The Lovecraft Project:

H. P. Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we human beings are a tiny, insignificant fraction of the universe, and that there are things much bigger and more important than us hidden in the depths of the world.

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.

Polaris

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” – Chuang Tse

Polaris is a story about a man who has a strange recurrent dream about a fantastical city, a dream that ends up engulfing his life and becoming his preferable reality.

The short story begins with haunting imagery, as the narrator personifies elements of nature to create a hellish effect: the winds “curse” and “whine” while trees “mutter” things to each other. This makes us readers feel that the narrator, although alone in his house near a swamp, is actually surrounded by the environment, being watched by all sides.

He’s watching, in turn, the Pole Star, which he describes in a similar fashion, painting it as a mysterious, unsettling figure that even suffers from a memory problem. The Pole Star, up there in the darkness of the sky, is not only observing him intently, but also appears to have something to say to him, if only it could remember. According to the narrator, the star was “winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey a message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.”

Watching the star, he sleeps and dreams of a city. A city made of marble, standing still in a plateau between two peaks. The place, its robed inhabitants, and their uncanny language, it all seems strangely familiar to the narrator, as if he knows them, but just like the star, cannot remember the details. His notion of time also becomes fuzzy: “Long did I gaze on the city, but the day came not,” he writes.

This dream becomes recurrent, making the barrier between reality and imagination thinner with each passing day. The narrator’s mind doesn’t take long to become trapped in that old predicament, where a dream feels so powerful, so real, that the dreamer can’t distinguish between reality and dream: the dreamer can’t say which world they belong to.

This problem is brilliantly reflected in the narrative, with the narrator’s physical presence in the marble city changing alongside his descriptions of the place: if he was a passive, interested observer before, now he’s a talking participant in that city. If the peaks were described simply as “strange” before, now he calls them Noton and Kadiphonek. The city is now called Olathoë. He has a friend named Alos. The narrator suddenly knows the political history of Olathoë, its past and current troubles. In other words, the shift that happens in his mind, where reality becomes the dream and the dream becomes reality, slips through the prose, which now treats the dream in a more grounded manner.

The narrator stops describing his house in the swamps, and we realize that we have had no access to his “normal” life whatsoever. We don’t know the name of anyone in his family, of his friends, or even of the place he lives in. But we know that the city of Olathoë stands betwixt the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek. We know that his friend is named Alos, who’s a patriotic warrior that commands armies. There, in that fantastical city made of marble, the narrator has a goal: he must help stop an enemy invasion by standing on top of a watchtower and sending a signal when he spots the enemy approaching. The narrative of the dream, therefore, becomes more palpable, more lively, more real than that of his life in the swamp. This makes the reader understand why the narrator would prefer a life in Olathoë over his normal one: after all, the only thing we know is that he lives in a swamp located near a cemetery. The absence of information about his “real” life makes it sound more abstract and undesirable than the dreamed one.

While he’s at the watchtower, he starts to watch the Polar Star again, which makes him hear some words, which are then represented in the text as a poem. This poem sounds like a curse from the Polar Star: “Slumber, watcher,” it begins, as the protagonist starts to feel a strange drowsiness overcoming him. He sleeps, wakes up in his house in the swamp, and so now knows that the house is a dream and that if he doesn’t wake up, he will fail in his duty to his people and his friend Alos, putting them in harm’s way.

He’s deemed mad by those around him, of course, as it seems to be the fate of all Lovecraftian protagonists, and he ends his narrative twisting “in a guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every moment grows.”

The Polar Star’s poem, however, adds another layer to his struggle: time. It ends with a promise, “Only when my round is o’er shall the past disturb thy door,” it says, suggesting that the city of marble may not be imaginary after all, but just lost in time. His dream may be a window to another life, in another time. If Olathoë stands between two peaks, the narrator is a character that also stands in the middle of two realities, two times, two selves. The Polar Star works as a bridge and every time he crosses it to the more mundane, boring side – where the “squat yellow creatures” are not fearsome warriors, but just Eskimo (which is a lamentable comparison, to say the least) – he feels lost and imprisoned, craving for another taste of that more exciting life.

Polaris, then, is a great short story about the alluring power dreams can have.

October 26, 2020.