Our Cynical Omelet

Words Fail You

Posted on 2/23/2010 at 11:17:13 AM

This is simultaneously the thing I hate and love about horror stories of a certain era, in this case as spoken by a character in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan.

She was sitting up in bed, and I listened to her as
she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now
I would not dare whisper in the blackest night, though I stood
in the midst of a wilderness.  You, Villiers, you may think you
know life, and London, and what goes on day and night in this
dreadful city; for all I can say you may have heard the talk of
the vilest, but I tell you you can have no conception of what I
know, not in your most fantastic, hideous dreams can you have
imaged forth the faintest shadow of what I have heard–and
seen. Yes, seen. I have seen the incredible, such horrors that
even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street and ask
whether it is possible for a man to behold such things and live.

The cheapest device in the proverbial book, the staple of early (and a lot of other) Lovecraft: The Unspeakable. But what on earth is it? In many of these tales, we are dealing with educated Englishmen who would certainly have the Greek and Latin to come to grips with what Plato thought about young boys, what horrors are perpetrated against women and children in war, and what sort of things Caligula got up to on his days off.  Popular fiction of the time had lots of bloodthirsty druids and opium fiends… so what’s so darned unspeakable?

I’m haunted by the paranoid idea that everyone who read that in 1894 knew exactly what Machen wasn’t saying, and that I don’t.