H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
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Average rating4
From the notorious, bestselling author of ATOMISED: a scholarly love letter on the hugely influential and reclusive literary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft 'Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.' In this prescient work, now with an introduction by Stephen King, Michel Houellebecq, the controversial and bestselling author of ATOMISED, focuses his considerable analytical skills on H.P. Lovecraft - one of the seminal horror writers of the early 20th century. Houellebecq's insights into the craft of writing illuminate both Lovecraft and Houellebecq's own work. The two are kindred spirits, sharing a uniquely dark worldview. But even as he outlines Lovecraft's rejection of this loathsome world, it is Houellebecq's adulation for the author that drives this work and makes it a love song, infusing the writing with an energy and passion that characterises Houellebecq's new novel. This is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Lovecraft, Houellebecq, or the past and future of horror.
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Houellebecq wrote H. P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie in 1991, three years before publishing his debut novel, Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte). His book on Lovecraft, translated into English in 2005, is the avant-garde which precedes Houellebecq's great war machine. I would consider the oeuvre a pseudo-auto-biography, reminiscent of Baudelaire's perception of Poe, of Nietzsche's Schopenhauer as Educator and, clearly of Savater's graduation thesis on Cioran. To make it clear, Nietzsche's Schopenhauer is Nietzsche himself, along with his Wagner: it is a way of writing about oneself indirectly. What I find fresh and pioneering about Houellebecq's essay is his discovery of an alternative route to world nihilism. To name some of the others: 1) Schopenhauerian – Wagnerian (as Baudrillard has put it); 2) Palahniuk's post-existentialism from Fight Club, Pygmy and Rant; 3) Baudrillard – Žižek – The Matrix; 4) Lars von Trier. Against the World is in fact a way of attacking Nietzsche through Schopenhauer, something that many of Nietzsche's disciples won't appreciate. To say No to life is to go against the test of the eternal return, to choose damnation and resentment over life's affirmation. A Nietzschean cardinal sin! However, one can acknowledge that it is sometimes difficult to endorse life when the feelings of alienation (more exactly fear and hatred against the world) seem to prevail over one's natural (?) inclination to harmony, peace and balance.
Certainly a better analysis of H. P. Lovecraft's literary themes than biography of his life, and Lovecraft is not so abstruse that one would need a separate text to understand his work. There are still some interesting parts, namely Houllebecq's summary of Lovecraft's racism, contempt for modernity, and disregard for sex and money, both in his life and his books, and they are what make this biography worth reading, though they might have worked better as an introduction to a collection of Lovecraft's short stories.
