closed energy system, with energy loss due to work, and energy gain through food).
The outsider peers through a window of the ivied castle and finds there a merry company, the contents of consciousness, rationality, sanity…but as he enters in an attempt to join or integrate with the rest, consciousness reacts not only to him and his feeble persona, but to the inevitable and escapable Shadow that always accompanies him (and every human being), the unconscious and inseparable opposite of the ego which in one instant shatters the illusion of rationality and the hopes of self-realization.
The final horror comes in the moment of truth, when the ego perceives its own Shadow, its unconscious opposite reflected in that fateful mirror. The outsider sees the atavistic nightmare that always lurks at the threshold of rationality, and which Lovecraft so skillfully described as “the compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable,” all that the ego abhors, rejects, and represses because of rational, esthetic, or ethical reasons: his “dark brother” who becomes blacker, denser, and more powerful the more it has been alienated from consciousness. It is “the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity and dissolution,” the conglomerate of all the ego perceives as ultimate evil, clustered around the archaic, undifferentiated Shadow archetype. “It was the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide,” of that which (from the point of view of the shocked and horrified ego) should have always remained underground, buried in the unconscious. With deep loathing, the outsider notices that the apparition presents “a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape,” being the distorted, unconscious parody of the conscious ego.
Then, as the outstretched fingers of the outsider touch those of his unconscious and nightmarish mirror image, an instant of ego-shadow fusion occurs, that goes beyond mere recognition or understanding. This is the closest the outsider ever comes to self-realization and psychic wholeness…. For the cataclysmic revelation of the Shadow within himself, the understanding that he and the monstrous abomination standing before him are one, instantly shatters sanity as he experiences (and is unable to cope with) the most traumatic experience of human existence.
In that instant “there crashed upon (his) mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory.” As consciousness and unconsciousness touch, fuse for an instant, “all that had been” becomes evident, all is understood in a moment of terrible insight. But the flood of anxiety is unendurable, awareness of the truth is too painful, and a desperate repression occurs. With this regressive flow of energy or libido, the outsider “forgets” what has horrified him. “The burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images,” that is, in the chaos of opposing systems within the psyche. The price of unification, of Selfhood, is too high, and it is better to live in ignorance than to accept the awful reality of man’s atavistic and unconscious nature. This utter failure leaves the outsider “dazed, disappointed, barren, broken”…. Lovecraft, the pessimistic realist, is telling us that self-realization is an impossible dream.
The outsider escapes from the now empty and desolate castle, in a dream under the ever present moonlight. An attempt to return to the subterranean castle, to regress to the claustraum, to find total oblivion in a reversal of the individuation process, fails. The ego cannot escape from the world of consciousness and reality: the stone trap-door is immovable.
His “new freedom” is provided only by insanity, and the outsider, unable to recover from his “soul-annihilating” experience, rides now with the “mocking and friendly ghouls,” his archetypal fantasies and complexes (or perhaps his fellow inmates in the insane asylum). But in his bitterness he almost welcomes the new freedom of schizophrenia, the new wildness of breaking away from reality—of being “an outsider among those who are still men,” who are still sane and have not yet felt the icy fingers of terror and the holocaust of ego-disintegration in the ultimate confrontation with the Shadow.
Lovecraft, familiar with Jungian theory, was well aware that few, if any ever achieve any significant approximation to Jung’s idealized ego-expansion and self-realization. In his conviction that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind the correlate all its contents,’ the dreamer from Providence has painted a gloomy and devastating picture of man’s destiny: not a glorious psychic integration, but the ever imminent collapse of the ephemeral illusion of rationality.
3. AN ANTIMETAPHYSICAL INTERPRETATION: THE ABSURDITY OF POST-MORTEM DESTINY
H. P. Lovecraft, a rationalist, a logical positivist with absolutely no belief in the supernatural, used his celebrated tale “The Outsider” as medium to convey, in disguised form, his sardonic contempt for the incongruity of metaphysical beliefs and dogmata such as life after death, immortality, and resurrection. With the searing irony of the materialistic philosopher, he unleashed this piece of macabre sarcasm on the vain hopes and illusions of a gullible world.
The subterranean castle is simultaneously Lovecraft’s cynical conception of heaven and of the kingdom of Dis on the pattern of Dante’s Inferno, while the outsider is a corpse that has been dead and buried for countless years. Some uncanny psychic residue allows this “carrion thing,” this unnatural denizen of the tomb, to become an animated corpse and continue his unthinkable existence in the underground vaults of the cemetery. Lovecraft has granted, for the sake of argument, man’s survival after death, and is ready to carry this notion to its absurd implications.
The living corpse exists in the “subterranean castle,” sole survivor among the “piled-up corpses of dead generations,” while his deteriorated brain retains only vague memories of the past. The “mouldy books,” containing the traditional beliefs of his ancestors, convey to him hopes and dreams of light, of happiness, of rebirth, of future glory…. Lying in his underground crypt-vault-castle, and “unable to measure the time,” he dreams of rejoining the world of the living, the world of light and of gay figures he sees in the books and which always evoke half-memories of his mundane past. He dreamed and waited, “not knowing what he waited for.” Finally, his longing for light “grew so frantic,” that he decided to climb the single “black tower” leading “to the unknown outer sky.” With tremendous effort, the rotting and inconceivable monster manages to scale this sole avenue of escape, and achieves his unholy resurrection as he emerges from the crypt. He finds himself standing in the midst of the graveyard where his body was laid to rest in the unmeasurable past, something for him “abysmally unexpected” and producing the “most demoniacal of all shocks,” since he had fancied himself the inhabitant of a castle and not a denizen of the underworld…. Lovecraft, to show us that the metaphysical dream is sheer insanity has allowed life to linger in this disintegrating corpse, and now has resurrected it, returning it to the world of the living.
The grisly creature, still nursing a frantic craving for light, for companionship, for happiness, and even for the mythical glory of heaven, runs swiftly and eagerly under the moonlight, guided by remote recollections from his distant past. He recognizes landmarks and buildings, rivers and bridges, but he finds them all changed, altered, aged, and crumbling, an indication of the long time elapsed since the grim reaper put an end to his natural life. (Incidentally, this is an idea that was later elaborated by Lovecraft’s friend and fellow author, Clark Ashton Smith, in “Xeethra.”)
This decaying, pitiful parody of living men ultimately arrives at his destination, the “venerable ivied castle” where he once lived or reigned, noting here also the ravages of time. The castle was “maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness…the moat was filled in, and…some of the well-known towers were demolished.” But, without attempting to understand the implications of the changes that time has brought to the places he knew in the far past, he is attracted “with interest and delight” by “the open windows,” through which he observes an “oddly dressed company,” “making merry and speaking brightly to one another.” He sees in all this “gorgeous light and revelry” the fulfillment of his hopes, the glory he had only dated dream of before.
