29 pages • 58 minutes read
The Colour Out of Space
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Symbols & Motifs
The Meteor as Message
Three times, Lovecraft compares the meteor to a message or messenger from beyond. In religion and myth, the birth of something from the heavens is supposed to deliver the message that humankind has a special place in the eyes of a benevolent God. The meteorite does the opposite. While Lovecraft never explicitly spells out the supposed message, he surrounds references to the messenger with words like, “lone,” “weird,” “frightful,” “unformed.” If a wordless message can be translated, the meteorite is mutely warning humankind to know their place in the cosmos, that this place is the smallest and least significant.
Helplessness in the Face of the Unknowable
Passivity and helplessness are common motifs in Lovecraft’s work. Ammi remarks on Nahum’s passivity in the face of horror, and the narrator comments on the fact that Ammi also seems to be stuck, unable to leave the area of the blight. His characters are often stricken by a sense of resignation, which prevents them from fleeing certain annihilation. For example, Nahum and his family continue drinking from the tainted well. Ammi seems equally stuck. He knows the blight is creeping closer, but he stays on. Perhaps in Lovecraft’s view, his characters are like the proverbial frog in hot water. The horror creeps up so slowly they are overwhelmed before they realize it’s too late. Perhaps this is the natural and inevitable reaction of human beings in the presence of something from a part of the universe so far beyond human experience or comprehension.
The Colour Itself
Lovecraft uses the unseeable colour motif as an illustration of cosmicism. The alien entity radiates electromagnetic energy at a wavelength (colour) that the human eye is not designed to register. Lovecraft may have been thinking of colorblindness. The human eye contains three different kinds of cones, each sensitive to a different range of wavelengths (colors) in the spectrum. Other animals, such as dogs and cats can distinguish only one colour across range where a human can see thousands of gradations. On the other hand, some birds, insects, and fish can distinguish 99 million gradations of colour that humans cannot. Apparently, the colour from the meteorite is just one of hundreds of millions of things in the universe that our eyes aren’t equipped for.
In addition, Lovecraft would have been aware of the existence of chimerical colours, colours outside the normal colour space that could be seen only under particular conditions, and possibly even imaginary colors that don’t exist but can be described mathematically.
Lovecraft’s description of the colour radiated by the meteor suggests that its radiation interferes with the light we are equipped to see. For example, when the unnamed narrator describes something like a haze or a chiaroscuro effect, the use of strong contrasts of light and shadow to model three-dimensional figures on a flat surface. Or when the scientists from the university say that they use the word “colour” only as an analogy for something their science cannot explain.
Lovecraft proposes that an object from another part of the universe might exhibit properties that don’t occur in our corner of the cosmos, properties that we are not evolved to detect because nothing on our world evolved to deal with it. Presumably, wherever the entity comes from, its properties are as commonplace as the colour blue is to us. We, in our vanity and failure of imagination, assume that the universe is relatively homogeneous and the physical laws that apply on Earth are the same that apply everywhere else. Lovecraft and his devoted readers prefer to hope that there are still possibilities beyond our imagination.
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