The Doorstep Lovecraft Obscurity And Knowledge

Cedric Wysocki
Mr. Doucet
English III Gothic
4/28/23
Of Obscurity and Knowledge
When analyzing H.P. Lovecraft's compilation of stories The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, it can be seen that Lovecraft ties the human condition of fear to our limited understanding of our world and the obscurity of what exists outside of it. By applying the scholarship of Bradley A. Will in his essay, H.P. Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime, and Patricia MacCormack’s essay, Posthuman Teratology, to H.P. Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories it becomes transparent that the opaqueness of the worlds of Lovecraft tie into the human capacity for understanding and how fear can exist from what we cannot understand. Although

Lovecraft’s use and understanding of the sublime within his works by showing how certain characters, story points, and other things acknowledge the sublime. Bradley A. Will says this about Lovecraft’s character building using the sublime, "He has experienced the sublime and is awestruck by the accompanying negative knowledge-- the awareness of the scope of the failure of human understanding" (4). This is a very basic description of what the sublime is in its most basic form by informing the reader about negative knowledge and the limited scope of human understanding.And it shows perfectly how Lovecraft can use it to create fear within his works by implying that there are things that exist outside of our ability to understand them. The essay continues with this idea of the sublime by showing the reader excerpts of The Color out of Space which features a color that is completely indescribable as it exists outside of humanity's capacity for understanding. Bradley A. Will writes that, "The failure of language--the inability to describe the color-- is the result of a lack of signified for the signifier. The color is perceptible,

H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, Pickman's Model, features the narrator exploring the curious works of a painter named Eric Pickman who is known for his horrifying and inhumane works of art. One of his works is described as, “As I am a living being, I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into a canvas. The monster was there-- it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared-- and I knew that only a suspension of Nature's laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model" (87). The very existence of Pickman’s paintings are proof of Patricia MacCormack’s ideas of the monster being an extension of humanity because of the way they are described as being a suspension of nature's laws. This describes his work as something monstrous because it extends itself out of what is considered normal to humanity, in essence becoming the sublime and a monster at the same time.The very existence of Pickman is something that is described as being inhuman, as though he exists on the far outskirts of what is considered “human”. Pickman is described as, “He wasn't strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate"(89). His inhumanity is a result of his variation from societal norm, because of his way of living