Consider this famous quotation from the opening of “The Call of Cthulhu” as quoted by Harman himself in Part Two:
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Thus Harman could argue that HBD may be true but bad for us to know—something very like the actual position of such liberal Comstocks as Richard Lewontin.
Consider, to switch genres, Dr. No. Quarrel, the ignorant, superstitious but loyal native retainer, is afraid to land on Crab Key, due to the presence of a dragon. Bond and his American buddy Leiter mock his fear (Leiter: “Hey Quarrel, if you see a dragon, you get in first and breathe on him. With all that rum in you, he’ll die happy.”) But of course the dragon—which turns out to be a flame-throwing armored tractor—incinerates Quarrel whilst Bond and the equally superstitious but much more toothsome Honey Ryder are taken prisoner. While in this genre we know that Bond is the heroic knight who will ultimately slay the dragon, for now he does seem to be what Dr. No calls him, “just another stupid policeman” who would have done well to listen to the native—not unlike any number of Lovecraft’s educated protagonists.75
This smug assumption that knowledge leaves us safe, and indeed safer, is what Lovecraft is satirizing when the narrator of “Call of Cthulhu” dismisses the warnings of the “excitable Spaniard,” not, as Harman would have it, lampooning “racism” on some meta-level.76
Also, Michel Houllebeq, an author Harman otherwise praises, has emphasized that Lovecraft is anything but self-assured, either as a White man, or for the White race itself.77 If “racism” is able to play the self-debunking role Harman wants it to, this is only because of Lovecraft’s self-doubts, based on his horrific experiences in the already multi-culti New York City of the 1920s, that the White race would be able to survive the onslaught of the inferior but strong and numerous under-men. As Houellebecq says, Lovecraft learned to take “racism back to its essential and most profound core: fear.”
“FASCISTIC SOCIALISM”
On a related point, Harman puts this phrase, from Lovecraft’s last major work, The Shadow out of Time (which he generally dislikes, for reasons we’ll dispute later), in italics with a question mark, and leaves it at that, as if just throwing his hands up and saying “well, I just don’t know!” Alas, this is one of Lovecraft’s most interesting ideas. Like several American men of letters, such as Ralph Adams Cram, Lovecraft concluded that Roosevelt’s New Deal was an American version of Fascism, but, unlike the Chamber of Commerce types who made the same identification, he approved of it for precisely that reason!
More generally, “fascistic socialism” was essentially what Spengler and others of the Conservative Revolution movement in German advocated; for example:
Hans Freyer studied the problem of the failure of radical Leftist socialist movements to overcome bourgeois society in the West, most notably in his Revolution von Rechts (“Revolution from the Right”). He observed that because of compromises on the part of capitalist governments, which introduced welfare policies to appease the workers, many revolutionary socialists had come to merely accommodate the system; that is, they no longer aimed to overcome it by revolution because it provided more or less satisfactory welfare policies. Furthermore, these same policies were basically defusing revolutionary charges among the workers. Freyer concluded that capitalist bourgeois society could only be overcome by a revolution from the Right, by Right-wing socialists whose guiding purpose would not be class warfare but the restoration of collective meaning in a strong Völkisch (“Folkish” or “ethnic”) state.78
But then, Harman would have to discuss, or even acknowledge, ideas that give liberals nose-bleeds.
WEIRD PORN
Harman makes the important distinction that Lovecraft is a writer of gaps, who chooses to apply his talents of literary allusion to the content of horror; but gaps do not exclusively involve horror, and we can imagine writers applying the same skills to other genres, such as detective stories, mysteries, and westerns.79 In fact,
A literary “weird porn” might be conceivable, in which the naked bodies of the characters would display bizarre anomalies subverting all human descriptive capacity, but without being so strange that the erotic dimension would collapse into a grotesque sort of eros-killing horror. (p. 4)
Harman just throws this out, but if it seem implausible, I would offer Michael Manning’s graphic novels as example of weird porn: geishas, hermaphrodites, lizards and horses—or rather, vaguely humanoid species that suggest snakes and horses, rather like Harman’s discussion of Max Black’s puzzle over the gap produced by the proposition “Men are wolves”—create a kind of steam punk/pre-Raphaelist sexual utopia.80
PROLIXITY
Speaking of Lovecraftian allusiveness not being anchored to horror or any particular genre or content, brings us to my chief interest, and chief disagreement, with Harman’s discussion of Lovecraft’s literary technique.
I knew we would have a problem when right from the start Harman adduces The Shadow out of Time as one of Lovecraft’s worst, since this is actually one of my favorites, and the one that first convinced me of his ability to create cosmic horror through the invocation of hideous eons of cosmic vistas. Harman first notes, in dealing with the preceding novella, At the Mountains of Madness, that while the first half would rank as Lovecraft’s greatest work if he had only stopped there, the second half is a huge letdown: Lovecraft seems to descend to the level of pulp content, as he has his scientists go on a long, tedious journey through the long abandoned subterranean home of the Elder Race, reading endless hieroglyphs and giving all kinds of tedious details of their “everyday” life.81
For Harman, “Lovecraft’s decline as a stylist becomes almost alarming here” (p. 225) and will continue—with a brief return to form with “Dreams in the Witch House,” where Harman makes the interesting observation that Lovecraft seems to be weaving in every kind of Lovecraftian technique and content into one grand synthesis— until it ruins the second half as well of Shadow.
In a series of articles here on Counter Currents—soon to be reprinted as part of my next book, The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others—I suggested that not only should Lovecraft’s infamous verbosity no more be a barrier to elite appreciation than the equally deplored but critically lauded “Late Style” of Henry James, but also, and more interestingly, that conversely, we could see James developing that same style as part of an attempt to produce the same effect as Lovecraft’s, which fans call “cosmicism” but which I would rather call cosmic horror (akin to the “sublime” of Burke or Kant).82 Or perhaps: Weird Realism.
While Harman has greatly contributed to a certain micro-analysis of Lovecraft’s style, he seems, like the critics of the Late James, to miss the big picture. Although useful for rescuing Lovecraft from pulp oblivion, he still limits Lovecraft’s significance to either mere literature, or illustrations of Harman’s ontography. I suggest this still diminishes Lovecraft’s achievement.
The work of Lovecraft, like James, has the not inconsiderable extra value, over and above any “literary” pleasure, of stilling the mind by its very longeurs, leaving us open and available to the arising of some other, deeper level of consciousness when the gaps arise.83
But this is not on the table here, because Harman, like all good empiricists (and we are all empiricists today, are we not?) rejects, or misconstrues, the very idea of our having access to a super-sensible grasp of reality that would leap beyond, or between, the gaps; what in the East, and the West until the rise of secularism, would be called intellectual intuition.84
Reality itself is weird because reality itself is incommensurable with any attempt to represent or measure it. Lovecraft is aware of this difficulty to an exemplary degree, and through his ass
istance we may be able to learn about how to say something without saying it—or in philosophical terms, how to love wisdom without having it. When it comes to grasping reality, illusion and innuendo are the best we can do. (p. 51, my italics)
As usual in the modern West, we are to shoulder on as best we can, in an empty, meaningless world, comforted only by patting ourselves on the back for being too grown up, too “smart,” to believe we can not only pursue wisdom, but reach it. As René Guénon put it, it is one of the peculiarities of the modern Westerner to substitute a theory of knowledge for the acquisition of knowledge.85
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
February 28, 2013
MIKE HAMMER, OCCULT DICK:
KISS ME DEADLY AS LOVECRAFTIAN TALE
Kiss Me Deadly (1955; 106 minutes; Black and White)
Director: Robert Aldrich86
Writers: Mickey Spillane (novel), A. I. Bezzerides (screenplay)
Stars: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart , Gaby Rodgers, Jack Elam, Wesley Addy, Strother Martin, Percy Helton, and introducing Cloris Leachman.
“A crack formed and enlarged, and the whole door gave way—but from the other side; whence poured a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven, which, coiling sentiently about the paralysed detective, dragged him through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.”—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook” (Weird Tales, 1927)
“Soberin and Gabrielle are vying for the contents of the box. Gabrielle shoots Soberin, believing that she can keep the mysterious contents for herself. As she slyly opens the case, it is ultimately revealed to be stolen radionuclide material, which in the final scene apparently reaches explosive criticality when the box is fully opened. Horrifying sounds emit from the nuclear material as Gabrielle and the house burst into flames.”—Wikipedia, Kiss Me Deadly87
“The key Mike found led him to something of which he had no comprehension and which will very possibly kill him, and maybe destroy the Earth. He and Gabrielle are caught in a world of meanings that preexist them—culture, science, religion and myth. They proceed as they do in pursuit of something they don’t understand—but think they understand the value others place on it. They are fatally wrong.”88
While recently reading Barton St. Armond’s classic article “H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent,”89 I came to the Lovecraft quote above and had an odd thought: I’ve seen this before!90 Then it hit me: the finest screen adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft occurred already in 1955, and quite unconsciously at that. I suppose that’s the best way, the way it had to be; no bothering with Lovecraft’s purple prose or mythos monsters; just the pure essence of Lovecraftian terror, mixed with a lot of sleaze to keep the marks happy and then sloshed up on the screen. It’s called Kiss Me Deadly.
Here’s a synopsis courtesy of DVD Savant:
Sleazy, cynical detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) makes his living with divorce cases, often unleashing his sexy secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) as an agent provocatrix on straying adulterers. When he picks up naked-under-a-trench coat hitchhiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman, in her first movie) and she’s later tortured to death, Hammer decides to ditch the bedroom work and pursue the secret behind the brutality, purely for profit. His government agent friend Pat Chambers (Wesley Addy) warns him off, but Mike slowly pulls the case apart by threatening witnesses and putting Velda and his best buddy Nick (Nick Dennis) in harm’s way. When the secret turns out to be a mysterious box stolen from a government science lab, Hammer finds out too late that he’s latched onto something far too big, and too hot, to handle.91
This is a Lovecraft tale? Sound absurd? Can you prove it isn’t?92 Consider this from the screenwriter: “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it. It was automatic writing. Things were in the air and I put them in it.”93
Not your usual auteur’s claim of authorship. It’s the usual note of contempt of well-paid Hollywood commie hacks94 for two-fisted American pulp writers, here Mickey Spillane rather than Lovecraft,95 and with the interesting additional note of surrealist writing techniques. As happens in many a horror tale, you don’t have to believe in the Ouija board to conjure up something ugly “in the air” when you play with it.
Although opening to indifferent business, the film has become a legendary noir, ultimately getting a Criterion Collection release a couple years back. Reading all the commentary and fanboy buzz on the net you can’t get far without hearing about how Aldrich and Bezzerides not only had contempt for the material, but wanted to take down the whole Mike Hammer phenomenon, which they seemed to think spelled either the coming of Fascism or the return of the Stone Age.96 The message they seemed to want to deliver—best expressed by Fed pal Pat near the beginning—is surprisingly up-to-date: don’t take the law into your own hands, give up your guns, stop listening to conspiracy theories, and trust—but above all, don’t question—the Feds.
But as I’ve said before, the writer who lets his imagination free is not likely to produce something pleasing to the PC crowd.97
In the case of this film, by portraying Hammer not as Spillane intended—a somewhat more violent, lower-class but still Marlowe-style knight errant—but rather as a psychopathically violent moron, they produced an astounding sleazy and ultra-violent film that barely escaped the box office poison of a “C for condemned” rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency and was cited as a threat to America at the very same Congressional hearings investigating those damned comic books!98
But Hammer is brutish and stubborn, keeping the cops and the feds in the dark even though they keep trying to impress upon him the importance of this case; he doesn’t seem to realize just how far in over his head he is. . . . Hammer’s no hero, and the film’s staggering climax represents his complete failure: his realization of the horrible forces he’s been toying with, followed by a nuclear meltdown from which he barely escapes. And then the film simply ends, with abrupt finality, leaving Hammer as a broken, irrelevant archetype, an out-of-date relic whose time has passed with the relative innocence of the pre-atomic age.99
Once compared with what Aldrich & Co. produced, Spillane’s Hammer did indeed seem more like Marlowe or the Thin Man; the self-sabotage is rather like Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, where the Jewish and American sadism makes the audience sympathize with the Nazi “villains.”100 It’s no surprise to recall how Tarantino already ripped off (or “paid homage to”) KMD’s “glowing what’s-it in the suitcase” McGuffin for Pulp Fiction.101
Still, I need to answer a number of objections you undoubtedly have. First, you might point out that Lovecraft liked to make his protagonists scholars, however oddball, or professors, scientific explorers, or even just wealthy slackers (“The Hound,” “Pickman’s Model”), not thugs like Hammer. Even the “detective” in the quote above is, rather implausibly, a dandy from Trinity College, Dublin who returns to New York to join the police force and investigate occult matters.102
Well, the film picks Hammer up “out of the gutter [he] came from” as the mob boss says (even the mob loathes him; the feds want someone “to open a window” after interrogating him) and tidies him up into “more of a Playboy-inspired dream guy, a proto-James Bond who has to fend off dishy dames with a club.”103 Not that Mike himself is now an effete snob. As the New York Times says: “Mike himself is a sort of cultural caveman, whom Aldrich pointedly surrounds with high art: modern paintings, 19th-century poetry, radios that invariably pour forth classical music whenever Mike switches one on.”104
Like a good post-war consumer, Mike has read all about the “Playboy Philosophy” and has bought all the right toys, from his mid-century modern bachelor pad—complete with wall-mounted, reel-to-reel answering machine105—to his brand-new Corvette; the rest of the surrounding, the “culchah” items, are provided by his clients and informants.106
After m
eeting the Rossetti-spouting Christina, he searches her book-lined apartment—casually stealing the book he needs, of course—and finds out that she “always seemed have [the radio] tuned to that station”—the all-Schubert station, apparently—so the next time Mike’s at home needing to do some hard thinking, sure enough he turns on a radio set to the same station, as if Mike usually listens to string quartets rather than bachelor pad exotica (Brooklyn hipsters from the ‘90s would kill for that so-ironic pad, man). During another “think, damn it” session he asks Velda to read out the poem Christina has marked, presumably to allow him to concentrate on this difficult “thinking” business, but it sure seems as if he could be functionally illiterate.
The final clue falls into his hands at a “modern art” gallery, where, archetypically, he gives away his entrance by walking, caveman that he is, right into and smashing a glass end-table. (I’d love to hear that was a goof Aldrich decided to keep in.)
So while Mike isn’t himself an egghead, he is surrounded by cultural references, which actually is what gives the Lovecraft touch.
Like one of Mad’s parodies, the movie unfolds in a deranged cubist space, amid the debris of Western civilization—shards of opera, deserted museums, molls who paraphrase Shakespeare, mad references to Greek mythology and the Old Testament. A nineteenth-century poem furnishes the movie’s major clue.107
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