I spent a month studying H.P. Lovecraft to write this for a graduate course.
Lovecraft: A Review
By Steven Bozeman
The horror fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft has profoundly influenced the fields of literature, philosophy, and psychology. This is evident not only in the posthumous praise lavished upon the man by many respected artists of our time, such as Stephen King and Guillermo Del Toro, but also in the collection of scholarly debate surrounding his work. A thorough consideration of Lovecraft’s impact requires us to be familiar with his background and worldview. We must also pay heed to the masterful prose that distinguished Lovecraft from the mediocre stories that appeared alongside him in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. This paper will draw from multiple scholarly articles to investigate the underlying themes of his weird fiction, his textual delivery, philosophical implications of his work, its psychological insight, and the resulting cultural response. This study will hopefully act as a springboard into a later study that can contextualize Lovecraft within the field of literature, thus providing a better understanding of the artistic merit of his work and its impact on our psyches.
Widely considered to be the successor to Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft was a pessimistic and elitist man whose dire familial situation exacerbated his morbid worldview. The loss of his father to syphilis and the subsequent mental deterioration of his mother did nothing to improve his already downtrodden demeanor. Frequently contemplating suicide, ruminating on the failures of Anglo society to keep what he perceived as inferior races at bay, condescending various magazine editors into accepting his gloomy stories, and ridiculing religious faith and anthropocentricism, Lovecraft was a tormented and often isolated individual. A philosopher exhibiting these flawed characteristics would have most likely had a failed career. But these very flaws ironically contributed to Howard’s genius as a storyteller. How is it that such afflictions can contribute to creativity?
Victoria Nelson posits that artists use their mediums to act out pathologies. In other words, an artistic expression may be an expression of a need to overcome something. “To give a material representation to anguish is in itself to be freed from it” (103). Examining the biographical information we have about Lovecraft, it is reasonable to assume that his issues with his parentage, his dissatisfaction with society and his racism are manifested in his stories of cosmic horror. Lovecraft’s fiction is replete with a hostility to otherness and an “obsessional interest in family past rather than future, forebears rather than offspring” (95). According to Nelson, Lovecraft’s stories didn’t fix his problems but were instead a “makeshift form of ongoing anxiety management.” This psychoanalytic interpretation of Howard’s work views his fiction as something that “bears the burden of resolving in the imagination the problems posed by the illness” (103). But how do we discern exactly where Lovecraft’s psychological issues arise in his stories? The answers to this are what constitute a vast majority of the scholarly debate about the master of weird fiction.
Lovecraft’s letters from his stay in New York indicate that he had a detestable intolerance for non-whites. This is documented in his fiction, with Lovecraft using harsh language, such as his description of “an Arab with a hatefully Negroid mouth” (Tyree 144). Even outside of his fiction his unapologetic anti-Semitism was expressed bluntly in his letters. He once wrote that "[t]he mass of contemporary Jews are hopeless as far as America is concerned. They are the product of alien blood, and inherit alien ideals … I've easily felt able to slaughter a score or two when jammed in a N.Y. subway train" (Schoell 54). A reactionary nature is common in authors of horror fiction and, for Lovecraft, it contributed to his creative vision. His “underlying fear of otherness often morphs into literal nightmares of alien beings and unnatural monstrosities” (Tyree 137).
Lovecraft’s racism is perhaps most evident in his tale The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The narrator of this story learns that he has similar heritage to a town’s fish-like inhabitants. However, the story offers a dual perspective regarding racial “otherness.” The narrator is initially repulsed by and suspicious of the residents of Innsmouth, but he eventually becomes more curious and empathetic. However, before we deem the story’s racial ambivalence as something that can redeem the author, we must consider its meaning in the greater context of Lovecraft’s mythos, namely, that all humans, regardless of race, will eventually be subverted by terrifying revelations about the universe (Bealer).
His narrators often share the common experience of realizing that humans are insignificant in the grand scheme of the cosmos. This revelation is brought on by the discovery of an alien presence that has the power to wipe us out. This inconvenient truth, compounded by an underlying atheism, leaves no hope for the humans in Lovecraft’s universe. Consistent with Howard’s xenophobia, it is in this dreadful universe of no salvation that our common origins are “not salutary…but awful” (Aboriginal 4).
Character development is not quite necessary in these stories because, in the end, we are faced with the belittling of all of mankind. In fact, characterization was not Lovecraft’s strong point most likely due to his shyness, ill health, and unwillingness to understand those that were different from him (Schoell). This lack of empathy and understanding exhibited by Lovecraft especially applies to aboriginal people.
James Goho’s The Aboriginal in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft is an article that analyzes the role of aboriginal people within these weird tales. These interbred cult-members shockingly rattle the narrators’ previous conceptions of the world. This still aligns with Lovecraft’s derogatory and racist view of the “other” but it ultimately lends more power to these people. There is a fear of these vanquished or enslaved populations because in the stories they arise in horrific form. The narrator usually happens upon a group of beings engaged in a disturbing scene of religious ritual.
“In ‘He’, Lovecraft displays a hellish image of the future of New York, with drumming as the soundtrack. It is like a dark bestial beating heart:
I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horrible in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the wave of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen” (Aboriginal 11).
Unfortunately there is something more to this. To the horror of our discovering narrators, the actual villains in Lovecraft’s stories are not these cult-like people but the alien beings they worship. The narrators ultimately discover monstrous and indescribable aliens that render all humans of the earth as insignificant as ants in a tornado. The discovery of these Great Old Ones such as the giant octopoid “Cthulhu” consequently ruptures the sanity of a narrator. The mere existence of such creatures is devastating to the psyche. Lovecraft’s men tend to be scientifically curious academics and the stories themselves are typically their personal reflections as they contemplate the horrible existential implications of a discovery. This existential meltdown that is common in Lovecraft’s stories has led scholars to much philosophical debate. What are the metaphysical underpinnings of this brand of horror?
“[The] relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft’s habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction (or sanity breakdown) and an ontological destruction (or unleashing of the corrosive forces of the cosmos)” (Woodard 5). Planet Earth is inconsequential compared to the brutal forces of Lovecraft’s universe. Even our conception and experience of time itself is a delusion.
Kurt Fawver’s “Present”-ly Safe: The Anthropocentricism of Time in H.P. Lovecraft’s Fiction posits that, in Lovecraft’s stories, time is a defense mechanism created by humans to help them cope with their insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Since Lovecraft’s monsters are far beyond the scope of our commonly used units of measurement they are able to uproot scientific, ethical, and metaphysical concepts that we previously regarded as truth. Fawver proposes that time as we experience it has no objective existence. Lovecraft’s monsters, however, are beyond time and able to traverse time and space with ease.
This may remind you of the esoteric physics of Einstein and Hawking. Certainly, the meager heretofore findings of their galactic science only lend credit to the awful scope of Lovecraftian horror. “A suggestion that something or someone has, in an atemporal sense, already destroyed the entire species underlies all Lovecraft’s tales. The only way [for humans] to deal with this inevitability is to block it out, to erect a psychological defense against the crushing presence of past and future evils” (Fawver250). Our construction of time as we know it is an evolutionary defense mechanism that distracts us from the reality of our place in the cosmos. “Humankind cannot be allowed to understand the true nature of time because, if it did, it would be forced to recognize that humanity is not special, humanity will eventually be erased from the earth, and the universe is much more complex than any human can imagine; anthropocentricism would be obliterated, and, with it, any hope for the future of Homo Sapiens…The anthropocentric perception of time in Lovecraft’s work, therefore, arises due to humanity’s need to maintain hope and a sense of purpose in a hopeless and purposeless cosmos. Assured safety and peace of mind grows only from a regime of ignorance—in this particular instance, ignorance of time’s ultimate nature” (Fawver 253).
Before moving on to other philosophical themes within Lovecraft, let’s witness the frequently cited introduction to The Call of Cthulhu, which can provide us a glimpse of Lovecraft’s eloquence as a writer and one of his elaborations of our cognitive limitations just described:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age” (Lovecraft 78).
In Lovecraft’s stories there is also a destruction of another essential human experience: the sublime. Vivian Ralickas’s “Cosmic Horror” and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft posits that there cannot be a sublime reading of Lovecraft. Due to the deterministic materialism that underlies his universe, the marginalized protagonists of his stories only have an illusion of freedom, an illusion that can only be attributed to chance. “In denying the human subject freedom, an idea crucial to the aesthetics of sublimity, Lovecraft’s worldview necessarily makes an experience of the sublime impossible” (367).
This gets worse. Ralickas also states that the Western ethics required for sublimity are themselves subjective falsehoods. “Cosmic horror therefore not only dethrones the human subject whose pre-eminence sublimity affirms, but also questions the ethics of Western culture, the basis of the common sense that makes sublimity possible” (369). Everything we’ve told ourselves about our history and moral progress is merely a subjective illusion governed by a mechanistic universe that is indifferent to our needs and aspirations. We are inseparable from the “nature we seek to dominate” (389) because the newly revealed conception of nature suddenly includes the likes of Cthulhu; and nothing remains but dread and a total of loss of self. What is meant by “dread”? “Dread is not like fear; it lacks any determinate object and is something we all feel….This is the horror of human existence that Lovecraft experienced and tried to dissolve in his writings” (Sickness 5).
The underlying dread of these stories is, in fact, unnamable. James Goho’s What is “The Unnamable”? H.P. Lovecraft and the Problem of Evil is an extensive exploration of the limits of speech in describing unfathomable horror and suffering. Lovecraft has written of “that chief of torments—inarticulateness” (Unnamable 6), and he employs it in his stories. Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy also confirms the power of this vagueness when it comes to writing horror. Referring to Lovecraft, Harman states that “[n]o other writer gives us monsters and cities so difficult to describe that he can only hint at their anomalies. Not even Poe gives us such hesitant narrators, wavering so uncertainly as to whether their coming words can do justice to the unspeakable reality they confront” (9). This is precisely why there has not been a truly faithful film adaptation of Lovecraft’s work. If the evil witnessed by Lovecraft’s characters can’t even be adequately described, and if this indescribable nature of the beings is integral to the effectiveness of the stories, then perhaps they’ll never successfully make the transition to the big screen (Hand and McRoy). “Rather than inventing a monster with an arbitrary number of tentacles and dangerous sucker-mouths and telepathic brains, we must recognize that no such list of arbitrary weird properties is enough to do the trick. There must be some deeper and more malevolent principle at work in our monsters that escapes all such definition…[i]n Lovecraft the medium is the message” (Harman 22).
H.P. Lovecraft’s catalog of weird tales should be continually examined as the field of horror fiction develops. The cosmic scale of his stories can only be elaborated upon as our technology and knowledge of the universe develops. A further study could strive to expose the presence of Lovecraftian elements in literature and film, as well as an analysis of why we enjoy this madness. If and when we find that we are not alone, Lovecraft’s vision will be all the more terrifying.
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