In gratitude for Carter’s assistance, the entire army of ghouls and nightgaunts agrees to accompany Carter in approaching the Great Ones in their castle and making a plea for his sunset city. Flying over Leng and Inganok, they see Kadath looming in front of them—a mountain of almost inconceivable height, with the Great Ones’ castle on top. They begin an ascent, but after a time Carter notices that the night-gaunts are no longer flapping their wings: a “force not of earth” has seized the army and is bearing it up to the castle. Swept into the castle, Carter finds to his amazement that the place is entirely empty and dark, except for one small light that glowed from a tower room. Then a “daemon trumpet” blasts three times, and Carter notices that he is now alone—the ghouls and night-gaunts have disappeared. Accompanied by an array of “giant black slaves,” a “tall, slim figure with the young face of an antique Pharaoh” approaches him. It is Nyarlathotep, “messenger of the Other Gods,” and he speaks at length to Carter. The Great Ones, the gods of earth, have deserted their castle to dwell amidst Carter’s own sunset city, and this is why he himself is denied it in his dreams. But what is that sunset city? Nyarlathotep tells him:
“For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love….
“…These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New-England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.”
What Carter must do is to go back to his sunset city and urge the Great Ones to return to their castle. Nyarlathotep provides Carter with a shantak to take him back, and they fly off. But Carter becomes aware that it is all a trick: the shantak plunges him “through shoals of shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness” and is heading toward the great throne of Azathoth in “those inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time.” It then occurs to Carter that all he has to do is
< previous page page_73 next page > < previous page page_74 next page >
Page 74
wake up in his Boston room, leave dreamland behind, and take cognizance of the beauty to be found on his doorstep. He does so, and Nyarlathotep’s plan to destroy Carter and deprive him of his sunset city is foiled.
While writing the story, HPL expressed considerable doubts about its merits: “I…am very fearful that Randolph Carter’s adventures may have reached the point of palling on the reader; or that the very plethora of weird imagery may have destroyed the power of any one image to produce the desired impression of strangeness” ( SL2.94). And elsewhere: “Actually, it isn’t much good; but forms useful practice for later and more authentic attempts in the novel form” ( SL2.95). The novel has, indeed, inspired highly contradictory judgments, some HPL enthusiasts finding it almost unreadable and others, like L.Sprague de Camp ( Lovecraft: A Biography[Doubleday, 1975], p. 280), comparing it to the Alicebooks and the fantasies of George MacDonald.
If there is any dominant literary influence on the novel, it is probably William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), which is similarly an exotic fantasy written without chapter divisions. Several other features of plot and diction bring Beckford’s Arabian fantasy to mind. One other possible influence is John Uri Lloyd’s curious novel of underworld adventure, Etidorhpa(1895), which HPL read in 1918 (see SL 1.54–55). This strange work, full of windy philosophy and science defending the idea of a hollow earth, nevertheless contains some spectacularly bizarre and cosmic imagery of the narrator’s seemingly endless underworld adventures, although no specific passage seems to be echoed in HPL’s work. Nevertheless, HPL’s dreamworld creates the impression of being somehow underground (as in Carter’s descent of the 700 steps to the gate of deeper slumber), so perhaps he was thinking of how Lloyd’s narrator purportedly plunges beneath the actual surface of the earth on his peregrinations. (Some have believed that the episode involving the high-priest with the yellow silken mask is an allusion to Robert W.Chambers’s The King in Yellow[1895], but HPL would not read this work until two months after completing the Dream-Quest.)
The novel seeks to unite most of HPL’s previous “Dunsanian” tales, making explicit references to features and characters in such tales as “Celephaïs,” “The Cats of Ulthar,” “The Other Gods,” “The White Ship,” and others (not to mention the “real-world” story “Pickman’s Model”); but in doing so it creates considerable confusion. In particular, it suddenly transfers the settings of these tales into the dreamworld, whereas those tales themselves had manifestly been set in the dim prehistory of the real world.
It has frequently been conjectured that the tale carries out HPL’s old novel idea “Azathoth” (1922); but while this may be true superficially in the sense that both works seem to center around protagonists venturing on a quest for some wondrous land, in reality the novel of 1926 presents a thematic reversal of the novel idea of 1922. In the earlier work—conceived at the height of HPL’s Decadent phase—the unnamed narrator “travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled”; but he does this because “age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men.” In other words, the narrator’s only refuge from prosy reality is the world of dream. Carter thinks that this is the case for him, but at the end he finds more value and beauty in that
< previous page page_74 next page > < previous page page_75 next page >
Page 75
reality—transmuted by his dreams and memories—than he believed. (Carter’s realization is prefigured in the episode involving Kuranes.)
In this sense, the resurrection of the Dunsanian idiom—not used since “The Other Gods” (1921)—is meant not so much as a homage as a repudiation of Dunsany, at least of what HPL at this moment took Dunsany to be. Just as, when he wrote “Lord Dunsany and His Work” in 1922, he felt that the only escape from modern disillusion would be to “worship afresh the music and colour of divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial,” so in 1926—after two years spent away from the New England soil that he now realized was his one true anchor against chaos and meaninglessness—he felt the need to reject these decorative artificialities.