Andrés Vaccari

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
By Michel Houellebecq

(The Australian December 2-3, 2006)

In this short but eventful study of H.P.Lovecraft, Michel Houellebecq suggests the pioneering writer created modern horror while exhausting its possibilities. Perhaps the horror genre never lived up to its early promise because practitioners such as Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft are such tough acts to follow. Or perhaps, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno, horror literature is impossible after Auschwitz. Yet, for better or worse, the 20th century’s best-selling author was Stephen King.

Houellebecq, the bad boy of French letters, portrays his literary hero as a distorted reflection of himself: a misanthropic, old-fashioned recluse who passionately pursued literature for its own sake. This personal and precocious work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Lovecraft. In the introduction, King aptly describes it as a “scholarly love letter”.

Houellebecq’s Lovecraft raged against the four pillars of the modern world: democracy, progress, money and sex. In his own words, Lovecraft admired puritanical values because 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 of life which marks the deepest and most sensitive soul”.

Lovecraft failed at life but succeeded at writing. He lived penniless and chronically unemployed, despite an omnivorous intellect. He was not as withdrawn as the myth suggests, and his staggering amount of correspondence testifies to strong friendships. Lovecraft was the most prolific letter writer of the century, producing in excess of 100,000 letters, which many consider on par with his greatest work. He hated humanity as a collective, while treating individuals with exemplary kindness and respect.

Lovecraft died in obscurity at 46, never seeing a book of his in print. Scattered in countless lurid magazines, his creations clawed their way into the American literary canon with a little help from the devoted editorial work of his disciples.

Although he remained a staunch atheist and enthusiast of modern science, Lovecraft’s dark literary creations mocked the conceited, rosy assurances of science as well as religion. His stories portray the universe as an abyssal, indifferent place teeming with wonders that exceed human comprehension: wonders that can (and often do) become the most abject of horrors. His materialism, Houellebecq argues, is essential to his work. Unlike certain vampire or werewolf tales, it is not “a question of believing or not believing. There is no possible reinterpretation, there is no escape. There is no horror less psychological, less debatable.”

Impressively, Houellebecq packs a great deal of original insights into a brief space. He traces some essential tensions in Lovecraft’s stories, especially what he refers to as “the great texts”. These fictions are impeccably structured but full of distinctive stylistic excesses, delirious paroxysms “where adjectives and adverbs pile upon one another to the point of exasperation”. Here is a sample, almost at random, from The Call of Cthulhu (1926):

There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Having glimpsed the infinite, Lovecraft’s characters have two choices: to die or go insane. Houellebecq admits that excesses such as these present an insurmountable barrier to the arbiters of good taste. His response is fittingly Lovecraftian: in the end, he says, “critics die and are replaced by others”.

Lovecraft combines precise, meticulous descriptions with an engulfing sense of the unnamable, immemorial and indescribable. An unusually sensuous writer, he addresses the sensory register of the reader. Yet the real horror always remains out of view. When the Old Ones (the abominable otherworldly creatures at the centre of Lovecraft’s mythology) appear, they defy depiction. The reader is confronted with an oozing, screeching, multi-tentacled nightmare beyond the mind’s grasp.

The vocabulary of the sciences, Houellebecq says, helped Lovecraft convey a sense of “objective terror”, a terror “unbound from any human or psychological connotations”.

Racism and sex are also perceptively, if briefly, examined. Houellebecq argues that Lovecraft’s racial hatred deeply informs his work, present in the images of subhuman “mongrel” creatures, and in the figures of his cultured, Anglo-Saxon narrators. Yet the influence of racism is complex and the monsters are never just simple stand-ins for a racial Other. Houellebecq regards Lovecraft’s attitude as masochistic: he saw himself as a failure in life, as a victim.

Freudian interpretations have equally missed the mark. Lovecraft summed up psychoanalysis as “puerile symbolism”, and Houellebecq agrees. Contrary to the main trend in literary studies of the genre, Houellebecq argues that sex and the unconscious play no part in Lovecraft’s stories. Not even misogyny, it seems. This is a weak part of his argument: Lovecraft tried to purge his material of all eroticism, seeking to distil something more primal, purer than libido. But aren’t horror and sex intimately related?

This was Houellebecq’s first book, published in 1991 before he made his mark as a novelist. In the introduction, he says he now considers it his first novel, with Lovecraft as the central character. It is a taut and stimulating work, breezy and profound; it is openly admiring of his subject, yet impassioned and critical. Two of Lovecraft’s great texts fatten up this edition, as an introduction for the uninitiated.