The Poetics of Sound in H. P. Lovecraft’s Literature on the Example of the Story The Outsider

Abstract

The reality in the works of H. P. Lovecraft is described as strange, inhumanistic, and alien to the mankind but it is not mystical. On the contrary, the creations and events described by the writer are presented as material facts of the world. In modern philosophy following Graham Harman this view of the world is called weird-realism or weird-materialism. This paper explores one of the media used in building Lovecraft’s ontology and proposes a philosophical and cultural analysis of the new concept of The Sound Out of Space in Lovecraft studies to describe the audial medium of the weirdontology and weird-epistemology of H. P. Lovecraft. The name of the concept should refer to the headline of the famous work of the writer The Colour Out of Space (1927). The concept in the text is presented through the poetics of sound, which is the whole set of ways of representing the audial field. The article consists of the introduction with a brief historical overview, the methodological study of sound as an otherworldly medium, sound mapping of the story The Outsider (1921), the analysis of the narrative meaning of sound, discussion of the results gathered and the conclusion. The research hypothesis assumes that different media of the Lovecraftian weird-materialism have different properties and implement different modes of access to the truth of weird-reality, and their understanding can add something new to the knowledge about the strange ontology of the writer. The authors develop a phenomenological typology of sound adapting the methodology of Michel Chion and embedding it into the context of the poetics of the Lovecraftian universe. The resulting three groups of sounds represented by six types of sounds are used to describe the concept and are applied to the story The Outsider. The results show a remarkable distribution of certain types of referenced sounds within the plot composition of the story. This makes it possible to supplement the ideas about the features of the world of the story and the internal state of the protagonist, as well as to interpret the denouement of the plot more fully in the context of Lovecraft's epistemology. The poetics of Lovecraft's sound is closely connected with other means of representing the strangeness of reality, its weird-materiality. At the same time, sound as a unique medium offers specific opportunities for creating artistic images, an atmosphere, and displaying the writer's philosophical intention. This strategy of sound research of a literary text can be applied to other literary works.