Pulp Fantasy Library: Polaris

I hesitated, at first, about writing yet another Pulp Fantasy Library post about a story by H.P. Lovecraft so soon after the conclusion of The Shadow over August. However, I soon realized that, since I'm already in the midst of reading and re-reading the stories of HPL's Dreamlands for my work on Dream-Quest, it only makes sense that I should also use them as fodder for more posts on Grognardia. On the off-chance anyone wants to complain about that, feel free to vent your spleen in the comments. That's what they're there for. 

The earliest of Lovecraft's tales associated with the Dreamlands is “Polaris," written sometime in 1918, but not published until 1920 in the first (and only) issue of Alfred Galpin's amateur journal, The Philosopher. "Polaris" was reprinted twice during Lovecraft's life – in the May 1926 issue of National Amateur and in the February 1934 issue of Charles D. Horning's The Fantasy Fan. It was also reprinted posthumously in the December 1937 issue of Weird Tales. As the first Dreamlands story, one can already see Lovecraft experimenting with the ideas, imagery, and themes that would later become more important in later entries in this literary cycle.

The story is brief but suggestive, more of a prose-poem than a typical weird tale. Its unnamed narrator dreams of the ancient city of Olathoë in the land of Lomar, beneath the ceaseless gleam of the Pole Star. In his dream, he inhabits the body of a Lomarian during a time of siege, when the Inutos press upon the city’s walls. Chosen to mount the watchtower and guard against treachery, he succumbs to the lulling shimmer of Polaris and falls asleep. When he later awakens, the city has fallen, its fate sealed by his own negligence. Back in the waking world, the narrator is tormented by the possibility that Olathoë was reality and his modern existence only a dream, with Polaris itself shining above as an eternal reminder of his failure.

What makes “Polaris” interesting is not its plot, which is little more than a vignette based on one of HPL's own dreams, but the way it introduces the idea of dreaming as a gateway to another existence, one continuous across nights and perhaps more “real” than waking life. This conceit, to which Lovecraft will return in later stories, is the first step toward the creation of the Dreamlands as he would eventually develop them. In addition, we see the first hints of what might be called the “rules” of that setting, such as:

• Dreams as portals: The dreamer does not merely imagine but in some sense enters another world, complete with a history and geography of its own.
• Identity across dreams: The narrator is not simply himself, but inhabits another body, another life, as if reincarnated or transported.
• Dream vs. reality: The story leaves unresolved which world is real, a tension Lovecraft would return to repeatedly.

As a work of literature, “Polaris” is a bit rough, lacking the ornate landscapes of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath or the romantic melancholy of “Celephaïs” (which I'll discuss in the weeks to come). Instead, its importance lies in presenting Lovecraft’s enduring fascination with the idea of dream as revelation, that what we glimpse in sleep might not be fantasy at all, but rather memory, prophecy, or indeed truth. The notion that the dream may be more real than the waking world would become one of the cornerstones of the Dreamlands stories.

“Polaris” may also reflect Lovecraft’s personal preoccupations at the time of its writing. He possessed a lifelong fascination with astronomy and once hoped to study the subject at Brown University. That ambition, however, was derailed by a nervous breakdown in 1908, which left him unable even to complete high school, much less pursue higher education at an institution as prestigious as Brown. By the time he wrote “Polaris,” Lovecraft was 28 years old and had no steady employment or reliable income, surviving instead on the remnants of a dwindling inheritance. In this light, the narrator’s dereliction of duty beneath the watchful star can be read as a symbolic dramatization of Lovecraft’s own sense of failure and unfulfilled promise. Yet, as is often the case with his work, what begins in the register of personal despair is ultimately transformed into a broader, more cosmic vision.

For readers who first encountered the Dreamlands chiefly through Lovecraft’s later and better-known stories, “Polaris” offers a glimpse of the cycle in embryo. By the light of the Pole Star, Lovecraft first sketched out a realm where dream and waking life blur and where the heavens themselves seem both oppressive and eternal. At the same time, the story hints at the liberating possibilities of that realm as a place where the constraints of his own earthly disappointments could be reimagined and transcended. In the Dreamlands, at least, he discovered a vehicle of escape, one that would grow into a central imaginative outlet for the rest of his career.