Notes on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls"
Millenia of the oppressor's rituals.
parasitical
kidnapping the commoners
Devolution.
Ancestral memories: the narrator sees his family role (the Swineherd) in dreams once he moves into the renovated Exham Priory.
A cultish cabal at the heart of a benighted and powerful family.
fed upon others as past of their continuous
engagement over millenia on the site
with the old rituals of the Magna Mater.
a literal expression of social relations between high
and low over many different types of
economic system
slave: Rome
Medieval: Britain
capitalist: United Kingdom
Archeology: Layers of ritual horror, one laid atop the other
The ARRAS in the round bedroom:
How thin the arras of social reality between
everyday apprehension of society
and our historically [and genealogically] determined
selves.
--
A tradition in Lovecraft's fiction:
Bad families
Bad ancestors
Bad patriarchs
Bad progenitors
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Ward possessed by his ancestor Curwen.
"The Lurking Fear"
A family degenerates into lightning-deranged subterranean
cannibals over generations.
"The Unnameable"
A thing kept in the attic beyond rational lifespan
"The Thing on the Doorstep"
A wizard father inhabits the body of his married
daughter?
A theme in Lovecraft: the past is a key to understanding the true horror
of our situation as peons in a galactic machine
of primal violence.
"The Rats in the Walls" is a great nay-saying.
In the world of the story, the FATHER, a rich Yankee magnate, ends up
in an asylum. There is no place for his family's autarky today.
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