Out of the Shadows: A Structuralist Approach to Understanding the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

The Milford Series

Popular Writers of Today

ISSN 0163-2469

Volume Seventy-Five

Copyright © 2011 by James Arthur Anderson

Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

DEDICATION

To the three wonderful women in my life: my mother, Ruth M. Anderson; my sister, Elaine Clark; and my wife, Lynn Llorye Anderson.

PREFACE, by S. T. Joshi

The story of how H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) emerged from being a mere pulp hack to being on the cusp of literary and academic respectability is a weird tale as bizarre as anything he ever wrote. In his declining years he appears to have become grimly resigned to the realization that his tales would find a merited oblivion in the already crumbling pages of the pulp magazines in which they had appeared. The dilemma facing Lovecraft was that his work was out of step both with the dominant social realism of the mainstream magazines as well as the stilted and mechanical formulas of the pulps. His best work was rejected by pulp editors who could not pigeonhole it in within their narrow parameters, but there was not the slightest chance that it could find a home in the slick magazines of the day. Accordingly, Lovecraft became increasingly discouraged with the development of his own career; unusually, and inexplicably, sensitive to rejection, he came to conclude toward the end of his life that the rejection by Weird Tales of At the Mountains of Madness (and, perhaps more relevantly, the unfavorable response it received from some of his closest colleagues) did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career (SL V 224). It is scarcely to be wondered that Lovecraft’s half-dozen attempts to negotiate book deals with major publishers all came to naught, marred by his inexperience in literary marketing, his excessive humility, and his incomprehensible refusal to offer a perfectly good short novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for publication.

The resurrection of Lovecraft’s work by his devoted friends, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, is too well-known to rehearse. That these two colleagues—one of whom never met Lovecraft in the flesh, the other of whom met him only fleetingly at wide intervals—would form a publishing company initially devoted to the sole purpose of issuing Lovecraft’s work seems to be a scenario unparalleled in literary history. In addition, Lovecraft was posthumously compelled to rely on the kindness of strangers—those many fans who diligently scoured amateur journals, pulp magazines, and fan publications for his fugitive writings, and who made the first tentative overtures at critical analysis. Dr. James Anderson is correct in believing that their efforts, although on occasion valuable, were marred by a certain lack of academic rigor.

All this changed—somewhat—in the 1970s, when a new generation of Lovecraft scholars emerged with a single-minded determination to raise the level of appreciation of Lovecraft and his work. But even these scholars were in many cases outside the academic mainstream. Even those who were professors—preeminently Dirk W. Mosig, whose relatively few years of work in the early 1970s planted the seeds for much of the Lovecraft scholarship of the last three decades—were not in the conventional humanities disciplines one might expect. Mosig was a professor of psychology; Donald R. Burleson, whose two books and many articles have made him a pioneering Lovecraft interpreter, was initially a professor of mathematics. I myself was trained in the study of Latin, Greek, and ancient philosophy, although I have found these disciplines of great value in placing Lovecraft within the context of literary and intellectual history. Other scholars, such as Peter Cannon, David E. Schultz, and Steven J. Mariconda, were outside the academic arena altogether.

The work of these and other scholars culminated in the Lovecraft Centennial Conference at Brown University in August 1990, a gathering that attracted participants from around the world. At last, a leading university had given its imprimatur to the study of Lovecraft. Slowly, attitudes in the academy began to change. When Burleson’s challenging deconstructionist study, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (1990), appeared, a brief review in American Literature (the flagship journal for the academic study of American writing) noted: It’s getting to where those who still ignore Lovecraft will have to go on the defensive. Since 1990, work on Lovecraft appears devoted largely to unearthing his lesser-known writings—especially his letters—and to the dissemination of his tales. My three editions of Lovecraft with Penguin Classics presents all his major fiction in corrected and annotated texts. To be sure, Lovecraft will not become a classic merely because a publisher says so, but the tide seems definitely to have turned. Articles on Lovecraft have recently appeared in Extrapolation, Neophilologus, Paradoxa, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and other standard academic venues. Victoria Nelson’s dense chapter on Lovecraft in The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2002) is perhaps an augury of what we can expect in the future—a sophisticated attempt to incorporate Lovecraft the man (or, perhaps more accurately, the cultural icon) and the writer within the realms of American and world civilization.

But, as Dr. Anderson’s book keenly demonstrates, there is still much room for interpretation of the basic thrust of Lovecraft’s stories. In his lucid, concise analyses he has shown how felicitously the critical methodology of structuralism can be used to illuminate the complexities of Lovecraft’s richly textured work. But Anderson is wise to use an eclectic mix of critical approaches, demonstrating his awareness that a single hermeneutic has inevitable limitations that can result in critical blindness. Anderson’s thorough familiarity with Lovecraft’s texts (essays and letters as well as stories) and with the best scholarship on Lovecraft is evident on every page of his book, and the fluidity with which he weaves together different critical approaches into a unified commentary is enviable. Because Lovecraft’s work is so at odds, both in matter and in manner, with what has come to be regarded as the classic American literature of the first three decades of the twentieth century, an approach like Anderson’s is necessary to show that Lovecraft in his way can lay claim to being a classic himself.

And yet, the real test of a classic is not the amount of critical commentary an author generates, whether in or out of the academy, but the degree to which his work affects the thoughts and lives of a wide array of literate readers over many generations. By that test, Lovecraft has already achieved a respected place in the canon of American literature. It now remains only to clarify the exact contours of that status by the explication of his best work. In that task, James Anderson has made an exemplary contribution.

S. T. Joshi

CHRONOLOGY OF H. P. LOVECRAFT’S LIFE

1890 August 20: H. P. Lovecraft born in Providence, RI.

1893 Lovecraft’s father committed to Butler Hospital.

1898 Father dies

1904 Death of grandfather Whipple V. Phillips.

1904 Attends Hope High School

Moves to 454 Angell Street

1906 Astronomy column in Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner

1908 Nervous condition prevents graduation from high school

1908-1913 Period of seclusion at home.

1912 First published verse Providence in 2000 A.D., in Providence Evening Bulletin.

1914 Joins United Amateur Press Association

1917 Volunteers for R.I. National Guard and is rejected for health reasons.

The Tomb and Dagon.

1919 Mother institutionalized

Attends lecture by Lord Dunsany in Boston.

Writes The White Ship.

1920 Begins correspondence with F. B. Long

Celephais and From Beyond.

1921 Mother dies.

Meets Sonia Greene in Boston

The Outsider and The Music of Erich Zann.

The Nameless City.

1922 First visits NY City and Marblehead.

Begins correspondence with Clark Ashton Smith.

Visits Galpin and Loveman in Cleveland.

The Lurking Fear.

1923 First story to Weird Tales. The Rats in the Walls.

1924 Marries Sonia Greene in NY. Moves to Brooklyn. Turns down editorship of Weird Tales. Searches for work.

The Shunned House.

1925 Sonia leaves for Cincinnati, then Cleveland.

The Horror at Red Hook.

He, and In the Vault.

1926 Returns to Providence at 10 Barnes St.

Begins correspondence with August Derleth.

The Call of Cthulhu, The Silver Key, Pickman’s Model.

1927 The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath completed.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

The Colour Out of Space.

First anthology appearance—The Horror at Red Hook.

Included in 3rd volume of British Not at Night series.

1928 Travels through Vermont and Mass.

Brief reunion with Sonia.

The Dunwich Horror.

1929 Divorce granted; fails to file final papers.

1930 The Mound completed.

Fungi from Yuggoth completed.

The Whisperer in the Darkness.

Begins correspondence with R.E. Howard.

Trip to Quebec.

1931 At the Mountains of Madness.

The Shadow over Innsmouth.

Trip to Florida.

1932 Visits E. Hoffmann Price in New Orleans.

Death of Lillian D. Clark.

The Dreams in the Witch House.

1933 Moves to College Street with Annie Gamwell.

Through the Gates of the Silver Key completed.

The Thing on the Doorstep.

1934-35 Stays with Robert H. Barlow in Florida.

The Shadow out of Time.

The Haunter of the Dark.

1936 The Shadow over Innsmouth published by small press.

1937 Dies on March 15 of colon cancer.

INTRODUCTION

Although Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is generally recognized as one of the world’s finest writers of horror and science fiction, his work has received little critical attention outside the genres to which it has conveniently been categorized. While some excellent critical work has been accomplished in Lovecraft studies, it has, for the most part, been written by dedicated amateurs and fans rather than by mainstream scholars and critics, who tend to avoid the genre-type work of Lovecraft and his peers (Cannon, 24). As a result, the study of Lovecraft has been forced into the shadows of literary criticism, where it has become more closely associated with science fiction and horror than with the study of more privileged kinds of literature.

There are, in fact, many who would say that Lovecraft should remain in the shadows, that his work is strictly hack writing designed for the pulp magazines of his time. Critics such as Edmund Wilson have ridiculed Lovecraft’s concocted myth (47) and fantastic ideas, while praising the realistic work of his contemporaries (Hemingway, Dos Passos, and others). And even today, Lovecraft is seldom represented in mainstream anthologies of short fiction or American literature, and is generally not taught as part of twentieth century American literature. This, I believe, is because Lovecraft has yet to be fully understood and appreciated by mainstream critics, who see him only as a writer of the weird tale.

Yet even as Lovecraft is dismissed or ignored by mainstream critics, he still has endured, becoming more popular after his death than he ever was during his lifetime. Although his work was never published in book form while he lived, all of his fiction remains in print today, both in the Arkham House hardcover editions (revised by S. T. Joshi to be as textually accurate as possible), and in mass market paperback editions. Furthermore, Lovecraft remains one of the most widely anthologized authors in the horror and science fiction genres. Thus, despite the lack of scholarly attention to his work, H. P. Lovecraft refuses to go away.

In this study, I will take Lovecraft out of the shadows of literature and shine the light of critical theory on his works as I analyze them as mainstream stories. Using a structuralist critical theory as my underlying method, my analysis will show that Lovecraft’s work expresses many of the realistic themes of his contemporaries. While his stories may appear fantastic, they are based on naturalism, which Lovecraft takes to the N’th degree through a cosmic context. While Hemingway’s world might be cruel and unforgiving, individual characters can, at least, leave some mark on the world. In Lovecraft’s universe, however,