IN THE STORIES OF NEW ENGLAND SPECULATIVE FICTION WRITER HOWARD

Phillips Lovecraft, characters seem incapable of the objective detachment req-uisite to an aesthetic judgment. When confronted with natural spectacles thatought to give rise to a feeling of the sublime, for instance, they are too entan-gled in the web of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror to contemplate the vast expansesof nature in a manner that would see the humanity in them uplifted.1 The landsurveyor in “The Colour out of Space” takes no pleasure in observing the infi-nite expanse of the night sky upon his return from his first visit to the valleywest of Arkham, where the ominous “blasted heath” is located: “[He] vaguelywished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey[sic] voids above had crept into [his] soul” (“Colour,” 55). After he hearsAmmi Pierce’s 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 con-templation in Lovecraft. In “The Dunwich Horror,” his characters are too fear-ful of the monstrous human-alien spawn they must face to engage aestheticallythe spectacle of its ritualistic chanting at the top of a mountain: “The weirdsilhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinitegrotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in the mood for aes-thetic appreciation” (“Dunwich,” Dunwich 194). As I hope to make evident inthe ensuing analysis, his characters are equally incapable of the detached andlife-affirming judgment of the beautiful.

The inability of Lovecraft’s protagonists to perceive phenomena with thekind of objective distance demanded by the aesthetic gaze originates in theirenmeshment in “cosmic horror,” a devastating experience which rouses a fearfar exceeding that of merely dying. In death, our finite, individual being ceasesto be, yet we can find comfort in our awareness that our cultural heritage is of

Art, Cosmic Horror, and the Fetishizing Gaze in the Fiction of

H. P. LovecraftVivian Ralickas

Vol. 19, No. 3, Journal of the Fantastic in the ArtsCopyright © 2008, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

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value and that the community we leave behind will survive us. Lovecraft’scharacters cannot find solace in these thoughts, since the horror they face isan index of the meaninglessness of the human condition. The origins of cos-mic horror are to be found in two aspects of Lovecraft’s personal philosophywhich he elaborates upon in his essays and correspondence: his adoption of amechanistic materialist view of life and his position as a self-described “cosmicindifferentist,” both of which divest human life of telos.2 Accordingly, it hasbecome commonplace in Lovecraft scholarship to affirm that his anti-humanistic creation narrative asserts that our social bonds, religious beliefs,and cultural achievements are not only irrelevant if considered from outsidethe limited scope of human affairs, but are based upon a false understandingof the cosmos and of our place in it. “Lovecraft’s major fictional themes,”observes Donald Burleson in a statement that succinctly sums up this pre-vailing critical stance, “form a sort of conceptual web, interlacing to providea potential for expression of the one major idea that always emerges; […]self-knowledge, or discovery of one’s own position in the real fabric of theuniverse, is psychically ruinous” (Burleson 137). To cite two exemplary casesfrom Lovecraft’s fiction, according to the bas-reliefs found in the Antarcticalien city in “At the Mountains of Madness,” humanity is the accidental by-product of scientific experiments conducted by aliens who colonized theearth long ago. Furthermore, if the fate of the time-travelling Great Race ofsuper-aliens in “The Shadow out of Time”—beings far superior to us whonevertheless cannot escape the doom of their civilization—is any indication,cosmic horror presages the annihilation of our human way of life. Cosmichorror therefore amounts to an experience of the cataclysmic horror that thehuman subject experiences once it cognizes the finitude of its existence andrealizes that, contrary to a humanist view which posits human life as intrin-sically meaningful in relation not only to itself but to the cosmos, there isneither anything distinctive nor significant about being human.

In spite of the explicit disavowal of the affirmative scope of humanismconcomitant to Lovecraft’s fiction, many of his stories foreground one of ourhighest cultural achievements: art. Steven J. Mariconda’s descriptive survey ofthe transcendent scope of artifacts in Lovecraft, which makes reference toLovecraft’s aesthetic pronouncements in his letters to defend the idea that, inhis fiction, art enables “us to see reality as it truly is” (12), offers a startingpoint to any discussion of art in Lovecraft’s work. While I agree with Mari-conda that art serves to further the aims of Lovecraft’s mechanistic material-ist view of existence, rather than focusing on what art communicates to theviewer, I approach the question of art’s function in Lovecraft from the oppo-site perspective: What do characters’ responses to art suggest about humansubjectivity in Lovecraft? In an effort to answer this question, I endeavor toelucidate, on the one hand, what the experiencing subject projects onto a

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Finally, in a manner similar to Curwen’s portrait, Pickman’s canvases, theShining Trapezohedron, the queer Innsmouth jewelry, the statuette ofCthulhu, and Zann’s music, ekphrasis in “Picture” reveals that art serves as avehicle for the exploration of the human psyche’s inner depths. In reflectingback to the observer the desire he projects onto a given representationthrough the enlivening gaze—a desire whose sensory basis characterizes it asperverse in Lovecraft—art points to the origin of cosmic horror: the humanself as a finite, embodied, and instinctually-driven being whose existenceserves no purpose. In staging a historical document at the centre of the dramaand, more importantly, a real illustration compelling to both schooled anduninformed classes of viewers alike, “Picture” enmeshes the reader in Love-craft’s cosmic horror by alerting us to the possibility that, in spite of the onto-logical distance that separates us from the narrator’s plight (he is a fictionalconstruct who exists in language whereas we are incarnate subjects), we toocan fall prey to the dangers of the enlivening gaze.

The enumeration and brief analysis of the aforementioned texts is by nomeans meant to be exhaustive, and there are other stories I could have men-tioned to examine the pragmatic function of art in Lovecraft. For instance, in“The Temple,” the small carved ivory head that the German submarine crewfind on the body of a dead foreign sailor serves an indexical function similar tothat of the jewelry in “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Instead, I hope to havedrawn attention to the intimate connection shared by art, the effect of cosmichorror, and the nihilistic, anti-humanist perspective of Lovecraft’s fiction.Ekphrasis in Lovecraft makes evident that, as a vehicle facilitating the humansubject’s coming into self-knowledge—a knowledge that simultaneouslydegrades the human self and our culture—art both focuses and intensifies cos-mic horror by capitalizing on our vulnerability to sensory stimuli and on ourinherent impulse to ascribe meaning to form.

Notes 1 I elaborate on the impossibility of an experience of the sublime in Lovecraft’s fic-

tion in “‘Cosmic Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft.”2 For an explication of these terms, see Lovecraft’s letters in H. P. Lovecraft:

Selected Letters 1925–1929, as well as S. T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft’s Ethical Philosophy” andA Dreamer and a Visionary: Lovecraft in His Time.

3 See Paul Buhle, Maurice Lévy, 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

Lovecraft’s fiction, this “sardonic linkage” between human beings and monsters

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becomes a fact in “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” a tale published a year later in1927. 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 andProtestants can be explained in their belief that “the maker of the image arrogates cre-ative 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 theRegnum Congo nor the De Bry illustrations, gleaning his account of the text fromThomas Huxley’s essay “On the History of Man-Like Apes” and his conception ofplate XII from an incomplete reproduction of it appended to Huxley’s essay. Nonethe-less, the function of plate XII in “Picture” does not depend upon Lovecraft’s intimateknowledge of either the Regnum Congo or the De Bry brothers’ original image, sincehe merely exploits, by means of ekphrasis, the perverse imaginative associations theidea of a cannibal butcher shop evokes.

Works CitedBuhle, 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. 196–210.

Burleson, Donald. “On Lovecraft’s 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. 135–147.

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.

——. “Lovecraft’s Ethical Philosophy.” Lovecraft Studies 21 (1990): 24–39.Joshi, S. T., and Peter Cannon. Ninth Footnote to “The Picture in the House.” More

Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Dell, 1999. 16.Lévy, Maurice. “Fascisme et Fantastique, ou le Cas Lovecraft.” Caliban 7 (1970):

67–78.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. 125–154.——. “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” 1927. At the Mountains of Madness and

Other Novels. 107–234.

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——. “The Colour out of Space.” 1927. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 53–82.——. “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.” 1926–1927. At the Mountains of Madness

and Other Novels. 306–407.——. The Dunwich Horror and Others. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Sauk City: Arkham, 1982. ——. H. P. Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1925–1929. 5 vols. Ed. August Derleth and

Donald Wandrei. Sauk City: Arkham, 1968–76.——. “The Haunter of the Dark.” 1935. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 92–115. ——. “The Music of Erich Zann.” 1921. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 83–91. ——. “Pickman’s Model.” 1926. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 12–25.——. “The Picture in the House.” 1920. The Dunwich Horror and Others. 116–124.——. “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” 1931. The Dunwich Horror and Others.

303–367.Mariconda, Steven J. “H. P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality.” Lovecraft Studies

29(1993): 2–12.Ralickas, Vivian. “‘Cosmic Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft.”

Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18.3 (2007): 364–398.

AbstractIn making reference to David Freedberg’s idea of the gaze that “enlivens,” elaboratedin The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989), to explainboth the nature and the dynamics of the reactions art elicits from Lovecraft’s charac-ters, this essay seeks to elaborate on a hitherto unexplored aspect of Lovecraft’s notionof cosmic horror: the pragmatic function art plays in his fiction. In laying bare our vul-nerability to sensory stimuli and our inherent impulse to ascribe meaning to form, artconcentrates Lovecraft’s anti-humanist effect of cosmic horror by eroding characters’humanity and revealing the false foundations of their sense of identity.

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