Occult Horror and the Subversion of the Realistic David Kumler A
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Into the Seething Vortex: Occult Horror and the Subversion of the Realistic David Kumler A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2020 Reading Committee: Eva Cherniavsky, Chair Gillian Harkins Mark Purcell Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English Department ©Copyright 2020 David Kumler University of Washington Abstract Into the Seething Vortex: Occult Horror and the Subversion of the Realistic David Kumler Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Eva Cherniavsky English Department Into the Seething Vortex examines a fascination with the occult that pervades contemporary popular culture. Whether we look to the neo-Lovecraftian cosmic horror of True Detective, the distinctly Satanic spin of the recent Sabrina reboot, or even Lana Del Rey’s recently admitted hexing of Donald Trump, occult ideas, symbols, and aesthetics are a ubiquitous feature of our present popular imaginary. This dissertation asks what this fascination with the occult—what cultural studies scholars have called “popular occulture”—might mean politically. Ultimately, I read contemporary popular occulture as reflecting a broad impulse towards “the weird”—a concept fundamental to the work of H. P. Lovecraft that has since been taken up by cultural critics and philosophers such as Mark Fisher and Eugene Thacker, who regard it as a useful concept for thinking about that which confounds our sense of “the realistic.” In a moment when, as many have observed, the future seems to have been cancelled, we are in desperate need of an alternative to business as usual, and in this dissertation I look to weird fiction in order to consider what that might look like. Informed by the work of scholars like Cedric Robinson, Sylia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, and Calvin Warren, I seek to complicate the “realistic” ways in which both the human and the truth have been deployed as cornerstones of political emancipation, highlighting the role played by racial capitalism in structuring both concepts. I do this primarily through readings of contemporary works of Lovecraftian fiction—focusing specifically on the work of Ruthanna Emrys, Thomas Ligotti, and Victor LaValle—and other artifacts of contemporary popular occulture, which, as I argue, complicate and unsettle received notions of reality and our relation to it. Ultimately, I suggest that occult narratives and practices— fundamental to the genre of weird fiction—often reflect (and perpetuate) a broad impulse to think beyond the realistic and even a recognition that “reality” is itself ideologically conditioned and thus contingent. Such narratives seek out the moments when thought itself falters—when, confronted with its limit, realism becomes impossible—and through such fissures offer the possibility of imagining and producing a different world, however terrifying it might be to do so. This dissertation contributes both to a body of scholarship that exists at the intersection between cultural studies, critical race theory, and political theory and to the contemporary influx in Lovecraft scholarship. Kumler 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................6 Introduction: The Sun Shivering and the Stars Aflame...................................................................7 Chapter 1: The Weird and the Other: Lovecraft the Cosmicist, Lovecraft the Racist...................32 Chapter 2: Ontological Perversion: Lovecraftian Fiction and the Problem of the Human............69 Chapter 3: Inhuman Subjectivities: Cosmicism, Racism, and The Ballad of Black Tom............105 Chapter 4: Against Salvation, Against Assimilation: Witches, Satanists, Feminists..................164 Bibliography................................................................................................................................212 Kumler 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is certainly impossible for me to name every person whose ideas have inspired my work in this dissertation, just as I cannot recall every conversation that has shaped my thinking throughout this process. Thinking, after all, does not occur in a bubble and, for every sentence I have written, I am certainly indebted numerous others. However, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank some of those without whose outstanding support this dissertation would not have been possible, however incomplete these acknowledgements might be. First, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Eva Cherniavsky for her tireless support of this project, for reading countless drafts of these chapters, and for consistently pushing me to think more carefully, more critically, and with more nuance. I would also like to thank Gillian Harkins, who has both challenged me and supported my work since my first day at the University of Washington, and Mark Purcell, from whom I’ve learned a great deal about radical democracy and the possibility of imaginative political thought. I would also like to offer my sincerest thanks to Matthew Hitchman, Liz Janssen, Lubna Alzaroo, Belle Kim, Daniel Roberts, and Kathleen Reeves for reading numerous drafts and providing thoughtful and insightful feedback throughout my writing process. I would like to thank Navid Ebrahimzadeh, Dan Bentson, and Dan Abella, my three officemates whose sharp thinking and conversation have both inspired and challenged me to be a better thinker. I would like to thank Alex McCauley and Sean Landis for challenging me to think about shipping containers in a more radical way. I would like to thank Kori Hensell for collaborating with me creatively in ways that deeply shaped this work. Lastly, I would like to thank Elizabeth St. Clair for her constant support as I fumbled my way through the soul- destroying gauntlet known as graduate school—I could not have done it without you. Kumler 7 INTRODUCTION: THE SUN SHIVERING AND THE STARS AFLAME “If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralyzing.” (H. P. Lovecraft, “Shadow out of Time”) “Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” (James Baldwin, “A Letter to My Nephew”) In 1962, James Baldwin published “A Letter to My Nephew,” an essay which the next year would be included in his best-selling collection The Fire Next Time and, for many years after that, would be anthologized and taught in schools across the country. A meditation on the seemingly intractable problem of antiblackness in America, the essay includes the striking image of blackness as “a fixed star, an immovable pillar” that structures the world we inhabit. Indeed, later theoretical work on issues like racial capitalism and the metaphysics of blackness has only revealed the degree to which blackness—and the production of race in general—structures our world: Without the institution of race and its ongoing reproduction, the world would not be what it is today. However, Baldwin provides another image—one of “the sun shivering and all the stars aflame.” Baldwin likens this apocalyptic vision to the liberation of black subjectivity from the chains of blackness: For black people to be liberated from the deeply entrenched structures of antiblack racism would mean breaking apart and subverting the very structure of reality. Despite the important gains of the Civil Rights Movement, antiblackness remains fundamental to the structure of our world today. From police shootings to mass incarceration to ongoing colonialist projects to the exploitation of racial value by the market, antiblackness is a Kumler 8 fundamental structuring element of life as we know it. To this day, true black liberation might feel something like, to use in Baldwin’s words, “an upheaval in the universe” through which “heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” As contemporary philosopher Calvin Warren puts it, “Because anti-blackness infuses itself into every fabric of social existence, it is impossible to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the world” (“Black Nihilism” 239). Black freedom, in other words, requires a complete undoing of the world as we know it. I’m struck by the parallels between a black liberation that “profoundly attacks one’s sense of reality” and H. P. Lovecraft’s notion of cosmic horror. Arguably one of the most influential horror writers of all time, Lovecraft pioneered a brand of horror writing based on the notion that the most terrifying thing in the world is not that which threatens one’s life—for instance, a murderer—but, rather, that which threatens one’s sense of reality. Accordingly, Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror” stories repeatedly stage encounters with that which transcends the capacities of human thought and language: ineffable celestial entities, staggering views of deep time, indescribable monsters, histories that undermine our conception of what and who we are. The horror in these stories is not that a scary monster can kill you—in fact, Lovecraft’s protagonists rarely die—but that, because you