Art, Cosmic Horror, and the Fetishizing Gaze in the Fiction of H. P.

Lovecraft
Vivian Ralickas

N THE STORIES OF NEW ENGLAND SPECULATIVE FICTION WRITER HOWARD

Phillips Lovecraft, characters seem incapable of the objective detachment requisite to an aesthetic judgment. When confronted with natural spectacles that ought to give rise to a feeling of the sublime, for instance, they are too entangled in the web of Lovecrafts cosmic horror to contemplate the vast expanses of nature in a manner that would see the humanity in them uplifted.1 The land surveyor in The Colour out of Space takes no pleasure in observing the infinite expanse of the night sky upon his return from his first visit to the valley west of Arkham, where the ominous blasted heath is located: [He] vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey [sic] voids above had crept into [his] soul (Colour, 55). After he hears Ammi Pierces story about the spot, moreover, his fear drives him to hurr[y] back before sunset to [his] hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above [him] in the open (56). Even the grotesque fails to inspire a disinterested contemplation in Lovecraft. In The Dunwich Horror, his characters are too fearful of the monstrous human-alien spawn they must face to engage aesthetically the spectacle of its ritualistic chanting at the top of a mountain: The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in the mood for aesthetic appreciation (Dunwich, Dunwich 194). As I hope to make evident in the ensuing analysis, his characters are equally incapable of the detached and life-affirming judgment of the beautiful. The inability of Lovecrafts protagonists to perceive phenomena with the kind of objective distance demanded by the aesthetic gaze originates in their enmeshment in cosmic horror, a devastating experience which rouses a fear far exceeding that of merely dying. In death, our finite, individual being ceases to be, yet we can find comfort in our awareness that our cultural heritage is of
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value and that the community we leave behind will survive us. Lovecrafts characters cannot find solace in these thoughts, since the horror they face is an index of the meaninglessness of the human condition. The origins of cosmic horror are to be found in two aspects of Lovecrafts personal philosophy which he elaborates upon in his essays and correspondence: his adoption of a mechanistic materialist view of life and his position as a self-described cosmic indifferentist, both of which divest human life of telos.2 Accordingly, it has become commonplace in Lovecraft scholarship to affirm that his antihumanistic creation narrative asserts that our social bonds, religious beliefs, and cultural achievements are not only irrelevant if considered from outside the limited scope of human affairs, but are based upon a false understanding of the cosmos and of our place in it. Lovecrafts major fictional themes, observes Donald Burleson in a statement that succinctly sums up this prevailing critical stance, form a sort of conceptual web, interlacing to provide a potential for expression of the one major idea that always emerges; [] self-knowledge, or discovery of ones own position in the real fabric of the universe, is psychically ruinous (Burleson 137). To cite two exemplary cases from Lovecrafts fiction, according to the bas-reliefs found in the Antarctic alien city in At the Mountains of Madness, humanity is the accidental byproduct of scientific experiments conducted by aliens who colonized the earth long ago. Furthermore, if the fate of the time-travelling Great Race of super-aliens in The Shadow out of Timebeings far superior to us who nevertheless cannot escape the doom of their civilizationis any indication, cosmic horror presages the annihilation of our human way of life. Cosmic horror therefore amounts to an experience of the cataclysmic horror that the human subject experiences once it cognizes the finitude of its existence and realizes that, contrary to a humanist view which posits human life as intrinsically meaningful in relation not only to itself but to the cosmos, there is neither anything distinctive nor significant about being human. In spite of the explicit disavowal of the affirmative scope of humanism concomitant to Lovecrafts fiction, many of his stories foreground one of our highest cultural achievements: art. Steven J. Maricondas descriptive survey of the transcendent scope of artifacts in Lovecraft, which makes reference to Lovecrafts aesthetic pronouncements in his letters to defend the idea that, in his fiction, art enables us to see reality as it truly is (12), offers a starting point to any discussion of art in Lovecrafts work. While I agree with Mariconda that art serves to further the aims of Lovecrafts mechanistic materialist view of existence, rather than focusing on what art communicates to the viewer, I approach the question of arts function in Lovecraft from the opposite perspective: What do characters responses to art suggest about human subjectivity in Lovecraft? In an effort to answer this question, I endeavor to elucidate, on the one hand, what the experiencing subject projects onto a
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Finally, in a manner similar to Curwens portrait, Pickmans canvases, the Shining Trapezohedron, the queer Innsmouth jewelry, the statuette of Cthulhu, and Zanns music, ekphrasis in Picture reveals that art serves as a vehicle for the exploration of the human psyches inner depths. In reflecting back to the observer the desire he projects onto a given representation through the enlivening gazea desire whose sensory basis characterizes it as perverse in Lovecraftart points to the origin of cosmic horror: the human self as a finite, embodied, and instinctually-driven being whose existence serves no purpose. In staging a historical document at the centre of the drama and, more importantly, a real illustration compelling to both schooled and uninformed classes of viewers alike, Picture enmeshes the reader in Lovecrafts cosmic horror by alerting us to the possibility that, in spite of the ontological distance that separates us from the narrators plight (he is a fictional construct who exists in language whereas we are incarnate subjects), we too can fall prey to the dangers of the enlivening gaze. The enumeration and brief analysis of the aforementioned texts is by no means meant to be exhaustive, and there are other stories I could have mentioned to examine the pragmatic function of art in Lovecraft. For instance, in The Temple, the small carved ivory head that the German submarine crew find on the body of a dead foreign sailor serves an indexical function similar to that of the jewelry in The Shadow over Innsmouth. Instead, I hope to have drawn attention to the intimate connection shared by art, the effect of cosmic horror, and the nihilistic, anti-humanist perspective of Lovecrafts fiction. Ekphrasis in Lovecraft makes evident that, as a vehicle facilitating the human subjects coming into self-knowledgea knowledge that simultaneously degrades the human self and our cultureart both focuses and intensifies cosmic horror by capitalizing on our vulnerability to sensory stimuli and on our inherent impulse to ascribe meaning to form.

Notes
I elaborate on the impossibility of an experience of the sublime in Lovecrafts fiction in Cosmic Horror and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft. 2 For an explication of these terms, see Lovecrafts letters in H. P Lovecraft: . Selected Letters 19251929, as well as S. T. Joshis Lovecrafts Ethical Philosophy and A Dreamer and a Visionary: Lovecraft in His Time. 3 See Paul Buhle, Maurice Lvy, and Michel Houellebecq. 4 Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city (Cthulhu, Dunwich 150). 5 In a twist of fate hinted at by Thurber that underscores the perversity of art in Lovecrafts fiction, this sardonic linkage between human beings and monsters
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The Pragmatic Function of Art in H. P Lovecraft 315 .

becomes a fact in Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a tale published a year later in 1927. The reader finds out that Pickman had transformed into a ghoul, explaining, retrospectively, the nature of his disappearance and his obsession with miscegenation (Dream-Quest, 338). 6 Freedberg points out that the iconoclastic stance adopted by Muslims and Protestants can be explained in their belief that the maker of the image arrogates creative powers to himself of which only God is in possession (86). 7 According to S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon in their ninth annotation of Picture in More Annotated H. P Lovecraft, Lovecraft had first-hand knowledge of neither the . Regnum Congo nor the De Bry illustrations, gleaning his account of the text from Thomas Huxleys essay On the History of Man-Like Apes and his conception of plate XII from an incomplete reproduction of it appended to Huxleys essay. Nonetheless, the function of plate XII in Picture does not depend upon Lovecrafts intimate knowledge of either the Regnum Congo or the De Bry brothers original image, since he merely exploits, by means of ekphrasis, the perverse imaginative associations the idea of a cannibal butcher shop evokes.

Works Cited
Buhle, Paul. Distopia as Utopia: Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the Unknown Content of American Horror Literature. H. P Lovecraft: Four Decades of . Criticism. Athens: Ohio UP 1980. 196210. , Burleson, Donald. On Lovecrafts Themes: Touching the Glass. An Epicure in the Terrible: a Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P Lovecraft. Ed. David E. . Schultz and S. T. Joshi. London: Associated University Presses, 1991. 135147. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: Chicago UP 1989. , Houellebecq, Michel. H. P Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie. New York: . Rocher, 1999. Joshi, S. T. A Dreamer and a Visionary: Lovecraft in His Time. Liverpool: Liverpool UP , 2001. . Lovecrafts Ethical Philosophy. Lovecraft Studies 21 (1990): 2439. Joshi, S. T., and Peter Cannon. Ninth Footnote to The Picture in the House. More Annotated H. P Lovecraft. New York: Dell, 1999. 16. . Lvy, Maurice. Fascisme et Fantastique, ou le Cas Lovecraft. Caliban 7 (1970): 6778. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Sauk City: Arkham, 1985. . The Call of Cthulhu. 1926. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 125154. . The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. 1927. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. 107234.
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316 Vivian Ralickas . The Colour out of Space. 1927. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 5382. . Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. 19261927. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. 306407. . The Dunwich Horror and Others. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Sauk City: Arkham, 1982. . H. P Lovecraft: Selected Letters 19251929. 5 vols. Ed. August Derleth and . Donald Wandrei. Sauk City: Arkham, 196876. . The Haunter of the Dark. 1935. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 92115. . The Music of Erich Zann. 1921. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 8391. . Pickmans Model. 1926. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 1225. . The Picture in the House. 1920. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 116124. . The Shadow over Innsmouth. 1931. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 303367. Mariconda, Steven J. H. P Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality. Lovecraft Studies . 29(1993): 212. Ralickas, Vivian. Cosmic Horror and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18.3 (2007): 364398.

Abstract
In making reference to David Freedbergs idea of the gaze that enlivens, elaborated in The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989), to explain both the nature and the dynamics of the reactions art elicits from Lovecrafts characters, this essay seeks to elaborate on a hitherto unexplored aspect of Lovecrafts notion of cosmic horror: the pragmatic function art plays in his fiction. In laying bare our vulnerability to sensory stimuli and our inherent impulse to ascribe meaning to form, art concentrates Lovecrafts anti-humanist effect of cosmic horror by eroding characters humanity and revealing the false foundations of their sense of identity.

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