Welcome back, fellow Lovercaftian scholars. This is the third week of our book club exploring Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle. This week’s thread is open for discussion of last week’s reading: The Doom that Came to Sarnath and The Cats of Ulthar.
For this week’s assignment we have two more short stories: Celephaïs and Nyarlathotep.
Celephais and Nyarlathotep were both written in 1920, the same year as The Cats of Ulthar and one of our future reading assignments, Ex Oblivione; evidently this was a very productive year for the Dream Cycle. While 1920 is the year in which Lovecraft wrote the most Dream Cycle stories, in 1927 he wrote two novella-length stories in the cycle: The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Reading for this week can be found in the trusty PDF here, and individual links for LibriVox recordings follow: Celephaïs and Nyarlathotep.
The Doom That Came To Sarnath was my first introduction to the writings of HPL many many years ago. I enjoy re-reading it as much as I did the first time. This time I opted to listen to it on HorrorBabble, the narrater was very good.
I always find myself thinking about little side stories in the same setting. What did the “people” of Ib ever do to deserve the hate of Sarnath? The beings that inhabited Ib seemed to just keep to themselves. They are described as having “bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voices”. Is it just simple pure xenophobia that drove the people of Sarnath to kill them all, or were there unstated incursions into Sarnath? The story does does not describe the denizens of Ib as anything other than ugly, and maybe that was enough for the people of Sarnath.
In the end the people of Sarnath got what they deserve, which is a somewhat surprising result considering how deeply xenophobic HPL was at the time of the writing. One would expect a Sarnath apologist viewpoint.
I always feel like Doom has an almost cinematic feel to it. Even though the story is brief the setting is lush and very interesting.
I found HorrorBabble while looking for a horror narrator to fall asleep to. I really enjoy their work.
To motivations for the people of Sarnath targetting the people of Ib, there’s definitely plenty of xenophobia mixed in there, which Lovecraft probably considered a good enough reason. He writes “with their marvelling was mixed hate, for they thought it not meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk.” I find it peculiar that the humans were relatively late settlers of this land yet they consider the world under the sole dominion of men.
The next sentence offers another reason. “Nor did they like the strange sculptures upon the grey monoliths of Ib, for those sculptures were terrible with great antiquity.” Evidence of art and culture from another sentient species, especially antique arts, would challenge Sarnath’s world view of men being the masters of the world. Guided by their pride and hatred, I can see them as willing to raze a city so that they can live in a comfortable ignorance.
I think the Doom may be motivated by another peeve of people with more “traditionalist” views. After an initial boom in productivity, over the course of a millennium the people of Sarnath became decadent and eventually grew ignorant of the looming threat of revenge by the people of Ib. It could serve as an allegory that the people of Ib waited until the people of Sarnath had long grown complacent, before they attacked. I could potentially see it as some racist allegory about constant vigilance against the threat of resurgence from a conquered “lesser” folk.
I really enjoyed the stories from this week. I find that Lovecraft provides just enough details to provide a definitive sequence of events while leaving room for speculation on the details. It’s definitely much richer than the writings of the previous week.