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The House on the Borderland Q1 - Cosmic Horror
William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland is described as a tale of Cosmic Horror, a genre perhaps mostly associated with Lovecraft now. Lovecraft was aware of the work of Hodgson and it's hard to imagine he wasn't inspired by it, but I've read he came to it too late in his career for it to have been much influence. What makes it Cosmic Horror? Was it the first? Can you think of other examples of early Cosmic Horror? What's the difference between this book and, say, a book like Stapledon's Star Maker, which also explores the expanse of the universe in literary form.
Comments
I have to admit that I don'y have much experience of horror so don't have a lot to compare to. I did think that the "fast-forward through time" bit had a lot of similarities with The Time Machine - the latter book was published earlier (1895 as opposed to 1908) and of course they do rather different things with the idea, and I don't know if there is any direct connection between the authors?
A bit of context on where the story fits with the revolution in physics at the start of the 20th century. Where did the idea of "Cosmic horror" come from?
This story was written in 1908.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt did her work on "standard candle" variable stars in 1908, with the main publication in 1912. In 1917, people worked out that "nebulas", like Andromeda, might be a long way away. Compelling evidence that there are other, distant galaxies turned up in 1922. The "Great Debate" about the size of the universe was in 1920. Work based on general relativity, showing that the universe was non-static, was published in 1927-ish.
In other words, people were starting to come to terms with the huge size of the universe just after Hodgson wrote this. That's different from Lovecraft, who did a lot of his writing after we starting to understand the size of the universe.
As for this as a book of horror, it fits with Hodgon's "Carnacki" stories, which merge horror and science fiction. (A precursor to Doctor Who?) That's a bit different from the Lovecraft stuff, I think, which has much more magic.
For me it has something to do with awareness of something that is, and yet somehow beyond, beyond our ken, our perception, or awareness. Just for you @Apocryphal I'll suggest that death, and one's own personal death (as opposed to say the manner of death, the time of death, etc.) can only be apprehended secondarily, at a distance of you like, as horror, and so it is bound up with the experience of the transcendent and sublime, e.g. religion and cult.
I'm not sure applying adjectives do much other than functioning as a coping method to pretend we can reduce horror to not horror.
As for the time-lapse, I thought it clearly showed the effect of moving pictures on the capacity of people to think of time in new ways. However that's just what struck me, have no idea if there is an actual straight line between them.
Time-lapse photography of course is destructive of the idea of time as an uninterrupted continuum or flow, replacing it with an atomistic conception of sequence of moments. In some ways it's similar to the effect that relativity theory had on light, which seemed to reveal that it was both a flowing wave and a solid bit, which is difficult to reconcile.
The point is it was the end of the kind of certainty that the mechanistic theories of physics and chemistry have to a certain type of mind, which permitted the eruption of the beyond back into minds that seemed to transcend everyday life, and revealed the end of it, i.e. horror.
@BarnerCobblewood 's comments made me think about to what extent there's a difference between
1) awe of encountering the numinous (often called "fear and trembling" in older accounts) and
2) horror in either Hodgson's presentation or in modern productions.
It seems to me that modern horror is more focused on shock and revulsion, whereas Hodgson was more concerned with existential stuff like life, death and the end of the universe. No doubt there's a whole raft of modern stuff addressing this angle too, of which I am ignorant. I suppose the earlier parts of Borderlands dealt with the shock aspect a bit, as we were (I think) supposed to be revolted by the pig things, but it seemed to me that he was more interested in the impact on an individual of facing the passage of aeons and the decay of the planet and universe at large.
I tend to think of Cosmic Horror as invoking a sense of dread at the scale of the universe. I have a feeling this was easier to understand in a faith-based age, before our knowledge expanded so much. The Babylonian concept of melammu, or 'frightening splendour', that citizens would experience when entering a temple or sacred area, or when encountering a mythical beast or the passing of a god or demon, probably comes closest. Have you ever almost fallen from a great height and caught yourself? Did you heart leap into your throat? Something like that, but sustained, is, I think, close to the right sensation. The cosmic part is in realising the universe is much larger and older than what the bible teaches, and the horror because that implies there is something (infinite somethings?) that exist beyond God. And God was, well, powerful - so is what exists beyond God more powerful?
I think for many, we've successfully slain God, or at least subdued him. He's basically just a fairy these days. So 'Cosmic Horror' many not be something we can really grasp - only imagine, in a broken kind of way. Similary, as someone who grew up watching Count Chocula and Sesame Street's The Count, I have never found vampires particularly horrifying or scary.
I'm not sure if there's a lot of difference between Stapledon's awe in the face of the scale of the universe, and Hodgson's horror. Both are perhaps two sides of a coin ('frightening splendour'). It's how the author (and later the reader) reacts to this concept that makes it horrifying. Hodgson could as easily described the house being swarmed by winged humans in the form of angels as he could gargoyles. The black sun. The arid plain surrounded by old anthropomorphic animal gods (suggesting the ancients were right?) The green sun in the centre, perhaps invoking illness. Lovecraft took things a step further by creating the Great Old Ones, seeking to take back their birthright, which gives them a malevolence which is perhaps missing from Hodgson. But maybe not knowing who the pig things are, who the gods are, who's in charge if anyone, was even more horrifying.
I have not read any Stapledon so can't compare to him. I was trying to think if I had ever really read anything that has traditionally been labelled as "Cosmic Horror" and I really don't know. Certainly no Lovecraft.
Would Stranger Things count as Cosmic Horror? That may be as close as I have got before this in any kind of medium, but I must just not be remembering correctly. Either way it's not a sub-genre that I have strong opinions on either way, but this particular book didn't really make me feel much in the way of horror in ways that I remember the movie 'Deep Star Six' made me feel when I was younger. In that case it was an unknowable creature from the deep. Come to think of it, underwater films always give me that creeping sense of awe and doom way more than most other types of films. Can an underwater film still classify as cosmic?
I've been rereading A Memory Called Empire - a cracking book which I enjoy more each time I revisit it - and came across this rather pertinent extract
Is this why Cosmic Horror is a popular genre now? We can play-act the horror, going through the motions of being scared, while we the players/readers are safe with our now-commonplace understanding that "space is big, really big". The things that shocked the early-20th-century writers have no emotional impact on us now.
Horror implies a revulsion to me. It's something different from fear/scare. Of course, I can develop fear for the things that horrify me. But not all fear is attached to horror. I might be afraid of being scammed on the internet, or being mugged. But I'm not horrified by these things. Things I find horrifying are - falling into a crevasse face first and getting wedged so my arms are stuck to my sides, and therefore not being able to get back out. And then finding any little movement actually gets me stuck further in. Now that's horrifying! And yes, I'm scared of that happening, too - who wants something horrific to happen?
Alien insects attaching you. That's scary. Alien insects eating you from the inside out - scary and horrifying.
Aliens so alien they cause you to vomit at first sight or smell because your body reacts involuntarily to how alien they are - maybe that's horrifying without being scary?
@Apocryphal I think you're right. Fear is of use, whereas horror has something to do with the realisation that nothing is of use. There's something about inevitability, and the realisation that the inevitable has not happened yet, that is related to horror, which entails the erasure of the effective self before it is erased. Why? Because as long as the self is effective, nothing is inevitable - there could be something done, but when there is nothing to be done, well that is the end of who we are, or have been. And yet we remain. So I think horror has something to do with inevitable endings that have not yet happened. And predictions like that transcend what we can actually know, and yet are persuasive. Like say the heat death of the universe.
What I find interesting about this is that these are what I would think of as properly "religious" and cosmological themes, about who we are and what our place is in the cosmos, but in our current phase we have almost no tools to face these realities. Horror eviscerates our ability to act, and so it is of great use if it can be wielded to prevent effective political action, but it is undercut by the fact that that our prophecies are not certain despite our saying so, and also that we do remain, and continue to act. I'm thinking here of stories like the orchestra on the Titanic that continued to play despite realising that it was over.
So horror and prophecy tend to go together as well. This is not what systems are able to deal with, which is why I (tentatively) think that game systems cannot evoke or manage it in play, but they can work for or against the players role-playing how it affects decision-making within the system they are using. Blah blah blah.