IV
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (69)
My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects; and the only reader I hold in mind is myself.
—H. P. Lovecraft, Letter to Edwin Baird (MW 506)
Perhaps it is impossible for a critical attempt to accomplish the same thing as the fiction it criticizes. At best, all that a critical essay—such as Lovecraft’s own “Supernatural Horror in Literature” or the one you are now reading—can offer is the transmission of content, the inessential. That being said, however, what can be done in an essay is attempt to understand how Lovecraft’s stories go beyond mere content. They point to the outside of content, which is where Benjamin’s translation project seems best suited with Lovecraft, particularly since critics have proclaimed Benjamin’s own project an ambiguous and ineffable one:
Thus readers cannot use “The Task of the Translator” as a secondary reference at all, since what it says at any given point is always provisional, and often contradicted elsewhere in the text. To read Benjamin is too hard for anyone to sustain. . . . His writing cannot be narrativized, organized and applied and worked out onto a literary text. As such, it is completely unusable as a theoretical basis for establishing a critical reading. (Fréche 105)
Benjamin’s “unusable” methodology works well with Lovecraft, however, not just because of the apparent symmetry in critical frustration that arises from reading them (a fairly standard trait in postmodern writing, after all), but because invoking the language of Benjamin’s translation allows us to stop looking for meaning in either the Lovecraft “mythos” that has sprung up around his works, or in the apparent connection(s) of those works to the worldview espoused in his letters and essays. Instead, we can look at the fiction in and of itself, in the function and structure of its language.
One aspect of Lovecraft’s fiction that virtually asks to be read in light of Benjamin is its apparent audience. Looking strictly at the text itself, then, who is Lovecraft’s apparent audience, and what does it mean to be not the “intended reader” so often discussed in critical works, but rather to be exactly who we are—some person who, according to the interior structure of the work itself, is an incidental reader who has come upon a text not addressed to them? This shift in critical perspective, if it is not already clear, reveals that Lovecraft’s texts often, and not coincidentally, mirror themselves in structure and content. To wit, a narrator slowly and shockingly discovers that his own projects and values are meaningless, while those who receive that narration similarly find that the message is not even intended for them, revealing their own lack of consequence or relational value.
Both Benjamin and Lovecraft, then, purport that a text is not really written for its receiver; only it is Lovecraft who deliberately enacts this message in his fiction. This structure is best revealed with a look at what Lovecraft considered “my best story,” the novella At the Mountains of Madness (SL 4.24). The text begins out of necessity, “I am forced into speech,” and the rest of the narrative contains the same frantic urgency implied by those first words, not unlike the urgency of a preacher exhorting his congregation to become saved, for it becomes eventually clear that salvation is at stake in the narrative (MM 3). The explicit goal of the narrator is that his story will be read by those who have control over future expeditions to the Antarctic, expeditions that would be disastrous for mankind. However, regardless of when or how the reader first comes upon Lovecraft’s story, that reader is assuredly not one of those expedition organizers. The effect is striking, and one that seems to have been overlooked by a number of critics in the history of Lovecraft’s reception. Not only does any given reader learn of mankind’s ineffective and inconsequential position in the scheme of reality, she learns about it by virtue of a narrative structure that similarly displaces her from being capable of effecting that truth.
Hence, again, the subtle but significant difference between traditional mystical writing and Lovecraft’s negative mysticism is evident. Mysticism offers a displacement of identity and, through that very displacement, the possibility of a future reconciliation with sacred meaning. It invokes a “pure language” lost to history—“In the beginning was the Word”—that promises the “pure presence” of a future reality. The negative mystic, however, reveals that “pure language” is ultimately only a “pure absence,” a referential structure that is always only revealed in an abridgment. In At the Mountains of Madness, the narrator states that his story is such an abridgment, noting, “[the] full story . . . will shortly appear in an official bulletin” (MM 61). Likewise are the sculptured walls of the alien city an abridgment of an ancient race’s history. The translation is but an echo of the original, and as with traditional mysticism, reconciliation with the sacred is always only a promised future event. In the negative mystic experience, however, those who truly glimpse the truth (and not just its sketches), such as unhappy Danforth in the narrative, reach only eventual madness. Revealing that Danforth has seen something that “he will not tell even me,” the narrator evokes signs of absence rather than presence (MM 33).
Lovecraft’s circularity in language and structure is significant, too. Airaksinen discusses Lovecraft’s circularity at length, stating that the circularity emphasizes the sacred quality of Lovecraft’s texts and that Lovecraft’s “major stories are circular such that the snake always eats its own tail, creating the perfect form, a circle, which cannot be doubted or criticized. The form of the text is a holy mystery” (218). It is worth mentioning another detail that emphasizes this combination of circularity and negativity: even the very identity of the Mountains narrator, just like Danforth’s secondhand vision, is revealed only as a secondary textual admission. That is, the reader discovers the narrator’s name, Dyer, not from the primary source of the narrator himself, but as an aside written in a letter within the narration, as Dyer is admonished for “having tried to stop” the fateful trip (MM 22). The narrative, told by a man whose name we know only from the writings of another, gives a preliminary sketch of a race of beings that he himself understands through their artistic productions. When Dyer and Danforth finally both see their pursuer in only a “half-glimpse,” a “flash of semi-vision,” it is discovered that even that fateful, final vision is but a shoggoth (MM 99). As a beast of burden of the Old Ones, the shoggoth is yet another “manufactured” production, rather than a revelation of the thing itself (MM 62).
Within Dyer’s narrative we have yet another detail that reinforces the negative truth of the next. The negative mystic produces a tale of desire, but always of negative desire. As Dyer—who is revealed in the text as a man against the Antarctic project both during and after the initial event—urges that further expeditions not go ahead, he reveals an attitude that is the ultimate negative position: he wants for something not to occur rather than an active positive event. Negative mysticism reveals the signs and symbols of an outside of human availability, but those who receive the message are urged to be content solely in the sign itself, to dwell within an absence that substitutes for a presence, since the coming of that presence would invalidate all meaning whatsoever. This language of negation and deferral is an element that, in an extended sense, is present in a great number of texts that precede Lovecraft, and are part of a tradition that he exemplifies and maintains.
Perhaps it is because of Lovecraft that we can now better understand just how a novel such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk operates. In the gothic Romantic tradition, as in Lovecraft, there are countless epistolary revelations, stories within stories, and secondhand narratives. But besides this distancing of the narrator from event, there is another element of Romanticism that is present in Lovecraft, correspondent with the negative mysticism argued here. For every nineteenth century poem and novel enc
ouraging an encounter with the moral truth of nature and the positive influence of powerful feelings (which is to say, texts that encourage the apotheosis of a mystical encounter) there are cautionary tales in novels, plays, and poems (such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Joanna Baillie’s Orra, among many others) that reveal the madness and despair that will result from such an event.4
In response to extreme emotion and the encounter with the unknown, Lovecraft’s narrators offer negation and deferral. In fact, the entire text itself is offered as that exact deferral; Lovecraft’s narrators are not without their own tools of recuperation, tools designed to offer an alternative for living in relation to madness. Constantly in the text of Mountains, Dyer offers a barrage of seemingly irrelevant facts and figures. It may seem odd that the narrator would be so specific, for example, in providing directions to a place he does not want anyone to visit: “Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 115°,” yet this citation is but one example of many in the text (MM 70). Besides repetitive references to locational directives, Dyer makes use of geological language for descriptions, “Jurassic,” “lower Eocene to upper Cretaceous,” “Pleistocene,” “Pliocene,” “Comanchian,” et al (MM 52, 60, 64, 69, 71). There is no necessary purpose for including these details. In fact, if the purpose of the narrative is to discourage investigation, giving specific locations and tantalizing, groundbreaking geological information is highly inappropriate. This “evidence,” however, can be understood as an effect of the negative mystic impulse. While a traditional mystic eschews the world of reality in favor for a Platonic world of eternal forms, trading the world of man for the world of God, the negative mystic embraces physical details and rational construction as the only possibility of salvation. The reliance on such details in what Roland Barthes calls “presenting the discourse of the real”;5 the text proclaims its own evidential reality and offers that as the authenticity of its meaning (142). Why these details are “negative” is that they act as the focus for a narrator who is attempting to concretize and organize his world. They are the structural referent and binary opposite to the world of madness and dissolution that is embraced in the mystical arena.
V
By using negative mysticism as a paradigm for understanding Lovecraft, and addressing these issues of “translation” in the search for sacred writing, we can perhaps explain, as well, some of the history of Lovecraft’s reception. Glen St. John Barclay is a fine example of a critic who understands Lovecraft’s negative mystical narrators all too well, and perhaps in some perverse sense is one of the few people who actually “reads” Lovecraft correctly—because, unlike most Lovecraft fans and critics, he is truly horrified by what he has read. Barclay writes:
Lovecraft is in fact an essentially tragic and ineffectual figure, possessed of virtually insane prejudices, and almost totally alienated from human sympathies or human experience, who contrived with the aid of a limited imagination to construct thoroughly artificial images intended to be horrific, but lacking any element of physical or psychological credibility to make them convincing. The fact that it is still possible to talk of a Cthulhu Mythos at all is due far less to Lovecraft’s own efforts, than to those of three men without whose interested endeavors Lovecraft himself would be the most unlikely ever to have achieved publication. (91)
Barclay’s reaction to reading the work is to produce a desperate frontal assault on all aspects of Lovecraft’s abilities as a writer. His frenzy reveals that he has encountered the “pure language” that is the goal of the narration. Like a post-Antarctic Dyer, he urges his reader to discontinue his projects, and marshals a great deal of “evidence”— Lovecraft’s poor imagination, insanity, prejudice, etc.—to support his work. After reading Lovecraft, Barclay has, in effect, become a Lovecraftian narrator!
Even some of Lovecraft’s admirers act like his characters. Take, for instance, readers such as August Derleth, who obviously admire yet misinterpret Lovecraft’s work. As Robert M. Price discusses in “Lovecraft’s ‘Artificial Mythology,’” Derleth and others seek to establish a pantheon of gods based on Lovecraft’s fictional entities and, further, to write more stories to flesh out the background “mythos” of this pantheon, “so that Lovecraft’s tales have become merely source documents, raw materials for the systematicians’ art” (247). The characters of Lovecraft’s fictional world, often informed by ancient texts such as the Necronomicon, “see the Old Ones as gods or devils . . . because they refuse to see the terrible truth that the Old Ones are simply beings that do not care about humans” (249). The alien entities are just that: alien entities. Both the writers of texts such as the Necronomicon and the more modern cultists and investigators in Lovecraft’s stories “cannot face the terrible human-minimizing implications of the existence of the overshadowing aliens and take superstitious refuge in religion, deifying the Old Ones as gods” (249). Like Dyer in At the Mountains of Madness (and Barclay), Derleth and his ilk attempt to counter, intentionally or unintentionally, the negative mysticism implied by Lovecraft’s texts. The counter to negative mysticism, naturally enough, is mysticism. So where Lovecraft’s characters fixate on gods and devils, Derleth, et al., likewise fixate on a fictional pantheon to catalog and systematize. The reason for their devotion can be understood as a following of the mystical impulse, albeit a misguided one.
Corresponding to the original argument on translation, it is interesting to note that, according to Price, Derleth’s misinterpretations begin when he attempts to translate Lovecraft’s nonfiction into his fiction. Or, in this case, what he thinks is Lovecraft’s nonfiction. As Price discusses in his article, Derleth bases much of his interpretation of Lovecraft on the now infamous but misappropriated “black magic” quote, where supposedly Lovecraft says his stories are “based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled.” Derleth receives this “quote” second-hand through Harold S. Farnese, who evidently passed on his own translation of Lovecraft’s themes. In a sadly vicious cycle foreshadowed by Benjamin’s theories, Farnese thinks he ascertains the “pure language” of Lovecraft, communicates this to Derleth, who then reinterprets Lovecraft in light of it. This progression, with the chicken ever coming before the egg, further illustrates the dangers of reading any text as an interpretation of another.
Unlike Lovecraft, we do not have the skill to reveal the pure language of the Real, so it seems unlikely that anyone will read this article and become Barclay, or even Derleth, nor would we urge them to do so. Today, the task of the Lovecraft critic is to think about the limits of Lovecraft’s fiction, not to critique his supposed limitations as a writer. In doing so, we will understand what it means to encounter the endpoint of our own thinking, our own projects. The result is a cruel revelation of an inherently meaningless world. But to think otherwise, as Lovecraft’s negative mystics tell us, would be to rush headlong towards the mountains of madness without even knowing that we journey there.
Works Cited
Airaksinen, Timo. The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror. New York: Lang, 1999.
Almond, Ian. “Different Fragments, Different Vases: A Neoplatonic Commentary on Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator.’” Heythrop Journal 43 (2002): 185–98.
Alston, William P. “Literal and Nonliteral in Reports of Mystical Experience.” In Katz, Mysticism and Language. 80–102.
Anderson, James Arthur. “Out of the Shadows: A Structuralist Approach to Understanding the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.” Ph.D. diss.: University of Rhode Island, 1993.
Barclay, Glen St. John. “The Myth That Never Was: Howard P. Lovecraft.” In Anatomy of Horror: The Masters of Occult Fiction. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1978. 81–96.
Barthes, Roland. “Textual Analysis of Poe’s ‘Valdemar.’” Trans. Geoff Bennington. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge, 1981. 133�
�61.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, 1968. 69–82.
Burleson, Donald R. “Lovecraft and Adjectivitis: A Deconstructionist View.” Lovecraft Studies No. 31 (Fall 1994): 22–24.
Clements, David Cal. “Cosmic Psychoanalysis: Lovecraft, Lacan, and Limits.” Ph.D. diss.: State University of New York at Buffalo, 1998.
D’Agati, Deborah. “The Problems with Solving: Implications for Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft Narrators.” Lovecraft Studies Nos. 42/43 (Autumn 2001): 54–60.
Dansky, Richard E. “Transgression, Spheres of Influence, and the Use of the Utterly Other in Lovecraft.” Lovecraft Studies No. 30 (Spring 1994): 5–14.
Fléche, Betsy. “The Art of Survival: The Translation of Walter Benjamin.” SubStance 28, No. 2 (1999): 95–109.
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