En:
83 years ago HP Lovecraft died at Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence, RI. Shortly before, while in hospital, already terminally ill, he’d got a chance to see a printed copy of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, an absolute masterpiece of a novella: sadly, that copy was full of errors, but still, it was published.
Lovecraft never became popular during his lifetime, although he was an infallible authority among his friends, who were his colleagues in amateur self-publishing and also pioneers of what we now know as Cosmic horror, a peculiar literary genre, which combines Cosmicism, proto-sci fi, Weird fiction/fantasy and, of course, Neo-Gothic horror per se.
Lovecraft also became the second literary figure after Alexander Blok who impacted my academic life to the extent that it changed my whole approach in perceiving a literary canon where a literary subject exists in constant iterations with its universe and is the driving force of a classical narrative.
Lovecraft’s narration is much closer to ancient storytelling than we might think: nothing *really* happens in his (mostly short) stories in terms of action, yet when his characters face something they cannot grasp, doesn’t it remind you of any ancient myth you read when you were much younger? A human being, intelligent, gutsy, articulate, knowledgeable etc., is going out, living his life until the very moment when a furious deity abruptly terminates it (often, also his post-mortem existence in Hades?)—can you see a pattern here? I do.
Of course, it can also be perceived in Genette’s description of “Recherche du temps perdu,” where the main acting force, i.e. the central character, is an “[…] intermediary subject,” who is an insomniac or a beneficiary of the miracle of involuntary memory” (Genette, “Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method,” 45); in other words, Lovecraftian characters, put in chthonic (ancient, primal) circumstances, could react accordingly, i.e. as Proustian prototype, his alter ego or Swann, through the prism of an elaborate stream of consciousness—horror, in the case of HPL’s canonical narrative.
Lovecraft’s writing still never ceases to amaze me: you don’t need Symbolist opulence to portray your awe and terror yet you *are* a Symbolist when you are creating the scariest monster, a figure so unimaginable that you need your own “des forêts de symboles” to re-create it in your imagination.
There is no one like Lovecraft. He is one of a kind who really turned fear into pure art. And that is it: he is Providence.
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