Failure of Lovecraft's Project: 1 of 3

[j d worthington]

Oh, most definitely. But then, the best literary criticism always does, just as it rattles the sticks-in-the-mud who complain about accepting such a figure into the canon in the first place.

And, frankly, there has been a considerable amount of rather good literary analyses of HPL's work over the years, some of which tends toward the rather dry, some toward the tongue-in-cheek (especially some of Bob Price's pieces), and some which is so well written and intriguing (and revisitable) that it quite possibly could classify as at least minor literature in its own right. Some of it, in my opinion, need not be humbled to be in the company of some of De Quincey's essays, or the more thoughtful critical work of Poe (whom Arthur Hobson Quinn called our first great critic).

Incidentally, I like the comparison to Conrad, and think it is rather fitting. Lovecraft, by the bye, thought highly of what of Conrad he read. I'll look up his comments to his aunt a little later and send them along, as I think you might find them of interest....

 

[j d worthington]

Ah! Here we go:

My current reading is Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim", and I find it the most vital and important of any of the books on my immediate programme. I had previously read only the shorter and minor productions of Conrad, and was inclined to marvel at the depth and extent of his fame; but having read this volume I marvel no more, but join in the admiring chorus[....] Conrad is at heart supremely a poet, and though his narration is often very heavy and involved, he displays an infinitely potent command of the soul of men and things, reflecting the tides of affairs in an unrivalled procession of graphic pictures which burn their imagery indelibly upon the mind. He feels and expresses as few authors can the prodigious and inhuman tides of a blind, bland universe; at heart indifferent to mankind, but purposefully malignant if measured by the narrow and empirical standard of human teleology. Hardy, as I remarked recently, seems to me vastly overrated; being at bottom ordinary, trite, and a trifle theatrical. But Conrad's reputation is deserved -- he has the sense of ultimate nothingness and the evanescence of illusions which only a master and an aristocrat can have; and he mirrors it forth with that uniqueness and individuality which are genuine art. No other artist I have yet encountered has so keen an appreciation of the essential solitude of the high grade personality -- that solitude whose projected overtones form the mental world of each sensitively organised individual -- which intrusion is powerless to assail and assaltable[???] [sic] only to intensify; which is at once the prison and protection of the proved and complex non-animal soul. Yes -- Conrad is at least one idol of today which is not a "false alarm"; and I think posterity will single him out with a very few companions as one of the supreme voices of the age.

-- Letters from New York, pp. 136-37​

And, of course, there are his comments in Supernatural Horror in Literature:

Naturally it is impossible in brief sketch to trace out all the classic modern uses of the terror element. The ingredient must of necessity enter into all work, both prose and verse, treating broadly of life; and we are therefore not surprised to find a share in such writers as the poet Browning, whose Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea, and of the dæmoniac driving power of Fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally resolute men.

 

[Extollager]

JDW, that Lovecraft passage on Conrad is too good to be buried in an only lightly-visited thread on a different topic. I'm just going to walk it over to the new thread department.

 

[Extollager]

JDW, you allude to some superb essays on Lovecraft (invoking de Quincey! ah!). Would you like to cite a few examples? Let me guess: one will be Fritz Leiber's "Literary Copernicus" paper.

 

[j d worthington]

While I would certainly recommend Leiber's "A Literary Copernicus" and his "Through Time and Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin" (both available in Writers of the Dark, which publishes all HPL's letters to Leiber and his wife Jonquil as well as Fritz's essays on HPL and a handful of Lovecraftian tales he wrote over the years), those weren't what I had in mind in particular. I was thinking more along the lines of St. Armand's The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (sadly long out of print and rather difficult to find for an affordable price, but worth looking up via the library system) -- a personal favorite; several of the pieces included in S. T. Joshi's Four Decades of Criticism, including those by Cannon, Mosig, St. Armand, and Wetzel, and such pieces as Donald R. Burleson's "On Lovecraft's Themes: Touching the Glass", in An Epicure in the Terrible (along with several other essays in that volume which, the rights having been returned to the editors, may be reprinted soon -- the original not being that easy to track down either, sadly):

An Epicure in the Terrible

You can find information on quite a few of the worthwhile books or essays on HPL at the H. P. Lovecraft Archive "Study" page:

Literary Criticism

His Study

For a very challenging and meaty look, Waugh's The Monster in the Mirror is highly recommended....

 

[Extollager]

Thank you. I will look into some of these things.

Incidentally, apropos of one of S. T. Joshi's books on HPL (the Decline of the West one) -- I expect any mail-delivery day now to receive a copy of a book called The Morbid Age (author Richard Overy) -- referring to the 1920s/30s, just exactly Lovecraft's most productive years. I expect it will fire off numerous Lovecraftian connections, although I expect to write about it for a Tolkienian 'zine!

The Morbid Age by Richard Overy reviewed by Richard Vinen TLS

 

[j d worthington]

It looks intriguing, and one I may have to search out at some point. However, given the review, I am also skeptical about the general idea and tone. I tend to agree with the idea that a large portion of the uncertainty was from causes which are still with us today: the way our scientific findings challenge or controvert traditional, often intuitive, views of ourselves and the universe around us. Certainely the "double whammy" of Darwin and Freud had an immense impact, causing both great excitement (and ferment) and a great reaction to refute or dismiss many (if not all) their points. Hence we had such an upsurge in the amount of fictional material (of all sorts) dealing with "the beast in Man" (one of the major themes of Lovecraft, of course, as well as Machen). And when Einstein & Co. came along with science which seriously questioned our foundational understanding of the basic structure of nature and reality....

At any rate, it should be an interesting book. I am curious about how you'll deal with it, especially in a Tolkienian venue. Which is that to be, by the way?

 

[Extollager]

JDW, I contribute frequently to Nancy Martsch's newsletter Beyond Bree. This Tolkienian 'zine has been appearing monthly for almost 30 years now. Lately I've been reviewing some excellent social history books for BB. Incidentally, in a short piece on the second World War, I quoted from a delightful essay by Arthur Machen called "The Gray's Inn Coffee House," which appeared in a 1944 book called We Shall Eat and Drink Again. Who'd have guessed, from "The Great God Pan" and so on, that Machen was (perhaps I should say, would become) a fine writer on food and drink? But then, for me, the best of Machen is his first autobiographical volume, Far Off Things. You mentioned de Quincey recently. I think there may be some influence from the author of the Confessions on Machen... I hope Lovecraft got to read Far-Off Things.

 

[j d worthington]

I would have to check to be certain, but as I recall, he did, and liked it.

I would like to read that particular piece by Machen, though I find it is in neither of the two volumes of his essays I have from Tartarus Press (Dreads and Drolls and The Secret of the Sangraal and Other Writings) which I have set aside to read in the next year or two, when I reach Machen's writings in my current project.

Do you know where I can find a copy of that piece, other than seeking out that particular volume? (Then again, some of Machen's books go for quite reasonable prices at times; I found all three volumes of his autobiography for ridiculously low amounts a while back....)

 

[Extollager]

JDW, email me with your mailing address and I'll send the "Gray's Inn" piece.

 

[Tets]

I propose, with the indulgence of you all, to provoke some discussion of the following thesis:

Lovecraft was a Romantic. He was a Romantic because, like Blake (who had very, very different beliefs), he wanted to change the consciousness of his readers. "Readers" refers to readers of his stories and/or of his letters. Lovecraft wanted his readers to accept what has been called his cosmicism. His cosmicism is a form of materialism. But it is not tenable.

I propose to offer three threads for discussion, each of which will deal with a factor that should make Lovecraft's thought unsatisfactory to any thoughtful reader.

Here is the first of three threads.

1.Lovecraft's Romantic project is unsatisfactory because essential to it is a basic category error. He mixes the quantitative and the qualitative.

Perhaps derived from the first few pages of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, Lovecraft's project forces upon the reader's attention the vastness of the universe (not just its spatial dimension, but its vast age). The earth is less than a speck compared to the inconceivable immensity of the universe. Our own species is a late arrival in an ancient universe. Given these incontrovertible facts, we must accept that we are insignificant.

This is fallacious reasoning. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

The size and the age of the universe are matters of quantity. But what makes human beings significant is not how big they are or how old they are. If that were true, a six-foot-tall, overweight septuagenarian would be slightly more "significant" than a thin five-foot-tall youngster simply because the former was a little bigger and a little older. Actually, no one ever said -- despite what HPL seems to have implied -- that what makes humans significant or not significant is their size and age.

For the sake of argument, though, let's play with this idea that "significance" CAN be a matter of quantity, of size and age. Let us suppose a universe in which an inhabited earth is surrounded by a few thousand miles of space, and that these have come to be within the past 50 years. And this is what IS. Most people would hesitate to say that the earth, in such a universe, is insignificant. Now let's double the size of the surrounding universe and double its age and that of the earth while keeping the age of humanity the same as it was before. Are we NOW ready to say that humanity is insignificant, where it wasn't, before? Most people would hesitate to do so. So we can continue to increase the size and age of the universe and the age of the earth. At what point do we cross the magic threshold, beyond which humanity becomes insignificant?

In short, then, the size and age of the universe are completely irrelevant when we are discussing the significance of humanity. I am not saying what does make humanity significant. I am only saying that it's illegitimate rhetoric to write as if what makes humanity significant is the fact that the universe is much older and much bigger than we are. I will suggest something about the significance of humanity in point #2 and #3, to follow.

Discuss.

Lovecrafts first Axiom is: The greatest an oldest fear is the fear of the unknown. In modern societies we do know really much about nature, so there isnt much unknown in modern world left. What is unkown and has to be unknown because human senses cant recognise, is cosmic space and time. Thousands of Millions of years and infinte space. things we cant know and cant comprehend. This is the base of cosmic horror. Its a quality.

For the universe, mankind is unimportant, at least if you believe in modern science.

Freud speaks about tree "Kränkungen" of Mankind: 1. Copernicus: Earth isnt the centre of the universe. 2. Darwin: Mankind isnt the centre of the Earth, its only an animal which evolved through Evolution without any teleos. Freud: The Conciousness isnt the centre of the human psyche, there is also the unconciousness. So we arent the Kings of the universe, we arent the kings of the planet, we even arent the kings over our own mind.

Thats why we are in some sense not important for the universe, were simply being.

Thats what i think is what Lovecraft means when he says Mankind isnt important for the universe. Theres no romanticism.

 

[Extollager]

Theres no romanticism.

We are probably disagreeing about what "Romanticism" means. C. S. Lewis's Preface to The Pilgrim's Regress distinguishes seven kinds of things called Romantic. At least four seem to me obviously to apply to Lovecraft:

"1. Stories about dangerous adventure -- particularly, dangerous adventure in the past or in remote places...

"2.The marvellous [Lewis instances Mrs. Radcliffe, Coleridge, E. R. Eddison, and others] is 'romantic', provided it does not make part of the believed religion." Lovecraft of course did not believe in Azathoth & Co.

"4.'Romanticism' can also mean the indulgence in abnormal, and finally in anti-natural, moods. The macabre is 'romantic'.... [Lewis instances Poe] Surrealism is 'romantic.'"

"6.Every revolt against existing civilisation and conventions.... is called 'romantic' by some people." Lovecraft's "cosmic" stories harp on this kind of thing persistently.

Lovecraft's thinking is pervaded by one or more of these "romanticisms." He may think that he is just being scientific, but this is not so. As I indicate in my other posting of today's date, while his scientific notions may have seemed unexceptionable in his day, this is no longer true.

However, if you prefer not to refer to Lovecraft as "romantic," there's no need to pursue the matter further.

 

[j d worthington]

Others have certainly seen at least a streak of romanticism (in the literary sense) in HPL's work over the years; and this really shouldn't be surprising, given the influence of the Goths on his work. I'm not sure I'd call HPL himself a Romantic, any more than I would a genuine Decadent; but I would say his works certainly have elements of each....

 

[Extollager]

Perhaps I should make clear that, while I differ with Lovecraft on important issues, I don't regard myself as demeaning him when I refer to him as a Romantic. I suppose most of my favorite authors are Romantics of some sort, and more than once that label's been applied to me!

 

[Tets]

sry, my mistake, i dindnt understand it correct

 

[nerd literature]

I know I might be coming late to the party and not as well read in these as some of the others who posted but I wanted to step up to the plate mainly discussing the

"4.'Romanticism' can also mean the indulgence in abnormal, and finally in anti-natural, moods. The macabre is 'romantic'.... [Lewis instances Poe] Surrealism is 'romantic.'"

I just read Machen's, "The White People" (it was one of the finest tales weird tales written according to HPL). What I found fascinating as I suppose HPL did in his philosophy about humanity's value of good and evil placed on an indifferent cosmos was the discussion between Ambrose and Cotgrave. The essence of the discussion revolved around the difference between Evil and evil, or more so saint and sinner or Good and Evil.

What I think would have appealed to HPL's idea of the indifference of humanity's view of good and evil was that Evil (with a capital 'E'). Evil, what I think Machen and eventually HPL thought of as true evil was that which goes against Natural Law. Something that is not part of a things nature. In the story Machen discusses cats or dogs talking or roses singing. These are where true terror and horror lies. The saint becomes the sinner or deamon by trying to gain knowledge that is beyond what is natural for humanity to understand and this is what turns the good in to evil, the saint into the sinner.

This is the case in much of HPL's stories, at least those that deal with Forbidden Knowledge and the Indifferent Cosmos. Most of his characters pursue the knowledge that is beyond what they are capable of understanding. Something they never had, something that was not theirs to understand. This is what causes the destruction of the mind and the body. One cannot unlearn what they discovered about the cosmos and that humanity is not the center of it.

I agree that the 4 point listed above on what would make HPL a romantic are true, mainly from his influences; Poe, gothic literature, Machen, Ambrose and Blackwood all of whose stories fall in to one or more of those points.

Best, Rob

 

[Extollager]

Rob, last November I posted this passage:

“That strangeness of things, which is the light in all poetry, and indeed in all art, is really connected with their otherness; or what is called their objectivity. What is subjective must be stale; it is exactly what is objective that is in this imaginative manner strange. In this the great contemplative is the complete contrast of the false contemplative, the mystic who looks only into his own soul, the selfish artist who shrinks from the world and lives only in his own mind. According to St. Thomas, the mind acts freely of itself, but its freedom exactly consists in finding a way out to liberty and the light of day; to reality and the land of the living. In the subjectivist, the pressure of the world forces the imagination inwards. In the Thomist, the energy of the mind forces the imagination outwards, but because the images it seeks are real things. All their romance and glamour, so to speak, lies in the fact that they are real things; things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind. The flower is a vision because it is not only a vision. Or, if you will, it is a vision because it is not a dream.”


Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox,” 182-3.

I threw out the idea that Machen is akin to the "great contemplative," in that he believes there truly is a great and holy mystery of things. He loved this collect from the Book of Common Prayer:

"O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."

He understood this in a Platonic sense: let us perceive changing, visible things as manifestations of an eternal, invisible, and beautiful mystery. (There is a whole book from Oxford University Press called Discerning the Mystery, by Andrew Louth, now a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church.)

Ordinary bad behavior, Machen seems to have believed, such as murder and robbery, were fit matter for police and courts. In the "White People" opening that you refer to, he contrasts such criminality with "sorcery."

I see Lovecraft as akin to Chesterton's "false contemplative," in that the way Chesterton describes the latter I see something close to Lovecraft's "solution" to the problem of how to live in a meaningless universe. For Lovecraft, Machen must be profoundly wrong; there is no realm of the good, the true, and the beautiful, for which we long and to which, rightly seen, the forms of nature and right love afford manifestations; these are illusions. For Lovecraft, Dante cannot have seen, in the earthly girl Beatrice, an instantiation in time and place of adorable and never-perishing beauty and love, although (f0r Lovecraft) he could choose to write poems about her if he chose; in a meaningless world, they are perhaps no more false than any other "attitude" towards her that might be taken, as distinct from the one certain truth about her, which is that she was in truth merely an inevitable pulse in the grinding activity of a meaningless universe.

Obviously my sympathy is with Machen (and Wordsworth, and Charles Williams, and...) here rather than with Lovecraft. But they are both Romantics....

 

[j d worthington]

I see Lovecraft as akin to Chesterton's "false contemplative," in that the way Chesterton describes the latter I see something close to Lovecraft's "solution" to the problem of how to live in a meaningless universe. For Lovecraft, Machen must be profoundly wrong; there is no realm of the good, the true, and the beautiful, for which we long and to which, rightly seen, the forms of nature and right love afford manifestations; these are illusions. For Lovecraft, Dante cannot have seen, in the earthly girl Beatrice, an instantiation in time and place of adorable and never-perishing beauty and love, although (f0r Lovecraft) he could choose to write poems about her if he chose; in a meaningless world, they are perhaps no more false than any other "attitude" towards her that might be taken, as distinct from the one certain truth about her, which is that she was in truth merely an inevitable pulse in the grinding activity of a meaningless universe.

I think you oversimplify Lovecraft here. The way I see it, it was not a question of "either/or", but of two things which went hand in hand. Because we are creatures of the moment, even a species which is extremely ephemeral and no more nor less important than any other in the ultimate, objective sense, what we find of beauty, goodness, kindness, etc., is all the more precious to us, and all the more to be valued as human beings. That this is the ineluctable resultant of our evolutionary heritage does not detract from its importance to us one iota. This is evident in any number of his tales, let alone various passages throughout his letters. Look, for instance, at "The Quest of Iranon", which addresses quite directly the dichotomy between the beautiful illusions which so enrich life and the blunt reality which underlies them. (It also, incidentally, forms a critique of the Puritan work ethic, as well as momentary, shallow pleasures which -- as he would elsewhere remark about most popular, as opposed to "serious" art -- "merely affect to satisfy" our genuine emotional needs.) In his letters, he addresses various types of beauty and their importance, including the ephemeral beauty of the human body. All of these, as he notes, carry within them (due to our tendency toward associative thinking) the symbolic representation of things which extend far beyond themselves, into something much more lasting and, in any human perspective, meaningful.

I recently referred to one of the best brief summations of this when speaking of a Christmas card which Hoops and NoOne sent me, in which this quotation (from the "In Defence of Dagon" essays) was included:

Pleasure to me is wonder -- the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.

While as a philosopher Lovecraft saw that not only humanity, but the universe itself had no ultimate meaning or significance, he also was very firm in his view that human beings simply cannot genuinely face such a bleak belittlement on any lasting basis without it having a detrimental effect on our emotional stability and well-being. Thus these "illusions", though having the dimension of a somewhat bitter irony when viewed from "the cosmic perspective" of an objective outside viewer, are vital to us on the most fundamental level, and to be treasured both as links to our past and to our commonality as human beings. For us, they have all the aspects of "eternal verities" because they do supply us with an emotional satisfaction and anchor without which, as he rightly perceived, human beings would simply go mad, whether in the somewhat hysterical manner of some of his early narrators, or in the manner of an ever-increasing "quiet desperation" of those of his later tales. The two spheres are really not opposed, but parts of a whole.

 

[Extollager]

I think you oversimplify Lovecraft here.

Yet I think you are basically agreeing with my representation of what Lovecraft thought, or anyway of what Lovecraft thought he thought.

 

[Psitrekker]

Hi Extollager, this is in response to your original post on Aug 25th, 2010--you're first point. I think that the question of our significance was addressed pretty well by HPL, but he focused on the fearful or madening aspects of this revelation instead of the humbling, curiosity-invoking, positive aspects. That said, I think that there is a case to be made for "bigger and older" being related to significance in the universe. When you take into consideration the existence of other planets with much older and more sophisticated races having advanced technology (like the Yith with their ability to teleport and time travel), we start to look pretty damn insignificant by comparison. When you also mix in the godlike Old-Ones, and the even bigger than god-like Outer Gods that are practically as old as the beginning of time, essentially indestructible, infused with great power, and massively intelligent, then yes, we also look insignificant when compared wtih that.
I think that there's a point to be made about "big and old" when we compare, say dinosaurs with humans. Dinos were both bigger and older than us (in the sense that they lived for millions of years, and we've only been around a measly 100k or so. Which is more "significant"? Since we have bigger brains, complex language skills, opposable thumbs, and basically the ability to create civilization and advance ourselves (even to point of surplanting the ability of evolution to guide our adaptation), I think it's safe to say that we humans are more "significant". But when compared with a space-faring race that has been colonizing other planets for the past 5 million years, it gives one pause. Especially when you consider the histories envolved with various spacefaring races having to fight off other space-faring races in vies for power (as in the Mountains of Madness). None of our puny wars compare at all to these epic struggles that have come and gone before our race was even around yet. Food for thought, eh?