I’ll throw out a few ideas for you to consider as you read “The Music of Eric Zann” (1921) by H.P. Lovecraft… (text available here, and audio available from The Classic Tales – use iTunes to access the episode)
(Incidentally, before I begin, I should note that the wonderful Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a Lovecraft-inspired line of fragrances called “A Picnic in Arkham,” and one of the scents is named after this story. So we may not know how Zann’s music sounded, exactly, but we can be certain of how it smelled. Personally, I recommend BPAL’s Miskatonic University, which is a fantastic fragrance, but your mileage may vary.)
1. One of the many things that fascinates me about this story is its open-endedness. First, the horror defines name and description. Second, Zann’s “full account” is blown away into the abyss before we can learn of “the marvels and terrors” Zann reported. We are left with vagueness and suggestion only. I think this adds to the story, because it invites the reader to participate actively in the tale with his/her imagination, while underscoring there are things far beyond our comprehension. What do you think?
2. Another thing that fascinates me is the idea of unfixed geographic location. The narrator literally cannot go back again; he can’t find the Rue d’Auseil. The Parisian streets, like the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts, seem to allow and deny access to the place at will. How do you think this adds to the message and/or atmosphere of the story?
3. To return to our previous conversation about “The Outsider” and mirrors, it seems to me something similar occurs in “The Music of Eric Zann.” Zann goes to significant effort to keep the narrator from looking out the window. Of course the narrator eventually does, and he finds what he never expected. To quote scholar Donald R. Burleson,
He has reached out, he has touched the glass – because any such look outward into the chaos of the abyss is also a look inward; the window becomes a mirror in which the narrator sees himself for what he really is: a frightened and ignorant figure not prepared to deal with the nature of things.
What do you think of this? To what degree is Lovecraft’s focus the vast landscape of the unknowable cosmos, and to what degree is it the inner landscape of the individual human?
Travis Prinzi on 
Arabella Figg on 
SPT on 
Loading ...
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
There is stop motion video Die Musik des Erich Zann which gives us an idea of what the music might have sounded like, albeit for the piano and not the violin. It’s on YouTube. Atonal, of course.
Despite my obsessive reading and re-reading habits, I’m pretty new to interpreting literature on the anagogical level. Hopefully I’ll have some small share of beginner’s luck and this won’t come off completely stupid!
Taking all the questions at once: The open-endedness interested me too. The Burleson quote leans much more toward the idea of the ‘inner landscape’ than did my first impressions, but it does make sense. If mirrors are a place of revelation, then Zann’s open window was an utter failure to reveal, at least in the sense the main character expected—an apocalypse that wasn’t. But if the point of the character’s look into the abyss was the understanding of his own littleness, we have a resolution, however broken and halfway-there that may be.
Maybe it’s because I generally avoid the horror genre (sleeping peacefully is much too nice to overindulge in the weird), but I was very struck by the difference between Lovecraft’s view of the unknown/mysterious and the view put forward in most of the fantasy fiction I’ve read. I’m used to considering the supernatural as potentially friendly–dangerous, yes, but good, as long as it is the source or ally of light rather than darkness. It has the power both to kill me and to be my true champion. The Lovecraftian encounter with anything extraordinary seems to be terror followed by desolation and a sort of permanent confusion.
Add to that that what he first saw (or rather, heard) as beauty grew more nightmarish into something finally “accursed” at the end, and you have a man whom I would not have wanted to be at three A.M. Or anytime–I like my daylight un-haunted too.
Red Rocker, I haven’t gone to listen to that video, but as a musician I have to agree: “Atonal, of course.”
I was going to make a similar point, librarylily, about the protagonist’s glimpse into the abyss not revealing much, either about the abyss or himself, except for his own incomprehension and smallness. When he finally looks out the window all he sees is:
the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth.
If we could say that Lovecraft’s overall theme is the helplessness and sheer insignificance of man before the greater (and malign) forces of the universe, then we could place his protagonists on a continuum with respect to their relationship to these forces. Some are curious, and seek to explore and understand the forces, until turned back by horror and fear. Some seek to destroy the forces – with laughable results. Others, like the current protagonist, are repelled and attracted at the same time, but again, turn back when they get too close. And some others can not turn back. The forces they initially fear are part of their birthright, and they end up turning fish or cannibal. They are the ones for whom Nietzche’s saying applies: when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back.
Is Lovecraft interested in the inner landscape of the individual human? Last year, same time, I took the tack that Lovecraft’s cosmic forces are a metaphor for our basic drives, the id in general and sexuality in particular, which for him became tinged with the horrible because of his father’s death from tertiary syphillis. I admit now that that’s a fairly reductionistic reading. Wikipedia says that he suffered from night terrors and that inspired – powered? – his writing. Night terrors, as far as I know, are just about emotions, mainly fear, without accompanying content or images. So I would conjecture that he was in fact writing about fear, and putting the face of his eldritch gods on it to make a good story.
As one who has suffered from night terrors in the past, I can tell you they aren’t fun. It’s essentially a feeling of being awake but knowing you’re asleep & thus being paralyzed although your mind is awake & wants to take some sort of action to confront or flee from the overwhelming terror that you’re feeling. There’s a sense of something inexpressibly evil just off of the corner of your eye & if only you could make some sort of movement, it would go away. Your body being asleep, this of course makes such a gesture very difficult until after a supreme effort you literally force yourself to wake up.
As I said, not fun. Knock on wood but I haven’t had one of those in over a decade or more, & I never want one again. If Lovecraft is trying to put a face to his night terrors, then he occasionally is successful & then at other times not.
revgeorge,
I think I’ve experienced something like that on occasion. I want to open my eyes, but my muscles won’t respond to my brain. It does take a “supreme effort” as you say – and not always successful. I don’t get a sense of evil, more of a feeling of being buried alive.
Ugh.
Well, at least I now know what it is.
The fact that the protagonist is unable to refind the Rue d’Auseil is partially consistent with three things but not wholly congruent with any one thing. These facts are: (i) consistent with alternate dimensional reality or alternate timeline in the fact that he cannot even find it on old maps or find anyone that has been there. (ii) The facts concerning this street are consistent with a stairway to heaven (where heaven is equal to space) or some other Tower of Babel archetype. “I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of fights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall.” I gathered from one source (but have yet to confirm it) that ‘auseil’ means nothing in French but is close to the word for ‘gate.’ Throughout the story, we slowly learn that Zann is communicating through music (with some entity) not unlike the plot of the motion picture ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ When the boarder finally looks out the gabled window, he finds himself staring into deep space. “I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth.” Outwarding exploding blasts of air send Zann’s sheets out the window not unlike what we would expect from the connection of a common-place room to the vacuum of space. This is a scene common in science fiction when a spacecraft is breached and everything is sucked out that single point.(iii) The facts concerning the Rue D’Auseil are consistent with passing over into some ghostly sort of deadzone as is the case so often in myth where crossing a river is symbolic of going into the afterlife. Crossing the river Styx, the Nile, the Ganges or even the Jordan are all metaphors for dying. “The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river” But this account of passing over unromanticizes death with it’s allusion to putrification. “The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognize them at once.” (Lovecraft revisits the water black putrid water theme in ‘The Rats in the Walls’ which is a work of pure gothic horror. “…as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under the endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea.”) The street seems to be populated by persons who would fit the demographics of the occupants of any graveyard. “The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old.” All the occupants are either very old, or in the case of Blandot, comprimised and medically fragile. “I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot” Paralytic simply means he is in a paralyzed, and in a wheelchair, which is awfully curious since he lives on a steep staired street and in a five storey house. Futhermore, Zann himself takes on a death-like state at the climax of the story while continuing to saw his viole at fantastic speeds. “When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void.” Everyone on this street may already be dead not unlike the plot of the motion picture ‘The Others.’ At the climax, the protagonist has an encounter with a third entity in the room that is not Zann which he only feels. “Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol.” This is left to our imagination to be anything from a ghost, to Giger’s Alien, to Clive Barker’s Cenobites from the Hellraiser mythos, to any other sort of extra or ultra terrestrial.
It is infinitely more interesting and weird that all these genres are mixed up, undefined, and placed on the same axis by Lovecraft. I am most famously quoted by my peers as expressing my disbelief in extra-terrestrials by asking the question “why would there be monsters in heaven?” In this story, heaven, space, monsters, aliens and death all cross each other. I don’t know, what do you think Amy?
Jason, I like your breakdown of the three possibilities, as well as your connections between this story and more recent narratives. I think the blending of genres that you describe explain why Lovecraft is seen as a father of modern horror, fantasy, and science fiction all at the same time.