Discovering Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time

Something old and something new(er).  The two volumes in my collection that contain The Shadow Out of Time.  The one on the left is from 1982 and contains some errors that are corrected in the one of the right from 2005.

 
Somehow, I have never read The Shadow Out of Time until the past few days.  I own a dozen volumes of Lovecraft tales in my collection.  The story is not contained in any of my mass market paperbacks from the 1980's.  It is offered at the end of a larger paperback (see photo above) from that same period but I never read it.  It also appears in my Library of America hardback that I purchased in the mid-2000's.  But, while I read many other stories in those two volumes (most of which also appear in my mass market editions), The Shadow Out of Time has escaped my attention for whatever reason.

In a way this was a bonus.  After all these years, I had a new H. P. Lovecraft story to read.  That was exciting.  What's more, now having read it, I can say that it is one of his best works.  While that makes not reading it for so long seem strange, it also makes reviewing the tale all the more pleasurable.  This is new ground for me from one of my favorite writers.  (See here, here, here, here, here, and here for previous postings on Lovecraft.)
 
This inspired me to review my Lovecraft lexicon and encyclopedia for the first time in years.  It also sent me scouring through YouTube to see what is available there these days.  My, how times have changed.  There was scant Lovecraftian content 5 – 6 years ago.  However, in the past few years the number of videos has exploded.  You can spend many hours watching what is available about Lovecraft and his works.  Additionally, many of his stories are freely available in audio form on YouTube.  This was not the case just a few years ago.  I guess interest in Lovecraft has only grown wider since I started this blog, without me realizing it.

That is an exciting discovery.  Lovecraft has his faults.  He was certainly racist and that comes through in many of his stories.  His writing is also in a stiff and antiquated style that is anything but contemporary, though for me that adds to the appeal of his tales.  But, largely, the general reading public has discovered that no one is comparable to him for gripping and often disturbing weird fiction.  The nature of his stories is just as chilling today as it ever was.

The Shadow Out of Time is one of his last pieces of fiction, dating from the mid-1930's.  In it he exhibits his mature craftsmanship and certain aspects of the story reflect upon his larger body of work, especially At the Mountains of Madness.  This is the story of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor at the fictitious Miskatonic University, who is suddenly struck down before his students mid-lecture with a bizarre attack of amnesia.

Dr. Peaslee has to relearn how to speak properly.  He does not remember anything about himself or his wife and children.  His body is affected by the attack as if he has had a stroke, with him having to regain full use of his motor abilities.  While all these abilities soon return to him, he has no idea about his former self.  Perhaps even more strangely, he develops mental faculties beyond what he previously possessed with a fierce penchant for learning topics outside his former area of expertise.

His wife is so shaken by the turn that she divorces him.  Of his three children, only the middle son remains in contact with him.  He is untroubled by all this since he associates no past experience with his family.  Instead, he undertakes a prodigious research project that takes him all over the world.  He sometimes speaks in a manner that will haunt some of his youngest physicians more than a decade later when they discover that uncommon phrases and knowledge of that time became commonplace in the future.  How did Peaslee know such things ahead of their time?  He routinely mentions things “in dim ages outside the range of accepted history.”

After a little over five years, Peaslee suddenly snaps out of it.  His former self reemerges, but without a clue as to what has happened to him in the meantime.  His eccentricities vanish.  He attempts to put his life back together and start anew but he his plagued by “strange dreams and queer ideas.”  He has a disorienting sense of time.

The professor is driven to research past amnesia cases resulting in similar dreams and he does find records of such rare cases in the past.  “The essence was always the same – a person of keen thoughtfulness seized by a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge.”

Then things become stranger for him.  He develops a “queer fear” of seeing himself in mirrors.  The dreams become more vivid.  He finds himself engulfed in a “cyclopean” world of massive buildings and corridors.  This leads him to further research what he is experiencing.  He combs libraries for information on certain myths which lead to the “assumption that mankind is only one – perhaps the least – of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet's long and largely unknown career.”

These myths concern a “Great Race” that once inhabited the earth.  Here Lovecraft goes to considerable lengths to offer the reader precise details as to everything about such a race of beings.  This race has been on earth for many millions of years.  They came from the planet Yith, escaping whatever doom faced by that place.  

The Great Race has done this many times.  They inhabit the bodies of whatever race happens to be handy and remain in those bodies – traveling through both space and time – until faced with extinction.  At which time the most adept members of the race transfer their consciousness to some other host race, thus perpetuating themselves.  Since they can travel through both space and time, they have accumulated a vast amount of knowledge, jumping from host to host whenever faced with extinction.  Basically, they have become immortal though they have existed in many forms and will exist in many other forms in the future, none of which are human.

In their present incarnation they have cone shaped bodies.  They built an ancient, enormous subterranean city on earth where they live and archive their vast knowledge in endless volumes of specially sealed books.  Being masters of time, they are aware of their own fate.  At some point in the future these polyp-like creatures will rise up from deep inside the earth and destroy them.  But the Yithians will have already vaulted into some cockroach-like bodies before that can happen.  This will occur on earth long after humans have become extinct.    

Lovecraft describes the Yithians present cone-shaped bodies in great detail along with their culture, political system, the amount of leisure time they have thanks to machines completely running their economy and even the wars they have been involved in.  It turns out that they have had conflicts in the past with the Old Ones which are so prominent in At the Mountains of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu.

A couple of thoughts on this.  My first reaction was what a mind-blowing concept Lovecraft created here.  It is very complex and filled with multiple encounters with a vast array of forms of beings, places, periods of time, all mixed together.  Incredible.  My next thought was that it is rather ridiculous that Peaslee was able to find out so much detail about these “myths” but you have to just go with it to enjoy the story.  

Finally, The Shadow Out of Time reveals Lovecraft's philosophy of “cosmicism” in perhaps its starkest articulation.  I plan another blog post on cosmicism itself but for purposes of this review suffice it to say that humanity is not involved in any of this.  The universe is filled with a much bigger game being played by multiple races and forces that humans are clueless about.  In this story, Lovecraft puts human anthropomorphism in its place.  We are nothing of consequence.

Back to the story.  Yithians have inhabited a few human bodies through history just as they have all the other races through time and space – to learn from them and add to their truly colossal store of knowledge.  So goes the myth anyway.  Peaslee himself dismisses all this as a mad fantasy and that his dreams are the result of too much exposure to this sort of information while he was in his “secondary state” of amnesia.  Then the dreams of himself surrounded by the gargantuan architecture of some colossal city get worse.  

“For a while my chief concern  during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange rooms. […] And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till one night I could not resist it.  At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatsoever.  A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length.  Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaley, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base.  That was waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.”

Peaslee decides to document his dreams and the myths apparently behind them in a major psychological journal which is eventually read by a “prominent” mining engineer in Australia. (This requires another leap of faith, do such engineers really read psychological journals?) The Aussie sends Peaslee a letter accompanied by some photographs of desert ruins that precisely match the professor's persistent menacing dreams.

An expedition is organized by Miskatonic University to the western Australian desert.  Peaslee is joined by his middle son, Wingate, who is also a pilot, and several other academics including Dr. William Dyer, who ventured to the Antarctic earlier in At the Mountains of Madness.  

After a long “leisurely” voyage by ship (this being the 1930's), the expedition arrives at the Great Sandy Desert and, indeed, finds numerous artifacts that seem straight out of Peaslee's dreams.  He has difficulty sleeping, of course, and decides to go out into the desert alone on long walks under the bright moon (“gibbous moon” is a favored expression of Lovecraft).  Ultimately, it is on one of these walks that he is drawn toward the northeast of the camp.  There he discovers the source of all the fragments, the ruined ancient city itself buried under the desert (again, there is a strong similarity to At the Mountains of Madness here).

He journeys downward through an opening he discovers by chance and Lovecraft does a masterful job of taking him and the reader through the ruins by flash light.  The further Pealess ventures the more familiar everything becomes until he no longer fears becoming lost.  “For this was no chance or remote resemblance.  Definitely and absolutely, the millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkam.  True, my dreams showed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that account.  I was wholly and horribly oriented.”

His adventure continues with some of Lovecraft's most compelling prose.  The atmosphere is well established.  The man is alone with his fascination and fear.  “I was awake and dreaming at the same time.”  Wonderful phrasing to describe the junction of Peaslee's dreams with the reality of the gigantic antiquated city ruins in which he found himself.  He knows exactly where top go.  He knows exactly what to do.  Doing so, his dreamlike mind unleashes an existential horror.

“I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingling with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines.  Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful, momentary flashes of a nonvisual consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, batlike flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.”

By now the reader realizes that a Yithian had possessed Peaslee for five years, to learn what it could.  In the meantime, Peaslee's mind went back in time to a conical body when this subterranean city was in its prime.  Moreover, this has happened numerous other times in the past and the future, to a few other humans and to individuals of all sorts of races on their respective planets.  The immensity of this horror is well-expressed.  Peaslee's last act within the ruins unleashes his final horror but, as always with Lovecraft, proof of everything is illusive and/or nonexistent in the end.

Perhaps you can guess what the final horror is.  It is not unexpected and yet, reading the story's concluding paragraphs is both riveting and disturbing.  As I said, The Shadow Out of Time is truly mind-blowing in its staggering immensity and yet Lovecraft proves himself the maestro of bringing all this vast horror down to the existential experience of a single solitary individual.  Even if you figure out what is coming in the end it takes nothing away from the overall effect of the tale.

In reading this story in my old paperback, I was drawn to comparing many passages with my 2005 edition from the Library of America.  I became aware of the extent to which my old paperbacks were not completely accurate in their presentation of all these stories.  Liberties were widely taken with publishing Lovecraft's works after his death.  Some stories were published from secondary rather than original sources.  Some descriptive words were left out.  Long paragraphs were chopped into smaller chunks for contemporary readership.

S. T. Joshi, probably the world's foremost expert on all things Lovecraft and the author of a fascinating biography of his strange life which I also own, took great pains and years of effort to piece together “authentic” versions of the stories.  That is what is available in my 2005 edition.  These are also available for free at hplovecraft.com, a magnificent online resource.  While the differences are minor in most cases and in no way change either the story or the unique atmosphere that Lovecraft creates, it was interesting to spot the inaccuracies that I have been reading routinely for most of my life and to realize that there are improved versions of these incredible and rewarding tales that were not available in my youth.

Lovecraft struggled with writing The Shadow Out of Time.  It took several months to complete the story.  Even then he wasn't certain he liked it.  He never shared anything except complete, typed copies of his stories with his closest friends but in this case he showed his handwritten proof to a couple of associates, one of whom actually typed it for him.  Astounding Stories bought the rights to publish it in 1936 without having even read it.  The inaccuracies from the original manuscript began with its publication, as they apparently did with almost all of his fiction.  These inconsistencies seem to have grown worse with subsequent publication through the years.

The situation presented in The Shadow Out of Time is intimately horrible when you consider it.  A man's body is possessed by a vastly superior alien race while his mind is sent back in time to intermingle with these bizarre creatures in their vast city.  He returns to his senses only to discover that five years have passed and that his wife has divorced him for acting so strangely.  He cannot sleep because of increasingly pervasive dreams that terrify him.  He desperately attempts to deal with his malady by detailing it psychologically which only leads to further terrors when he discovers that what he thought were dreams were actually his remembrances.  

It is chilling just to consider the bare bones of the tale but when you add Lovecraft's special phrasings and atmospheric descriptions you find yourself immersed in literature that is unique in its morose existential affect.  The Shadow Out of Time is a fantastic achievement and shows the author's prowess during his most mature period.  It easily ranks as one of his best stories.  I found myself rereading sections of it both because I was blown away by the sheer weirdness and scale of what he articulates and because the prose itself is so creepy.  

Like all Lovecraft, I prefer to read him in the winter months.  The unexpected treat of discovering something so superb that has, for whatever reasons, alluded me all my life made it even more enjoyable.  I will return to this story again (and again).  It is so complex I'm sure that there are all sorts of details I did not catch in the first reading.  For a few evenings this January, Lovecraft was new to me again.  That beckons back to my college days and to many other splendid days (and nights) spent with this brilliant writer through my own experience of space and time.