His work deserves to endure, as it certainly will. But not as a worldview unto itself.
His work deserves to endure, as it certainly will. But not as a worldview unto itself.
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
–Stephen Crane, “A Man Said to the Universe”
T here are certain recurring elements in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The horrifying cosmic entity Cthulhu. The Necronomicon, a cursed tome of forbidden knowledge. Certain words recur, too, such as “Cyclopean.” When Lovecraft really wanted to convey the monstrous nature of what he was attempting to describe in his horror tales, though, “blasphemous” frequently seemed the best way to communicate the utterly alien, offensive, and profane quality of his subjects. It is a telling choice, one that helps illustrate the distinct and enduring quality of his work.
Lovecraft’s modern reputation might suggest widespread popularity in his own day. Not quite. Though he wrote many stories before his death in 1937, virtually all of them appeared in pulp magazines, for which he was often paid shockingly little. He only published one book in his lifetime, though his work did appear in some anthologies. Literary friends kept his work alive, enabling its gradual increase in popularity. The man who wrote, “That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die” would surely appreciate his own resurrection.
Now, author Stephen King, directors John Carpenter and Guillermo Del Toro, and countless others have claimed inspiration from him. His tales continue to sell well; non-literary media, such as songs and video games, have also derived from them. Providence, R.I., Lovecraft’s hometown, has now lovingly adopted him: A library at Brown University contains his papers. And the town itself bears memorials and plaques of his history there, as well as hosting NecromiCon Providence, a festival in his honor.
He is famous enough now to suffer the fate of many well-known figures from the past: a thoroughgoing and unfavorable examination of his prejudices. Those who go looking for evidence of them will find it, and discover a bigot even by the standards of his time. Sometimes, these racialist preoccupations show up in his work, such as in his seeming obsessions with genetic degeneration and race-mixing.
“The Shadow over Innsmouth” is perhaps the most striking instance of this. A depiction of a town besieged by amphibious humanoids (who breed with its human inhabitants, producing hybrid offspring), it presents a Lovecraftian spin on the pro-immigrant promise of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus.” Where Lazarus anthropomorphized the Statue of Liberty as welcoming “your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” the main character of Lovecraft’s story watches with horror as the waters between the town and an offshore reef where the amphibians reside fill “with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town” whose “bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.” The rest of the story displays a similar horror of the foreign.
Yet to try to interrogate Lovecraft’s work so harshly as to consider it no longer worth reading also reveals the fallacy of such an enterprise, which fundamentally fails to separate art from artist. And also its folly: There will be no “canceling” H. P. Lovecraft. He is, at this point, ineradicable. As just one example: The popularization, if not the origin outright, of the “theory” that extraterrestrials came to Earth in its distant past and created human civilization — the wellspring of practically an entire subgenre — owes a considerable debt to his novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” His influence has seeped into the soil of popular culture almost as though it were the indescribable otherworldly being that invades and pervades the unfortunate Gardner farm in his story “The Colour out of Space.”
A far more fruitful and interesting vein of inquiry concerning Lovecraft is to ascertain his staying power. A survey of his work suggests a ready answer. While he was certainly not the first writer to work from the assumption that some things are beyond human comprehension, he made the idea central to his fiction, elaborated upon it, and deployed it for the sake of horror. His imaginative faculties are no doubt impressive, conjuring up forbidden geometries, creating mountains of madness, and populating an entire cosmology of beings of whom the octopus-headed Cthulhu is only the most well-known. But these creations and flourishes would be mere curiosities without the central animating notion that mankind is beset by horrors beyond understanding. It is an idea perhaps most pithily conveyed in the famous opening of “The Call of Cthulhu”:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
It is no wonder that so many of his stories involve characters going mad, or are told by narrators begging their readers not to reveal what they have transmitted.
One can imagine past authors, brought back from the dead, being displeased that their names have turned into bywords for things they despised, even if the transformation had guaranteed them the immortality they surely sought. George Orwell opposed what we now call Orwellian regimes; Charles Dickens grew up in and sought to bring attention to and ultimately eliminate what we now call Dickensian poverty. But Lovecraft would delight unambiguously in what “Lovecraftian” has come to connote.
Should we? His tales endure for a reason, and are particularly enjoyable this time of year. But much horror fiction, even that which dwells upon evil, derives its power from its complementary implication of the good. In Lovecraft’s universe, there are greater powers. They are, however, at best indifferent to mankind, and at worst actively (or perhaps even just incidentally) hostile to it, a reflection of the author’s own atheist materialism. Even he, however, could not totally escape a lingering of the divine: If nothing else, his resort to “blasphemy” as a descriptor assumes a reference point from which the profane so notably deviates. A truly indifferent universe — a true horror — would be shorn even of this.
Lovecraft’s work deserves to endure, as it certainly will. But not as a worldview unto itself.