becomes evident when we witness the growing interest in, or rather, retreat to, the occult, astrology, magic, religion, witchcraft, and superstition, the countless new cults emerging everywhere, the fads of pseudo-mysticism, the drug-culture…. All the frantic attempts at regaining some of the lost security destroyed by Galileo, and Darwin, and Freud, and Einstein, and Skinner, and countless others….
It is this ultimate conflict of man facing the cosmos and reactingwith horror to the realization of his impotent insignificance, that constitutes the theme of “The Outsider.”
The subterranean castle is the womb, where embryonic man is being shaped by his inherited potential and genetic characteristics. He experiences the pains of birth trauma after the arduous travel up the vaginal tower. Man is filled with dreams and expectations, with illusions about his own destiny. He strives for happiness, freedom, dignity, knowledge…. The cherished traditions of the past tell him that he is the lord of creation, the center of the Universe. He sees himself as the ultimate product of evolution, the culmination of all life. In his quest for knowledge and perfection, he hopes to find an answer to all questions in science, and sees in this castle of truth, the key to ultimate happiness.
But when the narrator reaches his destination and enters the bastion of reality, he finds not happiness, security, and fulfillment, but only the bare, cruel, merciless truth. As he correlates the body of dissociated knowledge, he achieves instant comprehension of reality. He knows “all that had been.” A terrifying vista of reality has been opened for him, and of his “frightful position” therein. In the mirror he sees reflected, not the lord of creation, but the loathsome, abominable vermin polluting a grain of sand in a purposeless universe. He recognizes himself as a meaningless atom of corruption, an ephemeral infection in the accident of Life. No destiny, no purpose, no dignity, no meaning….
Unable to cope with this “soul-annihilating” revelation, “in the supreme horror of that second” man forgets the truth and runs frantically back to the hopes and superstitions of the past, but finding the stone trapdoor closed, collapses into the “new freedom” of insanity. He can never be the same again. He is an outsider. He knows.
This ultimate conflict, the final confrontation of man with reality is a recurrent theme in Lovecraft’s fiction. The outcome reflects Lovecraft’s pessimistic view of human nature and perfectibility. Lovecraft, as a thinker, was a realist, and painted reality as he saw it in the powerful strokes of his incomparable fiction. He wrote with the realism of Richard Upton Pickman, Lovecraft’s uncanny self-portrait in “Pickman’s Model.” “The Outsider” provides a vivid representation of man’s pathetic helplessness in the cosmos.
5. DISCUSSION AND EVALUATION
The autobiographic interpretation is quite appealing, because it seems to fit well with known facts of Lovecraft’s life. To suggest that all the similarities between settings and incidents in “The Outsider,” and events or places in the life of the Providence author are mere coincidences, would be nothing short of preposterous. Nevertheless, although biographical data may have provided some of the “form” or setting in this excellent tale, it does not necessarily follow that the meaning of the story is to be read as an expression of Lovecraft’s hypothetically frustrated gregariousness. Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft’s intimate and long-time friend, for example, disagrees emphatically with the notion that Lovecraft had a “social inferiority complex,” and insists that he “never made the slightest attempt to reach out for liking .and understanding” (Nyctalops 8). “The Outsider” may not be Lovecraft’s cry of social anguish after all.
The analytical interpretation is also attractive, and there appear to be too many similarities between Jungian theory and Lovecraft’s chiller for this to be dismissed as coincidence.
H. P. Lovecraft, as a craftsman of consummate skill, was a perfectionist, always searching for the mot just, and constantly revising his tales before arriving at their final form. He also constantly incorporated bits of factual knowledge stored in his encyclopedic mind into the fabric of his fiction, giving them an added element of believability, so essential in achieving the temporary “suspension of disbelief” in the reader. Since Lovecraft’s published letters gave ample evidence of his familiarity with both FreudJan and Jungian psychoanalysis, it is plausible that he may have intentionally incorporated into many of his takes some of the universal symbols that lung was so fond of interpreting as verifications of his theory of dreams.
There is some specific evidence in Lovecraft’s fiction and poetry that he intended a psychological meaning for at least some of his works. For example, “The White Ship” described a voyage through the psyche, and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” takes place entirely in the dream-world of the narrator. And out of his poetry, consider the following lines from “Aletheia Phrikodes”:
“Things vague, unseen, unfashion’d, and unnam’d
Jostled each other in the seething void
That gap’d, chaotic, downward to a sea
Of speechless horror, foul with writhing thoughts.”
Nevertheless, our analytic interpretation is quite vulnerable to the accusation of subjectivism—too many assumptions are made which cannot be empirically verified. And besides, even if a psychological interpretation is adequate, why this particular one? Why not a Freudian explanation based on Lovecraft’s hypothetically repressed “sex instinct” (note the phallic symbolism of the “black tower”), or perhaps on a pathological manifestation of a deep-rooted “death instinct” (notice his perception of himself in the mirror as an already decaying corpse), or perhaps the monstrous image in the mirror represents the instincts of the Id perceived in a paroxysm of neurotic anxiety? Or perhaps the Adlerian “will to power” will supply a better answer; the “striving for superiority” that compensates for the outsider’s abysmal inferiority complex may be what is meant by the ascent of the tower, while the castle of lights is the “directive fiction,” the goal of his “life-style”…. Or is the question perhaps “how can you make words mean so many different things…?”
The main defect of all the possible psychoanalytic interpretations, is that the theories on which they are based are themselves built on hypothetical constructs of doubtful validity. Such theories are usually judged merely by their usefulness in the clinical setting, and not in terms of any absolute parameter of truth or falsehood. And the interpretations can hardly be more valid than the theories they are based on….
For this reason, although this type of explanation is very attractive, and although Jung’s analytical theory may appear to fit the story better than other similar theories, such interpretations must be taken with a grain of salt.
The anti-metaphysical interpretation is the most shallow and superficial of the four presented in this study. Although interesting and perhaps amusing, and in spite of being compatible with Lovecraft’s personal beliefs, it simply does not fit with his personality, always characterized by those who knew him well as one of tolerance and kind understanding. Lovecraft just did not possess the morbid and caustic humor implied by this interpretation. And, besides, the kind of survival shown in the tale does not correspond to traditional metaphysical notions. When engaging in this type of polemic, Lovecraft could do much better, as we can see in some of his letters to M. Moe and others, as well as in his essay “The Materialist Today.” This interpretation is perhaps the least valid of the four presented.
The philosophical interpretation is another matter altogether. It fits well with Lovecraft’s Weitanschauung and with the context provided by his other writings. Lovecraft, a scientist at heart, never tired of defending his views in letters to his friends, but being also a keen observer of human nature, did not expect others to share his convictions. He was a visionary
