Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy Graham Harman Winchester, UK Washington, USA First published by Zero Books, 2012 Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK [email protected] www.johnhuntpublishing.com www.zero-books.net For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website. Text copyright: Graham Harman 2011 ISBN: 978 1 78099 252 5 All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers. The rights of Graham Harman as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design: Stuart Davies Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution. Preliminary Note All citations of Lovecraft stories refer to the collection: H.P. Lovecraft, Tales. (New York: Library of America, 2005.) Each reference consists of a two-word abbreviation followed by a page number. For example, (CC 167) would refer to page 167 of “The Call of Cthulhu” in the Library of America volume. Abbreviations for the individual stories are as follows: CC “The Call of Cthulhu” CS “The Colour Out of Space” CW “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” DH “The Dunwich Horror” HD “The Haunter of the Dark” MM “At the Mountains of Madness” SI “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” ST “The Shadow Out of Time” WD “The Whisperer in Darkness” WH “The Dreams in the Witch House” All of these stories refer to one another to an unusual extent, giving them the flavor of a loosely assembled novel told by diverse narrators of barely differentiable personality. But for simplicity’s sake, Part Two will focus only on the eight most commonly recognized “great tales,” as plausibly listed by Michel Houllebecq in his wonderful book on Lovecraft.1 Yet his list coincides only partially with my own taste. For instance, “The Shadow Out of Time” strikes me as unworthy of Lovecraft’s mature talent, while I remain rather fond of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Through the writings of Heidegger, the poems of Hölderlin have become a staple of analysis in continental philosophy. The present book makes an analogous case for elevating Lovecraft to the philosophical stage. Lovecraft can be dismissed as a pulp writer only under the presupposition that all writing about otherworldly monsters is doomed to be nothing but pulp. But this would be merely a social judgment, no different in kind from not wanting one’s daughter to marry the chimney sweep. There can be good and bad “weird” writing, just as we find both excellent and banal naturalistic fiction. Strong and weak elements sometimes co-exist in the same Lovecraft stories, but at his best, he is a major writer who also deals with philosophical themes of emerging interest. For many readers, Lovecraft is a discovery of adolescence. I myself never read a word of his stories until reaching the age of thirty-seven. Whether this colors my interpretation with the ripeness of maturity, or with stolid bourgeois mediocrity, is a question for each reader to decide by experiment. Part One: Lovecraft and Philosophy A Writer of Gaps and Horror One of the most important decisions made by philosophers concerns the production or destruction of gaps in the cosmos. That is to say, the philosopher can either declare that what appears to be one is actually two, or that what seems to be two is actually one. Some examples will help make the theme more vivid. In opposition to common sense, which sees nothing around us but a world of normal everyday entities, Plato created a gap between the intelligible forms of the perfect world and the confusing shadows of opinion. The occasionalists of the medieval Arab world and seventeenth century Europe produced a gap between any two entities by denying that they exert direct influence on one another, so that God became the only causal agent in the universe. The philosophy of Kant proposes a gap between appearances and things-in- themselves, with no chance of a symmetry between the two; the things-in- themselves can be thought but never known. But there are abundant examples of the opposite decision as well. We might think that horses are one thing and atoms are another, but hardcore materialists insist that a horse is completely reducible to physical atoms and is nothing over and above them. In this way the supposed gap between horses and atoms is destroyed, since on this view there is no such thing as a “horse” at all, just atoms arranged in a certain pattern. Instead of atoms, we might also claim that the whole world is made of water, air, fire, or a gigantic and indeterminate lump. In ancient Greece these were the various tendencies of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Alternatively, we might hold that there are individual objects on one side and the various qualities of those objects on the other. David Hume denounced this gap, reducing supposed unified objects to nothing more than bundles of qualities. There is no such thing as an apple, just many different qualities that occur together so regularly that through force of habit we begin to call them an “apple.” And as for Kant’s gap between appearances and things-in- themselves, the German Idealists tried to destroy this gap by calling it incoherent: to think of things-in-themselves outside thought is meaningless, for given that we do think of them, they are obviously an element of thought. The destruction and production of gaps can easily coexist in the same philosopher, just as black and white coexist in the same painting. For example, if Hume is a destroyer of gaps by holding that objects are nothing more than bundles of qualities, he is also a producer of gaps through his denial that we can prove causal relationships between objects (this latter point is an inheritance from the occasionalists he so admired). Nonetheless, there is generally a dominant tone in every philosopher favoring one technique or the other. Since those who destroy gaps by imploding them into a single principle are generally called reductionists, let’s coin the word productionists to describe philosophers who find new gaps in the world where there were formerly none. If we apply this distinction to imaginative writers, then H.P. Lovecraft is clearly a productionist author. No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess. Despite his apparently limited interest in philosophy, Lovecraft as a tacit philosopher is violently anti-idealist and anti- Humean. Indeed, there are times when Lovecraft echoes cubist painting in a manner amounting almost to a parody of Hume. While Hume thinks that objects are a simple amassing of familiar qualities, Lovecraft resembles Braque, Picasso, and the philosopher Edmund Husserl by slicing an object into vast cross-sections of qualities, planes, or adumbrations, which even when added up do not exhaust the reality of the object they compose. For Lovecraft, the cubists, and Husserl, objects are anything but bundles of qualities. In parallel with this tendency, Lovecraft is anti-idealist whenever he laments the inability of mere language to depict the deep horrors his narrators confront, to the point that he is often reduced to hints and allusions at the terrors inhabiting his stories. The present book will consider numerous examples of both sorts of gaps in Lovecraft’s writings. But while Lovecraft is a writer of gaps, he is also a writer of horror, and the two should not be conflated. One could imagine a very different writer who used Lovecraft’s staple techniques for other purposes–perhaps a sensual fantasist who would place us in a world of strange and indescribable pleasures, in which candles, cloves, and coconut milk were of such unearthly perfection that language would declare itself nearly powerless to describe them. A literary “weird porn” might be conceivable, in which the naked bodies of the characters would display bizarre anomalies subverting all human descriptive capacity, but without being so strange that the erotic dimension would collapse into a grotesque sort of eros-killing horror. We will see that while the stylistic production of gaps augments Lovecraft’s power to depict monstrous horrors, the horrors themselves must occur on the level of literal content, not of literary allusion. 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.