through one of the low windows to join the gay party…only to sink into his blackest moment of despair. At the sight of the putrefying corpse creeping in through the window, “there descended upon the whole company” a panic “fear of hideous intensity,” that Lovecraft paints in vivid and unforgettable colors. Everyone fled madly, stampeding desperately from the unthinkable apparition that now stood there, “alone and dazed,” in the throes of melancholic anguish, unable to comprehend the reason for this sudden manifestation of delirious terror. He clings to the tenuous hope that the horrified mass reaction was due to something “that might be lurking near” him….
When he sees that fateful reflection in the mirror of reality, he does not perceive the nightmarish image as his own, since in his dreams he had always conceived himself as “akin to the youthful figures” in his books…and now is confronted with the “putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation,” with a “carrion thing” that “the merciful earth should always hide.” With horror, he detects in “its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape.”
As he stumbles, he touches “the rotting outstretched paw of the monster” but feels only “the cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.” In that mind-shattering instant he realizes the truth, he remembers the past, he recognizes the “altered edifice” where he now stands, and worst of all, he becomes agonizingly aware of his own condition. Overwhelmed by this nightmarish revelation of ultimate horror, this cruel mockery of all his dreams and hopes, the outsider sinks to the most abysmal depths of despair. But in that moment of supreme anguish, his tortured mind dissociates his painful awareness, and he experiences the merciful oblivion of amnesia.
In his mordant yet morbid humor, Lovecraft shows us now this tragic and pitiful parody of immortal man running blindly and frantically back, attempting to return to the graveyard, to the earth where he belongs—only to find the slab to the subterranean vault immovable. He experiences no regret, since he can only abhor the prospect of continued and meaningless existence in the crypt. Now he rides with the “friendly ghouls,” the necrophagous scavengers who become his sole companions in a final gruesome and grotesque mockery of man’s impossible dreams.
The outsider finds not the glory of Heaven, nor even the torments of Hell, but only the “unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid….” Man’s ultimate fate, man’s final destiny, is not the glory of supernatural existence, but the feast of the maggots.
With “The Outsider” Lovecraft achieved an equally effective, yet vastly different statement on the absurdity of immortality, as Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. To cease to exist is certainly preferable to the kind of unholy survival found in the outsider, and to conceive of any other kind of personal survival in a mechanistic and purposeless cosmos was a vastly more absurd proposition for the thinker from Providence.
4. A PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION: MAN’S POSITION IN A MECHANISTIC UNIVERSE
That H. P. Lovecraft was a first rate thinker and philosopher is shown by such brilliant essays as “Materialism and Idealism: A Reflection” and “The Materialist Today,” as well as by the numerous and profound philosophical speculations found in his extensive correspondence. His works of literature, such as “The Outsider,” cannot be appreciated or interpreted independently of his serious convictions. If Lovecraft was trying to communicate a deep message to mankind, it is here, in his philosophical works, that we shall find the key to the deepest and most significant meaning of all his unique fiction.
Lovecraft was a mechanistic materialist, influenced by Haeckel, but going far beyond the nineteenth century rationalist. He was an ardent believer and supporter of science and scientific method. A conservative in matters of art and morality, he showed himself to be an extreme modernist in his intellectual outlook. He was convinced of the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and to a much lesser extent, of the modern discoveries of psychoanalysis. His deepest scientific interest was in the area of astronomy, an interest which he maintained until the end of his short life.
Although he greatly appreciated the esthetic beauty of the myths and traditional beliefs of the past, he fully accepted the implications of the information available to his probing scientific intellect, and abandoned all traces of religious and superstitious beliefs at an early age. He conceived the cosmos as entirely purposeless and mechanistic, and man’s position therein as a mere insignificant accident lasting an instant in eternity.
Lovecraft had the unique ability of being able to achieve complete intellectual objectivity. He was capable of detaching his consciousness, of achieving a frame of mind of “cosmic outsidedness” and becoming a dispassionate observer of man and the universe. He was able to conceptualize a cosmos where our entire universe was reduced to a grain of sand, a mere atom in infinity, and at the same time to observe the amusing behavior of his fellow men with the same objectivity with which we might study the antics of ants, rats, or monkeys. His incisive mind was quick to spot the inconsistencies and incongruities of human hypocrisy, and he condemned the blindness of the fanatic theist together with the unjustified hopes of the idealistic atheist.
Lovecraft’s view of life was essentially pessimistic. He felt that most people are basically unhappy, and that a life of suffering is not preferable to the oblivion of death. Seriously contemplating suicide, he decided against it on the grounds that the esthetic pleasure he derived from the study of eighteenth century art slightly tipped the scales in favor of life. He considered the quest for truth, for new knowledge, the sole possible justification for the existence of the human species, and his eternal question was “What is reality?”
For Lovecraft, man, as well as the cosmos, has no purpose, no final goal. A rock, a man, a planet, and the entire universe, all are equally meaningless, and equally valuable in a purposeless cosmos. Life did not exist a moment ago, and will have ceased a moment hence, and the memory of man will be eternally forgotten. But man must live by the relative values imparted by culture and tradition, and from these he derives an illusion of security and stability. These values and traditions Lovecraft accepted as long as they did not contradict what his cold, rational intellect knew to be true. He opposed the blind iconoclastic fury of those all too willing to tear down what they could never replace.
Nevertheless, Lovecraft was intellectually too perceptive to become a philosophic missionary. With unparalleled objectivity, he was able to realize that a complete awareness of reality is not necessarily the best for all men, and that for many an illusion is preferable to the truth. Man exists for the merest instant, and anything making life less puhishing and more endurable has relative value.
Lovecraft had little faith in man’s ability to cope with reality, and in his brilliant letters and fiction predicted what we now call “future shock.” With deep regret he prophesied man’s retreat into insanity or the superstitions of a new dark age when faced with the new discoveries of science pointing toward the abysmai insignificance of man. The introductory paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu” provides an excellent summary of Lovecraft’s views, and also supplies us with the essential key for the interpretation of “The Outsider” within the framework of his mechanistic philosophy:
“The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas if infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Lovecraft has been often misunderstood in this paragraph as opposing scientific progress. Nothing could have been further removed from his intention. He simply stated what he perceived as the
