Science, Categorization, and Naming in H.P. Lovecraft's Fiction

Doktori (Ph.D.) értekezés CONFRONTING “THE BOUNDLESS AND HIDEOUS UNKNOWN”: SCIENCE, CATEGORIZATION, AND NAMING IN H. P. LOVECRAFT’S FICTION Matolcsy Kálmán Debreceni Egyetem BTK 2010 CONFRONTING “THE BOUNDLESS AND HIDEOUS UNKNOWN”: SCIENCE, CATEGORIZATION, AND NAMING IN H. P. LOVECRAFT’S FICTION Értekezés a doktori (Ph.D.) fokozat megszerzése érdekében a ............................... tudományágban Írta: Matolcsy Kálmán okleveles ........................................... Készült a Debreceni Egyetem Irodalomtudományi doktori iskolája (Angol-amerikai programja) keretében Témavezet ő: Dr. (olvasható aláírás) A doktori szigorlati bizottság: elnök: Dr. ………………………… tagok: Dr. ………………………… Dr. ………………………… A doktori szigorlat id őpontja: 200… . ……………… … . Az értekezés bírálói: Dr. ........................................... Dr. …………………………… Dr. ........................................... A bírálóbizottság: elnök: Dr. ........................................... tagok: Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. A nyilvános vita id őpontja: 200… . ……………… … . 2 Én, Matolcsy Kálmán, teljes felel ősségem tudatában kijelentem, hogy a benyújtott értekezés a szerz ői jog nemzetközi normáinak tiszteletbentartásával készült. Jelen értekezést korábban más intézményben nem nyújtottam be és azt nem utasították el. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 Method 7 Procedure 13 CHAPTER I: CONFRONTING THE VOID Landscape and Gothicity 19 The Gothic Crevasse and the Cosmic Interstice 33 The Confrontation Motif and the Fantastic 42 CHAPTER II: SCIENCE AND THE VOID Quasi-science, Science, and the Supramundane 64 The Insurmountable Anomaly 74 The Incomplete Paradigm Shift 90 CHAPTER III: CLASSIFYING THE VOID Obsessive Categorization 102 Precision and Vagueness 113 Classical and Prototype Categories 121 CHAPTER IV: NAMING THE VOID Defective Categories, Defective Names 137 Adjectivitis, Perverted Hedges, Unnaming, Non-language 143 Analogy and Metaphor 154 The Embodied-disembodied Protagonist 174 Metaphor and Referentiality 182 Metaphor and Chiasmus 192 CONCLUSION 198 WORKS CITED 207 4 INTRODUCTION . when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown— the shadow-haunted Outside —we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold. (Lovecraft, Selected Letters II 150) The importance of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s work is today evident from the Library of America edition of his works (2005), selected by Peter Straub, and the vast body of criticism on Lovecraft, which, as S. T. Joshi points out, has “now reached titanic proportions” ( A Subtler Magick 288). In spite of his early neglect by academe, by the 1990s Lovecraft had become something of a horror critics’ favorite. Joshi and Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. declare, “It is difficult to find an author in this century . whose writings were so unrecognized in his lifetime, yet so widely known after his death” (1). Lovecraft has been labeled “the supreme master of the tale of horror,” “one of the most sensitive and powerful writers of [his ] generation,” and “the greatest American author of horror tales since Poe” (Drake Douglas, J. O. Bailey, and John A. Taylor qtd. in Joshi and Faig 1), and he has been established as the sole representative of a transitory phase between the American Gothic of Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Hawthorne, and Ambrose Bierce as well as both contemporary horror and science fiction. Lovecraft’s writing has spawned a complete sub-genre called cosmic horror, and an entire generation of fantasists follow in their master’s steps. 1 Lovecraft’s present championing by academics and fans alike is doubtless due both to his merits as a writer with an extraordinarily unique and consistent vision as well as to his remarkable personality. Early Lovecraft criticism, which set out to introduce to the scholarly 1 Joshi contends that “[t]here is really no parallel in the entire history of literature for such enduring and wide- ranging attempts to imitate or develop a single writer’s conceptions” ( Rise and Fall 20). 5 community an author hitherto deemed “pulp” had to find a firm grip on both his literature and his character, hoping to be able to combine the two to the greatest extent possible. Fritz Leiber’s, Matthew H. Onderdonk’s, George T. Wetzel’s, and August Derleth’s early writings on, and editions of, Lovecraft—the errors and shortcomings of some of which are widely recognized today, especially in Derleth’s case—managed to grant the Providence-based author some long-deserved posthumous attention. These seminal works concentrated precisely on autobiographical details in Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry, essays, and correspondence, often attempting an “armchair psychoanalysis” of the author (Joshi, “Lovecraft Criticism” 25). Armchair psychoanalysis aside, it should be understood that most of the early studies on Lovecraft, such as the noteworthy fantasist L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), had no choice but to include a plethora of biographical detail, the “safe and sane” method of literary criticism. In Lovecraft’s case, certain axiomatic contentions used to be widespread until the 1990s 2: that the man is identical to his work; his work is identical to his dreams; and finally, his work, dreams, and personality are chiefly the product of, and an honor to, his hometown, Providence—the latter notion reflected in the romanticizing inscription on his tombstone, a contribution in part by Lovecraft critic Dirk W. Mosig, “I am Providence.” Many of those critical arguments are, however, the result of an entire campaign of insightful biographical work on Lovecraft’s fiction—in which both the earlier and more recent studies took their share. Through the superabundance of literary and biographical evidence, Lovecraft looms as an exceedingly autobiographical writer. The bulk of biographical data on him derives, of course, as much from his letters as from the memoirs of his acquaintances, Paul W. Cook’s, 2 Until the arrival of such works as Donald R. Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe , Timo Airaksinen, The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft , David Ashby Oakes’s “Twentieth-century American Gothic Literature as Cultural Artifact,” and Bradley Alan Will’s “The ‘Supramundane.’” 6 Sonia H. (Greene) Davis’s, and others’ recollections.3 Monographs and essays continue to appear on Lovecraft, a large number of which tend to be, to a lesser or greater extent, of a biographical nature.4 These studies all stress that Lovecraft recreated his fiction in his life, and, similarly, reiterated his life through his fiction—in much the same manner as his alchemists and sorcerers survive through centuries—that Lovecraft is the prime example of an individual fully engulfed by his work, an artist nurtured by the landscape and encapsulated in his dreams and writing. Did not Lovecraft himself tell Henry Kuttner, “Each author has to write what’s in him” (qtd. in Schultz, “From Microcosm to Macrocosm” 199)? Method Despite the vast amount of data at hand, the trappings of traditional biographical criticism must not be disregarded. Joshi suggests in The Weird Tale (1990) that “it may be advisable . momentarily to forget this body of peripheral material and read again the stories as stories. This is what they are, and this is what Lovecraft wanted them to be; it is a historical accident that all that other matter survives” (229). In this study I am directing my attention to the text, or, more precisely, what I define as “the Lovecraftian text.” My specification of the Lovecraftian text runs along the lines of not stylistic but chronological considerations, as— perhaps not too extraordinarily—the periods in Lovecraft’s life and thought roughly serve as a foundation for the evolution of his style and themes. His progress as a writer of the weird exhibited a gradual enrichment of his craft, which naturally came to fruition in his later tales, when his “exile” into New York and his return to his hometown, Providence, (1924 and 1926) 3 See Paul W. Cook, In Memoriam: Howard Phillips Lovecraft , and Sonia H. Davis, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft . 4 Recent publications in the field include Eddy and Eddy, The Gentleman from Angell Street (2001), Lovecraft and Willis Conover, Lovecraft at Last (2002), William Schoell, H. P. Lovecraft: Master of Weird Fiction (2004), Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (2005), Robert H. Waugh, The Monster in the Mirror (2006), and Faig, The Unknown Lovecraft (2009). 7 provided him with new impetuses for writing. A summarizing argument in Jason Colavito’s recent study, Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge and the Development of the Horror Genre (2008), will suffice to launch my explanation of the choice of the Lovecraftian text: “Lovecraft’s fiction coalesces around a dark mythology that attains its true cosmic import and grandeur only when considered as a whole” (185). While Colavito is right, his holistic view can perhaps be reduced a little. To my and other critics’, such as Joshi’s, eyes, Lovecraft’s most productive phase started around 1924 and lasted until his death, from the “Novanglicization of his fictional work” (Joshi, Subtler Magick 102) to the tales that he is most remembered by, where the mature author finally fuses with unequaled force his philosophical views (his cosmic pessimism and the idea of a mechanistic universe), the image of alien races from beyond the known universe, and a type of language that tries to define, name, and categorize the confrontation with a fantastic anomaly but must ultimately

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