HP Lovecraft’s Dagon - psychosis and language I read the…
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HP Lovecraft’s Dagon - psychosis and language
I read the HP Lovecraft story “Dagon”. I think it’s emblematic of the main subject of his work: the unspeakable. Summary: a castaway sees a seamonster and is driven insane. That’s the whole story, it’s great.
Trying to puzzle out why he wrote it reminds me of something I read in Lacan, a French psychoanalyst. Per Lacan, psychosis is literally about not having the language to describe what’s happening to you. Raw experience is stabilized by language; I know what happened to me because I can describe it, I can integrate it with the rest of my life with words that have stable meaning.
When I can’t talk about what happened, it’s like a tumor; it grows inside me but does no work, it just burns energy.
The narrator tries to find language for what happened to him. The closest he can get is a mythical seamonster named “Dagon,” but that doesn’t get him any closer to being able to talk about what happened to him because nobody believes in “Dagon” anymore.
I think that’s why Lovecraft wrote this odd story in which nothing happens. I read that Lovecraft’s father was institutionalized for mental illness associated with untreated syphilis. A horror nobody in the world can understand, for both of them.
#entertainment
source
I read the HP Lovecraft story “Dagon”. I think it’s emblematic of the main subject of his work: the unspeakable. Summary: a castaway sees a seamonster and is driven insane. That’s the whole story, it’s great.
Trying to puzzle out why he wrote it reminds me of something I read in Lacan, a French psychoanalyst. Per Lacan, psychosis is literally about not having the language to describe what’s happening to you. Raw experience is stabilized by language; I know what happened to me because I can describe it, I can integrate it with the rest of my life with words that have stable meaning.
When I can’t talk about what happened, it’s like a tumor; it grows inside me but does no work, it just burns energy.
The narrator tries to find language for what happened to him. The closest he can get is a mythical seamonster named “Dagon,” but that doesn’t get him any closer to being able to talk about what happened to him because nobody believes in “Dagon” anymore.
I think that’s why Lovecraft wrote this odd story in which nothing happens. I read that Lovecraft’s father was institutionalized for mental illness associated with untreated syphilis. A horror nobody in the world can understand, for both of them.
#entertainment
source
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