Lovecraft

Disturbing the Universe

Donald R. Burleson

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813182612
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) has been described variously as the successor to Edgar Allan Poe, a master of the Gothic horror tale, and one of the father of modern supernatural fantasy fiction. Published originally in pulp magazines, his works have grown in popularity since his death, so that more than thirty editions are currently in print.

Yet only recently has Lovecraft received serious attention from literary critics. And until now no one has examined his work from a post-structuralist perspective. Donald Burleson fills that void, for the first time in an extended study bringing the resources of deconstruction to bear on the works of this modern gothicist.

In an introductory overview, Burleson gives an unusually readable account of deconstruction theory and terminology, a field all too often discussed in densely opaque fashion. He goes on to deconstruct thirteen Lovecraft stories, delving into their fascinating etymological mazes, abundant ambiguities, and shifting levels of meanings. His lively and remarkably jargon-free readings explore Lovecraft's rich figurality to unprecedented depths.

At the same time Burleson develops the view that in practicing self-subversion and structural displacement, literary texts perpetuate themselves. His final chapter explores the broad themes running though Lovecraft's fiction, arguing that these themes in themselves prefigure the deconstructive gesture.

This insightful and provocative volume will go a long way toward displacing the label of popular writer and establishing Lovecraft as an important figure in American literature.

1. Pre-lude: The Manner of Reading

By the time structuralism, as a school of literary criticism and theory, fully arrived in America in the 1960s by way of translations from the French, it was already in the process of being unsettled, reconsidered and reshaped into a yet newer mode of thinking about literary texts, a mode that has come to be called post-structuralism. The term is a broad umbrella covering a variety of viewpoints, and its relation to its predecessor, classical structuralism, is by no means one of complete separation; post-structuralism is clearly an outgrowth and extension of structuralism. Critical theorist Richard Harland has even coined the term superstructuralism to cover the enormous range of critical and interpretative activity from early “scientific” structuralism all the way to post-structuralism in its most modern and radical forms. Classical structuralism as a way of thinking has of course spanned many fields, including linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, as well as literary criticism. In application to literature, the chief methodology of the post-structuralist approach to textual commentary—though it resists being characterized as “methodology” in the usual sense—is that of deconstruction.

The sort of thinking from which the theory of deconstruction has developed has been with us for longer than is widely believed. Some commentators have found suggestions of deconstructive thought as early as the fifth century B.C., in the writings of Gorgias, and the similarity between some deconstructive attitudes and certain aspects of ancient Eastern philosophy has been noted. But deconstruction has flowered into an intellectual “movement” from the late 1960s onward due primarily to the impact of contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and to the taking up of his banner (carried at various angles) by those critics who have become known as the Yale deconstructionists: Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and (to a lesser degree and with greater reservations) Harold Bloom. Derrida’s founding contributions to the theory owe much to relatively recent philosophical sources, particularly to Friedrich Nietzsche (directly) and to Martin Heidegger (somewhat obliquely). In all respects deconstruction has a way of continuing to seem new, however old its roots. The primary reason, it seems to me, is its radically “strange” nature—its open courting of paradox, its encouragement of peculiar and seemingly perverse (if rigorous) modes of reading texts. Deconstruction is not the sort of thing with which one can ever fully “come to terms.” One does not experience a sense of final mastery over deconstruction, does not reduce it to any pat formulaic paradigm. Understanding and coping with deconstruction is a bit like nailing Jello to the wall; some of it sticks, but some of it always slips mockingly away. If it were not so, deconstruction would not be itself, if indeed it is itself, which it would not hesitate to dispute. Deconstruction is an unsettling way of thinking, but, I do not fear to predict, it is here to stay.

Structuralism became post-structuralism essentially because of developments in linguistics—or, rather, changes in attitude toward linguistics as a well-formed science. It is not the purpose here to describe this process of metamorphosis in great detail, but we may note that classical structuralism, especially in its early, “scientific” style, before it began to shade off into a sort of proto-post-structuralism in the later writings of Roland Barthes, always took the attitude that mastery over language and over textuality was possible—that one could develop, from an adequate theory of language, a fully rigorous methodology for interpreting literary texts, a methodology capable of finding their rock-bottom “truths.” This expectation, of course, had also been entertained in some earlier schools of criticism, particularly among the old New Critics with their view of the text as organic unity. The idea, for structuralists, was that if literary texts reside in the domain of language—and structuralists and post-structuralists would agree on the point that they do—and if language, through a science of linguistic signs (semiology or semiotics) could be thoroughly and finally understood through making the study genuinely “scientific,” then so could literary texts. Make linguistics rigorous as a science, and you make textual interpretation and criticism so as well. But it is this premise—the possibility of reducing language to a wholly understandable and controllable discipline, a science of signification—that post-structuralists have called into question.

Language is far more unstable and mysterious, far more given to radical undecidability, far more elusive than has previously been thought.

Literary texts, as objects of “scientific” or masterfully methodological scrutiny, are surprisingly ill-behaved subjects. As laboratory specimens, they tend to slip off the pins on which we try to impale them, and run free. As conveyors of recoverable, univocal “meanings” or “truths,” they are titteringly uncooperative. As examples of figural language at work (and play), they are, in other words, typical.

Since the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, we have understood that language functions essentially through differences. A linguistic signifier is what it is by virtue of its difference from other signifiers. Cat is cat because it is not hat or cot or cab, etc. That is, cat is in a sense the sum of the things that it is not: it contains the “trace” of those other signifiers with which it contrasts itself to maintain its own form. But where does one stop, in the process of observing such traces? If cat contains the trace of hat, then hat in turn contains the traces of ham and chat. Ham contains the traces of dam and hang; chat contains the traces of chair (which contains the traces of flair and chain and cheer) and that (which contains the traces of than and what and thought), and so on, in endless and labyrinthine branchings into what one begins to glimpse as the sprawling field of language itself, that differential web or network in which texts live. Linguistic signifiers are like sums of differences. Like elements of the quantum field such as the electron, they are defined not in terms of self-presence or self-identity, but in terms of the field in which they are embedded. Indeed the analogy between the field of language and the quantum field of particle physics is rather intriguing. Each field is essentially a relational realm, and each has its undefinable, elusive terms—the linguistic trace to which we have alluded is just as slippery, but just as necessary, as the quark.

A linguistic sign was once thought to be a fairly pat and stable entity, consisting of a signifier together with a “signified,” or concept-as-meaning. It “contained” its meaning in an immediate presence that satisfied the notion of Western metaphysics (the metaphysics of presence) that meanings should be directly represented by language—that language should be transparent and should simply express our thoughts about the world. The mode of speech was thought to be the purest such expression, since with speech the speaker is present and the transfer of meaning is presumably immediate. Writing (from Plato onward) was considered secondary, was considered an unfortunate fossilization of speech, was sometimes even considered (e.g., by Rousseau) a dangerous and decadent successor to speech.

But with the modern view of the nature of language, we recognize that, to begin with, the linguistic sign is not the trim little device it once was thought to be, with its “meaning” nestled inside for ready access. Meanings do not reside “in” signs, because signifiers point not to “signifieds” but to other signifiers, which in turn point to still other signifiers, and so on. This is not to say that signifiers are meaningless—this is to say, rather, that meanings are scattered and relational in nature. A meaning does not shine forth as a local phenomenon; it flickers through chains of signifiers, never quite “present” in any one location. Even the use of spoken signifiers presupposes these semantic circumstances, and there is, accordingly, no privilege of speech over writing. Meanings are dispersed, deferred, always yet to come, in any use of language. Derrida coined the term différance to suggest the never-quite-here nature of meaning. Différance, like trace, is not strictly definable, but has something in it of at least two suggested meanings: “differing” and “deferring.”

The implications for reading literary texts are profound. First of all, texts reside in language and must partake of the mystery and complexity that that residence in language implies. We must of course abandon the quaint notion that a literary text has a fixed, single “meaning.” Such a view would in fact be insulting to the text—it would suggest that somehow the text fails to partake of the richness of the linguistic web in which it finds itself woven. But this is not entirely new with post-structuralist thought. Many previous critical points of view have recognized that texts are “plural,” or variously interpretable. Such viewpoints have, however, always tended to incorporate, however subliminally, the notion that there is a “total meaning” present in a text, and that by putting forward various readings, we are simply approximating an access to that meaning, which could be reached and controlled and wholly understood were we but clever enough. What the post-structuralist view of language says, in part, is that the “meaning” of a text can never be totalized or encapsulated or reached, because the nature of language is such that there are always elements of indeterminacy and is such that texts do not have edges or borders. If we try to enclose a text with borders (Warning: Interpretative reading can never proceed beyond this point.), then the text, whose edges are fuzzy, will overrun the borders and find its own way out into farther regions. Even thinking of texts as being physically limited—This text begins on page 65 and ends on page 85—is artificial. Any piece of writing, in finding its way past our attempted borders out into the field of language, encounters other wandering texts there and interrelates with them. All text becomes intertext. Literary texts dwell in language, and language is intrinsically unstable, “polysemic,” and everywhere traced through with undecidabilities. It was Nietzsche’s cardinal insight that all language is figural rather than referential—that metaphor operates everywhere, that even the “rigorous” dialectical language of philosophy is simply rhetoric that has forgotten its own metaphoricity.

We can dispense with “authorial intent,” a notion belonging to that old metaphysics of presence that would treat language as having self-present and fixed meaning and would treat the text as being a ready access to the author’s mind, a mind unambiguous and all made up as to its intentions. Even if we could suppose we knew the author’s intentions (say, through letters describing them), we would have to ask: Did the author really know them? And even if the author in some sense knew them, do they survive in the writing and rule out all other possibilities? If the author were to provide a line-by-line, word-by-word gloss attempting to forestall all pluralities of interpretation, the gesture would be self-deconstructing. It would amount to an admission that alternative readings must be possible.

The modern view is that a text, once written, is a creature of language and is a public document. As a creature of language, it is something that the author could in no imaginable way have controlled totally. Language precedes the author, and language will survive the author. If the author is articulate, the text will say, presumably, what the author intended—but will always say many other things as well, quite independently of authorial intent or authorial ability at expression. Texts, again, reside in language, and language leads a life of its own. As a public document, the text is ours to read, to help create by reading. Texts, in my view, continue to write themselves by being read. And as Roland Barthes has commented, even the author, like anyone else, can visit the text only as a guest. The author produces a written work, but the work when read becomes text, of which the reader or critic is not merely a consumer but a fellow producer.

Some people have felt that such “open” textual views by post-structuralists suggest that texts either mean nothing at all or can be made to mean anything (which would be tantamount to meaning nothing). Both suggestions derive from misconceptions. To begin with, texts end up meaning more than we might have thought, not less, when we submit them to the close readings that post-structuralism champions. We do not empty texts of their meaning; we deny only the privilege of univocal meanings to which texts might have been reduced. “Full” meaning is always deferred, always around some corner yet to come—but meaning deferred is not meaning denied. Yet texts cannot be made to mean just anything, either. They dwell within language, and language, though infinitely sprawling and complex, has form, within which texts function.

But post-structuralism recognizes and highlights the fact that the manner of functioning of texts within language is problematic. Texts tend to unravel themselves, tend to subvert their own apparently “ruling” logic. It is the purpose of deconstructive reading to discover how this self-subversion comes about. In pursuing the matter, we are not carping at the text for failing to have a consistency or integrity that it could have had. We are, on the contrary, showing that the text has the figural richness to partake fully of language. We are throwing light upon textual features that more simplistic readings would allow to remain hidden.

All modern schools of criticism, however, have sought to do that—to elucidate texts. So how is deconstruction different? We will compare it with its immediate predecessor.

One of the main features of classical structuralism’s attempts to arrive at the “true” content of texts is to try to demonstrate the presence in those texts of binary oppositions, or bipolarities. These structures, critics have argued, stand close to being the most basic, pervasive, and reliable features of texts. They represent, some would say, the reflection in texts of something fundamental in the human mind itself. Examples of such binary oppositions are endless: good and evil, high and low, inside and outside, order and chaos, kindness and cruelty, knowledge and ignorance, sound and silence, light and dark, large and small, hope and despair—in general, anything and its opposite. These binary oppositions may occur in any manner in a text, for example, as simple narrative description, as symbolism, as expressed or implied thematic content. Structuralist thought, in any case, insists on strict distinctions between the poles of the bipolarity, whatever it is: good is good and not evil, evil is evil and not good. Boundaries are drawn between the terms of the opposition, and the thinking is essentially ideological.

Going beyond this ideologizing tendency and looking at the matter more closely, post-structuralist thought sees the boundary between two terms of a binary opposition to be highly provisional, wobbly, ultimately imaginary. One approach that deconstructive reading takes is to demonstrate, in the text, that within each term of the binary opposition the other term secretly and necessarily dwells. If the opposition is “x versus y,” then x contains a y-aspect that must be there in order for x to function as x, and y contains an x-aspect that must be there in order for y to function as y. Thus the differences operative in the text are not so much a matter of x‘s difference from y as they are a matter of x‘s difference from x and y‘s difference from y. Neither term is “self-identical” or indivisibly characterizable. Indeed the superficial “difference” between x and y remains possible to entertain only as long as we suppress, or fail to notice, those more subtle differences, ways in which each term differs from “itself.”

In a somewhat different but closely related formulation, we may see deconstruction as dealing with supplementarities: ordered pairs of terms in which the first term mentioned is considered to have privilege, superiority, or primacy over the second term. A common example is “nature/culture.” The idea is that nature is the original, pure state, which is “supplemented” by (added onto by, and ultimately perhaps threatened with replacement by) culture. Deconstructionist reading often reverses the supplementarity, upsetting the order and the privilege afforded the first term, without, however, fully allowing the reversed structure to become a privileged, settled reading in its own right.

For example, one could easily turn the supplementarity nature/culture on its head by pointing out that nature is, at least from a certain point of view, a construct of culture. If there were no culture, no human community, no commonality of shared thought, and if there were only (presuming we can imagine such a thing) a pure state of nature uncomplicated in any way by what we call culture, then the term nature would have no meaning for us whatever, above simple “being” or existence. A hypothetically cultureless person living alone in a cave and having no prior experience with human community would not look around and say, Well, now, this is the pure, natural state, uncontaminated by culture. Nature, as the first term in the supplementarity nature/culture, is understandable as a concept only by contrast, only from the point of view of culture—and even then, perhaps, only as a signifier to which we can never quite attach a definite mental image. We would say, then, that nature is (to repeat the oft-used term of Barthes and Derrida) always already (toujours déjà) infiltrated by culture: there is no “original” nature, but only a context-dependent term nature that is already contingent upon culture. Derrida, following the practice of Martin Heidegger, often crosses out such an always-already-supplemented term as “nature,” putting it under erasure (sous rature) in such a way that both the crossing-out and the term crossed out are visible, to show that although we cannot get along without such a term as “nature” altogether, its status is highly provisional. In effect we have unsettled and reversed the given configuration, suggesting an alternative—culture/nature.

But—and this point is often missed—simply to reverse a supplementarity in this way is to perform only a partial deconstruction. The suggestion is not that the new supplementarity now takes over. We do not say, Well, now, you see, it’s culture/nature, pure and simple, the way it always should have been, and leave the matter at that. A deconstructive reading finally refuses to grant privileged status to the new supplementarity, just as it refused to grant it to the old one. We refuse, for example, to favor “culture” over “nature” altogether, since culture as a condition of human community or commonality can only be defined by the possibility of its absence: people live together by virtue of not living apart. Thus neither term in a supplementarity has absolute, unquestionable privilege over the other, however strenuously the surface-level reading of a text may suggest such a privilege for one term or the other. Texts themselves subvert such suggestions even while making them. The reader arrives not at Hegelian-style dialectical synthesis of opposing terms but rather at “aporia” or impasse: an irresolvable textual oscillation between poles of an opposition or between competing configurations of privilege in a supplementarity. The reductive ideological thrust of supplementarities is undercut, uncentered, unsettled. The “logocentric” quest for hermeneutic certitude, the hankering after semantic fixity or the final ground of “truth” i...