Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer
or interpreted independently of his serious convictions. If Lovecraft was trying to communicate a deep message to mankind, it is here, in his philosophical works, that we shall find the key to the deepest and most significant meaning of all his unique fiction.
Lovecraft was a mechanistic materialist, influenced by Haeckel, but going far beyond the nineteenth century rationalist. He was an ardent believer and supporter of science and scientific method. A conservative in matters of art and morality, he showed himself to be an extreme modernist in his intellectual outlook. He was convinced of the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and to a much lesser extent, of the modern discoveries of psychoanalysis. His deepest scientific interest was in the area of astronomy, an interest which he maintained until the end of his short life.
Although he greatly appreciated the esthetic beauty of the myths and traditional beliefs of the past, he fully accepted the implications of the information available to his probing scientific intellect, and abandoned all traces of religious and superstitious beliefs at an early age. He conceived the cosmos as entirely purposeless and mechanistic, and man’s position therein as a mere insignificant accident lasting an instant in eternity.
Lovecraft had the unique ability of being able to achieve complete intellectual objectivity. He was capable of detaching his consciousness, of achieving a frame of mind of “cosmic outsidedness” and becoming a dispassionate observer of man and the universe. He was able to conceptualize a cosmos where our entire universe was reduced to a grain of sand, a mere atom in infinity, and at the same time to observe the amusing behavior of his fellow men with the same objectivity with which we might study the antics of ants, rats, or monkeys. His incisive mind was quick to spot the inconsistencies and incongruities of human hypocrisy, and he condemned the blindness of the fanatic theist together with the unjustified hopes of the idealistic atheist.
Lovecraft’s view of life was essentially pessimistic. He felt that most people are basically unhappy, and that a life of suffering is not preferable to the oblivion of death. Seriously contemplating suicide, he decided against it on the grounds that the esthetic pleasure he derived from the study of eighteenth century art slightly tipped the scales in favor of life. He considered the quest for truth, for new knowledge, the sole possible justification for the existence of the human species, and his eternal question was “What is reality?”
For Lovecraft, man, as well as the cosmos, has no purpose, no final goal. A rock, a man, a planet, and the entire universe, all are equally meaningless, and equally valuable in a purposeless cosmos. Life did not exist a moment ago, and will have ceased a moment hence, and the memory of man will be eternally forgotten. But man must live by the relative values imparted by culture and tradition, and from these he derives an illusion of security and stability. These values and traditions Lovecraft accepted as long as they did not contradict what his cold, rational intellect knew to be true. He opposed the blind iconoclastic fury of those all too willing to tear down what they could never replace.
Nevertheless, Lovecraft was intellectually too perceptive to become a philosophic missionary. With unparalleled objectivity, he was able to realize that a complete awareness of reality is not necessarily the best for all men, and that for many an illusion is preferable to the truth. Man exists for the merest instant, and anything making life less puhishing and more endurable has relative value.
Lovecraft had little faith in man’s ability to cope with reality, and in his brilliant letters and fiction predicted what we now call “future shock.” With deep regret he prophesied man’s retreat into insanity or the superstitions of a new dark age when faced with the new discoveries of science pointing toward the abysmai insignificance of man. The introductory paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu” provides an excellent summary of Lovecraft’s views, and also supplies us with the essential key for the interpretation of “The Outsider” within the framework of his mechanistic philosophy:
“The most merciful thing in the world 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 if 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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Lovecraft has been often misunderstood in this paragraph as opposing scientific progress. Nothing could have been further removed from his intention. He simply stated what he perceived as the inevitable and deplorable consequence of man’s inability to cope with the new horizons opened by science, while still regarding knowledge as the ultimate good. That his pessimistic prophecy was justified becomes evident when we witness the growing interest in, or rather, retreat to, the occult, astrology, magic, religion, witchcraft, and superstition, the countless new cults emerging everywhere, the fads of pseudo-mysticism, the drug-culture…. All the frantic attempts at regaining some of the lost security destroyed by Galileo, and Darwin, and Freud, and Einstein, and Skinner, and countless others….
It is this ultimate conflict of man facing the cosmos and reactingwith horror to the realization of his impotent insignificance, that constitutes the theme of “The Outsider.”
The subterranean castle is the womb, where embryonic man is being shaped by his inherited potential and genetic characteristics. He experiences the pains of birth trauma after the arduous travel up the vaginal tower. Man is filled with dreams and expectations, with illusions about his own destiny. He strives for happiness, freedom, dignity, knowledge…. The cherished traditions of the past tell him that he is the lord of creation, the center of the Universe. He sees himself as the ultimate product of evolution, the culmination of all life. In his quest for knowledge and perfection, he hopes to find an answer to all questions in science, and sees in this castle of truth, the key to ultimate happiness.
But when the narrator reaches his destination and enters the bastion of reality, he finds not happiness, security, and fulfillment, but only the bare, cruel, merciless truth. As he correlates the body of dissociated knowledge, he achieves instant comprehension of reality. He knows “all that had been.” A terrifying vista of reality has been opened for him, and of his “frightful position” therein. In the mirror he sees reflected, not the lord of creation, but the loathsome, abominable vermin polluting a grain of sand in a purposeless universe. He recognizes himself as a meaningless atom of corruption, an ephemeral infection in the accident of Life. No destiny, no purpose, no dignity, no meaning….
Unable to cope with this “soul-annihilating” revelation, “in the supreme horror of that second” man forgets the truth and runs frantically back to the hopes and superstitions of the past, but finding the stone trapdoor closed, collapses into the “new freedom” of insanity. He can never be the same again. He is an outsider. He knows.
This ultimate conflict, the final confrontation of man with reality is a recurrent theme in Lovecraft’s fiction. The outcome reflects Lovecraft’s pessimistic view of human nature and perfectibility. Lovecraft, as a thinker, was a realist, and painted reality as he saw it in the powerful strokes of his incomparable fiction. He wrote with the realism of Richard Upton Pickman, Lovecraft’s uncanny self-portrait in “Pickman’s Model.” “The Outsider” provides a vivid representation of man’s pathetic helplessness in the cosmos.
5. DISCUSSION AND EVALUATION
The autobiographic interpretation is quite appealing, because it seems to fit well with known facts of Lovecraft’s life. To suggest that all the similarities between settings and incidents in “The Outsider,” and events or places in the life of the Providence author are mere coincidences, would be nothing short of preposterous. Nevertheless, although biographical data may have provided some of the “form” or setting in this excellent tale, it does not necessarily follow that the meaning of the story is to be read as an expression of Lovecraft’s hypothetically frustrated gregariousness. Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft’s intimate and long-time friend, for example, disagrees emphatically with the notion that Lovecraft had a “social inferiority complex,” and insists that he “never made the slightest