Punter LOVECRAFT 2016

Chapter Title: LOVECRAFT: Suspicion, Pattern Recognition, Paranoia
Chapter Author(s): David Punter
Book Title: The Age of Lovecraft

Book Editor(s): Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
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9
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LOVECRAFT
Suspicion, Pattern Recognition, Paranoia
David Punter
I want in this chapter to suggest that there is something pecu-

liarly “modern” in Lovecraft’s writings. This may, on the face of it,
seem a strange proposition. After all, a great deal of what is obvious
about Lovecraft’s textuality is the extremity of its archaism. This comes
across in at least two different ways: first through the continual insis-
tence on the antiquity of the scenes in which his stories and poems are
set, from ancient Egypt through to (more usually) his peculiar and spe-
cific (re-)envisioning of Providence, Rhode Island, and New England
more generally; and second through the pseudo-antiquity of his own
prose, whether presented as rendering manuscripts and other commu-
nications from the past or delivered as in propria persona.
But when attempting to address this archaism, difficulties arise. After
all, Gothic fiction in Europe and America has dealt in such deliberate
slippages of time for several centuries, yet critics have discerned in Love-
craft some clear difference in his prose, his poetry, and more generally
his concerns with how to textualize fear. For when we come to consider
Lovecraft’s project and his accomplishment, then that is the one word,
the reverberating keynote, we need to keep in mind: what Lovecraft is
crafting, sometimes with considerable success, at other times not, is fear.
It is a commonplace to say that the “origins” of Gothic fiction lie in
the latter half of the eighteenth century, and to pursue this by claiming
that such fiction emerges as a response to the era of Enlightenment, itself
perhaps a “reactive fiction” designed to dispel religious and mytholog-
ical beliefs surviving from the Middle Ages, which came to be seen as
encumbrances to the ideals of human progress, barnacles messily hold-
ing back the stately progress of the ship of reason (see Punter, 20–53).
Yet critical thinking about the Enlightenment has historically encoun-
tered certain problems.
The Enlightenment was, of course, a pan-European phenomenon of
183

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184 David Punter
the middle years of the eighteenth century, perhaps best represented in
the great French Encyclopédie, which had the grand project of encom-
passing and describing all current human knowledge. For the Enlight-
enment, there were no dark corners, no shadows; it seemed possible that
technological and industrial progress would soon—if it had not done so
already—banish the ghosts, spirits, demons. Provided superstition and
most forms of religion were discarded, there would be no impediment
to what was regarded as the intrinsic perfectibility of man. All of natu-
ral life was deemed to be open to scientific inspection, although the arts
also had a role to play, provided they could be viewed through the lens
of cool reason and did not consort too far with dangerous reaches of fan-
tasy and the imagination. The Enlightenment was intrinsically teleolog-
ical; it pointed to a surpassing end of human knowledge, one that would
be beneficial to all mankind.
This is far too vast a subject to enter onto here, but suffice to say
that, quite apart from Gothic fiction, Enlightenment conjured its own
intrinsic demons. Whether we refer to them as the “Illuminati,” as the
resurgence of Rosicrucianism, as a series of long-lived and endlessly
recurring radical plots to overthrow the State, Enlightenment was
haunted from the outset by accusations of its own secrecy: a movement
that claimed its mission was to throw light into shadowed corners stood
against the backdrop of a long history of plot, paranoia, conspiracy.
The apparent attempt to accomplish a secure grounding of knowledge
in reason was always accompanied by the thought that this attempt
was itself yet another grab for power, that the opposition to potentates
and tyrants, monarchy and priesthood, was merely the efflorescence of
a long-fostered plan on the part of a quasi-masonic intelligentsia and
professional elite to take over the reins of influence.
We may look at these interpretations of the struggles of Enlighten-
ment in a number of different ways. For my purposes, and in order to
prepare for a discussion of Lovecraft, the term I want to focus on is
apophenia. Now, apophenia is a contested term. Essentially, it relates to
the far wider issue of pattern recognition, which is currently a key term
in a range of discourses from psychology to systems analysis; indeed, it
has been claimed that pattern recognition is a way of referring to the
key distinction of human beings from other animals, although clearly
in this claim there lies an implicit privileging of the ability to describe
pattern rather than merely to apprehend it—as all living creatures must
do, to one degree or another, in order to survive and multiply. Pattern

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lovecr aft 185
recognition, one might reasonably say, is the gateway to successful nour-
ishment and reproduction.
Apophenia, however, is not quite thus; it is, in itself, the victim of
a confused and anxious terminological history, but from this history a
few phrases and attachments stand out. Apophenia is the perception of
patterns in data otherwise regarded as without meaning. The existence
of apophenia has been regarded as a tool for use in the diagnosis of
early stages of schizophrenia. But to turn to the deployment of the term
“apophenia” in relation to the work of Lovecraft, it is also associated
with conspiracy theory and more importantly with the specific form of
apophenia known as pareidolia which is the term used to describe those
moments when perceivers claim to have, for example, seen holy signs
in the delineation of the most mundane of objects: a piece of bread, for
example, which when cut accidentally into a specific shape shows the
outline of the holy stigmata.
Apophenia, it perhaps goes without saying, is necessarily a contested
site; after all, without a contest between belief structures, no single spe-
cific manifestation of pattern could be seen as pathological, and all the
examples of pareidolia of which one can find evidence must by defini-
tion have at least more than one believer, otherwise they could not enter
the textual field at all. But of all the phrases surrounding this contested
site, the one that is perhaps most apposite to Lovecraft is this: apophe-
nia is a “process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnor-
mal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field” (Conrad, 406).
Repetition; monotony; abnormality. These seem to me to be three key
words when discussing Lovecraft, and I hope to suggest that in the con-
text of these terms Lovecraft’s fiction escapes from the confines of archa-
ism and reminds us, fearfully and at times painfully, of the specifically
modern context of these terms, even if it does so through a type of neg-
ative reflection.
But before approaching, or returning to, Lovecraft, I will take two
detours. I will say something about William Gibson’s novel Pattern
Recognition (2003), and something about the peculiar and engrossing
case history of Judge Schreber, as told by Freud. The case of Schreber
is unique among Freud’s case histories for two reasons: first, because
Freud never met Schreber and analyzed his situation largely through a
reading of Schreber’s own remarkable biography and, second, because
this analysis of Schreber is the only one of Freud’s to which is attached,
albeit with certain disclaimers, the term “paranoia.”

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186 David Punter
Turning first to Pattern Recognition. There are many ways of describ-
ing the central motifs of this novel, but the one in which I am interested
is the attribution of the video clips that form its center of attention.
Largely unintelligible but susceptible to worldwide distribution, they
are eventually attributed to one of a pair of twins, a twin who has been
brain-damaged. It turns out (if anything does “turn out” from this closely
involuted novel) that the clips are, among other things, visual represen-
tations of the brain fracture, the partial separation of lobes, from which
the twin suffers; thus, the plot hinges on the “recognition” of the “pat-
tern” that is endlessly reproduced through the world’s media but that
has its origin in an individual’s psycho-medical condition.
What is accomplished through this series of tropes? We are not speak-
ing here of “mere” paranoia, but instead, in thoroughly modern terms,
of a variety of neuropsychology, but this does not in itself prevent the
reader from seeing the metaphorical relation between the condition of
Nora’s brain and the (as we might put it) “repetition,” the “monotony,”
the “abnormality” that may characterize the more general condition of
neocapitalism—after all, the peculiar gift, talent, strength of the novel’s
major protagonist, Cayce Pollard (the “pollarding,” in the sense of cut-
ting back in order to grow more fruitfully though more artificially, of the
“case,” a name Gibson has used a number of times before) is to recog-
nize through a quasi-allergic reaction the power or weakness of various
examples of the “brand name.”
“Pattern recognition”: we perhaps need to focus on the term “re-
cognition,” which implies, presumably, that the patterns at stake are
ones that have existed previously—our potential cognition of them is
merely “re-cognition,” these patterns underlie the current interpreta-
tions we might lay upon them. We are surely drawn irresistibly to Der-
rida’s notion of the “trace” (see, for example, Writing and Difference);
not in itself a new notion, but one that, like all the others with which
we shall be dealing here, is susceptible of a prehistory; we might think,
for instance, of the old American word for an almost-erased road or
track left by a preexistent and now almost demolished civilization—the
“Old Natchez Trace” might be the most instantly recognizable literary
example.1
And so, the issue of pattern recognition may be one that is freed from
the more usual coordinates of time and space; in saying that, I am obvi-
ously building toward—or perhaps am overinfluenced by—Lovecraft’s
continual discourse of that which lies beyond the “usual” coordinates,

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lovecr aft 187
that which can only be described by a different topography, a different
geometry, a difference in how the perceiving mind might be challenged
to make sense of what it appears to be seeing. Lovecraft’s texts—let us
venture upon a generalization here—exist only on the border of that
which can be apprehended and that which cannot; he is the writer of
the trace, the writer of that which can be apprehended only after it has
gone or prior to its arrival, that which is never present: the writer of the
trace, the trace of the writer.
And this is perhaps a strange thought: that Lovecraft may be, or have
been the incarnation of, Derrida’s dream—the writing that never was,
the event that never happened, the text that dissolves into its own oth-
erness. Yet I want to pursue this thought; but before I do—and unend-
ing prefaces, ideas that never come to the point, are neither foreign to
Lovecraft nor, of course, to Derrida, whose entire huge oeuvre might be
considered, from one point of view, as a prolegomena to that which was
never written, that which never could be written, that which, in Love-
craft’s version, would only ever have been written in that curious lin-
guistic tense that would involve the prewriting of the history of the stars
and of the cosmos—I need to bring onto the stage, as does every literary
critic who is aware of the demands of the law, the judge: and in this case,
Judge Daniel Schreber of the German High Court.
As Judge Schreber takes the stage, and occludes Mr. Lovecraft and
Mr. Gibson by the sheer weight of his legal majesty—perhaps we might
think at this point of a different judge, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dead
judge of The House of the Seven Gables, image for the uneasy sleeping
of a corrupt and collusive law—we move into a different realm of pat-
tern recognition. For the good judge—and it appears that Schreber was
a good judge, for he retained his high office throughout his lifetime even
though, remarkably, he did not renounce some of his “convictions,” for
example that he was female and that he was irradiated by the rays of
God—held to a version of the originations of the world that was “dif-
ferent.” I will not say “different” from what, but suffice it to say that
Freud was sufficiently moved—or disturbed? or comforted? or corrobo-
rated?—by what he read in Schreber’s account of his life to feel that here
was an example on which he could comment, to the good, whatever that
might possibly mean, of the ongoing diagnosis of paranoia.
Paranoia; apophenia: here is where I am seeking to arrive, or so it
would appear. Where am I seeking to arrive? Where, or what, is the pos-
sibility of arrival? We can arrive only if we have set out, or at the very

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188 David Punter
least plan to do so, and thus we have already (obviously) formed a pat-
tern, perhaps in its most crucial form as a map. What, then, is “pattern
recognition”? What would it mean to discover that all of our petty strug-
gles on this planet have merely been enactments of larger cosmic battles
of which we know (at the beginning or, frequently, at the end) nothing?
Or what will it mean to find that we as individuals are the recipients
of messages that we can rarely understand, let alone interpret, but that
may have been reaching us—whoever “us” might be—for not merely
a few years or decades, but for millennia past? And these are some of
the questions that Lovecraft poses, although they do not seem a million
years away from either Marx and Engels on ideology or from F. Scott
Fitzgerald on the giant spectacles, the summation of the regime of con-
trol by “optical illusion” (see The Great Gatsby).
However, I already appear to have long postponed my encounter
with Lovecraft. This seems suitable, for Lovecraft’s texts are excessive,
embarrassing, excrescences on the corpus of literature, are they not?
Perhaps more interestingly, in some lights they appear to be a continu-
ing satire, a deliberate extension to the extreme; but confusingly, that is
exactly what they are not. That is not what they are at all. That is, in
a very real sense, the very last thing that they are. Because they do not
reside within their own anachronism; instead, they are texts of moder-
nity. And so now it is time to examine, or perhaps better, inhabit, this
curious reticulation of the modern.
We can examine it, for example, in the “case” of Charles Dexter Ward.
Ward, by the time the story begins, is mad; that is, as Lovecraft might
put it, a point on which all are agreed. But the crucial question remains:
Has he been rendered thus by what he has discovered, by the revelation
to him of patterns within the cosmos whose very existence is sufficient to
make one lose one’s wits; or is he mad in the sense that his derangement,
his alterity, the obliquity of his perception is such that it has enabled him
to see more deeply into a truth, a meaning, a sense of pattern that we, the
otherwise “normal” readers, the representatives of a modern, “enlight-
ened” outlook on life would regard, have regarded, will no doubt con-
tinue to regard, as altogether a narrative of insanity?
In Lovecraft, we as these “normal” readers are placed in a curious
situation—“curious” in the sense of “peculiar,” but also “curious” in the
other sense of becoming victims of a certain curiosity, an inquisitiveness,
which we may feel—and, of course, especially as scholars of one kind or
another, and therefore by a necessary extension as antiquarians, poking

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lovecr aft 189
about among the remains of the dead, striving to reanimate that which
is long gone, consigned to dust and history—is both essential and suspi-
cious. As a “reader” of Schreber, Freud, too, is placed, or places himself,
in a curious position: analyst where no analysis, in the classical sense,
is possible; seeker after meaning where the outcome of this search is far
from obvious. Freud’s commentary on Schreber’s autobiography may
have contributed to the ongoing description of paranoia—indeed it did—
but it did Schreber no “good” at all. It was not even directed toward a
“cure”; and, as I have said, Schreber’s entrenched beliefs remained, as
far as Freud was aware, substantially unchanged throughout his life—
although his methods of concealment, his adjustment between his pri-
vate and public worlds, appear to have become, for better or worse,
more sophisticated.
With what does Lovecraft confront us? He confronts us with an
extended commentary on modernity, on the enterprises and limitations
of the modern. In the “case” of Charles Dexter Ward, there is always the
possibility of a diagnosis, indeed in this case at least two separate diag-
noses, one by Dr. Willett and one by those who are referred to only as
the more “academic” alienists. Many of Lovecraft’s texts serve as test
cases of psychological interpretation; the deeper subtext—although not
all that deep—is probably most clearly evidenced by his occasional ref-
erences to Freud. A typical one refers to Freud’s interpretative struc-
ture as “puerile” (11).
And this is interesting, for there is a curious tension in Lovecraft’s
texts themselves between the “puerile” and the adult. We can see it in
their reception, where they occupy some kind of maturational hinter-
land; they are stories that one “used to” read, but out of which we have
now grown, now that we are “grown-up.” Of course, the obvious terrain
here is that of the adolescent, and one might refer to Lovecraft’s texts as
“transitional.” They appear to suggest unknown powers at work and,
although it might appear bizarre, it would not in fact be too far from the
point to think of Lovecraft’s ongoing battle between the (evil) “Great Old
Ones” and the (good, or at least fair) “Elder Gods” as an internal bat-
tle within the adolescent as she or he seeks to comprehend the possibil-
ity that parents (repositories of wisdom fatally mixed with imposers of
savage and apparently meaningless rules) might fall into two imaginary
categories. D. W. Winnicott’s categories of the good and bad mother are
relevant here, as is his attempt to assert that where we end up as we try
to negotiate—as perhaps we do all our lives long—our way between this

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190 David Punter
Scylla and Charybdis of maturation is with some ill-formed, always tem-
porary, structure of the “good enough” (see Winnicott).
But in Lovecraft, it would be fair to say that nothing is ever “good
enough.” The old gods are evil, and one specific mark of their malignity
is that they were here before us; in one sense, this is sufficient to explain
the impossibility of us having any dealings with them that will not con-
taminate and, in the end (or perhaps before the beginning), threaten us
with a complete dissolution of self. In many of the stories, but by no
means all, a safeguard is inserted (perhaps he is a cemetery guard) in
the form of a narrator who can come between us and this dissolution.2
Yet, Lovecraft asks, is this sufficient? It may be that we can guard
against dissolution in the future, but what if it has already occurred, if
we are ourselves merely the fruit of a prior catastrophe that has per-
manently removed us from the possibility of realizing a potential that
cannot occur on the infected soil of Earth? We might consider, for exam-
ple, “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” which is, it would appear, the
outcome of an invasion by mankind of territory that had previously
belonged to, and been peopled by, an entirely different “race” (and “race”
is another site of endless contestation from Lovecraft): “It is told that in
the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of
Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the
gray stone city of Ib, which was old as the lake itself, and peopled with
beings not pleasing to behold. Very odd and ugly were these beings, as
indeed are most beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned” (5).
In Lovecraft, the trappings of modernity are being constantly under-
mined by memories (even, and perhaps especially, if they are “immemo-
rial”) of what has previously existed; indeed, it would be fair to say that
in these (endlessly, monotonously, abnormally) repeated scenarios we
come across something of the true duplicity of the nature of the “haunt.”
That which haunts is also that which can lay claim to its own prior
neighborhood, its “haunt,” and no legal exercise, or paralegal exorcism,
can perform a proper or lasting judgment when it comes to ownership of
the land—or of the imaginings of that land, for in the best of Lovecraft’s
tales it would seem that it is the land that imagines itself.
In, for example, “Under the Pyramids,” Lovecraft writes,
I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly
alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead.
I saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls, fal-

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lovecr aft 191
cons, cats, and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably
through subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea
beside which man is as a fly, and offering unnameable sacrifice to in-
describable gods. (65)
Yet, of course, this is merely a simulacrum of a land imagining, or dream-

ing, itself; the interpolation of choice items (“unwholesome,” “subterra-
neous,” “titanic,” but above all “unnameable” and “indescribable”) from
Lovecraft’s powerful but limited litany of repeated (monotony-inducing)
adjectives makes this over into an unmistakably colored perception, of
the “prior” as never at rest, as ceaselessly seeking to impose its rhythms
onto the present, the modern. Those rhythms, those totally unmelodic
melodies—the drumming, the maddening thin piping that surround the
incarnations of the gods of the Cthulhu Mythos—serve as an unceas-
ing backdrop to the equally ceaseless, but perhaps ultimately pointless,
endeavor of language to disclose some pattern, some meaning, to this
resistant and resurgent past.
Apophenic textuality: the constant, monotonous repetition. We need
only to consider one of Lovecraft’s many, many lists of “forbidden
books,” all of which are exactly (or almost exactly) the same. In “The
Haunter of the Dark,” for example:
He himself had read many of them—a Latin version of the abhorred

Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des
Goules of Comte d’Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von
Junzt, the old Ludvig Prinn’s hellish De Vermis Mysteriis . . . the
Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling volume
in wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and dia-
grams shudderingly recognisable to the occult student. (344)
Repetition, like chanting, will incarnate; this has, of course, been the sta-
ple belief of magical cults and groups down the centuries, exemplified,
for example, in the rituals of the Order of the Golden Dawn. To put it
another way, language is power; if the Word can only be recited correctly,
then it will exercise an influence over mankind that can be effected by
no other force—military, religious, economic.
It would be easy to see this as the response of an always defeated intel-
ligentsia, drowning in the mud of warfare, the corruption of the State,
and especially recently the endless violent speciousness of capitalism, to
its own subjugation, and that is certainly part of the story, and it is one

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192 David Punter
within which Lovecraft’s texts have their place, although it is indeed
interesting that, as I mentioned above, this place is always on the neg-
ative side. In other words, when words of power are spoken in Love-
craft, they are almost invariably harbingers of evil or, to be more precise,
they serve to allow in and onto the terrain of humanity that which is
abhuman. Words in Lovecraft are not the salvific province of mankind;
they are treacherous; they summon the unexplained and the profoundly
unwanted, and above all they may be overheard, overheard by figures
and beings that have no salvation, no mercy at heart.
Instead, they belong to an older order, to be feared and shunned.
We do not need to list them here, Nyarlathotep, Great Cthulhu, Yog-
Sothoth, and all the others, a cast of thousands—or do we? Because it is
in their listing, oddly, that they achieve such “reality” as they have: they
sometimes seem to be, in Walter Benjamin’s sense when he is analyzing
the impulses of modernism (although some might feel, and this would
be equally relevant to Lovecraft, that what Benjamin is really talking
about here is a historically specific manifestation of obsessive/compul-
sive disorder), pieces for collectors (see Benjamin, 61–69). For example,
at some point in the development in the “myth,” Cthulhu takes over the
commanding role, which he/she/it did not have before—exactly when
did this happen? This is the kind of question that gets asked among
adepts of what we might call the Lovecraftian myth machine.
And that machine—and it is just as “real” as the texts themselves—is
essentially geared to another machine: the modern machine that pro-
duces “authenticity.” We might consider, for example, “Pickman’s
Model.” Here the artist Pickman, famed (albeit among a very limited
circle) for producing artworks that excite “the physiology of fear” (79),
is eventually revealed as having produced his appalling paintings from
“life”—hence the notion of the “model.” But this weird version of authen-
ticity is, of course, immediately reversible: if this “thing” that he has
reproduced is “life,” then what indeed is life, as we have formerly con-
ceived it? And we might follow this reflection on the provenance of the
visual arts with an essay into the musical sphere, with “The Music of
Erich Zann.”
Here our narrator, lodged in an unpromising boardinghouse, hears
from the old, dumb musician who, he has been told, inhabits the floor
above him the strains of wild melody: he is “haunted” (that word again)
by “the weirdness” of his music. “Knowing little of the art myself, I
was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music

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lovecr aft 193
I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly
original genius” (46). But, predictably, this hunt for the “original,” the
“authentic,” produces nothing; or rather, what it produces is the revela-
tion (which, it has to be confessed, the reader has all along been expect-
ing) that Zann’s music is simply his terrified attempt both to reproduce
and at the same time drown out quite other melodies that are coming
at him constantly through a window that opens, if it opens at all, onto
a different world.
And so for Lovecraft there is no promise or threat of originality;
instead, there is only the monotony of apophenia. Everything has been
said, uttered, done before: all our attempts to conjure a lively, active
present are overshadowed by the looming “presence” of the past—just,
we may say, as the attempts of the adolescent to form a “different” life
are constantly overshadowed by the loved, feared, reviled life that has
gone before, by the knowledge that is simultaneously not a knowledge,
of the primal scene; but just as, as well, modernity—in, for example, one
of its most potent recent incarnations as early twentieth-century mod-
ernism—is condemned to look back over its own shoulder to see what
“foul fiend” may be following. Lovecraft’s revealing dismissals of Freud
are, in fact, paralleled by his scorn for T. S. Eliot (see Joshi, 179).
The primal scene: it would hardly be possible to pursue the major
motifs in Lovecraft without venturing into the territory of the sexual, the
reproductive, if only because of the near-absolute embargo in his stories
on any possible thoughts of the kind. Near absolute, but not absolute;
for there are, for example, the fish-women of Innsmouth, transmitters of
the past abhumanity that continues to infect the region around. Fish, the
fishy, the octopoid, the tentacular—there is a whole metonymic series in
Lovecraft that moves us through a set of perspectives of what might be
found in the ocean, that which might be swimming (or flailing, or flump-
ing) below the surface, signified only by its impact on the purity of the
aboveground species. Fish-women, dark pools of water, traces of feet
that are not (yet) feet on flooded steps up to the streets that are also pecu-
liarly waterways in towns that Lovecraft at least considers “ancient”:
this is the kind of antiquity that might come to reclaim us if we cease
for a moment to believe in modern methods, if we drop our guard and
risk the relapse into the sea, or into the graveyard—at any rate, below
the ground, whence our ancestors came.
As we have seen, one of the complexities in Lovecraft concerns lan-
guage: whether it is capable of creating, enacting, performing new

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194 David Punter
things; whether it remains as the ineluctable bond that attaches us, with
or without our agreement, to the abhuman; this, of course—and this is
perhaps one of the most radical of Lovecraft’s suggestions, one of the
most radical parts of his suggestiveness—would imply that, at root, lan-
guage is not human at all. In this respect, the only modern thinkers who
have followed this line to any kind of fruition, if not conclusion, are
Deleuze and Guattari, with that complex and convoluted series of read-
ings that we might summarize as the discourse of the wolf (see Deleuze
and Guattari, 36).
There is, for example, “The Nameless City.” Here, paradoxically,
there is no lack of names: Araby, Memphis, Babylon—the whole appa-
ratus of Orientalism is here within the first page, and later we will hardly
be surprised to learn that we are yet again in the haunting presence of
the “mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred”; how many times, we might reasonably
ask, have we seen him before. But the city itself has no name; it is part,
perhaps, of that different, unnamed, unnameable universe that Love-
craft himself refers to as having been addressed, if not described, by Lord
Dunsany in the phrase “the unreverberate blackness of the abyss” (34).
A “nameless city”; Beckett’s L’Innomable (1953); various other
“unnameables.” In Lovecraft, matters are frequently “beyond descrip-
tion.” Perhaps, strictu sensu, they are always beyond description, and
here is where it seems to me that one can loop back again to Love-
craft’s modernity. For if we consider earlier tales of ghosts, ghouls,
phantoms—for example those so frequently recounted in eighteenth-
century chapbooks—then what one finds is a deeply earnest attempt to
convince the reader of the verisimilitude of these encounters with the
occult, the strange, the otherwise unbelievable.
And of course one finds this in Lovecraft, too, but with, I believe, a
subtly different inflection. Lovecraft is not, I think, principally trying
to make us “believe in” his manifestations; rather, he is challenging us
to produce the clear grounds on which we would oppose them. What,
precisely, are the ways in which we would stand our ground above the
slow, inevitable sinking of the marsh? How, he challenges us, are we to
maintain our empiricist beliefs if it is the case that there are other evi-
dences—in all cases scientifically verified—that might cause us to enter-
tain a different point of view?
We could at this point bring back the judge; and who better, who
more reasonable and sane, than Judge Schreber to adjudicate these com-
peting systems, these different beliefs? Well, one answer, although not

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lovecr aft 195
everybody will believe it, is Freud himself, and here he is speaking of
some of Schreber’s own beliefs, specifically in relation to Dr. Flechsig,
the doctor who attended Schreber from the first and was curiously
rewarded by being offered a key place in the judge’s delusional system:
Of the actual nature of Flechsig’s enormity and its motives the pa-
tient speaks with the characteristic vagueness and obscurity which
may be regarded as marks of an especially intense work of delusion-
formation, if it is legitimate to judge paranoia on the model of a far
more familiar mental phenomenon—the dream. Flechsig, according
to the patient, committed, or attempted to commit, “soul-murder”
upon him—an act which, he thought, was comparable with the ef-
forts made by the devil or by demons to gain possession of a soul.
(Freud, 38)
There are various terms one might pick up on here; I want to attempt to
gesture toward only four. The first is “vagueness,” because this speaks
also to the impossibility that Lovecraft’s protagonists customarily have
in recalling key events in their encounters with significant figures; so
many of the stories are full of hiatuses that we might fairly refer to as
the sense of a haze, a cloud of unknowing that develops around the pri-
mal scene, so that origins cannot, and indeed must not, be known: to
look too closely at that which is forbidden might indeed drive us mad,
might enable us, with the utmost horror, to imagine that perhaps, after
all, we were not here first, that somebody else has been here before us—
modernity’s most terrible anxiety, its most active fear, its most promi-
nent spur to action and textuality.
The second, all too obviously, is “judge”: what is it “legitimate” to
“judge”? Or perhaps the question is better stood upon its head, as with
the jurors in Alice’s courtroom: what would it be that might be “illegiti-
mate to judge”? In Lovecraft, there is no judge. There is no figure—and
here we necessarily think again of the ghastly, sleeping figure of Haw-
thorne’s Judge Pyncheon, summation of all that may be wrong with
the very notion of the embodiment of the law—who has the power or
capacity to judge of the phenomena described. Except, of course, for the
author himself: final arbiter of the events mentioned, full of hints, always
dropped too soon for more recent tastes in detective fiction—yet perhaps
this is partly the point. For in Lovecraft, oddly enough, nothing is ever
truly mysterious; rather, what needs to be uncovered is simply the covert,
silent operation of the apophenic, the discovery of patterns where, other

146.96.128.36 on Fri, 25 Aug 2023 04:17:04 +00:00
196 David Punter
than the sharing of mass delusion, none may exist; the exposure of what
might otherwise be thought of as “Enlightenment” as being, in Blake’s
resonant phrase, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (150).
The third and fourth are “dream” and “soul murder,” and I want, per-
haps unfashionably, to couple them together. Lovecraft is very interested
indeed in what the soul might be, what might happen to it, and how it
might fare when decoupled from other coordinates, principally but not
exclusively the body. Yet, following from his dismissals of Freud, he
is not much interested in dreams. He uses them when they might take
effect as narrative devices, but there is no richness to his interpretation
of dream, no sense of what might otherwise have been thought of as use-
ful fodder to his mill; instead, there is, as would presumably be obvi-
ous from his dismissals of Freud, a fear of the dream and a preference
for different systems of signs—not ones set in the vaporous atmosphere
of the imagination, but ones instead set in stone, on the headstones of
graves, on the walls of prodigious vaults, in the walls where otherwise
humans might never come, and so written, sometimes, in language that
no man can understand.
Except that, of course, somebody has to understand them, or the tales
could not be written, textuality could not occur. Apophenia and moder-
nity: the need to discover (find, uncover) patterns, no matter what the
evidence might suggest. In Lovecraft, it is frequently remarkable how
far his narrators can lag being the reader; what we have worked out
pages or even whole chapters ago remains to be fully absorbed by our
narrator/detective figure, but this is perhaps too simple a way to put it.
For what this odd narrative procedure may in fact enact is a difference,
an ingrained difference, between two distinct parts of our reading per-
sona, and I suspect that this is where the true appeal of Lovecraft lies.
For in his tales, we rush ahead of ourselves. There is part of our read-
ing persona that always already knows what the denouement is going
to be—we have read the repetitions, we have experienced the monot-
ony of the modern, so many times before, we already know that there
is no possibility of originality here, despite—or perhaps because of—
the archaism of the apparatus, and so we have no need of moment-by-
moment reading.
And yet, the other part of our self, that part which remains wedded to
text, remains firm in its attention, no matter what the object—we have
to retain some kind of narrative jouissance, even if it is only a modern-
ist simulacrum; we have to suppose, at least for a certain duration, that

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lovecr aft 197
things are not foreclosed. Perhaps here is the most extraordinary thing
about Lovecraft. It would of course be naive to conclude that anything
in his tales of disaster, collapse, madness, and somnambulism could ever
turn out different; of course not. But that does not prevent the occulted
wish that the modern could eventually triumph over the crude, barbaric,
violent impulses of the old.
Of course, it may be that in order to imagine this future triumph—
which would be the long-displaced and delayed victory of enlighten-
ment—we would need to become involved in a descent into apophenia;
we would need to believe, to believe sincerely and with, no doubt, mili-
tary, economic, and political force to back us up—that these hauntings
can be banished. But of course they cannot; the essence of modernity is
indistinguishable from its dealings with its archaic other—as apophenia
is indistinguishable from the need to make or perceive patterns without
which we would not be able to survive.
Notes
1. The reference is to Eudora Welty’s story, “Livvie.”
2. The reference here is to Derrida’s “Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.”
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———. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
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Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003.

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Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. New York: Signet, 1961.
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tional Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 89–97.

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Chapter Title: LOVECRAFT: Suspicion, Pattern Recognition, Paranoia

Chapter Author(s): David Punter

Book Title: The Age of Lovecraft

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b9x1f3.14

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He himself had read many of them—a Latin version of the abhorred