Gou Tanabe's Visions of Lovecraft, Part 4: Morbid Palimpsests
Perhaps the only uneven quality of Gou Tanabe's work is how the mangaka handles Lovecraft's frame narratives.
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If you're just jumping on board—or need to refresh your memory—check the previous parts below!
As mentioned previously in this series, Lovecraft set many of his most famous stories along the Eastern Seaboard, primarily New England. Alien horrors are brought home to normal, God-fearing Americans, and readers can undoubtedly empathize with Lovecraft's protagonists when they too are faced with horrors beyond comprehension.
To heighten this sense of nightmarish realism, Lovecraft also heavily relies on frame narratives in which protagonists—clear stand-ins for readers—uncover eldritch truths throughout the story, eventually succumbing to some sort of terrible consequence. If you will allow me to dramatically oversimplify what I view as the typical Lovecraft experience, imagine a mix of the old aphorisms "the devil is in the details" and "curiosity killed the cat".
Of Tanabe's Lovecraft adaptations, his Shadow Over Innsmouth is perhaps the most complete for how it faithfully maintains the original frame narrative, which opens with narrator Robert Olmstead pledging to reveal the truth of the titular Massachusetts town despite the federal government's attempts erase Innsmouth from history. Olmstead traces his lineage to this doomed fishing hamlet, and it was he who witnessed the return of an otherworldly force that, in a sense, had never left in the first place. He hints at "drastic measures" and "a terrible step which lies ahead" (Lovecraft, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth); then, in the conclusion, he references the suicide of his uncle Douglas, who shot himself after making a similar "ancestral journey". Olmstead's admittance that he "bought an automatic and almost took the step" clarifies his implication from the opening, which makes one wonder why Lovecraft was so purposefully vague to begin with.
Tanabe brings this revelation forward in his prologue while omitting the details about Robert's uncle, instead leaving the reader on a tense cliffhanger:
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth 24 |
The panel transitions lend additional gravity to the prologue's final sentence, which had always passed me by whenever I read the original Lovecraft tale. Furthermore, the story's twist is hidden in plain sight. The awful secret that drove Douglas to suicide and nearly caused Robert to do the same is hinted at this transition point, albeit in a way that most will only notice on a second reading.
Then, at the very end of the adaptation, Tanabe expertly reframes Robert's dream of his dead grandmother by presenting the most important information through the Eliza Orne herself. Lovecraft's tendency to 'tell' rather than 'show' leads to climactic moments that ultimately feel like summaries. His version of the dream is a prime example of this, as Robert describes how his grandmother "had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders—destined for him as well—he had spurned with a smoking pistol" (Lovecraft, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"). The line feels much more eerie when presented to Robert (and the reader) by the dream manifestation of Eliza Orne, who leads him towards the truth that Douglas had tried to avoid:
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth 417 |
This choice makes Robert's first-person narration feel much more immediate: he is no longer just paraphrasing his grandmother, but literally following in her footsteps, as his uncle was supposed to years before. The addition of the final line—"Can you imagine how it broke a mother's heart?"—reinforces Robert's connection to Innsmouth and, by extension, untold generations of ancestors before him.
Tanabe's adaptation of "The Call of Cthulhu" is similarly successful in foregrounding elements from the conclusion in order to give the story a sense of urgency. Lovecraft opens the original story with a brief and easily overlooked epigraph, which purports that the the first person narrative was "Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston". Thurston drily recounts how he came into possession of his late uncle's various papers, among which are a "queer clay bas-relief" and a packet titled "CTHULHU CULT" ("The Call of Cthulhu"). The tale begins to take shape as Thurston follows up on three leads initially investigated by his uncle: a local sculptor plagued by nightmares, a police officer who bore witness to an unholy ritual deep in a Louisiana Bayou, and the sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck. It's not until the conclusion that Thurston begins to fear for his own physical (as opposed to mental) well-being:
I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives [...] A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye. (Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu")
While the manga generally follows the same progression as the original tale, right down to the three-act structure, Tanabe adds an original prologue that makes immediately introduces Thurston's desperate attempt to write everything down before it's too late, thus making good on the epigraph's—and the frame narrative's—promise. Chased through the night by a pair of shadowy pursuers, Thurston runs home, locks the door, and begins writing this very story without a moment's hesitation:
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu |
Rather than idly musing about "the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents" and "the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents" like in the source material, Tanabe's version of Thurston writes those same words as the cultists close in on him, emphasizing that this manuscript is his "last will and testament" (Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu 281). Just as with The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Tanabe overhauls The Call of Cthulhu's frame narrative by emphasizing the narrator's impending doom from the very start.
In several other works, however, Tanabe's desire to immerse the reader in the storylines and imagery as soon as possible strips away some of the originals' complexity. His Haunter of the Dark faithfully begins with the mangled body of the late Robert Blake, who was allegedly "killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge." The exact circumstances are, of course, revealed over the course of the tale, but where Tanabe ever-so-slightly deviates from the original story is in telling the tale from Blake's point of view, as opposed to Lovecraft's relatively distant limited omniscient narrator who snidely doubts all supernatural explanations for the protagonist's demise from the very start. Tanabe only hints at this in his introduction as he lingers on Blake's pen, forever halted mid-sentence:
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark |
Lovecraft's narrator is far more critical in the opening paragraphs, going on to write that "among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake’s diary at its face value" (Lovecraft, "The Haunter of the Dark"). By stripping away much of this ironic veneer, Tanabe embraces the "less rational" explanations for Blake's condition and welcomes the reader to do the same. After all, the manga version does what the story cannot: it clearly depicts the titular creature, thus making its existence an objective truth. Where Lovecraft maintains his poker face, Tanabe shows his hand.
But this does not mean that the original narration cannot coexist with this nameless, shapeless being. In Understanding Comics, author and artist Scott McCloud discusses the various types of word/image relationships that can be found throughout the medium, with one in particular that stands out as being unique: the "interdependent" mode, in which "words and pictures go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone" (McCloud 155). He demonstrates comics' capacity for irony with the following examples:
The white lie of the first excerpt and the wry humor of the second show how text can contradict an image to yield a much more interesting story together than if they were presented separately. Thus, there it would be perfectly reasonable for Tanabe to illustrate an eldritch beast erupting from a church tower in the dead of night while also preserving the same ironic detachment of Lovecraft's narrator.
The only other remnant of this tone in the manga can be found in a newspaper article that Blake reads as as rumors of otherworldly forces begin to spread throughout the city:
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This is a step in the right direction with its characterization of the crowd's "whimsical" and "fanatical" speculations, but another issue soon presents itself. Lovecraft's narrator summarizes the report with a scathing critique of the the townsfolk, in a passage that is noticeably absent from the manga:
"The verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given by the reporters."
(Lovecraft, "The Haunter of the Dark")
One can almost imagine Lovecraft chuckling to himself as he insults these yokels, so easily duped by a few scraps of cloth and a foul smell, knowing full well that the reader yearns to be just as credulous as those "superstitious hill-dwellers". In the manga version, readers have no choice but to believe.
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark |
Tanabe uses a similar sort of narrative streamlining in his adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness, though this choice has more controversial and wide-ranging implications. The original At the Mountains of Madness is written from the perspective of Professor Dyer, a geologist from the fictional Miskatonic University who, along with a bevy of fellow academics and explorers, embarks upon a perilous journey deep into the Antarctic continent. Dyer's intent from the first line of the Lovecraft story is to reveal why he is opposed to further exploration of the region and to tell all after a period of careful silence: "I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why" (Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness Ch. I) The story thus takes on the tone of an impassioned plea contextualized with long stretches of personal testimony and occasional transcripts from the doomed sub-expedition led by the brash biologist Dr. Lake. Its first three chapters recapitulate the facts previously revealed to the public after Dyer's return to States, but beginning with the fourth, the beleaguered professor attempts to fully explain what he and his student Danforth discovered and "break through all reticences at last—even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness" (Ch. III).
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"Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror." (Ch. XI)
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| Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness Volume 2 324 |
It would be unfair to say that Tanabe neglects this plot point, as it is represented here clear as day. However, its relegation to the epilogue does sap some of its thematic potency. Instead of permeating the narration from the start and hanging over the reader like the "sinister, curling mist" in Lovecraft's novella (Ch. XI), Dyer's attempt to prevent further Antarctic exploration is only revealed to the reader at the chronologically "correct" point in time rather than the most rhetorically effective. This page goes so far as to openly acknowledge the frame narrative of the original by combining narration from the very first chapter of original with commentary from the conclusion:
"The coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow [our route] despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the Antarctic"
(Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness Ch. I)
"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life."
(Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness Ch. XII)