Lovecraft and Matters of Weird Realism: Decadence, Architecture, and Alien Materiality

Abstract

Lovecraft and Matters of Weird Realism: Decadence, Architecture, and Alien Materiality Hisup Shin (bio) Lovecraft and Weird Architecture In linking H. P. Lovecraft with the resurgence of realism in recent years critics often highlight the writer’s capacity to imagine a landscape that shares no physical properties with the world we inhabit. The utter shock and disbelief voiced by his narrators at the end of his stories reflects their struggle to make sense of a cache of strange shapes, things, and perspectives populating the Lovecraftian fantasy landscape. For Graham Harman, the language of cognitive dissonance in the face of shocking encounters is not merely a rhetorical accoutrement of supernatural genre fiction but an important index of what he calls “weird realism,” a type of realist representation instigated by a sense of a “reality too real to be translated without remainder into any sentence, perception, practical action, or anything else.”1 In this view, the “remainder” is what emerges from the encounters after language fails, a kind of ghostly presence of thing-in-itself shimmering between the lines, so to speak, “the very embodiment of an anti-pulp writer.”2 For all its quirky novelty value, weird realism continues European modern realism, which Erich Auerbach famously articulates by tracing a line of stylistic development from Stendhal through Balzac to Flaubert, in its pursuit of the unmediated thingness of the world. Narrative in this development is, according to Auerbach, represented as a level of unmediated observation in which “every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could.”3 In referring to Flaubert’s style as the culmination of realist development, Auerbach suggests that writing can become a vehicle for accurate representation by doing away with its symbolic or mythical [End Page 51] characters.4 What weird realism latches onto and radicalizes is this possibility of pure expression, where language can potentially catch a glimpse of thing-in-itself glimmering in the shadow of knowledge and appearances where it resides because it is dislodged from anthropomorphic ways of thinking and describing. Furthermore, at a time when global capitalism and industrialization are identified as the culprit of a series of planetary crises from biodiversity depletion to global warming, the attempt to push such a realist agenda is not just a literary goal but part of a broadly conceived multidisciplinary effort to heighten our awareness of the ailing planet. The question of whether we humans as a species are able to modify our predatorial modes of existence by reconfiguring the way we relate to the world has been the subject of range of inquires across the humanities and physical and social sciences. The growing interest in Lovecraftian supernatural horror as an important development in twentieth-century US modernism reflects in part the renewed attention to the capacity of literature and arts to imagine a world beyond the instrumental or exploitative frame of human perception and “conducts.” What weird realism offers, then, is a “reconfiguration” of the ailing planet: this planet expresses its own volition through flooding, wildfire, and other shocking, often sublime environmental events rather than silently suffering at the claws of industrial and economic modernization. As one recent critic puts it, the current onslaught of planetary woes, the sign of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, is “an opportunity to embrace a new ontology” that requires us to “reconfigure our orientation to the material world.”5 It is this new ontology that weird realism aims to represent, a realism that disowns the idea of the human mind as the frame of knowledge and instead regards things themselves as actors enmeshed in a dynamic, often complex web of relationality that goes beyond human measures and interest: “The question is no longer, ‘what must the mind be like for X to be possible?’. . . but rather, ‘what must the world be like for X to be possible?’”6 Taking a cue from this ontological approach, this essay explores what Mark Gages terms “the existence of an architecture” in Lovecraft’s writing that is “curious” and “strange” and that challenges notions...