SOURCE: Nelson, Victoria. “H. P. Lovecraft and The Great Heresies.” Raritan: Quarterly Review 15 (winter 1996): 92-121.

[In the following essay, Nelson compares descriptions of psychic horror in the fictional works of H. P. Lovecraft and Schreber's Memoirs.]

Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

—Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Four Corners” is a bit of generic roadside slang for that fixed point in the landscape where a quaternity of boundaries meet. At a similar nexus within the human psyche three territories rigorously fenced off from each other by Western Enlightenment culture—philosophy, religion, psychology—converge with a fourth, the artist's imagination. Only a handful of literary maps to this inner “region of the Great Heresies”—so dubbed by the Polish Jewish fantastic writer Bruno Schulz—have been drawn during this past and passing era of Modernism-Postmodernism. Those I wish to examine here belong to Schulz's American contemporary, the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, with cartographic glosses provided by a notable madman of the previous century, Daniel Paul Schreber.

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.” So speaks the reclusive narrator of Lovecraft's story “The Outsider,” which reaches its climax in the split second when this nameless character understands that the horrific shambling creature approaching him down the hall in a strange castle is an image in a never-before-encountered object: a mirror. A century earlier, the self-described outcast of Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Wakefield,” a man who voluntarily abandoned wife and home for a twenty-year exile from the quotidian, had always the option of returning to “normality.” This was an opportunity a writer some of whose followers consider the heir of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe never viewed as open and available to him.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, the only child of a silver salesman who was declared legally insane when Howard was three. Five years later, the father died in an institution of paresis, the medical diagnosis of tertiary syphilis. Howard and his mother lived with his wealthy maternal grandparents for the rest of his childhood and early adolescence. The family fortunes collapsed at his grandfather's death when Howard was fourteen, after which the young Lovecraft lived a highly secluded life with his mentally disturbed mother. He withdrew increasingly from the world; ill-defined health problems in childhood and a self-described nervous breakdown during adolescence allowed him to skip regular school attendance, and he did not attempt college. During World War I, at age twenty-seven, he tried to join the Rhode Island national guard, but he was rejected after his mother intervened with authorities. In 1919, his mother was institutionalized; she died in confinement two years later. Shortly thereafter Lovecraft contracted a brief, unsuccessful marriage with Sonia Greene, an older woman who was an admirer of his stories, and they settled in Manhattan. Within two years they had separated; he returned to Providence to live with an elderly aunt. In 1937, at the age of forty-seven, he died of intestinal cancer.

During his short life Lovecraft produced the body of horror stories and novellas for which he is famous. He was also an avid “amateur journalist,” part of a large informal network of aspiring writers who published their own magazines and corresponded with each other through national clubs; a voluminous letter writer (over five thousand pages in typescript survive); and a reviser (for tiny sums) of other people's manuscripts. The stories—Lovecraft's own and those he ghost-wrote—were published entirely in the pulp magazines that are the Ur-source of twentieth-century American popular literature and film.

In part because his work appeared in these venues and never in established literary journals, Lovecraft is traditionally regarded as a marginal figure outside the canon of serious American literature. The best known high-critical judgment was passed by Edmund Wilson, who pronounced: “The only real horror in most of the fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” In spite of a mounting surge of critical interest that began in the 1960s and 1970s, the mainstream assessment of Lovecraft's stories remains the same: it is fodder for young adolescent males, what older brothers read aloud to their younger brothers in hopes of frightening them out of their wits.

Like Poe, the author he venerated as his “god of Fiction,” Lovecraft delighted in undercutting his own rationalist tenets. In tale after tale, in defiance of his own staunchly held materialist views, monsters erupted from the regions of Unrat, much as in Goya's famous drawing The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produje monstruos). Self-taught but widely read, Lovecraft adopted both the style and stance of the Enlightenment while also drawing heavily from the estheticism of the decade of his birth. This tension between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worldviews and literary styles within a single twentieth-century writer is one of the special charms of Lovecraft's stories.

A deeper source of inspiration, however, was no literary forebear such as Poe or the Celtic fantasists Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen—though all three heavily influenced his early work—but his own childhood dreams and obsessions. After the death of his grandmother when he was six, Lovecraft wrote a friend,

I began to have nightmares of the most hideous description, peopled with things which I called “night-gaunts”—a compound word of my own coinage (perhaps the idea of these figures came from an edition de luxe of Paradise Lost with illustrations by Doré, which I discovered one day in the east parlour). In dreams they were wont to whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed, the while fretting & impelling me with their detestable tridents.

Lovecraft asserts that the terror these creatures evoked in him made up the principal impetus for his fiction—though we may ask whether these male demons are related to a child's loss of a grandparent, as he stated, or the more profound ongoing loss by degrees of his father, first to insanity and then to death.

A typical Lovecraft story involves the encounter between a studious, celibate, introverted male protagonist and a deformed or formless, intensely repulsive, and terror-inducing male creature (labeled as “indescribable,” “unnameable,” or “unspeakable,” but in fact often drawn in the most loving, obsessive detail). This encounter with the antinatural or supernatural “thing-that-cannot-be” triggers in the protagonist either insanity or his own physical disintegration into a loathsome alien form—outcomes, as we will see, that are structurally identical.

This intrusion of the impossible into the world of the senses in a Lovecraft story usually happens within the context of family via the ill-advised actions or genetic predisposition of an ancestor. The protagonist (who is also often the narrator) discovers he is related by blood to, or descended from, the horror. This realization either triggers or is coincident with his own regression into antihuman form. By story's end he is either mad (and, conventionally, writing from an asylum) or is engulfed and metamorphosizing into an alien creature himself.

Underneath the simple narrative pattern Lovecraft created an elaborate cosmogony of extraterrestrial beings—what his fans dubbed the “Cthulhu mythos,” after the principal god of this demonic hierarchy, who lies in a state of suspended animation in his ruined city deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. There are also Azathoth, the blind idiot-god, his servant Nyarlathotep, and Yog-Sothoth, a mediating entity who wanders in space and assumes various loathsome forms. These entities inhabit a plane of being in which natural laws as we know them are abolished; the Lovecraftian universe that surrounds (and sometimes invades and overwhelms) our narrow sublunary life is cruel, meaningless, and profoundly antagonistic to humans.

A paramount feature of the stories is setting: onto a familiar New England topography Lovecraft grafted imaginary rural areas (always represented as “degenerate”) as well as towns, most notably Arkham, home of the fictional Miskatonic University, which he modeled on Salem, Massachusetts. Sorcerers and the occasional witch (women characters are sparse in the stories) represent token nods to the more notorious aspects of New England's Puritan past, but these figures seem perfunctory next to his true and deeply original subject, the misshapen horrors from “beyond the stars.” Lovecraft also invented a number of occult works to which the stories make constant reference, most notably a mysterious book called the Necronomicon—always with the adjective “dreaded” appended—written by the “mad Arab” Abdul Al-Hazred. Lovecraft's repeated citations of these works allowed him to construct a formal framework of spurious scholarly authority that equally bestows credibility on, and contrasts starkly with, the anarchic, uncontained deformity of his creatures.

A model story is “The Dunwich Horror,” a tale of the twin offspring of a mating between an entity from outside space and time and the daughter of a decayed backwoods family. The more human twin, Wilbur Whateley, grows into a golemic creature eight feet tall, partly human above the waist, a fabulous monster below. Caught breaking into a university library in quest of forbidden Hermetic lore, he is attacked by dogs and disintegrates into a “sticky, whitish mass” on the floor. His invisible brother, in desperate flight to the realm of its father Yog-Sothoth, materializes briefly on a hillside as something resembling a gigantic octopus with half a man's face, yards wide, and then vanishes in a bolt of lightning, leaving behind a horrid stench. A Miskatonic professor explains to the terrified locals that the thing

was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. … It grew fast and big for the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big—but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.

This last sentence, in Lovecraft's italics, ends a story that suggests a demonic parody of the Christian sacrifice and ascension. But what, exactly, is the nature of the “outsideness” in which Wilbur and his invisible twin participate?

“Madness,” Gérard de Nerval once declared, “is the desire to be recognized by an ideal other who functions as a transcendental Being.” Wilbur's outsideness consists, in one of its intersecting Four Corners, of that cluster of abnormal mental and emotional attributes which our ancestors called demonic possession, our great-grandparents called dementia praecox, and we call psychosis.

Lovecraft was the child of psychotic parents. His father developed what was probably an organic psychosis caused by tertiary syphilis; by the time of her hospitalization his mother was suffering from a paranoid psychosis that may have been schizophrenia (there is no evidence that it was also paresis). Though the term is now being rapidly supplanted by its former cousin “bipolar disorder,” or manic depression, I follow the third revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in using “schizophrenia” to refer to that highly distinct type of mental illness which displays such recurring features as thought disorder, concretization of language, visual and auditory hallucinations, and occasionally paranoia.

Was Lovecraft himself schizophrenic? Psychosis, as we will see, is unmistakably the life problem that figures throughout his works, but what Lovecraft gives us is a teasing, tantalizing prospect of and proximity to psychosis, not the condition itself. So what is the difference between a person describing his own madness and a writer obsessed with the notion of containing and controlling madness through art? Carl Jung made the distinction neatly when he described James Joyce and his schizophrenic daughter as “two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other drowning.” In fact, however, three categories, or states of mind, can be distinguished: psychosis in medias res, psychosis recalled from a later perspective of relative sanity, and latent psychosis distanced and controlled, but never completely banished, by means of the containing narrative structure of a composed “fiction.”

The first state is that of a person living through a psychotic episode, who has no mediation with his madness but is totally identified with it. The second state is madness viewed in hindsight, after the episode has passed—a rather darkly Wordsworthian mode that Théophile Gautier, describing his friend Nerval's Aurélia, dubbed “the memoirs of Insanity dictated to Reason.” The third state characterizes writers like Lovecraft, who, even as they describe in figurative terms the process of going mad (often with little conscious knowledge of what they are up to), remain themselves unpossessed—that is, to use their own symbolic terms, still present in body, space, and time.

The Saxon judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), in contrast, wrote as one who has passed through the transcendentally deforming experience and then returned, if only temporarily, to describe it in the language of human sanity. Schreber produced a remarkable document, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), that owed its initial notoriety primarily to Freud's use of it, in a 1911 paper, to theorize about the link between homosexuality and paranoia. Later Freudians and other commentators have since investigated Schreber from a staggering variety of theoretical perspectives. From our post at the Four Corners, however, Schreber's universe shows striking similarities to Lovecraft's invented one, and particularly to the recurring Lovecraftian theme of physical invasion by (or generation from) an alien male entity, an act of violation that forcibly triggers a profane metamorphosis in the helpless human victim. It is highly unlikely that Lovecraft—who did not read German, loathed Freud, and was adamantly opposed to psychological interpretation of any kind—had access either to Freud's paper or to Schreber's memoir, which was not translated into English until 1955. The similarities, I will argue, rise from Lovecraft's inner intuitions and not his reading background, just as Schreber's own peculiar cosmogony of solar rays derives from the structure of his psychotic compulsion and not from the knowledge of Zoroastrianism he undoubtably possessed as a cultivated German reader of the late nineteenth century.

Schreber believed that the souls of men, and especially his own, existed in an unending and excruciatingly painful “nerve contact” with each other and with God, as a consequence of the mutual attraction between impersonal divine rays and individual human nerves. His constant bombardment by God's rays since the onset of his illness, Schreber tells us, has devastated him; voices from inside told him that this crisis was precipitated by an act of soul murder, committed either by his psychiatrist Dr. Flechsig or by one of Flechsig's forebears against the Schreber family. Flechsig himself now constantly violates other people's nerves and invades their thoughts; he has this power because souls have much weaker characters than living men do. Most of Flechsig's soul now resides inside Schreber, whose contact with these divine rays has transformed him into a woman, both sexually and in the sense of a passive receptor.

Schreber's paranoia is perfectly matched in Lovecraft's vision of the malign intentions of the creatures who live outside space and time. These “Great Old Ones” had come to earth long before there were men and were, says Lovecraft in “The Call of Cthulhu,”

not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape … but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. … They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in their tombs.

In this classic paranoid construct featuring “ancient and elaborate alliances between the hidden outer creatures and certain members of the human race” and “non-human creatures watching us all the time” (italics his), the human victim inevitably succumbs. Yet even though his protagonists can never resist the murderous Dionysian call of the Old Ones (Lovecraft had read his Nietszche), their creator locates himself squarely on the metaphorical side of “sanity” that the rigid structure of his stories provides.

As far as is known, Lovecraft never experienced a psychotic episode; the evidence for his early “breakdown” is rather sketchy. The recurring images in his works suggest rather that engulfment by the unconscious remained a continually threatening possibility to his restless consciousness. This crucial distinction is mirrored in the literary category in which each author has placed his works: memoir and fiction, respectively. Yet both are realists, as committed to truthful representation as any Zola or Dreiser. They are faithful documentors of interior reality as they experience it—as autobiographers of the deepest level of their psyches.

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One of the most distinctive features of psychosis is its dynamic of externalization. Madness is experienced as being enacted on the subject from without; a person perceives his own unintegrated psychological contents as outer-world creatures and demons who threaten to engulf and physically destroy him. The barriers between inner and outer, subject and object, dissolve so entirely that no boundary remains to protect the ego from the onslaught of this projected unconscious material. “No wall however thick,” Schreber complained, “no closed window can prevent the ray filaments penetrating in a way incomprehensible to man and so reaching any part of my body, particularly my head.” When the inner life of the psyche is allegorized so concretely, the outer world of objects becomes a perfect mirror in which to view the fragments of one's projected soul.

In literary works, we are accustomed to branding this universe of subject merging with object as pure pathetic fallacy. A Victorian rationalist's “fallacy,” however, represents what had been for pre-Enlightenment Westerners a profound organizing principle of the universe. Viewed in this framework, the outer landscape does not simply mirror our inner feelings; rather, in the tradition of Renaissance natural philosophy, the human soul, the parvus mundus, contains within itself the heavenly macrocosm. Each mirrors the other and reverberates at the points of coincidence; not only is external reality made to stand for internal reality, but behind both is posited a deeper transcendental reality.

Though they are currently most recognizable in the visual arts—in surrealism and expressionism—these ancient principles of projection may also be found in certain kinds of twentieth-century fantastic literature, whose literary family tree shows strong morphological links via Romantic literature to the hermetic Neoplatonism of the Renaissance, whose roots in turn lie in Late Antiquity. In this kind of art—in which, as Slavoj Zizek has declared, “the unconscious is outside”—every object represents a piece of psychic matter extruded from the main character or narrator and, by extension, consciously or unconsciously, from the author. In ever-widening circles of projection the contents of the psyche are cast first onto immediate surroundings—furniture, rooms, houses—then onto the natural landscape, finally even onto the globe itself.

To these interior psychic contents as we find them projected onto an outer literary landscape I would like to give the name psychotopography. Perhaps the most familiar of all psychotopographic loci, as Gaston Bachelard has advised us, is the house. Daniel Paul Schreber experiences the onset of his all-too-real psychotic break by what he perceives as a constant rustling of mice in the walls in his bedroom. Schreber enters his madness in a kind of historic and collective topographic plunge from the conscious to the unconscious level of his psyche:

It was as though I were sitting in a railway carriage or in a lift driving into the depths of the earth and I recapitulated, as it were, the whole history of mankind or of the earth in reverse order; in the upper regions there were still forests of leafy trees; in the nether regions it became progressively darker and blacker.

Back on the surface, a disturbing lack of fixity in the house of the psyche may have been the source of his anxious concern about the physical layout of the clinics in which he was housed (the Memoir even includes a floorplan) and his occasional conviction that he is in a room that “does not tally with any one of the rooms known to me in Flechsig's Asylum.”

What the psychotic experiences as direct, unmediated hallucination the writer obsessed with psychosis imagines as psychotopographic metaphor. Lovecraft's house of the psyche, while conventionally Gothic, is, like Schreber's, an architectural and geologic metaphor of consciousness (historic) grading down to the unconscious (prehistoric). In “The Rats in the Walls,” Exham Priory, the American narrator's ancestral English home, is described as

architecture involving Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly.

Beneath this structure lies a subterranean chamber deeper than the deepest known Roman vault. Rats causing the same sort of nightly disturbances as Schreber's mice seem to be crawling from these lower depths, whose passages show signs of having been “chiseled from beneath.”

The search party ultimately discovers, in a “twilit grotto,” a sea of gnawed human bones; in this place humans from time immemorial had been bred in pens, butchered, and eaten by succeeding generations of the depraved family. What lies still farther below? Says the narrator, the last descendant, who is shortly to go mad and begin eating the other searchers: “those grinning caverns of earth's center where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.” Lovecraft, touching down at the bottom of his psyche, fictionally anticipates (like Poe before him) death and chaos in the encounter with the unconscious.

Lovecraft and Schreber agree that the nether regions of the psyche—in psychotopographic terms, the map's edge or the end of the known universe—are the point at which we enter a completely different reality operating outside the conventional laws of the known world. They assert that the self makes this journey, a grotesquely ecumenical itinerarium mentis ad Deum, by moving regressively down, rather than progressively up, the soul's traditional direction. And finally, according to their joint testimony, three kinds of transformations concretely enact the journey into the transcendental world of madness: bodily deformation, the decomposition of human speech, and the collapse of time and space.

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“The grotesque body,” Mikhail Bakhtin has written, “is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.” Tobin Siebers, pointing to what he calls the “great writers of the metamorphic tradition—Ovid, Shakespeare, Gogol and Kafka,” notes that E. T. A. Hoffmann in particular “employs a bizarre anti-Darwinism in which humans mutate into plants.” Hoffmann's governing principle of metamorphosis, which draws heavily from the Hermetic alchemical tradition (another syncretic thread that links the ideas of Romanticism and twentieth-century fantastic literature to the philosophical legacy of Late Antiquity), is shared by H. P. Lovecraft, who gives it a considerably more demonic twist.

Carlo Ginzburg notes the widespread Eurasian folk belief that anything modifying the image of the whole human body is a way of expressing “an experience that exceeds the limits of what is human. … Anyone who goes to or returns from the nether world … is marked by asymmetry.” In stories such as “Dreams in the Witch House,” Lovecraft attaches tremendous violence as well as terror to the breakdown of form, echoing Henri Bergson's suggestion that “plasticity of the human form … is not a physical, but a metaphysical attribute connected to violence.”

Lovecraft reserves his greatest powers of eloquence for the deformation and disintegration of the body, the dreaded physical metamorphosis from human to inhuman. The description of the naked Wilbur Whateley, half-human offspring of Yog-Sothoth in “The Dunwich Horror,” attempts to capture the sense of shapes that lie, as Lovecraft characteristically insists, beyond the reach of human language or perception—though, as the following passage demonstrates, he's game to try:

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest … had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, cilated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat.

Lovecraft, no minimalist, leaves these detailed renderings of the “indescribable” with their deliberately overblown excess (this one carries on for another half page) gloriously unmoderated, thereby sealing his doom with the reader of orthodox tastes. Lovers of the baroque may have a different reaction. And students of syphilis may wonder if memories of Winfield Scott Lovecraft's death to a sexually transmitted disease whose physical marks were lesions, eruptions, tubercles, bubos, and gummas of the most horrific sort may have impressed themselves on his sensitive son. Whether or not his father's neurosyphilis also manifested these bodily symptoms, an interested lay reader looking up paresis in the medical textbooks of the early twentieth century would have encountered graphic photographs of deformities that not only do defy description but also closely resemble some of the traits of Lovecraft's pustulating monsters.

These monsters, in fact, are always hybrids, embodying Wolfgang Kayser's definition of the grotesque as a “monstrous fusion of human and nonhuman elements.” Produced by the human sexual act, their lack of sexuality—or rather, the monstrous incomprehensibility of their sexual parts—is a key aspect of their horror. The Shoggoths, a species of living imitative matter created by the Old Ones, are “slopping,” “slobbering,” “greasy,” and “green, sticky spawn of the stars.” An aura of sexual squeamishness and repulsion hovers like a low and unattended fog around these descriptions.

Daniel Paul Schreber, in contrast, directly experiences a hallucinatory altering of his own body as well as of the bodies of the living creatures around him, which are there because God created them specifically for him. In this supercharged interior “holy landscape,” he believes himself to have been impregnated, much like Spenser's sleepy nymph Chrysogyne in The Faerie Queene, by God's solar rays. He undergoes his most profound bodily change, from male to female, and also experiences a shrinking in size; his penis retracts, and various inner organs—heart, stomach, gullet, and intestines—are distorted or eliminated entirely by the rays. He has, Schreber is further convinced, a second, “mentally inferior” body. Outside his own deformations is a category of creature Schreber calls “fleeting-improvised-men,” or “humans produced by miracle,” representing humans disembodied into souls.

Both Schreber and Lovecraft strongly associate deformation of shape with genealogy, the family tree. In what was most probably a displacement from his own overbearing father, the child pedagogist Moritz Schreber—who before his death was subject to “hallucinations with a pathological urge to murder,” in his son's words—Schreber attaches his own “soul murder” and bodily distortions to a feud between prior generations of his own family and that of his doctor. Lovecraft likewise displays an obsessional interest in family past rather than future, forebears rather than offspring. His narrators typically discover a genetic relation between themselves and a nonhuman ancestor whose fate and form they must inevitably assume. In a brilliant echo of the amphibious Nantucket of Moby-Dick, in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” the men-fish inhabitants of a seedy port town share a characteristic “Innsmouth look” that bears the mark of “biological degeneration rather than alienage.” The sea creatures have told their human allies that everything living came from the water and would return to the water; if they mated with them and went back to the water, they would never die. A kind of profane immortality, in other words, can be achieved by moving down the evolutionary scale. As Melville himself succinctly put it: “Reversion—or the soul's undoing.”

Such biological degeneration, in Lovecraft's stories, is thus a figuring of parental madness projected backward through the family tree as well as a psychotopographic rendering of regression into the separate reality of psychosis. The fact that he depicts only members of inbred, isolated families mating with monsters also suggests a metaphorization of the psychological dynamics of incest, the inversion and perversion of family that simultaneously combines biological and psychological regression. Schizophrenia, sometimes located in children of socially isolated families with an overly dominant parent, might itself be considered the psychological analogue of physical incest, representing as it does an early psychic engulfment by the parent and a consequent failure by the child to differentiate from the family nucleus. Daniel Paul Schreber's overriding sense of invasion, which he projects onto the figure of his doctor as well as onto God (structurally equivalent father figures, as shown in his revealing remark: “God is incapable of judging me correctly”), as well as the extreme and unrelenting violation of interpsychic boundaries, is a pervasive theme in the testimonies of schizophrenic clinical literature.

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“What does language communicate?” asks Walter Benjamin, and promptly answers: “It communicates the mental being corresponding to it.” In the psychotopographic universe, language is also subject to transformation, and its disintegration from a vehicle for recognizable human communication into something “other”—both divine and demonic—also signals the shift into the transcendental world of merged subject and object.

Striking parallels are present between Neoplatonic language theories and the linguistic concretism characteristic of schizophrenia. According to syncretic principles formulated in Late Antiquity, developed and extended in medieval Jewish cabbalism, and revived by Christian Hermeticists during the Renaissance, humans have lost the ability to understand God's divine language, the pre-Tower of Babel lingua adamica in which a name concretely is the idea of its object. In seeking to recapture this ontological link between being and language, the late-sixteenth-century mystic Jakob Boehme declared that the Natursprache, God's original language, could be perceived in a trance, but that God was also literally embodied in the words of human language as manifest in intricate schemes involving heart, breath, and utterance. The act of articulating vowels and consonants during prayer was a tangible act of unity with God, with the mystic event occurring concretely in the mouth of the speaker and thereby drawing down the divine into the ordinary world.

Just such a merging of signified and signifier in language is a wide-spread clinical symptom of schizophrenia. In the latter condition, however, it indicates severe confusion and a breakdown in analogical thinking. A person experiencing a schizophrenic psychotic episode often perceives figurative language in literal terms and is incapable of separating the symbol from the object it stands for. (For this reason clinicians have traditionally used as a primary diagnostic indicator the inability to interpret metaphorically a proverb such as “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”) In the breakdown between internal and external boundaries, schizophrenics also typically hear voices they do not identify as their own—auditory hallucinations that clinicians believe are physically produced by their “hearer,” who is activating his own speech muscles without emitting audible sounds. Whether the schizophrenic perceives these voices as coming from inside or outside, however, he experiences them as other, alien, invasive. Or as Schreber put it with terrifying succinctness: “I am exposed to acts of bellowing.”

Some schizophrenics report that the voices speak in an alien language that only the afflicted person is able to understand. Here Schreber presents a perfect psychotic parody of Boehme's angelic language. The voices he hears speak in the “nerve language” in which God communicates with souls. This tongue, which Schreber also calls Grundsprache (“basic language”), he describes as a “somewhat antiquated but powerful German” in which many words have reverse meaning (“poison” means “food,” etc.). A principal feature of the nerve language is that, as with God's rays, the voices use it to bombard a defenseless Schreber day and night. In the microcosm of the human psyche the cosmos-uniting attributes of Boehme's angelic Natursprache have become the cosmos-disintegrating forces of Schreber's demonic Grundsprache.

This crucial difference between the language of mystics and psychotics was identified by Michel Foucault in his gloss on the magical language of Raymond Roussel (yet another schizophrenic, and a contemporary of Lovecraft's): “The cruelty of this solar language is that instead of being the perfect sphere of an illuminated world, it divides things to introduce darkness into them.”

In another striking parallel to Boehme, Schreber believes that the psychosis can be concretistically thwarted at the physical site of utterance, the point where language converts from a private to a social act and where, for Boehme, divine and human unite. The voices torment Schreber by delivering fragments of the same sentence hundreds of times a day. Though cursing and obscenities also serve, Schreber's best defense against this onslaught is to finish the fragments, compulsively, with grammatically complete phrases; doing so destroys the rays precisely in his mouth. It is Schreber's profound conviction that conquering nerve language by speaking in complete sentences “is the ultima ratio for preserving my house,” a means by which to stay at least half sane and stave off the forces of total possession.

Nikolai Gogol, who did go mad, though he was not yet mad when he wrote “The Overcoat,” gave Akaky Akakievich the distinctive trait of expressing himself only in “prepositions, adverbs, and particles which have absolutely no significance whatsoever. If the subject was a very difficult one, it was his habit to leave his sentences quite unfinished.” A dangerous habit, as Schreber would have advised him. For a shaky and disintegrating self, the ordering framework of the language we share with those around us acts as a stabilizing container. As James Russell, scholar of mysticism and Lovecraft aficionado, tells us, “Syntax is a deep part of what makes us human.”

Linguistically, Lovecraft depicts the journey to the other reality in much the same terms as Schreber experiences it—in the actual loss of ability to speak human language that his characters frequently experience, and their subsequent involuntary conversion to a demonic language. Lovecraft's version of Grundsprache is Aklo, the language of the demiurge Cthulhu and his minions which he reproduces in words, phrases, and—infrequently—a sentence (as, for example, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, “In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”). A common representation in a Lovecraft story is of a cultivated, male, English-speaking voice either juxtaposed with, or declining into, a buzzing nonhuman noise “like the drone of some loathsome gigantic insect” that produces in the listener a “feeling of blasphemous infinity.” (One also thinks of Gregor Samsa's insect-language, incomprehensible to humans.) The narrator, if overwhelmed, ends by either talking in this demonic Ur-language or describing his surrender to the forces that rule the other reality in exalted, quasi-religious terms.

The main character of “The Rats in the Walls” undergoes his linguistic regression in the grotto deep below his ancestral home, surrounded by the sea of gnawed human bones:

No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys' face on that flabby, fungous thing! … Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do! … 'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust … wolde ye swynke me thike wys? … Magna Mater! Magna Mater! … Atys … Dia ad aghaidh's ad aodaun … agus bas danach ort! Dhonas's dholas ort, agus leat-saw! … Ungl … ungl … rrlh … chchch. …

These remarks may be glossed as modern English, Elizabethan English, Middle English, Latin, Celtic, and Aklo. The story is a bit of a cheat, of course, since the narrator tells it in perfect English, from the stereotypical vantage point of the madhouse, having been restored to “form” solely by the conventions of the popular genre Lovecraft is working within.

In folklore such distortion of voice or language has traditionally been a distinguishing feature of the otherworld and, in pre-Enlightenment Western culture, of dead souls. Against Schreber's “bellowings” and the “thunder croakings” and “croaking, baying voices” of the Whateley offspring in a story like “The Dunwich Horror,” for example, can be set a range of mythic parallels from Greek antiquity. Maurizio Bettini has noted the “squeaking, gibbering” voices of the dead in the Iliad, a cacophony associated with bats, and the statement by Eusthathius, in his commentary on the Odyssey, that “mythically trismos [whistling] got chosen for souls because they were deprived of articulated speech and only made noise” (note also the sinister “faint whistling” that stalks Kafka's narrator in “The Burrow”). The presence of this strong tradition implies at the very least that the internal experience of schizophrenia replicates, in ways we do not yet understand, a culturally consistent representation of the supernatural and not, as Louis Sass asserts in Madness and Modernism, a distinctively twentieth-century sensibility of Apollonian alienation.

In some Lovecraft stories the Old Ones communicate by telepathy rather than uttered speech. Telepathy as a construct amounts to a dissolving of boundaries between one human being and another that produces only a kind of inchoate merging in place of true contact. Language, a social act, is thereby reduced to thought, a private inner act that functions as a vehicle of invasion, not of communication and relationship—precisely the effect of psychic violation that Schreber describes in the ongoing assault he endures from his inner voices. As a characteristic of a primal, undifferentiated universe, telepathy allegorizes as well the human situation of an engulfing parent from the perspective of a passive child.

At the same time Lovecraft believes in a transcendental realm “beyond words,” the most obvious mark of this belief being his trademark use of the adjectives “indescribable,” “unspeakable,” and “unnameable”—in their lower-case manifestation a secularization of the divine “name that cannot be pronounced”—to render his things-that-cannot-be. By the standard conventions of literary style, of course, frequent recourse to this mode of nondescription is considered very bad form, and he was often taken to task for it. Lovecraft was well aware of these criticisms. In a story called, with deliberate irony, “The Unnameable,” he has a character chide the protagonist, a stand-in for himself, that

my constant talk about “unnameable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed my heroes' faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious convictions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology—preferably those of the Congregationalist, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can supply.

The story concludes triumphantly with the doubting character quite literally scared out of his wits—and, by extension, his rationalist stance—by an apparition in a nearby cursed house (the two characters are, appropriately, sitting in a cemetery during this conversation).

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Both Lovecraft and Schreber mark the disintegration of body and language with a simultaneous shift out of the boundaries of space and time. From the point of departure in consciousness there is a move downward into unconsciousness and ultimately, at the bottom of the psyche, into transcendent reality—which, for the psychotic sensibility, means hell rather than heaven.

Even as he insists that the Old Ones are not supernatural beings but “alien life forms” consonant with scientific materialism, Lovecraft represents the world of the senses as an illusion behind which lies a “truer” realm outside time and space. As a character in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” asserts:

From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another incorporeal life of a far different nature from the life we know. Sometimes I believe that this less material life [of dreams] is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

This world of forms is a Platonic nightmare; it is, he says in another story, “the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry,” and a misshapen realm as well: in speaking of the architecture of the city of the Great Old Ones, he says its “geometry was all wrong.” Humans, in Lovecraft's view, stand in constant danger of eroding or reverting (never “ascending”) into this fourth-dimensional realm of altered forms.

Daniel Paul Schreber is equally committed to the notion of a “realer”—and more horrific—transcendental world. In fact, Schreber's inner universe even more than Lovecraft's is consistently ordered by the laws of pre-Enlightenment natural philosophy. Schreber has embraced, in his psychosis, the pre-Cartesian notion of the cosmos as the living body of God in which all parts are influenced by the whole and the two realms, mind/spirit and body, are concretely and organically joined. There is little difference, for example, between his self-described “cosmogenic theory” of divine rays and the Hermetic-Gnostic vision, promulgated in the Renaissance from Ficino to Robert Fludd, of a physical universe in which, according to a second century c. e. Corpus Hermeticum treatise, there is “a community of actions among the hierarchies whose operations are like rays of God … and the operations work through the world and work upon man through the physical rays of the cosmos.” Schreber's account of the transmigration of souls to other planets and of an explicitly Zoroastrian upper God (Ormuzd) and lower God (Ariman) might be regarded as the ultimate Gnostic text in which the individual becomes the special, albeit not particularly favored, object of the deity's attention: “God entered into exclusive nerve contact with me, and I thus became the sole human being on whom His interest centres.”

Schreber is not the only modern Western psychotic in the literary record to have been overwhelmed by Hermetic visions of the macrocosm. One of many such examples is Gérard de Nerval, who saw (he tells us in Aurélia) “a great conspiracy afoot among all animate beings to restore the world to its primordial harmony”:

All things live, function, relate to one another; the rays of magnetism emanating from myself or from other individuals pass without impediment along and through the endless chain of created things; they form an invisible network which covers the whole globe, and detached filaments of them make their way by degrees to the very planets and stars. Captive for the time being on the earth, I am in touch with the sun, the moon and the stars, who share in my joys and my sorrows!

Such testimony seems to lead us toward a conclusion that schizophrenia may include as one of its characteristics a fairly orthodox Neoplatonic world view with religious overtones that parody the mystic's revelation experience. Schreber himself was emphatic on the subject: “A person with sound nerves is, so to speak, mentally blind compared with him who receives supernatural impressions by virtue of his diseased nerves.”

Lovecraft echoes, at a greater distance, this representation of psychosis as simultaneous possession by spirits and initiation into the secrets of the hidden universe. Whereas Schreber might be called a solar Zoroastrian, Lovecraft is—as Barton St. Levi Armand has correctly labeled him—a Gnostic radical dualist. Lovecraft turns the dark vision of Gnosticism on its head, however, in his insistence that not physical matter but the preexisting forms themselves are evil and demonic; we leave this world to cleave with them to our eternal damnation. Such a position, to put it mildly, represents “materialism” of a rather qualified sort. Even though Schreber typically, like Lovecraft, identifies himself as a rationalist and adamantly denies he was ever a religious believer, he insists that “the most gruesome time of my life … was also the holy time of my life.” Both in a sense were involuntary mystics catapulted against their will, via their pathology, into the transcendent.

This neglected angle of entry into the Four Corners, in which the secular and relatively new field of psychology touches on the older religious dimension of hierophany and the soul, obliges us to reflect on the historical shift of attitudes, now a virtually unconscious reflex in all intellectual endeavor, that exiled the transcendental from the mainstream of Western thinking. At the level of language this transition is embodied in the shift in meaning of the term psychosis, which meant to the Greeks of Late Antiquity the movement of the soul, or the principle of life generally (cf. the Latin synonym animatio, or “animation”). Increasingly marginalized in Western culture after the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concept of the soul itself, or pneuma, vanished as a distinct category and was absorbed first into the physiological vocabulary of Western culture as the more secular psyche gained ascendance.

By the nineteenth century the meaning of psychosis (first employed as a psychiatric term by Ernst Feuchtersleben in 1854) had been transformed into pathological movement, or agitation: in the oed definition, “mental illness that includes hallucinations, delusions, loss of contact with external reality.” The stage was thus set for the coup de grace at the turn of the twentieth century, when, in Otto Rank's words, “Freud essentially eliminated the soul” by declaring the unconscious, formerly a spiritually constructed Other, to belong to the material world. Of Schreber's elaborate belief system with its capricious deity, omnipresent miracles, and hierarchies of souls, Freud pronounced simply that the rays “are in reality nothing else than a concrete representation and external projection of libidinal cathexes.” Psyche was now a fully materialized entity.

Yet we ignore or rationalize the spiritual dimension at our peril. Schreber's psychotic universe is noteworthy precisely because, in what was already a predominantly secular era, it contains a crucial component of religious experience: terror and awe. Tobin Siebers has observed that, in our secular age, “the desire to supplant sacred terror with psychological pathology is a common reaction to the supernatural.” Yet the grotesque has always been an important feature of orthodox religious art, a recognized “sacred language” in and of itself revealing a reality beyond the natural. David Williams has noted that “Christianity, as a rational, philosophic religion, required a deep symbolic encoding of the mysterious and mystical truth of the grotesque and the fantastic, on the one hand to prevent its degeneration into magic and, on the other hand, to elevate it to the full intellectual reality of the allegorical.”

In the twentieth century the narrow field of the literature of the fantastic, with its strong undercurrents of pathology, reproduces ambiguous fragments of that experience. Georges Bataille has argued that, “Those arts which sustain anguish and the recovery from anguish within us, are the heirs of religion.” A French commentator on Lovecraft, Maurice Lévy, has noted, like many others, this strange—one wants to say “unholy” as well as unheimlich—link between literature of the grotesque, personal pathology, and the mystic religious experience:

Driven by a myth—a necessarily oriented structure, based on the quest for and the revelation of the sacred—horror can only be expressed by and in sacrilege; the impious cults, hideous ceremonies, blasphemous rites … which tell a reverse history of salvation. … To formulate sacrilege is somehow to recover the meaning of the sacred.

If the Godhead in orthodox religion must always find some representation as Monster, as Slavoj Zizek asserts, the post-Christian monster is an equally necessary appendage of the Enlightenment: as soon as Kant's pure Subject appears, says Zizek, there is also the Ding an Sich, the void that cannot be grasped, an empty space of thinking where the monster—that is, the inherently unstable element—appears. In this way the grotesque tradition, with its now-tattered link to a sense of the divine, continues to fulfill its ancient function.

The grotesque, however, makes up only half—the dark half—of the complete religious experience. As Wolfgang Kayser noted, the grotesque truly “instils fear of life rather than fear of death.” What it noticeably lacks is the experience of bliss, grace, divine joy. When the union of human and more than human occurs as a merging of subject and object in the compromised context of a psychotic episode, the field can only bear a blighted fruit. The inner worlds of Lovecraft and Schreber are full of fear and suffering, painful metamorphoses, debasement: transformation minus transfiguration.

If psychotics might be considered failed mystics, it is not the absence of a communal framework of shared religious belief or philosophical speculation that betrays them—madness, after all, was equally well known in the Christian Middle Ages as well as across cultures—but rather the encounter with their deepest psychic wounds, the fatal flaw that first lures them into the region of the Great Heresies and then overwhelms them. As a refiguring of the wound in allegorical terms, the transcendental experience draws the psychotic farther and farther away from a human, conscious integration of his own suffering. Episodes of false grandiosity are quickly followed by crushing despair. No healing occurs as a result of the compelled inner journey, only a perverse urge to repeat one's submission to it. If Jakob Boehme is, as he is sometimes stylized, a master of the inward journey, then Daniel Paul Schreber is its slave.

Still, as Moshe Idel remarked of Bruno Schulz, the shared malaise of Lovecraft and Schreber, however inseparable from their individual pathologies it may ultimately be, can be considered not simply “symptomatic” in a clinical sense but a microcosmic reflection of a deeper metaphysical unrest, a tragic, half-articulated awareness “that avenues once open are no longer accessible to man.” Like Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror,” they are seeking, and failing to find, the invisible twin without whom the kingdom of heaven cannot be reached.

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Lovecraft, at some level highly aware of the duplicitous nature of the psychotic's downward journey, intuitively sensed (probably rightly) that the Gnostic epiphany of knowing—being “transformed through enlightenment into the actual object of knowledge,” as Giovanni Filoramo puts it—was more than his conscious ego could handle, that any fusion with the transcendental object would be fatal to his sanity. The encounter with the horror at the center of self had, consequently, to be avoided at all costs. In the following warning we read Lovecraft's strategy of avoidance for managing the uncontrollable uprushings of the psyche:

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

Or, as a character of his says elsewhere, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

Such a policy of strictest containment, even as it seems to be superficially overturned time and again in the dark outcomes of his stories—in which at least one sacrificial victim is inevitably served up, stripped of shape, speech, and human identity, to the Great Old Ones—Lovecraft in fact enforces at the level of narrative structure. Just as psychosis itself might be said to represent a symbolic defense against the direct experience of unbearable psychic pain, Lovecraft mobilizes a considerable array of literary devices as defenses against psychosis. At first his representations seem straightforward enough. The prospect of metamorphosis, whether physical or psychological, fills his characters—and us as readers by extension—with terror, disgust, and loathing. At the same time, however, his stories evoke the same low-level terror over and over again without taking his readers any farther into resolution or any deeper into self-awareness. The madness is tightly locked into the formulaic structure and metaphoric level of these stories, and consequently it remains an enchanted beast that can never have its curse lifted, can never be humanized by the insights of art.

The separation of category between popular fiction and high literature of the grotesque is crucial to an understanding of how we as readers experience H. P. Lovecraft in contrast to writers like Schulz or Kafka. The fact that popular “genre” literature lacks the sanction of traditional high culture critics does not prove ipso facto that it possesses subverting virtues; there are very good reasons to have reservations about these literary modes and there is a level on which Edmund Wilson's judgment of Lovecraft is not entirely off the mark.

The basic distinction is between a reading experience that is complete in itself and another kind of reading experience that provides a catharsis of sorts yet carries within it the compulsive demand to be repeated. After reading Moby Dick a reader does not feel compelled, in a week or two, to seek out another adventure story with whales in it. Reading Henry James's Turn of the Screw or a tale by Singer, Schulz, or Kafka does not trigger an insatiable hunger for more stories about demons, real and possible, or men turning into insects. These works are in some mysterious way self-fulfilling; they are inherently satisfying in themselves and can—in time—be reread with even deeper appreciation for their levels of meaning. Yet reading a murder mystery or a ghost story or a romance—all the genres whose readers are aptly described as “addicts”—is in essence engaging in a Wiederholungszwang: after finishing the work, such a reader is moved not to reread it (specific works in these genres tend to have a one-time reading function only) but to read another of exactly the same kind, new content cast in the same unchanging form. Even to read a story by Poe, Lovecraft, or any of the great Victorian or Edwardian ghost story writers is to embark on an endless cycle in which the true catharsis seems oddly displaced, moved forever forward into the future as the reader “devours” story after story.

Why is this so? Of course one answer is obvious: the stories of Kafka, for example, do not replicate a single narrative movement; they contain nothing formulaic or “typical,” as Lovecraft's stories do, in their plot or characters. But the truth lies deeper. W. H. Auden provided an important clue when he said: “The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is a sharing in the suffering of another.” If this is a true statement—and I believe it is profoundly true—what is there, then, in the avoidance of suffering that offers such a compulsive attraction, such a hook? In terms of Lovecraft and horror stories generally, the repetitive element is an experience of inchoate terror that is packaged into a familiar, predictable, and highly structured plot in such a way that the reader of (for example) a horror story is teased with the tantalizing prospect of utter loss of control, of possession or engulfment, while remaining at the same time safely contained within the girdle of a formalized, almost ritualized narrative.

Reading (or writing) a horror story, then, might be considered a similar experience to what Lenore Terr and other psychiatric researchers now call the “posttraumatic games” that children who have been kidnapped, raped, or otherwise mistreated typically invent. That is, while often repressing a direct memory of the event, such children play games that symbolically reproduce the dreadful experience. Because they make no conscious connections, however, the wound is never healed by this enactment; it is only unconsciously displayed over and over again. The same might be said of the writer and reader of formulaic horror stories. Representations of terror-inducing entities and situations fulfill the compulsion to experience a familiar yet disconnected sense of being overwhelmed—a rewounding in the name of healing that never arrives at its goal. Because both writer and reader dare not come too close to the true wound at the core of their being—it is too terrifying—they are cursed to reenact its effects compulsively, and the psychic experience, like the game playing, remains a completely unconscious act.

Projection itself—the central device of all psychotopographic art, high or low—represents (in the psychological quarter of the Four Corners) an attempt by parts of the personality to communicate with each other through internal defenses erected within the psyche. The paradox is, of course, that this effort to communicate must be forever thwarted by the very nature of its form, which demands constant repetition with no resolution. An affect that is allegorized as an Other, in the real world or a work of literature, is calling attention to itself and wants the conscious psyche to notice it. The very fact that it is the Other, however, means that the projection is still in place, and no true recognition occurs.

Keeping their projections entirely intact, popular ghost and horror stories offer no identification with suffering, no understanding of its source. They merely replicate in the reader the emotional aftershocks of psychic trauma (dread, terror) in a manageable form while the source of the suffering remains untouched, unlived, and unmastered. To read a genre story is to participate in a Sisyphean re-enactment that is not the kind of complex, deeply identified re-experiencing a reader undergoes with a writer like Kafka. Thus a world of difference lies between watching, on one hand, a movie called, perhaps, Invasion of the Giant Cockroaches—heart thumping with terror while watching the enormous menacing insects attack a town, tiny citizens fleeing in all directions, a few crushed to death—and, on the other, waking up one morning with Gregor Samsa after a night of troubled dreams. In the second case, the deeper problem that both these works in their own very different ways take up—namely, the inner monster that belongs mostly to us and not to the outer cosmos—is lived from the inside out, not projected.

The person who watches Invasion of the Giant Cockroaches will very probably, the next week, go to see Attack of the Fungoids. (Now this person may very well be reading Die Verwandlung at the same time, as witness Wittgenstein and his pulp detective fiction; the educated are not exempt from such addictions!) It could be argued, of course, that this instinctive craving for repetition is exactly the experience of listening to a traditional folktale, that something inherent in formulaic structure triggers the desire to repeat the experience. Though they share with folktale a characteristic naive replication of plot and character type, however, the modern written mass genres are highly specialized forms that embody highly specific psychological Gordian knots. (In the murder mystery, for example, I suspect we see the simultaneous ritualized reenactment, and warding off, of a vast repressed and unconnected rage.) Using this distinction as an esthetic rule of thumb, the difference between H. P. Lovecraft and Franz Kafka—bearing in mind that both are still situated squarely on this side of the fence of sanity from Daniel Paul Schreber—might be expressed as the difference between pathology acted out and pathology partially acknowledged and transformed.

Maurice Lévy believes that writers like Lovecraft are effecting their own cure, which both parallels and partakes of the religious experience of redemption. The fantastic, he says, “is at once an evasion and the mobilization of anguish”:

It is at this deep level that the cure operates: because the sick man recognized these images of horror as his own, he is in a position to assume them fully and thereby overcome them. To give a material representation to anguish is in itself to be freed from it.

In fact, the Lovecraft stories provide neither consciousness nor “cure” but a makeshift and compulsive form of ongoing anxiety management in which, as Foucault observed of Roussel, “the work bears the burden of resolving in the imagination the problems posed by the illness.”

Like all humans, artists show varying degrees of psychological self-awareness. Lovecraft was not the sort of writer, or person, to look at his own stories and say: “Aha! My male creatures are always horribly deformed below the waist, they worship great phallic monoliths dripping with green liquid and there is never a whisper of sex in my stories! I wonder if there is any connection?” Lovecraft's awareness of the displacement of sexuality in his fictions seems nonexistent and consequently untransformed. A core of monstrousness at the bottom of his psyche remains monstrous; his eternally misshapen beasts are never released from the evil spell under which they labor.

High art does not “cure” its practitioner, either, though it can provide an opening up, a sense of expansion absent in the repetition compulsion of formulaic narrative. Even in its most sophisticated forms, however, art that is psychotopographic remains profoundly narcissistic and solipsistic. In the end, after this long dive into the burrow of self, the outer world, the world of the truly Other, begins to pull urgently at the reader. We don't want to stay trapped down under the roots, gasping for air; we know intuitively we must resurface in the human community or die.

Lovecraft, never able to reach this vision in his art, yet remains an authentic and original American talent. Obsessed by themes whose full dimension he was unable or unwilling to grasp consciously, he used his intense sensitivity to his own unconscious uprushings to give modern readers a unique body of work, and a new variation on some very old religious and philosophical traditions of Western culture. Not the least of Lovecraft's virtues, finally, was personal bravery, the tenacious spirit of the Outsider who managed to win his own mental stability and life as an artist against all odds of upbringing and family circumstances. His great creation was to make himself human.