Haunting Poe’s Maze: Investigative Obsessions in the Weird Fictions of Stefan Grabiński and H. P. Lovecraft

Abstract

The article is a comparative reading and analysis of selected works by two eminent authors of weird fiction, Stefan Grabinski and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the goal of which is to trace two (independent) trajectories of development of ideas concerning “weird” story writing, as established, in pre-modern context, by Edgar Allan Poe. The two authors appear to suffer from a combination of tragically inherent inability to write “like” Poe, with a haunting desire to do so. Exhibiting understanding of the Poesque discourse, they are driven to invent strategies to cope with the resulting textual neuroses—a way out of the discursive “maze” of Poe’s craft, a way that is always already shut. Where Lovecraft’s “mechanistic materialism” finds its expression in an indifferent cosmos, populated by alien beings, whose influence seems to be inscribed in the fabric of his textual realities, Grabinski’s sense of “amazement” is deployed internally, with psychological constructs overshadowing the “objective” reality. Both discourses, however, spring from one tradition of horror, and from the unexorcised trace of Poe’s spectre. The two authors’ ambivalent relation with modern sensibilities results in a series of obsessive investigations into the ideological underpinnings of art, philosophy and science.