Lovecraft Annual, No. 1

by S. T. Joshi (ed. )

  II

  Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

  —H. P. Lovecraft, Letter to Farnsworth Wright (SL 2.150)

  Horror in Lovecraft is essentially cosmic indifference. It is the realization that there is no purpose to the universe.

  —David Clements, “Cosmic Psychoanalysis: Lovecraft, Lacan, and Limits” (6)

  Lovecraft himself and numerous critics agree that one of the major themes in his fiction is the revelation of a philosophy of cosmic indifference. Critics also note the importance of Lovecraft’s nonfiction (especially “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and “Some Notes on a Nonentity”) and his copious letters as sources of supplementary information to help understand his fiction. Lovecraft foresaw the challenge his themes might pose. In a letter to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales at the time, Lovecraft comments, “I presume that few commonplace readers would have any use for a story written on these psychological principles” (SL 2.150). A review of Lovecraft’s critical reception, “Lovecraft Criticism: A Study” by S. T. Joshi, addresses the complaints of several early critics for whom this presumption proves true. This lack of understanding may have more to do with Lovecraft’s prose style, however, than the shortcomings of “commonplace readers.” For instance, whereas Finnish critic Timo Airaksinen frankly admits that Lovecraft is a “problematic stylist,” several of Lovecraft’s defenders, such as James Arthur Anderson, take it upon themselves to demonstrate “that much of what are mistakenly perceived to be flaws in Lovecraft’s work are really essential components of his overall theme and meaning” (Airaksinen 3, Anderson ii–iii). Likewise, in an article titled “Lovecraft and Adjectivitis: A Deconstructionist View,” Donald R. Burleson attempts to explain how Lovecraft’s apparent misuse of adjectives—often discussed by Lovecraft’s detractors—is actually an effective literary device. Suffice to say, then, with so much controversy over its effectiveness, that Lovecraft’s fiction is challenging at best.

  Compared to his fiction, however, Lovecraft’s nonfictional texts are very straightforward, explanatory, and declaratory—such as the “fundamental premise” comment in the above epigraph. Little wonder, then, that Lovecraft’s defenders often find it necessary to cite his nonfiction and his letters to help make their cases. For example, both Timo Airaksinen and S. T. Joshi make testament to the importance of encountering Lovecraft’s ideas in his nonfiction to properly understand his fiction. According to Airaksinen, “Lovecraft . . . develops a comprehensive literary theory, a personal philosophy, and a metaphysics which he follows in his fiction. . . . Without knowledge of this background philosophy, to discover what he is writing about is difficult” (3). S. T. Joshi claims that Lovecraft’s essays and letters provide “invaluable information on the understanding of Lovecraft’s thought and, hence, his fiction,” that Lovecraft’s “world view is worth examining in some detail so that we can then see how precisely and systematically the fiction is an expression of it,” and that “[the] failure to read Lovecraft’s letters has in particular caused problems for certain critics” (“Decline” 170, 171, 229).

  When critics employ his letters and nonfiction to understand his fiction, they are in effect employing a method of translation, but it is not a Benjaminian translation. The intent of this intertextualism is to interpret the content of Lovecraft’s fiction as if it were a translation of the ideas expressed in his nonfiction—what Benjamin might call an attempt to understand the transmission of information, i.e. to understand what really is not essential to the work. If Lovecraft’s fiction and nonfiction say the exact same thing in a different way, there would be no point in reading one after reading the other. One could simply read Lovecraft’s letters or “Supernatural Horror in Literature” to “get” his cosmic philosophy and not trouble with his complex and problematic fictional texts. This is assuredly not the case, however; surely there is some value in the differences between Lovecraft’s modes of writing. Lovecraft’s fiction expresses his philosophy differently than his nonfiction. The qualities that make Lovecraft’s fiction so challenging are exactly those same qualities that, in Benjamin’s opinion, are essential to the literary work: “the unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic’ ” (70).

  According to Benjamin’s principles, Lovecraft’s fiction should be able to stand well apart from his nonfiction. Perhaps, by employing a Benjaminian method, readers may be able, as S. T. Joshi suggests, “to forget this body of peripheral material and read again the stories as stories” (“Decline” 229). In Benjaminian terms, Lovecraft’s (and, for that matter, any author’s) work attempts to enact a revelation of “pure language.” If one reads his fiction as such a process, that reading, as such, is not much different from any number of other recent postmodern critics of Lovecraft. However, applying Benjamin allows one to dismiss Lovecraft’s nonfiction as the apparent origin of meaning for his fiction, and replaces this author-centered, intertextual critical view with a more language-oriented methodology that explains just why Lovecraft’s fiction is worthy of critical attention in the first place without the need to “supplement” of Lovecraft’s additional texts and explanations.

  III

  Of the supposed “problems” or “flaws” of Lovecraft’s writing, the one that may be most responsible for hindering the comprehension of his cosmic themes is the misunderstood outlook of his narrators. Despite Lovecraft’s claim that “scene, mood, and phenomena are more important in conveying what is to be conveyed than are characters and plot,” the character of his narrators are of key importance in his fiction (“Some Notes on a Nonentity” [MW 562]). Deborah D’Agati touches on this idea in her article “The Problems with Solving: Implications for Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft Narrators.” Lovecraft’s narrators tend to be very rational. As they encounter the uncanny, they conduct “a search dictated by rational inquiry” (57). Some readers criticize Lovecraft’s narrators for being too logical, claiming that the narrators seem to possess an unrealistically tenacious hold on logical but implausible explanations for uncanny events rather than concluding that the supernatural is at work. As D’Agati explains, however, the narrators have no reason not to expect logical answers—in their empirical and materialist worldviews, supernatural explanations are just not a thinkable option. The narrative voices of these empiricists are often so appropriately dry and objective that readers may forget that there is, in fact, a character with a particular worldview narrating the story.

  To be fair, reader expectations also play into this quandary. Upon encountering a Lovecraft story, especially if it is contained in a context such as an issue of Weird Tales, the reader understandably expects the uncanny, unnatural, and weird to occur. One may assume that the readers of Weird Tales and its ilk in fact want to read about aliens, ghosts, monsters, and whatnot. Indeed, such elements would be the whole point of the story to most readers of weird fiction. However, since readers of weird fiction assume, expect, and want the presence of supernatural entities and paranormal forces, the appearance of such entities or forces is not as shocking and horrible to the reader as they are to the unsuspecting narrators. As D’Agati notes, “Lovecraft’s narrators are stunned because they find the opposite of what they expect” (59). Because of this discrepancy in expectations, many readers have been unable to easily identify with Lovecraft’s narrators and thus fail to understand the mystic quality of the narrators’ tales. To be sure, Lovecraft writes fiction in the language of the mystic; his narrators encounter what lies outside of the mundane sphere of human experience and attempt to explain the unexplainable, describe the indescribable, and name the unnamable. In short, his narrators experience the ineffable and struggle to communicate it.

  Lovecraft’s stories, then, express cosmic indifference via illustration and demonstration, as opposed to the version of cosmicism present in his letters and nonfiction, where he reveals his philosophy in simple declarations or exp
lanations. As Fritz Leiber states the case, readers of Lovecraft’s fiction encounter “confirmation rather than revelation” (56; emphasis in original). Thus, Lovecraft’s fiction, in a sense, is what Airaksinen calls a “sacred” text: “The vision is apocalyptic but at the same time liberating, just like the touch of holiness must be. . . . The Lovecraftian text robs the world of its meaning, yet forces his reader to cling to it, as the only road to salvation” (217–18). Lovecraft’s stories, then, often “fail” to adequately express his cosmicism because what he is attempting to do, in fact, is relate a mystical experience, or at least what would pass for a mystical experience in his mechanistic fictional world, which is somewhat different from mystical experiences in our world.

  Epistemologist Bimal Krishna Matilal explains the mystic viewpoint as follows: “‘Mysticism’ has been loosely used for an assortment of views. The salient feature of these views is that they envision an integrated picture of the cosmos and promote a special type of human experience that is at once unitive and nondiscursive, at once self-fulfilling and self-effacing” (143). Christian philosopher William P. Alston defines as mystical “any experience that is taken by the subject to be a direct awareness of (what is taken to be) Ultimate Reality or (what is taken to be) an object of religious worship” (80). Thus, the mystic experience is a confrontation with reality such as it is, typically an event perceived as a coming to terms with universal totality or connection. The experience is self-fulfilling because it provides a sense of place and purpose, and self-effacing because it does away with individual identity as one connects with the sublime. Didier T. Jaén’s article on mysticism in fantastic literature discusses the mystical experience as a kind of unsettling confrontation with the cosmos which forces a new understanding of its laws and rules. For Jaén, this confrontation originates in “disquieting art”: “The disquieting art object forces or presumes in the spectator a revision or reconsideration of the everyday laws of nature” (110).

  These definitions of mysticism put Lovecraft’s fiction well within the mystical paradigm. In regard to Jaén, consider the numerous examples of “disquieting art” found in Lovecraft. To name but a few: the wild viol playing in “The Music of Erich Zann,” the idol and strange architecture in “The Call of Cthulhu,” and the mural sculptures in At the Mountains of Madness. Just as Jaén states, these art objects influence Lovecraft’s narrators to reconsider their understanding of the world.1 The narrators eventually apprehend what Alston terms “Ultimate Reality.” In Lovecraft, this Ultimate Reality is “a single truth, a terrible truth from the human point of view: namely, that mankind is but a tiny insignificant speck, without hope and without meaning. The more we learn, Lovecraft says, the smaller we become” (Anderson 166). While the notion of mysticism in Lovecraft falls in line with Jaén and Alston, it diverges from Matilal’s definition at this point. As the quote from Anderson notes, Lovecraft’s mystical experience is indeed self-effacing; the narrator’s sense of self is suitably sublimated. The difference, also illustrated by Anderson’s quote, is that Lovecraft offers no self-fulfillment. It is because of this distinction that Lovecraft’s narrators are negative mystics. Lovecraft’s narrators become chagrined instead of fulfilled, despondent instead of hopeful, disillusioned instead of content.

  Reading mysticism into Lovecraft is by no means entirely new. Bradley A. Will and Richard E. Dansky, for example, both explore Lovecraft’s inside/outside cosmology in some detail. Lovecraft’s “inside” is the limited realm of human experience; the “outside” is the cosmic. Lovecraft often refers to the cosmic as the “beyond,” which is apropos since it is actually what is beyond human ken. This cosmology is also characteristic of mysticism: “[the] world as we know it is a delusion that hides the true nature or state of things, or else it is no delusion at all, revealing all there is, if only we could see. The mystic thus learns to see the world in this double perspective” (Jaén 107). This is exactly what happens to Lovecraft’s narrators. Will’s article “H. P. Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime” compares Lovecraft’s cosmic vision with Kant’s description of the apprehension of the sublime. Kant concludes that encountering the noumenal (or sublime) sphere results in a sense of awe and wonder for that which is greater than ourselves. Lovecraft’s version of the noumenal sphere— the cosmic—is “mechanistic and material” rather than spiritual, but it is mechanistic beyond human comprehension (Will 16). Dansky, in his article “Transgression, Spheres of Influence, and the Use of the Utterly Other in Lovecraft,” discusses Lovecraft’s fictional universe in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s epic (immutable) and novel (mutable) spheres and how Lovecraftian narrators transgress between the two.

  Lovecraft’s fiction, then, consists of narrators attempting to express their version of a mystical truth, to discuss in the human sphere that which lies beyond it, to approach the limitless “pure language” within the limits of language. Going back to Benjamin, the only way to understand such content is to understand that it cannot be translated, to understand that it attempts an approximation of the ineffable, of what lies outside of comprehension altogether. This untranslatability is obviously a crucial element in Lovecraft’s work. Furthermore, psychoanalytic critic David Clements argues that a narrator struggling to express the ineffable is not just an element of Lovecraftian fiction but is rather precisely what defines a work as weird fiction:

  the narrator cannot entirely repress the knowledge gained in the tale. He will therefore turn to writing this story. Writing is Lovecraft’s solution as well; it allows Lovecraft to both express the absolute truth of cosmic indifference while simultaneously reveling in a jouissance. This is the special mixture that results in weird fiction. (10; emphasis in original)

  Thus proceed a great number of Lovecraft’s narrations. They are expressions of cosmic indifference that reveal what expressing things with dry, critical—one might say indifferent—language cannot, primarily the fact that a true revelation of cosmic indifference is something that is so totally antithetical to normal human conception, and hence so horrifying, that it cannot be stated dryly or critically. The mystical experience, in short, is one to which one cannot be indifferent, objective, and critical.

  Quite often, a Lovecraft narrator offers a cautionary tale and a salvation narrative all in one. Unlike traditional mystical and/or sacred writings, however, the salvation lies entirely in avoiding, not embracing, the forces that provide a transcendent meaning to the world. The difference between Lovecraft and, say, St. John of the Cross, then, is that while their texts have the same purpose structurally—they offer a new ontological vision of the world and humanity’s relation to it— one structure is the negative image of the other. John (or Teresa of Avila, or any other traditional mystic) urges belief in order for the reader to gain admittance to God’s infinite love and compassion. Lovecraft’s narrators, too, urge belief, but it is a negative belief—a belief in a godless universe that bears infinite indifference to humanity’s actions. In the world of Lovecraft’s fiction, the positive belief that one lives in a world where one’s motives and proceedings are substantive lays the foundation for horrific peril when the narrative of self-importance comes undone. The stories prove to the characters that not just faith, but reason, too, is false and the narrator is damned both spiritually and logically.

  In the mystic tradition, to be enlightened—to learn of the “big picture” of the cosmos—is to be saved or to be one with the universe. However, in Lovecraft’s fiction, to be enlightened is to be damned to hopelessness. In order to believe that one is saved or at one with the universe, one must maintain ignorance of the cosmic reality. Lovecraft’s narrators often pine for such ignorance, which in this case is literally blissful. Ignorance is the only path to salvation. “Consciousness, then, is fundamentally based on denial. It is in this sense that our everyday world, our daytime world of consciousness, is a buffer, a blanket of merciful ignorance” (Clements 28). The offering of salvation emphasizes Airaksinen’s opinion that Lovecraft’s fic
tional texts have sacred qualities. However, the stories expose the audience to truths that should remain hidden and, thus, the audience is damned by the very text that would offer salvation. If the purpose of traditional mystics is to spread the gospel,2 or “good news” of what they have known, then the Lovecraft’s narrators should endeavor to keep their mahspel,3 or “bad news,” to themselves.

  If these stories are, in effect, the mahspel expressing the negative mystical experience of the narrators, then it should be obvious that Lovecraft’s fiction creates a much more potent and nuanced vision than his nonfiction. According to Alston,

  no statements, not even rough, imprecise ones, are possible with respect to mystical experience or its objects. In mystical literature, language is limited to evocative or expressive uses. Mystics should be understood as saying what they do in order to evoke in the hearer some faint echo of the mystical experience and/or to express that experience or their reactions thereto. (82; emphasis in original)

  This is exactly why it is a mistake to equate the ideology found in Lovecraft’s letters with the “meaning” of his fiction: rational, explanatory prose can offer nothing but rational, explanatory comprehension. Lovecraft’s fiction, in contrast, does something very different and Lovecraft’s narrators offer something more because, in short, Lovecraft does not have the same kind of mystical experience that his narrators do. Lovecraft himself comes about his cosmic philosophy based on information within the human sphere. His narrators come to similar, but subtly more profound, conclusions by acquiring information from outside the human sphere. They offer absolutely bleak and nihilistic revelations that come from having confronted the outside of rationality. Lovecraft’s letters and essays, which by their genre classification as nonfiction hold an implicit assumption of truth and presence of meaning, can only build up that which his negative fiction tears apart by archaic and obscure language, hints, and suggestions. To put this argument another way, it is a mistake to translate the message of Lovecraft’s letters into his fiction because reason is everything and serves as the solid basis of the cosmicism in his nonfiction, but reason is paradoxically nothing and everything in his fiction. In his fiction, while the story serves to probe that rationality is nothing, the message of the negative mystic is that rationality is indeed everything, for it is all one has left to which to cling.