undercurrent

September 10, 2004

Contre le monde, contre la vie

Over the next week (or however long it takes me to get through it) I�ll be posting some or all of my translation of Michel Houellebecq�s HP Lovecraft � Contre le monde, contre la vie. This is not an official, legal, nor even necessarily an accurate, translation (I'm not sure whether one is planned), but I certainly think it�s worth taking note of, and sharing with others, the fact that this contemporary novelist has thought fit to devote his time to an essay on the great master of supernatural horror. Moreover, far more than any of his other biographers Houellebecq swiftly heads straight to the core of what makes Lovecraft important.

My personal response to the book is one of utter delight, as at meeting a long-lost friend. It seems to me that those who speak of Lovecraft with the most passion, whether to others of the same secret clan or to outsiders who remain baffled by their devotion to a minor pulp-fantasy author, are those who once afflicted at an early age by Lovecraft, never quite escape from the miasma of his creations. Although the compulsion may lie dormant for years, decades even, a hazardous glance at the shelves of a secondhand bookshop, taking in a worn paperback tattooed with some pulp artist's lovingly naff rendering of tendrillous, seething 'unspeakable monstrosities', will send a physical shiver of recognition across the surface of the skin; and for a couple of days we will once again be utterly hooked, abstracted from reality, lost in a world both familiar and inexhaustibly fascinating, a world that is totally unreal but which ineffaceably stains reality with its ghastly tint. One returns to Lovecraft not as to a childish indulgence, with a feeling of a guilty pleasure, but as to the sea or the sky, to an enduring, elemental mystery which never be explained away, no matter how 'grown-up' one's attitude towards it.

Lovecraft, with Felis

Literary critics who �rediscover� Lovecraft and attempt to �situate� him in various literary-historical narratives are truly missing the point, for the only way of appreciating Lovecraft, indeed the only reason for being interested in him at all is to experience the work in its very singularity, with a passion. Houellebecq, a poet and novelist himself, is obviously a member of our select coven (he first �discovered� Lovecraft at seven years old), and he demonstrates clearly that Lovecraft�s singular complex of literary forces, the worlds he created, continue to live on, even outside of Lovecraft�s own writings, and cast their eldritch curse on every new generation.

Houellebecq, with great clarity, traces the source of that potency to Lovecraft�s real philosophical novelty, which is to have doggedly pursued fear as a constitutive human impulse. Lovecraft was intent on showing, pass� Kant, that the noumenal � the outside of our limited anthropomorphic optic - extends its dark tendrils into experience through the very archaeopsychic triggers that connect human experience with that outside. Certainly Lovecraft�s transcendental fear is a fictional simulation, the shuddering pleasure of the fantastical experienced in the safety of the armchair, but what he has us feel is also the reality of our connection with the cosmos, the �unbearable proximity to matter� felt by the schizophrenic (of course, Lovecraft�s characters are constantly under threat of insanity).

More prosaically, but no less important for an understanding of this philosophical novelty, Houellebecq shows that for Lovecraft what was all-too-real was his encounter with life outside of the niceties of a New England Bourgeois; The impulses behind the religion banished by his strict materialism returned with a vengeance when he contemplated the seething life of the street, the melting-pot model for the future of a decoded, remixed metropolitan humanity. This uncontrollable mass of people of all colours, of flowing matter, became the obsessional centre of the Lovecraftian imaginary, a core that at once repelled and could not be escaped; for, through myriad terrifying vectors of cosmic, transtemporal miscegenation, Lovecraft knew that one was intimately connected with the filth of life. Lovecraft became the sole proponent of a life-denying religion without redemption. For the rest of his days, his neurotic self-creation as a peculiar, withdrawn anachronism proceeded in parallel with a plumbing of the depths of his psychotic loathing for base matter, both of which in turn fed on the streak of misanthropy, self-doubt, and indignation at the modern, bordering on a terror of living reality itself, that is invoked in Houellebecq�s title: �Against the world, against life� (cf also Levinas� transcendental dictum, bristling with Lovecraftian frisson: �The rustling of the there is�.is horror�)

Lovecraft�s undying appeal to the young is that he feeds not only their wonder at the universe but also their fears. Children live in a world of illogical forces beyond their control, unanswered questions, dark corners. Lovecraft�s stories are not about people but about abstract forces; forces of darkness, forces of fear and disintegration, forces of doubt, forces of the outside. These forces, being already virtual and abstract, have far more potential for jumping the gap between their simulated life on the page and their realization as actual emotions in the reader than fictional characters ever do (of course, whereas we must agree with Deleuze and Guattari, that all great writing is concerned with abstract forces, nevertheless with Lovecraft this is particularly clear). The stories activate circuits of cosmic-philosophical doubt in a child from with the adult will never escape. The stories themselves become mechanisms for the outside to come in � via doubt, fear, anxiety, feelings of ungroundedness, and so the fiction really becomes what it talks about: a series of partly-opened gateways, portals, to elsewhere.

In Lovecraft�s historical survey of weird fiction, �Supernatural Horror in Literature� [Dover, 1973] he specifically seeks to distance his work from mere �horror� or �fantasy� fiction by insisting on the importance and the basis in material reality of these cosmic forces (�the spectrally macabre�, �the literature of cosmic fear�):
�There is here involved psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species���there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative ever were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.���Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.���there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain � a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space�

This last sentence could almost have come from Kant in one of his darker moods when he enthusiastically relates all the nasty things that could happen if not for the forces of reason (Lovecraft's distinction from Kantianism being his profound distrust, or at least sceptical suspension, of the 'as if's of the regulative principles that keep our minds contained).

��The one test of the really weird is simply this � whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the know universe�s utmost rim��

Here we are right at the heart of the matter : Lovecraft�s work demonstrates the radical immanence of signs and the real, of stories and the reality they augment. Although in this respect Lovecraft is closer to the ancient traditions of story,song and magic than his pulpy 'non-literary' status would suggest, Lovecraftian horror also shares this feature with the decidedly contemporary spheres of propaganda, pornography and advertising (commercials use certain sign-techniques to tell a story �about� a state of mind that if successful invokes that very state of mind). Lovecraft�s test for the quality of a �weird tale� could equally be imagined coming from the mouth of an adman or a director of pornography: �The final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a sensation�. Lovecraft is in fact an anachronism in the opposite direction to that which he wished, in his self-creation as an Edwardian gentleman: he is of the post-Beyond the Pleausure Principle age of William Burroughs and Videodrome - in other words, of the fearful immanence, or the immanence in fear, of fiction and the real.

Lovecraft's fiction doesn�t seek out these archaeopsychic sources as a matter of romantic style, but because as material bases of the transcendental unconscious they are the sources of human energy. Note how acute is Lovecraft�s understanding of this: he immediately stresses the direct connection between �fiction�, biological heritage, and physiology. (Note also how even the most supposedly detached, discursive examination of Lovecraft�s writing leaks into an invocation of the very same forces that his fiction describes). These forces are cited as the drive behind the fiction, rather than as creations of the fiction (��.It has always existed, and always will exist, and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales..�) These fearful forces are, ultimately, something that presses down upon the writer, like the dank ceiling of his bio-psychological prison cell, and causes something to pass through him to his creation, using them both as media for the amplification of their antediluvian rhythms. Houellebecq�s task then, eschewing obvious mechanistic psychologizing causation, is to show by what means they took hold of Lovecraft himself and transformed him into their most potent poet celebrant.

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12/11/04 : The complete translation can now be found here

Posted by robin at September 10, 2004 02:10 PM