René Galand, The wounded ego of Howard Phillips Lovecraft The horror stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft are ranked among the most celebrated in the genre. His fame, however, has been mostly posthumous. His work never attracted the attention of major publishing houses during his lifetime. They appeared mostly in short-lived magazines and amateur publications. Serious critics despised his writing, his style above all. 1 Recognition, even posthumous, was late in coming, but come it did: in 1990, a centennial celebration of his birth took plate in his native city, Providence. It was held at Brown University, and lasted three days, with participants from all over the world. 2 Lovecraft's novels and stories have been accepted as genuine masterpieces by writers as diverse as Borges, Cocteau, and Michel de Ghelderode. They have been made into films and TV shows. Translations have appeared in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and several other countries. They have been the subject of theses, and with each passing year the list of scholarly articles devoted to them grows longer and longer. A special issue of the journal Cahiers de l'Herne was devoted to him. 3 Does Lovecraft deserve this fame? What, in his works, has real literary merit? Not his style, assuredly. Edmund Wilson was right when he poked fun at Lovecraft's use and abuse of adjectives like "horrible", "terrible", "frightful", and "awesome". Here is a list of adjectives found in the opening pages of the novel At the Mountains of Madness : hellish, hideous, revolting, loathsome, inhuman, horrible, terrible, hateful, alien, crazy, insane, monstrous, fantastic, cryptical, mysterious, forbidden, unnamably evil, buried, evil, shunned, dark, unnatural, fantastic, malignly frowning, fiendish, deadly, cyclopean, blasphemous, damnable, frightful, bleak, eldritchly demonic, grotesque, queer, sinister, menacing, dimly sinister, uncanny, morbid, strange, delirious, lurking, treacherous, desolate, unearthly, lethal, abhorred, bizarre, febrile, terrifying, oppressive, anomalous, soul-clutching, dreadful, mad, aeon- dead, tragic, brooding, insanely buried, unhallowed, doomed, labyrinthine, bewildering, desperate, viscous, ill-fated, deadly, and many of them recur more than once. Where, then, must we look for literary value in Lovecraft's writings? It will be found, I believe, in the picture he paints of man's fate. In this respect, Lovecraft's writings bear many similarities with the dramas of Sophocles or Shakespeare. Man, in his pride, believes himself to be the king of the universe. The Roman emperor Augustus was worshipped like a god. In Corneille's tragedy, Cinna , he says these famous words:" Je suis maître de moi comme de l'univers ." And Louis the XIVth found himself as high and as powerful as the sun itself. In reality, man stands no higher, in the scale of things, than the lowest worm. The greatest king, be his name Oedipus or Lear, is only a fly to be swatted by cruel gods, a brainless rat running from a trap to another, a pebble thrown hither and thither by the waves of the sea. 4 This is also the essence of Lovecraft's vision: man is but a toy in the hands of evil gods who are the true rulers of the universe. The worst blows to human pride, however, have not been struck by writers like Sophocles or Shakespeare, but by scientists. Freud names two of them: Copernicus and Darwin. Jacques Derrida adds another two: Freud himself, and Marx. 5The four of them have struck down the altars built to human pride, and their influence has left deep marks in the writings of Lovecraft. Copernicus had proved that the earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny rock lost on the confines of a galaxy. Darwin had shown that man was not the king of nature, but only a superior kind of monkey. Marx had demonstrated that man was reduced to the status of a thing, of an object, by social and economic forces of which he was totally unaware. And Freud, finally, had shown that the conscious will of man was powerless against the wild energy of the unconscious. Oriental wisdom gives this advice:"Do not step on the tiger's tail". In the world seen by Lovecraft, it is impossible not to step on some tail or other. There are powers as cruel or wanton as any god to be found in Sophocles or Shakespeare. There are other beings, monsters, ghouls and demons of all kinds, always ready to destroy anyone careless or foolish enough to disturb them in anyway. The earth, long before the human race "shambled out of apedom", as Lovecraft puts it in At the Mountains of Madness , had been occupied by races from outer space whose powers went beyond any ever dreamed of by man. They built such megalopolises as Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib, in the land of Mnar, and a nameless city in the middle of Arabia Deserta. Remnants of these cities sill exist, acccording to Lovecraft, in unexplored parts of Antarctica, Australia and the Himalayas. 6 These alien races worshipped strange and cruel gods. The artificial pantheon created by Lovecraft's fertile imagination has been studied by August Derleth. 7 In this pantheon, there are the Elder Gods, who exist far away from earth, in the constellation Orion. Other gods, the Great Old Ones or the Ancient Ones, have ruled the earth. Supreme among them is the blind idiot god, Azathoth. I would see him as a representative of the absurd. Yog-Sothoth, the all-in- one and the one-in-all, not subject to the laws of time and space, may symbolize the boundless universe, unfathomable to human reason. Other Great Old Ones include: Nyarlathotep, their messenger; Cthulhu, who dwells under the sea; Hastur, who occupies the air and interstellar space; Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat with a Thousand Young. They correspond, according to Derleth, Nyarlathotep to an earth elemental, Cthulhu to a water elemental, Hastur to an air elemental, and Shub-Niggurath to the fertility principle. Later additions to this pantheon include Dagon, ruler of the Deep Ones, dwellers of the ocean depths, and Yig, the snake-god, probably influenced by the Aztec divinity Quetzalcoatl. The Great Old Ones are gone now, inside the earth, under the sea, or in the recesses of space, but their dead bodies told their secrets in dreams to the first men who formed a cult which never died. This is what is meant in the chant of the followers of Cthulhu:"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu awaits dreaming." R'lyeh was the mighty city from which Cthulhu once ruled. Some day, when the stars have returned to the appropriate location, R'lyeh will rise again from beneath the sea, and Cthulhu will again bring the earth under his dominion. When the stars were right, the Great Old Ones could plunge from world to world, but when the stars had moved to the wrong position, they had to lie dreaming, waiting for their followers to revive them by the appropriate rites which had been communicated to their ancestors through their dreams, and transmitted from generation to generation of men. Only the Elder Gods can place a limit to the power of the Great Old Ones, and just as some men possess the knowledge given to their ancestors by the Great Old Ones, so have some men retained the knowledge of the Elder Signs which alone can put a stop to the intrusion of the Great Old Ones. ( The Call of Cthulhu, The Lurker on the Threshold, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward ). According to Lovecraft, some of the extra-terrestrial aliens who, at one time or other, occupied the earth, still survive underground, below the sea, or in remote areas of the earth's surface ( The Mound, The Moon-bog, Dagon, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Whisperer in Darkness ). Some may even be among us, waiting till they are ready to take over the earth ( The Dark Brotherhood ). Lovecraft explains, in his novel At the Mountains of Madness , how explorers have recently discovered strange corpses in caves near the South Pole. These caves resembled the caves described by Poe in his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The corpses were shaped like stars. Lovecraft's explorers have been able to make out their history, since its major events were represented on sculptured friezes along the walls of underground buildings. The star-shaped creatures, like other alien races, came out of cosmic space to the nascent, lifeless earth. They lived under the sea for a good deal of time, where they built fantastic cities, and fought with and defeated various cosmic enemies. It was under the sea that they first created earthly life, for food and for other purposes. They created ideal slaves, the Shoggoths, by molding multicellular protoplasmic masses which they kept under hypnotic control to perform the heavy work. The star-shaped Old Ones later lived on land, where they used their Shoggoths to build their huge cities. They also allowed other cell groups to develop into various forms of animal and vegetal life. This was the origin of the human race, whose first ancestors, shambling and primitive mammals, were used for food and for entertainment by the Old Ones who had become land-dwellers. Geologic changes and convulsions of the earth crust destroyed some of their marine cities. They also had to contend with another race of cosmic invaders, shaped like octopi, the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu, which for a time drove them wholly back to the sea. Later peace was made, the newly emerged continents given to the Cthulhu spawn while the star-shaped Old Ones kept Antarctica.