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Stylistic study of Lovecraft's fiction writings: Sentiment analysis based on

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

Working Paper (January, 2021)

Jose Luis Arroyo-Barrigüete

Abstract

This paper, at the intersection of literary studies, computational linguistics and psychology, analyzes Lovecraft's literary production throughout his career as a writer of . Fifty- four writings from the period 1905-1935 have been studied by applying the computational techniques of sentiment analysis and following a methodology that is structured in three stages.

In the first stage, each of the writings is analyzed, identifying the relative percentage of emotions conveyed on readers according to Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. Once this process is completed, a hierarchical cluster analysis is carried out to identify homogeneous groups of works. Finally, a statistical analysis is carried out. The results point to three different conclusions. First, the quantitative analysis confirms that there exists an intimate connection between the sentiments of fear and sadness in Lovecraft’s writings, which generates an intense emotion of despair.

Second, the vast majority of his works can be grouped into two different patterns as far as sentiments are concerned. Finally, there seems to be a relationship between the identified patterns and the evolution of Lovecraft's style; that is, there is a temporal evolution toward much darker works, which are dominated by negative emotions.

Keywords: Lovecraft, weird tales, the Mythos, computational linguistics, sentiment analysis, Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions.

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1. Introduction

Not only has Lovecraft's work had an enormous impact on popular culture (Smith, 2016), inspiring everything from films and comics to music and video games, but both his work and the figure of Lovecraft himself have aroused great interest in the academic community. This has resulted in the development of the most diverse research and even the existence of academic journals dedicated to the study of Lovecraft’s works, such as Lovecraft Studies (1980-2005) and

Lovecraft Annual (2007-present).

All his fictional works are usually grouped into three different stages: the Macabre (1905-1920), the (1920-1927) and the (1925- 1935). However, it is ‘impossible to categorize the stories by their dates of creation, as they overlap, while containing elements that thematically fit a different cycle. Another issue is also that the Dream Cycle and the Cthulhu

Mythos share many aspects and themes, blurring the line between the categories further’

(Zbořil, 2015: 48). Certainly, as will be analyzed later on, although there is a more or less clear difference between the works corresponding to the period 1905-1920 and later ones, the distinction between the Dream Cycle and the Cthulhu Mythos is rather less clear.

Lovecraft’s stories ‘combine elements of the Gothic tradition with , and even some details that could be recognized in detective stories’ (Pérez de Luque, 2013: 111), and many of these stories share the insignificance of the human race as a sign of identity

(Harman, 2008). As Houellebecq notes in relation to Lovecraft, ‘Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration

[…]. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles’ (2019: 40-41). Certainly, as a preeminent

Lovecraft authority, S. T. Joshi notes, ‘Lovecraft never passes up an opportunity to diminish human achievements’ (2014c, unpaginated), and the superiority of alien civilizations is

-2- manifested in many ways, from physiological to intellectual (Joshi, 2016: 339). Closely linked to this idea, in Lovecraft's stories, humanity often finds itself surrounded by mysteries that escape its mere understanding, precisely reinforcing this idea of insignificance. Thus, starting from an atmosphere of darkness and melancholy (Norman, 2013), it would seem that Lovecraft seeks a combination of feelings of insignificance, despair and fear.

Certainly, emotions play a key role in Lovecraft's work, for as the author himself points out,

‘Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author’s intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point’ (Lovecraft

2013[1935]: 2). However, to carry out a rigorous analysis in this regard, it is necessary to frame the study of these feelings in one of the existing conceptual frameworks in the field of the psychology of emotions, and in our case, we have chosen Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions (Plutchik,

2009). In the case of Lovecraft, and as will be seen with the quantitative analysis developed below, the dominant primary feeling is fear, followed by sadness and trust, and their combination in dyads, which produces the feelings of despair and submission (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Main sentiments in Lovecraft´s works according to Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions

(Source: Prepared by the author based on Plutchik, 2009)

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1.1 The Sentiment of Fear

The dominant emotion in Lovecraft's work is fear, as well as other emotions (dyads) that are associated with it, such as submission and despair. It is not a physical fear, but it is based on ‘a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer’ (Lovecraft 2013[1935]: 2), which, as Mastropierro (2009: 95) points out, has its origin in ‘the abysmal difference, distance, between his characters and the universe that surrounds them’. This distance makes human beings unable to understand the mysteries that surround them, thus reinforcing the idea of their insignificance. The problem, from a literary point of view, consists precisely of how to ‘depict with mere words that which forever lies beyond the sphere of the known’ (Mariconda, 1991:

189). As Stableford remarks (2007: 71), ‘The entire tradition of cosmic can be regarded as a heroic but doomed attempt to rise to that challenge: to communicate the uncommunicable’.

Certain elements are systematically used by Lovecraft to generate this peculiar feeling of fear.

Andronova and Torhovets (2019: 49) highlight that Lovecraft used epithets ‘in order to transfer the dark, mysterious and sinister atmosphere of his unique literary world by appealing to the reader’s feeling of disgust, repulsion and fear’, appealing to sight, smell and hearing. Certainly,

Lovecraft attempts to induce a sensory experience in the reader, with sight being the most used sense, followed by hearing and smell: touch seldom occurs, and taste is completely absent

(Hölzing, 2011).

With respect to sight, mathematics and, in particular, geometry are used ‘to help build the mood for which was striving’ (Hull 2006: 10), describing abnormal structures or strange dimensions to create an intimidating atmosphere. References to uncanny mathematics, beyond our ability to comprehend, create a feeling of ‘mathematical insignificance’, which contributes to enhancing the cosmic insignificance inherent in Lovecraft's philosophy (Look, 2016). As

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Ingwersen (2014: 57) points out, the concepts of curved space and unfathomable dimensions are recurrent motifs in Lovecraft's worlds, which this author calls ‘the horror of geometry’. These influences must be sought in the scientific developments of the moment, including Einstein's theory, about which Lovecraft felt enthusiastic and that is based on the idea of non-Euclidean geometries.

Art is another element that appears recurrently with the intention of generating the emotion of fear. Ralickas (2008: 314) indicates that there is an ‘intimate connection shared by art, the effect of cosmic horror, and the nihilistic, anti-humanist perspective of Lovecraft’s fiction’. In fact, in

Lovecraft's work, ethnic objects such as statuettes, idols or fetishes ‘are usually indicators of things far worse than mere murder’ (Hefner, 2014: 667-668). Additionally, in these descriptions, we also find another of the signs of identity in Lovecraft's style, which emphasizes the limitations of language in describing objects since they show ‘seismic torsion with their own qualities’

(Harman, 2012: 27).

As far as the sense of hearing is concerned, Lovecraft's work contains numerous allusions to sounds, always characterized by their unpleasant nature, which represents the total terror of the unknown (van Elferen, 2016). Perhaps the most characteristic element of Lovecraft's work is his teratonyms (Robinson, 2010: 127), built on the basis of ‘sounds-patterns that lie outside

English phonetics or run contrary to the phonotactics of the language to result in anti-aesthetic constructions’. There exists a preponderance of low and back vowels that speakers perceive as dark, heavy, ugly, hostile, etc. (Clore, 1998: 35. Cited in Robinson, 2010). These teratonyms are undecipherable or unpronounceable, reinforcing, again, human limitations.

Finally, we find that the sense of smell is less considered than the previous senses because as

Burke (1767: 156) points out, ‘No smell or tastes can produce a grand sensation, except excessive bitters and intolerable stenches’. There exists a link between evil forces and smell, or

-5- an association of smell with fear and disgust, as Lovecraft frequently ‘describes inorganic matter

(e.g., stone) in a way that suggests organic corruption or similar processes. Generally, these are accompanied by nauseating smells’ (Hölzing, 2011: 183). Perhaps the clearest example of this connection between evil forces and smell is that provided by one of the fragments of the

Necronomicon included in The Horror (Lovecraft, 2017a [1929]: 64): ‘By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them’.

However, beyond the sensorial experience, we find another key element in the process of inducing fear: time. As the author himself points out, ‘The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression’ (Lovecraft, 2009 [1937]: 1). Certainly, time in Lovecraft’s works is peculiar, while the time of narration is overlapped with time on a universal scale, that is, a time before which ‘the entirety of human history does not measure, […] a scale which the human mind cannot conceive’ (Smith, 2011: 837).

1.2 The Sentiments of Trust and Sadness

As Lovecraft mentioned in his correspondence with , ‘No weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax’ (H. P.

Lovecraft a Clark Ashton Smith 17 October 1930. Cited in Joshi, 2014a, unpaginated). He used several techniques ‘to achieve these hoaxes, including: realism and naturalness of characters, language and setting. Perhaps his most distinctive technique for capturing a sense of realism was to integrate the sciences within his fiction as elements of the setting and atmosphere’

(Livesey, 2008: 30). Certainly, Lovecraft, a rationalist, ‘produced a literature in which the

-6- boundaries of rationalism and science are pushed to their limits; but he could only get the “kick” he wanted by adhering to the most rigid and up-to-date findings of that science’ (Joshi, 2010:

201).

Joshi (2014b, unpaginated) notes that ‘the use of many types of documents—letters, diaries, newspaper articles, […]—serves to ‘distance’ the narrative and subtilise it’. Henderson (2019:

96) suggests another possible reason: in some of his writings, as in The Case of Charles Dexter

Ward, his longest work of fiction, ‘by incorporating letters into the text, Lovecraft plays to his strengths, for they allow him to bypass interactions that would expose the flimsiness of his characters’. In any case, grounding the story in a chronology of information meticulously compiled from theoretically reliable sources is an excellent way to give credibility to the story.

In fact, the narrators in Lovecraft stories are often ‘taciturn academics passively observing the horrors that unfold’ (Harman, 2012: 50), among other reasons, because these types of profiles are usually perceived as objective and credible observers. This is a common scheme in all of

Lovecraft's work in which ‘an accumulation of place-based evidence, both folkloric and scientific, leads […] to a realization of the illusory nature of truth and the unknowability of the cosmos’

(Evans, 2005: 123). As Sorensen (2010: 502) points out, ‘Lovecraft uses techniques from ethnography and antiquarianism to produce both a model of culture and a universe that draws its claims to verisimilitude by means of a strategic practice of citation’. We will not insist further on this point since the reader interested in delving into the various rhetorical resources used by Lovecraft to provide credibility to its stories can consult the recent work of

Hernández Roura (2019).

Finally, another key emotion in Lovecraft's narrative is sadness. The atmosphere of sadness is a fundamental element throughout the story, as Lovecraft's fiction focuses ‘on producing strong atmospheres of death, darkness and melancholy’ (Norman, 2013: 6). However, the feeling of

-7- sadness is relevant not only by itself but also by its combined effect with the feeling of fear.

According to the aforementioned Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, the combination of fear and sadness generates the emotion of despair, a despair partly based on the idea that furthering the nihilistic perspective, there may be a beyond, but it is something inhabited by evil, even worse than the ‘meaningless world of material reality’ (Hanegraaff, 2007: 89).

2. Methodology

2.1 Data

All Lovecraft´s works analyzed in this paper have been obtained from The H.P. Lovecraft Archive

(https://www.hplovecraft.com/), which includes a list of Lovecraft’s works, revisions, minor works and collaborations. We have focused specifically on his fiction works, excluding only those stories written in collaboration with other authors, as this would distort the stylistic analysis, as well as those that are not extant or are too short to use for quantitative analysis. The final list used is shown in Annex 1 and includes 54 tales, novelettes and novels.

2.2 Procedure

The quantitative analysis was carried out in three stages. First, each of the works was analyzed, identifying the relative percentage of emotions it conveys according to Plutchik's Wheel of

Emotions. Once this process was completed, an agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis was carried out to identify homogeneous groups of works, that is, clusters of works that share similar characteristics from the point of view of the emotions they transmit. To perform this exercise, the Euclidean distance and Ward's linkage method were used to identify compact clusters. Once the different groups were identified, a statistical analysis was carried out, and more specifically, a boxplot of each of the sentiments was constructed. This approach allows us to identify the pattern of emotions present in each cluster.

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All quantitative analyses were conducted in R (R Core Team, 2013), a programming environment oriented to statistical analysis, using several packages to elaborate the code: reshape2

(Wickham, 2007), NbClust (Charrad, Ghazzali, Boiteau and Niknafs, 2014), tidytext (Silge and

Robinson, 2016), ggplot2 (Wickham, 2016), fmsb (Nakazawa, 2018), scales (Wickham, 2018), tidyr (Wickham and Henry, 2019), stringr (Wickham, 2019), gplots (Warnes et al., 2019), dplyr

(Wickham, François, Henry and Müller, 2020), and readtext (Benoit and Obeng, 2020).

Additionally, the NRC lexicon of emotions was used (Mohammad and Turney, 2013a and 2013b), that is, a list of English words and their associations with Plutchik's eight basic emotions. The code developed is available as complementary material to this paper.

3. Results

Once the sentiment matrix is calculated for the 54 works, the cluster analysis (Figure 2) shows an interesting pattern. First, we observe that the sentiments of fear and sadness constitute a compact group (vertical interpretation of the figure), while the other six sentiments are grouped somewhat more heterogeneously. In other words, as expected, fear and sadness are intimately linked in Lovecraft's works, which, as we have already mentioned, generates the feeling of despair that is so characteristic of his tales.

Looking at the clustering of the 54 studied works (horizontal interpretation of the figure), there seem to be two or three different groups. To determine the optimal number of clusters, 24 different indices have been compared, and the results indicate that seven of them recommend two clusters, ten recommend three clusters, and the remaining seven recommend between five and fifteen clusters. Thus, according to the majority rule, we choose three groups (see annex 1): cluster 1 (32 works), cluster 2 (18 works) and cluster 3 (4 works). In fact, cluster 3 is very different from the other two clusters, not only because it includes only four works but because according to the developed analysis, it presents a pattern of feelings that is notably different from the rest

-9- of the works. Cluster 3 includes The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1919), (1919),

Celephaïs (1920) and The of Iranon (1921). Due to the sample size, it is not possible to carry out a statistical analysis of this cluster, but certain interesting peculiarities can be observed, such as abnormally high levels of joy.

Figure 2. Cluster analysis of the 54 selected works (Source: Prepared by the author)

In Figure 3, the boxplot for cluster 1 is shown, and the interpretation of the figure is as follows.

For each of the eight feelings, we can find a vertical line of which its ends indicate the minimum and maximum values. The box represents the first quartile (lower horizontal line), the median

(inner horizontal line), and the third quartile (upper horizontal line). The points represent outliers, i.e., abnormally high or low percentages of that feeling. As seen, in the 32 works that make up this cluster, the dominant emotions are fear, sadness and trust, in that order, although

-10- the feeling of anger also takes high values. Surprise and joy are the two emotions with the least weight. Performing the same exercise for the 18 works in cluster 2 (Figure 4), we observe a different pattern because although the three dominant feelings are the same, their order of importance is different, being fear, trust and sadness. Additionally, the relative weight of fear in cluster 2 is lower than that in cluster 1, and the level of joy is significantly higher.

Figure 3. Boxplot of sentiments in cluster 1 (Source: Prepared by the author)

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Figure 4. Boxplot of sentiments in cluster 2 (Source: Prepared by the author)

Figure 5 shows the comparison of both patterns, which leads us to draw some interesting conclusions. First, it can be seen that in cluster 2, there is a better equilibrium, while in cluster

1, there is a greater polarization, with strong differences in the relative weight of the emotions.

In other words, the stories in cluster 1 present a lower emotional balance, with one emotion, fear, being very dominant with respect to the others. Conversely, we can see how the works in cluster 1 are darker, with a clear turn towards negative emotions: fear, sadness, anger and disgust increase significantly with respect to cluster 2, while joy reduces its relative weight considerably. Third, although trust remains a key emotion in both clusters, it has a significantly lower weight in cluster 1, which is relevant when interpreting the combination of emotions: in cluster 2, the two main emotions are fear and trust, the combination of which generates the sentiment of submission; however, in cluster 1, the fundamental emotions are fear and sadness, the combination of which generates despair.

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Figure 5. Boxplot of sentiments comparing clusters 2 and 1 (Source: Prepared by the author)

These differences lead to the question of whether there is any relationship between the clusters and the two stages of Lovecraft already mentioned in the introduction. As shown in Figure 6, in the period 1905-1920 (The Macabre), only 37% of the works follow the pattern of cluster 1, while 71% of the works written between 1925 and 1935 (The Cthulhu Mythos) follow this pattern. This finding has been confirmed by carrying out a unilateral contrast for the difference in proportions, obtaining a p-value of 0.015. Therefore, at a confidence level of 95%, we can affirm that Lovecraft's writing pattern is different in both periods, with a statistically significant evolution toward a greater use of the pattern corresponding to cluster 1. That is, an evolution is observed in Lovecraft's style toward works that are more polarized in terms of feelings, are

-13- darker, with a greater relative weight of the emotions of fear, sadness, anger and disgust, and in which the key emotions are fear and sadness, the combination of which generates despair.

Figure 6. Relative percentage of Lovecraft’s works in each cluster differentiating between the two periods (Source: Prepared by the author)

4. Conclusions

Throughout this paper, 54 works of Lovecraft has been analyzed, which span almost all of his career as a fiction writer. Using the computational techniques of text mining and, more specifically, sentiment analysis, various conclusions have been reached in relation to his work.

First, the quantitative analysis confirms that there exists an intimate connection between the sentiments of fear and sadness, while the other six sentiments of Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions are grouped somewhat more heterogeneously. In other words, if we had to summarize

Lovecraft's writings of fiction in a single sentiment, it would be despair, the combination of fear and sadness. This expected result has been quantitatively confirmed.

Second, the vast majority of his works follow two patterns as far as sentiments are concerned.

A first group (cluster 1) is characterized by a considerable polarization of emotions, with fear being the clearly dominant emotion, followed by sadness and trust. These are very dark writings

-14- with an overwhelming preponderance of negative emotions. A second group of works (cluster

2) presents a greater emotional balance. In this group, although the three dominant feelings are the same, their order of importance is different, being fear, trust and sadness. These writings are less dark than those corresponding to cluster 1, with a lower weight of negative emotions such as fear, sadness, anger and disgust and a higher relevance of the feeling of joy. In addition, there is a third group, made up of only four writings, which is notably different from the rest since the emotion of joy is dominant. The existence of these clearly differentiated patterns is interesting because there seems to be a relationship between them and the evolution of

Lovecraft's style, which leads us to our third conclusion. Comparing the periods 1905-1920 (the

Macabre) and 1921- 1935 (the Dream Cycle and the Cthulhu Mythos), it can be seen that in his first stage, only 37% of the works follow the pattern of cluster 1, while in the second stage, most of the stories (71%) follow this pattern. That is, there is an evolution toward much darker works, dominated by negative emotions, and in which the sentiment of despair, a combination of fear and sadness, plays a predominant role. It is worth asking to what extent there is a relationship between this transition and the author's own biography, which leads us to propose as a future line of research a diachronic study that through applying a methodology similar to that proposed in this work, analyzes the temporal evolution of the identified patterns.

Returning to the words of Lovecraft himself (2013[1935]: 2), ‘[…] we must judge a weird tale not by the author’s intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point’. In this respect, the conclusion of this paper summarized in a single sentence would be ‘Lovecraft, or the transition toward despair’.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Annex 1: list of Lovecraft’s fiction used in this paper

The dates for each of the tales have been obtained from The H. P. Lovecraft Archive (2020), which is in turn based on S.T. Joshi’s research.

Code Title Year Cluster N1 The Beast in the Cave 1905 1 N2 The Alchemist 1908 1 N3 1917 2 N4 A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson 1917 2 N5 1917 1 N6 1918 2 N7 1919 2 N8 The Doom That Came to Sarnath 1919 3 N9 Old Bugs 1919 2 N10 The Statement of 1919 1 N11 The Transition of Juan Romero 1919 2 N12 The White Ship 1919 3 N13 The Cats of Ulthar 1920 1 N14 Celephaïs 1920 3 N15 Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family 1920 2 N16 From Beyond 1920 1 N17 The Picture in the House 1920 1 N18 The Temple 1920 2 N19 1920? 2 N20 The Moon-Bog 1921 2 N21 1921 1 N22 1921 1 N23 The Outsider 1921 1 N24 The Quest of Iranon 1921 3 N25 —Reanimator 1921-22 1 N26 1922 1 N27 1922 2 N28 The Lurking Fear 1922 1 N29 The Festival 1923 1 N30 1923 1 N31 The Unnamable 1923 1 N32 The Shunned House 1924 1 N33 He 1925 2 N34 1925 1 N35 1925 1

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N36 1926 1 N37 1926 1 N38 Pickman’s Model 1926 1 N39 1926 2 N40 The Strange High House in the Mist 1926 2 N41 The Descendant 1926? 2 N42 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath 1926-27 1 N43 The Case of Charles Dexter Ward 1927 2 N44 The Colour out of Space 1927 1 N45 The Very Old Folk 1927 1 N46 The Dunwich Horror 1928 1 N47 The Whisperer in Darkness 1930 2 N48 At the Mountains of Madness 1931 2 N49 The Shadow over 1931 1 N50 The Dreams in the Witch House 1932 1 N51 The Evil Clergyman 1933 1 N52 The Thing on the Doorstep 1933 1 N53 The Shadow out of Time 1934-35 1 N54 1935 1

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