Michel Houellebecq: 'HP Lovecraft, Against The World, Against Life'

In the tradition of Camus’s L’Etranger, and looking forward to his own Platform, Houellebecq begins his account of the life and work of HP Lovecraft with a dramatic statement of existentialist ennui: ‘Life is painful and disappointing’. This gauntlet, thrown down to the reader with supreme intellectual arrogance, provides the basis for Houellebecq’s ‘cerebral mash note’ to the ‘recluse of Providence’.

Houellebecq presents Lovecraft’s genius as a rejection of the external world, and the values of the society in which he lived. Lovecraft often used to date his letters 200 years prior to the time they were written (ie in the time of the pre-Independence American Colonies), and never deigned to create realistic situations within his work (capitalist society’s twin obsessions, money and sex, are never once mentioned within his stories).

The genesis of Lovecraft’s story-writing career was his nervous breakdown, at the age of 18; while his contemporaries dived headlong into the world of adulthood, HPL immersed himself in fantasy, rarely interacting with the society which existed on his doorstep. The 8 stories classed by Houellebecq as his ‘great texts’ were written following his divorce and retreat from New York (where he was a painful misfit), back to the place of his birth and the confines of his family.

Lovecraft’s writing is singular in style. Whilst most horror stories will begin by painting a picture of banal urban life, and slowly revealing the cracks and contradictions within it, Lovecraft wastes no time in plunging his reader into a scene of primal, howling terror. His world is insecure, assailed on all sides by monstrous forces capable of crushing it at any moment.

It is a peculiar characteristic of Lovecraft’s writing that while no effort is made to develop characters beyond the stock ‘academic from Arkham University’, a great emphasis is placed on scientific theory and accuracy. His stories use the latest developments in the scientific world, for example discussing the new theory of relativity, and are fussily detailed, providing exact latitudes and longitudes to establish locations. This technique presents the reader with a sense of horror rooted in the very essence of the universe.

So how did Lovecraft see the world, and what caused him to shun society so vigorously? HPL presented himself as an old man even when still in his 30s, an Anglophile who in many ways was typical of the ‘gentleman amateur’ of Victorian England. While he was not wealthy (a particularly affecting sentence reads simply ‘he began to sell his furniture’), he would not chase late payments for work, and frequently offered his rewriting services free of charge. When he was forced by circumstances to apply for work, in New York, he was turned down for literally hundreds of roles, despite the strong economy of the time.

Lovecraft reacted violently to any analysis which attempted to impose rational explanations on the workings of nature and of the mind. He described Freud’s work on the meaning of dreams as ‘puerile symbolism’, resentful of the modern world’s incursion into the unconscious world. He also showed a clear understanding of the process by which the importance of individuals was subsumed in early capitalism by the economic efficiency of machines, and divided labour.

The horror in Lovecraft’s writing is produced by the almighty clash between primal nature and modern existence. There is a great emphasis on the antiquity of Cthulhu, Yog Sogoth, and the other ‘Old Ones’, who lurk in the shadows, or under the seas, ready to rise up and crush humanity. That these ‘old gods’ are worshipped only by ‘degenerate races’ in ‘uncivilised’ pockets of humanity, is taken by Houellebecq as a sign of Lovecraft’s racism. While Lovecraft undoubtedly shows in his letters a racist attitude which would have been common at the time, I think this reading is somewhat flawed.

That the ‘unspeakable rites’ of Cthulhu take place in remote clearings, in ancient tongues, away from the white man’s metropolis, indicate Lovecraft’s belief that chaos is an essential facet of human existence, as old as time, and untameable. The power of the old gods may be hidden, but there is no doubt that it will rise up, and modern civilisation will not withstand its assault.

The ‘recluse of Provident’, then, exists in a world hemmed in on the one side by the rise of the machine, and modern capitalism, and on the other by the ‘swirling chaos’ of human nature. His response is to turn his back on realism, and enter a dream-inspired world where the two opposing forces conspire to destroy one another. This rejection of reality, this literary escapism, argues Houellebecq, is the only reasonable response of an artist to the twentieth century world.

Indeed, echoes of Lovecraft’s supernatural horrors can be found in other important artforms of the twentieth century; the ‘unnatural geometry’ of Great Cthulhu’s tomb bears a passing resemblance to Futurism, and surrealist art would also use unnatural imagery to explore the darker reaches of the human psyche. The influence of his ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ has been acknowledged by many horror writers, musicians and film-makers, some of whom have attempted to expand and develop his universe, in a way that, according to Houellebecq, has not been paralleled since the followers of Homer.

Whether ‘life is disappointing’, or whether Houellebecq is guilty of literary posturing is down to the discretion of the reader. It is without question, however, that Lovecraft provided one of the great literary howls against the flaws of his society – a cry for human intellect and agency in a world which had come to be dominated by machines and factory processes, finding its ultimate expression as a generation was cut down by mass-produced weapons of war in Europe. This world, which sought to invade and categorise even the innermost thoughts of the individual was fulsomely rejected and torn apart by Lovecraft’s fiction, which still retains a vital power at the dawn of a new millennia.