What does it mean to be "Lovecraftian"?

[LambethWarp]

Yeah, Nietzsche (from my very lay understanding) would certainly count as a proto-postmodernist, or early anti-modernist, or at the very least a huge influence on the postmodernists. Nietzsche's influence is all over HPL, to the extent that I think one of the reasons the middle-aged Lovecraft disparaged the writing he'd done in his 20s and early 30s is that he saw it as the work of a barely post-adolescent Nietzsche fanboy. But the influence is there even in his later, better work - there's that great line in TCoC about mankind becoming, like the Great Old Ones, "wild and free and beyond good and evil" - couldn't really be any more explicit, could it?

In fact that whole passage is very reminiscent of the credo "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" of OG hashshashin Hassan-i-Sabbah (another favourite of Burroughs), later quoted and extended by Aliester Crowley:

Nothing is true, everything is permitted: Do What Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law

As systems of ethics goes, that's pretty damn postmodern!

There's a great essay by a guy call Sandro Fossemo called 'Cosmic terror from Poe to Lovecraft', which touches extensively on the Nietzsche-Lovcraft connection. Annoyingly I can't find it online, seems to have been taken down from the site that was hosting it. I'll post it here if I can find it somewhere else. There's a great line in it that goes "Poe sinks in[to] the soul to knock down external reality, Lovecraft on the contrary sinks in[to] the cosmos to demolish inner reality", which I thought very apt.

If you're into the whole critical-theory/deconstruction thing (not that I am, as a rule) I think you'd find Cyclonopedia very interesting - a lot of people have looked at that thread I started about it but no-one has replied yet. It's pretty fucking recherché but I found it fascinating. It really does come across as the work of a modern-day polymath 'mad Arab' (well, Persian in this case, but who's counting?).

[LambethWarp]

BTW, has anyone here read Michel Houellebeqc's Against the world, against life? Really, really good. I might start a thread about it when I get my copy back from a friend who has it at the moment.

[T. Kelly Lee]

Postmodernism is actually a subject near and dear to my heart.  My MA thesis was a postmodern deconstruction of Southern US race history.  This led me to do my dissertation on the postmodern nature of our popular understanding of American history.  (Essentially - there are two histories: 1) history as it happened; 2) history as we remember it.  The former doesn't matter - it's the narrative that counts, etc.) 

I have read Houellebecq on HPL and I think his book is genuinely good.  He basically paints HPL as a existentialist. But I think that's an oversimplification.  HPL believe that the universe was arbitrary and that it lacked INHERENT meaning, but not that it was MEANINGLESS.  Much like Nietzsche, the transvaluation of values didn't get us off the hook.  God is dead, yes, but there is more to it that's often forgotten.  We must become AS gods.  The existentialists were deconstructionists without purpose - I believe HPL thought every person needed a purpose.  That's why he wrote.  He couldn't really help himself.  Ultimately existentialism is unsatisfying - the reason Sartre became a communist in later life.  What is needed is a radical humanism.  I think that's what HPL is ultimately hinting at, like Nietzsche. 

And, yeah, I love that stuff.  I love it when writers are, themselves, well read.  Their work is so much richer for it!

[LambethWarp]

"What is needed is a radical humanism" - that sounds a lot like the very sort of Enlightenment thinking that Lovecraft was so opposed to! I argue here http://dointhelambethwarp.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/lovecraft-cyclonopedia-and-materialist-horror-4/ that HPL was motivated by a radical antihumanism. One of the overriding things you notice about his fiction is how utterly anti-anthropocentric it is. Then there's the obvious fact that he hated the vast majority of humanity...only the 'Anglo-Saxon' race was really worth considering, and even then, most of them were either boorish proles or vulgar, materialist bourgeoisie. I mean 'materialist' in the everyday sense of the word: shallow, consumerist, wealth-obsessed; Lovecraft moved more and more towards a philosophical materialism in his later works, I think. Houellebqec again: "The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles…What is Great Cthulhu? An arrangement of electrons, like us."

[T. Kelly Lee]

I still think that if you really unpack HPL you've got a very definite humanist theme going.  And, to be fair, I'm not the only one who sees it.  Robert M. Price wrote a great article for Humanism magazine a while back called "HP Lovecraft: Prophet of Humanism."  And I think a lot of what he argues is correct.  HPL's notion of a materialistic universe was the same that most atheists hold today - there's no god, there's nothing divine holding it all together.  His mythos monsters are really just hyper-intelligences that we've mistaken for divine beings...often at their behest. 

HPL described himself as an "indifferentist."  He didn't think that the cosmos has any concern for the lives of humans.  That radical stuff for his today - now it's just the basic underlying notion of atheism.  But HPL DID believe that humanity had a nature...though in one of his most profound quotes he describes it as base and servile.  He thought that people craved religion and were hung on it.  But also pointed out his belief that persons who sloughed it off were likewise superior to their peers.  Throughout his letters you see the influence of the notion of the "will to power."  He clearly believes that people can better themselves and that our baser nature is not a prison. 

In my way of thinking - that's very much a radical humanism.  He stated: "The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor."

 In his philosophy the Man of Truth is a transvalued human - the essential goal of the humanist project. What we're talking about here, is the essence of modern humanism - an obsence of faith and the quest of the human being to find meaning in a materialistic world.