Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets (2001) is a literary and cultural history of the grotesque, tracing its rises and falls in what she calls the “sub-zeitgeist.” Since Nelson traces the word “grotesque” to “grotto,” a teeming underwater or subterranean recess, it is fitting that her philosophical and historical preoccupations are also below ground, both too deep and too ethereal to emerge within the Zeitgeist proper. For the sake of her discussion, Nelson enlists first Franz Kafka (1883-1924), then H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), and Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), all authors who spent their lives plumbing spiritual and artistic grottos. For Lovecraft, the grotesque became a place of stark, singular horror, home to a lone, unimaginable monster, while for Schulz it was always a primordial sea of awestruck creation and lascivious joy. For Kafka, it was both.

Nelson argues that the otherworld of the grotesque has changed in the past five hundred years from the province of religion to that of art. The overpopulated world of demons, angels, monsters, curses, ghosts, golems, and strange and beautiful bodily metamorphoses, which had at one point been an integral part of Western reality, was banished during the Reformation. In the late nineteenth century, literature and art tapped into this wellspring again. But this otherworld was permitted only so long as it remained secular, never daring to claim that it was in any way actually real.

Introducing Schulz and Lovecraft, Nelson says that:

There is a … nexus within the human psyche where three territories rigorously fenced off from one another … philosophy, religion, psychology — converge with a fourth, the secular territory of imagine …

And so her book tells the story of how the West banished all worlds beyond this one, only to find itself unable to resist their pull. She sums up her argument with the claim that all cultural periods in the West oscillate between Platonic and Aristotelian thought. Her Platonic periods postulate the existence of a meaningfully separate world outside of this one, while for the Aristotelian, signs point only to the increasing complexity of this world, deeper and deeper into it, never farther away or through to something else.

To look into what this distinction actually means, and, more importantly, to see how the aestheticization of the supernatural remained anything but secular in the twentieth century, it will be worthwhile to look briefly at Kafka and then return to Lovecraft, a Platonic in Nelson’s view, and Schulz, an Aristotelian if ever there was one.

Inquiry into the true nature of grottos, as it develops in Schulz and Lovecraft, begins in Kafka’s The Burrow (1923), an unfinished short story written at the end of the last year of his life. Nelson introduces this story as “the first-person account of a creature we would be wrong to assume is human, though it thinks and feels like one.” The creature inhabits a winding underground stronghold made from the enlarged tunnels and dens of other creatures (“small fry”). Fearing intrusion, it decides to explore the outside world, but soon gets so scared by the open road that it returns, seeking comfort and safety only to lapse back into the same paranoia that had spurred its flight in the first place.

This deep underground locus is both the creature’s only hiding place, the root of all comfort, and yet also the font of all danger, nestled right up against the thing itself. We see that the deeper it digs in its quest both for discovery and for security, the closer it comes to that which will ultimately destroy it. It knows that “someone, whose invitation I shall not be able to withstand, will, so to speak, summon me to him,” yet what can it do but keep digging? The creature describes its conundrum thus:

everywhere, everywhere, I hear the same noise ... One could assume, for instance, that the noise I hear is simply that of the small fry themselves at their work. But … perhaps … I am concerned here with some animal unknown to me.

The question of whether these sounds are those of the small fry or of a looming, unknown creature is at the heart of this discussion. It is the difference between the singular, meaningful metamorphosis that Gregor Samsa undergoes in Kafka’s most famous story and the boiling, constant metamorphosis in Bruno Schulz, between the terror of Lovecraft’s world-eating monsters and the revelry of Schulz’s pliable human clay.

So by this route we arrive back at Schulz and Lovecraft. Bruno Schulz was born at the end of the nineteenth century in the town of Drohobycz, Poland. The son of a Jewish cloth merchant, he eked out a living as a high school art teacher, earning only a modicum of literary renown before he was shot by a Nazi official in 1942 while hanging sketches at a local gallery.

When oil was found in Galicia, a region near Schulz’s hometown, the area was quickly, crudely Americanized. “The Street of Crocodiles,” the best known of Schulz’s interrelated short stories, ends with this inscription: “The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year’s moldering newspapers.”

In contrast to this flimsy commercial wasteland, the town’s antiquated “Cinnamon Shops” hold the curiosities that most feed Schulz’s hungry imagination. These places are

dimly lit … dark and solemn … redolent of the smell of paint, varnish, and incense; of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities ... Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots … strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing engravings and amazing stories.

Perhaps to remain always near such places — or their remnants — Schulz stayed in his town, guarding the privacy that he knew was essential to the excruciatingly private world of his fiction.

Schulz’s stories focus on his father, a former shopkeeper whose mind degenerates into prophetic madness. His father is usually confined to an attic room, where he expounds his increasingly elaborate cosmology while attended by two lovely maidservants. His insanity is so colorful that it colors the lives of those around him. His prophetic pronouncements fill the bland sky with flocks of massing birds and cloud formations, which hang over the empty streets with the promise of some unhurried but irreversible cataclysm. He walks around “like a mesmerist, infecting everything with his dangerous charm,” traipsing in and out of madness with balletic grace.

The underlying philosophical preoccupation in Schulz’s work is that of an alternative Demiurgy, a “Second Book of Genesis”: the sentences grow up out of and express the belief that matter has not yet been formed in its last or best state. Rather, it should be always in flux, transforming restlessly, endlessly, with no favor for one form over another. According to the father,

the Demiurge … has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits … The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it … it entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself.

He sees life — or a conjoined process of life and death — everywhere. This is Schulz’s grotto, a place of spawning and dissolution, where birds, insects, dolls, and invisible creatures thrash about in whirlpools of blood, dirt, and foam. It is also a place to which only the father is privy. He rises without warning from the dinner table to “peer through the keyhole” or “run to a corner of the room, put his ear to a crack in the floor and … begin to listen intently.” When he’s not peering into the secrets of the basement, he’s up in the attic, “crouched on top of a ladder, working at something under the ceiling … he felt perfectly happy in that bird’s eye perspective close to the sky.”

Schulz’s stories all take place in a hazy “end times” that they evoke but never describe. Whether it’s the father’s death or “The Gale”massing over the streets, we know only that something is approaching and that all the existence leading up to it is beautifully, tragically ephemeral.

In the horror tales of H.P. Lovecraft, the end really does come. His grotto is stark and brutal, an open mouth of doom. Lovecraft’s metamorphoses shred his characters: something happens to a person that makes him not a person, and it cannot be undone. While Schulz finds some gooey, fermented motherly spirit at the end of his tether (a bride to his father perhaps), grown ripe and swollen, as if everything were heavily pregnant with everything else, Lovecraft finds a murderer spirit at the end of his, and it eats him whole.

H.P. Lovecraft grew up in and lived out his brief adult life in Providence, RI. Most of his stories are set in New England, in a fictional town that functions rather like Schulz’s Drohobycz. He wrote mainly for pulp sci-fi and horror magazines, winning, like Schulz, very little renown in his lifetime, although he did succeed in spawning the cabal of spin-off writers responsible for the infamous Cthulhu Mythos. In his most memorable writing, he strives for a sense of fear so raw that it exceeds the macabre, the gothic, the eerie, or the uncanny. Rather than an obvious forebearer like Poe, Lovecraft cites his childhood dreams and visions as his primary conceptual education, harking back to visits from apparitions called the “Night Gaunts,” which would rush through his house, tear him out of bed, and whirl him through space at sickening speed.

In their adult quests to render their childhoods palpable in prose, Schulz became a poet and Lovecraft did not. Schulz’s process of tunneling takes him to the insides of words, propelled by a linguistic delight and awe that intensifies as his search grows more desperate. Lovecraft, on the other hand, is not a very good writer. He has gripping ideas, but his prose is dull, insensitive and slow. Strangely, however, this shortcoming amplifies the real horror in his work: while Schulz is indisputably the greater artist, Lovecraft may be his equal at transmitting pure experience. As Nelson points out, when Lovecraft must describe the monster at a story’s end, he relies on adjectives like “unfathomable,” “indescribable,” “unnamable” and “unspeakable.” It is surely not insignificant that, as he approaches the monsters at the far reaches of his imagination, only these words remain. Lovecraft’s stories are genuinely scary because they end with the narrator going violently mute. The more the narrative falls apart, the more the presence of that which has torn it apart makes itself felt.

To see this in practice, two of Lovecraft’s stories will take us swiftly back to our attics and cellars: “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Music of Erich Zann.” Both recall the creature in The Burrow listening to its plotting invaders and Schulz’s father peering through keyholes onto splendidly private vistas. In both stories, characters discover worlds hidden by walls — under the house in the first case, over it in the second.

In “The Rats in the Walls,” the narrator inherits and moves to Exham Priory, a British manor vacant since a mysterious tragedy struck down its owners. It soon becomes clear that this “intensely hideous” presence has by no means left the premises, as the narrator and his trusty cat begin to hear noises in the walls. He starts digging into the foundation and finds that each receding level preserves an older, more depraved generation of his illustrious family. He passes “the gate to a new pit of nameless fear … a twilit grotto of enormous height … a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion,” until this passage opens onto “a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones,” which, in typical Lovecraftian fashion, turns out to have been “chiseled from beneath.”

At the end of his digging, the narrator feels “something soft and plump. It must have been the rats … that feast on the dead and the living.” He discovers that the house, and so the entire notion of his inherited home, is founded upon centuries of — yes — unspeakable rituals and brutal human sacrifice, a black magic that flows from the wellsprings of his bloodline. And then, as Lovecraft’s narrators so often do, he devolves into gibberish:

The war ate my boy, damn them all … and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames … No, no I tell you, I am not the daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It’s voodoo, I tell you … that spotted snake … ‘Sblood, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust … Magna Mater! Magna Mater! ... Dhona’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa! ... Ungl … ungl … rrlh … chchch …

And so the mystery goes unsolved, the horrible thing felt but undescribed. The rats beckon to something, but we can perceive only the beckoning until the final moment when the thing looms up. Then it’s too late.

In The Music of Erich Zann, we again have a narrator whose “memory is broken … my health, physical and mental … gravely disturbed.” After moving into a lodging house in the fictional Rue d’Auseil, he hears “ strange music from the peaked garret overhead … it was an old German violinist, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann.” After asking if he can come inside and listen to one of the old man’s midnight performances, the narrator offends him by trying to hum one of the tunes he’s heard. Zann requests that he take a room on a lower floor and cease listening. He does, for a little while.

In one of Lovecraft’s most touching scenes, Zann responds to the narrator’s climactic, illicit return visit by trying to write a note explaining “all the marvels and terrors which beset him.” Halfway through, Zann hears “an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player … in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look.”

The mute German drops his pencil and, as if heeding a rallying call, recommences his playing in a suicidal frenzy:

It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I have ever overheard … he was trying … to ward something off or drown something out … I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds … and then … I heard a shriller, steadier note … a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West …

This is the closest that Lovecraft comes to Schulz’s rich excess, celebrating, for a moment, language’s potential for calling up wild creatures and deep abysses simply by naming them. But he is too serious to relish this power for long. He is too convinced of the realness of his horror. He never shrinks from the eye of his descriptive storm: that lone, mocking note from the West. As ever, he cannot describe it, but he knows that it’s there, and that the cavalcade of satyrs and frantic screeching strings is no more than its rallying call, and that fiction is no more than one of its many guises.

So here we have two distinct pathways into and through the grotto, presaged by a third. The question they leave us with is loud, a response to phenomena that has found its way into secular art but is itself anything but that. As we listen through the walls, we wonder if we are hearing one giant thing or many tiny ones. This dilemma may cleave, intellectually, to the classic dilemma between Plato and Aristotle, but it is surely something more elemental. It is the dilemma that sets Nelson going on her Secret Life, but also the dilemma that terrifies the creature in The Burrow. Lovecraft’s narrator in The Rats in the Walls wants to dig through his cellar to find the original stratum, the point where his horrific heritage began, but is there such a point? Can Schulz’s father hear or see it, or does each window and keyhole present him only with another untiringly submissive canvas? Is the basement grotto-of-horrors founded upon a single spark of evil, or does it go down and down, through the ages, deepening out of sight? Will the clouds massing over Drohobycz break all at once, one at a time, or not at all? As we dive down or climb up into the grottoes that be, we have to ask.

David Rice ’10 is looking forward to things happening exactly as they’re going to.