An Eldritch Crisis

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to look at the ways and reasons Lovecraft’s fiction is attuned to today’s climate of ideological crisis. Because Lovecraftian tales are about terrible discoveries that shake the foundations of common-sensical knowledge, they present serious similarities to the ideological turmoil that comes with each crisis of capitalism. By analyzing Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” through Mark Fisher’s work on the weird, T.S. Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigms and Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject, I read the short story as a structural analog of capitalism’s current state of crisis with which it shares a confusion about things that should not exist according to the hegemonic worldview, evidence of a need of finding a new paradigm, and a situation in which these are no longer possible to ignore. This reading of Lovecraft against a capitalist background should help establish the weird tale as a crisis genre, able to resonate easily with times of crisis like the twenty-first century.