Lovecraft in November 1935 wrote what was to be his last major story, “The Haunter of the Dark” (DUN, 92-115), a tale dedicated to his correspondence friend, the then teenage writer Robert Bloch. The protagonist is named Robert Blake. This Blake, with a report of whose mysterious death the story opens, has been “a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort” (93). The story is narrated in the third person, supposedly deriving from a diary left by the hapless Blake of events preceding the narration. Young Blake, occupying rooms in Providence, Rhode Island’s College Hill, overlooking the westward city, grows, by his diary account, fascinated with the view of Federal Hill across town and in particular with a certain dark church over which there seems to hover “a vague, singular aura of desolation” such that birds, viewed through Blake’s field glasses, never come to rest there (95). Blake feels that this distant “world beyond the mists” is an ethereal region “which might or might not vanish in dream” should he ever try to approach it (94). But after a long period of restlessness, he resolves to seek it out on foot.
He crosses the city, finding the Italian residents of Federal Hill oddly disturbed at his asking about the mysterious and reportedly long-empty church. He finds the church, however, and manages to enter its dust-shrouded interior, finding a mouldering pile of ancient and ill-reputed books (and a recordbook in cipher, which he pockets). Climbing to the tower room beneath the steeple, he finds, on a “curiously angled stone pillar” (101), an asymmetrical box containing a crystallike object that seems to fill him with eerie cosmic visions when he stares into it. He encounters also the skeleton of a man bearing a reporter’s badge from a bygone city newspaper. The man’s pocketbook contains a piece of paper with scribbled notes. Evidently the reporter somehow perished there in the act of investigating reports of a departed evil sect once active in the church. The notes speak of a Shining Trapezohedron, gazing into which will summon a certain Haunter of the Dark, an entity that cannot exist in light. Having already gazed into the crystal, Blake thinks he hears stirrings past the trapdoor to the steeple above the tower room where he stands. Unnerved, he flees.
A month or so later he solves the cryptogram he has carried away, finding further references to the Haunter of the Dark, together with accounts of the Shining Trapezohedron itself, an ancient object of extraterrestrial origin. He begins to suspect that he has summoned the Haunter and that an unholy link has been established between that dark entity and himself. A lightning storm puts some of the city lights out of commission, and Blake is terrified that the Haunter will take advantage of the absence of light to venture forth. Newspaper accounts record similar fears on the part of the resident Italians, among whom memories of the old cult still live. About a month later a titanic electrical storm shuts down the whole city’s lighting system, and Blake’s diary shows that he was then petrified with fear. Watchers at the church hear ominous sounds from the darkened steeple and witness a blur of blackness that wings its way eastward toward College Hill. Blake is there, scribbling blindly in his diary that the thing knows where he is and that he has become one with the thing that is streaking eastward to find him. His body is found at his desk, his last diary entry reading, “Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye” (115). This story presents, besides its obvious narrative features and its irresolvable question of the identity of Blake with the nameless Haunter, an unstable textual concern with the bipolarity of light and darkness, a concern over which the text opens itself out in perpetual indeterminacy.
We note, first, that a haunter is a frequenter (Old French hanter, “to frequent”). Yet here already we encounter problems, since of course the bizarre presence in the church steeple, only invoked at intervals of centuries, is infrequent, uncommon, freakish, usually not present. Haunt(er), further back in its etymology, stems from the Indo-European root kei-, “to lie,” “bed,” “couch,” “night’s lodgings,” “home.” The senses of this root suggest, early on, a linkage between the Haunter’s “haunts” (the church) and Blake’s rooms on the other side of town. Then, despite the text’s efforts to make it seem as if any linkage between Blake and the Haunter is of recent date, Blake is always already linked with that which he fears. He is, in a way, the Haunter waiting for a chance to appear. The same Indo-European root kei- gives us, by way of the form ki-wo-, the Sanskrit Shiva, suggesting multiplicity and the cyclicity of destruction and rebirth. One may read here a reference to textual plurality and deferral, such that the issue of the Haunter promises to be, as one might expect, problematically resistant to facile reading. A pun on the Indo-European level, involving the distinct but homonymic root kei-, “to set in motion,” further makes the Haunter problematic. That entity does not set anything in motion; it rather is, passively, set in motion, summoned (kei- gives us the Latin citare, “to summon,” “to cite”) by Blake. The interchange between activity and passivity here points up the notion that, again, the entity toujour déjà awaits Blake’s evocation and awaits identity with Blake, contrary to the text’s sedulously produced impression that the evocation is a tragedy that need not have happened. Citing is, of course, production anew of (a copy of) what has already been there.
If haunt(er), in the titular Haunter of the Dark, presents etymological intrigue at the outset, then so does dark—a partner in that bipolarity dark/light or light/dark that will loom large, as we shall see, in the text’s machinations. Dark stems from dher-, “to make muddy,” “to obscure.” If the Haunter is the Haunter of the Dark, in the sense of being a feature of the dark, then it is characterized by the dark—by obscurity of identity, upon which the text will be seen to dwell. It is interesting to note that the root dher- is responsible for Dublin—nota bene the “great wholesome Irishman,” the policeman whom Blake questions. Originally Dublin was a muddy stretch of settlements along the river Liffey, which James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, universalizes to expand across the world (producing, e.g., the Mississliffey). Again, the suggestion is one of multiplicity of interpretation, proliferation of potential for meaning, textual dissemination.
What may we make of the text’s writhings over the bipolar issue of light and dark? Even before examining the text’s own workings over this opposition, we note a general self-dismantling tendency in the opposition. We scarcely know whether to posit initially a supplementarity of the form light/dark or one of the form dark/light. Conventional thematics lead one to suppose that light is the preferred or privileged concept (light/dark), but one notices also that dark is the “natural” condition pervading the scene until it is dispersed by light (dark/light). Dark exists independently, while light requires the assistance of a source. Light is generally perceived as a positive concept, a presence, whereas dark is perceived as a negation—the absence of light. Thus the positive term is unnatural and contrived; the negative term is primary and natural. But we readily see that the two poles of the opposition necessarily entail each other. Dark, as the absence of light, is not comprehensible qua dark without knowledge of light, of that which has to be missing to define the term being defined. A universe wholly without light would be one in which the term dark would be meaningless. Conversely, a universe of all light (no darkness, no shadows) would be one in which nothing could be contained, since objects in the presence of light cast shadows. Light would be featureless and incomprehensible without the contrast of shadow. With this general backdrop of problematic concepts, we may proceed to find more specific difficulties in the text’s own uneasy thrashings over the issue of light and dark.
The text works hard at depicting Blake as an innocent, if naive and misled, victim—the word victim is actually applied—of a tenebrous horror with which he is contrasted. His ultimate coalescence with the Haunter only heightens the horror. One feels that he should be separated from the Haunter, but in the end he is not. Blake, on casual reading, is a dweller in light; the Haunter is the Haunter of the Dark. The text even suggests this dichotomy through descriptive symbol, trying to widen the gap between Blake and the Haunter, when it describes the colonial house in which Blake lives and writes and paints: “His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof furnished admirable lighting” (94). This description of the uppermost regions of the house is contrasted with the description of the uppermost portion of the mysterious church, whose steeple is the only part not admitting light. And clearly the same descriptions try to link Blake with the notion of light and the Haunter in the church with the notion of darkness. But there is a great deal in the text working, at the same time, against this seemingly natural tendency.
First, obviously, Blake is himself devoted, as an artist, to the dark and the weird. If as a protagonist he is to be regarded as a victim of dark forces, then he is such a protagonist manqué. More exactly, he is always already susceptible to those forces that will engulf him. He is coalescence with darkness waiting for an opportunity to happen. The thing in the steeple, supposedly a creature of darkness, is, on the other hand, invoked by a Shining Trapezohedron. Compare, considering the protagonist’s name, lines from William Blake’s “The Crystal Cabinet”: “This Cabinet is form’d of Gold / And Pearl and Crystal shining bright, / And within it opens into a World.” The creature is invoked by someone’s looking into the Shining Trapezohedron, an act scarcely possible without the very thing that is supposedly antithetical and inimical to the Haunter—light. Neither pole in the Blake/Haunter opposition is so unalloyed with its opposite as one might think.
Even if Blake were simply “good” and the Haunter simply “evil,” associated respectively with light and darkness, however, problems would persist. The notion that light (Fiat lux!) should connote goodness, with darkness connoting the opposite, is not one consistently upheld in mythopoetic tradition. Lucifer himself (from lux) is etymologically the “carrier of light,” a mythic cognate with Prometheus, who, like Satan, was punished by the gods for bringing light or fire to humankind. Traditionally humans fell on the occasion of enlightenment—upon eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Darkness, on the other hand, has often been associated with calm, innocence, peace, forgetting, nepenthe. The night is given to sleep and dream, the day to garishness and tedium. It is clear—and even in saying “clear” we fall into the habitual metaphorical linking of light with the goodness of understanding—that any reductive notions of light and darkness are bound to be perturbably facile.
Light in its etymological connections belies any simple notion of an association with goodness. The root is leuk-, “brightness,” which yields (aside from Lucifer, as already noted), through the form leuk-sna-, the derivatives luna and lunatic, as well as (via the Germanic form lugon-) the name Loki, the Norse god of fire, also perceived as the god of evil and known as the father of the death-goddess Hel. By all accounts, Loki presided over discord, confusion, hatred, enmity—again calling into question the notion that fire or light must be linked with goodness. The same Indo-European root leuk- also gives us, through the form luk-ya-, the Greek lussa, “rabies,” leading again to the idea of madness, the idea that rabies shows up as a shining in the eyes. Significantly, then, Blake’s investigators, reading his diary, speculate that his mind may not have been entirely sound, given his devotion to the morbid and given his jottings about the old church. But light and darkness are problematic in the text even beyond these general considerations.
The details of the events of Blake’s experience, we are told, derive from his diary, from which the text, however, does not quote directly until the end. We are told, early in the tale: “Now, studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarise the dark chain of events” (93). In effect, at this stage and during the greater portion of the story, we are kept in the dark about the precise wording of Blake’s diary entries. The passage cited leads us to believe that we will see those entries verbatim, but we do not. We see only paraphrasing, summary—references to the diary at a considerable remove from its original language. We are told that, of the content of the cryptogram that Blake has solved, the diary is “strangely reticent” (106), so we are now at multiple removes from any foundational grounding in specific language. It is only at the end that the text gives us direct citation from the diary in Blake’s own frenzied words, shedding light on what he has said. Thus the effect is that, in the part of the text in which we are concerned with Blake himself (supposedly associated with light and innocence), we are immersed, epistemologically, in darkness, while at the end, when the Haunter (supposedly characterized by darkness and evil) comes most forcefully into play, we are for the first time immersed in light. What the text says is subverted by the manner of saying.
We are told that Blake’s monitor roof, over his studio, furnishes “admirable lighting.” Yet the result, in Blake’s hands, is “seven canvases, studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes” (94). Blake, supposedly on the side of innocence and light, is already a purveyor of darkness, painting canvases that seem more like the other side of the opposition—the Haunter side—than like what the text on the narrative level would have us believe of Blake. Light here paradoxically leads to darkness; darkness dwells in, is the upshot of, light.
Blake, looking out from his study window over the westward city with Federal Hill and the church beyond, reflects that the hill seems “somehow alien, half fabulous.” We are told that the feeling would persist “long after the hill had faded into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the courthouse floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque” (95). It is curious here, of a protagonist purporting to side with light against the darkness and what he fears in it, that light comes off as “grotesque” in its effects. Darkness here carries no such stigma. The same passage, speaking of the fading from sight of Federal Hill, suggests comfort in darkness rather than horror in it. Again the supposedly simple roles of light and dark in the text are confounded by the text’s own language.
Similarly, when Blake enters the forbidden church, he finds that in the nave, “an almost eldritch place,” over all the dusty desolation “played a hideous leaden light as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange, half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows” (99-100). Light here is described as “hideous,” a characterization that the darkness in the church is spared. The text continually subverts the roles that it has purportedly set up for darkness and light.
In the end Blake comes to believe, whether truly or not, that he has become one with the Haunter. Two of his last frantic scribblings in his diary read, “Light is dark and dark is light” and “I am it and it is I” (115). Questions of identity and alterity arise multiply here, since, as we have seen, there is some question about whether we may in any facile way associate Blake with light and the Haunter with dark or identify one with the other. This difficulty finds symbolic expression, earlier, in the Shining Trapezohedron. A trapezohedron is a solid or crystal with trapezoids or trapeziums as faces. Right away we are faced with ambiguities of linguistic usage: a trapezium in American usage is a quadrilateral having no parallel sides, and in British usage it is a quadrilateral having two parallel sides. A trapezoid, however, is a quadrilateral having two parallel sides in American usage and no parallel sides in British usage. The resulting confusion about parallel sides is compounded by philosophical difficulties surrounding the notion of parallelism itself. Not the least difficulty is the problem that, while parallel often implies closeness and similarity (as when we refer, e.g., to parallel developments), it also suggests apartness, failure to meet, separation, difference. Indeed an expression such as “parallel developments” implies both likeness and difference, or likeness for which the sense of difference is preserved across a separating distance. Thus, symbolically, the question of “parallelism” between Blake and the Haunter, over which the text labors, promises from the outset to be unsettling and indeterminable. Whether Blake and the Haunter are in the end “meeting” or “not meeting” not only is undecidable but also is a question that has to come to us through a fog of difficulty surrounding the whole philosophically infamous question of identity and alterity.
It is curious that, near the end, Blake scribbles the name Roderick Usher. This may be read as a reflection of the idea (actually put forth by Lovecraft in his critical essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”) that Usher in Poe’s tale was himself one with his horror—one with the doomed house that fell down about him. But immediately before writing the name Roderick Usher, Blake has also scribbled the words “can hear” (115), referring to his ability or imagined ability to hear what is happening in the steeple across town. We can also read the name Roderick Usher as a reference to preternaturally acute hearing, which Poe’s character possessed. The text thus presents further uncertainty about the relation between Blake and the Haunter. Usher, appropriately here, derives from the Indo-European root os- that also gives us oscillation.
Indeed the notion that Blake, as he seems to believe, becomes one with the Haunter, entangles oddly with logic. The dead reporter’s notes tell us that the Haunter is “banished by strong light” (103), so that at the end Blake’s death may be explained by the fact that the Haunter finds and coalesces with him only in time to be “banished,” itself, by the final titanic burst of lightning. But if Blake is dead and the Haunter is merely banished, then one wonders in what sense they may be said to have become the same entity, both dead-present and banished-absent. Can one entity be both? The answer is not necessarily no, but in any case the question points to a disturbing textual fissure not suited to be closed by any finally satisfying fiat of interpretation. When Blake, at the end (as if this text could have any real end), writes of “the three-lobed burning eye” (115), he could well be writing, with reference to himself, of the “three-lobed I”—the moiling and shifting trinity consisting of himself, the Haunter, and the indeterminate relation between the two.
With its writhings over light and dark and over undecidable identity, the text is like its own described alternations of flashing lightning and muffling blackness, refusing to “settle” as resolutely as the wheeling birds refuse to settle about the grim-visaged church on the hill.