By Costa Koutsoutis
Weird and speculative fiction that covers a spectrum including horror, fantasy, and science fiction creates a fertile ground for writers and readers to explore the limits of human understanding, human psychology, and human interaction with the wider world. It’s a lens through which we see our worst, but at the same time allows us to parse out bits that indicate our best, helping readers recognize flaws, faults, and paths towards changing for the better despite what the texts and worlds say to us.
One of the forefathers of this writing, Howard Philips “H.P.” Lovecraft’s footprints in weird fiction are immense, but one of the fundamental issues that anyone in the 21st century runs across when writing about Lovecraft is the irremovable stain of his personal biases. On top of that, you have the inevitable everywhere-ness of weird and eldritch elements in contemporary genre fiction regardless of medium. There is the popular book (and TV adaptation) Lovecraft Country, as well as the existence of Lovecraft’s fake grimoire The Necronomicon appearing in other works of fiction and even manifested in real life at times, such as claims the Vatican has a copy or when a student at Yale jokingly created a card catalog entry for it. Lovecraft himself has even appeared and been parodied in fictional works inspired by his own creations, such as the comics Atomic Robo (as seen in trade volume 3, “The Shadow From Beyond Time”), and in the comics The Courtyard, Neonomicon, and Providence (all from Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows) his creations are center stage. It’s gone so far that even Sherlock Holmes received an infusion of weird vibes with Netflix’s 2021 series The Irregulars about Dr. Watson and a gang of scrappy teenagers saving London from supernatural horrors. There is no lack of Lovecraftian mythos and overall eldritch fiction in horror and science fiction, as well as the larger popular consciousness of the 21st century. You only have to look.
The point here is that you no longer have to rely on his purple prose and structure in order to read that kind of fiction that fits the genre parameters that can be called “weird.” So many writers of that time exist and continue to be found and rescued from the dust and rot of history, new writers flourish, and the power of the public domain allows us to take what we want from the carcass of Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu” mythology and do what we want with it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we can discard him entirely, because since we no longer need him, we can be as cutting as we want, and delve into his work for things that might have not been seen otherwise, and actually might have been concepts that not only did the author not desire or even want to include, but might have not even existed at the time.
A perfect example is Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness, published in 1936 but written in 1931 after the twilight of the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration and in an era where arctic exploration came to be aided by machines. A modern reader can easily see beyond the surface of using then-recent trends in Arctic exploration as a backdrop for a horror story. Instead, At the Mountains of Madness becomes an unwitting critique of exploration, colonization, and the invasive nature of American “manifest destiny.”
In the novella, Dr. William Dyer, professor Lake, and the grad student Danforth (among others) head to the Antarctic continent to explore, catalog, and push the limits of human knowledge. The epistolary style of writing is presented as a narration of Dyer’s diary, starting out fairly routine reports of their scientific discoveries and surveying, though references to odd star-shaped soapstones and oceanic fossils far older than expected hint at the terror to come. Several of the alien Elder Things are discovered, supposedly dead, as the group moves further and further into the continent’s interior. It is here that the history of the city and these aliens, who built this empire thanks to the labor of the shoggoth, polymorphic amoeba-like creatures that could be psychically-controlled to form and make whatever was needed.
Ultimately, the scientists’ encounters with a mysterious ancient city, the plant-like Elder Things, and the terrifying shoggoth lead them to flee in terror, having realized their folly in attempting to exert their pride and designs upon the South Pole.
As Marco Petrelli wrote in his paper “‘Manifest Destiny;’ the American West as a Map of the Unconscious” 19th and early-20th century fiction both at home and abroad worked hand in with the growth of scientific curiosity, innovation, and the increasing desire to know more and more of the world around them. This lines up with the growth of the United States as its own entity in the world as we know it today, their own expansion into unknown (at least unknown to white American and European explorers) territories via Manifest Destiny, the indigenous inhabitants of those lands be damned.
Defined by John O’Sullivan in “Annexation” in 1845, Petrelli puts forth that Manifest Destiny is the concept of the United States of America, a growing nation at the time, as a “Providence continent” guided by patriarchy, chauvinism, and divine Protestant fate to grow and seize what they want in a post-Lewis and Clarke America. It also defined anything outside the literal and metaphorical as both scary, but also something to force and push into to tame. Manifest Destiny was the idea that it was a literal command from the Protestant Heaven to grow, and to fight back against the horrors that it told us were beyond our immediate domain.
The mission of manifest destiny, according to Petrelli, was to spread and prevail against unseen and monstrous horrors that existed in unknown spaces. (2018 pp. 5-10) And yet, someone like Lovecraft, who, as S. T. Joshi wrote in 1997 in The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, was a devotee of the Antarctic exploration movement that was going on in the 1930’s, feared what those explorers, representatives of that apparently-sacred Manifest Destiny, might find. It is in this fear that the novella is consciously born.
Mitch Frye writes in “The Refinement of ‘Crude Allegory;’ Eugenic Themes and Genotype Horror in the Weird Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft”, that Lovecraft’s original works were largely reflective of something Frye calls “genotype horror” (2006, p.239), a definition he gives as a fear of genetic or racial unknowns that parallel the general existential concerns that Lovecraft voiced in letters and stories. This means that it aimed explicitly at capitalizing on genetic fears, which the utterly non-human Elder Things and shoggoth absolutely are.
At the same time, these non-human beings, their behaviors, and their history still reflect surprisingly-human behaviors, desires, and actions. For example, the dissection of the sled dogs and missing expedition members by the Elder Things reflects the crude autopsies conducted on the frozen Elders’ discovered earlier by the human expedition. Later on, Dyer himself, when exploring the remains of the city and learning the story of the Elder Things, who conquered, colonized, and arguably even seeded the universe, we see mankind’s desire to expand, conquer, colonize, and use indigenous populations and local species as tools and resources to be exploited. There is even a parallel between the introduction of pigs by white English colonizers in places such as Australia with the creation of the giant mutant penguins discovered by our protagonists, used as a food source by the Shoggoth themselves, who also represent enslaved persons, utilized, indeed created, explicitly for brute labor that the colonist class – too busy with the abstract pursuits of science and exploration – deign beneath them.
In Carolann North’s “The Ethics of Quantum Colonialism” (2021), she defines the concept of “Americanism” as being an identity tied not just to racism and Puritanism, but also of explicitly working to cut ties with the old world (Europe) while pushing for aggressive exploration/expansion. (p.59) Americanism is Manifest Destiny, an ironic twist that was meant to be uniquely non-European but still replicated European colonial attitudes and behaviors. We then see that exact behavior being mimicked, according to Dyer, by the Elder Things in their colonization of Earth.
And their colonization fails. It fails, and all that remains are the last few Elder Things, most of them frozen and asleep. The Shoggoth still lurk, having claimed the dilapidated home of their former masters who they drove to the sea. Even the massive ice mountain wall that hides a monstrosity so great it cannot be described is left as a legacy of the failed colonial attempts to harness something, someone.
The innate desire for freedom against colonialism is an intimate part of world history and as the late 20th and early 21st century have unfolded, we’ve seen more and more scholarship on post-colonial possibilities, pointing towards post-colonial art and lives throughout the world. The United States itself is, ironically enough, a post-colonial land that failed to shed the burden and shame of what colonialism does, they simply re-filtered it through a new lens. And when Lovecraft applied that to At the Mountains of Madness, what he came out with was an example of what could go wrong when you, as the saying goes, “fuck around and find out.” The Elder Things fucked around, and they ended up finding out what that led to, a fear that the unknown Manifest Destiny was supposed to suppress would bite back. One could argue that in the creation of the shoggoth, the Elder Things doomed themselves by removing themselves from direct labor. This stratification of their social order mimics the stratification of human society in a capitalistic sense, which Manifest Destiny sought to do throughout new territories.
While a comparison of the shoggoth with say, slavery and slavery uprisings (such as the 1791 Haitan revolution)should not be directly made due to the lack of indigenous nature of the artificial shoggoth, one can still look to the way in which colonialism strives to bring Western capitalistic “order” to where it touches. In desiring to expand and considering what must be done (i.e. creating a worker race), the Elder Things’ comparison to Manifest Destiny supporters in the United States (and colonizers across the board in Europe) is apparent, and the root of the “fuck around and find out” reading is more apparent. So despite Lovecraft’s both textual and subtextual intent on the Elder Things and this ancient Antarctic city as being drastically-different from humankind, there is a clear line from the fall of the Elder Things’ earth-based colonization and the inevitable criticism of colonialism and Manifest Destiny that modern readings can take from it.
Did Lovecraft want this? Probably not, though of course the issues of authorial intent are another thread to follow entirely, we as modern 21st-century readers and writers are not only encouraged to, but actively look at older works to put different perspectives on them that reflect more modern sensibilities and understandings of the world around us. One could argue that “it doesn’t matter” what Lovecraft thought or wanted is the only appropriate way to respond to his texts as a retaliatory mechanism, self-defense against his biases and assumptions about the structure of the world he lived in that allowed for him to express himself thus, for better or worse.
However, what can make a reading of this entry in the Lovecraftian mythos as post-colonial and anti-Manifest destiny is being free. We are free of the absolute authority and constraints of patriarchy, colonialism, American exceptionalism, and racist power structures. They are no longer absolutes and are pushed back against in people’s lives and readings of materials. We are no longer limited by them, and thus can see what we might have ignored because of the burden of “authorial intent” and all of the bias intent in that.
Thus, we shouldn’t consider something like our approach to At The Mountains of Madness as retaliatory. Ironic, yes, but not retaliatory. There isn’t necessarily something there to retaliate against, when we’re being presented with a better way to look at it, instead recognizing that it, somehow without trying, unravels the tenets of the society that inspired it by being a horror story requiring terror and othered monstrosity.
The shadow of Manifest Destiny in American culture and the way its colonialism, despite American exceptionalism, ended up mimicking European colonialism, is a work that must be struggled with and processed through time, both in real-life as well as in fiction (where its impact is still being felt). However, it is possible to look at it and realize that with a post-colonial eye, we can see how the stories such as At The Mountains of Madness could be, ironically, read as anti-Manifest Destiny and anti-colonialism thanks to the way horror functions. The Elder Things built a mighty empire, and it still fell.
In wanting to scare us and discuss his own fears and fascinations, Lovecraft somehow gives us a tool to illustrate how the desire to conquer is universal among oppressors, and that the potential for those oppressors to be overthrown and shown their own failures is universal as well.
The explorers of At The Mountains of Madness fucked around, and in finding out, fleeing the non-Euclidian city with their metaphorical tails between their legs, we see that resistance against the presumptive power and authority of manifest destiny and the colonialism that it brings has existed throughout time and even in the void of distant space. As it should.
