Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer

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СКАЧАТЬ utterly hideous, ugly, and differ­ent from all other children…and that other youngsters would probably be repelled and horrified by his mere appearance. Sarah Phillips Love­craft, who died a diagnosed psychotic the same year “The Outsider” was written (1921), deeply resented her husband’s general paresis, a hatred that was displaced to the child, only to produce deep guilt feel­ings and anxiety to the troubled woman. The reaction formation which followed her inability to cope with her neurotic and moral anxiety re­sulted in the compulsive overprotection that characterized her relation­ship with the child. But her deep hostility toward her son occasionally broke through her defense mechanism, as when she succeeded in mak­ing him feel ugly and distorted (a feeling that he was never able to completely overcome)—all the while rationalizing that she was doing this for the child’s own good, keeping him close to her, under he “protection,” and away from other children and the rest of the world that might try to hurt him. The added imminence of financial disinte­gration was the final stress she could not endure, the straw that broke the remaining thread of sanity in a wretched woman who was to spend her last years in the insane asylum. And her son was not by her death bed when she was stricken by her final illness….

      In his abysmal solitude, the child would often lie, outside, un­der the “dark, mute trees,” and “dream for hours about what (he) read in the books,” picturing himself among the “gay crowds” that must ex­ist in the “sunny world” beyond his “infinitely old and infinitely horri­ble” prison-home. He tried to escape, but as he moved away from the house, his anxiety and his insecurity became unendurable, the air be­came “filled with brooding fear,” and he ran swiftly back in defeat. So, through what to him appeared to be endless twilights, he “waited and dreamed, not knowing what (he) waited for.” Finally, his longing for light, for happiness and acceptance, “grew so frantic, that (he) resolved to scale the tower,” fall thought he might, in his desperate attempt to reach out and attain his impossible dream. Life was not worth living any longer “without ever beholding light,” without joining the illusive world of gaity, of belongingness, of love.

      The decision to reach out to others was not an easy one, and is represented in the story as the perilous, slow, and arduous ascent of the tower, with frantic hope mixed with mounting anxiety and incertitude. But finally, coming out of his shell, he emerged from his precocious seclusion.

      The realization that his peers were not equally encumbered by a crippling psychological environment, is for him a grotesquely unbe­lievable shock. This act of the will, this emergence from his psycho­logical prison, has not elevated him to dizzying heights but simply placed him on a level ground, natural to everyone else. But determined to make the most out of his position, he proceeds with a “frantic crav­ing” in his quest for acceptance and love. Ultimately he arrives at the castle of lights, the goal of his childhood dreams.

      His innocent heart is filled with delight as he observes the inviting “open window, gorgeously ablaze with light, and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry.” But as he gathers sufficient courage and attempts the actual social contact his inner nature demanded, he does so only to step from his “single bright moment of hope to (his) blackest convulsion of despair and realization.” He experienced the psychologi­cal blow of social rejection and isolation.

      To his anxious and subjective mind it did not appear as if his peers’ reaction was due to his different interests, in part , the conse­quence of his superior intellect, which made him prefer the acting of historical roles to the childish games of others…. (One who knew him in childhood later referred to him as “crazy as a bedbug.”) No, he per­ceived himself as shunned because of the actual revulsion and nausea caused by his hideous ugliness. Mother had been right! He was a loathsome monster! Seeing his image in the mirror of the mind, the psychological eye perceived only a distorted abnormality, that had “by its simple appearance” turned a group of playing children into “a horde of delirious fugitives….”

      This cataclysmic collapse of his self-concept brought him “avalanche of soul-annihilating memory,” he could understand now “all that had been….” He knew now why he had not been allowed to come in contact and play with other children, why his mother always needed to protect him and keep him away from others, he knew the truth about his hideous deformity…. How could he know that in reality he was a rather handsome child with a monstrous mother in the throes of grow­ing personality disintegration…? This traumatic experience had far-reaching and long-lasting effects, and the dreamer from Providence never completely overcame his feelings of ugliness and social inade­quacy. For the rest of his life he was more or less a recluse, going out at night and preferring to deal with his friends through correspondence. It is true that in his latter years, particularly the last decade, he was able to compensate for this handicap to a great extent, perhaps due in part to his brief marriage and his New York “exile,” which contributed to make him more fully human. But “The Outsider” was written before he was exposed to the healing effect of those influences.

      Returning to the text of the story, we notice that the experience of such completely negative self-concept produced a tremendous burst of anxiety in his young but lacerated mind, and that “in the supreme horror of that second” he repressed his excruciating self-awareness as well as the traumatic event leading to it…he “forgot what had horrified” him. He tried to retreat once more to the consolation of his mother, to the relative security of his home—but the door was closed: things would never be the same again.

      He rationalized, saying that he was not sorry for his alienation, and turned for companionship and inspiration to the inner world of fantasies and dreams, riding with the “mocking and friendly ghouls”—the “night gaunts” of his dreams—in the catacombs of his own imagination. In his extreme introversion, he realized that “light was not for (him), nor any gaiety,” save that produced by his own fan­tastic creations. And in his “new wilderness and freedom,” his inde­pendence from others, he “almost welcomed the bitterness of alienage,” realizing always that he “was an outsider, a stranger in this century and among those who are still men,” among those still able to find happi­ness through interpersonal relations. Rejected by his peers, oppressed by his mother, and misunderstood by all, he renounced society and the twentieth century. Finding security and esthetic pleasure only in the past, he often reminisced the “happiness” of his childhood in his latter years, and turned to the eighteenth century for beauty and inspiration. As August Derleth, his first biographer, noted, he remained an outsider all his life, and his spirit flourished in his rightful and beloved eigh­teenth century. His unique genius and imagination allowed his mind to fly at prodigious heights well beyond the reach or conception of com­mon men, but like all mortals, his life was the product of an accidental combination of heredity and environment that could not have resulted in a different outcome.

      “The Outsider” is a powerful and touching statement about the early years of the “gentleman from Angell Street.”

      2. AN ANALYTICAL INTERPRETATION: ALLEGORY OF THE PSYCHE

      “The Outsider” almost appears to have been written in order to fit the analytical theory of Carl Gustav Jung. Even though interpreta­tions using Freudian psychoanalysis or Adlerian individual psychology, among others, are also possible, Lovecraft’s tale acquires unusual psy­chological significance when viewed as an allegorical voyage through the Jungian conception of the unfolding human psyche and its funda­mental conflicts. Even though Lovecraft’s letters show that he was well aware of Jung’s theory, the question of whether this story is a case of conscious artistry or a manifestation of the author’s own unconscious and dynamic psyche, is not settled.

      The subterranean castle in the tale stands for the Collective Unconscious, the unfathomable psychic ocean common to all men, and containing “rows upon rows” of “antique books” or archetypes. The archetypes, or primordial images, are the psychic representations of the primordial experiences of the species throughout eons of evolution: they are the depository of the ancestral wisdom of the human psyche. (For the reader unfamiliar with Jung’s analytical theory, СКАЧАТЬ