New critical essays on H. P. Lovecraft

Abstract

David Simmons (ed.), New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)Is H. P. Lovecraft an 'Outsider No More?', David Simmons asks in his introduction, so titled to reflect the unease with which the 'respectable' academic approaches a writer who has been treated with little more than derision for most of his posthumous career. Simmons's inquiry sensibly acknowledges that those taking Lovecraft's work seriously are still on the back foot, while the anthology itself makes a further contribution to the gradual yet steady repositioning of Lovecraft's work from paraliterary curiosity to canonical credibility: his writing is now to be found on the shelf of your local Waterstones in Oxford University Press, Penguin Classics, and Vintage Classics editions.The essays contained in this anthology ably demonstrate why this shift in his reputation has occurred in the first place: Lovecraft's weird tales are an amazingly fecund resource for scholarship, reflecting as they do a squirming, tentacular mess of twentieth-century neuroses, modernist angst, and philosophical shock. Those ignoring Lovecraft's oeuvre based on the unexamined claim that he is a 'bad writer' are missing out on an author whose unique take on the weird tale not only precipitated a paradigm shift in genre fiction, but contorted into numerous fantastical and compelling shapes the many anxieties of his age.The book is divided into two sections, each containing six articles contributed by a variety of authors. Simmons opens Section One, 'Lovecraft and His Fiction', with an examination of 'abject hybridity' in Lovecraft, especially as applicable to Lovecraft's racism, which Simmons suggests is a valence of his more fundamental nihilism. Simmons identifies manifold negotiations operating in tales including 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family' and 'Under the Pyramids'. These evidence his assertion that when Lovecraft's indifferentist philosophy, or 'Cosmicism', is 'considered alongside the abject, it becomes an interesting means of suggesting that the ostensibly prejudicial elements of Lovecraft's fiction warrant a decidedly more complex analysis than to merely be labelled racist' (p. 19). In the subsequent essay, 'Lovecraft's Liminal Women', Gina Wisker takes a similarly non-reductive look at representations of the female in Lovecraft's stories, asserting that while there is a 'fascination with women as a source of disruption and disorder' in Lovecraft's work, his focus is (typically) miscegenation rather than simple misogyny (p. 31). As she asserts, female figures consorting with 'the alien Other' represent the potentiality for 'degeneracy and the end of humanity as we know it' (p. 51). In 'The Hysterical Female Gothic', Sara Williams narrows the focus to one tale, 'The Dreams in the Witch House', and thoroughly mines the rich Oedipal seams running through that text's delirious body horror. This opening triptych of essays demonstrates a far more productive engagement with Lovecraft than a mere kneejerk dismissal of his work based on political squeamishness.In 'Slime and the Western Man', Gerry Carlin and Nicola Allen situate Lovecraft within wider modernism. The justification they use is a suggestive one: 'the dissolution of time' associated with both modernism and with Lovecraft is 'a great leveller, reducing man to imagined or actual oblivion at the turn of the page, and rendering barriers between high and low art, modernist literature and popular genre fiction, the greatest inconsequence of all' (pp. 73, 88). The next two essays are close readings of two of Lovecraft's most celebrated tales. In 'Lovecraft's Mirages', Robert Waugh takes a fine-tooth comb to At the Mountains of Madness. He investigates Lovecraft's use of optical hallucination and the phenomenon of 'looming', which disorients polar explorers with darkly foreboding misperceptions of indistinct and exaggerated land masses on the horizon. …