Book Review
Atheist Shrugged
H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
translated by Dorna Khazeni
Believer Books, 2005
(247 pages, $18.00, paperback)
It is remarkable that anyone still remembers Howard Phillips Lovecraft. A writer of obscure supernatural horror stories never published outside of cheap pulp magazines, an introverted and impoverished misanthrope known only to a tiny circle of friends, H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937 fully expecting to leave no literary legacy whatsoever.
Yet over the past seventy years, Lovecraft’s stories have not only continued to be read, but have ascended into the popular consciousness and even, with the publication of a Library of America collection in 2005, been tacitly accepted into the American literary canon.
Dark Insight
Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life claims that the reason for Lovecraft’s persistence is that he possessed a uniquely pure and fervent insight into the dark side of human existence. Houellebecq (pronounced “well-beck”) is a French writer of some notoriety, famous for his highly explicit and bitterly anti-modern novels, and here he passionately eulogizes his literary hero.
In Lovecraft, Houellebecq sees an exemplar of the total rejection of modern living, a completely sincere hatred of everything that makes up contemporary life: “Absolute hatred of the world in general, aggravated by an aversion to the modern world in particular. This summarizes Lovecraft’s attitude fairly accurately.”
Houellebecq is fascinated by Lovecraft’s resistance to all the popular opiates and secular optimisms that pervade contemporary life. His fiction contains no sex, no economics, no politics. Lovecraft admired the Puritans, not for their piety but for their moral “inhibitions” and grave disdain for comfort, which he called “attempts . . . to fashion a pattern of beauty in the hog-wallow that is animal existence.”
Lovecraft was a committed atheist. In fact, Houellebecq argues, few other atheists have ever had the courage of belief equal to his. He understood that in a godless universe, everything is reduced to chaos and indifference. Lovecraft’s stories portray mankind as a tiny and insignificant aberration within an infinite, chaotic, and hostile universe. The essential relationship between reality and man is that of predator to prey.
A Nightmare in Prose
All this comes through in the histrionically elevated imagination of Lovecraft’s stories. He is concerned entirely with the imagination, with vast and fabulous visions of the great, dark cosmos outside of us. Houellebecq treats Lovecraft’s style and vision in a series of chapters whose titles add up to an overall appraisal (as Stephen King summarizes it in his excellent introduction):
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
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