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Scholarly
Observations on Lovecraft’s
“The Rats in
the Walls”
| Thematic Considerations | Time and the Past | Nyarlathotep |
. . . . somewhat in the manner of Poe, but with thematic content that is Lovecraft’s own, is “The Rats in the Walls,” written in 1923. Here the themes of merciful ignorance and unwholesome survival come into play as Lovecraft gives us a tale of atavism, a story whose narrator discovers dreadful facts about the activities of his ancestors and finds that the family tendencies in fact survive down to himself, the present scion. (Here we find also the theme of oneiric objectivism in the narrow form, in that the narrator’s dream of the twilit grotto prefigures his actual discovery of such a place beneath the priory. The theme functions here on the relatively limited level of oneiric precognition; Lovecraft at this point has yet to pursue it in a broader way.)
In such early fictional efforts as these, Lovecraft clearly is
already at work on some of the thematic fixations that will color his later
work, but at this point the themes in question take the expressive form of
horrors coming to isolated characters. While
it is true that even in later stories the horrors come to individual, isolated
characters, the horrors of the later and more mature works also have more global
implications for humankind generally. In
thematic terms, Lovecraft, in the early and middle 1920s, is merely warming up.
Donald
R. Burleson. “On Lovecraft’s Themes: Touching the Glass.”
An Epicure in the
Lovecraft’s
fascination with past’s inescapable hold on the present continued in “The
Rats in the Walls,” (1923). The
narrator, Delapore, 
moves
into Exham Priory, a family home abandoned centuries before for mysterious
reasons. The priory has a
“peculiarly composite architecture; an architecture involving Gothic towers
resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a
still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even Druidic or native
Cymric, if legends speak truly.” With
its accretions of additional levels and wings over the centuries, the priory
stands as both a monument to the forward march of time and a symbol of time
standing still.
After the priory has been renovated, Delapore begins to hear the
nightly scurrying of rats in the walls. He
traces them to a subcellar, beneath which he finds a passageway leading down to
a bone-filled grotto. The crushing
truth that Delapore’s forbears practiced cannibalism overwhelms him.
Before the reader’s eyes, his words degenerate progressively to
proto-human grunts, in a descent that mirrors his actual physical descent
through the priory from the contemporary furnishings upstairs to the prehistoric
caverns below. Lost in time, he
develops the same appetites as his ancestors, and so he must be
institutionalized.
. . . . Likewise, in “The Rats in the Walls,” we are told that
the flight of the Delapores from Exham Priory occurred during the reign of James
I [17th Century], that the family fought in the American Civil War,
and that Delapore’s own son returned from World War I a maimed invalid. . . .
the integration of real history with the imagined genealogical history of the
characters imparts a convincing realism to the horrible events that follow.
This storytelling technique also informs us that the events leading to
the revelation of the final horror, though embedded in historical record, are
not recognized when they occur as hideous portents of what is to come.
Lovecraft appears subtly to suggest that the conflicts with time and
space perceived by his characters are not so much distortions of reality but
parts of reality that have been selectively ignored.
Insofar as these conflicts reveal hitherto unimagined historical
possibilities, two conclusions are possible: that the otherwise normal worlds
inhabited by Lovecraft’s characters are just a fluke of perspective based on
mankind’s inability or unwillingness to admit events it cannot explain; or,
worse, that what Lovecraft’s characters consider to be the normal world is
itself just an isolated point in the void, a sort of papering over of the chaos
that occasionally rips and lets the horrible truth come through.
Stefan
Dziemianowicz. “Outsiders and Aliens: The Uses of Isolation in Lovecraft’s
. . . . Nyarlathotep is referred to in “The
Rats in the Walls.” . . . But Nyarlathotep is multiform and unlocalized; as
the crawling chaos he not only reaches to Azathoth, he also partakes and
mediates that chaos in his own 
waxen
mask of a persona—he is what he imitates.
And as such a crawling chaos we see him in the earlier story [“The Rats
in the Walls”], “the mad faceless god” to which “the eldritch scurrying
of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors and determined to lead
me on” do indeed lead the hapless de la Poer; and he becomes of that nature
too as he degenerates through various styles, slangs, vocabularies, and tongues
until he can only chatter, “Ungl. . . rrlh. . .
.chchch”, the center of the crawling chaos that is the soul of
“the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods”—who “dance slowly, awkwardly,
and absurdly” between the walls of Exham Priory and the Witch House [a
location in another story of the same name, employing Nyarlathotep] and of the
seemingly stable walls of the world those houses represent.
The elegant aspect of this horde is . . . the cat Nigger-Man, who points
out to the narrator where the chaos can be found, who in the caverns is
“monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones,” and who at the end darts
past “like a winged Egyptian god, straight into the illimitable gulf of the
unknown.” We might recall that late letter in which he says of a cat
that has died that it has “returned to that eternal Night of which he and all
his kind are inalienable fragments!” . . . . Nigger-Man is the double of
Nyarlathotep and realizes his nature profoundly.
Robert
W. Waugh. “Landscapes, Selves, and Others in Lovecraft.”
An Epicure in
the Terrible. Eds.
David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi. London:
Associated UP, 1991.
220-242.
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