The unnameable : representation(s) of the sublime

Abstract

H. P. Lovecraft’s narrator of The Unnamable is criticized by a friend for talking, of writing, about things which cannot be really talked or written about: Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnameable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sighs or sounds which paralyzed my hero’s faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. One might suspect that the friend, Joel Manton, accuses Carter, the narrator and a writer, of writing about nothing, of giving names to things which are unnameable and thus nonexistent from the point of view of scientific or philosophical discourse for which, as Manton puts it, “it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology”.