Death No More: Lovecraft and Donne

There are really only two significantly influential writers to H.P. Lovecraft: E.A. Poe and Lord Dunsany. Even Lovecraft admitted this himself in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (March 8th, 1929):

"Even when I break away, it is generally only through imitating something else! There are my 'Poe' pieces & my 'Dunsany' pieces—but alas—where are my Lovecraft pieces?"

Certainly there were other influences, but those were the two big ones. I would actually like to focus on minor influence to Lovecraft: John Donne. Donne didn't have that great of an impact on Lovecraft (it seems difficult to imagine how he could have), but one of Lovecraft's famous "poems" (for it is only two lines longs) certainly has some some Donnian influence:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

This poem was originally written in The Nameless City, but is reiterated again in The Call of Cthulhu. It is the "even death may die" portion that seems to resonate with Donne's Death be not Proud (I will write the whole thing — it's not a long poem):

Death be not proud, though some have calléd thee
Might and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, who thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And does with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make up sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

It is in particularly the last line that resonates with Lovecraft's couplet: "And death shall be no more; death thou shalt die" vs. "And with strange aeons even death may die." Interestingly neither author capitalizes the word death, which would indicated there is no metaphysical or supernatural tone in the usage of the word death: death is not some daemon or god incarnate such as Milton renders Death in Paradise Lost (though Donne does speak directly to death); death is just the end of life. So what Donne and Lovecraft are both saying is paradoxical: death can achieve death.

But die is another word used here: "death may die" and "thou shalt die." Dying is a something that is done, and death is both something that has been done and the effect of the doing. I'm mincing words and being pedantic here, but both Lovecraft and Donne are being either redundant (like Nietzsche's example of lightning strike: the "doing-doing") and paradoxical... Paradoxical because it would be absurd for an effect (i.e. death) to cause (i.e. dying) its own effect upon itself, being simultaneously the cause of itself, and effecting itself as its own cause (I know that is confusing... it took me a couple of minutes to think through how to write that). It would seem that the ending of the end of life is the nature of immortality ("That is not dead which can eternal lie"), so the question arises: is immortality a paradox? If it is redundant, then it would be just a silly play of words and inherently meaningless. But if it is a paradox we might as well accept what Cantor, Gödel, and Turing concluded: there will be paradoxes, and many of them, that are unsolvable and incomprehensible. I suppose we don't even understand death enough to ponder the implications of death being no more.

There is something almost terrifying and painful in our inability to understand both death and Donne's paradox of death's death. Perhaps this is why Lovecraft used "death may die."

There is, however, one subtle but important different between the two: Donne says "death, thou shalt die" and Lovecraft says "even death may die." Donne renders the death of death as imperative and inevitable — a commandment. Lovecraft renders it as something possible but not inevitable; it can happen, but it does not have to happen.

In reality what either author means is, admittedly, perplexing, though Donne is far more transparent than Lovecraft (and that only by comparison). Donne is essentially trash-talking death, calling death a slave that must obey fate and chance (note that Fate and Chance are made proper nouns by being capitalized in the poem). He is also saying to death that good men do not fear death, and that death is not unlike sleep: short and then we wake up (presumably in the afterlife: "One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally"). Death makes us sleep through its weapons of war, sickness, and poison, but we, too, induce sleep with drugs and charms — in a sense we possess the same powers as death. In short, Donne is saying that when we die we sleep for a short while and awake immortal; and by awaking eternally death will die. Lovecraft, however, does not give so much context as to his take on the death of death. In fact the poem is only given in those two short stories because the protagonist was reminded of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, who wrote that couplet in his book The Necronomicon. But given the general content of Lovecraft's works we can conclude that he would be referring to ancient, immortal monsters that slumber ("eternal lie"). But then again, Lovecraft could  be saying that all things die, and all things must come to an end, so that after many "strange aeons even death may die." Like his monsters and aliens and ancient cities, Lovecraft is just as vague and haunting as he is with that couplet. Those two lines might be meant to drive the reader mad if one thinks about it for too long and in too much depth.

As to their exacting meaning and usage of death no more, it nonetheless seems reasonable to conclude that Lovecraft's "death may die" was inspired by Donne's Death be not Proud — the two poems are too strikingly similar (certainly Donald Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, found the similarity between the two to be striking). It is difficult to imagine Lovecraft escaping grade school without ever having read some of Donne's work, even though he never finished high school. I personally discovered Death be not Proud and memorized it before I ever had to read it in high school.

And though the influence and inspiration of Donne and other authors (these other authors I will discuss in other posts down the way) upon Lovecraft do not readily jump off the page like Poe and Lord Dunsany do, it is nevertheless refreshing to take a look at other authors that inspired one of the great masters of horror.

Further reading:

Burleson, Donald R. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe. University Press of Kentucky. 1990. 

Faust: Thomas Mann and Nietzsche

I suppose for my first entry in this new found blog I will discuss and analyze a tale that is dear to my heart, and that has fascinated me for years: Faust.

Certainly Goethe's Faust is the most famous of the Faust tellings, though in too many ways Goethe's Faust is more like Job (for this is true) than like the Antichrist. It was Marlow who rendered Faust as the Antichrist — very literally his Doctor Faust lived a life that was the exact opposite of Christ's. Certainly Thomas Mann was cognizant of this; which leads me to what I consider the greatest of the Faust legends: Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus.

Mann's Faust, a musician named Adrian Leverkühn, is modeled primarily off of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This is one reason for why I personally hold Mann's Doktor Faustus in a higher esteem than other tellings of Faust, for his melding of Faust with Nietzsche is not only well executed, but very clever. In addition to this, Mann's Doktor Faustus is very elegant in how he uses the tale of Faust to describe the state of the German people during World War II, i.e. Germany selling its soul to Hitler (Mann being an Exilliteratur writer — a German writer who fled Nazi Germany and dissented against the Nazi regime in his writings; as he was writing Doktor Faustus in the latter years of WWII and a few years past it).

But I wish to speak of Mann's very clever amalgamation of Nietzsche with Faust, for it is not only subtle, but well executed. There are, of course, all the obvious similarities: both Leverkühn and Nietzsche had fathers that died while they were still young; both studied theology and abandoned it to study with a professor in Leipzig (Nietzsche philology; Leverkühn music, though Nietzsche was also a music-lover and composer); both suffered life-long illnesses, headaches, nausea, eye soreness, et cetera; both contracted syphilis after they "accidentally" visited a brothel; both went mad and lived an additional eleven years under the care of each's sister; et cetera.

Beyond that there is his treatment of various character's names; names that are neither directly from the various Faust tales nor the life of Nietzsche, but oftentimes a strange combination of both, an etymological play, or derived and altered from a prominent German. Adrian's last name, Leverkühn, is a play on the German leben kühn, or "live boldly/dangerously" (a sort of motto of Nietzsche's). A very interesting use of name and character is Mann's use of Wagner, or lack there of. Richard Wagner was a mentor and father-figure to Nietzsche for some years; but Wagner is also the name of Faust's assistant; thus the two Wagners would be contradictory in their roles to each other. This is where I think Mann fails in some regards... how perfect it would have been to find a means to meld the two characters who also share the same name — unfortunately, there really is no character that is either like Richard Wagner or like Faust's assistant. I suspect Mann denounced Wagner as much a Nietzsche later did (I'm conjecturing), for Wagner was Antisemitic and a prototype for Hitler, and Mann and Nietzsche both regarded themselves as anti-Antisemitic. Mann even excludes a very large and influential portion of what would have been Nietzsche's life in Tribschen, where Nietzsche spent much of his time with the composer and his wife (I mean Wagner's wife, as Nietzsche never married... which brings me to Lou Salomé).

Serving two masters is something addressed in both Marlow and Goethe's Faust tales: since Faust has signed his soul to the Devil, he may not marry, for marriage is a covenant between two people under God; thus serving two masters. This is why Faust asks for Helen of Troy to be his consort and whore in Marlow's telling, and Gretchen is killed in Goethe's tale. Likewise, Adrian seeks to marry a woman, Ines Rodde, who is based on Lou Salomé. Adrian asks a friend to convey his wish to marry Ines, but Ines instead marries the messenger. Lou Salomé said that Nietzsche had asked her to marry him through his friend, Paul Rée, the psychologist, which she declined; she also claimed that Rée had also asked for her hand in marriage and also declined. Binion actually demonstrates that this was a lie Salomé told, for she desired both men, though neither ever actually asked her. Mann, however, would not have been aware of this, as he held Bertram's biography on Nietzsche above all others, and Bertram does relate Salomé's telling of Nietzsche's proposal to her. Nonetheless, it seems acceptable for Mann to use this falsehood for the sake of conveying the forbidden "serving two masters".

The last real comparison and analysis that is very well executed is the Antichrist theme. Nietzsche often referred to himself as "The Antichrist", as well as it was the title of the first part of an unfinished book; he also called himself an "Immoralist" and denounced all notions of good and evil and Judaic-Christian morality. So was Faust an Antichrist, living the exact opposite of the life of Christ: Christ was tempted by the Devil and declined, where Faust was tempted and accepted; Christ had wine with his closest friends (the Apostles) on his last night, as did Faust; but Christ did not wish to be alone and wanted someone to watch over him while he prayed, while Faust wanted to be alone and told his friends to go to bed and not worry about a thing; Christ went to Heaven and Faust went to Hell. Adrian Leverkühn does the same thing, gathering his friends for one last supper to drink wine, and told them he told he sold his soul to the Devil; then he collapsed and went insane. The parallel between Nietzsche and Leverkühn that I most enjoy is their last works: Nietzsche's last publication was called Ecce Homo ("This is the Man", a reference to John XIX:5 when Pontius Pilate presents Jesus to the Jews for execution), his autobiography. Clearly Nietzsche is continuing his Antichrist theme by mockingly identifying himself as Christ — he was known for calling himself Dionysus, especially when signing letters. Likewise, Adrian's last musical composition was called The Lamentation of Doctor Faust, clearly carrying on the Antichrist theme and referencing himself as a Faustian man; in other words, an autobiography.

I would not be the first to say that Nietzsche was a man of extraordinary character. He was regularly sick, "...uninterrupted three-day headache accompanied by the laborious vomiting of phlegm... No one has ever been able to diagnose fever in me" (EH §1), and yet he went on to write five books in six months, a couple of which were penned in just a couple of weeks. He certainly was of such physically weak but mentally stern character that it seems to be no wonder at all that Mann would find Nietzsche be of such extraordinary character that the man seemed to belong more in the realm of fiction than reality.

Certainly there is more to Mann's Doktor Faustus than these few simple things: it is a critique of art, music, psychology, the state and mind of the German people, the German spirit, what it is to be German, and some more stuff about Germany. Of course one could filter the work through Mann's Exilliteratur spirit and a criticism of Germany selling its soul to Hitler, something William McDonald addresses several times in his Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers. But this and what I have written is an aspect of Mann's telling of Faust that I do not think gets enough admiration.

Further reading:

Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a  Friend. Knopf, Inc. 1948.

Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton University Press. 1950.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. 1908.

In The Beginning...

An introduction to a new found blog:

After a long personal debate with myself I have decided to start a new blog. My old one, Perceptions In Chronomorphosis, just wasn't doing it for me anymore. I really had no idea what I wanted to do with it when I first began writing in that blog — I had no theme in mind, much less did I know what to name it (hence the very pretentious title). It began with science and religion, then moved into politics, then general themes (e.g. masks, fear), and occasionally interspersed with posts on art and architecture. It having no real direction when it began, and thereafter gaining no real direction for the future, I have decided to quit the ghost on that blog and begin anew. In looking back on what I wrote in that blog over the course of four year I find much of what I wrote detestable with the occasional good idea — it reeks of an amateur polymath questioning a silence universe. So enough! I wish to begin again.

This blog, however, does have a direction: simply my thoughts, critique, and analysis of various artists and thinkers and their works. I will not present any new ideas or philosophies, but simply reflect on what others have written, filmed, painted, sculpted, and composed. This is not meant to be a pure criticism, for I loathe critics. I believe Mark Twain said it best: "The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it." No, this is also meant to be analysis and exploration of philosophies, themes, symbols, and concepts.

I suspect, knowing myself, that there will not be much of a theme or format, for I may easily jump from an excerpt of poetry from E. A. Poe in one post to the ideals of architecture according to Bramante in another, then to the literary influences of Jules Verne in another. This will be the various analyses of ideas and themes and symbols in whatever is captivating my mind at the moment. I imagine that my own personal thoughts and sentiments will be interpolated from time to time. Whatever.

And so now it begins.