Beyond Human Senses : describing the  indescribable
in  the  fiction  of  Howard  Phillips  Lovecraft

Submitted in partial fulfilment of
the requirements for the degree of
BACHELOR OF ARTS
Nene College, Northampton, 1996
 
 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks are directed mainly at Penny, for humouring me when I used her as a sounding board for my ideas, and for her eternal patience, belief, and support. Thanks are also due to Simon Perrill, Nigel Burrell, Russell for fact-checking, and all the Lovecraftian scholars whose works have been my guide through the twisting labyrinth that is an undergraduate thesis.
This work is dedicated to the memory of Andrew Paul Lancaster, who shared my passion for Lovecraft, and without whom this dissertation would never have been attempted.

The life of Howard Phillips Lovecraft has, to many scholars, become inextricable from his work; as if by properly understanding his fiction and his letters we will better come to understand the man. Lin Carter's 1972 biographyLovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos seems so intended: a reconstitution of anecdotal 'facts', polarised and refracted through the lens of the author's own ideas about the man, making Lovecraft and his work operate in yoked tandem, without ever managing to achieve a theoretical basis that will allow this 'tandem' to operate. It's almost as if the biographical details of Lovecraft's life are as fascinating to Carter as his fiction and thus must be read through, or moderated by, the fiction. The key to understanding Lovecraft's canon becomes one of a biographically-oriented search that uses literary criticism as a validator for its findings, not the other way round.

For me it was - and is - Lovecraft's works of fiction that must take primacy. Biographical details are fascinating insights into areas of his texts, as are author-centred approaches  to some of his over-riding themes, but one must always remain fixed on the core of the  Lovecraft phenomenon: the stories he left behind him after his brief, melancholic life. The search for biography in the work of a man whose life was composed of elaborate fictions, is often a search for a glowing but non-existent chimaera, an attempt to reconstitute already fictional 'facts'. My research is concentrated, in the main, on the written artifacts Lovecraft left behind him, not the apocrypha and heresies of his biographers, friends, and detractors.

This is not to say that the life of Lovecraft hasn't been chronicled with precision and insight. de Camp's
Lovecraft: A Biography is a detailed and human account of the life of  the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos. It served as an invaluable guide through the labyrinths of contradiction and paradox that litter the trail to a satisfactory literary critical space in which to examine the disparate strands that makes up a writer's life and works. I will occasionally come back to biographical/author-centred approaches because it is nigh on impossible not to, but the stories, letters, and entries in his Commonplace Book exist as very real artefacts that we can use to calibrate his fiction; whereas personal recollections are always subjective and often rose-tinted, thwarting accurate analysis.

The weird fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft exists as a visible landmark in the continuum of fantastic fiction. His works are on the very cusp of the two distinct orders of the genre. On the one hand: the old guard, where terror is explored primarily in the Gothic manner, heavy with the accumulated "furniture" of the genre, and running into limitations that the mere suggestion of horrors cannot break free from; and on the other: the new guys on the block, the pulp 'hacks', unhampered by any restrictions and only too happy to deliver sharp, visceral, graphic shocks. This is exemplified by Stephen King in Danse Macabre when he says: 'I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out'. (King, 40).

Today it is easy to concern ourselves with the very real faults that pepper Lovecraft's literary legacy. His verbosity, pomposity, intolerance, misogyny, misanthropy, his xenophobia, his tendency to either over-stress or under-write his nightmare visions. It may be true that Lovecraft's characters exist mainly as plot functions or expositors of views. There is no attempt to flesh out these hollow men, Lovecraft's eye remains cold and analytical. His first-person narrators are cut from the same cloth, with the same template: they are all antiquarians and scholars, scientists and dabblers in ancient lore, intellectual snobs, and it is only in the models of the past that answers to the problems of present and future are to be solved. I will be returning to this 'antiquarianism' occasionally, for Lovecraft's Graeco-Roman affinities and neo-classicist beliefs mean that his fictional worlds exist in a perpetual state of threat, forever in danger of losing cohesion or ontological stabilty because of deviations that assail the classical 'norm'.

That racial prejudice provides a thematic infrastructure to describe his ontologically unstable universe is, paradoxically, both Lovecraft's downfall and his triumph. Much has been written on Lovecraft's prejudices and how they are moderated through and exaggerated in his fiction until they become hysterical reflections of his fear of the 'foreign' contamination of Anglo-saxon blood-stock and the degeneration of racial purity. Stories such as 'The Lurking Fear' and 'The Dunwich Horror' seem to bear out this hypothesis, and many of Lovecraft's letters are littered with anti-semitic rhetoric, anti-black propaganda and even a provisional support for the ethnic cleansing policies of Adolf Hitler. This is the dark-side of the Lovecraft personality, and it does make painful reading for a devotee of the dark and eldritch worlds of Lovecraft's creations. Racial minorities are really only ever treated as figures of mystery, exoticism, or fear in his stories; in his letters there was evidence of actual hatred:

      Of course they can't let niggers use the beach as a Southern resort-
     can  you  imagine sensitive  persons bathing  near  a pack of greasy
     chimpanzees? The only thing that makes life endurable  where blacks
     abound is the Jim Crow principle, & I wish they'd apply it in N.Y. both
     to niggers &  to  the  more  Asiatic  types of  puffy,  rat-faced Jew.
     Either stow 'em out of sight or kill 'em off - anything so that a white
     man may walk along the streets without shuddering & nausea
     (quoted  in de Camp, 249),

and there are many more examples of this kind of infantile racism throughout his letters. This racial prejudice is petty and ignorance-fueled, but, when refracted through the lens of his powerful fantasist's imagination, it creates depictions of alien 'others' that remain largely unrivalled in the history of the macabre. By exaggerating the immigrant 'others' he feared, and the social degeneration he believed would result from their influx (as in 'The Lurking Fear' and 'The Dunwich Horror'), Lovecraft created a panoply of monstrous beings that moved just outside of the range of human perception, time, and space. Clive Bloom in 'This Revolting Graveyard of the Universe' (in Doherty, 64) suggests that racism only forms part of Lovecraft's stories, that although Lovecraft's horrors are:

    a  transposition of  his social  fears about new immigrant groups into a cosmic battle in which the evil Untermenschen are constantly defeating the less numerous Ubermenschen  ... the majority of Lovecraft's tales depict Anglo-Saxon degeneracy  among  the rural white poor, not the newly arrived passengers of the steerage.

Bloom uses 'The Dunwich Horror' to illustrate this point, although, as I will examine in the third chapter, some his ideas are very much open to question.

To tackle Lovecraft's work, I intend to explore three elements of Lovecraft's work that can really be grouped together under the general heading: transgressions; in which I mean a moving past the boundaries of, in Chapter One - human perceptions; in Chapter Two - human time; and in Chapter Three - human physicality. I feel these areas give a good general picture of Lovecraft's overriding themes, while allowing me to home in details that I feel will offer some insight into Lovecraft's literary legacy, attempting to thematize Lovecraft's stories, while using his fictional works, his books of letters and his critical piece 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'. In the conclusion I will draw together the strands, but more importantly try to follow the enduring appeal of both his own stories, and the later writers who have borrowed from or emulated his themes and/or styles.

To create a theoretical basis from which to examine the texts of Howard Phillips Lovecraft requires a careful consideration of the major issues at play within the Lovecraft canon. From an epistemological standpoint, modern literary criticism functions best as an interrogator of unresolved elements at play within a subject text, and with the works of Lovecraft these unresolved textual elements are as important as the resolved aspects of narrative. Stories of otherwordly - or indeed otherdimensional - terrors find easy resolutions problematised by the sheer otherness of their subject matter; Lovecraft's stories take this a stage further with their evasive, de-centred nature.

For Lovecraft, horrors cannot be contained within a narrativity that is unable to pronounce their name; subjectivity fails to find labels or descriptions of the things from beyond, and the whole pattern of linear story-telling is disrupted by this constant falling short of the narrative truth. Somewhere in the midst of Lovecraft's overly-ornate, fussily over-worked verbosity lurks a series of connected discourses that not only seek to explain the universe in terms of timeless 'Old Ones' whose presence on this planet sparked the first steps towards human evolution, but also to question the very nature of subjective reality itself.

Joanne Russ sees Lovecraft's fictions as symptomatic of what Laing called 'ontological insecurity'. This suggests that '(I)f one fears that one doesn't exist securely ... any contact with another becomes potentially catastrophic ' (In her article in Smith, Curtis 463). She offers this as an explanation for Lovecraft's obsessions with the fragility of human perceptions of reality, an obsession succinctly revealed by the character of Crawford Tillinghast in 'From Beyond':

      (W)ith  five feeble  senses we  pretend to comprehend the boundlessly
     complex cosmos, yet other  beings with a  wider, stronger, or different
     range of senses might not  only see very differently  the things we see,
     but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which
     lie close at hand yet can  never be  detected with the senses we have
     ... strange,  inaccessible  worlds  exist  at our  very elbows.
    Dagon and other macabre tales, 58).

The 'boundlessly complex cosmos' is one of the cornerstones of Lovecraft's work, it imbues his work with the impossibility of understanding even the horrors contained within his own tales. Such horrific intrusions 'from beyond' become harbingers of human insignificance in the face of abyssmal gulfs of unknowable, incomprehensible space. It is almost as if Lovecraft's creatures are signifiers - Yog Sothoth, Cthulhu, Shub Niggurath, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep - without humanly comprehensible signifieds. The narrators of Lovecraft's stories are never able to satisfactorily describe the monsters that populate the fictional universe, and instead their attention is turned towards breaking the monsters down into component parts that human minds can at least make sense of. This is illustrated in 'The Call of Cthulhu', where Cthulhu 'cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order ' (The Haunter of the Dark, 72). Instead Cthulhu is reduced to a signifier of an  infinite chain of signifieds; Cthulhu is 'A mountain (that) walked or stumbled ' (ib); Its bas relief shows elements of 'an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature ' (ib. 49), and that has 'rudimentary wings '; Cthulhu changes, depending on what part, or facet, of It that the narrator is observing. Cthulhu is  described as 'Polypheme ' and 'a gelatinous green immensity ', (both ib.) and this instability of coherent form interrogates the limits of human perception, by posing the mind a puzzle made up of conflicting images and impressions. Naming has always been a symbol of ownership, Durkheim tells  us, so perhaps a part of the horror of Cthulhu is the horror of humanity eclipsed by something we cannot own by naming.

Lovecraft's mythos, and many of his non-mythos stories, attempt to address  and describe feelings of the sublime, using a new vocabulary of images from the developing genres of horror and science-fiction to create a new grammar to examine those feelings. Lovecraft's use of sublimity - an excess of sensory information of such intensity that it literally causes fear and wonder - is best summed up in the letter Lovecraft sent to Clark Ashton Smith in 1930:
    The  true function  of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground
     for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and
     burning curiosity and sense  of awe which  a sensitive minority of
     mankind  feel  toward the  alluring  and  provocative  abysses of
     unplumbed space and unguessed  entity which  press in  upon the
     known world from unknown infinities and in unknown relationships
     of time, space,  matter, force, dimensionality, and consciousness.
     I know that my  most poignant  emotional  experiences are those
     which concern the  lure of  unplumbed  space,  the terror of the
     encroaching outer  void, and the struggle to transcend the known
     and established order.
     (Letters, Volume 3)

Strangely, though, these 'poignant emotional experiences ' are products of the intellect, and not the senses; they are to do with 'considering' and not 'sensing' or 'experiencing'. Burke, in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, describes this moment when fictional consideration over-reaches the limits of human sensing in his discussion of Milton's Paradise Lost: '(T)he mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images ' (quoted in Sage, 36) and it is exactly the presence of this crowd of images that Lovecraft attempts to
 in his fiction, to mediate the sublime through the calmly rational first-person narrators that populate his most famous fictions.

Layered throughout each of Lovecraft's stories is an interdependent structure of binarily-opposed terms and discourses: the discourses of science and superstition; of past and present; of forces from this world and from beyond; of humanity and otherness. Lovecraft seems perpetually engaged in metaphysical debate within his stories, structuring them in such a way that the opposing terms interrogate each others' difference.

In 'The Colour From Out of Space', for example, the discourses of modern science and folk-superstition are re-examined by use of an agent from beyond our narrow grasp of 'reality'. The meteor that hits Nahum Gardner's well 'was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws' (The Haunter of the Dark, 181) and as such it is explicable by neither science nor superstition, and neither discourse is adequate to describe or explain what becomes of the Gardner's farm in the collision between the alien with the commonplace. The meteor, a 'large coloured globule ... it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all
 ', (ib.) exists as a causal focus for a series of narrative and philosophical discourses that examine the effects of the unknowable upon minds that instinctively need to know the nature and structure of everything. Taxonomy - the human drive to classify and understand - cannot satisfactorily signify this unworldly other; language fails to impose order upon this pattern of alien behavior. Not only is it impossible for us to ever know the colour that this 'other' is, it is equally impossible for us to divine its intentions or the processes it uses to secure the success of its goals. The way the alien lives and just what it is that it does to the Gardner family are things we cannot know; they are a system of practices and routines that defy our attempts to impose terrestrial psychopathology upon them.

Lovecraft sustains the conflict between the rationality of human science and the irrationality of the sublime, finally telling us little about either, but giving us feelings of  the latter, which may be the only approach Lovecraft could find, and it maintains an almost dialectical tension between the two. That the human cost is, as Joanne Russ identifies (463) engulfment is an almost irrelevant factor in our understanding of what Lovecraft's tale tells us about the things that dwell beyond our narrow sphere of perception, and is only of importance in the quest for understanding of what the tale tells us about our own feelings of vulnerability and cosmic insignificance.

To borrow from Lacan, the world of symbolic order is disrupted by the intrusion from the brooding 'imaginary' of deep and boundless space. Blaise Pascal's famous response to infinity, that 'Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie : 'the terrible silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me' (PensŚes, iii.206 ) encapulates this sense of sublime terror generated by man's contemplation of eternity. Ordinarily, we are only able to examine infinity  with the use of science and mathematics, by use of astronomy and theoretical physics. We tie space and its mysteries down to logical, taxonomic, mathematically constant structures;  structures controlled by the algebra of relativity. Lovecraft seems to be making the simple statement that space, with its many mysteries, is really whatever we say it is. The writer of science-fiction has as much licence to investigate eternity as the scientist, and that the writer can use elements of science to back up his fictional schema means that he is in a strong  position to extrapolate without  recourse to such annoying inconveniences of 'proof' or evidence. Lovecraft's universe is huge and threatening, and can never be measured or quantified. The 'vivid interplays of unknown and inconceivable influences' underpinning Lovecraft's fiction 'give vast and fabulous activity to dimensional areas that are not shapes, and to nuclei of complex rearrangements that are not minds' (Letter to D. Wandrei, Letters 2, 127). What lies beyond our narrow sphere, then, exists beyond human science. Lovecraft makes a new universe, and populates it with horrors that awaken our feelings of awe and terror. Human rationality, and the limits it imposes upon what it will see, what it will believe, only exists as a kind of sublime circuit-breaker, something that prevents us from constant feelings of sublimity. Civilisation, culture and science 'earth'  us against constant sensory exposure to the perpetual wonder of the universe. Whether we use the discourse of science - imposing rational, symbolic order upon a universe that may have more facets and twists than we can ever know or imagine - or the discourse of the local witness in 'The Colour Out of Space' - from which we learn more but ultimately know as little - the central concern of the narrative is what we become when a piece of space stops being 'out there' and moves into our realm. What use is there for taxonomy, quantification, even religion (... the way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world' [Haunter, 196]) in the face of the sublime?
 
The three professors from Miskatonic University subject the 'colour' to all manner of scientific experimentation and Lovecraft describes the processes in some detail before the element reduces itself - and the beaker containing it - and literally passes out of the rational gaze of science. The role of science in this phase of the narrative seems simple, but is actually quite complex. Initially it appears to be the attempt of modern science to reduce the 'colour' to a set of laws, rules and dimensions that will identify the properties of the aerolite. But, while masquerading as an attempt to quantify, measure, describe and identify just what the colour is, the scientist's role is simply to show us what the colour is not. This theoretical aporia, in which contradiction empowers but also threatens narrative function, reduces the text to a search for signification, which always falls short of - or indeed negates - that which it attempts to describe. It is almost as if the human linguistic system is challenged and found lacking; what are often seen as relatively stable linguistic units like deixes are subverted into betraying less than the information they are intended to encode. If situational co-ordinates are open to question - now/then, here/there, us/them - then more abstract and ambiguous coding is completely jeopardized. Lovecraft's prose makes it almost impossible for us to imagine the contents of the aerolite  (and the alien behaviour they impose upon human physiology) because he is more intent on showing us what the aerolite isn't. 'Us' and 'them' are redundant terms, for the boundaries between alien  and human physicality are blurred; 'here' and 'there' are fused into a place neither here nor there,  Nahum's farmafter the fact.
 
Nahum Gardner - a man of the land, innocent of affairs of space and the paradoxes of infinity - occupies a peculiar narrative position, for his story and his words are mediated through the more knowledgeable Ammi Pierce in anecdotal form, embedding authorship of the story firmly in the control of others. The hierarchy of discourses is structured from Lovecraft's prose, through the persona of the surveyor, through the narrative of Pierce, who relates the story of Gardner. This makes the narrative very difficult to separate into the discourses that structure the story. The narrator himself is a man of Euclidean geometry, suddenly thrust into Lovecraft's non-Euclidean universe; he is a surveyor, a man of symbols and equations, measurements and scale drawings. His world view is altered by the tale of 'the blasted heath', and his intellect falls short of categorical signification of this thing which is:

        no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast
        to measure. It was a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms whose mere
        existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws before our
        frenzied eyes (Ib. 202).
 
The colour's passage from the 'unformed realms' of the unconscious to the 'motions and dimensions' of symbolic order is facilitated by engulfment, then destruction. Its hosts - the Gardner family, the local wildlife and fauna - become reduced (much as the colour reduces itself) until they are defined more by what they are no longer than what they have become. Presence yields to absence in an alchemical interation that somehow leaves less than was present before, without leaving left-over or waste.
 
The colour's interactions with humanity point to an essential colourlessness of behavior, as if contact with the sublime dissolves the human soul, or at least deadens it. If colour is defined as the amount and quality of light reflected back from a source, then this colour seems more like an absence of light, a demonstration of an anti-colour. The colour makes its hosts 'calloused to strange and unpleasant things' and forces people to act 'listlessly and mechanically' as they perform their 'thankless and monotonous chores ' (All 'Haunter', 187). The Gardners are shunned by the local populace, excommunicated from fellow man they can only become less than human. Social order is broken down by this calamity from elsewhere and no explicable alien social order rises to fill the vaccuum. The Gardners are made alien, but they are also alienated from the community by all but Ammi Pierce.

Signification becomes a series of diminishing iterations, winding down into entropy, both social and physical. The colour brings an end to social order and physical function; cut free from evolutionary purpose and instinctual drive, the human soul itself loses its 'colour'. The metaphysical collision of 'within' (human space)  and 'without' (alien space) challenges physical and moral law. A breakdown on the level of physicality is followed by a fracturing of moral sense, as if one is wholly reliant on the other. The natural order - personified by neo-pastoral Nahum - once disrupted is irrevocably altered. The human soul, once bared before the painful bliss of the sublime, is forever eclipsed. Newtonian constants, which Newton himself saw as requiring the hand of god to reset its mechanisms, are reduced to the same ambiguous, monotonous colour as Nahum's land; partial signifiers of a universe of existential horror and preternatural properties.
 
The 'aerolite' is a harbinger of an alien sign system, and its meeting with Nahum's simple existence forever redefines the relationship between absence and presence. That the colour continues to move, 'an inch a year' is a clear indication that in the battle between order and chaos, the symbolic and the imaginary, order will always fail because its terms are so tightly bound to inflexible axioms, its terms are too self-referential and tied to simplistic rules and relativistic, general laws. The irrational knows no such limits, it creeps on like  cancer through cells, until reason itself is devoured, made absent, by the presence of the sublime. Science, rational order, after asking the questions falls short of an answer. Folk-tale - and modified superstition - also fails. Only that from outside - an alien grammar imposed on the human structure - can overwrite human experience and genetics, re-writing humanity in alien sentences that mean nothing to the characters within the story, for they are unreadable. The surveyor, the metonymic 'eye' (I) can only survey. There is no evidence of reciprocity, humanity gives nothing back to the universe in this non-Newtonian equation. The sublime 'aerolite', characterised by awe and terror, not only acquaints its hosts with their own mortality and a glimpse of their own extinction, but also consumes the sense of self-preservation that Burke found at the heart of the sublime.
 

Lovecraft's works are constantly addressing a notion of exceeding human understanding and perception, of taking his readers beyond all that is known or postulated within our consensus reality. Working within the confines of the genres of both horror and science-fiction, Lovecraft devised a detailed mythology and a pantheon of god-like beings to facilitate some unsettling explorations into ultra-human forces and ideas; evoking feelings of human limits transgressed. In his essay 'How to think what no one has ever thought before', William H. Calvin advises one 'to take a nap and dream about something' (Science, Mind & Cosmos, 29), and Lovecraft seemed acutely aware of this simple path to questioning the fundamental principles of human scientific empiricism. Flights of cosmic fantasy can serve to interrogate accepted modes of human thought as well as to titillate escapist minds.
 
In the previous chapter I examined the manner in which Lovecraft used elements of a modified idea of the sublime to exceed human feelings and understanding; in this chapter I will pay close attention to the way Lovecraft used time, and a sense of time beyond a human perception of time, to add force to the devices and concerns described in the first chapter. Time - its passing; history; prehistory; lineage; the
'sense of pageantry' of one's ancestry (Letters 4, 416) - is central to Lovecraft's works. Not just the time we count off on clocks and watches - although it is this idea of time that fuels Lovecraft's musings - but rather a philosophical consideration of time that is not tied to a human measurement of time, but rather a system freed up from linear human restraints in which our perception may only be one of many.
 
Where his search for a scientific sublime is a fantasist's quest for truth in a universe in which God has been philosophically pronounced dead and other things must fill the void left by his passing, the examination of non-human time-frames gives rise to other interesting lines of enquiry and criticism.  To human perception, the arrow of time has a straight and true shaft and transports us all from birth through to death, remaining oblivious to how attached an individual becomes to their own, personal synchronic span of diachronic eternity. Human life is ephemeral, a tiny part of a massive continuum, and where some chose religion to ease the perpetual truth of our mortality, Lovecraft's atheism offered him no such comfort. That:

     (P)arents and friends die; beloved houses and landscapes become
     hopelessly   altered  or   destroyed;  social  millieux  and  other
     environmental  supports  decay and become metamorphosed; and
     one's  own  self grows  old,  exiled from the beauty, vividness &
     adventurous expectancy of youth
     (Letters 4, 416)

is something Lovecraft was very much aware of, but the solution was not to be found by 'drugging oneself with immortality-mythsin order to be tolerably contented during the brief span one lives.' (ib, 415) Instead Lovecraft used other myths to examine the uneasy relationship between humans and time.
 
Within Lovecraft's stories time moves in increasingly mysterious ways, and its passage is constantly disrupted - or even reversed - by forces beyond human ken. Ted Hughes, in 'Moon Clock', wrote about a kind of time that was 'somehow, somehow never now' (Moon Whales, 80) and there is a sense of this odd paradox contained within Lovecraft's fantasies: that the thing we call the present is only a nexus or meeting place for all times ; that each era can influence not only the future ( which it does second by second ), but the past also, as if time is divisible, that creatures beyond our knowledge may view what we see as an immutable journey forward  - from the past into the future - as merely a system of operations that can be reduced, reshuffled, reversed.

At The Mountains of Madness examines an idea of human history and the taxonomic quest of science to impose retrospective labels to areas of prehistory. Palaeontology seeks to classify that which it cannot
 but only hypothesize about. The aim of the Miskatonic University Expedition is to learn about prehistory, but their methodology is really only directed at confirming existing ideas about that prehistory. Science carries with it its own hegemony, rewriting the world with its theories. It seems always to be seeking to consolidate its theoretical grasp with a necessarily blinkered view, a view that humansare capable of having. This realisation feeds back into one of the dilemmas of scientific philosophy: how we, with limited powers of reason and understanding, can ever hope to understand the complex, possibly limitless principles that govern eternity. It really comes back to the 'five feeble senses' idea addressed in the previous chapter, and Lovecraft is, in many ways, declaring war on science's hegemony.
 
In a letter to Harold S. Farnese in 1932, Lovecraft discussed his fascination with that which is unknown, outside scientific classification, declaring it a 'virtually permanent ... part of the human personality '. (Letters 4, 70-71) Although contemporary science 'destroys' human belief in the supernatural, Howard Phillips Lovecraft saw his work as:

        asense of impatient rebellion against the rigid and eluctable tyranny of time, space and  natural
        law - a sense which drives our imaginations to devise all sorts  of plausible hypothetical defeats of
        that tyranny -and  second a burning  curiosity  concerning  the vast  reaches  of unplumbed  and
        unplumbable  cosmic   space  which  press  down tantalisingly  on all  sides of our  pitifully  tiny
        sphere  of the known. Between  these  two  ...  factors  I  believe  the  field of  the weird must
        necessarily continue to have a  reason for  existence,  and that the nature of man  must necessarily
        still seek occasional expression ... in symbols and phantasies  involving  the  hypothetical
        frustration  of physical law, and the imaginative extrusion of knowledge and adventure beyond the
        bounds imposed by reality.
 
Lovecraft's phantasies, then, invent new forms of answer to the eternal question 'Why are we here?' and reinterpret the universe in the shape of narratives that resist the rigorous scrutiny of science. Lovecraft's message seems to be that if science's Grail-quest is right and there is a 'Grand Unified Theory' that can interpret and explain the universe around us, then its message is one we should fear rather than embrace. Totality of vision and understanding will only seek to undermine our imagined position at the centre of things, and show us instead that our search for a universal truth and order to the universe is as hollow as our theological dreams. Dawkinian evolutionism shows us a vision of a godless world no less marvellous or miraculous for this absence, but this was a message that had been telegraphed in advance by the discoveries that Darwin had softened somewhat to fit in with his wife's strong religious beliefs. Lovecraft's stories take a different path to atheism, telling us that there may well be forces out there that we could feasibly label 'god-like', but this pantheon is unlike anything we ever expected to be out there. The truth of the human 'Book of Genesis' is nothing to do with the fall from Paradise, indeed the true story is but a brief entry in some incalculably complex laboratory journey, we are little more than an experiment that escaped from the test-tubes of the Great Old Ones somewhere in the 'that nameless geologic past' of The Mountains of Madness (76).
 
The 'pageantry of history' is recorded on the labyrinthine walls of the Antarctic city of the Old Ones, a series of carvings, arabesques and cartouches that show the 'abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race' (ib. 79). Human time is dwarfed, and ultimately eclipsed by this 'monstrous dead city' (ib) that is a thousand million years old; and it's bas-reliefs record the myths and legends of that time, myths that stretch back unimaginable lengths of time, establishing an unknowable gulf of time, perhaps a thousand million times a thousand million years, the 'preterrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, in other galaxies, and in other universes.' (ib. 82). Human time, or more accurately human perception of history, is reduced to the tiniest subset in a master set of boundless aeons; time becomes something immeasurable to human taxonomy. The discoveries of the Old Ones' historical record reminds us that in our need to classify  we have created synchronic labels for areas of Earth history - Eocence, Cretaceous, Mesozoic, pre-Cambrian, Jurassic - but these are not the vast epochs we imagine them to be, but rather ephemeral periods in a much larger scale than we are really capable of grasping. Where time becomes something that dwarfs human perception, the 'much-discussed couplet' from 'The Call Of Cthulhu' comes readily to mind:"That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange eons even death may die" and with it the realisation that eternity, whatever that may be, will be filled with the risings and fallings of species such as ours, and the permanency of that deathis a matter of the strangeness of time. In the caverns of Antarctica, the narrator and his companion are offered a glimpse of thesestrange eons. The narrator's knowledge of the forbidden books of the Miskatonic University library prepares him, in part, for the revelations of prehistory; Danforth's breakdown at the further revelations of the other mountain range and city destroys his mind. His mad ravings - 'the windowless solids with five dimensions ... the original, the eternal, the undying ' (ib. 138) - are partly rationalised by the narrator as conceptions drawn from Danforth's earlier researches into theNecronomicon, that were not formed until 'his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading ... He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance ' (139); but time itself is so compressed and distorted in this terrifying tomb of 'primal white jelly' that maybe the narrator's denial is symptomatic of his reticence to believe what his senses and researches are telling him. Perhaps one of the subtexts of Lovecraft's use of the elongated time-scale of At The Mountains Of Madness is that we, as a race, are hopelessly locked onto a scientific course that believes it will explain all the mysteries of time and space if we ourselves are given enough time; and that we really cannot - or will not - grasp or accept the idea of a cosmic
bigger picture that doesn't contain us at the very centre. Just as occidental geographers placed Europe at the centre of the Mercator Projection, so terrestrial conceit wishes us to appear as a bright, shimmering jewel in the middle of the beautiful crown of the heavens; we wish to be evolution's highest achievement and our planet to be the ultimate reflection of the distance we have travelled down the evolutionary path, something we shape to reflect our needs and whims, but not a battlefield, an experimental farm or a cosmic laboratory. We want to see ourselves at the very top of the food chain,
not as a food-source, not fodder, not the vivisected, and certainly not cattle.
 
The aforementioned 'strange eons' form the heart of Lovecraft's 'The Shadow out of Time'  where, like the narrator, the story is concerned with unearthing the 'fragments of unknown, primordial masonry' that make up human prehistory.
 
'The Shadow out of Time' asks many of the same questions as At the Mountains of Madness. It is an odd, but powerful tale in which the narrator, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, seeks to piece together an account of the times in which a 'secondary personality' overwrites his own. This new personality is an
'utter alien' usurping Peaslee's body for its own purposes over a sustained period of five years (The Lurking Fear, 159). After regaining control of his own body and mind, Peaslee discovers that:

         (M)y  conception  of  time  -  my  ability to  distinguish  between
         consecutiveness  and simultaneousness  -  seemed subtly disordered;
         so  that  I formed  chimerical notions  about  living in  one age and
         casting one's mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future
         ages. (162)

Indeed when the World War breaks out, Peaslee is assailed by 'strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences - as if I knew how it was coming out and could lookupon it in the light of future information.'(ib.)
 
Just as 'The Colour Out of Space' opened a discourse between science and folk-tale,  'The Shadow Out of Time' uses myth to fill in the spaces left by the theoretical musings of science. Although the 'new developments in those theories of relativity ' of Einstein who reduces time 'to the status of a mere dimension ' (162), it is myth - 'the persistent legends of immemorial antiquity' (164) - that allows Peaslee to put together a reasonable account of the 'curious knowledge and strange conduct of (his) body's late tenant' (162).  'Stupifying gulfs of time' (ib) yawn under Peaslee, and the deeper he digs into myth and folklore, the more he discovers about the creatures that had 'delved into every secret of nature before the amphibian forebears of man had crawled out of a hot sea three hundred million years ago' (169).
 
Some of these creatures 'were as old as the cosmos itself ... Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages of other galaxies and universes were spoken of .... there was no such thingas time in the humanly accepted sense' (ib). Indeed the Great Race of Yith can project themselves through time, across millions of years, to 'study the lore of every age' (ib). Moving forward and backward through time, it is from this race that 'arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology' (ib), and, although the Great Race find it harder to travel back in time than they do forwards, they seem to be in control of time and its mysteries.
 
Peaslee, in dreams, remembers his missing years, recalling the:

     horrible annals of other worlds and other  universes  ...  strange orders
     of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful
     chronicles  of  grotesque-bodied  intelligences  which would  people it
     millions of years after the death of the last human being.
 
Lovecraft shows us the races that bracket human existence, showing us to be just a parenthesised clause in an unknowably alien sentence. The human race's life-span is nothing in comparison to the planet's age; just as the individual human's life-span is insignificant next to the Great Race of Yith's four or five thousand years. It seems that we have nothing in common with these incredibly ancient, mind-projecting aliens. Nothing except taxonomy; for the Great Race are a race of historians and archivists using the bodies of other races, forwards or backwards in time, as their history books. The minds of the selected creatures are transported into the bodies of the Great Race, and it is here that Peaslee meets the minds of people from every age of human history, as well as minds from other times. Some 'would live in incalculable epochs to come ', while others are from 'six million years in the past(179). Just like the Old Ones in At The Mountains of Madness, the Great Race are historically-minded, indeed there are Old Ones amongst the assembled minds in the past that Peaslee meets, for what else could 'the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of paleogean Antarctica' (ib.) be?
 
That the Great Race are technologically well in advance of us, but still remains interested in
history, one of ther first casualties of modernity, if Post-Modernism is to be believed - is perhaps one of the most fascinating things about them; for it shows, perhaps, a dissatisfaction with their present, in favour of chronicling both distant past and far-flung future. The Utopian 'fascistic socialism' (ib. 180) of the Great Race's society seems to retain stability through historical researches, which provide the ten foot rugose cones with a collective interest that also acts as a kind of societal glue. Myth and legend threaten the Great Race, but they remain fixed on their chronicling and archiving.
 
In many ways this interest in history reflects Lovecraft's own antiquarian sensibilities. Lovecraft's letters reveal him as a man who yearned for the past,  a scholar who longed to live in a simpler, less confusing age. He saw himself as an eighteenth century gentleman born out of time. Lovecraft affected an 'eighteenth century pose', de Camp notes (22), although '(F)ew outside of mental institutions ... have carried out the charade with Lovecraft's rigor'. (ib.) This vigor for the eighteenth century translated itself into a hatred of using post-colonial words and phrases, and of dating some correspondences and self-portraits two hundred years before the actual calendar date; but it also manifested itself in a keen interest in the history of bygone ages. This is reflected in much of his fiction, but 'The Shadow Out of Time' seems a specific examination of Lovecraft's idea of the ultimate in historians. Though the
otherness of the Great Race serves to add dramatic weight and cosmic horror to the tale, Lovecraft's working-through of his philosophical considerations of time gives 'The Shadow Out of Time' a power and resonance that reflects its writer's preoccupations, and turns time itself into a traversable geography. In a multi-dimensional universe, the Albert Einsteins and Stephen Hawkings of our  world are only capable of theorizing about the particular effects that humans are capable of considering. The archivists of the Great Race know no such bounds, and neither, in his own way, did Lovecraft himself.
 

Lovecraft moved between the timeless depths of infinite space and the mysteries of fractured time to evoke sublime reactions. His stories seem to be constantly posing the question: if our perceptions of time and space are faulty,  then what can we really hold to be true in the universe?  Lovecraft had many devices for bringing the sublime to Earth,  to juxtapose cosmic reality with human perception of reality; whether it was the direct approach: which brought the alien into immediate human contact (as in the aerolite from 'The Colour Out of Space', ); the buried: where the alien is suggested by cyclopean ruins (as in At The Mountains of Madness, or 'The Temple');visitation : where the alien is visited by the human  (as in 'The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath' or 'The Shadow Out of Time'); or fusion: where the alien is mated with the human, (as in 'The Dunwich Horror' or 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'). In all of these cases, the 'other' is brought into contact with the human, and the contact leaves the human changed forever by the experience.
 
There is a long tradition of depictions of the monstrous and the grotesque, and Lovecraft draws from a large pool of precedents in the construction of his eldritch horrors. Working within a genre, already bound by rules and conventions, Lovecraft was keenly aware of the essential ingredients it took to produce fiction that would bring the fantastic into sharp, horrific focus. He was a fan and critic of horror tales, and many of his main influences are chronicled in his critical work 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'. Although, some may argue, much of Lovecraft's work seems to be contradicted by his theoretical assertions, there is still the sense that the effects his horrific creations achieve make such contradictions almost irrelevant.
 
'The Dunwich Horror' is, as I mentioned in the preface, used by Bloom as a partial defence of Lovecraft's racism. He believes that the story shows that social degeneration comes from within
instead of the xenophobe's idea of without. For me this seems like hedging; and I'm not sure it stands up to scrutiny. The threat in the story comes from  Old Whateley's commerce with things from very much without, proving that contact with alien others is ultimately more destructive than the 'path of retrogression so common in many New-England backwaters ... (who have) come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding' (The Haunter of the Dark, 77). Far from off-setting Lovecraft's racism, Bloom's example just seems to suggest that Lovecraft's hatred of degenerates was not restricted to those from overseas. In many of his stories, these back-woods communities suffer from a moral and physical collapse that is eclipsed
 by degeneration that reaches in from without.

The Whateleys have had commerce with alien forces, and their house has become a kind of slum '
from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared' (ib. 79). The condition of the Whateley's house is perhaps a metaphor for, or a result of, the human degeneration after contact with the alien Yog-Sothoth; a creature summoned using theNecronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. The exotic (Alhazred) facilitates contact with the alien,  (Yog-Sothoth) causing degeneration. This degeneration is perhaps best illustrated in the description of the thing that is Wilbur Whateley, which:

         lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor
         and tarry stickiness ... its chest had the leathery, reticulated
         of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and
         black  ...  from  the abdomen  a  score  of  long  greenish-grey tentacles
         with red sucking mouths protruded limply ... of genuine
         blood there was  none;  only  the foetid  greenish-yellow  ichor
        which had trickled along the painted floor (ib.93).

The unholy product of a union between terrestrial and alien parents, Wilbur  Whateley is a xenogenetic mutation. His twin, who looks more like his father than Wilbur does is 'all made o' squirming ropes' and there is 'nothin' solid about it - all like jelly '. (ib. 111) Barton Levi St. Armand sees this kind of  description as part of Lovecraft's 'Great Dread of the Viscous' (The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, 63), and this fear of viscosity is ever-present in Lovecraft's descriptions of monsters and their body fluids, but it is enlightening to compare these kind of descriptions with the language Lovecraft uses to describe his visit to a East Side slum, where:

        (T)he organic things - Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid - inhabiting that
         awful cesspool could not by any stretch  of the imagination  be
        call'd human.  They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations
        of  the  pithecanthropoid  and amoebal; vaguely moulded  from
         some  stinking   viscous   slime   of  earth's  corruption,  and
         slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in or out of
         windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive  of nothing  but
         infesting worms or  deep-sea unnamabilities.  They  -  or  the
         degenerate   gelatinous  fermentation  of  which  they   were
         composed - seem'd to  ooze, seep and trickle
            (Letters 1, 333-334).

St. Armand sees this description as a 'manically excremental raving' (64) that surpasses anything Dean Swift tried to depict, but I feel that linking this xenophobic nightmare with Juvenalian satire
detracts from the real insight this passage gives us into the formation of monsters within Lovecraft's stories. The foreign and the other are intrinsically linked in 'The Dunwich Horror', and Lovecraft's disgust at the East Side slum is echoed in many of his other works. The horror that constitutes 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' -intercourse with deep ones from the sea - is described as:
 
     a limitless stream - flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating - surging
     inhumanly ...  in  a  grotesque,  malignant  saraband of  fantastic
     nightmare ... I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green,
     though they  had white  bellies.  They  were  mostly  shiny  and
     slippery, but  the ridges  of their  backs were scaly. Their  forms
     vaguely suggested  the anthropoid,  while their  heads were  the
     heads of fish (The Lurking Fear, 150)

which really isn't all that far from the language Lovecraft uses to describe the slum. If anything the Innsmouth creatures are portrayed as more human than the urban ethnic minorities. Its tempting to suggest that Lovecraft's fear of the viscous and of the grotesque is by far exceeded by his fear of the
foreign.
 
'The Dunwich Horror', then, goes beyond human physicality, but is forever dependent upon human frames of reference to delineate its form. Although the creature(s) it describes are composed of the same kinds of fragments as Cthulhu in the preface, the fusion of human and alien blurs the distinction between those fragments. Where Cthulhu was utterly alien - a chain of signifiers that will not fit into a humanly comprehensible whole - the Whateley twins' humanity is shackled to the alien elements of Yog-Sothoth. The progeny of this alien and human mating are, paradoxically, both lessened for us as
aliens, and empowered for us as grotesques.
 
The offspring of Yog-Sothoth are acting as a spearhead for an invasion of the Earth, a
'plan for the extirpation of the entire human race' (The Haunter of the Dark, 103). That the
others gain a foothold in this world by mating with the Whateleys is surely evidence of Lovecraft's loathing of the 'contamination' of Anglo-Saxon blood-stock by what he saw as inferior immigrants. By the alchemy of the imagination, this corrupted blood is transmuted into viscous ichor, a pollution that can only be cleared by extermination. I find this subtext is too strong to ignore, whatever Bloom might say. The human is engulfed by the alien, then destroyed by it.
 
In 'Pickman's Model',  although the objects of awe and terror are still very much 'others', this time they are from the all-too-near edges of this world, rather than the vastness of space. Richard Upton Pickman, a painter, specialises in capturing images that distress and disturb the members of the Boston Art Club where he exhibits. The story's narrator, Thurber,  is a friend of Pickman, who begins his narrative following the painter's mysterious disappearance. He is in possession of more information regarding the disappearance than anyone else, but not at all interested in where his erstwhile friend has gone; indeed the story is only used as an explanation for why Thurber will no longer use the subway.  This 'queer prejudice' (The Haunter of the Dark, 34) is a direct result of his association with Pickman, whose morbid art is, Thurber believes, profound and possessed of genius. Offering a sideways dig at the pulp magazines that were the only market he had for his own work, Lovecraft notes:

    (A)ny magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and
     call it a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a
     great painter can make such a thing really scary  or ring  true.
    That's because only a real artist knows  the actual anatomy of
     of  the  terrible or the physiology of fear  -  the exact sort of
     lines and proportions that connect up with latent  instincts  or
    hereditary memories of fright,  and the proper colour contrasts
     and lighting effects to stir the  dormant  sense of strangeness.
     (ib. 35).

and one feels that Lovecraft is not only talking about painted art here, but also literature. The '
magazine-cover hacks' can just as easily be the 'magazine-story hacks' that abounded during Lovecraft's day, and the 'physiology of fear' is something Lovecraft himself investigated in 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'.
 
The story itself is oddly constructed, building up as it does to a big punch-line: that Pickman's horrific, nightmarish visions are actually copied from life-models. The monsters and ghouls of the story, then, are only shown to us through the windows of Pickman's painture, moderated through the eyes  - and then the narrative - of Thurber. What gives the story its power, and earns it its place in this chapter, is the way the depictions of the monstrous - of the others - is given extra weight through their disguise as works of art. This strategy is one of concealment; it conceals the 'reality' of the monsters beneath the illusion of artifice, and herein lies the strength of the device. An artist's works can exceed the bounds of reality, can depict exterior or interior landscapes and images that are limited only by imagination. When Pickman's paintings exist as art their shocking power is off-set by their artifice: art exaggerates nature, and cannot be trusted to accurately reflect real things. But when Pickman's art is revealed as nature, the monsters are revealed as more than just products of some crazed fevre dream; indeed these are creatures painted from life, they exist in larger and more menacing forms than the ones depicted in Pickman's works. The effect of this is to exponentially increase the power of the subjects of the paintings.

The awful ... blasphemous horror ' of the paintings is defined in the narrative by what it is not: it is not the 'exotic technique ' of Sidney Sime, nor the 'trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi ' of Clark Ashton Smith (all ib. 40) that makes these paintings work, but some other quality that Thurber struggles to find a label for. This 'Daemoniac portaiture' (ib.) depicts the encroachment of awful creatures into human society, where they feed or battle, or teach small children (changelings) how to eat human flesh. These creatures are 'seldom completely human ... roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness .' (ib.) They exist in the margins of society, at its darkest edges and its deepest depths. They prey on humans who stray across their places, and they interact with humanity in ways that Thurber hardly dares mention; the most chilling for Thurber being the changeling - where 'weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal' (ib. 41). That the 'dog-things' (ib.) are the results of this practice disturbs Thurber, although at this point he is still viewing Pickman's works as art. It is not until the final page that Thurber finds the photograph of the thing in the cellar that makes him realize that all the rest of Pickman's paintings are true representations of their subjects too.  Pickman is not only 'a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist' (ib. 43), he is also, possibly, one of the weird
children substituted for a human baby. The monstrous can be concealed by the illusion of art, but also by the individual monster's guile. It is almost as if the 1920's Harlem concern of 'passing' - the black peoples' attempts to pass as white - is being given a contemporaneous twist within Lovecraft's tale; except here the 'blasphemous shapes' of Pickman's possible kin are 'passed' as human. The behaviour of the creatures can be seen as the stereotypical behaviour of the black 'savage': cannibalism, violence, tribal behaviour. Also, and perhaps most tellingly, Pickman lives in an exotic part of the city which few but  the 'foreigners that swarm' its streets (ib. 38) know about. Perhaps, once more, Lovecraft's visions owe their roots to his fear of the non-Caucasian, rather than the viscous.
 
While I am not trying to suggest that all of Lovecraft's monsters are based on his fear of his society being swamped by the flood of immigrants, I do find it interesting that his monsters echo the concerns of the time in such a neat, but hysterical, form.
 
'The Dunwich Horror' and 'Pickman's Model' are by no means the only tales to feature such concerns, it is only space that prevents me from citing many more examples. Maybe Lovecraft's monsters, the things from outside human physicality, are often just distorted reflections of things from within.
 

The Internet buzzes with information about Lovecraft. Scholars swap messages with teenagers whose introduction to Howard Phillips was an epigram on Iron Maiden's 'Live after Death' album. Arguments flare up, ideas are exchanged, even paranoid Lovecraftian fantasies are aired. One thing is certain, Lovecraft's monsters have been translated into the information super-highway's ghosts in the machine.
 
In the world of 'hard copy', Lovecraft is the subject of a regular journal -Lovecraft Studies; and anthology publications such as "The Starry Wisdom". New imprints of his works see the light every year, and writers as diverse as Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard have worked in the Lovecraftian manner.

The cinema has translated his work to varying degrees of success; from the the bizarrely titled Roger Corman film "Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Haunted Palace'" [1963] (actually a version of 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward'); through the eighties 'splatterfests' "Re-Animator" [1986], "From Beyond" [1986], and "Bride of the Re-Animator" [1989]; to the nineties antecedents "Necronomicon" (1994), and "From the Mouth of Madness" (1995), cinema seems to want to show what Lovecraft only hinted at.
 
Lovecraftian creatures, ideas and stylistics permeate the horror genre still. It is hard to overstate Lovecraft's contribution to the genre, just as it is hard to ignore some of his intolerant views. There is a balance to be struck somewhere between the author and his works, but it is sometimes hard to locate. The force of Lovecraft's prose makes this so, and the critic ends up with a mass of contradictions to try to unravel, often unsatisfactorily.
 
In his introduction to The Starry Wisdom , David M. Mitchell wrote:

    (A) large part of Lovecraft's driving force came from the frisson
     he experienced between the  patriarchal  vision  of order,  logic
     and  reason  to  which  he  adhered, and the intruding chaotic,
     female forces from 'outside'  -  forced  both  destructive  and
     redeeming. This paradox was, for him, never resolved and I am
     of the opinion that his occasional misogyny  and ill-considered
     racism both sprang from this gulf  between  these antagonistic
     sides of his personality
     (ed. D. M. Mitchell, 10)

and that was almost the exact same sentiment that I had always planned to end this dissertation with, but the more I have read, the harder it has become to subscribe to this notion any longer. The only way I can soften the blow of reading some of Lovecraft's virulent racist statements is to note that Lovecraft's xenophobia stretched far beyond racism, and was more a fear of strangers, regardless of skin colour.
 
The Poe-esque story "The Outsider" shows us that maybe this fear stretched further, that Lovecraft also feared a much more personal other.

The reflected face of the ghoul in the mirror, the moment when the narrator sees his own monstrousness in the silvered glass, is perhaps Lovecraft's fear of the most terrifying other of all.
 

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