HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Dorna Khazeni, 119 pages
No one with even a passing familiarity with the biography of HP Lovecraft doubts that he was a man deeply alienated from his times, from humanity in general, and even from himself. In these essays Michel Houellebecq argues that Lovecraft's discomfort with the world matured into hatred, and that Lovecraft was, in his own retiring, shabby genteel way, at war with modernity and all it implies. Faced with world-historical forces that reduced him to insignificance, Lovecraft invented his cosmic horrors to simultaneously represent the ultimate sources of the personal and social dissolution which terrified him and the causes of its own eventual (but inevitable) doom.
This book was written before Houellebecq had himself become a well-known writer, and it is interesting, of course, to note the obvious differences and subtle congruences between his writing and that of his subject. Both are appalled by the formlessness of the modern and post-modern world, neither is capable of the leap of faith necessary to find a solution in pre-modernity. What is left to them, beyond horror and despair, except anger and disgust?
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