Sunday, November 8, 2015

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991)

by Michel Houellebecq

At first glance Michel Houellebecq’s biography H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is a bit of a disappointment. It actually includes two lengthy stories by Lovecraft at the end of the book and, after the introduction by Stephen King, the essay itself takes up only a scant 62 pages. Though King is somewhat promiscuous in his praise for works of and about the macabre, it’s still something of a coup. As always, he takes an autobiographical approach, telling the reader about an idea that he had for a story called “Lovecraft’s Pillow” that tries to imagine what kind of strangeness could be absorbed by lying one’s head in the same place that Lovecraft did while he was writing his stories. Eventually, however, he arrives at Houellebecq’s essay, beginning with the fact that the author takes some arguable stances when approaching his subject. Which is good. Rather than a straight biography, of which there are already several, the author tries to get into the mind of Lovecraft, looking at things from his worldview, and then place his work within that context. There is also the argument that HPL is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, a view that is becoming more accepted as time goes on. The subtitle of the essay comes from the imagination of the writer of weird fiction who does not believe in the world as it is, and knows that there's nothing more. That writer will also cast aside human life as easily as academics want to cast aside Lovecraft. In King’s words,

          All literature, but especially literature of the weird and the fantastic, is a cave where both readers
          and writers hide from life. (Which is exactly why so many parents and teachers, spotting a teenager
          with a collection of stories by Lovecraft . . . are apt to cry, “Why are you reading that useless junk?”)
          It is in just such caves--such places of refuge--that we lick our wounds and prepare for the next
          battle out in the real world. Our need for such places never subsides, as any reader of escapist
          literature will tell you.

Houellebecq begins the brief first part of the essay with an assault on reality, making the claim that realistic fiction is worthless because of the way it simply reflects the mundane real world that we are mired in. In this context escapist fiction is exactly that, a way out. For Lovecraft, a man who held an extreme disliked for the world and the people in it, his transition to adulthood was a traumatic one, and was reinforced--in Houellebecq’s view--by an extreme materialistic view of the world, the idea that nothing else exists but matter. In Lovecraft’s words, “all rationalism tends to minimalize the value and the importance of life, and to decrease the sum total of human happiness. In some cases the truth may cause suicidal or nearly suicidal depression.” What is really at play here in Houellebecq’s assertion is that Lovecraft’s fiction is a jolt out of the numbness and mendacity of life. “To call it a shock would be an understatement. I had not known literature was capable of this.” But Houellebecq takes this even further to say that Lovecraft’s fiction isn’t even literature at all, but mythology.

To support this idea, he goes on to list all of the authors who subsumed their writing to encompass and expand on what Lovecraft had already written. The then states that, “In an age that exalts originality as a supreme value in the arts, this phenomenon is surely cause for surprise . . . nothing like it has been recorded since Homer and medieval epic poetry.” Well, there is something almost exactly like it that happened shortly after Lovecraft’s death with the advent of bebop in the jazz world when nearly every young musician--on every instrument, no less--began to copy Charlie Parker. His influence was far more widely felt in jazz than Lovecraft’s was even among authors of weird fiction. But it is significant, and Houellebecq calls the resulting homage “ritual literature.”

Part Two is the analysis of Lovecraft’s work. It begins with a brief summarization of the worldview of Lovecraft’s fiction, that amid the humdrum routine of human existence, in every gap in the web of the human presence on Earth, “in every place where human activity is interrupted, where there is a blank on the map, these ancient gods crouch huddled waiting to take back their rightful place.” But his essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, Houellebecq states, is a bit disappointing for the fact that it simply recounts the history of such literature without offering a glimpse into how Lovecraft would go on to change it, from describing a supernatural which not only depends on human existence but in many ways is created by humanity, to a supernatural in which man is so insignificant as to be meaningless in the design of the cosmos. Thus the fears that Lovecraft taps into are not just the primal one of human death, but the far more philosophical one of contemplating human non-existence. The initial discussion of Lovecraft’s fiction is setting. Rather than spending time on the banal and the intrusion of evil into it, Lovecraft usually begins his stories in media res, with the façade of human significance already cracked wide open.

Houellebecq sees a weakness in the fact that Lovecraft’s characters--often first-person narrators--do not have the ability to comprehend the significance of events as they transpire, that somehow they should be able to understand in the moment what they only seem to grasp in retrospect. Far from diminishing his great work, however, this only seems to make it that much more breathless in the retelling. Lovecraft’s work is then contrasted with that of the novelist, whose mission is to realistically replicate life--something Lovecraft believed was impossible--including all of it’s emotional baggage surrounding sex, finances, and personal relationships. Lovecraft eschewed all of these in favor of descriptions of things that could not be described, things outside of human experience. Lovecraft is far more interested in architecture, and the idea that man is only mean to “build vast beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.” In terms of sensual imagery, Lovecraft is also a master manipulator in the way that only writers are, using words to describe perception in ways that are also outside human experience, and yet utterly evocative. Finally Houellebecq delves into the elements of Lovecraft that resulted in the first of his stories to be published in France appearing in a collection of science-fiction. But unlike those writers descriptive detail, both scientific and topographic, are used by Lovecraft to reinforce the supernatural even more, demonstrating their aberration in defying humanity’s carefully constructed laws of the universe.

Part Three, the lengthiest section in the book, could be most aptly described by the title of one of the chapters in it: Antibiography. He had little in the way of money, and nibbled through a small inheritance throughout his life. He met Sonia Haft Greene in 1922 and she induced him to marry her two years later. When he moved to New York to live with her, his life seemed to begin anew, but things changed with Sonia lost her job and suddenly the city lost its appeal, all of which is described in his autobiographical story, “He.” Though he put everything he had into attempting to get a job, he had no experience and no one would hire him. Despair ensued, Sonia moved to Ohio for work, and after a year of separation he moved back to Providence and the couple divorced a few years later. It is at this point that a latent racism begins to emerge in his work, no doubt influenced by his time on the streets of New York City, watching immigrants and those he felt beneath him gaining employment while he was left to suffer. These personal horrors were also those that he employed in his writing, allowing all of his protagonists to resemble himself in some manner, and be tortured by those lesser species of sub-humans who did not.

This obsession, claims Houellebecq, is most evident in “The Dunwich Horror,” which can be seen as something of an inversion of the Christian mythos, by replicating those tropes in evil form. In this, Houellebecq makes a fascinating point. By casting himself as the victim and the sub-humans as the enemy, the gateway into this world for the old gods, Lovecraft was living his own nightmare. And this he sees as one of the major elements of Lovecraft’s later period, a genuine fear that comes across in his writing as few other writers have been able to achieve. But his fear extended to life itself. One of the anecdotes he relates earlier in the book is how Lovecraft kept a bottle of cyanide at hand with which to kill himself. And he ends the book with this quote by the writer:

          And as for Puritan inhibitions--I admire them more every day. They are attempts to make of life
          a work of art--to fashion a pattern of beauty in the hog-wallow that is animal existence--and they
          spring out of that divine hatred for life which marks the deepest and most sensitive soul.

One of the great joys of the piece is that Houellebecq is able to talk about Lovecraft’s style and use generous examples, but gives away nothing. In that, it is possible to read this book and still enjoy the works later but have a new appreciation of them. Not all of Houellebecq’s arguments are convincing, but all of them can be appreciated for the thoughtfulness and the way in which he weaves them into a cohesive theory of Lovecraft’s art. And in that respect, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, is an essential work in an ever-growing cannon of literature about one of America’s great, unsung literary talents.