HOUELLEBECQ, Michel, H.P. Lovecraft – Against The World, Against
Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson / Orion Publishing Group, London, 2006.
Octavo;
paperback; 247pp. Minor wear; some pages dog-eared; mild creasing to spine.
Very good.
Stephen
King’s Introduction to this essay is somewhat patronising. He refers to
Houllebecq’s analysis of the life and work of Lovecraft as a “mash note” and in
doing so, kickstarts the project with a sense of the trivial. It’s as if he,
all unwittingly, attempts to drag the subject of the essay down to populist
levels, and implies that Lovecraft, and anyone determined to waste their time
with him, must, in essence, be regarded as ‘popular culture’. It’s a somewhat
dubious start for this effort, especially given that King – unashamedly
populist as he is – declares himself to be indebted to Lovecraft as a source of
inspiration.
I
can almost see where he’s coming from though. I know that it’s more than
somewhat of a generalisation, but Americans tend to be absolutists – this is
this; that is that – and whenever lines begin to blur they get a little
nervous. To a European sensibility, the fact that a bestselling French writer
of literary fiction publishes an essay on an American writer of genre fiction
presents no paradox. To the US, it’s as bizarre as letting Adam Sandler present
the Nobel Prizes. In reality, such terms as “literary fiction” and “genre
fiction” have little relevance in Europe and it’s only the marketing principles
of bookshops in English-speaking countries which make such arbitrary
distinctions. Mr King is just assuming that, if he’s being asked to write an introduction
to a book about Lovecraft, then it must be aimed at the geeks, and therefore he
pitches his tone accordingly. This is to undermine the seriousness with which
Houellebecq approaches his subject; the reader should not make the same
assumption.
The
essay itself was written – in the original French – in 1991. This re-publishing
is as much a marketing exercise as it is a heartfelt attempt to get
Houellebecq’s thoughts out to an English-speaking fan base. Not only have
Weidenfeld & Nicolson contracted King to write the Intro., but they’ve
enclosed re-printings of “The Call of
Cthulhu” and “The Whisperer in
Darkness” along with a host of biographical information, about both
Lovecraft and Houellebecq, and a bibliography of French translations of
Lovecraft’s work. The idea being, I presume, that, if you disagree with
Houellebecq’s thesis, you’ll feel that you still haven’t wasted your money. For
me though, I think the real meat of the package is Houellebecq’s analysis,
despite the presence of some flaws. Let me explain.
The
essay breaks down into four parts – a Preface and three sections, each
separated thematically into various components. I will address these, one by
one, in order.
In
the Preface, Houellebecq muses upon the reception which his essay has had since
he had first penned it, how there were things which he had overlooked or which
he feels he should have lingered longer over. He describes his discovery of
Lovecraft’s works at the age of sixteen and his exploration – increasingly
half-hearted – of those authors who had inspired, or who had been inspired by,
Lovecraft’s material, but with the uneasy realisation that he knew next to
nothing about Lovecraft himself. Conversely nowadays – he says – people
approach him to autograph his book on HPL but few of them actually read any of
HPL’s works, content to know about him through biographical notes and about them
by association, through pop cultural references.
He
says that writing the essay was like writing a novel with only one character –
HPL – and felt just as freeform and unrestricted, with the exception that it
“was constrained in that all the facts it conveyed and all the texts it cited
had to be exact”. For the most part, he holds true to this notion; however it’s
in those citations that the strength of his arguments starts to fail, and his thesis
to come adrift.
Finally,
he praises the poetry of Lovecraft’s use of language (something that he does
discuss in the body of his argument) and quotes extensively and quite aptly from
“The Whisperer in Darkness”, a text
which he claims to have omitted in the first draft, with some regret. Later, he
presents a list of what he terms Lovecraft’s “Great Texts” and “Whisperer” is listed amongst them: I
wonder if, in earlier printings, it failed to appear? He doesn’t explicitly
say.
Part One: Another Universe
In
this initial foray, Houellebecq sets the groundwork and examines the scope of
Lovecraft, both the individual and his product. Let it not be said that
Houellebecq shies away from shocking statements or confrontational notions –
this is a writer who likes to get a reaction. He begins by telling us that life
is “painful and disappointing” and that people who like life do not like to
read, because life has very little to do with literature. The real world is so
far removed from the narrative constructs of literature that only those who
reject the world and all it contains could find solace in the pages of a book.
Punchy stuff, and I find no argument with it.
This
part of the essay falls into two parts: in the first he addresses the writer
and tries, using his correspondence and other writings, to assign him a
literary locale. He reveals that Lovecraft had a natural affinity with the
Modernist writers of the English literary tradition – along with Virginia Woolf
for example – in that he stood for an utter rejection of the realist writing of
the Nineteenth century, as exemplified by such authors as Gustave Flaubert and
Thomas Hardy. As well, Houellebecq identifies HPL as an ardent existentialist,
discovering himself trapped in a meaningless existence in an irrelevant world.
He thus paints Lovecraft as the doppelganger of Antoine Roquentin from Sartre’s
novel, Nausea. Unlike the protagonist of that book however, HPL’s strategy to
deal with this angst was of a different nature.
According
to Houellebecq, Lovecraft dealt with his existential despair by refusing to
play the game: rather than finding meaning in the universe and creating a
purpose for himself within it, he revelled in his isolation and found a space
in which to dwell alongside and apart from the structures surrounding him:
engagement and struggle became as inconsequential as the meaningless objects
around him. Even his ‘career’ as a writer he refused to acknowledge as anything
other than an idle pastime, considering the prospect of making a living off his
work faintly disgusting. That these sentiments percolate into his work, I think
no die-hard fan would deny.
The
second section of this first part is entitled “Ritual Literature”. By this
term, Houellebecq means the body of work by an author who has attained ‘mythic
status’ in a literary sense. In this way he compares HPL to Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes canon. Fans of Sherlock Holmes, Houellebecq
declares, would not allow their favourite character to die; they re-visit the
canon stories, each time with a sense of pleasure and delight; they are faintly
amused, but not convinced by, pastiche and homage texts, spring-boarding off
the main body of work; and they wistfully hope that one day a hidden cache of
new material will someday be discovered. On top of this is the sheer amazement
the reader feels for the accomplishment – ‘how do they do it?’ – a hidden
complexity that invites deeper investigation. All of this can be said of
Lovecraft and of his readers.
Houellebecq
then goes on to define HPL’s oeuvre as a series of increasingly-crucial
concentric circles. Outermost, he places Lovecraft’s correspondence and poetry;
next he assigns collaborative efforts, things he co-wrote or ghost wrote,
including the works of August Derleth, derived from HPL’s notes and drafts;
third, he places all of the short stories juvenilia and novellas that Lovecraft
wrote – the canon. Lastly he creates a list of tales which represent the ‘holy
of holies’, the definitive works, those which – if Lovecraft was a religion –
would be termed the “great texts”. Houellebecq claims to have taken pleasure in
compiling and setting out this list, and I feel much the same way about
reproducing it:
“The
Call of Cthulhu” (1926)
“The
Colour Out of Space”
(1927)
“The
Dunwich Horror” (1928)
“The
Whisperer in Darkness”
(1930)
“At
the Mountains of Madness”
(1931)
“The
Dreams in the Witch House”
(1932)
“The
Shadow Over Innsmouth”
(1932)
“The Shadow Out of Time” (1934)
Finally,
Houellebecq asserts that it is the numinous presence of Lovecraft himself,
pervading this material, which lends an almost mystical quality to the writing.
Lovecraft, he declares, fundamentally denies examination, even by his most
diligent biographers, and has attained an almost cult status in his own right,
distinct from his work.
Part Two: Technical Assault
With
a title like this, it’s obvious that some examination of the minutiae of
Lovecraft’s style is about to be undertaken; however, since this is
Houellebecq, we need not fear that it will descend into some dry and
stultifying discussion of adverbs and adjectives (although that does come up at
one point). He begins by referencing the essay which Lovecraft wrote – “Supernatural Horror in Literature” –
and observes how dull a catalogue it is, since obviously it contains nothing
comparable to HPL’s own work. He notes that this piece appeared shortly before
Lovecraft began to pen the “great texts” and declares that it was by
cataloguing this list of styles and references that HPL was able to dispense
with his mentors and finally forge ahead on his own. Simultaneously,
Houellebecq states that clues to Lovecraft’s technique are almost non-existent
in his correspondence, since his advice is inevitably focussed upon the
problems faced by the individual to whom he is addressing his comments – thus,
nothing of general application can be discerned. He notes that HPL was ever
willing to provide the essential building blocks of a good story but was candid
about how to stack them together.
(Amusingly,
and in a nod to Italo Calvino’s If On a
Winter’s Night a Traveller, each section of this part of the essay has an
apropos title which forms a clause in a long sentence. Why? Who knows, but it’s
quite cute.)
Attack the Story like a
Radiant Suicide...
Here,
Houellebecq examines HPL’s hooks, the openings to his stories. He compares
Lovecraft’s introductions to those of Graham Masterton (The Incredible Shrinking Man) and comes to the conclusion that
Lovecraft uses his opening salvos to divide his audience. While typically
verbose, they do nothing to soften the impact for the reader: the introductory
paragraphs hardly ever hint or allude to the impending narrative; rather they
drop the reader straight into something bewildering and confronting. As an
all-or-nothing approach, Houellebecq finds it completely admirable, the moreso
because Lovecraft is able to build upon it, escalating the pitch of terror.
Conversely, he finds that this kind of narrative set-up makes HPL’s characters
seem somewhat obtuse, since they never seem to see it coming.
...Utter the Great "No" to
Life Without Weakness...
Next
Houellebecq tackles the content of Lovecraft’s stories, and in doing so
compares him to an architect: before beginning to build, he says, an architect
first must decide which materials to use.
Having
identified HPL as an existentialist who utterly rejects the world as a
meaningless construct, and that attempting to capture it in print would be
equally meaningless, he states that Lovecraft makes a conscious decision to create
his own realities in his writing. The fantastic and the horrid are the
foundation stones of this reality and he makes these vistas as real as he can,
with the conscious exclusion of two subjects which other writers would consider
essential: sex and money.
Here,
Houellebecq tackles head-on the accusations that have been levelled against
HPL, that his misanthropic, asexual universes are the result of psychological
misfires and neurotic blocks. Quite the opposite, as Houellebecq demonstrates
with several apposite quotes from HPL’s correspondence, Lovecraft simply made
an aesthetic choice to exclude these topics from his work. He also shows that
Lovecraft was well-read in the works of Freud, particularly in the areas of
symbolism, sexual and otherwise, and on the nature of a transactional universe,
and rejected them outright as obvious rubbish.
In
essence therefore, what some would consider a psychological blindspot, or
Freudian slip, in HPL’s writing is actually a conscious and deliberate decision
as part of the writing process. Lovecraft simply says “no” to the depiction of
real life, in order to pursue his stated aims.
...Then You will See a
Magnificent Cathedral...
Lovecraft’s
eye, says Houellebecq, is an architect’s eye; his sensibilities respond to architectural
models. In this way, HPL is able to capture the sensation of moving through
architectural space and in fact creates such spaces in his writing in order to
underscore and heighten the dramatic pace of the tale. Colours form a lesser
component of his descriptions and take a back seat to plastic shapes and
tangible forms. No argument from me, but I do think Houellebecq pushes the
notion a little far when he declares that HPL is a creator of “sacred space”.
...And Your Senses, Vectors
of Unutterable Derangement...
In
terms of physical sensations Houellebecq notes the overloaded descriptions
which HPL provides. Along with this, he identifies a disturbing quality of
anonymity in all of Lovecraft’s protagonists. In his early works, it seemed
that HPL took deliberate pains to make his heroes seem particular, or
individual; by the time of the “great texts” however, he has forsaken this
approach in favour of bland characters whose only purpose is to transmit
sensations. In these turgid descriptions of repugnance, Houellebecq again finds
evidence for Lovecraft’s existentialist worldview.
...Will Map Out an Integral
Delirium...
Here,
Houellebecq examines the kind of horror that Lovecraft tries to generate. He is
not interested in the vampire or the werewolf – constructs that have discrete
mythic connotations and psychological rationales – he wants to build an
“objective horror” which transcends the human condition. To this end he draws
from all areas of scientific knowledge, bombarding his narratives with
objective facts and with references to myriad fields of learning, in order to
add verisimilitude to the fantastic worlds he is building. Houellebecq compares
HPL with Immanuel Kant who said he wanted to create an ethical code “not just
for man but for all rational beings”; Lovecraft wanted to build a mythology
that “would mean something to those intelligent beings that consist only of
nebulous spiralling gases”.
...That will be Lost in the
Unnameable Architecture of Time.
In
this final section, Houellebecq dwells on the surgical manner in which
Lovecraft outlines his visions. Precision is ever-present: map references in “At
the Mountains of Madness”; intersecting times and events in “The Call of
Cthulhu”; mathematical dogma in “The Dreams in the Witch House”. The human
world depicted in these tales is concrete, tangible and delineated, right up to
the point where the entities of the Mythos take over, at which moment sanity and
this precise notation part company.
Part Three: Holocaust
Of
course, since this is Houellebecq, we can expect him to toss in a loaded word
like “holocaust” with very little provocation. Here it is: the title of the
third part of the essay. In this section, Houellebecq examines Lovecraft’s life
and looks at the impact that it has upon his writing. Essentially, he looks at
HPL’s marriage and his racist tendencies.
Like
the other parts of this essay, there are several sections with intriguing
titles, but I’d prefer to look at this piece as a whole. We are given a
timeline in HPL’s life that consists basically of ‘pre-nuptial’ and
‘post-nuptial’. Before meeting and marrying Sonia Greene, Lovecraft was a
particular type of person, probably quite typical of his time and place; after
the marriage and the time he spent in New York, this character shifted
dramatically and created the individual who would go on to pen the “great
texts”.
From
an existentialist perspective, the marriage was a moment when HPL chose to
engage with his environment and embark upon an act of self-creation.
Nevertheless, he chose to take this step in a very passive fashion: Sonia was
the driving force in the relationship and Lovecraft simply went along for the
ride. Houellebecq argues all the same that HPL was definitely in love with
Sonia, but years of non-engagement had dulled his reactions. The move to New
York however, was an even more serious instance of coming to terms with reality.
Arriving
in the metropolis, HPL felt sure of his ability to find work; but his
assurances were couched in provincial WASP-ish terms. As a white male of
reasonable education, he felt entitled to be chosen for whatever position he
applied for. How shocking then to find that race and breeding amounted to almost
nothing in the Big Apple! Lovecraft’s benign racist tendencies went from mild
to red-hot, causing him to champion Hitler and make sweeping declarations of a
genocidal nature in his correspondence. As his bigotry became incandescent in
the face of his failure to find work, Houellebecq argues that Lovecraft’s
ability to even define the ‘otherness’ which offended him fell by the wayside.
However upon his return to Providence, he re-adjusted his perspective, altered
his opinion of Hitler and the Final Solution and retired into a bruised
geniality. It could be argued that he had discovered a type of acceptance, or
at least have come to realise that – as part of the meaningless universe around
him – there was nothing to be done about it. Still, the later “great texts” are
notably less racist (less racist, not inclusive) than his earlier works.
Added
to this, Houellebecq finds a markedly masochistic streak in HPL’s writing,
especially after this time. If Lovecraft’s protagonists are essentially himself,
rendered down to passive spectators of awfulness, then the horrible things that
they encounter are things that Lovecraft does to himself. A cry of existential
angst? Quite possibly.
*****
In
the final analysis, Houellebecq argues that every great passion will leave its
artistic impression upon the world and that this complex and undefinable
individual has done just that with the works he left behind. However just what
that passion was, or from where it stemmed, is frustratingly – though
compellingly - hard to pin down. All that is left is the Mythos and the myth of
Lovecraft.
If
there is a case against Houellebecq’s analysis – and, for the most part, it’s
the most compelling analysis I’ve ever encountered – it’s that, for all his
assertions that he was forced by the constraints of the essay format to check
his facts and cite his sources, he actually doesn’t. Most of what he says is
supported by citations but some of it isn’t. Reading his Notes in the back of the
book, the translator Dorna Khazeni lists many instances where throwaway
references within the text attributed to HPL or others cannot be located, even
after cross-checking with S.T. Joshi, who seems to have all of Lovecraft at his
fingertips. Some of this stems from the fact that Houellebecq was working from
French translations of Lovecraft and the exact wording is occasionally difficult
to pin down; still, there are instances where Khazeni couldn’t source quotes
from Houellebecq himself, and this is troubling.
On
the other hand, there is a genuine passion for the work in evidence here. Not
the OMG! type of enthusiasm that most fan-boy venues tend to generate, but a
fully-considered and realised, intellectual response. If for nothing else, this
refreshing stance earns this book a place on my shelf of Lovecraftiana.
As
a final note, my overview presented here is couched in various ‘-isms’,
specifically the existentialism of HPL and his position as a modernist author.
Houellebecq makes his analysis without resorting to such language, referencing
neither Sartre nor existential despair (not to mention Virginia Woolf!). These
constructions are purely my own, reading and extrapolating between his lines,
and are there due to the nature of the circumstances which led to my writing
this extended review. If my philosophy and literary theory are somewhat creaky,
mea culpa, and my apologies!
Four-and-a-half
Tentacled Horrors.
