Pickman’s Model

"It was really hard to decide upon a fifth one! There were a number of short stories from Lovecraft that I was playing with, and I decided to go with the 1927 story, Pickman’s Model . The narrator of the story, a guy named Thurber, starts off by recounting why he’s filled with anxiety on a daily basis, particularly as concerns subway tunnels or anything that would take him underground. He recounts how he came to be in this particular state through his interactions with a painter named Richard Upton Pickman, who paints very ghoulish pictures. His artwork is not typically welcomed within more polite society because of the subject matter that he chooses to pursue. But Thurber recognizes that his artistry really is quite exquisite, that Pickman is quite an accomplished painter, even if the subject matter that he chooses is not what one would consider to be tasteful. So Pickman invites Thurber to his studio, where he sees the various paintings in progress. At a particular moment, Pickman leaves the room, and Thurber examines one of the canvases more closely – and sees pinned to the corner a little photograph of a ghoulish creature that seems to be feasting on human flesh, or something along those lines. He realizes that what he has taken as creations of Pickman’s ghoulish imagination are in fact scenes painted from real life. And the revelation is – and this is the conventional Lovecraftian revelation – that what we typically think of as being our reality is really just a small part of a larger reality, which encompasses powers and forces that are beyond our comprehension. Should we become cognisant of them, the result is often madness. That’s where The Call of Cthulhu begins – there’s this little epigraph that tells us that we really don’t know what we’re dealing with here in the universe, and if we ever really figure it out, we’re just going to go stark raving mad. That same point is where Pickman’s Model ends. Thurber realizes that these monsters exist in his world, and that’s why – to come back to the beginning – he’s filled with anxiety, and unable to bear the idea of going down underground in subway tunnels and things like that. For Lovecraft himself, China Miéville makes the argument that the anxiety is a reflection of the cultural chaos that followed World War One , where death on a mass scale had been witnessed in ways that had never been seen before – through a war that introduced poison gas and tanks and machine guns. So there was a spate of horror fiction that began to come out in the 1920s and the 1930s. Today, it may well be that we’re confronting challenges on a global scale that seem almost insurmountable – things like climate change , for example, that are everywhere and nowhere, and present an existential threat to the continued existence of humans on the planet. That’s very much what Lovecraft thematizes with his cosmic indifferentism, or cosmic dread: that human beings in his fiction discover the existence of powers and forces that we cannot even really comprehend, much less resist. So maybe there is a correspondence between those ideas and our contemporary moment, and our awareness of things like black holes and deep space and deep time, and climate change and global problems. In Lovecraft’s fiction, we are just the playthings of cosmic forces that we can’t really comprehend fully or resist."