At the Mountains of Madness Read Online Free Page A

identify with the Old Ones, Lovecraft describes their government as “evidently complex and probably socialistic.” This could come only from the Lovecraft of the 1930s, who had come to see “socialism” as “probably necessary.”  14 This flurry of apparent “leftism,” however, does not put him out of kilter with Spengler. Lovecraft has merely replaced his faith in an “aristocracy” with one in some kind of culturally trained technocracy—a different elite, but an elite sharply differentiated from the masses just the same. He does not advocate democracy, grassroots or otherwise, but an “oligarchy of intelligence and education.”  15
    At the heart of Lovecraft’s elitism—including his “socialism”—was a visceral mistrust of and antipathy for the masses. Lovecraft believed that reforms were necessary in order to forestall an alternative that appalled him.
    “Something must be done,” he says. “The old system . . . leads absolutely nowhere except to a suffering bound to breed violent and disastrous revolution,”  16 and “the need of legal change, if we are to avert a revolution, is pretty manifest today.”  17 In short, Lovecraft was a “socialist” precisely because of his loathing of revolution. This pathological hatred is the horizon of the novel.
    “I’m no Bolshevik!” Lovecraft insisted,  18 a fact made clear in his vicious 1919 essay “Bolshevism.” Even after he had moved to the left and become a critic of capitalism, he excoriated the “total
cultural
disruption”  19 of the Russian Revolution. His fear is of revolution’s supposed degradation of “culture.” Race is still firmly evident in this concern, and here it can be seen how it segues into class, the other key axis on which this hatred of revolution is articulated. The uprising of the masses is something Lovecraft views with evident terror. This is because he both views such masses as racially inferior (“sub-human Russian rabble” in the case of the Bolsheviks), and loathes them precisely
because
they are masses. There is little more contemptible and terrifying to this elitist. It is with this in mind that we can make sense of the sudden switch in our allegiance vis-à-vis the Old Ones, and the uncovering of a fate worse than (cultural) death.
    Lovecraft locates the most telling clue to his ultimate nightmare in a sudden, “supremely radical” change in the carvings. “We realised, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones’ sculpture at the time of the tunneling. . . . But now, in this deeper section . . . there was a sudden difference . . . in basic nature as well as in mere quality . . . involving [a] profound and calamitous degradation of skill.”
    A few pages later, one of the perpetrators of that “degenerate work” appears. It is, of course, not an Old One, but a Shoggoth.
    We have learned the story of the Shoggoths over the course of the novel. They are, simply, slaves, created by the Old Ones and bred to be beasts of burden. There was a time when they were “uppity,” and a war of subjugation was fought. They were defeated. But that was then. The story of that abortive revolt can serve no purpose other than to explain the final confrontation of the book, its ultimate horror. In the abyss into which our protagonists literally descend, they face the murderer of the Old Ones, and it is a slave that has turned. The Shoggoths are, literally, revolting.
    What can this mean but that the Shoggoths have triumphed? The first revolution was a dress rehearsal, like the 1905 Russian revolution. At some point between then and now they tried again, and succeeded. The Shoggoth’s “shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles” is the logical extension (literally
ad nauseam
) of Lovecraft’s dehumanizing, subhumanizing vision of the masses. Is it a coincidence that the Shoggoth stares at the narrator with “myriads of temporary eyes”? That it is compared to a subway train, a working-class,