Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; Hypnos

Welcome back to the creeping revision of H.P. Lovecraft’s work!  This week I’m delving into Hypnos and it’s duality meaning.

The basic story is that the classic unreliable narrator meets a man who had a god-like face almost as ‘white as the marble of Pentelicus.’  The man had passed out in a train station, and our narrator went to him and when the man opened his eyes the narrator knew ‘he would be thenceforth my only friend.’  They discuss the universe and everything within it, and the narrator sculpts his friend.  Our narrators new friend has a secret desire that he dare not speak of, to rule and go past the barriers of our known world.  They experiment in drugs and try to get into the sleep world (which I can only imagine is a precursor, or even the beginnings of the dream-cycle pantheon).  Then one one of these trips the friend (unnamed…for now), goes past an impassible barrier in the dream world, and comes back terrified and visibly aged.  The two then vow to sleep as little as possible, also with the help of drugs.  They age horribly and they pass their time in big groups and go to as many parties as possible, until one night as they are sleeping something strange happens as a light glows over his friends head and our narrator can see the disembodied face that looks as his friend once did before he went through the impassible barrier.  The police come and gather the narrator and tell him that he has been alone, that all along he has been alone…that there was no friend.  the only evidence is a bust of his friend with the name Hypnos.

There is an emerging theme that I had never known about from hearing about Lovecraft and that is the drugs.  There have been many stories thus far eliciting that the narrators are using drugs to help them get past the barriers and see what is beyond.  One cant help but think of the drug dreams of Irving Welch, and wonder if these are stories of fever dreams.  It would be a provocative theory, though probably an unpopular one, but I would need to read more to see if the thread continues.

The connectors in the story are traced back to Greece.  The narrator is a sculptor and he says he spends his free time sculpting his friend, who has a forehead as white as the marble of Pentelicus…a mountain in Athens known for it’s marble.  Then at the end we find that the friends name was Hypnos, which was the Greek demi-god of sleep.  So we come to a crossroads.  The story is either telling us that the narrator finds this marble bust, and through his drug or fever dream, thinks that the bust opens its eyes and becomes his friend.  Remember that the friend was found asleep in the train station, a place where it would make sense for a bust to be.  Our narrator is lost in the HYPNOtic gaze of the bust, steals it and the drugs bring him through the adventures.  The strange light over his friend at the end, is actually light over the bust and the cracking of the narrators reality.  Remember that the idea was put there by drugs (one can only guess that it was a hallucinogenic), and he then stayed awake with the help of drugs.  Sleep deprivation on top of a psychotic break will only deepen psychosis.

The other option, is that the events of the story are unfolded exactly how they are told, but frankly with the evidence that Lovecraft deposits throughout the story, this is not very likely.  In any case, this was probably my favorite story thus far, right up there with The Tomb and The Tree.

Join me on Thursday this week (08/17) for one of Lovecraft’s Poems “Nathicana”.  and if you want to read along with me I’m reading the Del Rey edition of “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”. ISBN:  0345331052