“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came”: Depicting the Artist in Caitlin Kiernan’s The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl

In his story “Pickman’s Model” H.P. Lovecraft crystallises one of the recurrent themes in weird fiction when he writes of the central artist character: “Pickman was in every sense – in conception and in execution – a thorough, painstaking and almost scientific realist” (PM 86). The notion that it is the artist or writer who is uniquely positioned to be able to communicate with the horrors that constitute the negative sublime embodied in cosmicism is repeated several times throughout the (sub) genre; in Arthur Machen’s “The Hill of Dreams”; in Algernon Blackwood’s The Centaur; Lovecraft himself returns to this motif in “The Music of Eric Zann” and The Call of Cthulhu; while more recently, weird films and videogames such as In The Mouth of Madness and Alan Wake have also explored this idea. This chapter examines how Caitlín R Kiernan, who’s “work is weird in the richest and fullest and richest sense of the term … drawing upon the heritage of cosmic weird fiction” (Joshi 706), continues and complicates this tradition. Kiernan, who has been noted for her artistic concerns (Joshi, 2017, Goho 2020) has published numerous stories and novels in which, to quote one of Lovecraft’s narrator’s: “It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came” (COC 145).

Much like Lovecraft, in a move that seems at least partly autobiographical, Kiernan’s fiction similarly explores the abject nature of the artist’s relationship with their art. Julia Kristeva writes of the abject that it “beseeches, worries and fascinates desire” (1) and so Kiernan’s stories are filled with artistic and creative characters who are irresistibly drawn to that which repulses them, reflecting her own view that “I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels.” (qtd in L.C. Jones online) Yet, whereas artists or other creative individuals are often severely punished for their transgressing of boundaries in Lovecraft’s work, Kiernan’s characters experience a decidedly more varied fate. This chapter will explore these fates and examine the ways in which this discrepancy in fortune seems tied to the increased awareness that Kiernan’s characters possess concerning “the unreliability of perception and cognition” (Kiernan qtd L.C. Jones online). Existing in a more self-reflexive and knowingly postmodern relationship to concepts of taboo and the ‘Other’, characters such as the protagonist of “Houses Under the Sea” note that “all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions” (182) and consequently embody a degree of critical distance absent from older instances of the form.