"I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can
interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or
deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down
from the external universes." Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937)
A kind of lethargic terror descended upon Lovecraft as he turned 18
and he knew the reason for it perfectly well. In a 1920 letter he
revisits his childhood at length. The little railway set whose cars
were made of packing-cases, the coach house where he had set up his
puppet theatre. And later, the garden he had designed, laying out each
of its paths. It was irrigated by a system of canals that were his own
handiwork, its ledges enclosed a small lawn at the centre of which
stood a sundial. It was, he said, "the paradise of my adolescent
years".
Then comes this passage that concludes the letter: "Then I perceived
with horror that I was growing too old for pleasure. Ruthless Time had
set its fell claw upon me, and I was 17. Big boys do not play in toy
houses and mock gardens, so I was obliged to turn over my world in
sorrow to another and younger boy who dwelt across the lot from me.
And since that time I have not delved in the earth or laid out paths
and roads. There is too much wistful memory in such procedure, for the
fleeting joy of childhood may never be recaptured. Adulthood is hell."
Lovecraft, for his part, knew he had nothing to do with this world.
And at each turn he played a losing hand. In theory and in practice.
He lost his childhood; he also lost his faith. The world sickened him
and he saw no reason to believe that by looking at things better they
might appear differently. He saw religions as so many sugar-coated
illusions made obsolete by the progress of science. At times, when in
an exceptionally good mood, he would speak of the enchanted circle of
religious belief, but it was a circle from which he felt banished,
anyway.
Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the
conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe
is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure
in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The
human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and
disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the
feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything
will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of
meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good,
evil, morality, sentiments? Pure "Victorian fictions". All that exists
is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant.
He remained steadfast in his materialism and atheism. In letter after
letter he returned to his convictions with distinctly masochistic
delectation.
Of course, life has no meaning. But neither does death. And this is
another thing that curdles the blood when one discovers Lovecraft's
universe. The deaths of his heroes have no meaning. Death brings no
appeasement. It in no way allows the story to conclude. Implacably,
HPL destroys his characters, evoking only the dismemberment of
marionettes. Indifferent to these pitiful vicissitudes, cosmic fear
continues to expand. It swells and takes form. Great Cthulhu emerges
from his slumber.
What is Great Cthulhu? An arrangement of electrons, like us.
Lovecraft's terror is rigorously material. But, it is quite possible,
given the free interplay of cosmic forces, that Great Cthulhu
possesses abilities and powers to act that far exceed ours. Which, a
priori, is not particularly reassuring at all.
It is possible, in fact, that beyond the narrow range of our
perception, other entities exist. Other creatures, other races, other
concepts and other minds. Among these entities some are probably far
superior to us in intelligence and in knowledge. But this is not
necessarily good news. What makes us think that these creatures,
different as they are from us, will exhibit any kind of a spiritual
nature? There is nothing to suggest a transgression of the universal
laws of egotism and malice. It is ridiculous to imagine that at the
edge of the cosmos, other well-intentioned and wise beings await to
guide us toward some sort of harmony. In order to imagine how they
might treat us were we to come into contact with them, it might be
best to recall how we treat "inferior intelligences" such as rabbits
and frogs. In the best of cases they serve as food for us; sometimes
also, often in fact, we kill them for the sheer pleasure of killing.
This, Lovecraft warned, would be the true picture of our future
relation****p to those other intelligent beings. Perhaps some of the
more beautiful human specimens would be honoured and would end up on a
dissection table - that's all.
And once again, none of it will make any sense.
This desolate cosmos is absolutely our own. This abject universe where
fear mounts in concentric circles, layer upon layer, until the
unnameable is revealed, this universe where our only conceivable
destiny is to be pulverised and devoured, we must recognise it
absolutely as being our own mental universe. And for whoever wants to
know this collective state of mind through a quick and accurate
survey, Lovecraft's success is itself a symptom. Today, more so than
ever before, we can utter the declaration of principles that begins
Arthur Jermyn as our own: "Life is a hideous thing, and from the
background behind what we know of it peer demoniacal hints of truth
which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous."
The paradox, however, is that we prefer this universe, hideous as it
is, to our own reality. In this, we are precisely the readers that
Lovecraft anticipated. We read his tales with the same exact
disposition as that which prompted him to write them. Satan or
Nyarlathotep, either one will do, but we will not tolerate another
moment of realism. And, truth be told, given his prolonged
acquaintance with the disgraceful turns of our ordinary sins, the
value of Satan's currency has dropped a little. Better Nyarlathotep,
ice-cold, evil, and inhuman.
It's clear why reading Lovecraft is paradoxically comforting to those
souls who are weary of life. In fact, it should perhaps be prescribed
to all who, for one reason or other, have come to feel a true aversion
to life in all its forms. In some cases, the jolt to the nerves upon a
first reading is immense. One may find oneself smiling all alone, or
humming a tune from a musical. One's outlook on existence is, in a
word, modified.
Ever since the virus was first introduced into France by Jacques
Bergier, the increase in the number of readers has been substantial.
Like most of those contaminated, I myself discovered HPL at 16 through
the intermediary of a "friend". To call it a shock would be an
understatement. I had not known literature was capable of this. And,
what's more, I'm still not sure it is. There is something not really
literary about Lovecraft's work.
To make this case, let us first consider the fact that 15 or so
writers (Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, Lin Carter, Fred Chappell, August
Derleth, Donald Wandrei, to name a few) consecrated all or part of
their careers to developing and enriching the myths created by HPL.
And not furtively so, nor in hiding, but most avowedly. The filial
lineage is even further systematically reinforced by the use of the
exact same words. These take on the value of incantations (the wild
hills west of Arkham, Miskatonic University, the city of Irem with its
thousand pillars ... R'lyeh, Sarnath, Dagon, Nyarlathotep ... and
above all the unnameable, the blasphemous Necronomicon whose name can
only be uttered in a whisper) ...
In an age that exalts originality as a supreme value in the arts, this
phenomenon is surely cause for surprise. In fact, as Francis Lacassin
op****tunely points out, nothing like it has been recorded since Homer
and medieval epic poetry. We must humbly acknowledge that we are
dealing here with what is known as a "founding mythology".
Edited extract from HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, by
Michel Houellebecq (published by Believer Books this week) Translation
2005 by Dorna Khazeni
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