H. P. Lovecraft : Against the World, Against Life
by Michel Houellebecq
Paperback, 256 pages, £8.99, Gollancz
*
reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont
Though presented as a monograph, Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life (henceforth Against the World) is actually an extended essay padded out with the complete texts of “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and “The Whisperer in the Darkness” (1930). Ably translated from the original French by Dorna Khazeni, Against the World is barely a hundred pages long and is divided up into briskly written thematic chapters and sections that are as pleasant to read as they are tendentious. As with Maurice Levy’s work on Lovecraft, the book makes little pretence of universality or even sustained argument or scholarship. Instead, it is a book with a very specific point to make.
Against the World is arguably best seen as a form of biographical literary manifesto; an act of post hoc intellectual colonisation in which Lovecraft is cast as a quasi-existentialist author whose themes are
intriguingly similar to those that would later emerge as central to the work of Houellebecq as a novelist.
Houellebecq presents Lovecraft as an author who is fundamentally opposed to life. This rejection of life has its origins in Lovecraft’s troubled youth and the ‘nervous breakdown’ that made it impossible for him to attend university, but it has its true origins in the time Lovecraft spent in New York.
Devoting an entire chapter to Lovecraft’s racism, Houellebecq points out that, prior to arriving in New York, Lovecraft displayed no greater tendency to racism than was common in someone of his class and origins. Lovecraft’s more infamous views only started to emerge once he arrived in New York and he was forced to deal with not only the collapse of his marriage but also his complete failure to find any kind of employment. This experience must have been horrific for Lovecraft as here was a thoughtful and erudite man from a good family not only estranged from his wife but also incapable of finding work. Meanwhile, all around him people of other cultures and races lived broadly happy and occasionally prosperous lives in the great melting pot and economic centre that was New York in the mid-20s. Why should they be able to live happily while a man of breeding and refinement such as Lovecraft should be so utterly miserable?
“This man who did not succeed at life, did indeed succeed at writing. It was hard for him. It took him years. New York Helped him. He who was so gentle, so courteous, discovered hatred there” [page 118]
Houellebecq paints Lovecraft as this almost ethereal creature of solitary habits and questionable mental stability who is taken and broken on the wheel of New York. A failure in love and a failure in life, Lovecraft was made to see that the values he held so dear in no way guaranteed a happy life. Initially, this sense of alienation turned Lovecraft’s other-worldliness into bitterness and resentment at the more successful and well-adapted New Yorkers around him, but eventually the breaking of Lovecraft allowed him to produce what are now widely called his ‘Great Texts’; the classics of Lovecraftian fiction that all appeared after Lovecraft’s time in New York.
“This is the profound secret of Lovecraft’s genuis, and the pure source of his poetry: he succeeded in transforming his aversion for life into an effective hostility.
To offer an alternative to life in all its form constitutes a permanent opposition, a permanent recourse to life -- This is the poet’s highest mission on this Earth. Howard Philips Lovecrsft fulfilled this mission.” [page 119]
When Houellebecq says that Lovecraft rejects life, he is making a very specific claim. ‘Life’ in Houellebecq’s sense is not some vague synonym for ‘happiness’ or ‘existence’, rather he means the forces that shape our existence and which have come to define our social conception of what is and is not a ‘good life’.
“If an author were to be defined, not by the themes he addresses, but by those he avoids, then we would be forced to argue that Lovecraft’s position is rather unique. In his entire body of work, there is not a single allusion to the two realities to which we generally ascribe great importance: sex and money.” [page 57]
Houellebecq sees Lovecraft’s genius as residing in his decision to reject sex and money either as ideals worth pursuing or as appropriate subjects for literary exploration. This is characterised as a rejection of realism. By this Houellebecq means ‘realism’ as an aesthetic tradition, not as a philosophical one allowing Lovecraft to be permanently wedded to ‘the real’ through his inclusion of scientific concepts whilst also rejecting traditionally realist forms of story-telling such as the stories of sex and relationships that make up most dramas and the tales of fortunes accumulated and princesses penetrated in populist adventure stories. Lovecraft’s writing replaces traditionally realist concerns with an alternative set of principles. These principles can be seen in the fact that Lovecraft’s viewpoint characters are frequently detached doctors (1922’s “Herbert West - Reanimator” and 1927’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”), aloof academics (1925’s “The Call of Cthulhu”) or, if not estranged from the real world by profession, they are so by virtue of their very being (1936’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”). Even when Lovecraft is providing us with a slice of human reality to hold onto for the purposes of the story, his characters are invariably detached and alienated from the world they inhabit. They are seldom described in any depth and even if they are into is only as a means to the end of giving us access to the second level of Lovecraft’s anti-realism, a ‘real world’ full of creatures and forces that are utterly alien to human understanding. Cthulhu is not looking for sex, nor is it interested in money, it is beyond such concerns and as such is completely Other to those of us whose lives are dominated and defined by exactly those things.
After writing Against the World, Houellebecq produced the novel Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (1994). I use the French name to refer to the novel as, unlike its English title Whatever, Extension du Domaine de la Lutte nicely sums up the central idea of the work, namely that the liberal principles that govern economics also govern sexuality. Liberalism, as an economic philosophy, is sold on the basis of potential; we can see this in the refusal of the American working class to vote for higher taxes. We can also see it in the theory that the free movement of capital and an unrestricted and unregulated market economy mean that new markets can respond more quickly and enrich more people with greater speed than if they were moderated by the apparatus of the state. This is why capitalism is popular. However, the same principles that allow people to make their fortunes also allow people to become penny-less and destitute with no hope in sight. But despite the fact that people can be left in the kind of grinding poverty that would simply not be possible in a socialist state, people still talk about capitalism and liberalism as being all about freedom. Houellebecq argues that the same sleight-of-hand has taken place with the liberalisation of sexual mores. The de-valuation of virginity, the decay of marriage and the reduction of celibacy to little more than a joke are parallels to the gradual deregulation of the marketplace. A more liberal set of social attitudes to sex means that some benefit hugely by enjoying vast numbers of orgasms with vast numbers of partners and all of us have the possibility of achieving this too. However, the reality is that, just as with economic liberalism, sexual liberalism results in there being losers. Extension du Domaine de la Lutte deals with these losers of the sexual economy, as does Atomised/Elementary Particles (1998), which ends with the creation of a race of immortal post-humans called Homo Cyberneticus that are as free from the constant search for sex and money as Lovecraft’s gods and monsters.
At a basic level, this book is not so much about Lovecraft as it is about Houellebecq trying to find his own creative footing as he explores what it is that he wants to write about by articulating what he admires in the works of another. His decision to strip Lovecraft of his position as Poe’s heir to the throne of American gothic in order to reposition him as a fore-runner to the first generation of literary existentialists including Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus is not only convincing (especially given the short-comings of Levy’s attempts to cast him as a died-in-the-wool author of the fantastic) but fascinating as it effectively reminds us that the focus of Lovecraft’s work should not be the prose or the monsters but rather the individual and the psychological.
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Jonathan McCalmont is the editor of Fruitless Recursion. He lives in London where he teaches and prepares contributions to venues such as NYRSF, Strange Horizons, SF Site and Videovista.
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