Let me preface this summary with the caution that I am no philosopher. Nor, let it be said, am I such a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, the person or the writer. I read much of his work in my early teens without knowing it, because I consumed junk, horror, and junk horror, by necessity. These were the books available to me around the house and in discount bins in the Perth City mall.
I read a cheap horror anthology on the South West Coach Lines one Sunday afternoon, during a storm somewhere south of Bunbury. I was not worried, then, about style, or structure, or whether someone was a good or bad writer, or their politics. I was a naïve reader; I only knew what I enjoyed. When some strange man broke into a library to steal a book, and was attacked by a dog, and his body melted – melted – that scene stayed with me for 25 years. When I came back to horror as an adult, not for enjoyment but for scholarship, I tracked down that scene and found it – you already know – in Lovecraft’s “Dunwich Horror”. My youthful self had, in ignorance and by accident, given us an expansive education in the writings of classic horror authors, including Lovecraft.
Whether one likes Lovecraft’s writing or not, whether one likes Lovecraft or not, any person attempting to understand the modern horror genre must study his work. And if a person is studying, as I am, the workings of cosmic horror, Lovecraft is inescapable. One of the best literary critical studies of Lovecraft’s work in the last decade has been Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Harman is the doyenne of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), the study of objects as things in themselves, whose phenomenal qualities do not give us access to the object (or something like that, don't take my word for it). Whatever OOO might be as a philosophy, it works well as a literary theory, and as a study on metaphor. In the below I will attempt to summarise Harman’s study of Lovecraft by extracting the literary from the metaphysical, insofar as that is possible.
A summary of Part One: Lovecraft and Philosophy
One ought not to reject Lovecraft because he is a bad writer because he was a pulp writer. To reject an entire genre is silly. One should learn to discern good and bad writing from within any genre. Lovecraft was himself aware of good and bad writing within his own medium, and was scathing of those who produced banal speculative fiction focusing on novel content rather than the “sense of awe, marvel, and strangeness which the reader would feel in the presence of such a thing” (Lovecraft in Harman, 21-22). Harman writes of HPL: “The medium is the message” (23).
It is no surprise to learn that Harman believes Lovecraft is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, mainly due to “his deliberate and skilful obstruction of all attempts to paraphrase him” (9). For Harman, Lovecraft “writes stories about the essence of philosophy” (33). His study of Lovecraft is based on this foundational philosophy: being is untranslatable – “reality is too real to be translated without remainder into any sentence, perception, practical action, or anything else” (16).
Lovecraft, says Harman, is “perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them” and “between objects and the qualities they possess” (p. 3). An object’s reality is more than the totality of its qualities. He is therefore a “productionist” in Harman’s coinage, meaning someone who finds “new gaps in the world where there were formerly none” (3). Lovecraft shows himself as “anti-idealist” too when his characters are unable to describe the things they encounter in language, being reduced to “hints and allusions” (4). HPL undercuts his own literal descriptions by splitting an object off from its
qualities, and also by piling up sensual qualities (34).
This is evident in one primary aspect of Lovecraft’s style. When the narrator attempts to describe ‘the monster’, he does not describe it literally, but hints at its form. He creates a gap between “an ungraspable thing and the vaguely relevant descriptions that the narrator is able to attempt” (24). Harman calls this aspect of the style the ‘vertical gap’. In a second, ‘horizontal’ stylistic element, which Harman calls ‘literary cubism’ (234), the “power of language is no longer enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality. Instead, language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspect of the thing” (25). Harman summarises these “two separate fissures that obstruct the power of literal language” (234):
This is the stylistic world of H.P. Lovecraft, as world in which (1) real objects are locked in impossible tension with the crippled descriptive powers of language, and (2) visible objects display unbearable seismic torsion with their own qualities . . . Normally we feel no gap at all between the world and our own descriptions of it. But Lovecraft unlocks a world dominated by such a gap. (27)
For this reasons Harman calls HPL a “Kantian writer of ‘noumenal’ horror” (27).
It is important to note however that a writer of gaps is not always a writer of horror (4, 235). Harman splits content from style: “Lovecraft as an author of horror writes about horrific content (monstrous creatures more powerful than humans and with no regard for our welfare), while Lovecraft the author of gaps is one who could have flourished in many other genres featuring many different sorts of content” (4).
This is confusing. There must be more to horror than fission and fusion, but if the fission and the fusion are not working to induce 'horror', if they might be working equally as well to induce surprise and laughter, where does the horror come from? Harman states that the horror comes from the powerful creatures with no concern for humans. He might as well be describing a god. Are all such gods horrific?
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