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.

The Temple

“On August 20, 1917, I, Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, Lieutenant-Commander in the Imperial German Navy and in charge of the submarine U-29, deposit this bottle and record in the Atlantic Ocean at a point to me unknown but probably about N. Latitude 20 degrees, W. Longitude 35 degrees, where my ship lies disabled on the ocean floor.”

The Temple is a short story about a German official stuck in a sinking submarine while the people around him go insane and betray his country. The narrative depicts a battle between nationalist pride and the supernatural, showing how madness marks the victory of the latter.

The protagonist is Karl Heinrich, a German official who begins to record the strange events that happen to his submarine after they come across a dead man holding an ivory idol.

Lovecraftian narrators tend to reject the supernatural. They realize the events they’re about to tell are fantastic in nature and fear that if they don’t distance themselves from them, displaying a great degree of doubt, their story will come across as silly and be rejected by us. Karl Heinrich is different, denying the fantastic with more vehemence than usual because for him, it’s not a question of credibility, but identity.

Karl Henrich is German, but he doesn’t believe his nationality is an abstract concept that just marks the language he speaks in and the culture he’s been submitted to. No, Karl treats his nationality as an imperative that guides who he should be and how he should act: it entails a certain set of values that he must uphold at all times, lest he betray his country. In practice, being a German means Karl must value reason and discipline above all else. So, when the fantastic events start to occur and the people around him don’t deny them, he responds with violence, for in his eyes, his men are not just being silly, they are traitors.

The first big event is when they find the body of a man clenched to their submarine after they shoot down an enemy ship. He’s carrying an ivory idol, which they take from him before throwing his body back into the water. This is when one of Karl’s men – the boatswain Müller – claims that the body didn’t sink, but swam away.

Karl’s reaction to this tale immediately reveals his anger and even his xenophobia: he curses his own men while linking their foolishness to the place they were born in. Müller, for example, is called a “superstitious Alsatian swine,” while those who believed his story are “severely reprimanded.” When the nightmares start, Karl calls his own men “dazed” and “stupid” and decides to check himself if they are not lying to him.

We are supposed to loathe Karl, who kills Englishmen and is in general a terrible human being. When he talks about his victories over the “English pig-dogs,” he either uses a cold, matter-of-fact voice that lacks empathy towards the people he killed (“After that we sank the lifeboats with our guns and submerged”) or writes with an amused tone that suggests a bit of sadism (“The ship sank quite picturesquely […] Our camera missed nothing, and I regret that so fine a reel of film should never reach Berlim”).

And he treats his “friends” almost as badly: when the nightmares start, his men start to moan strangely, and Karl is much more annoyed by this than worried for their wellbeing. This is just natural, for, in his eyes, the fact that they’re being affected by the supernatural makes them less German than him: they are not alike anymore, for while Karl with this superior German intellect doesn’t let himself be touched by the strange influence that is taking hold of his ship, his men prove to be far weaker and not worthy of their nationality.

As time passes, the supernatural sightings become more frequent and begin to sound a lot like guilt concealed by a veil of the fantastic: Karl’s men were killing other human beings but, unlike Karl, they seem shaken by this. The protagonist, of course, abhors this notion, which can be observed as he writes about Müller:

“He was in a detestable childish state, and babbled of some illusion of dead bodies drifting past the undersea portholes; bodies which looked at him intensely, and which he recognized in spite of bloating as having seen dying during some of our victorious German exploits.”

The beginning of this passage is especially fascinating because it shows how disturbed Karl gets with the supernatural. It’s his exaggerated attempt to dismiss it that reveals how it gets to him, as almost every word in the sentence is the character passing judgment against those who believe in Müller. The boatswain is compared to a child to discredit his tale, which is painted as naive and immature; his state is said to be detestable; his words don’t form coherent speech, since he’s “babbling”, and the events he witnessed are described as an “illusion”. It’s too much against the fantastic in such a short sentence, which reveals an effort by the narrator to reject the things being told.

Karl is losing control of his men, so matters don’t take long to escalate. First, he reprimands them severely, then he locks them up, then he starts to whip them, and finally, he has to shoot some of them down. His crew is restless, talking about a curse, and even Müller’s silence seems to have an effect on them: the boatswain has become himself a symbol of a supernatural threat, a living reminder of it. One day, he disappears and Karl is thankful for it, rationalizing the event by believing the old man threw himself overboard committing suicide.

The sighting of an American warship shakes things up even more, making his men think of surrender – which Karl immediately describes as an un-German act. Patriotism is everything for Karl and it’s a discourse that can legitimize all kinds of decisions. This is exactly the appeal of a “greater good”: it can transform any despicable act into a commendable one, because now this act is viewed as necessary. Karl, for example, defends that even the killing of children is justified if it’s done for one’s country, for “all things are noble which serve the German state.”

There’s also a moment when he laments the absence of doctors in his crew and feels the need to defend the decision, saying that he understands it because “German lives are precious.” What seems to escape him is the implication that some German lives are more precious than others.

Karl claims that he’s “always a German,” which marks how he sees nationality as a performance, as a set of noble attributes one should always display. But his German origin, his German sense, and his German will are brought up so many times that his nationalist pride becomes a caricature of itself. Consequently, instead of coming across as superior, he sounds ridiculous each time he mentions them: his constant remarks about his nationality are meant to highlight his own power, but actually have the opposite effect. His obsession with the theme hints at how he’s starting to doubt his alleged superiority, revealing how it’s being put into question.

Karl keeps dehumanizing everyone that stands against him. About the mutineers, he writes that “they roared like the animals they were.” The protagonist thinks he is the last bastion of civilization, looking down on all others because of their beliefs in the fantastic and because of their origin. While Müller is an “Alsatian swine”, his fellow officer Klenze is a “womanish Rhinelander”, which apparently explains his inefficiency.

Eventually, Karl murders everyone in the submarine except Klenze. Their boat sinks to the bottom of the ocean and they await their death – Karl more patiently than Klenze. While the protagonist accepts his fate, believing his country will honor his sacrifice, Klenze starts to pray and get restless. He begins to talk about a mysterious “he” who lives in the water and is calling to them.

Karl accuses his colleague of madness and Klenze’s answer encapsulates one of the core ideas of cosmic horror: “If I am mad, it is mercy. May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end! Come and be mad whilst he still calls with mercy!” In Lovecraft, madness is usually seen as a blessing, because to have perspective on things, to truly know how the universe works, is to glimpse at pure horror. Madness, then, is a mechanism that protects the individual from complete despair.

While they sink, some dolphins catch the protagonist’s attention, as they never go up to the surface to breathe. Karl is a man who exhibits that kind of scientific curiosity that is indistinguishable from psychopathy when present in situations that dehumanize the other. When Klenze leaves the submarine to die, for example, the protagonist tries to find his body with a searchlight because he “wished to ascertain whether the water-pressure would flatten him as it theoretically should, or whether the body would be unaffected, like those extraordinary dolphins.” The man has just killed himself and Karl wants to use this death to satisfy his curiosity.

After Klenze dies, Karl continues to use the searchlight to look for possible means of rescue and to observe what lies at the bottom of the sea. Suddenly, he spots the underwater ruins of a city. Just like the other fantastical cities in Lovecraft’s work, this one is also made of white marble and has an ancient aura that instills it with a sense of wonder. In Karl’s words, those ruins possess “an air of immemorially ancient splendour which nothing could efface.”

In this city – he calls it Atlantis – one specific structure stands out among the others: the titular temple. This temple is a huge structure, which so impresses the narrator that he makes sure to emphasize its size in his journal: words like “titanic”, “immense”, “magnitude”, “great”, and “impressive” are used to describe its doors and facade.

Karl is clearly mesmerized by the city, which is so enchanting that makes him lose track of time: “I cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with is beauty and mystery.” He even seems transported to the past when he writes that its terraces were once “verdant and beautiful,” as if he could glimpse at how they once were.

He eventually decides to explore the ruins with a diving suit (what more can he do, besides dying anyway) but dares not to venture inside the temple, which causes in him a sort of vague terror: this vagueness is important because it tells us how the danger the temple holds and the horrors it hides are so “primal” in nature that they cause an instinctive reaction. Karl’s fear is “blind” but still “mounting”: the fear of the unknown that only grows with each passing second, fueled by the victim’s imagination.

As his experiences become stranger and more inexplicable, Karl increases the number of times he has to reject them as mere hallucinations and delusions. Since he attributed his rational mind to his German origin, it’s exactly his superiority that is at risk: if he accepts the supernatural as the truth, he will betray his core values. His solution is to register the events as he experienced them, but at the same time warn us about their nature:

“It is well that the reader accept nothing which follows as objective truth, for since the events transcend natural law, they are necessarily the subjective and unreal creations of my overtaxed mind.”

He finally ceases to resist the call of the city and leaves the submarine once again to discover the source of a strange light, finding that it comes from inside the temple. Here, the descriptions go full Lovecraftian, with the indescribable element appearing to show how the sublime defies words and characterization: “As I stared at the uncannily lighted door and windows, I became subject to the most extravagant visions—visions so extravagant that I cannot even relate them.”

The final paragraphs reinforce the clash between the supernatural and his notion of national superiority. Since he’s a German – a man of reason, of control and order – his descent into madness marks the destruction of his identity. He’s losing the traits his idea of superiority hinged on: “My own German will no longer controls my acts,” he remarks. He’s becoming as weak as the men he whipped and shot down and that is the thing that bothers him the most.

The story ends with his promise to visit the temple. Since this is written as a manuscript, the story puts itself into a corner, as it can’t show what lies in the temple, as Karl never returned to record his experiences. It’s anticlimactic, sure, but the point is that no matter what Karl finds in the temple, the fact that he went there is enough to make him lose the battle. The big supernatural element in The Temple, then, remains just a suggestion – but one that is more than enough to cause cracks in the protagonist’s resolve and deconstruct his feelings of superiority.

The Temple is a horror story about the clash between reason and madness – but since the protagonist links the former with his identity, he puts his own nationalist pride at stake. After all, what’s a German compared to Cthulhu?

August 10, 2021.

—> You can read The Temple here.