Michel Houellebecq
H. P. Lovecraft. Contro il mondo, contro la vita

Anyone who doesn't know Lovecraft might find this little book complex, perhaps critically interesting, but then might say: “Ok, bene benissimo, not my cup of tea.”

Anyone who knows him in the most provincial and impure way (tentacles, Dagon, solitary of Providence, the esoteric surrounded by black kittens who would have inspired Alien, Sam Raimi, Marvel, and the crowned Madonna) would first be bored to learn that his "master" was what he was, and then find themselves disappointed by the lack of explanations about the complicated mythological bestiary (absolutely random) that so excites them.

Anyone who truly knows HPL, who has genuinely read him, without being discouraged by his apparent verbosity, who has entered the shadowy reality of his narrative and philosophical power, will not agree with everything Houellebecq writes, but will certainly find much truth, and something extremely valuable, in this essay, or novel with only two protagonists: Lovecraft & life.

I'll start with the most incorrect (least correct) thing that catches my eye: "Against the world, Against life." HPL was not against. He didn't need to be. He criticized, was disgusted, hurled darts, and was horrified by the world and life. But if he was AGAINST, he later went BEYOND. "Beyond the world, Beyond life." This is his greatness, this is the enlightenment that struck me; this is what helps to truly understand this book. The moral is that Lovecraft was an intellectual the world had never known and will never know again.

Houellebecq proceeds with an autoptic method (like HPL), deconstructing the concept of storytelling (like HPL), sacrificing the characters (like HPL), leading us to a definitive, total outcome, so "beyond" that it cannot leave any escape (like HPL): Lovecraft was not capable of living. Lovecraft loved a world that didn't exist. Lovecraft was practically almost uninterested in anything his modernity could offer him.

The essay says much, a great deal. There is a very well-done technical analysis that explains the complex and profound narrative-structural approach of HPL, there are many free interpretations by the Author, there is the very tedious and tricky issue of racism… I tell you what I think HPL might have left, and on which Houellebecq and I might agree.

Lovecraft was not a master, a solitary, an intellectual in the ivory tower: sloppy definitions that are really too tight for him. Incapable of love, having shelved the mechanical routines of sex in his brief marital experience, living in hardship because he was totally disinterested in money and had a completely anti-commercial mindset, he was genuinely and incontrovertibly SUPERIOR. To what? To our reality, to our world. "Racist" because he was crushed by those who knew how to live better than he did, frightened by competition, inadequate since his childhood. He took revenge, in a certain way.

But it wasn't even revenge, which presupposes, in its infamy, a certain miserable inferiority; with mocking cynicism, unassailable fantastic extension, and unparalleled detachment, he relegated the globe to an accident. To a random gathering of dots amassed by cosmic winds blown by forces that science deludes itself into understanding. Something terribly similar, poetically and poietically, to the reality of dark matter. But he also enjoyed populating this world, or rather, the unfathomable spaces hidden between the folds of the universe's material fabric, with energies, thinking entities that through needle holes that pierce the aforementioned folds, filter into our plane of reality. Here comes Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shubb-Nigurrath, all the amenities that delude the inattentive and pop reader into having dealings with an intricate pantheon, a mythology, a "Cycle."

All nonsense; dragon eggs scattered here and there in weird and fantastic magazines. Mocking contradictions, reshuffles, myths as formless and intangible as the creatures that populate them. A prankish provocation that Houellebecq unfortunately fails to emphasize enough; Lovecraft carried on his monstrous pantheon not only because it was narratively functional to the unveiling of certain plots but also because he was amused by how his inventions stimulated, in a prosaic and childish way, the imagination of even his most devoted and close admirers.

Apart from the trash, which is unfortunately what remains of him today, Lovecraft slams his reality in our faces: dear man, dear religions, dear science; if you think all you see in the world is yours, and you fight for it, it's only because you're deluding yourselves about knowing every aspect of reality. There is OTHER that escapes your senses, that can only be measured through the influence it exerts on our reality. And therefore it is horrible, indeed it is more than horrible, it is beyond, both the world and life. And here the circle closes.

Having understood this (early '30s) HPL lets go; commercial pretensions like artistic aspirations to reach and (de)scrIbe cosmic horror. He dedicates himself rather to the de-structuring of historical becoming, to the sci-fi fascination with time as a dimension that can be traveled in any direction, writes for himself and to alleviate the suffering of what was surely a period far from easy. Because, despite everything, he was still human. But death did not have the satisfaction of either breaking him or making him regret anything; if in letters he was truly sincere, then he was superior even to death, as well as, intellectually speaking, to life.

It's hard to remain indifferent, when one has a sensitive and free soul, to what HPL managed, with great effort and with a glowing, unsettling carnal flow of thoughts, to communicate to us. Something so powerful, alien, and impeccably delirious as to sound almost moving.

PS: Houellebecq, probably because he wrote the essay about thirty years ago, couldn't have known, but the adjective "Lovecraftian" doesn't mean a damn thing…