Lovecraft, Tolkien, and the nightmare as “a necessary drug for the mass consciousness”

Here’s a description of the book Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project (Brill, 2013) by Russian-born literary and cultural scholar Dina Khapaeva, who is currently serving as chair of the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech:

What is a nightmare as a psychological experience, a literary experiment and a cultural project? Why has experiencing a nightmare under the guise of reading a novel, watching a film or playing a video game become a persistent requirement of contemporary mass culture? By answering these questions, which have not been addressed by literary criticism and cultural studies, we can interpret anew the texts of classic authors. Charles Maturin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Howard Philips Lovecraft and Victor Pelevin carry out bold experiments on their heroes and readers as they seek to investigate the nature of nightmare in their works. This book examines their prose to reveal the unstudied features of the nightmare as a mental state and traces the mosaic of coincidences leading from literary experiments to today s culture of nightmare consumption.

And here several interesting passages from a section of the book titled “The Culture of Nightmare Consumption.” The latter term, note, refers to Khapaeva’s contention, or rather observation, that today we live in and with “a consumer culture for the nightmare,” where the nightmare is “a staple consumption concept upon which today’s culture is extremely dependent.”

The works of J. R. R. Tolkien and H. P. Lovecraft, which directly influenced contemporary fiction and the visual arts, can hardly be overestimated, and represented a new landmark in the formation of the Gothic Aesthetic. Their works laid the foundations of the contemporary culture of nightmare consumption and facilitated the nightmare’s penetration into everyday life, allowing it to exert a huge influence over the minds of millions of readers, viewers, and video game users.

. . . Tolkien and Lovecraft most probably had no idea of each other’s existence, at least while they were writing their main works. However, being united in the space of contemporary culture, their quests have merged into the single project of the Gothic Aesthetic.

. . . The rise of the Gothic Aesthetic in the 1990s occurred through a coincidence of several trends and factors that had started to emerge in the late 1970s. The birth of Gothic rock coincided with the peak of Tolkien’s popularity due to the translation of The Lord of the Rings into most European languages. These events had clear social consequences: Gothic rock produced the Goth youth subculture, while The Lord of the Rings inspired the rise of role-playing games. The writings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose prose was instrumental  in promoting a fascination with nightmares, were also used as a model for role-playing games in the early 1980s, but his works gained true popularity in the late 1980s-early 1990s, when contemporary computer games were developed. Works by Tolkien and Lovecraft made a unique contribution to the rise of the Gothic Aesthetic, influencing the minds of millions of readers, users and viewers.

In the 1980s the nightmare gradually began to transform into a necessary drug for the mass consciousness; the public was not aware of its addictive effect until it began to require equine doses of direct and vulgar nightmares in order to achieve the desired effect. Over the last 20 years the nightmare has become the most desirable psychological state, and indeed any product on the pleasure market that does not imitate it seems to the contemporary consumer to be insipid and unreal.