Much of my scholarship and teaching centers on the Decadent literature of the fin de siecle.  While the "weird tales" of the 20th century have been mined extensively for use in RPGs, the work of the Decadent and Aesthetic movements is still ripe for adaptation.  Here are a few off-the-cuff ideas:

Joris-Karl Huysmans's A Rebours as a Call of Cthulhu crawl: the novel takes place within one location--a decadent aesthete's house; with a little twisting, we get a dining room made to look like a ship's cabin (what if it allows for real transportation through time/space?), monstrous plants, an organ that creates alchemical potions depending on what notes and chords are played, a library that mixes the sacred and the profane (enjoy sorting through the Latin pr0n to find that grimoire, suckers), a funerary banquet for the host's lost virility (or is that a ritual to summon Shub-Niggurath?), and more enchanted paintings of Salome than you can handle.

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Cthulhu adventure: Where is Basil Hallward? There are rumors of his demise to be investigated; these rumors take the characters to high-society dinners, exhibitions of the Royal Academy, East End opium dens, and low theaters alike. Characters to meet and interrogate: Lord Henry and his Yellow Book (Yellow Book/Yellow Sign?), Sybil Vane (who seems possessed when performing on stage...work in some Hastur/King in Yellow here), the debased chemist Alan Campbell (whose suicide will happen right as the characters need him most, but was he laying the groundwork for Herbert West?), and of course Dorian himself (what if Dorian's portrait isn't merely the barometer of the state of his soul, but something that absorbs his evil nature and take on a life of its own?).

Oscar Wilde's Salome: Not the events of the play itself, but rather the events surrounding the play. The Lord Chamberlain's office denies the play's performance not on the grounds that it contains biblical themes, but rather because they know the performance is a really a series of ritualized motions and incantations to let loose something otherwordly and monstrous. Of course, those degenerate French fail to see the metaphysical horrors at work and have authorized the play's performance. How to stop it? Bonus game of "guess which is the avatar of Nyarlathotep": Lord Alfred Douglas (he did seem to have an uncanny power over Wilde), Sarah Bernhardt (another of Wilde's great muses), or Wilde himself (what was it exactly that he learned amidst the stacks at Oxford)?  Vatican involvement--what if the head of John the Baptist is kept somewhere as a relic...a relic that can speak and still knows something...

In the immortal words of Charles Dickens:



Or something to that effect. By all means, please continue!

Oddly, I don't think that fin de siècle matches up all that well with Mythos stuff. This is likely because I'm a Lovecrsft purist. I think that - speaking so broadly as to be untenable - it would be difficult at best to work things like Decadent aesthetics into ostensibly Mythos adventures, since the two were created and deployed for fundamentally different reasons.

That being said, someone with your background would likely be able to come up with some phenomenal adventures. I'm just not quite convinced they'd be Mythos stuff, or play as Mythos adventures. It's tough to have Cthulhu Mythos works when you've stripped out the Twentieth Century and the associated aesthetic breaks that were consciously & deliberately made from the Decadents etc by the Mythos authors.

Quote from: Géza Echs;533639Oddly, I don't think that fin de siècle matches up all that well with Mythos stuff. This is likely because I'm a Lovecrsft purist. I think that - speaking so broadly as to be untenable - it would be difficult at best to work things like Decadent aesthetics into ostensibly Mythos adventures, since the two were created and deployed for fundamentally different reasons.

That being said, someone with your background would likely be able to come up with some phenomenal adventures. I'm just not quite convinced they'd be Mythos stuff, or play as Mythos adventures. It's tough to have Cthulhu Mythos works when you've stripped out the Twentieth Century and the associated aesthetic breaks that were consciously & deliberately made from the Decadents etc by the Mythos authors.

Is Robert W. Chambers a Decadent or a Mythos writer?

Quote from: misterguignol;533643Is Robert W. Chambers a Decadent or a Mythos writer?

Depends on how technical you want to get!

By all meaningful definition, Chambers was a Decadent author (though the vast majority of his output, as you'll recall, was rather base romance fiction). He's often anthologized specifically for his influence upon later Mythos writers, and unfortunately sloppy editors and readers have elided the difference between Chambers-as-influence and Chambers-as-author.

Of course, this gets complicated if we bring in the whole genre theory saw about genres only existing in their reception and, therefore, we should be comfortable with referring to Chambers as a Mythos author since that's how he's received now etc, etc. But I'm happy to throw that in the "too technical for this discussion" bin.

Quote from: Géza Echs;533660Depends on how technical you want to get!

By all meaningful definition, Chambers was a Decadent author (though the vast majority of his output, as you'll recall, was rather base romance fiction). He's often anthologized specifically for his influence upon later Mythos writers, and unfortunately sloppy editors and readers have elided the difference between Chambers-as-influence and Chambers-as-author.

Of course, this gets complicated if we bring in the whole genre theory saw about genres only existing in their reception and, therefore, we should be comfortable with referring to Chambers as a Mythos author since that's how he's received now etc, etc. But I'm happy to throw that in the "too technical for this discussion" bin.

Well, neither the Mythos nor the Decadence is a genre.

Anyway, I'm in the camps that sees no value in keeping the "purity" of Lovecraft's work, which is also the camp Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu comes from.  CoC isn't pure by any stretch since it includes the work of authors who aren't Lovecraft, and in the way it treats much of Lovecraft's mythos in the first place.  Frankly, I think that's great because all of the deviations seem to go toward making the Mythos more gameable rather than keeping it centered on a purist emulation of the literature.

Not being a scholar like Géza or misterguignol, I am sure I am way out of my league in this thread, but here's my 2c.

I have this very simple vision of HPL's Mythos stuff as a reaction to the post-Industrial Revolution world. Meaning, a reaction against Science, against Industry, against the death of mystery and wonder, against the idea that Man has a manifest destiny to unravel the secrets of the Universe and make Nature his bitch. Even the racist stuff can be shoehorned into this greater schtick, as White Man barges into the dark corners of Africa and Asia and displaces native populations, who end up at Lovecraft's New York doorstep annoying his racist ass (and, in the tales, getting respectable white men mixed up with their Cthulhiana and Yog-Sothothery).

I'm preaching to the choir here, I know, but what I really meant to say is that I feel that the 1890s are just as good a milieu as the 1920s, since what I consider to be the main ingredient of the Mythos stew -- the Industrial Revolution -- is already there.

Medieval Cthulhu, now there's an epoch which stumps me. You can play with the contrast against religious world-views, but it just ain't the same.

Quote from: misterguignol;533663Well, neither the Mythos nor the Decadence is a genre.

Mrm... Yes and no, depending. My speciality isn't Decadent literature, so I'm off my footing there, but I'd argue that the Mythos is absolutely a genre (or at least a "sub-genre", for an even less meaningful term) in modern day. In the 1920s and 1930s it wasn't, of course; then it was just a few author's way of writing weird fiction (which was, I contend, very much a genre).

QuoteAnyway, I'm in the camps that sees no value in keeping the "purity" of Lovecraft's work, which is also the camp Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu comes from.  CoC isn't pure by any stretch since it includes the work of authors who aren't Lovecraft, and in the way it treats much of Lovecraft's mythos in the first place.

I think you're misunderstanding me when I say that I'm a Lovecraft purist. That term doesn't mean adhering to the aesthetics and philosophy of Lovecraft alone - it means rejecting what runs contrary to the aesthetics and philosophy of Lovecraft as part of the "Mythos". This is, of course, in-line with Chaosium's take on the matter; their sidebar on why they do not reflect or agree with the Derleth Mythos has been in every edition that I can remember seeing, for example.

What this means is that we can have elements of the game that come from sources that are not Lovecraft and concerns that were not Lovecraft's... But not outright reversals of everything that was philosophically and aesthetically developed within the Mythos by Lovecraft and those few who actively worked with him during his lifetime (such as, again, Derleth, who as you'll recall campaigned hard for the Mythos to become a pseudo-Catholic parable rather than an expression of philosophic Cosmicism).

QuoteFrankly, I think that's great because all of the deviations seem to go toward making the Mythos more gameable rather than keeping it centered on a purist emulation of the literature.

I agree! Any game where I can't write an adventure focusing on the lost unpublished papers of Dr. Herbert West held in the collection of a Carcosan worshipper, opposed by a contingent of Shan who want his copy of Massa di Requiem per Shuggay (mistakenly assumed by him to be a variant text of The King in Yellow), where everyone faces an ongoing incursion of Nethescurial from other disparate texts located nearby in the stacks... is not a game that properly reflects the Cthulhu Mythos.

But I think it's important to note that these elements, however tangentially, can be connected to the Cthulhu Mythos (most of them explicitly so). It becomes more difficult to apply works that arise out of earlier traditions that have distinct aesthetic and philosophic bases than the Mythos does. Not impossible, mind you, but difficult. Much of Wilde's stuff, yes, if it were sufficiently altered and played with. Other stuff, no matter the surface appearance... Less so (Lovecraft, as you'll recall, played cleverly with this idea of genre inclusion when he lauded Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" to the Heavens... then savagely cut down the idea that it should be counted as a weird story).

Put short, I think the ideas you're putting forth are interesting, but I hesitate because I fear that people might - again - fall into the notion that the Cthulhu Mythos, insofar as it can be meaningfully described, is little more than its surface details, its imagery and trope, rather than notice that the meaning is much more significant than all the tentacles and cultists.

Quote from: Géza Echs;533759Mrm... Yes and no, depending. My speciality isn't Decadent literature, so I'm off my footing there, but I'd argue that the Mythos is absolutely a genre (or at least a "sub-genre", for an even less meaningful term) in modern day. In the 1920s and 1930s it wasn't, of course; then it was just a few author's way of writing weird fiction (which was, I contend, very much a genre).

I'd contend that the "Weird" is a mode rather than a genre.  What counts as a Weird Tale is too fluid to really stand up to generic scrutiny.  It's a meaningless distinction to most people, granted, but to me it's an important one when thinking about how far generic conventions go in defining a body of work.

QuoteI think you're misunderstanding me when I say that I'm a Lovecraft purist. That term doesn't mean adhering to the aesthetics and philosophy of Lovecraft alone - it means rejecting what runs contrary to the aesthetics and philosophy of Lovecraft as part of the "Mythos". This is, of course, in-line with Chaosium's take on the matter; their sidebar on why they do not reflect or agree with the Derleth Mythos has been in every edition that I can remember seeing, for example.

You're right, I did misinterpret what you meant by "purist."

QuoteWhat this means is that we can have elements of the game that come from sources that are not Lovecraft and concerns that were not Lovecraft's... But not outright reversals of everything that was philosophically and aesthetically developed within the Mythos by Lovecraft and those few who actively worked with him during his lifetime (such as, again, Derleth, who as you'll recall campaigned hard for the Mythos to become a pseudo-Catholic parable rather than an expression of philosophic Cosmicism).

I'm not sure I see what is incompatible about the general worldview of the Decadents and that of the Mythos; both are fixated on the idea of degeneration, whether it be racial, cultural, etc.  There's quite a bit of cosmicism in the Decadence as well, inasmuch as it recognizes that religion has ceased to structure the how we view things on a grander scale at the fin de siecle.

QuotePut short, I think the ideas you're putting forth are interesting, but I hesitate because I fear that people might - again - fall into the notion that the Cthulhu Mythos, insofar as it can be meaningfully described, is little more than its surface details, its imagery and trope, rather than notice that the meaning is much more significant than all the tentacles and cultists.

And here's where perhaps I didn't explain myself well enough.  I've probably only described the surface elements, but underneath all that I would hope to work in some deeper implications from the Mythos.

Quote from: The Butcher;533691Not being a scholar like Géza or misterguignol, I am sure I am way out of my league in this thread, but here's my 2c.

Nothing to be worried about on my end, I assure you.

QuoteI have this very simple vision of HPL's Mythos stuff as a reaction to the post-Industrial Revolution world. Meaning, a reaction against Science, against Industry, against the death of mystery and wonder, against the idea that Man has a manifest destiny to unravel the secrets of the Universe and make Nature his bitch.

To some extent, but it's important to remember that Lovecraft, himself, was so science-positive that it hurt. The man believed that unfettered scientific investigation was an unassailable good - though it would likely run the risk of destroying the species, one day (these two things aren't incommensurate for Lovecraft; he actively engaged in the position that it's not if we go extinct so much as when). I'd resist the urge to label them a "reaction against X" and see instead how they reflect Y. That is, Lovecraft wanted to show in his work that humanity's perspective is narrow, hopelessly limited, and constrained by the fundamental mechanistic scientific laws of the universe. Scientific investigation is fundamentally "good" (insofar as a moral term has any meaning - to HPL it held none), but scientific investigation will inevitably reveal the meaninglessness of humanity upon the grander scale.

Due to a mixture of biology and socialization, a sudden shock of confrontation with the truth of humanity's decentered place in creation is liable to cause a break in mood, mind, or health, which is why Lovecraft's characters so often become depressed, go crazy, or suffer fits. It should be noted again, though, that this is not a rejection of science, or a mechanistic universe with humanity as the most minor of cogs, or anything like that. They're fantasies, nightmares of what could happen if humans are forced into a cosmic perspective through an undeniable confrontation. And this idea refined over time; there are reasons why Lovecraft moved from the "peace and safety of a new dark age" anti-exploration narrator of "The Call of Cthulhu" to the "whatever else they were, they were men" narrator of At the Mountains of Madness, after all.

QuoteEven the racist stuff can be shoehorned into this greater schtick, as White Man barges into the dark corners of Africa and Asia and displaces native populations, who end up at Lovecraft's New York doorstep annoying his racist ass (and, in the tales, getting respectable white men mixed up with their Cthulhiana and Yog-Sothothery).

To some extent. The racist elements of the Mythos range from the intriguing to the disgusting, from the complex to the simple. With Lovecraft the matter is simple: non-assimilable non-Aryan races are physically inferior to Aryan races, and their cultures are both degenerate and degenerative to other cultures that they come into contact with. In other writers racial matters or racist overtones get played with in intriguing and often disturbing ways; T.E.D. Klein, for example, quite deftly explores some of the irrational breaks between whites and blacks in the last third of the American Twentieth Century. Robert E. Howard did much the same, occasionally, most notably in "Black Canaan" (though he himself was a racist).

QuoteI'm preaching to the choir here, I know, but what I really meant to say is that I feel that the 1890s are just as good a milieu as the 1920s, since what I consider to be the main ingredient of the Mythos stew -- the Industrial Revolution -- is already there.

Intriguingly, 1890 is often thought to be the provisional start date for Western modernism. I'm happy to see that you picked it, since I use that date for the start of the true weird tale as well. And it's the year of Lovecraft's birth, to boot. But, yes, my tied exegesis above notwithstanding, I see what you're saying and do, in fact, agree with where you're coming from in general.

QuoteMedieval Cthulhu, now there's an epoch which stumps me. You can play with the contrast against religious world-views, but it just ain't the same.

I think it can be done well - some stuff inspired by the stories by Clark Ashton Smith set during the medieval period could be cool. But it really needs a deft touch.

Quote from: The Butcher;533691Not being a scholar like Géza or misterguignol, I am sure I am way out of my league in this thread, but here's my 2c.

I have this very simple vision of HPL's Mythos stuff as a reaction to the post-Industrial Revolution world. Meaning, a reaction against Science, against Industry, against the death of mystery and wonder, against the idea that Man has a manifest destiny to unravel the secrets of the Universe and make Nature his bitch. Even the racist stuff can be shoehorned into this greater schtick, as White Man barges into the dark corners of Africa and Asia and displaces native populations, who end up at Lovecraft's New York doorstep annoying his racist ass (and, in the tales, getting respectable white men mixed up with their Cthulhiana and Yog-Sothothery).

I'm preaching to the choir here, I know, but what I really meant to say is that I feel that the 1890s are just as good a milieu as the 1920s, since what I consider to be the main ingredient of the Mythos stew -- the Industrial Revolution -- is already there.

This is all especially true if you view the Mythos in line with early strains of Gothic literature.  The Industrial Revolution certainly looms large in the Shelley's Frankenstein--and technological horrors returned again in force at the end of the century (not coincidentally so near the beginning of WWI).

QuoteMedieval Cthulhu, now there's an epoch which stumps me. You can play with the contrast against religious world-views, but it just ain't the same.

Heh, I always assumed that would just look like Conan.

Quote from: misterguignol;533769I'd contend that the "Weird" is a mode rather than a genre.  What counts as a Weird Tale is too fluid to really stand up to generic scrutiny.  It's a meaningless distinction to most people, granted, but to me it's an important one when thinking about how far generic conventions go in defining a body of work.

Part of my work on Lovecraft, the weird, and American modernism is looking at his Supernatural Horror in Literature as a manifesto of the weird tale, specifically attempting to pare away that fluidity in order to leave behind a generic definition of the weird tale that can stand up to scrutiny. This does, of course, assume that generic conventions are meaningful in the first place; I tend to think that they're not, in fact, all that meaningful in general, but recognize that attempts to define and circumscribe one's own (or one's own beloved) body of work is a gesture that can be and often is quite meaningful, and thus worth analysis.

QuoteYou're right, I did misinterpret what you meant by "purist."

No bother.

QuoteI'm not sure I see what is incompatible about the general worldview of the Decadents and that of the Mythos; both are fixated on the idea of degeneration, whether it be racial, cultural, etc.  There's quite a bit of cosmicism in the Decadence as well, inasmuch as it recognizes that religion has ceased to structure the how we view things on a grander scale at the fin de siecle.

Here I'll have to defer to your greater knowledge of the area - I simply don't know enough about the Decadents to form a cogent position on what they did and did not work towards. You have me intrigued, though; I'll need to go back to Lovecraft's letters and reconsult what he specifically thought of them (I know offhand that he couldn't stand Victorian didacticism, though that's an aside, and that he thought that some the total disconnection from prosaic reality represented in some Decadent work as dissatisfying as the total focus upon prosaic reality represented in some Realist work).

QuoteAnd here's where perhaps I didn't explain myself well enough.  I've probably only described the surface elements, but underneath all that I would hope to work in some deeper implications from the Mythos.

Oh, no fear. As I said, I think you could pull this off, based on what I've seen you say. I tend to hesitate when well-handled difficult ideas get sent off into the hands of those with slightly less of a nuanced touch, that's all.

Quote from: Géza Echs;533788Part of my work on Lovecraft, the weird, and American modernism is looking at his Supernatural Horror in Literature as a manifesto of the weird tale, specifically attempting to pare away that fluidity in order to leave behind a generic definition of the weird tale that can stand up to scrutiny. This does, of course, assume that generic conventions are meaningful in the first place; I tend to think that they're not, in fact, all that meaningful in general, but recognize that attempts to define and circumscribe one's own (or one's own beloved) body of work is a gesture that can be and often is quite meaningful, and thus worth analysis.

Oh, artistic manifestos are well worth looking at even when you don't agree with them or they fail to hold up to scrutiny (which is the fate of most of them).  I was just teaching George Eliot's essay about realism and the depiction of German peasants last week--it's a great window into the mindset of Victorian realism, but I can't agree with any of it!

QuoteHere I'll have to defer to your greater knowledge of the area - I simply don't know enough about the Decadents to form a cogent position on what they did and did not work towards. You have me intrigued, though; I'll need to go back to Lovecraft's letters and reconsult what he specifically thought of them (I know offhand that he couldn't stand Victorian didacticism, though that's an aside, and that he thought that some the total disconnection from prosaic reality represented in some Decadent work as dissatisfying as the total focus upon prosaic reality represented in some Realist work).

I haven't read much of Lovecraft's letters, but I can say this about the Decadents: they were working mainly in reaction against the didacticism and realism of mainstream 19th-century literary production.  Wilde is a rather mild example, but everywhere in "The Decay of Lying," "The Critic as Artist," and "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" you see a dissatisfaction with realism that Lovecraft would have found resonate.

I think it's interesting, in this regard, how many Decadent works straddle the line between the Gothic and Decadence: Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Huysmans's La-Bas, Rodenbach's Bruges la Morte, the short fiction of Arthur Machen and Vernon Lee, L'Isle-Adam's L'Eve future, Chamber's The King in Yellow, etc.

QuoteOh, no fear. As I said, I think you could pull this off, based on what I've seen you say. I tend to hesitate when well-handled difficult ideas get sent off into the hands of those with slightly less of a nuanced touch, that's all.

Honestly, so long as people have fun with it I'm not bothered by how faithful it is!

Oh, I also wanted to mention that I've started that Robert E. Howard anthology, but I haven't gotten to "Black Canaan" yet.  I will definitely PM you when I've finished it.  But man, the racism is THICK in these stories.  I'd estimate 90% of them are based on racial anxieties.  The other 10% are about sailors.

Quote from: misterguignol;533802I haven't read much of Lovecraft's letters, but I can say this about the Decadents: they were working mainly in reaction against the didacticism and realism of mainstream 19th-century literary production.  Wilde is a rather mild example, but everywhere in "The Decay of Lying," "The Critic as Artist," and "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" you see a dissatisfaction with realism that Lovecraft would have found resonate.

For what it's worth (I can't remember if I said this upthread), Lovecraft absolutely adored Wilde (as he did Poe and as he did Baudelaire)... Up until he learned about Wilde's homosexuality. Then, tragically, he turned rather savagely against Wilde (which is strange, since Lovecraft oddly didn't have all that much of a negative reaction in general to openly homosexual persons, like Hart Crane, who he knew personally).

QuoteI think it's interesting, in this regard, how many Decadent works straddle the line between the Gothic and Decadence: Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Huysmans's La-Bas, Rodenbach's Bruges la Morte, the short fiction of Arthur Machen and Vernon Lee, L'Isle-Adam's L'Eve future, Chamber's The King in Yellow, etc.

I should have known my first PhD advisor was worthless when he gave me a tonne of shit for choosing to read La-Bas while going through a brief survey of historical literature leading up to weird fiction!

QuoteHonestly, so long as people have fun with it I'm not bothered by how faithful it is!

I only get concerned because I so often find it necessary to work against the mythology that's grown up around Lovecraft and the mythos, despite the fact that there's been a rather tireless effort to de-mythologize the gentleman from Providence since the middle of the 1960s. I rather think that it must be what a Poe scholar feels when he hears yet again how Poe drank himself to death, or some such.

QuoteOh, I also wanted to mention that I've started that Robert E. Howard anthology, but I haven't gotten to "Black Canaan" yet.  I will definitely PM you when I've finished it.  But man, the racism is THICK in these stories.  I'd estimate 90% of them are based on racial anxieties.  The other 10% are about sailors.

Oh good! But refresh my memory - is that The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard anthology? Or a more generalized omnibus? I can't quite recall how many of Howard's sailor stories made it into the former, but there are, in fact, a lot of Howard's sailor stories out there - just as there are an epic amount of boxer and cowboy stories. And, yes, Howard's racism is pretty hefty. From what I've read in his biography and letters it wasn't quite as extreme as Lovecraft's, and showed greater signs of mollifying towards the end of his life... But it's still pretty bad. I tend to read Howard's racism (as I do his anti-civilization trends) as reflections of a quasi-Southern Renaissance attitude in his writing. I often indulge myself in thinking how well Howard would have fit in with the Fugitives, for example.

Pop Cthulhu : Lovecraft :: WoW : Tolkien ?

Meh.

Let me know when you guys make it deeper into the 20th Century and get to Borges so I can at least pretend to keep up.