Help me think through my unholy Faulknerian/Lovecraftian thesis proposal

[Nomad4life]

Hello all! First post- Let me know if I need to move it or change anything, please.

I am making plans to submit a thesis proposal contrasting Falkner's Yoknapatawpha setting against Lovecraft's Arkham City. Although initially this may seem like a very bizarre pairing, it is perhaps not as odd as it first seems. After all, Faulkner and Lovecraft were publishing at nearly the same period of time, and both writers were trying to capture vistas of transition and uncertainty within "mythic" fictionalized cities based on actual United States cities. There are some stylistic similarities between the two as well-

Lovecraft's opening to The Call of Cthulhu:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

Might just as well have been a passage from Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, don't you think?

So here is where I'm kind of stuck. I have what may (or may not) be a new and different direction to take both Faulkner and Lovecraft in. (I'm sick of reading debates on Faulkner's status as a postmodernist. I'm tired of seeing Lovecraft confined to comparisons within the gothic genre.) I'm trying to do something interesting, different, and fun here, and I feel that I'm right on the verge of… Something.

But what?


The first part of my thesis would have to be spent on an obligatory "legitimizing Lovecraft segment." I plan to use this part explaining that I do not wish to "legitimize" Lovecraft as a writer, but as a maker of a mythology that embodied the fears of the 20th century. (For example, I believe that Lovecraft's idea that the center of the universe was a seething mass of blind idiocy actually predates the Big Bang Theory, but I'd need to look that up.)

I would then need a segment explaining Lovecraft's Arkham, how Lovecraft composed and changed this setting over a period of time, and how this fictional city relates to his overall mythos.

I would then need a segment detailing a researched interpretation of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, and how this county relates to Faulkner's overall mythos (Thomas Sutpen legend, etc…)

I could then move on to the comparison. But what should this comparison focus on? The obvious answer would be "gothic elements" in both settings, but I'm trying to avoid that if possible. Or perhaps that's exactly what I should be doing? I've thought about focusing on "the treatment of time" or "the construction of truth" in both settings, but I'm just not sure. Perhaps I could compare characters- Thomas Sutpen and Joseph Curwen, for example? (Both of whom sacrifice their offspring to keep their dreams alive, in a manner of speaking.)

Does anyone have any advice for me? Do you know of any ways to help me focus my beam of thought into something I can write about for 90 pages or so? Any points or even concerns you might have would be most helpful.

Thank you.

[Virgil]

Sounds interesting. I have never read Lovecraft so I can't really comment. It does sound like you have a basis of comparison. My only advice is that a good comparison includes differences as well as similarities. I wish you the best of luck.

[mtpspur]

This will be of no help whatever but when I read of Lovecraft/Faulkner in the same breath the comicbook equivalent would be Marvel's Man-Thing series from the 70s--available in black in white in an inexpensive reprint volume where you have the a southern city being haunted by the presence of the swamp creature juxtaposed with the citizens of the small town. Stories definitely have the Lovecraft influence and the non-horror stories the Faulkner. If you get a chance try it and see. It might help you focus the literary side of your thesis in visualizing how it can be done.

[Pendragon]

Lovecraft I know very well. The problem lies with Faulkner. There, I draw a blank. Arkham is, of course, home to Miskatonic University, one of the few places a true copy of the Necromonian lies. They send the expidetion to The Mountains of Madness that uncovered the Great Old Ones. The Necromonian is at the heart of many of the other stories, as it is the prime source of dark magic. Hope this helps.

[Ryan_002]

In my opinion, the greatest difficulty you will face is a quality Bakhtin (see M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays) related to Greek Myth, that of "Epic Distance". Lovecraft was extremely influenced by Greek mythology, so much so that as a child he "worshipped" dieties of the Greek pantheon (see Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, Maurice Levy 1988). These early influences contributed to Lovecraft's tendency to isolate the past as being a time of grandeur, of the first and the greatest, and so disconnected with the present as to be almost another dimension rather than timeframe. (Although Lovecraft's epic past is far darker than the Greeks envisioned it, the beings and civilisations of that time are always described as being greater and privy to grand secrets). This was the key element that made Lovecraft's work stand out since epic distance is usually a characterstic distinctly lacking in the novel form (exceptions made for pulp or high fantasy). Faulkner, being a modernist writer under the influence of Joyce and Woolfe, is working within a school of writing that generally seeks to aestheticize the mundane. In most modernist novels, such as To the Lighthouse (Woolfe) or Ulysses (Joyce), the situations described are entirely normal, there is no "plot" per se, and the writer simply highlights how the everyday ups and downs can be as majestic as the fantasies of a novel. In the most broad terms, the two seem to use modalities that are in fact conflicting. One seeks to highlight an imaginary world greater than ours, the other seeks to portray the mundane world as being magical. Furthermore, Lovecraft actually seems somewhat further ahead (I don't mean better but simply newer) in that the Call of Cthulhu represents the gradual transformation of the Gothic into modern Horror, whereas The Sound and the Fury conforms more strongly to straightforward Gothic conventions. Also, what you want to look out for is the scene with Dilsey, where she is cast in a more favourable light than the Quentins by Faulkner. Bear in mind that Lovecraft was also a product of his time, and was in fact openly discriminatory. (He openly confessed disgust at the migrant Chinese and African American communities, see the same text I indicated earlier). The professor is killed by a negro, and the vodoo practitioners of New Orleans are implicity...not caucasian. Note Lovecraft's denunciation of the practices of non western cultures, and that in related stories the worship of Dagon came to Innsmouth from pacific islanders.

It occurs to me however that you can probably do a bit of academic jujitsu and claim that this is in fact a similarity, since both writers are attempting to push the boundaries of their favoured modes. Content wise the biggest similarity would be the poor presentation of academia as being detached to an almost immoral degree (the blase attitude of Miskatonic in the face of cosmic horror, the nihilstic and apathetic philosophy of Jason Compson III, who causes a suicide). In addition, both writers describe a struggle against the elusiveness of truth, and the inability of man to handle something irrational (the horror of Cthulhu is not in that it is a big monster, but in the simple fact that it exists. It is "the thing that should not be", which is a moniker the Quentins might well apply to Benjy).

Interesting comparison though, and I think you can do really well if you work on the angle that both texts are drawing heavily from the Gothic tradition.

[PeterL]

I like your idea, and I think that there is a lot to it Lovecraft's family had been fairly well off in the past, but the society in which they did well had changed, which is similar to Faulkner's situation. The increased in immigration after WW1 changed both Providence and Salem, the model for Arkham, at least as much as industrialization had changed them in the 1800's. Some of what Lovecraft mythologized the situation that he saw, but some of his writing was simply fantastic.

In different ways Faulkner and Lovecraft were trying to show, tell, and explain in some way what had happened.

I wish you good luck with your thesis. I think that Lovecraft was a nearly great writer, and his skill as a crafter of characters was truly great. His use of language to demonstrate a character aand a setting was unique.