The Dish

Charles Baxter explores the persistent appeal – as well as persistent racism and misogyny – of H.P. Lovecraft. He considers how his fiction represents faith, writing that “what accompanies Lovecraft’s depictions of living death is a fundamental conviction that there is something wrong with the whole idea of resurrection, mostly because there is something wrong with life itself. The greatest hope of Christianity is, in these stories, a terrible outcome fervently to be avoided”:

His three best stories, “The Colour Out of Space,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Dunwich Horror,” can all be read as inversions of Christian themes, as Houellebecq first noted. “The Colour Out of Space” contains a travesty of the Pentecost, “The Dunwich Horror” a travesty of the Incarnation, and “At the Mountains of Madness” a travesty of resurrection, which also appears elsewhere in graveyard-kitsch form in “Herbert West: Reanimator.” Whenever anybody or anything is brought back to life in a Lovecraft story, the resurrection is always botched, and the return to life is catastrophic. Since life itself is a form of sleepwalking anyway, the descent of the “foul” Pentecostal flame in “The Colour Out of Space” can only bring more destruction and misery, the God of these stories being a malicious trickster.

As for the afterlife, or the life to come, the unlucky resurrected ones dwell in various subbasements and oubliettes where they give off “a deep, low moaning” that is “hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities.”

In Lovecraft, all the eternities are desolate. When not made out of spare parts and jolted to life by electrical means, the resurrected are hidden away, “leaping clumsily and frantically up and down at the bottom of [a] narrow shaft.” This is not just the depiction of horror but of genuine suffering, the suffering of those perpetually imprisoned and unable to die.

Haunted by the failure of death that can result in zombiism, the stories repeatedly quote “the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred”: “That is not dead which can eternal lie,/And with strange aeons even death may die,” an utterance not of hope but of inconsolable despair. Like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the stories are haunted by death-in-life and by the prospect of a life after this one that may be even worse than the one you have now.

Chloe Schama explains what it felt like to find herself in her ex’s novel:

I stayed up late that night and finished the manuscript, reading with a strange sense of honor. Isn’t it every woman’s fantasy, to some extent, to be someone’s muse — to feel as though her beauty, intelligence, and grace are so extraordinary that they inspire not just devotion but art? I’d never admit to desiring celebrity, but that doesn’t mean that I’d turn down the chance to be immortalized — or at least captured for a moment — by someone else. At art museums, I’ve always played a game: Matisse or Picasso, Manet or Degas, Rembrandt or Rubens — whom would I prefer to sit for?

But there was horror mixed with the honor. I’d never asked myself: Bellow or Roth, Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? It seemed too terrifying to be made three-dimensional — to be faced with someone else’s portrait of your psyche. If the depiction seems to miss the mark, but includes just enough to make you recognizable, then you’d have to wage an endless personal PR campaign with anyone who came in contact with the text: No, reader, you don’t know me. But if the novel contained some shades of truth — perhaps the attributes you don’t share widely (aren’t they always the most compelling?) — then you face an even scarier prospect: Yes, reader, you know parts of me before we’ve ever met.

On a related note, Karley Sciortino considers why, aside from the allure of being a muse, many of us romanticize the idea of dating artists:

Last winter, Bret Easton Ellis had Kanye West as a guest on his podcast, and part of their conversation centered around the reality of being someone who creates things. Kanye mentioned that he felt particularly self-aware of the artist’s tendency to oscillate between periods of inflated ego and periods of self-loathing. It’s an intense life — there’s the pain of creation, padded by periods of downtime where one feels compelled to escape reality. And stereotypically, sex and drugs have been sedatives for that intensity. But that oscillation can make for a charged romantic relationship. One minute the artist appears so amazing and confident that you can’t help but open your legs, and the next minute they suddenly plummet and become vulnerable and insecure, and need you to open your arms to comfort them. In my experience, despite the fact that artists think they want to be with someone smart and critical, who challenges them — deep down most really just want to be babied. And this is why the artist is appealing not only to those seduced by rebellion and celebrity. It’s also attractive to the nurturing type. Some people love a fixer-upper.

The New Republic recently retrieved from their archives a classic essay by W.H. Auden on Freud’s enduring insights. Auden, writing in 1952, claimed that even if his specific theories were disproven, Freud “would still tower up as the genius who perceived that psychological events are not natural events but historical and that, therefore, psychology as distinct from neurology, must be based on the pre-suppositions and methodology, not of the biologist but of the historian.”

As a child of his age who was consciously in a polemic with the “idealists” he may officially subscribe to the “realist” dogma that human nature and animal nature are the same, but the moment he gets down to work, every thing he says denies it. In his theories of infantile sexuality, repression, etc., he pushes back the beginnings of free-will and responsibility earlier than even most theologians had previously dared; his therapeutic technique of making the patient relive his past and discover the truth for himself with a minimum of prompting and interference from the analyst (meanwhile, one might add, doing penance by paying till it hurts), the importance of Transference to the outcome of the therapy, imply that every patient is a unique historical person and not a typical case.

Freud is not always aware of what he is doing and some of the difficulties he gets into arise from his trying to retain biological notions of development when he is actually thinking historically.

For example, he sometimes talks as if civilization were a morbid growth caused by sexual inhibition; at other times he attacks conventional morality on the grounds that the conformists exhaust in repression the energies which should be available for cultural tasks: similarly, he sometimes speaks of dream symbolism as if it were pure allegory, whereas the actual descriptions he gives of the dreaming mind at work demonstrate that, in addition to its need to disguise truth, it has an even greater need to create truth, to make historical sense of its experience by discovering analogies, an activity in which it shows the most extraordinary skill and humor. In a biological organism, everything was once something else which it now no longer is, and change is cyclical, soma-germasoma; a normal condition is one that regularly reoccurs in the cycle, a morbid one is an exception. But history is the realm of unique and novel events and of monuments—the historical past is present in the present and the norm of health or pathology cannot be based on regularity.

(Photo of Freud in 1872 at age 16, with his mother Amalia, via Wikimedia Commons)