces of Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft. I use their stories as sources of examples. I sketch a theory of monsters in the fantasy world. My modest main aim is to understand the logic and semiotics of losing one's personal identity and its psychological consequences. I imagine the semantics of a possible world maximally similar to the readers' actual world, except it allows monsters and, because of them, monstrous threats to one's identity. This is the language game played by the classical horror writers I will introduce.

Keywords: Thomas Nagel, de se beliefs, possible worlds, monsters; personal identity; physical identity; horror; suicide, madness, literary strategies, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell. "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." (H.P. Lovecraft).

. Lovecraft: The Monstrous but Happy

Readers sometimes call H. P. Lovecraft's approach to "cosmicism." His stories would express horror on the cosmic scale, which entails the insignificance of the human presence (Berruti, 2004). We can read them that way, but I adopt a different approach. Cosmicism looks redundant anyway because an individual is an insignificant speck among the huge mass of humanity. However, HPL's stories focus on an individual's inner life and psychology [deleted]. Cosmic horror does not explain itself; on the contrary, we need a psychological perspective to understand it. HPL writes: "The greatest fear is the fear of the unknown" – I would add: the fear of the unknown experience when the Other emerges and invades my mind (Berruti, 2009). The question is, "Who Am I"; or "What is happening to me?" This is one of the sources of the nameless horrors HPL plays with so well.

In HPL's story "The Rats in the Walls" (1923), one of his masterpieces, told in the first-person, the narrator, one de la Poer, purchases and renovates the ancient, ruined family mansion, Exham Priory. He moves in but is troubled by rats that scurry up and down inside the walls, making cool thinking and sound sleep impossible. He starts exploring the basement and, to his horror, finds an enormous cavern full of typically scarred human bones. He infers cannibalistic rituals over an extended period – his ancestors have been inhuman monsters, which entails, "I am a monster": because he is one of them, he is like them. He sees evidence of awful monstrosities; who were these monsters? 

They were de la Poers; I am a de la Poer and a monster. The narrator cannot cope with such a horrible thought. He cannot quite figure out what they have been like, which, a fortiori, applies to himself. We realize he has failed his Nagel Test because he cannot understand himself. He collapses under the strain, realizing he is and will forever be an Other and a stranger among human beings. He does not deserve the status of a human person. As if to prove it, as he tells, when they find him, he crouches over the half-eaten, dead body of the plump Captain Norrys, his close friend. This is what he says:

"No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys' fat face on that flabby, fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy died! . . . Shall a Norrys hold the lands of a de la Poer? . . . It's voodoo, I tell you . . . that spotted snake . . . Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do! . . . 'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust . . . wolde ye swynke me thilke wys? . . . Magna Mater! Magna Mater! . . . Atys . . . Dia ad aghaidh 's ad aodann . . . agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-sa! . . . Ungl . . . ungl . . . rrrlh . . . chchch . . ."

HPL adds a touch of cosmicism to the blend here. The narrator hears a call from "those grinning caverns of earth's center where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players." Then the narrator slips beyond comprehension – where the language fails, de se expressions become impossible, and the Nagel Test must also fail. De se expressions dominate first but then disappear when madness proceeds. And he still hears the rats scurrying in the solid stone of the asylum's walls. The rats are the bringers of madness. Ultimately, he is locked up in a "barrel room." Now his identity is dubious – partly intact, partly gone. HPL tells the story in the first person; therefore, to narrate the end, the narrator must still possess the vestiges of his mind – enough to understand de se constructions – which the reader may find surprising. Anyway, he is now isolated from the world, his mansion demolished.

HPL's "The Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1920) plays with a similar idea, but this story lacks the dramatic force of "The Rats." The narration is now in the third person. In "Arthur Jermyn," Arthur, a physically malformed but sane person, receives a box that contains the ancient remains of his ancestral female relative. This creature looks like a white half-ape, proving Arthur's status as a mongrel. He commits suicide by bathing in oil and burning himself to death. The story looks like a predecessor to the "Rats."

"The Music of Erich Zann" (1921) is one of HPL's masterpieces. A student tries to remember the location of Rue D'Auseil, but no map shows the place. No one he knows has been there, and after so many mental shocks, his memory is shattered, but he tells what he can. He once lived in an old house on Rue D'Auseil beyond a dark river with no name, although it must be the Styx. In the house, Erich Zann plays his viola. The music is endlessly strange. One night when the music turns infernal, he feels he must go and explore. He glances out of a high window facing not the city lights but a featureless abyss and its "savage darkness." The house is now located in the middle of nothing:

Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

He enters Zann's room and finds the old man dead but still playing wilder than ever, responding to "the faint mocking note" from outside. Erich Zann still fights the demons that have already taken his life. The student panics and runs, ending up in the city. However, he cannot find his way back to Rue D'Auseil.

This tale is about a visit to Hades, which is strangely and suddenly transformed into a possible alternate world where the narrator gets lost after facing a nameless horror that drives him close to insanity. The structure of the story is interesting because of its duplicate horror element. First, Zann plays his magical music to keep death away, but from the dark abyss, death plays back a tune in response to Zann's vain effort. Zann dies, but his music stays and continues unabated. Second, the student meets the nameless terror of the void when he looks out before entering the room. Zann is dead, and the student hovers near insanity.

We have here an unexplainable double horror in a literary masterpiece. The story leaves open Erich Zann's psychology. We learn nothing about him except that he plays like a madman. In this story, the environment, the river, the street, the house, and ultimately the dark abyss behind the window play the horror note. This environmental horror embeds Erich Zann's death and its mysterious cause. Everything happens in the middle of nowhere; therefore, the story tells how it feels when you are harassed by nothingness and, in HPL's terms, the unknown void. This story is the perfect explication of his proverb. 

At the same time, we – including the student – cannot imagine what it is like to be Erich Zann, a dead musician; hence, his Nagel Test fails, and he seems incapable of formulating thoughts. He is one of the living dead, like a Zombie. What do we learn about Zann? He is no longer a human person capable of de se thoughts. He is a dead man playing music and, as such, an ambiguous mystery – an oxymoron and a kind of monster. The student meets an alien environment – a possible world that is not quite his own; that threatens his sanity and life. He knows he is about to lose his wits, so he panics and escapes.