H.P. Lovecraft’s texts not only richly and intriguingly support deconstructionist readings but they also interweave to form intertext characterized by shared thematic concerns, which themselves lead to further deconstructive potential.
One may discern certain broad themes that permeate Lovecraft’s fiction. One notes, for example, the theme of “forbidden knowledge,” or “merciful ignorance”—the theme that there are species of knowledge only by ignorance of which humankind can maintain even the semblance of wellbeing. The story “The Call of Cthulhu” fairly well spells out this thematic notion in its opening paragraph: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” (DUN, 125). The same theme plays a heavy role in numerous other tales, including, notably, “The Music of Erich Zann,” in which Zann makes every effort to prevent the narrator’s looking out the forbidden window; and “The Haunter of the Dark,” in which Robert Blake enters the forbidden church and partakes of the knowledge therein only at his peril.
One may also identify what may be called the theme of “denied primacy”—the notion that we human beings were not the first lords of this planet, and indeed have never really been its lords. This theme informs such stories as “The Nameless City,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” among others. In each case, the hapless human protagonist discovers that humankind was preceded on the earth by vastly older, highly organized forms of life, forms sometimes eerily thought to survive to the present time, hidden in out-of-the-way places but threatening to appear once again. The latter notion intertwines with yet another broad Lovecraftian theme, that of “unwholesome survivals,” unthinkable survivals from a past either thought long dead or not suspected to exist. All these themes interact with a further one—the theme of “illusory surface appearances,” that is, the theme that things are not as they appear on the surface, below which deeper and more terrible realities are masked.
One notices that these recurrent themes interweave with each other—for example, in the fact that the knowledge forbidden to humans may be that humankind is preceded by other races on the earth, or that certain olden consciousnesses survive to reach into the present and menace humankind’s position therein, or that, possibly because of these facts, the world is not as it seems. But one notices also that the themes themselves smack of a certain deconstructive flavor.
Certainly all literary texts deal in “forbidden knowledge” of a sort, since they refuse to succumb to totalizing or categorical reading. As creatures of unstable and uncontainable language, they forbid us to know all there is to know about them and indeed insist that the phrase “all there is to know” is of doubtful meaning, even doubtful possibility of meaning. Unwholesome survivals, or at least unsuspected survivals, lurk in all literary texts, peeking through at the point at which one looks into the surprising and labyrinthine complexities to be found in the relational play of linguistic signifiers. One gains a certain sense even of “denied primacy,” reading texts closely in the post-structuralist fashion and discovering that we as readers can never be “primary” or “first.” Language, in all its mysteriousness and caprice, precedes us and will survive us, so we only flatter ourselves with thoughts of masterful primacy. Also we note that the immediate effect of the theme of denied primacy is to decenter: to expunge from the “text” of earth’s history, in fictive terms, the notion that humankind is central there. Further, and especially, one notes in the theme of “illusory surface appearances” a veritable self-description of texts, which indeed are never merely what they appear to be upon a surface-level or facile reading.
The themes, then, that pervade Lovecraft’s tales conceptually suggest the deconstructive spirit. They prefigure arguments that, as many post-structuralists believe, texts are inclined to deconstruct themselves and that notions of totalization and epistemological closure are illusory.
But these various themes all tend to play into a broader theme, a kind of Lovecraftian supertheme that may be termed the theme of “the ruinous nature of self-knowledge”: the notion that, when we as humans come to look upon the cosmos as it is, we find our own place in it to be soul-crushingly evanescent. We find that the universe is supremely indifferent to our presence, that in the real fabric of the cosmos we are but the slightest insignificant thread. The result is a curious irony, because the effect is that humankind is uniquely capable of suffering the self-discovery of insignificance. Humans, alone among earth’s acknowledged tenants, are just sufficiently well developed mentally and emotionally to ponder the tragedy of their own vanishingly small dash of color on the universal canvas.
We say “tragedy,” but the Lovecraftian revelation is not tragedy in the classic sense. We do not retain, from the experience of self-discovery, even a sense of the great come low. We have no truly tragic vision of ourselves, no enduring pride to fling back into the faces of the mocking gods of chaos. “Lesser” (but then, in a way, more fortunate) animals do not reflect upon their status. Humankind, Homo sapiens, is the knowing animal, and what it comes to know is the ego-crushing irony and psychic suffering inherent in the fact that it can know anything at all. When the Outsider reaches forth, touches the glass, and comes to know, in an apocalyptic moment, his own unfaceable nature, he is a synecdochic figure for humankind. The whole experience of Lovecraft’s fiction is the experience of the Outsider, wandering through textual mazes of shockingly revelatory mirrors, reaching out with hopeful hands and touching, in various ways, the fateful glass. This particular Lovecraftian effect, of ironically self-understood insignificance brought to light with the collapse of anthropocentric systems of privilege, is an effect unprecedented in literature. In spirit it clearly has a great deal in common with the deconstructive gesture of questioning and unsettling metaphysically privileged systems of all kinds.
Yet this thematic notion is also self-deconstructing. Lovecraft’s big theme, of the ruinousness of self-understanding, seeks to cleave reality into a bipolarity: the hope of humankind to possess meaning and worth in the cosmic scheme on the one hand and, on the other, the dashing of such hope by the experience of discovering, and being cursed to be able to contemplate, the blind indifference of the universe to human concerns. But upon closer scrutiny the poles of this opposition are seen to collapse into ultimate indeterminacy. Each of the poles contains, as its condition of possibility, the necessary trace of the other.
When one postulates an indifferent cosmos, one can only think of it as “indifferent” from the standpoint of its being indifferent to humans. In a universe altogether lacking the element of consciousness, the universe could in no way be “indifferent.” To what then would it be indifferent? The purported indifference would have no being. Indifference amounts to a reversal upon a collective expectation consciously entertained, sine qua non. And a reversal must be a reversal of something, without which it cannot appear. The universe can only be characterized as indifferent to (and by) a conceptualizing form of consciousness that has, by the conception, had its loftier expectations disappointed. In a perverse and paradoxical way, then, humankind subverts itself, contributes to the possibility of its own insignificance, paves the way for the cosmos to have that most human-centered of qualities—indifference. To put it another way, the only true cosmic indifference is cosmic indifference felt. The pole of the binary opposition that consists of loss of hope is no pole at all without the covert containment of the other pole—the potential for hope, the sense of what it is that is lost.
Conversely, humankind, however reduced in esteem by the Lovecraftian experience of arrival at self-understanding, is still fashioned of star-stuff, still interwoven with the universe by which it is ignored. This uncaring cosmos amounts to a cosmic complementarity without which one could not even raise, to begin with, questions of human worth or meaning. Imagine a solipsist—a human consciousness convinced that only it exists—whose solipsism turns out to be true—a consciousness outside of which there is nothing. That is, imagine humankind, full of its hopes, without the opposing pole of a universe threatening to dash those hopes. Such a consciousness could be neither significant nor insignificant, because such a distinction presupposes a universe existing beyond that consciousness for comparative backdrop. Being “significant” or “insignificant” must suggest being significant or insignificant to something. There can scarcely be imagined a significance or insignificance without context or a question of human importance or unimportance without a universe seen as granting or denying importance. Humans do not rest satisfied to be self-important. Their collective craving is to be seen as important, to be validated by the world as important. Thus the pole of the binary opposition consisting of potential for hope is no real pole without containment of its opposite. Each half of the bipolarity is the enabling condition of the other.
The result is that Lovecraft’s broad thematic concern falls into irresolvable oscillation or aporia. It answers to no final or mastering description, no totalizing containment, no closure on “truth.” Such closure, of course, for any text expected to be literary, would be sure death. But that sprawling web of intertext that we call “Lovecraft” does not succumb. By proving to be, in the best post-structuralist sense of the term, unreadable—plurally indeterminate, unstable, shifting, disseminated, forever unsettled, energetically resistant to being reduced to fixity of interpretation—the Lovecraft intertext perpetually demands to be read, and reread, and ever more creatively misread. It reinscribes itself over and over in the quantum field of language and textuality. Teasing us on, it forever places the mirror before our faces, inviting us to reach forth, touch the glass, and become the text-wandering vagabond, the Outsider—the questing reader forever overwhelmed, yet darkly charmed, by a dancing universe of text without beginning or end.