New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature
The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft
Editor Sean Moreland
University of Ottawa Ottawa, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-95476-9 ISBN 978-3-319-95477-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954728
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
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This book is dedicated to Caitlín R. Kiernan and Thomas Ligotti, who have opened holes in the world that can never be closed, and to the late, greatly lamented David G. Hartwell, whose editorial vision helped shape the course of horror literature in the late twentieth century and who did so much to promote and refine it.
Acknowledgments
The impetus for this collection came from conversations with many friends and colleagues, some of whose critical works can be found in the pages that follow. Others, whose work doesn’t appear between these covers, also deserve thanks for their inspiration of, suggestions for, or help with this volume: these include Aalya Ahmad, S. J. Bagley, Rajiv Bhola, Matt Cardin, Bobby Derie, Robert D’Errico, Derek Newman-Stille, David Nickle, Lydia Peever, Dennis Quinn, and Ranylt Richildis. This book also came about in part due to work presented in the Horror Literature Division of the ever-generative International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. My thanks go to the conference organizers and to Rhonda Brock-Servais, former Division Head and perpetual High Priestess of Horror. Thanks are also due to the Association of part-time professors at the University of Ottawa, for helping fund my annual participation in the conference.
Most importantly, my boundless gratitude belongs to my wife, Madeleine, who makes everything possible, including playing the dancing clown machine.
1 Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural Horror in Literatur e 1
Sean Moreland
Section I “The Oldest and Strongest Emotion”: The Psychology of Cosmic Horror 11
2 The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius 13
Sean Moreland
3 The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics 43 Mathias Clasen
4 Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion, Watson’s “Little Albert,” and Supernatural Horror in Literature 61
Sharon Packer
5 Gazing Upon “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space” with H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: Theorizing Horror and Cosmic Terror 77 Alissa Burger
6 “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in the Late Middle Ages
to Dandyism
Vivian Ralickas 8 Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy
S. T. Joshi
9 Reception Claims in Super natural Horror in Literature and the Course of Weird
11 Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the Dismorphmythic in Lovecraft, Angela Carter, Caitlín
notes on contributors
Alissa Burger is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Culver-Stockton College. She teaches courses in research, writing, and literature, including a single-author seminar on Stephen King. She is the author of Teaching Stephen King: Horror, The Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature (Palgrave, 2016) and The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of Six Versions of the Story, 1900–2007 (2012) and editor of the collection Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of Multimodal Literacy Engagement (Palgrave, 2017).
Michael Cisco is the author of the novels The Divinity Student, The Tyrant, The San Veneficio Canon, The Traitor, The Narrator, The Great Lover, Celebrant, and MEMBER, and a short story collection, Secret Hours. His fiction has appeared in The Weird, Lovecraft Unbound, and Black Wings (among others). His scholarly work has appeared in Lovecraft Studies, The Weird Fiction Review, Iranian Studies, Lovecraft and Influence, and The Lovecraftian Poe. He teaches in CUNY Hostos, New York City.
Mathias Clasen is Assistant Professor of Literature and Media at Aarhus University, Denmark. He specializes in supernatural horror in literature and film, particularly modern American horror, and he has published works on zombies, vampires, Richard Matheson, Dan Simmons, and Bram Stoker. His work aims at explaining the functions and forms of horrifying entertainment by situating the study of the genre within a framework informed by evolutionary and cognitive psychology as well as
neuroscience. His monograph Why Horror Seduces (2018) investigates modern American horror in film, literature, and video gaming within a scientific framework.
John Glover is the Humanities Research Librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he supports students and faculty in their research and instruction, pursues various outreach programs, and directs Digital Pragmata, a digital arts and humanities initiative. In 2015 he presented “Node, Edge, or Tentacle: Data and the Lovecraftian Literary Network” at the 36th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. His research interests include humanities librarianship, digital humanities, literary horror, and the research practices of creative writers. He speaks regularly on research for creative writers, and in spring 2015, he co-taught “Writing Researched Fiction” in VCU’s Department of English. As “J. T. Glover,” he writes fiction and non-fiction, and his work has appeared in The Children of Old Leech, The Lovecraft eZine, and New Myths, among others.
Brian R. Hauser is Assistant Professor of Film at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. He has published essays on The X-Files and its relation to the vanishing Americans in James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, a rhetorical narrative theory approach to cinematic adaptation, and the importance of DIY-independent cinema. He is also a filmmaker and screenwriter, who won the 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival Screenwriting Competition with his feature-length script Cult Flick. He is completing a monograph on weird cinema.
Brian Johnson is Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of English at Carleton University where he teaches theory, genre fiction, and Canadian literature. Recent publications include essays on serial killing in Canadian crime fiction, the pedagogy of horror, libidinal ecology in Swamp Thing, and alien genesis in H. P. Lovecraft and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. His research focuses on weird fiction, superheroes, and sexuality.
S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has prepared comprehensive editions of Lovecraft’s collected fiction, essays, and poetry. He is also the author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). His awardwinning biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) was later expanded as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has also prepared Penguin Classics editions of the work of Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007).
Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and medievalist. After receiving a PhD from the prestigious Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, she spent two years completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, investigating literature written during the time of the Black Death. She was recently appointed Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England.
Sean Moreland His essays, primarily focused on Gothic, horror and weird fiction in its literary, cinematic, and sequential art guises, have appeared in many collections, encyclopaedic volumes, and journals, most recently Lovecraftian Proceedings 2 and The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe. He recently edited The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation and Transformation (2017). He is in the midst of a monograph, tentatively titled Repulsive Influences: A Historical Poetics of Atomic Horror, which examines how horror literature since the early eighteenth century has interwoven with the reception of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in shaping popular anxieties about materialism and mortality. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Ottawa and occasionally conducts interviews, writes reviews, and blogs about weirdness at Postscripts to Darkness (www.pstdarkness.com).
Sharon Packer is a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist in private practice and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is also an author and a prolific writer whose most recent book is Neuroscience in Science Fiction (2015).
Vivian Ralickas holds her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. Her published works include ar t criticism, translations, and two essays on Lovecraft: “Art, Cosmic Horror, and the Fetishizing Gaze in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft” (2008) and “‘Cosmic Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft” (2007). She teaches English Composition and Literature, including courses on horror fiction and Dandyism, at Marianopolis College in Montreal.
Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher Education. Her principal teaching, PhD supervision, and research interests lie in contemporary women’s writing, Gothic, horror, and postcolonial writing. Her published works include Margaret Atwood, an Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012), Key Concepts in Postcolonial Writing (2007), Horror Fiction (2005), and Postcolonial and African American Women’s Writing (2000).
Introduction: The Critical (After)Life of Supernatural Horror in Literature
Sean Moreland
In 1925, writer and publisher W. Paul Cook (1881–1948) invited his friend and fellow amateur journalist H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) to write a historical and critical survey of supernatural literature. Already an avid reader, and increasingly an accomplished writer, of such fiction, Lovecraft committed to this task with an ambitious course of reading including acknowledged classics, less well-known historical works, and many contemporary fictions of the strange and supernatural, most of them by British and American writers. His research and preparation was such that it took Lovecraft nearly two years to submit the manuscript to Cook for publication.1
The initial, and only partial, first publication of the essay occurred in 1927, in what turned out to be the sole volume of Cook’s journal, The Recluse. Lovecraft’s most ambitious and influential critical work, Supernatural Horror in Literature (hereafter SHL) would reach only a handful of readers at this time. Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth century, SHL was widely recognized as exerting an unparalleled influence over the development and reception of Anglophone supernatural, horrific, and weird literature. The essay’s core critical concepts continued to evolve
S. Moreland (*)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2018
S. Moreland (ed.), New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_1
in Lovecraft’s later career; one trajectory of this development, Lovecraft’s changing assessment of the “titans” of early twentieth-century weird fiction, is detailed by S. T. Joshi’s chapter in this volume. During Lovecraft’s lifetime these critical concepts would reach a wider audience than the essay itself due to their embodiment in his fictions and exposition via his voluminous letters, many of them to an epistolary circle of writers who adopted and adapted his critical framework through their own writings, as John Glover’s chapter elaborates.
SHL itself would posthumously reach a wider audience with its publication by Arkham House, first as part of The Outsider and Others (1939) and then as part of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1965). Even at that point, few could have predicted how its critical and popular influence would continue to grow, with Dover publishing an inexpensive paperback edition in 1973 to a greatly expanded readership. SHL’s public profile rose with the onset of the mass market “Horror Boom” of the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1981, it received a belated endorsement in Stephen King’s biographically inflected survey of horror, Danse Macabre, which suggested, “If you’d like to pursue the subject [of earlier supernatural fiction] further, may I recommend H. P. Lovecraft’s long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature? It is available in a cheap but handsome and durable Dover paperback edition.” King’s immensely popular writings, as Alissa Burger’s chapter explores, did much to renew public interest in Lovecraft’s work in general.2
In 1987, influential editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell more forcefully emphasized SHL’s importance to the development of modern horror. His seminal anthology The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror describes Lovecraft as “the most important American writer of horror fiction in the first half of” the twentieth century, as well as “the theoretician and critic who most carefully described the literature” with SHL, which provides “the keystone upon which any architecture of horror must be built: atmosphere.”3 Hartwell rightly singles out atmosphere as SHL’s most important idea, as expressed in one of the most widely cited statements in the essay. Atmosphere, Lovecraft insists, is the “all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot, but the creation of a given sensation” (23). The “true weird tale” (22) creates an “atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces,” with “a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject,” of “a malign and particular suspension or defeat” of the laws of nature (23).4
INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF SUPERNATURAL
Because of its insistence on atmosphere, Hartwell claims SHL is “the most important essay on horror literature.”5 This assessment has been echoed many times since. In More Things than Are Dreamt of: Masterpieces of Supernatural Horror (1994), James Ursini and Alain Silver state, “Lovecraft’s fame rests almost as heavily on his work as a scholar as that of a writer of fiction,” due to his “now classic” survey of the field. They locate SHL’s importance in its “expansive analysis of supernatural horror and fantasy contrasted with the condescending tone of earlier essayists.”6 Cumulatively, such estimates reinforce S. T. Joshi’s claim, in the preface to his annotated edition of SHL, that it is “widely acknowledged as the finest historical treatment of the field.”7
Lovecraft took supernatural fiction very seriously, and was among the first critics or theoreticians to do so consistently. He saw it as a crucial literary tradition with significant cultural value, deeply rooted in the evolved nature of humanity and tied to the state of society, and therefore eminently worthy of close study and focused aesthetic appreciation.
SHL reflects its author’s historical and cultural moment, his enthusiasms, prejudices, and anxieties, as much as his insights and capacity for rigorous thought. It is Lovecraft’s most sustained attempt to reconcile what a 1927 letter describes as his own “parallel natures”:
The world and all its inhabitants impress me as immeasurably insignificant, so that I always crave intimations of larger and subtler symmetries than these which concern mankind. All this, however, is purely aesthetic and not at all intellectual. I have a parallel nature or phase devoted to science and logic, and do not believe in the supernatural at all – my philosophical position being that of a mechanistic materialist of the line of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius – and in modern times, Nietzsche and Haeckel.8
Hardly a disinterested survey, SHL is Lovecraft’s attempt to think through feeling, situating his “purely aesthetic” cravings intellectually by providing a historical account of a literary form defined through an objectification of affect. Both descriptive history and prescriptive canonization, it opens with the resounding statement, “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” (21) and then proposes that its ability to evoke this emotion is the standard whereby the “literature of cosmic fear” should be judged (23). SHL explains the appeal of supernatural and weird fiction across history and cultures by presenting Lovecraft’s “intimations of larger
and subtler symmetries” as an elementary, “if not always universal” (21), aspect of human psychology. The appeal of supernatural fiction is linked to what Lovecraft elsewhere calls “the most ineradicable urge in the human personality,” which is the desire “for ultimate reality.” This desire is “the basis of every real religion” and philosophy, and “anything which enhances our sense of success in this quest, be it art or religion, is the source of a pricelessly rich emotional experience—and the more we lose this experience in religion, the more we need to get it in something else.”9 Lovecraft sees supernatural literature’s chief value as its provision of such a rich emotional experience in the form of “atmosphere.”
Lovecraft also took atmosphere very seriously. Like the notion of a “structural emotion” or dominant tone developed by T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Lovecraft’s atmosphere derives to a large extent from Poe’s aesthetic criterion, the “Unity of Effect.” Atmosphere offers a sense of expansion, a “feeling of magnification in the cosmos—of having approached the universal a trifle more closely, and banished a little of our inevitable insignificance.”10 However, atmosphere also takes on, in William F. Touponce’s words, “the primary meaning of historical authenticity in Lovecraft’s aesthetics.”11 Atmosphere is Lovecraft’s refuge against the culture-corrosive maelstrom of modernity, offering an eminently Eliotic “sensation of a sort of identification with our whole civilization.”12
Lovecraft took civilization very seriously, too. In the same letter, he claims to care not about individual human beings, but only about civilization, by which he means “the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men.”13 Such men are SHL’s ideal readers, with “minds of the requisite sensitiveness” to appreciate the serious atmosphere of the true weird tale (20). Despite the universality of some of SHL’s insights and the expansive audience it has found since its first publication, it is evident that Lovecraft envisioned his audience of “acutely sensitive,” and sufficiently serious, readers as defined along gender, class, and racial lines, as many of the contributions to this volume examine.
The racial politics of Lovecraft’s atmosphere are prominent in SHL’s typological approach to the supernatural literature of different cultures. While justifying Lovecraft’s claim that the “literature of cosmic fear” (22) is a trans-cultural, almost universal, human phenomenon stemming from a “profound and elementary principle” (21), his brief discussions of non-
INTRODUCTION:
Anglo-Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmicism. For example, “In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouration and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black Boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors” (24).
This contrast suggests the close kinship between “atmosphere” and what would have been called, by the Gothic writers of the previous two centuries, the sublime, a kinship this volume’s first chapter develops in detail. Indeed, Lovecraft’s contrast re-stages the Burkean distinction between powerful, masculine sublimity and delicate, feminine beauty. It aligns the former with the Western cultural imagination, with its Teutonic seriousness, and the latter with its Oriental counterpart, sheer, sprightly, and not so serious. This is a ubiquitous trope of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Orientalism, and hardly unique to Lovecraft. Yet here it reveals a hierarchy of literary form, establishing that the seriousness, intensity, and atmosphere of the “true” weird, with its cosmic orientation, elevates it above the merely decorative diversions of “sheer phantasy.”
It also suggests the belief in racialized cultural incompatibility that leads to Lovecraft’s elsewhere-stated desire to “get rid of the non-English hordes whose heritages and deepest instincts clash so disastrously with” those of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans—especially the more serious and sensitive among them.14
The criterion of atmosphere becomes in this and related passages a means of suggesting the superiority of the “mystical Teuton” in the realm of literary supernaturalism. Passed over quietly by most of the plaudits above, this aspect of SHL must be reckoned with by writers and scholars who admit the importance of Lovecraft’s critical legacy. The need to do so is especially important in light of how Lovecraft’s critical legacy continues to influence the course and conception of horror, weird, and supernatural fiction in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer do so, at least to a degree, in the introduction to their epic compendium The Weird (2011). Important for its international scope and commitment to going beyond the work of Lovecraft and the Anglo-American pulp tradition, The Weird is nevertheless grounded in SHL’s definition of weird fiction:
A “weird tale,” as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale “has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane—a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or defeat of … fixed laws of Nature”—through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.15
This suggests the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of working with the weird as a historically informed mode of expression without wrestling with Lovecraft’s critical legacy. An awareness of this is evident in the VanderMeer’s claim that “the Weird is the story of the refinement (and destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework,” a framework that SHL did much to establish. However, they also oppose the Weird to this (or to any) singular tradition: it involves “the welcome contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions.”16 The phrase “welcome contamination” is a quiet critical rejoinder to SHL’s cultural politics of racial exclusivity.
Despite the widespread acknowledgment of SHL’s importance, and the problems its influence poses, the essay has not received much in the way of sustained critical attention. In S. T. Joshi’s words, scholars of both Lovecraft and weird fiction broadly “have not made as full use” of Lovecraft’s essay as they could.17 The chapters in this volume begin to rectify this, variously deepening and broadening the critical dialogue surrounding SHL by examining its achievements, limitations, and influences. They do so using a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches and, in some cases, by pushing SHL’s critical concepts in directions Lovecraft could not have foreseen and would not have approved.
The essays in the first section, “‘The Oldest and Strongest Emotion’: The Psychology and Philosophy of Horror” explore SHL’s conceptions of fear, horror, and the cosmic. My chapter, “The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius,” turns to the vexed question of cosmic horror’s relationship with the sublime. Focusing on the adjective “cosmic,” I argue that the classical materialist poetics of first-century BCE Roman poet Lucretius are a major source for Lovecraft’s modernist muta-
INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF
tion of the sublime into SHL’s cosmic horror and his later ideal of a “nonsupernatural cosmic art.” Mathias Clasen turns to evolutionary psychology to examine SHL’s achievement with “The Evolution of Horror: A Neo-Lovecraftian Poetics.” Clasen analyzes SHL’s attempt to produce a naturalistic account of both the emotion of horror and the seductive appeal of supernatural horror fiction, demonstrating that many of Lovecraft’s claims for the psychobiological basis of horror are eminently compatible with contemporary social scientific models of human nature and culture. Sharon Packer’s chapter, “Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion, Watson’s Little Albert and Supernatural Horror in Literature,” engages with the history of psychology, considering the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis and the behaviorist experiments of John B. Watson on Lovecraft’s conception of fear and horror. Packer also critically considers Lovecraft’s appreciation for aspects of Jewish mystical literature, and particularly SHL’s praise of Ansky’s The Dybbuk, despite his infamously anti-Semitic views. Rounding out this section while anticipating the concern of the essays in the second is Alissa Burger’s “Gazing Upon ‘The Daemons of Unplumbed Space’ with H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: Theorizing Horror and Cosmic Terror.” Burger looks back on Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic horror and its relationship to hierarchies of affect through its reception and adaptation by the most popular living writer of supernatural horror, Stephen King. King’s Danse Macabre builds on Lovecraft, while casting a long shadow of its own over late twentiethand early twenty-first-century horror and supernatural fiction, and Burger charts Lovecraft’s critical influence not only in a number of King’s stories, but also in their cinematic adaptations.
The essays in the second section, “‘A Literature of Cosmic Fear’: Lovecraft, Criticism and Literary History,” focus on SHL’s historical and critical claims. Helen Marshall moves back beyond the eighteenth-century Gothic, examining SHL’s elliptical treatment of horror in the Medieval period. Despite Lovecraft’s evident disdain for and relative ignorance of the culture of the late Middle Ages, Marshall finds his essay useful for reframing the penitential poem The Prick of Conscience as an early example of the “literature of cosmic fear.” Vivian Ralickas turns to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, via Lovecraft’s interest in the philosophical and aesthetic movement of Dandyism. Examining Lovecraft’s relationship with Epicureanism and Dandyism as modes of aestheticized, elitistic masculinity, Ralickas provides a detailed account of how these movements framed SHL’s engagement with writers including Baudelaire, Gauthier,
and Wilde. S. T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft and the Titans: A Critical Legacy” focuses on Lovecraft’s prescience as literary critic, re-examining his assessment of five of the early twentieth century’s most important writers of weird fiction, M. R. James, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Walter de la Mare. Joshi closely traces Lovecraft’s shifting critical views of these writers, focusing particularly on how his developing conception of cosmicism affected his estimation of their respective achievements. John Glover’s “Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature and the Course of Weird Fiction” provides a detailed analysis of both Lovecraft’s own critical writings and those of his early champions, many of whom were also his epistolary interlocutors and friends. Glover concludes by examining Lovecraft’s relationship with the shifting definitions of “horror” and “weird” fiction over the last quarter century, opening the field that will be further explored by the essays in the third and final section.
The essays in “‘The True Weird’: (Re)defining the Weird” work with and through SHL’s often nebulous and even contradictory conception of the weird in a variety of ways. Returning to some of the concerns raised by the essays in the first section, but from a very different perspective, Michael Cisco’s “Bizarre Epistemology, Bizarre Subject: A Definition of Weird Fiction” reads Lovecraft’s philosophy of horror in resistant and creative ways via Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze. Cisco uses SHL and related writings as philosophical instruments in order to work out an original, experiential theory of the bizarre. With “Women, Sex and the Dismorphmythic: Lovecraft, Carter, Kiernan and Beyond,” Gina Wisker provides both a feminist critique of Lovecraft’s essay and an examination of how a number of important contemporary women writers of weird fiction have adapted and transformed elements of Lovecraft’s writings. To this end, she examines short fiction by Angela Carter, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and a number of contemporary writers whose work is featured in Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles’s groundbreaking anthology She Walks in Shadows (2015, released in the US as Cthulhu’s Daughters.)
Brian R. Hauser turns to Lovecraft’s influence and critical relevance for film studies with “Weird Cinema and the Aesthetics of Dread.” Hauser explores the applicability of the adjective “Lovecraftian” to a number of contemporary films, while examining the reflections these films offer of Lovecraft’s aesthetic and critical principles, by drawing on contemporary studies including Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2016.) Finally, Brian Johnson’s chapter, “Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird,” brings
INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL (AFTER)LIFE OF SUPERNATURAL
this volume full circle with a return to the psychology of horror via a historicized account of Lovecraft’s Freudian intertexts, which become part of a wide-ranging examination of the relationship between the shifting connotations of the words “queer” and “weird” through the twentieth century. Johnson’s penetrating analysis of the ways homophobia shaped Lovecraft’s cultural context provides a deeper understanding not just of his writings, but also his troubling exemplarity in twentieth-century sexual politics.
Notes
1. Readers interested in a more detailed account of the essay’s biographical context and publication history should consult S.T. Joshi’s “Introduction” to The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 9–20.
2. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkeley Books, 1983).
3. David G. Hartwell, The Dark Descent (New York: Tor Books, 1987), 5.
4. For a cogent discussion of the significance of this conception, its roots in Lovecraft’s reading of Poe, and its evolution in his later critical writings, see S.T. Joshi, “Poe, Lovecraft and the Revolution in Weird Fiction,” (paper presented at the Ninth Annual Commemoration Program of the Poe Society, October 7, 2012), http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psblctrs/ pl20121.html
5. Hartwell, The Dark Descent, 85.
6. James Ursini and Alain Silver, More Things than Are Dreamt of: Masterpieces of Supernatural Horror (Limelight, 1994), 61.
7. S.T. Joshi, “Preface,” The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 7.
8. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 160.
9. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 301.
10. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 300.
11. Touponce, 59.
12. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 300.
13. H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume II (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1971), 290.
14. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, 292.
15. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” The Weird (New York: Tor Books, 2011), xv.
16. The Weird, xvi.
17. S.T. Joshi, “Preface,” The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 7.
The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius
Sean Moreland
CosmiC Horror: A Terrible sublime
…vapour chill
The ascendance gains when fear the frame pervades, And ruthless HORROR, shivering every limb … Lucretius1
In an exchange with scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, China Miéville locates Lovecraft within a “visionary and ecstatic tradition,” part of a “break” in that tradition contemporaneous with the First World War. This break is the shattering of representation that gave rise to modernist literature, “a kind of terrible, terrible sublime.”2 This chapter contrasts what Supernatural Horror in Literature (SHL) calls cosmic horror with earlier uses of the term, examining the pre-modern aesthetic sources Lovecraft synthesized with early twentieth-century anxieties in expressing this terrible sublime. Lovecraft identified with the first-century BCE Roman poet Lucretius,3 whose epic poem De Rerum Natura (DRN) was crucial to his subversion of the theological and sentimental humanist
S. Moreland (*)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2018
S. Moreland (ed.), New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_2
foundations of the Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian discourse on the sublime. Lovecraft read the Roman writer through his own racialized sexual and political anxieties in ways that continue to shape modern weird and horror fiction and contemporary philosophical appropriations of his writings alike.
GHosTs And Goulds: CosmiC Horror before loveCrAfT
Can I not fling this horror off me again, Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile, Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm, At random ravage?
Tennyson, “Lucretius”
As Brian Stableford notes, “the notion of ‘cosmic horror’ is closely associated with Lovecraft.”4 However, although Lovecraft’s writing, and SHL in particular, popularized and re-defined cosmic horror, which would become almost exclusively associated with him by the late twentieth century, Lovecraft did not invent the phrase, already in circulation nearly a decade before his birth, nor was he the first to conceive of the affective concept it described. Horror writer Thomas Ligotti looks back to the writings of French scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal for an early modern, and contrapuntal, conception. Pascal
wrote of his a sense of being ‘engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me; I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’ (Pensées, 1670). Pascal’s is not an unnatural reaction for those phobic to infinite spaces that know nothing of them.5
The Enlightenment saw a proliferation of writings about the affective intensity evoked by the scalar abysses of the world viewed through the complementary lenses of the microscope and telescope. Consider this passage from The Book of Nature, a collection of lectures by British physician, philosopher, natural theologian, and the Romantic period’s most influential translator of Lucretius, John Mason Good:
What is the aggregate opinion, or the aggregate importance of the whole human race! We call our selves lords of the visible creation: nor ought we at any time, with affected abjection, to degrade or despise the high gift of a rational and immortal existence.—Yet, what is the visible creation? By whom peopled? And where are its entrances and outgoings? Turn wherever we will, we are equally confounded and overpowered: the little and the great alike are beyond our comprehension. If we take the microscope, it unfolds to us […] living beings, probably endowed with as complex and perfect a structure as the whale or the elephant, so minute that a million millions of them do not occupy a bulk larger than a common grain of sand. If we exchange the microscope for the telescope, we behold man himself reduced to a comparative scale of almost infinitely smaller dimension, fixed to a minute planet that is scarcely perceptible throughout the vast extent of the solar system; while this system itself forms but an insensible point in the multitudinous marshallings of groups of worlds upon groups of worlds, above, below, and on every side of us, that spread through all the immensity of space.6
Published in 1826, Good’s description of cosmicism resembles Lovecraft’s a century later, but for its emphasis on “creation,” and the concluding sentence this word anticipates: “and in sublime, though silent harmony declare the glory of God, and show forth his handy work.”7 Good spent much of his intellectual life desperately attempting to reconcile Christianity with both Lucretius’s atomic materialist vision and that emerging with nineteenth-century scientific developments. Throughout his writings, the word “sublime” reminds readers of the presence of a divine creator, and the unique relationship this creator has with humanity. His tendentious translation of Lucretius interjects the word sublime frequently in order to reinstate the divine significance of the human figure, in effect subverting the Roman poet’s depiction of humanity as merely one among countless species of perishable material phenomena, emerging via a procession of undirected collisions at the atomic level.
Good’s description is but one dramatic example of the “turn” characterizing most accounts of the sublime from the early Enlightenment through the late Victorian era. In this turn, horror, a paralyzing affect marked by a freezing sensation, one often occasioned by the vastness and unknowability of the universe, is melted into a sensation of awesome elevation, usually by a theistic intimation of our privileged position within that universe. It is within this discourse of affective theology that “cosmic horror” existed prior to Lovecraft.
The earliest use I’ve found of the phrase itself is part of a journalistic description of the period leading up to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883: “We could feel that some cosmic horror was impending long before the catastrophe took place, and I fancy that other sensations of a like nature are in store. We hear from one part of Asia of atmospheric phenomena which disturb numerous and delicate people.”8 From its first recorded appearance, nearly a half-century before Lovecraft adapted it, the term “cosmic horror” was associated with an atmosphere, in the most literal sense, one that “delicate” people were especially responsive to, and one involving a disturbing intimation of threatening immensity. This usage derives from the idea of “cosmic emotion” developed by English mathematician and philosopher, William Kingdon Clifford, who in turn derived it from English utilitarian philosopher, Henry Sidgwick.9 Clifford defines what he means by the term in his 1877 essay, “The Cosmic Emotion”:
By a cosmic emotion—the phrase is Mr. Henry Sidgwick’s—I mean an emotion which is felt in regard to the universe or sum of things, viewed as a cosmos or order. There are two kinds of cosmic emotion—one having reference to the Macrocosm or universe surrounding and containing us, the other relating to the Microcosm or universe of our own souls. When we try to put together the most general conceptions that we can form about the great aggregate of events that are always going on, to strike a sort of balance among the feelings which these events produce in us, and to add to these the feeling of vastness associated with an attempt to represent the whole of existence, then we experience a cosmic emotion of the first kind. It may have the character of awe, veneration, resignation, submission; or it may be an overpowering stimulus to action.10
Clifford points out the admirable synthesis of these two forms in a sentence by Immanuel Kant, which has been “perfectly translated by Lord Houghton”:
The two things I contemplate with ceaseless awe: The stars of heaven, and man’s sense of law.11
Clifford’s cosmic emotion is a version of the Kantian sublime influenced by Herbert Spencer’s progressivist evolutionary views. Clifford calls it “the cosmic emotion,” rather than specifying what emotion it is, because “the character of the emotion with which men contemplate the world, the temper in which they stand in the presence of the immensities and the
eternities, must depend first of all on what they think the world is.”12 In other words, whether the cosmic emotion is awe or terror depends on how “the world,” reality, is understood, an understanding that changes drastically with historical and cultural context and the development of scientific knowledge: “Whatever conception, then, we can form of the external cosmos must be regarded as only provisional and not final, as waiting revision when we shall have pushed the bounds of our knowledge further away in time and space.”13 Clifford’s cosmic emotion influenced William James, whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) presents it as a natural legitimation of religious belief. Ligotti notes the contrast between James and Lovecraft in this regard: “In both his creative writings and his letters, Lovecraft’s expression of the feelings James describes form an exception to the philosopher-psychologist’s argument, since Lovecraft experienced such cosmic wonder in the absence of religious belief.”14 Clifford’s ambiguous “cosmic emotion” was resolved by American lexicographer, physician, and natural theologian George M. Gould into “cosmic horror.” Gould’s formulation was popular in medical, philosophical, and theological literature from the mid-1890s through to about 1910, first occurring in 1893: “I have learned that many another sensitive despairing soul, in the face of the glib creeds and the loneliness of subjectivity, has also and often felt the same clutching spasm of cosmic horror, the very heart of life stifled and stilled with an infinite fear and sense of lostness.”15 Gould continued to refer to cosmic horror in his later writings, associating it with a supposed pathological inability to recognize divinity in nature. His 1904 essay “The Infinite Presence” states: “Only for a short instant, at best, will most persons consent to look open-eyed at any clear image of fate or of infinity,” since “the freezing of the heart that follows, the appalling shudder at the dread contemplation of infinity, which may be called cosmic horror, is more than can be endured. If those stars are absolutely and positively infinite, then there is no up or down, and they knew no beginning, will have no ending. With any such staring gorgon of fatalism the surcharged attention is shaken.”16
However, Gould asks, “Why may not this cosmic horror be turned to cosmic pleasure? It is at best not bravery or athletic prowess, and at worst it is a psychic want of equilibrium, a morbid metaphysics.”17 Gould concludes that those who exercise a moral intuition of the infinite experience cosmic horror as the first stage on a journey to ecstatic elevation: “The horror is from disuse of the innate power, and the sublimest pleasure may be found in excursions into the infinite.”18 For Gould, cosmic horror is
only a base material that “man’s sense of law” sublimates by affective alchemy into an elevated “ceaseless awe,” the inability to reach such “sublime pleasure” he equates with “a morbid metaphysics.” This is a medico-theological recapitulation of the Kantian sublime that Lovecraft turns on its head.
A morbid meTApHysiCs: loveCrAfTiAn CosmiC Horror
I have encountered no evidence that Lovecraft had firsthand knowledge of Gould’s writings, which he would have scorned. Yet Lovecraft’s conception of cosmic horror can be best understood in contrast to Gould’s. Where Gould’s cosmic horror exemplifies what Miéville calls “the nostrums of a kind of late Victorian bourgeois culture,” Lovecraft’s conception becomes, also in Miéville’s words, “the most pure and vivid expression of that moment” when such nostrums become “unsustainable.”19
While the primary inspirations of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror are works of supernatural literature, including those by Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson, their work is demonstrably shaped by Romantic and Victorian natural theology. Good’s Book of Nature was an important source for Poe’s cosmic tales and philosophical ruminations. SHL places Hodgson “perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality,” with House on the Borderland called “perhaps the greatest” of his works (59; see S. T. Joshi’s chapter for an account of the evolution of Lovecraft’s cosmicism as criterion). This novel describes an affect that as clearly echoes Addison’s account of the sublime (described below) as it anticipates Lovecraft’s cosmic horror:
There was no need to be afraid of the creature; the bars were strong, and there was little danger of its being able to move them. And then, suddenly, in spite of the knowledge that the brute could not reach to harm me, I had a return of the horrible sensation of fear, that had assailed me on that night, a week previously. It was the same feeling of helpless, shuddering fright.
The most direct and detailed literary source of SHL’s conception of cosmic horror is Blackwood’s “The Willows,” described as the “foremost” of his fictions for the “impression of lasting poignancy” it evokes (66.) “The Willows” details “a singular emotion” closely related to, but distinct
from, natural sublimity, in which “delight of the wild beauty” mingles with “a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm” that “lay deeper far than the emotions of awe or wonder,” and “had to do with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me.”20 The only difference between this description and Gould’s cosmic horror is that Blackwood’s affect involves a simultaneous commingling of horror and awe, rather than the resolution of the former into the latter by a sublime turn. Lovecraft consistently follows Blackwood in presenting cosmic horror as a “sense of awe” “touched somewhere by vague terror.”21
The simultaneous fusion of Lovecraft’s version of cosmic horror and the sequential fission of Gould’s are reflected in their respective diction. Where Gould is consistent in using the phrase “cosmic horror” throughout his writings, Lovecraft’s phrasing varies widely. In SHL alone, Lovecraft refers, seemingly interchangeably, to “cosmic panic,” “cosmic terror,” “cosmic horror,” and “cosmic fear.”22 As Stableford notes, “Lovecraft’s fascination with the adjective ‘cosmic’ is clearly evident” in SHL, but the adjective is “used there in a sense that is rather different from the connotations eventually acquired by ‘cosmic horror.’”23 Like Clifford’s deliberately unspecified “cosmic emotion,” SHL’s recurring use of “cosmic” modifies a variety of emotions, a vacillation more revealing than terminological consistency could be. These verbal compounds serve three closely related functions in Lovecraft’s writings, and especially in SHL. First, they distinguish between Lovecraft’s use of “cosmic” and the traditional teleological and providential connotations cosmos carried over from Greek philosophy. Lovecraft’s compounds move from the lofty or mystical connotations of “cosmic” in its Stoic or neo-Platonic uses to what he called “cosmic indifferentism.” This philosophy is grounded, as S.T. Joshi explains, in
mechanistic materialism. The term postulates two ontological hypotheses: 1) the universe is a “mechanism” governed by fixed laws (although these may not all be known to human beings) where all entity is inextricably connected causally; there can be no such thing as chance (hence no free will but instead an absolute determinism), since every incident is the inevitable outcome of countless ancillary and contributory events reaching back into infinity; 2) all entity is material, and there can be no other essence, whether it be “soul” or “spirit” or any other non-material substance.24
For Lovecraft, the cosmic follows a dynamics of descent, back to the body and its physiological states. Mathias Clasen notes that Lovecraft was among the first theorists of horror to consistently apply “a natural basis for the appeal of horror stories” by recognizing that “people are biologically susceptible to superstitious fear.”25 The accuracy of this recognition is explored in more detail by Clasen’s chapter.
Second, Lovecraft’s phrasal compounds differentiate between the emotion they signify and its “mere” physiological equivalent, a distinction more fully explored by Michael Cisco’s chapter. The latter emotions are the provenance of the “externally similar but psychologically widely different” literature of “mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome,” and this is not SHL’s domain (22). Where “fear” is a simple, instinctive response to a perceived threat, “cosmic” suggests a component of cognitive disruption, an epistemic shock, the intrusion of “the unknown.”
Third, Lovecraft’s insistent vacillation between terror, horror, panic, dread and fear ambiguates these emotions, unsettling the hierarchized differentiation of terror from horror first popularized by Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, building on philosopher Edmund Burke, toward the end of the eighteenth century. Radcliffe claimed that horror paralyzed and froze the faculties, a description echoed by Gould’s account of cosmic horror a century later. Terror, on the other hand, stimulated the imagination, awakened the senses, and involved the sublime. This aspect of Radcliffe’s distinction anticipated Kant’s account of the sublimation of terror via the intuition of moral reason, an account reframed by Gould’s formulation, one that has maintained a centuries-long influence. It is, for example, echoed by Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981), as Alissa Burger’s chapter details. Yet the collapse of Radcliffe’s Burkean hierarchy, part of the rhetorical work done by SHL’s lexical transitions, was a crucial part of Lovecraft’s break from his Romantic and Victorian precursors.
“To resusCiTATe THe deAd ArT”: HowArd loveCrAfT, re-AnimATor!
For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start— Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” (1920)
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the Senate or the House make amendments to which the other chamber does not agree? That is just what very frequently occurs. In such cases a conference committee is appointed, made up as a rule of three members from each chamber. These conferees meet and try to reach a common ground by compromise. Then, when they have agreed, they report to their respective chambers and the latter must accept or reject the conference report without further amendment. Some Tricks of the Lawmaker’s Trade.— Lawmaking is a skilled profession; it takes the average congressman most of his first term to learn just how it is done. He must acquire a knowledge of the rules, written and unwritten, the traditions, and what may rightly be called the “tricks of the trade”. Ability as an orator does not count for much, particularly in the House. The house chamber is a big, noisy place where only a leather-lunged speaker can make himself clearly heard. Congressmen, moreover, do not take kindly to long speeches; they expect members of the House to say what they have to say in five or ten minutes. If a congressman desires to make an impression upon the voters of his home district by sending them accounts of his able speeches in their behalf, he can usually obtain from the House, by unanimous consent, permission to have his speech printed at the public expense and distributed without its ever having been delivered on the floor of the chamber at all. When long speeches are made it is usually to waste the time of Congress and prevent the passage of some measure to which the speakers are opposed.[118]
The value of experience in Congress. Filibusters.
Attempts to talk a measure to death are known as “filibusters”. Both chambers are now able to put an end to filibusters by applying rules which shut off further debate when a specified majority of the members so desire; but in the old days, before these rules were adopted, senators sometimes kept the floor hour after hour all day and all night long, talking on every irrelevant matter, reading long extracts from books, and employing all their ingenuity to lengthen the debate. The proceedings in the Senate are often interesting; but the visitor to the House gallery is likely to be disappointed if he goes with the expectation of hearing some good speech-making. The real work of the House is done in committee.
Classification of congressional powers
The Powers of Congress.—The powers of Congress, as the lawmaking branch of the national government, are set forth in eighteen clauses of the federal constitution. Hence it is customary to speak of the “eighteen powers of Congress”, although there are in fact more than eighteen separate powers, as anyone will find if he takes the trouble to count them. These powers may be conveniently grouped together under eight heads: (1) financial, the power to levy taxes and to borrow money; (2) commercial, the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states; (3) military, the power to declare war, to raise and support armies, to maintain a navy, and to provide for organizing, arming, and calling forth the state militia; (4) monetary, the power to coin money, to regulate the value thereof, and to protect the currency against counterfeiting; (5) postal, the power to establish post-offices and post roads; (6) judicial, the power to constitute tribunals subordinate to the Supreme Court; (7) miscellaneous, including powers in relation to bankruptcy, naturalization, patents, copyrights, and the government of the national capital; (8) supplementary, the power to make all laws which may be found “necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers”. This is a rather tedious classification of congressional powers, but the section which enumerates these powers is, by all odds, the most important part of the whole constitution and no one can claim to know much about the government of the United States unless he understands, at least in a general way, what these eighteen clauses express and imply.
Express and implied powers.
It will be noted that all the powers except the last are express powers, that is, they are conveyed to Congress in so many words. The last is a grant of implied authority, in other words it is a provision for supplementing the express powers. Where Congress has the express right to tax, to borrow, to regulate interstate commerce, to raise and support armies, or to coin money, it has the implied right to make whatever laws may be “necessary and proper” to carry its express powers into full operation. Having the express power to borrow money, Congress may therefore establish a system of banks if this is needed to render more easy the operations of borrowing. Having the express power to
support armies, it may place almost any sort of restriction upon industry in war time. By the implied powers clause of the constitution the authority of Congress is given great elasticity.
Are the Powers of Congress Broad Enough?—If the words of the constitution had been strictly interpreted, the powers of Congress would now be too narrow for the work which a strong national government must perform. It is easy to understand why the framers of the constitution were cautious about conferring broad powers upon the new government. They were anxious that no legislative despotism should be built up in America. But as time passed the express powers of Congress have been steadily widened by the process of interpreting them broadly so that today the real authority of Congress is much greater than one would suspect from a mere reading of the constitution. For all practical purposes they are broad enough although it is probably true that if the constitution were to be redrawn tomorrow, the authority of the national government would be increased. Nearly all the amendments proposed in recent years have been in the direction of expanding the powers of Congress.
The handicaps to good work
The Efficiency of Congress.—In comparison with the other great parliaments and legislatures of the world, the Congress of the United States does its work fairly well. It is rather too large in membership, and the House of Representatives would probably gain in efficiency if it were reduced in size. Another handicap to good work arises from the enormous grist of measures which comes forward at every session. Congress is always under constant pressure for time. Many millions are often voted in a single hour and it is impossible for the congressmen to go carefully through the long list of financial items. Until very recently, the absence of a budget system afforded an incentive to extravagance; but this defect has now been remedied.[119] Congress also lacks leadership. In European countries every parliament and legislature has a recognized leader, usually called the prime minister He or his colleagues present the business and carry it through.[120] There is nothing of this sort in either the Senate or the House of Representatives. It is true that each political party has a floor leader, but he has not effective control over his followers. The chairmen of
The lack of leadership.
The lobby
the various committees also supply a certain measure of leadership, but their work is not unified. Mention should also be made of the pressure which is applied to individual members of Congress by the lobbyists. These lobbyists are hired workers, usually lawyers, who are paid to help get measures through, or in some cases to prevent the passage of certain laws. They are employed by corporations, or by labor organizations, or by anyone who is deeply concerned in measures pending before Congress. They use every form of persuasion in their efforts to have congressmen see their side of the case. The “lobby” has been placed under various restrictions in recent years, but it is still an influential factor.
The influence of small groups in Congress.
The Congressional Oligarchies.—We are in the habit of assuming that the power in national lawmaking rests with the 531 men who constitute the Senate and the House of Representatives; but the dominating influence is in reality exercised by a relatively small group of men in both chambers. The chairmen of important committees and certain others of long congressional experience are the men whose influence counts. The rest follow their lead for the most part. Important measures, moreover, are often discussed in a caucus of the majority party, and the action of the caucus is considered binding on all who attend it. A member in either chamber, especially a new member, who displays a disposition to be wholly independent, and to disregard the advice of his party leaders or the decisions of his party caucus is not likely to get many favors for himself or for his district. The senator or representative who desires to be effective finds it necessary, therefore, to help others with their plans whether he approves them heartily or not, in order that he may be, in turn, helped with his own. It is almost always true that a group of thirty or forty members, on the majority side, can secure the passage of measures which they desire and can prevent the passage of measures to which they are opposed.[121] In this respect the Congress of the United States does not differ much from legislative bodies the world over. Large deliberative bodies are invariably prone to follow the lead of some relatively small group in
their own membership; otherwise they would never make headway, and the larger the chamber the more likely is this to be true.
General References
J B , American Commonwealth, Vol. I, pp. 97-208; W W , Congressional Government, pp. 58-129; C. A. B , American Government and Politics, pp. 231-293; Ibid., Readings on American Government and Politics, pp. 214-271; E K , National Government of the United States, pp. 308-378; W. B. M , Government of the United States, pp. 146-218; S. W. M C , The Business of Congress, pp. 43-84; L H , Your Congress, pp 67-109
Group Problems
1. Is it desirable to restrict the present powers of the Senate in relation to treaties? Reasons for giving the Senate special powers in relation to treaties. The meaning of “advice and consent”. Washington’s attitude and experience. The action of the Senate on important treaties during the past hundred years. The practical difficulty of obtaining a two-thirds majority. Confirmation as a barrier to secret diplomacy. References: R H , The Senate and Treaties, pp. 169-195; H. C. L , The Senate of the United States, pp. 1-31; E K , National Government of the United States, pp. 549-551; 573; S. B. C , Treaties: Their Making and Enforcement, pp. 67-92; Congressional Record, 1919-1922.
2. The personnel of Congress. References: Types of men elected. Their occupations at home Their legislative experience Are there too many lawyers? Length of service How the personnel might be improved (Material for this study may be had in the Congressional Directory, and in the various autobiographical works such as J G B ’ Twenty Years in Congress; C C ’ Autobiography, etc )
3. The merits and faults of the committee system. References: J B , American Commonwealth, Vol I, pp 156-166; S W M C , The Business of Congress, pp. 43-60; L. G. M C , Congressional Committees, pp. 58-86; E K , National Government of the United States, pp. 344356; P. S. R , Readings on American Federal Government, pp. 257-264.
Short Studies
1. The old and the new method of choosing Senators. G H. H , The Election of Senators, pp. 36-129.
2 The procedure in impeachments. W B M , Government of the United States, pp 168-173
3. The Speaker of the House. C. A. B , American Government and Politics, pp. 280-289; M. P. F , The Speaker of the House of Representatives, pp 296-330
4 The rights of minorities. F A C and J S , Democracy in Reconstruction, pp 446-467
5 The general powers of Congress. W B M , Government of the United States, pp 208-218
6 How Congress legislates. E K , National Government of the United States, pp 350-356; P S R , Readings on American Federal Government, pp. 290-296.
7. An Englishman’s observation on the work of Congress. J B , American Commonwealth, Vol. I, pp. 191-208.
8. The rules of the House and Senate. E K , National Government of the United States, pp. 333-344.
9. Obstruction in Congress. S. W. M C , The Business of Congress, pp. 8592.
10. Party organizations in Congress. W. W. W and L R , Introduction to the Problem of Government, pp. 334-351.
11. The lobby. P. S. R , American Legislatures and Legislative Methods, pp 228-298
12 The Library of Congress. F J H , American Government, pp 287288
Questions
1. Do the merits of the double-chamber system outweigh the objections? Why should the members of the two chambers be chosen by different methods? Name at least three different methods of selecting representatives.
2. What is the present value of equal representation of the states in the Senate? What legal and practical obstacles are there to changing this system?
3. Look up and explain the following terms which are commonly used in Congress: executive session; morning hour; union calendar; ranking member; filibuster; leave to print; pigeon-holing a bill; pork barrel; rider.
4. What are the practical difficulties which arise when the Senate declines to confirm appointments proposed by the President?
5 Explain the difference between an impeachment and a bill of attainder
6 The Senate usually exercises more influence than the House in matters of lawmaking Can you give reasons why this should be so?
7 Tell how congressional districts are mapped out Mark on an outline map the districts in your state Have any of them been gerrymandered?
8. The chairmanships of committees usually go to senior members. Do you think this a wise or unwise practice?
9. What would be gained, and what would be lost by lengthening to four years the term for which representatives are chosen?
10. Two women, Miss Rankin of Montana and Miss Robertson of Oklahoma, have sat in Congress. What are the arguments for and against electing women in future?
11 Members of the House of Representatives receive salaries of $7500 per year Is this too much or too little? Give your reasons
12 Congressmen are entitled to the free use of the mails (This is called the franking privilege ) Some years ago one senator sent nearly 750,000 copies of his speeches through the mails free Do you believe this privilege should be withdrawn or retained?
13. Should the rules of the House provide for unlimited debate?
14. Can you suggest any practical way in which the work of Congress might be improved?
Topics for Debate
1. The English practice of choosing non-resident representatives is advantageous and should be adopted in the United States.
2 The states should be represented in the Senate according to their respective populations
3 The provision relating to a reduction in representation, whenever citizens are excluded from voting (see Amendment XIV) should be enforced
CHAPTER XV
THE PRESIDENT AND HIS CABINET
The purpose of this chapter is to explain how the President of the United States is chosen, what his powers are, and what functions his cabinet performs.
T P
The notable Presidents.
The Man and the Office.—Forty years ago, an eminent English writer on American government spoke of the presidency as the greatest secular office in the world “to which anyone can rise by his own merits”.[122] In view of this fact, he asked, how does it come that the position is not more frequently filled by great and striking men? There have been twentynine presidents since the constitution went into force in 1788. Of these at least three, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln have won an assured place in world history. Five or six (including Adams, Jackson, Grant, Cleveland, and Roosevelt) displayed during their respective terms of office some qualities which marked them as men of uncommon force or ability. Three others are still living and their achievements cannot yet be fairly estimated. But taking all these together, and even adding a few more for good measure, would it not still be a fair statement to say that at least half the presidents have been men whose names would be entirely forgotten nowadays were it not for the fact that they occupied the presidential chair?
Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, John Marshall, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun are great and striking figures in American history although they never reached the presidency; on the other hand the nation has, at various times, bestowed its highest honor upon men of commonplace qualities. This, of course, was not what the Fathers of the Republic expected. It was their anticipation that the presidential office would always be filled by men of “pre-eminent ability and virtue”.
Why has this expectation been in part disappointed? That is a question which can only be answered by a study of the methods by which presidents are chosen, the relations between the office and the party system, and the duties that presidents are required to perform.
How the President is Chosen.—The Articles of Confederation did not provide for a President;
Why the plan of indirect election was adopted.
executive functions were performed by committees of the Congress. But this plan was found to be altogether unsatisfactory and the framers of the constitution decided in 1787 that the new federal government ought to have a single executive head. How to choose this head, however, was a problem which gave them great difficulty and they debated it for a long time. They did not approve a plan of election by direct popular vote, for they feared that this might result in the choice of men who were personally popular but had no other qualifications. Their study of ancient and mediaeval republics made them averse to choosing the head of the nation by direct popular vote. They were not prepared to trust the people; in those days the risk seemed too great. On the other hand they did not desire to have the President chosen by Congress because this would give Congress control of the office, whereas their aim was to make the presidency a check upon Congress. So they finally decided upon the expedient of direct election by means of an electoral college.[123]
The presidential electors. How the plan worked in the earlier elections.
The Original Plan of Election.—Stated briefly the plan which they agreed upon and inserted in the constitution was as follows: Each state shall choose, in such manner as its legislature may determine, a number of electors equal to the state’s combined quota of senators and representatives in Congress. A state having, for example, two senators and twelve representatives, is entitled to fourteen electors. On a definite date, once in four years, the electors meet in their respective states and give in writing their votes for President and Vice President. These votes are sealed up, sent to Washington, counted, and announced. This plan did not contemplate that nominations should be made in advance, or that political parties should have anything to do with the election, or that the various states, in choosing their electors, should pledge them to vote for any particular candidate. It was expected that the electors would meet, discuss the merits of all the available men for the position, and give their votes accordingly
The Actual Methods of Election Today.—At the first two elections this plan was followed. There were no nominations and no campaign preceding the election. But at the election of 1796 it was well
understood, even before the electors met, that the contest would be between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. And as time went on the actual practice drifted further away from the original plan of free choice by unpledged electors. Political parties grew up; the electors were chosen with the definite understanding that they would vote for a particular party candidate, and their share in the election became purely nominal. In 1804 some changes were made in the method of election but they did not affect the general plan or the current practice. Gradually the people took into their own hands the function of choosing the President; everywhere the state legislatures turned the work of choosing the electors over to them, so that the presidential elections became, in everything but name and form, direct elections by the people.[124]
Five steps in the choosing of a President:
In the choice of a President there are now five steps, but only two of these are of any practical importance. First, each political party nominates its candidate at a national convention, as already described.[125] Second, in each state the political parties nominate, either by primaries or state conventions, their respective slates or groups of electors. Third, the voters on election day decide which group of electors shall be given the formal function of electing the President. This the voters do on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November every fourth year. Each voter marks his ballot for a group of electors but what he really does is to indicate his preference for one of the candidates already nominated at the party conventions. This means, of course, that one or the other group of electors is chosen as a whole and the state’s vote cast solidly. It rarely happens, for example, that a state casts ten electoral votes for one candidate and five for another; if it has fifteen votes they all go to one candidate. For this reason it sometimes happens that a candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes although not a majority of the popular votes, taking the country as a whole. Fourth, the electors meet in their respective states and cast their votes. Fifth, these votes are opened in Washington and counted in the presence of Congress. Among these five steps the first and
1. The nomination of candidates.
2. The nomination of electors.
3 The polling
4 The action of the electors
5 Counting the votes
third are the important ones. The last step is nothing but a formality unless it appears that no candidate has received a majority. In case this happens the House of Representatives proceeds to choose a President from among the three candidates who have stood highest. In the case of the Vice President the choice rests with the Senate.[126]
The “availability” of candidates.
Factors which Influence Presidential Nominations and Elections.—As matters have worked out it is not possible for anyone to be elected President without first obtaining a nomination from one of the two leading political parties. The party organizations and the party conventions are influenced by groups of political leaders and these leaders are often more interested in a man’s strength as a candidate than in his personal qualifications for the work which a President has to do. The consequence is that candidates have sometimes been nominated by party conventions because they were compromises on whom opposing factions of the party could agree, or because they could be counted upon to carry some important state at the polls, or for some other reason having nothing to do with the executive capacity of the individual concerned.
“Dark horses”
A big national convention, comprising more than a thousand delegates, cannot be expected to do its work with calm deliberation or to weigh carefully the personal qualifications of all those who seek to be nominated. If there is a prolonged contest between two or three strong candidates, no one of whom can obtain the requisite number of votes in the convention, the delegates in their impatience are likely to turn to a “dark horse”, that is to someone less prominent on whom there is a chance of agreement.[127] This has often happened.
The real work of nominating candidates is not done on the floor of the convention. The plans are laid and put into operation by groups of leaders in private conferences, the delegates following these leaders when called upon. And the fact that a candidate possesses “great and striking qualities” does not always commend him to these party leaders. On most occasions they are likely to prefer a man who, if elected, will work in harmony with the party organization rather than take the reins of office wholly into his own hands.[128] By
The election may turn upon various things.
Narrowness of the People’s Choice.—A nomination by one of the two leading parties is in some cases almost equivalent to election. There are times, of course, when the election turns chiefly upon the merits of the two leading candidates; but more often the result is determined by other factors entirely. Each candidate embodies the strength of his party as well as his own, and each political party is for various reasons stronger in some years than in others. When a party has been in power for a term of years the people usually grow disgruntled with its policy and refuse to support the candidate of that party at the next election no matter how capable he may be. There is every reason to believe that the Democratic candidate was doomed to defeat in 1920 no matter who he might have been. When one political party remains in power for eight or twelve years it makes many enemies; people find fault on one score or another and decide that they will vote for a change. Even a strong candidate in such circumstances has very little hope of winning.
Public opinion is a very fickle thing. It exalts a public man as a hero today and execrates him tomorrow. It is strong for one policy this year and often veers around to something quite different a year or two later. Men are borne into the presidential office on this surging tide, sometimes without much reference to their individual qualifications. They are nominated because they are acceptable to the party leaders, or because they come from some strong and doubtful state, or because they are agreed upon by compromise, or for any one of a dozen other reasons. The capacity of the man is not always, and indeed not usually, the chief factor in determining a presidential nomination.[129] Under the circumstances the wonder is that the country has obtained, in the presidential office, such a high general level of personal capacity and character.
Presidential powers: various combinations of circumstances, therefore, men of mediocre quality have sometimes been nominated.
Powers of the President.—The actual powers of the President are greater than those of any other ruler in the world, whether hereditary or elective. He is the chief engineer of a great mechanism which controls an army, raises several billion dollars a year in taxes, enforces laws, regulates
commerce, and employs the full time of more than half a million public officials. Congress makes the laws, it is true; but were it not for the President and those whom he appoints, the laws would not be enforced. Congress decides what taxes shall be levied; but the President and his subordinates collect them. Congress appropriates money out of the treasury; but the executive branch of the government, of which the President is the head, spends the money. The President, in other words, is the nation’s chief executive—he is charged with the duty of executing the laws. This is a large responsibility and a good deal of the work is necessarily entrusted to subordinates whom the President appoints.
1. Appointments.
The appointing power is, then, an important phase of the President’s authority. He names all the higher officials of the Government subject to confirmation by the Senate as has already been explained. He has the power to remove any national official. In the case of minor officials he may, and usually does, depend upon the advice of senators or congressmen both as regards appointments and removals; but in the case of all high officers these things must have the President’s personal attention. Naturally they take a great deal of his time.
2. The executive veto.
In relation to Congress the President has the right to make recommendations and to veto any measure which he does not approve. These recommendations he may make either by written message or by appearing before Congress in person. The veto power places a powerful weapon in the President’s hands. Every bill or resolution which passes both Houses of Congress must be laid before the President. If he approves, he signs it. If not, he is entitled, at any time within ten days, to return the bill or resolution without his signature, giving his reasons for the refusal to sign. When the President vetoes a measure in this way Congress reconsiders it and a vote is then taken to determine whether the action of the President shall be sustained or overridden. If two-thirds of the members present in both the Senate and the House vote to override the veto, the measure becomes effective; if less than two-thirds so vote, the measure becomes null.
Scope of the veto power.
The “pocket veto”.
But suppose the President neither signs nor vetoes the measure within ten days after it is sent to him, what then? The constitution provides that in such case the measure shall become a law. If Congress adjourns before the ten-day period has expired, however, the bill does not become a law. It is not necessary for a President to veto any measure that may come to him during the ten days immediately preceding the adjournment of Congress. If he does not approve the measure, he merely withholds his signature and it dies on his table. This is known as the “pocket veto”.
The veto power has been used very little by some presidents and a great deal by others.
Its use and abuse
During the first forty years of the Republic only nine bills were vetoed. But during the past forty years presidential vetoes have been very common. When a measure has been vetoed there is great difficulty, as a rule, in obtaining the necessary two-thirds vote to override the veto; but vetoes, nevertheless, are occasionally overcome. The use of the veto, although it is an exercise of executive power, makes the President a vital factor in legislation. Under ordinary circumstances he can defeat any measure that is not acceptable to him.[130] There are exceptions to this rule, to be sure, but it is valid in the main.
3. The conduct of foreign relations.
Although the power of appointment and the veto power in normal times the two chief sources of the President’s authority, he has others of considerable importance. He conducts relations with foreign governments and negotiates all treaties. Treaties do not become valid, however, until ratified by the Senate. He decides whether ambassadors and other diplomats sent to Washington from other countries shall be formally recognized. He has power to pardon offenders sentenced in the federal courts. He is commander-in-chief of the military and naval forces. All these functions are vested in the President by the constitution and the laws.
4 Other powers
Other powers have been acquired by usage, for example, the right to have a large voice in controlling the policy of the political party to which the President belongs. The President is a party man, a party leader. He is elected on a party platform. The people expect the President to carry out the
The Vice President pledges which this platform contains. To do this the President finds it necessary at times to take the initiative in securing the passage of laws by Congress and also to bring influence to bear upon the members of both Houses. Strictly speaking, the President has no formal share in the making of the laws; but as a matter of usage he has a highly-important influence upon legislation.
Succession to the Presidency.—In case the President should die, or resign, or be removed by impeachment, or be otherwise incapable of performing his duties, the Vice President succeeds. In the absence of the Vice President it has been provided by law that the members of the cabinet, beginning with the Secretary of State, have the right of succession according to the seniority of their offices.[131] No President has ever resigned or been removed from office. On several occasions, however, a Vice President has succeeded by reason of a President’s death. Some presidents have been seriously ill during their terms of office, and President Wilson was absent in France for several months during 1918-1919; but in no case has the Vice President been called upon to exercise the presidential functions.
The office of Vice President, apart from the right of succession which it carries, is not of much importance. In selecting their candidates for the office the two leading political parties have usually given very little thought to the problem of getting the most capable man. By the time the great task of nominating a candidate for the presidency has been finished, the delegates are in a mood to get home. They will not spend hours and days taking ballot after ballot for the second place on the ticket. Apart from presiding in the Senate the Vice President has no regular official duties, but there is the ever-present chance that he may have to step into the chief executive position. For that reason the work of selecting candidates ought to be done more carefully than has usually been the case.
