Dystopia as Utopia: Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the Unknown Content of American Horror Literature

118 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW PAUL BUHLE DYSTOPIA AS UTOPIA: HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT AND THE UNKNOWN CONTENT OF AMERICAN HORROR LITERATURE Man imagines himselffree from fear when there is no longer anything unknown . . . Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical. The pure immanence ofpositivism, its ultimate product , is no more than a so-to-speak universal taboo. Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea ofoutsideness is the very source offear. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adomo, Dialectic of the Enlightenment Emotions and feelings that the philosophers ofthe machine had neglected or despised, were now reasserting themselves above all, the trunk of the past, which had been cut down, was now sending up numerous suckers, suckers infested with grubs and covered by fungus almost before they had left the ground. In their baser manifestations, these new forces would curb socialism; in their most humane aspects, they would add to its mechanical futurism a certain element it had always lacked. Lewis Mumford, The Condition ofMan Someday the piecing together ofdissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas ofreality, and ofourfrightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation orflee from the deadly light into the peace and safety ofsome new dark age. H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of the Cthulu Every schoolchüd reads Poe, but our national credo of "Progress" has for centuries denied the darker views of life. Radicals (and by no means only radicals) feel surrounded by a horrific nightmare, but most Left creations have, at least untU recent decades, sought to cheer the spirit with our BUHLE 119 own version of Progress or to confine misery and mystery to the realistic portraits of today's world. In the end it is much' the same: we want to banish Horror from the field of emotions, to strip life of all that is perilous to touch and consider. The literary critics have largely shared these taboos, glancing uneasUy over their shoulders now and again at the voluminous literature of "Blackness." Constance Rourke's American Humor and Harry Levin's The Power ofBlackness stand virtually alone in showing the sense of horror to be organic to the American tradition. The late dean of American criticism, Edmund WUson, spoke for many when he brushed aside violent humor and pulp horror as vulgar and uninteresting. Left critics like V. L. Parrington and Granville Hicks likewise read out the horrorists in favor of the uplifting function of the "progressive," realistic novel. One can understand and even sympathize with this radical myopia. The seemingly assured arrival of Socialism in the days before the First World War, the threat of Fascism and Nazism in the 1920s to 1940s, the infinite horrors of imperialism and the charred and broken lives resulting from the multitudinous forms of class oppression at home—these allowed scant ground for consideration of the irrational save as a weapon in the hands of the enemies of humankind. But the times have given cause for other visions. Since the Second World War, we have more clearly begun to see America as a CivUization and not merely a conglomerate of opposing classes and groups. The events of the 1960s, the mixture of drugs, music, and heightened sexual imagery in renewed Utopian dreams indicate that "non-rationalism" or supra-rationalism is not the exclusive property of the Right but ground that must be politically contested. Most of all, perhaps, the dawning of popular awareness of the rest of world-historic experience-from the anthropological and journalistic stories of non-industrial societies gone or about to be destroyed, to the tales of Third World anti-Imperialist triumphs-have shown how limited and fragmented our view of the human essence has been. Among the analysts of American literature, perhaps Leslie Fiedler's post1930s -radical conception of "American Love and Death" is the closest precursor to a wider perspective. He set a new standard for American literary criticism by showing the omnipresent death pageantry to be the result of erotic faUure, the sexual alienation of Homo Americanus. But Fiedler's conclusions missed the heart of the problem at every vital point. Of course the themes of morbidity have "something to do" with a lack of sexual...