The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

Celephaïs

“In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward the distant regions where the sea meets the sky.”

Celephaïs tells the story of a man named Kuranes, who prefers the world of dreams to his own. His connection with the dreamworld is so strong that it’s immediately framed as a matter of identity: “Kuranes” is the protagonist’s dream name – his real one remains concealed precisely to reinforce his connection to the oneiric realm.

The narrator tries to find a motivation for the protagonist’s attachment to his dreams, implying that they were able to offer a safe place to escape from the harsh impositions of reality: “Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been,” the narrator ponders. Kuranes is a man who has lost his fortune, a nobleman in disgrace that finds in his dreams a place of refuge.

He tries to tell everyone about the marvelous things he saw, but people just laugh at him – the bourgeois mindset rejects fantasy, deeming it not “serious” enough. So Kuranes stops even writing about them: his dreams are to become his secret, never to be shared. Free of the constraints of the modern, rational, capitalist world, he embraces fantasy altogether: “The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper.”

The conflict placed at the heart of the story, then, is the one between fantasy and reality, between dreams and the so-called truth. The former is said to be about beauty and wonder, while the latter is harsh and foul. The first paragraph ends in a meta-commentary on writing, criticizing those who have embraced modernity’s movement toward realism, stripping life from its beauty: by foregoing the fantastic in the name of seriousness, focusing on more grounded work, writers have abandoned the very thing that made their stories worthy in the first place.

“Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.”

The opposition between fantasy and seriousness made the fantastic be associated with silliness and childish behavior: fairy tales became stories for children and children only, being looked down upon by “serious” adults. Modernity turned the rejection of the fantastic into a sign of maturity. The narrator, then, laments how people consequently became “dulled and prosaic,” “wise and unhappy.” The thesis being articulated here is that by abandoning the fantastic, humanity has shackled itself to a mundane existence, one bereft of imagination and wonder.

Despite stating that describing Kuranes’ dreams is a futile effort, the narrator tries to do it anyway. They mention cities of bronze and stone – Lovecraft tends to highlight the materials his fantastic cities are made of –, golden cliffs, and strange regions where the illusion of the horizon is made true and so the sea indeed meets the sky. These dream cities are awe-inspiring and majestic in nature: they “glisten radiantly” because they are made of exquisite materials, boasting streets paved with onyx and gates made of bronze.

And they are located in weird places. When Kuranes is floating over a sinister abyss, he sees a rift opening in the darkness, revealing one of such cities. He recognizes this one as being “none other than Celephaïs, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago.”

Kuranes is ecstatic to be finally dreaming about the same magical place that once enchanted him very much, nearly forty years ago. But he wakes up before he can fully explore it again. Dreams can be a fickle thing, so Celephaïs is presented as this intangible location that slips through the protagonist’s fingers like a castle made of sand.

Three nights later, however, he dreams of it again, and this time manages to stay for a long while. It’s a place with camel drivers and red-roof pagodas, which immediately evokes Eastern imagery: Orientalism is once again being used to frame the fantastic in a Lovecraft story. Celephaïs is also described as a city that exists outside time, where everyone is young and no one notices Kuranes’ eventual absence (when he wakes up). It’s a place of magic and wonder that instills a sense of peace in the protagonist, who enjoys staying still for a long while, just gazing at its stunning vistas.

But then he wakes up again and Celephaïs and the silent valley of Ooth-Nargai are lost once more. The protagonist wants to grab hold of this specific dream, but the sand keeps slipping through his fingers. Frustrated and obsessed, he resorts to drugs to help him sleep more and find Celephaïs again: the dreamworld has become much more alluring to him than reality itself, the only place to escape to.

Poor and uninterested in life, Kuranes perishes one day. His death, however, is presented as a gift, since it releases him of reality permanently. Death gives him what he has always yearned for: the ability to stay at Celephaïs forever. And because he created the city in his dreams, Kuranes is even elected its leader, acquiring the power his family had once wielded in life.

The short story ends by juxtaposing dreams and reality once again. The dreamworld is formed by beauty and the sublime – it almost paralyzes you with its terrible wonders –, while the real world is marked by misery and violence. In the waking world, Kuranes ended up a trump whose death is ignored by everyone and even mocked by nature itself – the poor lose dignity even in death. In the dreamworld – the realm of fairy tales – he is a king who will live happily ever after:

“And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighbouring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephaïs and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily forever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.”

The story ends on a fascinating note. The presence of this odious millionaire suddenly brings up a social issue: if someone were to make a painting of the last image of this final paragraph, there would be a body of a poor man, probably in rags, being cast upon the rocks at a bottom of a tower, which would hold at its top a businessman living richly. In other words, it paints a strong image of social inequality and even unabashedly takes the side of the poor, qualifying the rich man as being “especially offensive”.

Millionaires are the new nobility, we may not call the likes of Bezos and Musk “Milord” but, for all practical purposes, they are just as untouchable as a prince or a king were. Their ridiculous dragon-like wealth – which liberal ideology justifies as deserving – gives them the means to be above the law and it will be passed through generations, granting their heirs the same boons. The only difference between them and the old nobility is that the element that legitimizes their wealth is a new fallacy: meritocracy just replaced blue blood and God’s will with hard work.

Kuranes, however, was once part of the old nobility himself. His dead body being thrown against the tower actually serves as a metaphor for the death of the old aristocracy, based on family name and blood. Up on the tower, there’s the “new money”, a businessman who has used his wealth to live just like a noble. And just below him, dead on the rocks, is the former nobility, whose power has faded away and can persist now only in dreams… and fantasy.

Celephaïs is a great short story that opens with an argument in favor of the fantastic and closes with a depiction of one of the most significant modern shifts in social division – all the while defending the power and beauty of dreams.

August 16, 2022.

—> You can read or listen to Celephaïs for free here.