Nature as the source of Mysterium Tremendum: An essay on the poetic works of Blackwood, Smith and Campbell

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to analyze three horror classics - Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907), Clark Ashton Smith’s “Genius Loci” (1936) and Ramsey Campbell’s “The Voice of the Beach” (1977) - in which the landscape is envisioned as the abode of supernatural power. The common thread between these stories is the concept of natural scenery which merges and blends the real and unreal, the mind, flesh and the phenomenal world. As landscape is a major component of the plot, rather than mere background to the stories, the authors use it to formulate certain metaphysical ideas about existence and the nature of reality itself. My objective is to historically and epistemologically contextualize these ideas, clarify them and relate them to particular recent developments in philosophy and social theory. My second aim is to examine the semantics of space particular to each narrative, the association and partition of its structural elements, and the latent level of meaning arising from the organization of the stories’ mise-en-scène.

Keywords

• landscape
• semiotics
• nature
• horror
• enlightenment
• romanticism
• algernon blackwood
• clark ashton smith
• ramsey campbell