The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (19 page)

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is in every way a negation of Blatty’s Exorcist. In Lovecraft’s novel, the universe is in the hands of forces that are indifferent to human life, as it is in the real world. This is acceptable to very few readers. Good and evil are childish abstractions, as they are in the real world. Again, this is acceptable to very few readers. And the idea of human beings as creatures with souls is not an issue in the story because it was not an issue for Lovecraft. Everyone, not only the hapless protagonist of the book, exists in a world that is nightmare through and through. In Lovecraft’s universe without a formula, everyone is killable—and some kill themselves just ahead of the worse things waiting for them. Life as we conceive it, let alone a configuration of atoms with the given name of Charles Dexter Ward, occurs in a context of permanent jeopardy that only remains to be discovered and never to be defeated. Lovecraft does not want to take you on an emotional roller-coaster ride, at the end of which he tells you to watch your step as your car slows down and you settle back onto steady ground. He wants to catapult your brain into a black madness from which there is no return—a weightier undertaking for a horror writer, even though no reader has ever been so influenced.20

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Lovecraft’s handling of the subject matter of supernatural possession is so at odds with Blatty’s that the two men might have been living in different centuries, or rather millennia. The narrative parameters of The Exorcist begin and end with the New Testament; those of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward could only have been conceived by a fiction writer of the modern era, a time when it had become safe not only to place humanity outside the center of the Creation but to survey the universe itself as centerless and our species as only a smudge of organic materials at the mercy of forces that know us not (as it is in the real world). As for the protagonist of the title, his possession is just a means to much larger ends that have been eons in the making: he is, as previously imaged, a configuration of atoms and not an ensouled creature of a god who has been monkeying around with us for only a hundred thousand years more or less. Lovecraft’s narrative is not only modern, it also emerged from an imagination that was deferential to no dogma that may be dated, one that assimilated what had come before and envisioned what might come to be in the evolution of human consciousness, deliberating with a fearsome honesty until it settled on a position it could hold in good faith and was ready to jettison as dictated by evidence or cerebration. Lovecraft drew upon and extended the most advanced thought of his time as well as all previous scientific and philosophical developments that tended to disenchant the human species with itself. In that sense, he really went the limit of disillusionment in assuming the meaningless, disordered, foundationless universe that became the starting point for later figures in science and philosophy. Lovecraft existed in no man’s land of nihilism and disillusionment. He will always be a contemporary of whatever generation comes along. One cannot say the same about most recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature, never mind writers of horror fiction.

Whereas Lovecraft was uninterested in the human race except for its scale in proportion to an indifferent universe full of monsters, Blatty has proven himself as someone who is

“involved with humanity” and sensitive to its suffering. To overlook this fact is to miss the point of his work. That he is dependent on religious salvation to justify human suffering cheapens his writing for the unfaithful as much as it should give it value for believers. Perhaps no one since John Milton has made such an attempt to excuse human misery in religious terms. (This is a Sisyphean labor destined to be ineffectual, making it an easy mark for an atheist poet like A. E. Housman, who wrote that “malt does more than Milton can / To justify God’s ways to man.”) Lovecraft and Blatty each depicted the invasion of something terrible into this world in variant ways. Likewise, the manner in which this subject is rendered by their respective authors is worlds apart. It is at the intersection of manner and matter that their style of consciousness diverges. The no-nonsense prose of The Exorcist and its supernatural subject come together at a rutted intersection as old as the Cross, a Golgothic crossroads littered with spent formulas borrowed from the Catholic Church. Blatty stands in the same place as endless others before him. He would not be misunderstood by anyone who lived during the Middle Ages. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Lovecraft’s rhetorical fervor cannot be confused with that of anyone else, and the locus to which he escorts his readers is a cosmic crux that no one had ever glimpsed before him. He would be as alien to a medieval mind as the modern or postmodern world itself. That Blatty wins the contest for the time and money of the legions should perplex no one. Average readers will stand 86

patiently in line to buy a bestseller; few of them will even get in line to buy a literary classic of its type.

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NOTES

1. At this point in his life, Tolstoy was running low on each of Zapffe’s four methods for obnubilating one’s consciousness—isolation, distraction, anchoring, and, most toweringly, sublimation through his work as a literary artist. Each of them had served him well for a time before letting him down. A genius of disillusionment, Tolstoy reached a juncture where he inferred that all our actions are just a way of killing time. Only subsequent to our demise can we take a breather, as our survivors like to think of it.

Perhaps this is why the ground, the crypt, or the wall-space where our remains are interred is called, with Olympian impropriety and untruth, our final resting place. As if our anxious need to kill time allowed us any other rest-stops along the way.

2. A cinematic exemplification of this betrayal is the closing voiceover of Se7en (1995), which was indeed a work of dark vision in which chaos triumphs over order until, at the last minute, the actor Morgan Freeman saves the day by intoning, “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.” The quote is taken from Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. The words are those of the hero of the book, Robert Jordan, who sacrifices his life in war for what he considers a good cause. Not minding being killed by the enemy, Jordan is also willing to commit suicide in order to avoid capture. But he would rather not kill himself.

His father had done that, as Hemingway’s had, and Jordan judges him a coward for this act. Could Hemingway have also thought himself a coward when he adjourned this life as a suicide some decades after writing For Whom the Bell Tolls? (See footnote number one to the section “Creating Horror” below.) What a triumph of order over chaos that would have been—a terrible but heroic integrity right to the end.

3. The following is a philosophical bromide of the post-nihilistic era: being alive has no value except within a limited framework. In the movies, a stock plot is that of a law-enforcement official who moves from a big city to a small town because in the big city his efforts to better his environment were ineffectual or unnoticeable while those in a small town, he expects, will “make a difference.” The plan here is to change frameworks in hopes of creating the illusion that one’s life has value in itself. Outside of the movies, this plan of exchanging one framework for another is more difficult to pull off successfully. And since these frameworks are made up by our minds, and not by a filmmaker, they are liable to dissipate at any moment. Any ultimate frame in which our lives take place is uncertain both in its consolations and its reality. Faith in some absolute—or, alternatively, in the absence of absolutes—may go limp at any moment.

The only assured life-value we can know comes to us from outside the edges of the frame—from the fact that our lives will end but have not yet done so. Naturally, this value is, at best, devalued in some measure by unpleasant feelings such as sadness and anxiety. And there may even be no value to it, commonly speaking, if one would prefer to have it all done with for some reason. But if there is any value to be had, it has but one certain point of generation—the end of our lives, whether in oblivion or in an immortality whose framework is unknown, as already discussed under the subhead “Philosophy” of the section “Thinking Horror.” While human life may have value on a contingent and relative basis, it still retains holding places waiting to be filled by pain and then, in some form, the process of dying. If death is the home of potential value, dying is a valueless 88

way-station that cannot be bypassed. The most desirable epitaph to have etched on one’s tombstone is this: “He never knew what hit him.”

4. Hamlet’s allegation is passably true. Yet not all are made cowards by the consciousness of postmortem “ills . . . that we know not of”—as if the possibility of unknown horrors after death were better left hanging over our heads for the rest of our days rather than discovered to be or not to be true as soon as possible. Either way, they are a real life-spoiler if one thinks about the matter more thoroughly than did the Prince of Denmark.

But a sloppy and imaginative generalization suits the self-interrogative soliloquy better than would a dry and well-considered answer. For God’s sake, he is not replying to a pollster’s survey: “Question: Is being dead all right or not all right? Especially when you consider the alternative?” In his essay “Ideas concerning the Intellect generally and in all Respects,” Schopenhauer is more fastidious and less speculative than Shakespeare’s Dane, enumerating “certain universally popular errors firmly accredited and daily repeated by millions with the utmost complacency.” Number one among these errors is the following: “Suicide is a cowardly act.” In another essay, “On Suicide,” Schopenhauer argues that self-murder betokens a mistaken conception of one’s nature and motives, but he does not dismiss it as a cowardly act. Anyone who has felt the urgency to do oneself in knows the nerve it takes to go through with it.

5. The human instinct to have one’s own “way of life” outlast those of competing ways is risibly preserved in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Faced with the extinction of humanity at the hands of a doomsday device created by the Russians and set to be activated by a nuclear attack on the part of the U.S., American politicians and military officials, at the urging of ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, plan to survive by living in mineshafts for the next hundred years, after which they would emerge and, in Strangelove’s estimation, “work their way back to the present gross national product within, say, the next twenty years.” Worried that the Russians could have the same plan, Gen. Buck Turgidson, with all the foresight one would expect from a man of his position, speculates, “I think we should look at this from a military point of view. I mean, supposing the Russkies stashed away a big bomb, see. When they come out in a hundred years, they could take over!” Another general agrees with Turgidson, who rambles on, “Yeah, I think it would be extremely naïve of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policies. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge!” The goofball insanity played out in this scene has had audiences soaking their drawers with laughter since Kubrick’s film was released in 1964. The characters seem to be such funny little puppets as they sketch out a survival plan, the success or failure of which they will not live long enough to see.

All they ask for is the hope that succeeding generations will survive and persevere in the same goofball insanity as they did. In Zapffe’s terms, Dr. Strangelove is a work of artistic sublimation. Its audiences can bust a gut watching it and still go on breeding to secure the way of life it parodies. Should the events of this movie ever be realized, those who emerge from the mineshafts will laugh as riotously at its goofball insanity as those who went in. George Santayana’s epigram “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is one of the biggest hoots of all time. Only by repeating history every second of every day can human beings survive and breed. How ludicrous that anyone would not want to be doomed to repeat history. Or that any mortal could possibly learn anything from it that would change our “way of life.” That would be the doomsday scenario, the prologue to a tragedy that ends with the entrance of the Last Messiah.

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6. Consciousness studies sometimes draw attention to the phenomenological view that at your death the whole world dies because the representation of it that you have inside your head is the world, a solipsistic dreamland of your own making. Thus, there is no possibility of enshrining the world as you know it or partaking by proxy—for instance, by sexual reproduction—in the future.

7. In her 1995 book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Kay Redfield Jamison cites an identical apocalyptic sentiment contained in the letters of the French composer Hector Berlioz, who remarked that in his frequent moments of depression he felt as if he could without hesitation light a bomb that would blow up the earth. Antecedents of Jamison’s work are The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton, Born under Saturn: The Conduct of Artists: A Document History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (1963) by Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (1971) by Bridget Gellert Lyons, and The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (1976) by Reinhard Kuhn.

8. Skilled use of the supernatural is one reason why one might consider Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c. 1606) a superior work to his Hamlet (c. 1600-1601). While both dramas are patterned along the lines of a soap opera—complete with family squabbles, betrayals, jockeying for position in a world on the make, etc.—Macbeth is played out within a supernatural order that is reinforced throughout the play and gives it a terrible mystery that Hamlet lacks. The latter work does have its ghost, but this apparition serves only as a dramatic device to get the plot moving, which could have been done without an otherworldly intervention, rather than coloring all the incidents of the play with a shadowy and malefic presence, as is the case with Macbeth. Without the three witches (a.k.a. Weird Sisters; Sisters of Fate), who officiate as masters of a power that reduces the characters of the drama to the status of puppets, Macbeth would not be Macbeth. Without the ghost of Hamlet, Sr., Hamlet would still be Hamlet. (As we all know, later in the drama Hamlet the Younger doubts the word of his father’s spirit and double-checks them by having a troupe of actors stage a number called The Murder of Ganzago so that he can see for himself how Claudius responds to the play’s reenactment of his uncle’s murder of his father. The play’s the thing, not the ghost. It is just too much that after all the inside information thunderously told by the elder Hamlet in the first act, Hamlet would still feel the necessity to engage in his own detective work before making his move. Another set-up could have been used to point the finger at Claudius’s nefarious deed and its method.) There is, of course, a mass of fine rhetoric and a gloomy view of the human condition expressed by the title characters in both Hamlet and Macbeth. However, there is another dimension of the unknowable in the latter work that goes beyond the unknown movements of the human heart and presents the world itself as a living nightmare from which one may awaken only by the nightmare of dying.