Back on the lowest degree of human development, yet congratulating himself like a Monty Python knight on his remarkable and triumphant journey, and rejoicing in the return of his egoic, and egotistical, daylight consciousness.
Finally, we must ask the main question: why is the ghost mutilated?
This is just classic misdirection, as in a magician’s trick. Why are the ghost’s fingers mutilated has absorbed the critics. But if the ghost is some representation of the narrator, then the ghost is like an image in a mirror. If the ghost’s fingers are mutilated, rather than ask “Gee, why are the fingers in the mirror mutilated?” we should ask, “Why are the narrator’s fingers mutilated?”
I would suggest that the spectre in the doorway (the “Thing on the Doorstep” or “Lurker on the Threshold”) is NOT the thing behind the door. Brydon, having fled the chance of reaching the Center, is confronted rather by its inversion, the paltry ego which, however grand in worldly terms, is a sadly limited sight—a mutilation, in fact—in comparison to the fully developed Primordial Man who reigns at the Center. Brydon is far too proud of his single possibility, and perceives the fullness of the Primordial Man as a mutilation rather than the fulfillment of all possibilities.
Rather than standing erect in the primal darkness on the top floor (like the tree, or ithyphallic god, at the Center of the Garden; the “darkness” of course is another traditional symbol-through-inversion, the overwhelming fullness of Universal Manifestation symbolized by darkness, like a strong light that blinds rather than illuminates) he awakens lying flat on the ground, in the morning sun, on the lap of his motherly confidante.
Brydon has in effect chosen to remain on the level he was born—the squares making up the floor of his childhood home—rather than move forward into the center (Primordial Man), nor, consequently, to rise from there to a higher level, eventually actualizing all possibilities of manifestation (Universal Man).56 In the words of E. M. Forster (cited with approval by Camille Paglia): “Maimed creatures alone can breathe in Henry James’ pages—maimed yet specialized.”57
Or, as St. Mark asks, “What would it profit a man to gain the whole world [to say nothing of a real estate development, even one on Irving Place] and to lose his [chance of a fully developed] soul?”
Speaking of the New Testament, Brydon may be fruitfully contrasted with an earlier figure from classic American literature: Melville’s Bartleby. While H. Bruce Franklin58 has explored Bartleby’s parallels to Christ and to Hindu asceticism—transmitted through Emerson’s Transcendentalism—I think we can even more closely identify him with Guénon and Evola’s realized being, who embodies
. . . the style of an impersonal activity; to prefer what is essential and real in a higher sense, free from the trappings of sentimentalism and from pseudo-intellectual super-structures—and yet all this must be done by remaining upright, feeling the presence in life of that which leads beyond life, drawing from it precise norms of behaviour and action.59
Bartleby has gone so far beyond Brydon that he no longer has a house or home at all, living surreptitiously in his employer’s office (one can’t really say “at his job”) and, ultimately, lying in a prison yard and staring at the wall. While Bartleby is famous for his refusal to perform any of his employer‘s tasks with his “I would prefer not to,” he also, at one point, insists that rather than do so he “would prefer to be stationary,” making him functionally identical to the Chakravartin, the Realized Man who rules the universe from his unmoving position at the center.60
Bartleby’s erstwhile employer, who narrates his tale, is clearly a member of what William James would later call the “healthy-minded” and, for all his sympathy and somewhat grudging efforts on Bartleby’s behalf, unable to finally understand him.61 He suggests that Bartleby’s melancholy nature must have been amplified unduly by his tenure in the Dead Letter Office; yet it is precisely this daily confrontation with death, that is, the transience of what Salinger’s Buddy Glass called “this goddamned phenomenal world” that enables one to rise above it. Unlike James’ “discrete” Brydon, Bartleby has confronted death and used that extreme situation to leverage himself into the Center, erect and stationary, at rest as the world revolves around him.62
And his famous, sentimental conclusion—“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”—would better be directed against such all too human specimens as Brydon. As for Bartleby, he has indeed “remain[ed] upright, feeling the presence in life of that which leads beyond life, drawing from it precise norms of behaviour and action.”
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
October 31, 2011
“A GENERAL OUTLINE OF THE WHOLE”
LOVECRAFT AS
HEIDEGGERIAN EVENT
Graham Harman
Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012
A winter storm in NYC is less the Currier and Ives experience of upstate and more like several days of cold slush, more suggestive—and we’ll see that suggestiveness will be a very key term—of Dostoyevsky than Dickens.
On a purely personal level, such weather conditions I privately associate63 with my time—as in “doing time”—at the small Canadian college (fictionalized by fellow inmate Joyce Carol Oates as “Hilberry College”64) where a succession of more or less self-pitying exiles from the mainstream—from Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan to the aforementioned Oates—suffered the academic purgatory of trying to teach, or even interest, the least-achieving students in Canada in such matters as Neoplatonism and archetypal psychology.65
One trudged to ancient, wooden classrooms and consumed endless packs of powerful Canadian cigarettes, washed down with endless cups of rancid vending machine coffee. No Starbucks for us, and no whining about second-hand smoke. We were real he-men back then! There was one student, a co-ed of course, who did complain, and the solution imposed was to exile her—exile within exile!—to a chair in the hallway, like a Spanish nun allowed to listen in from behind a grill.
Speaking of Spain, one of the damned souls making his rounds was a little, goateed Marrano from New York, via Toronto’s Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, no less, who was now attempting to explain Husserl and Heidegger, to “unpack” with his tiny hands what he once called, with an incredulous shake of the head, “that incredible language of his,” to his sullen and ungrateful students.66
I thought of this academic Homunculus, who played Naphta to another’s Schleppfuss67 in my intellectual upbringing, when this book made its appearance in my e-mail box one recent, snowing—or slushy—weekend. For Harman wants to explain Husserl and Heidegger as well, or rather, his own take on them, which I gather he and a bunch of colleagues have expanded into their own field of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) or Speculative Realism. And to do so, he has appropriated the work of H. P. Lovecraft, suggesting that Lovecraft play the same role of philosophical exemplar in his philosophy, as Hölderlin does in Heidegger’s.
“That incredible language of his” indeed!
Part One tries to explain this Object Oriented business, but only after he tries to justify or excuse dealing with someone still often regarded as a glorified pulp hack on the same level with the great Hölderlin. He tries to short-circuit the attacks of highbrow critics, still exemplified by Edmund Wilson’s, by denouncing their rhetorical strategy of paraphrase.
Paraphrase? What’s wrong with that? Perfectly innocent, what? Well, no. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the “stupidity of content”—the equal plausibility of any proverb, say, and its opposite—Harman insists that nothing can be paraphrased into something else—reality is not itself a sentence, and so it is “is too real to be translated without remainder into sentences” (p. 16, my italics). Language can only allude to reality.
What remains left over, resistant to paraphrase, is the background or context that gave the statement its meaning.68 Paraphrase, far from harmless or obvious, is packed with metaphysical baggage—such as the assumption th
at reality itself is just like a sentence—that enables the skilled dialectician to reduce anything to nonsensical drivel.
Harman gives many, mostly hilarious, examples of “great” literature reduced to mere “pulp” through getting the Wilson treatment. (Perhaps too many—the book does tend to bog down from time to time as Harman indulges in his real talent for giving a half dozen or so increasing “stupid” paraphrases of passages of “great” literature.)69
Genre or “pulp” writing is itself the epitome of taking the background for granted and just fiddling with the content, and deserves Edmund Wilson’s famous condemnation of both its horror and mystery genres. But Lovecraft, contra Wilson, is quite conscious, and bitingly critical, of the background conditions of pulp—both in his famous essays on horror and, unmentioned by Harman, his voluminous correspondence and ghost-writing—and thus ideally equipped to manipulate it for higher, or at least more interesting, purposes.
The pulp writer takes the context for granted (the genre “conventions”) and concentrates on content—sending someone to a new planet, putting a woman in charge of a space ship, etc.70 If Lovecraft did this, or only this, he would indeed be worthy of Wilson’s periphrastic contempt. But Lovecraft is interested in doing something else: “No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess” (p.3, my italics).
Since philosophy is the science of the background, Lovecraft himself is to this extent himself a philosopher, and useful to Harman as more than just a source of fancy illustrations: “Lovecraft, when viewed as a writer of gaps between objects and their qualities, is of great relevance for my model of object oriented ontology” (p. 4).
Back, then to Harman’s philosophy or his “ontography” as he calls it. I call it Kantianism, but I’m a simple man. The world presents us with objects, both real (Harman is no idealist) and sensuous (objects of thought, say), which bear various properties, both real (weight, for example) and sensuous (color, for example). Thus, we have real and sensuous objects, as well as the real and sensuous qualities that belong to them … usually.
All philosophers, Harman suggests, have been concerned with one or another of the gaps that occur when the ordinary relations between these four items fail. Some philosophers promote or delight in some gap or other, while others work to deny or explain it away. Plato introduced a gap between ordinary objects and their more real essences, while Hume delighted in denying such a gap and reducing them to agglomerations of sensual qualities.
Harman, in explicitly Kantian fashion this time, derives four possible failures (Kant would call them antinomies). Gaps can occur between a real object and its sensuous qualities, a real object and its real qualities, a sensuous object and its sensuous qualities, and a sensuous object and its real qualities. Or, for simplicity, RO/SQ, RO/RQ, SQ/SO, and SO/RQ.
Take SQ/SO. This gap, where the object’s sensuous qualities, though listed, Cubist-like, ad nauseam, fail, contra Hume, to suggest any kind of objective unity, even of a phenomenal kind—the object is withdrawn from us, as Heidegger would say. It occurs in a passage such as the description of the Antarctic city of the Elder Race:
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism. (At the Mountains of Madness, my italics)
SQ/RO? This Kantian split between an object’s sensuous properties and what its essence is implied to be, occurs in the classic description of the idol of Cthulhu:
If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. (“The Call of Cthulhu,” my italics)
SO/RQ? Harman admits it’s rare in Lovecraft, (and elsewhere, though he finds hints of it in Leibnitz) but he finds a few examples where scientific investigation reveals new, unheard of properties in some eldritch or trans-Plutonian object.
In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. (“Dreams in the Witch House”)
And RO/RQ? You don’t want to know, as Lovecraft’s protagonists usually discover too late. It’s the inconceivable object whose surface properties only hint at yet further levels of inconceivable monstrosity within. Usually, Lovecraft relies on just slapping a weird name on something and hinting at the rest, as in
[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes. (Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath)
You can see, in each case, how the horrific effect, and the usability for Harman’s ontography, would entirely disappear if given a Wilsonian “paraphrase”: It was a squid with wings! The object, when analyzed, revealed new, hitherto unknown elements!
Confused yet? Bored? Don’t worry. The whole point of Harman’s book, to which he devotes the vast portion of the text, is analyzing passages from Lovecraft that provide vivid illustrations of one or more of these gaps. In this way Harman’s ontography acquires its Hölderlin, and Lovecraft is rescued from pulp purgatory.
While there is considerable interest in Heidegger on alt-Right sites such as this one,71 I’m sure there is considerably more general interest in Lovecraft. But Harman’s whole book is clearly and engagingly written, avoiding both oracular obscurity and overly-chummy vulgarity; since Harman is admirably clear even when discussing himself or Husserl, no one should feel unqualified to take on this unique—Lovecraftian?—conglomeration of philosophy and literary criticism.
The central Part Two is almost 200 pages of close readings of exactly 100 passages from Lovecraft. As such, it exhibits a good deal of diminishing returns through repetition, and the reader may be forgiven for skipping around, perhaps to their own favorite parts. And there’s certainly no point in offering my own paraphrases!
Nevertheless, over and above the discussion of individual passages as illustrations of Speculative Realism, Harman has a number of interesting insights into Lovecraft’s work generally. It’s also here that Harman starts to reveal some of his assumptions, or biases, or shall we say, context.
“RACISM”
Harman, who, word on the blogs seems to be, is a run-of-the-mill liberal rather than a po-mo freak like his fellow “European philosophers,”72 tips his hand early by referring dismissively to criticism of Lovecraft as pulp b
eing “merely a social judgment, no different in kind from not wanting one’s daughter to marry the chimney sweep” (“Preliminary Note”). And we know how silly that would be! So needless to say, Lovecraft’s forthright, unmitigated, non-evolutionary (as in Obama’s “My position on gay marriage has evolved”) views on race need to be disinfected if Harman is to be comfortable marrying his philosophy to Lovecraft’s writing.
His solution is clever, but too clever. Discussing the passage from “Call of Cthulhu” where the narrator—foolishly as it happens—dismisses a warning as coming from “an excitable Spaniard” Harman suggests that the racism of Lovecraft’s protagonists73 adds an interesting layer of—of course!—irony to them. As so often, we the reader are “smarter” than the smug protagonist, who will soon be taken down a few pegs.
But this really won’t do. Lovecraft’s protagonists are not stupid or uninformed, but rather too well-informed, hence prone to self-satisfaction that leads them where more credulous laymen might balk. “They’s ghosts in there, Mister Benny!”
Unfortunately for Harman, Lovecraft was above all else a Scientist, or simply a well-educated man, and the Science of his day was firmly on the side of what today would be called Human Biodiversity or HBD.74 Harman may, like most “liberals” find that distasteful, something not to be mentioned, like Victorians and sex—a kind of “liberal creationism” as it’s been called—but that’s his problem.
It would be more interesting to adopt a truly Lovecraftian theme and take his view, or settled belief, that Science, or too much Science, was bad for us; just as Copernicus etc. had dethroned man for the privileged center of the God’s universe, the “truth” about Cthulhu and the other Elder Gods—first, there very existence, then the implication that they are the reality behind everyday religions—has a deflationary, perhaps madness inducing, effect.
The Eldritch Evola & Others Page 5
