Sometime in 1921 Lovecraft wrote what has turned out to be one of his most variously interpretable stories, “The Outsider” (DUN, 46-52). In this tonally and stylistically Poesque tale, the first-person narrator, the Outsider, dwells miserable and alone in the clammy bowels of an ancient and ruined castle, “vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books” (46). He yearns for light and gaiety and some company other than that of the “noiseless rats, bats, and spiders” sharing his abode. At times he ventures outside under the dark trees that blot out the sky, but he fears to proceed into the surrounding forest. At length he makes bold to climb the decrepit tower that he thinks must reach above the trees, if only for a glimpse of the moon: “I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since” (as he expresses it with chiasmus) “it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day” (47-48). Clutching such slimy handholds as he can find in the cylindrical stone wall, he makes the perilous climb, with difficulty pushing his way up through the trapdoor at the top into a chamber above. Opening a door in the chamber, he finds, streaming through, the full moon, which he has never seen before “save in dreams and in vague visions [he] dared not call memories” (49).
What he discovers at the top of the tower partakes of all the illogicality of dream-narration: “Instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on a level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground,” with an old stone church and a graveyard nearby. Walking across the countryside with “a kind of fearsome latent memory that made [his] progress not wholly fortuitous” (49), he at last comes to “a venerable ivied castle in a thickly wooded park; maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness” (50). Within the lighted hall, he sees “an oddly dressed company” evidently “making merry,” and he steps into the room through a low window, only to see the merry crowd become “a herd of delirious fugitives” (51), screaming and fleeing from what he takes to be some menace nearby.
Here Lovecraft employs his frequent device of driving a mental wedge by arranging for the narrator to be far behind the reader in realizing what is happening. The Outsider sees motion “beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room” and approaches, seeing there a ghastly presence, “the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.” He sees “in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering and abhorrent travesty on the human shape” (51). Stumbling, he inadvertently reaches out and touches the outstretched paw of the thing in the archway and, experiencing “a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory” (51-52), flees back to his tower, trying in vain to open the stone trapdoor. Denied return to his dwelling, he gives himself over to his situation: “Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind” (52).
The tale closes with a “revelation” of what the reader must already know. Back in the lighted hall, when the Outsider reached out to the monster in the gilded frame, he found himself: “stretched out [his] fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass” (52). While much can be (and has been) said about the tale in Freudian or mythic-Jungian interpretation—the tower as the birth canal, the journey out into light as the quest for wholeness of the psyche—we will observe here, further, that the text partakes of webs of self-subversion. The Outsider, in touching the glass, finds not simply “himself’ (as there is, of course, no such unitary being) but a striding repository of paradox.
We may scarcely even read the title of this tale without seeing that the text will entertain a binary opposition between outsideness and insideness, a spatial supplementarity in which insideness seems to hold privilege over outsideness. The Outsider, qua outsider, yearns to be inside: in the fold, in the midst of life. This bipolarity operates alongside another, the contrast between light and dark, with light the seemingly privileged pole, associated with the insideness that the questing wraith seeks, against the dark that characterizes the outsideness from which he wishes to escape. In the Outsider’s appellation one finds etymological connections both fruitful and problematic, suggesting anew at any rate the spatial oppositions upon whose tensions the text thrives. Out derives from the Indo-European root ud-, meaning also “up.” The Outsider’s scaling of the deadly tower suggests that “up” is “out,” but we shall have reason to wonder if it really is. The same root gives rise to utter, a notion antithetical to the Outsider’s self-descriptions: he says that he “had never thought to try to speak aloud” (47), and, of the moment when he sees the carrion thing in the archway, he refers to “the first and last sound [he] ever uttered—a ghastly ululation” (51). In the Outsider’s designation we find also -side-, suggesting sidle: to move sideways, indirectly, furtively, deviously, that is, to move as the text moves. As we shall observe, there are no fixed insides or outsides here, and any textual movements toward such supposed insides or outsides can indeed only be sidlings.
At the outset, it is significant that the Outsider’s problem resides in the point that he is in fact inside—in the prison of his grim and cobwebbed home, his sepulchral castle. He is an insider here, though that term commonly suggests being in the midst of company such as he lacks. Spatially he is an Outsider only in transit, when he is between his initial insideness (the ruined castle) and his new insideness (the lighted hall). He is literally outside only in the open countryside through which he walks. In the manner in which the text subverts its own spatial symbolisms, the Outsider is most the outsider when inside and is least the outsider when outside in the open air, where he has left his dungeon behind and possesses at least a hope, albeit ill-fated, of finding companionship and gaiety. At walk’s end, he is again inside, amid the “merry company.” In their presence, however, he becomes more of an outsider than he has ever been: he is feared, shunned, abhorred, fled from. It is curious that in the end it is only he who is an insider. The “herd of delirious fugitives” has become a crowd of outsiders while he alone remains in the hall. He alone has scaled the tower, has perhaps earned a chance at self-knowledge, and seems to have found it at the mirror. The “merry company,” however, each member of which has no doubt glanced into the same mirror in the course of the evening’s pleasantries, can have found nothing there to be learned. The merrymakers have in fact fled from the lighted arena of self-understanding.
But this opposition between the Outsider, who presumably gains self-knowledge, and the “merry company” of partygoers, who presumably do not gain self-knowledge, is one in which the difference is self-dismantling. Each half of the opposition differs more from itself than from the other half.
The Outsider’s supposed acquisition of self-knowledge is fraught with difficulties. Though he experiences a “single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory” (51-52), he does so only to lose it in the next moment: “I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images” (52). The text of course equivocates over the whole question of whether the Outsider indeed does learn or come to remember anything about himself, since he claims to have forgotten the mnemonic revelation but knows in the end what he has beheld in the gilded frame. But the more intriguing problem lies in the consideration that if the Outsider is supposed to have come to know himself through the experience at the mirror, then it would follow that there is a single, identifiable “self” to be known. As we have been in the process of seeing, however, the Outsider is a jumble of textual qualities scarcely characterizable in the reductive terms of possessing a simple self. Whether the Outsider really even is an outsider is undecidable, and there is no self-identical, single nature present in the creature who stands before the mirror struggling to comprehend what he sees. (It is even arbitrary that we say “he.” How do we know that the outsider is not a woman?) The Outsider’s conversion to self-knowledge at the mirror is curiously flawed, since he still possesses enough of his former mentality to return to the ruined castle and try to reopen the trapdoor into the tower room. He joins the “mocking and friendly ghouls” only when he finds himself unable to return to his customary state (52). To the extent that the question of his garnering self-knowledge is indeterminately open to varying assessment, he resembles the self-ignorant partygoers and differs from himself.
The “merry company,” conversely, though seeming to have no mental experience at all except primal reactions out of fear, can scarcely fail to see in the Outsider what he has seen in his own form—“a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape” (51). If they have learned nothing from looking in the mirror, they must have learned something by looking upon the “bone-revealing outlines” of the Outsider. At least at an unconscious level they must know that the Outsider is that which they themselves must one day become in the dissolution of the grave. To this species of self-knowing they can respond only by fleeing, in effect fleeing from themselves. In any case they do learn something of their own nature—they become aware of their fears if nothing else—and to that extent they resemble the aspect of the Outsider that comes to self-knowledge. The object of fear is, after all, a common object for Outsider and partygoers alike—the putrid spectacle of the Outsider. The “merry company,” like the Outsider, simultaneously seem to learn about themselves while not doing so. To what would no doubt be their horror, they differ less from the Outsider than from themselves, since they have a kind of kinship with the carrion horror that they fear. Both have in common an ambiguity of self-understanding versus the lack of it and share the condition of mortality that makes the rotting figure in the hall a harbinger of that which is to come to one and all. This dissolution would seem to symbolize the coming-apart of any hoped-for unity of characterizable being on the part of either the Outsider or the “merry company.” The two are homogeneous by way of a common heterogeneity.
With regard to the Outsider, in fact, it is in this heterogeneity that one finds the text most self-subverting. As is often the case in such usages, the definite article in the title of the tale, insofar as it seems to imply singularity, amounts to an ironic wink of the textual eye. There clearly is no single Outsider, no unitary creature with unambiguously enumerable qualities. The language of the text at the outset plays games with the impossibility of finding fixity in the Outsider. The tale opens with syntactically inverted structures that stress qualities: “Unhappy is he” and “Wretched is he” (46). The first word of the text concerns (with specious textual privilege) a quality, supposedly a quality of the Outsider, via a syntactic structure that wrenches words out of their accustomed order to make quality-naming foremost. Yet there is nothing more textually unclear—and necessarily unclear, if we are not to have a simplistic and uninteresting text—than the question of just what the Outsider’s qualities are. As if to underscore within itself the problematic condition of qualities, the text deals in transferred epithets, for example, when it speaks of the tower as “that concave and desperate precipice” (48, emphasis added). The fact that the Outsider experiences an apocalyptic moment at the mirror symbolizes his lack of simply present “self.” Mirrors reflect back, iterate, multiply, copy, transmute, or, perhaps more accurately, reflect the iterations that they find, so that a walk through a hall of mirrors merely points up a multiplicity that is already in effect. The mirror in the lighted hall stands within a “great gilded frame” (52), and thus purports to frame or fix the Outsider’s image, while really doing nothing of the kind. If anything is “framed” here, it is paradoxically the dramatized impossibility of the Outsider’s ever standing unambiguously portrayed within the borders of a frame.
The glass is thus as problematic as the Outsider (one would say the Outsider “himself,” if the Outsider had a self). The Indo-European root of glass is gel-, which, though it means “bright,” also gives rise, antithetically, to the form chol-found in cholic and melancholy and suggestive of black bile. It yields also both gull (to deceive, mislead) and gloss (to explain, clarify). Even gloss may mean either “to clarify” or “to interpret falsely or misleadingly,” deepening the well of uncertainty in which the Outsider seems to dwell in spite of his climb into the moonlight. Here again the text’s supplementarities are self-subverting with regard to privileged terms. The text works at making the mirror the clarifier, the means of the Outsider’s self-knowing. Yet there is no certain self-knowledge, no certain self to be known. The mirror gives back not self-understanding but the impossibility of it. Glossing (glassing) as clarification gives way to glossing as deception. Yet this reversed hierarchy does not reconfigure privilege, either, since if the glass gives the Outsider back to himself symbolically, as an undecidable and weirdly protean figure, then it is giving him back to himself as he is and is “glossing” or “glassing” him in the positive sense after all.
If the Outsider’s condition—externality versus internality, self-knowledge versus self-ignorance—is indeterminate, then we must recognize that it is no less so than are the Outsider’s own feelings about his condition. He says, near the beginning of the tale, when bemoaning the solitude of his chambers: “And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other” (46). The other presumably is the “avalanche” of ruinous memory that he has come to experience at the mirror. This statement seems straightforward enough, yet one notices that the second comma is superfluous in the reading that appears most natural. It discourages the reading “cling to those memories when my mind threatens to reach beyond” and encourages another reading—“strangely content when my mind threatens to reach beyond.” The implied ambivalence further divides the Outsider, textually, from himself. And in content we find, by looking back at the word and stressing its first syllable, the notions of containment and insideness, which would be opposed to what characterizes the Outsider if anything as facile as “outsideness” did describe him. Indeed his epithet is a mockery, since it suggests, by way of spacial metaphor at any rate, arrangements more definite than the Outsider’s nature could ever be.
When we read that the Outsider’s mind “threatens to reach beyond to the other” (emphasis in original), we need not limit our understanding of the other (interestingly stressed) to the notion of the Outsider’s “soul-annihilating memory” (51-52). The other, as a broad term in philosophy, figures into general problems of plurality and comes into play when one notices that a thing (the Outsider, for instance) is never “itself” in any monadic way but rather is identifiable only by way of all that is “other” to it. Of course its identification is indefinitely distributed and deferred, never given to simple self-presence, never capable of standing above its self-differences. More specifically, as used by psychoanalytic commentator Jacques Lacan, the term the other refers to the process of externalization by which a child, through acquisition of (and immersion in) language, comes to regard itself through the “eyes” (I’s?) of a surrounding social structure. Through this process one comes to codify oneself as “I,” a codification only possible through language. This process—for anyone, and certainly for the Outsider—is laced with paradox, even in the context of classical structuralist thought, since it implies that one may hope (even if in vain) to find one’s unified self only by losing the centrality of that self in giving it over to the “other”: to language, to society, to the commonality of the unconscious. In the context of post-structuralist thought, the paradox deepens. While one is supposed to have hopes of finding unity and selfhood through the self-transcending field of language, language is precisely that surreal field of instability in which one would expect to find such logocentric notions as “unified selfhood” to be always already subverted or unsettled. Where one seeks unity, one most finds the fragmentation of a problematic and perpetually deferred self.
In Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the child, generating an early “ideal-I” that will interact with the later and more socialized “I,” passes through a prelinguistic “specular” stage of self-recognition in the mirror, before connecting with the sociolinguistic “other.” But Lovecraft’s Outsider, whose ancestral chambers contain no mirrors, rings changes on this pattern by experiencing the encounter at the mirror after his disastrous introduction to society. As always, he declines to be systematized in any well-behaved manner. The text, however inadvertently, has the Outsider “strangely content” when his mind “threatens to reach beyond to the other”—when his mind inclines toward the (unfulfillable) hope of self-knowledge through society and language. He tells us of his experience with the partygoers in the lighted hall: “I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before; and could guess only vaguely what was said” (50). Of the moment when he beholds the carrion horror in the mirror, he says, “I cannot even hint what it was like” (51), though he goes on to do so, seemingly unaware of what he does. He is a wandering and fumbling stranger, an Outsider, in the land of language. But again, then, he is most an outsider when inside. He is most externalized by containment. He is testimony to the uncertainty of the notions of insideness and outsideness.
If the Outsider is permanently “outside” anything in any arguable way, then he is outside the capacity to be simply outside. He is outside any reductive or unifying description or structural code with which we might be tempted newly to imprison him. As such, he is in a sense free after all, whether that means being inside or outside, or both.