Rand and the Randians have long been aware of Ortega y Gasset as a fellow traveler. See, for instance, this article, which appears in an online publication entitled The Daily Objectivist.

Absquatch Wrote:
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> Rand and the Randians have long been aware of
> Ortega y Gasset as a fellow traveler. See, for
> instance, this article, which appears in an online
> publication entitled The Daily Objectivist.

Many thanks!

Absquatch Wrote:
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> ...Did you make
> inferences about his inner mind and self purely
> from the text, or did you start to draw
> connections after reading Lovecraft's letters,
> secondary literature, and the like?(...)

> I suggest that, if Lovecraft's letters and other
> papers had not been so readily available, then
> little of the critico-babble that tries to find a
> direct correlation between Lovecraft's inner fears
> and foibles and his fiction would exist. It all
> occurs post facto: (....)These facts hardly suggest that
> the themes that you and Gavin detect (or rather,
> manufacture) are self-evident and obviously true,
> based merely upon a reading of the fiction.

It is not simply a matter of comparing HPL’s stories to his letters, as Absquatch says, however- simply because HPL’s polemical views, whether on history, society, economics, aesthetics, etc., had far more outlets than simply just his letters: Lovecraft also wrote essays, epigrams, satires, and verse, etc. And it is my contention that Lovecraft’s later fiction constitutes basically a prose version of his earlier (and quite biting) verse satires: in this case, an inverted satire of Greek myths, utilized by HPL to serve as a medium for his sociological polemicism.

Now, if Absquatch were referring solely to Lovecraft’s early weird fiction, I would have to agree with him. Although some general deductions about Lovecraft’s racism, conservatism, or Puritan values can perhaps be probably discerned from them, Lovecraft, at this early date, has still not yet succeeded in combining his weird fiction with his sociological polemics. Indeed, one could define the “advent” of the truly “Lovecraftian” story as being characterized by the successful combination of Lovecraft’s weird cosmology with his sociological/satirical polemicism. And so when Lovecraft observed, later in life (1935), “I simply can’t write a short story these days” (SLV 136), he was acknowledging the fact, without explaining the cause: i.e. the usurpation of his weird/cosmic imagination by his sociological polemicism, often to the detriment of the atmosphere of his later works. (Just imagine how truly amazing, and horrifying, At the Mountains of Madness could have been, if HPL had made the alien ruins truly alien and unknowable, instead of using them as a parable to prop up his quasi-Spenglerian ideas.)

Nor is it accurate to somehow imply a wall between Lovecraft’s views on the one hand, and his weird fiction on the other. When Lovecraft, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, has Joseph Curwen compare the creaking of a tavern sign with a modern jazz piece, HPL is revealing, rather pointedly, his own point of view on a number of topics: whether modernism, blacks, jazz, chaos, and wine and teetotalerism. And when, in the same story, Lovecraft observes (rather ludicrously) that servants have no imaginations, he is putting forward, rather obviously, a pointedly aristocratic perspective. Neither of these two digressions are intrinsic to the story; (very few weird stories contain criticisms of servants or of jazz) -but they were necessary to convey/advance HPL’s point-of-view.

Absquatch Wrote:

> Any attempt, however, to analyze
> Lovecraft which focuses solely upon this aspect of
> his work at the expense of others, including his
> sense of cosmic wonder, is far too simplistic to
> take seriously,

What Absquatch is saying about myself -that I rely too much on Lovecraft’s letters, etc.- in truth applies more accurately to Absquatch than myself: for while he is correct to say that ideas of scientific wonder and cosmicism likewise motivated HPL’s fiction, Lovecraft’s dispassionate cosmic perspective is far more evidenced, or so I believe, in his correspondence, than it is in his fiction -in which the cosmic element is, contrary to popular belief, either small, or overwhelmed by his polemical perspectives.

Aside from a few truly cosmic works, such as the early, masterful “Dagon”, “From Beyond”, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, the later “The Shadow Out of Time”, and a few weird poems, the content of most of Lovecraft’s fiction is either mundane or sociological.

Stories of cannibalism: “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Horror at Red Hook”, “The Lurking Fear”, “Pickman’s Model”, “The Picture in the House”, “The Moon Bog”;
stories of necrophilia: “Herbert West: Reanimator”, “The Loved Dead”, “The Hound”, and “The Tomb“;
stories of sociological disruption or xenophobic infiltration: “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, At the Mts. Of Madness, “The Street“;
stories of “miscegenation“/failed marriages: “Medusa’s Coil”, “Arthur Jermyn”, “The Thing on the Doorstep.”
stories of rural degeneration: “The Unnamable”, “The Dunwich Horror.”
straight all-out parodies: “The Haunter of the Dark”, “The Horror in the Museum.”

It is Absquatch, and not myself, who is allowing his reading of Lovecraft’s letters to cloud his own reading of Lovecraft’s works. Nor is he, I think, alone in this.

Absquatch Wrote:
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> It is exactly a matter of sitting back and judging
> the past by the values of the present. A truly
> impartial commentator on Lovecraft and his views
> would not resort to self-righteous assumptions,
> and would not sit in judgment from the perspective
> of a later time.

Absquatch seems to be advocating the old dodge here: collective guilt means no guilt, collective error means no error. Again, HPL was the advocate of bizarre, retrograde views which were archaic even compared to the Enlightenment views of the 17-century, not to mention the early 20th. Even a 1920’s bigot would have looked askance at things like Lovecraft’s elitism, and his anti-American Toryism.

Absquatch Wrote:
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> by those who have some strange
> emotional need to denigrate their betters

By that criterion, the only person qualified to offer an interpretation of HPL would be Stephen King. For that matter, if HPL had held such a deferential attitude toward his “betters” as Absquatch seems to advocate, I daresay neither T. S. Eliot, James F. Morton, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Donne, or Oscar Wilde would ever have been subjects of Lovecraft’s criticism. (For his part, HPL never proclaimed himself to be anything other than a non-entity.) At any rate, I tend to think HPL would have taken more delight in the criticisms advanced even by a marked inferior, than the accolades of a worshipful follower.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 23 Mar 10 | 06:32PM by Gavin Callaghan.