The Criticism of Azathoth
Last Updated on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 20:07 Written by Robert M. Price Sunday, 11 December 2011 05:19
I write in full cognizance that my words may gain no one's credence, but then, as I will argue, I am the text, not the author, something that seems so evident as my words appear of themselves on the computer view screen, not arising from the point of any so-called "author's" pen. You, the reader, may read me and hasten to dash off an indignant reply. Eschewing modern technology for ancient, you may take in hand the pen because it is your needle narcotizing you into the delusion that the words which appear from the end of it are yours. What you will not realize is that all authors are themselves but pens, passive mediums, channelers, if you will, for the "automatic writing" practiced by the text as it writes itself. You write your own text only by virtue of reading what "you" have "written." In the same way you are rewriting the present text as you read it, as you are teasing your own sense out of it.
All the above implies that I have contracted "the French Disease," deconstruction. As the editor of Crypt of Cthulhu, I have for some years dutifully provided a forum for Donald R. Burleson's deconstructions of Lovecraft's texts as well as the shocked and outraged responses of those many readers who lost no time in writing to the letter column to roundly denounce the whole business. During that time, my own puzzlement matched their own. To be frank, Dr. Burleson's exegeses seemed not only arcane but frivolous to me. Yet I could see there was a method at work, however recondite. I grew curious as to what it might be. My greatest frustration in the whole controversy was that no one could ever seem to set forth clearly enough just what deconstruction was or meant. But I felt that Crypt's pages must remain open to any critical perspective. I could not let Dr. Burleson be shouted down by angry readers.
We Lovecraft students talk to ourselves in a small pond, and it has been noted that Lovecraft criticism will have great difficulty passing into the mainstream of literary criticism because we have already taken things so far that outsiders may have trouble catching up. The first pieces of Lovecraft criticism they read will already assume so much on the reader's part that the neophyte will give up in puzzlement. That, in short, is how I felt reading Dr. Burleson's analyses. He had already traveled so far in the company of Derrida and de Man that I was simply too winded to keep up the pursuit.
At length I began to look into deconstruction for myself. In the present article I would like to prepare the ground for a better understanding of deconstructive criticism as well as its appropriateness for the study of Lovecraft. I will make several illustrative references to Lovecraft's texts, particularly "The Whisperer in Darkness." I hope that after this article the reader may go back and unearth Dr. Burleson's earlier articles and read them with more sense.
Deconstruction is far more than a literary critical technique, and I for one find it helpful in understanding the critical application of deconstruction to try to grasp something of its philosophical import.
One of the most controversial aspects of deconstruction is the ousting from prominence of the author's intent. How can we justify such a Copernican revolution? Let us go several stages back and make a running start toward this critical axiom.
As a philosophical stance deconstructionism exists amid the ruins of "foundationalism." Traditionally philosophers tried to begin their speculations by establishing as their foundation some seemingly self-evident truth, whether Locke's raw sense perceptions or Descartes's "clear and distinct" innate ideas. Usually one started either with sense perception or reason. Derrida calls such supposed self-evident truth "Presence," only he does not believe in it.
Many philosophers have recently argued that foundationalism just does not work, because there are no truly raw sense perceptions unprocessed by some filter of construal. People in different cultures and with different habitual expectations actually see colors differently, for example. But rational innate ideas are no more helpful, because they are ungrounded. By definition, presuppositions cannot be proven or grounded. We could only try to do this by presupposing something else and then deriving axioms from which to "prove" what had been our presuppositions.
But is not the self itself present to consciousness? Hume had already cast doubt on this, suggesting that we could not be sure the supposed self is any more than a theatre for observed sensations and ratiocinations. But psychoanalysis made it clearer that the self is by no means present to consciousness. What we perceive is a heavily censored, tailored, selectively edited construct. Most remains below the water line.
God can by no means be present to consciousness, either. We can only know God derivatively by symbols, as theologians have long maintained; in the wake of the Fall, immediate knowledge of God is out of the question.
So, according to Derrida, all systems of meaning are based on certain axioms, which are falsely taken to be self-evident, based on "present truth." These presuppositions are archai (Greek for "ruling" principles), which form the supposed ground of any philosophy. But this ground is suspended in mid-air, simply posited arbitrarily to get the whole thing going. The ground is itself groundless. The arche of a system lacks any justifying arche of its own and thus rests on an-arche (no ruling principle, thus anarchy). Here I catch the strains of cracked flutes held in malformed paws. Here I catch sight of that Idiot Chaos whose spasmodic writhings lend each cosmos its eternal laws.
The farthest we can go back toward ultimate truth is language, writing, ecriture, the system of signs, symbols, signifiers, that give us meaning's coin of trade. In concert with Saussure and Structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss, Derrida sees all meaning-options, all ideas, notions, ways of emoting and perceiving, everything in the internal life of human beings, as contained in this system of signifiers. It is all a code implicit in language.
This is the reverse of the naive view of language which says that we construct words for things we already perceive in certain ways and for emotions or ideas we conceive in a wordless vacuum and then find we need a name for.
No, to the contrary, the options are already programmed into language. Logical oppositions, values, the range of emotions and ideas, all are functions of language, not the other way around.
Language might have evolved differently than it did, and we would think and feel differently. In fact, it has, hence the difficulties of cross-cultural communication.
More controversial still is the claim of Lacan, Derrida, de Man, and others that language has no referential, but only a rhetorical or performative function. Saussure said there is an impenetrable barrier between any signifier (take the word "glass", made up of these particular ink marks or phonemes) and the object supposedly signified (the breakable, serviceable object from which we drink). The signifier only points unstably and approximately, and with increasing slippage as time goes by, to the thing signified.
This gap between signifier and signified Derrida calls "differance," a play on the word "difference," combining the three kindred ideas of substitution of one thing for another, postponement or distancing of one by another, and one thing's being other than another, even than that thing it supposedly signifies. In a broad, fundamental, metaphysical sense, difference precedes identity, since to say two things are the same presupposes a difference which must be overcome. The fundamental condition is difference, which forms an ontological chasm which no signifier can ever cross.
Similarly, there is an unstable, "self-subverting" difference within each possible signifier. The meaning of any word or sign comes from the fact that it may be repeated. It will mean the same thing whenever we use it. But in fact it will not and cannot mean the same thing since in different contexts the same sign or word will never name or denote ¬quite¬ the same thing. "Dog" applies to a Doberman and a Chihuahua. How does "dog", then, have a single meaning? So the very thing, repeatability, that enables a signifier to have an identity, a meaning, immediately throws that meaning into question. A la Heraclitus, even the "same" object referred to by the same word in this moment and again five minutes from now has changed and become other than itself in the meantime.
All this means that there is no "transcendental signified" outside, behind, within, or beyond the text (e.g., in the intent of the author), beyond language. All meaning is generated and circulated within language. As Wittgenstein said, all meaning exists, all life is lived, in the form of different "language games." The psychoanalyst Lacan saw that our inner life is simply a text, a script, a series of signifiers, and to be healed we need to change the script.
Here is the first of a number of points where I see a Buddhistic flavor to deconstruction: Zen holds in effect that we are always moving within a text of linguistic/conceptual fictions and that Satori is the moment in which we strip away that text (like the famous Zen picture of the monk tearing the scriptures) and glimpse Suchness, ¬Tathata¬, ¬Sunyata¬, the Void, as it is. (It is, I suspect, no coincidence that Dr. Burleson is not only a deconstructionist but a Buddhist as well.)
There is no transcendental signified outside the text of either art or life. To think there is, says Derrida, is "logocentric." When we read a text, we face a field of signifiers. We scan them, ponder them, and then abstract some "meaning" (logos) from the text. The meaning is not "present" or self-evident, or no such abstracting act of "interpretation" would be necessary (or possible!).
To imagine that it is the interpreter's task to locate the "true" meaning somewhere in the text would be like a cartographer arbitrarily choosing a center point for a map. He must choose one if he is to begin drawing the map, but another might with equal justification be chosen. Given the beginningless and endless unitive surface of the earth, there can be no middle point before the choice of the cartographer/interpreter. So with any text. Logocentrism bids us pick out a "center of meaning" to provide coordinates for reading the text. But the order, however useful, is imposed by the reader.
While Derrida has pointedly denied that he thinks any interpretation is as good as any other, his point is that no text can be "totalized." That is, no interpreter can rightly claim to have secured the only true meaning in and of the text. No one has the copyright on what it means. Not even the author. The author is not made present to the reader in his text, since language is a broken bridge. Authorial presence cannot successfully pass over the "barrier" of Saussure, overcome the “differance" of Derrida. This may sound odd, even sophistical, but who can deny that scholarly discourse teems with disputes over what even the most acute writer meant in this or that passage, at fine points or globally?
Faced with the claim that the author's intent for "his" text is irrelevant, most of us recoil with vertiginous fear. Like Wilmarth we "start with loathing" when told of such monstrous
hermeneutical chaos. But what could be more Lovecraftian? We are experiencing the horror of self-displacement from an imaginary position of privileged centrality, the key element of horror in
Lovecraft.
Why should the notion of the text cutting itself loose from its author sound so strange? Why does it not sound illogical rather for the supposed intention of the author to have control of the text? Surely it is the genetic fallacy to say that the motive in creation determines the meaning of that creation. It is no more than a curiosity in the history of science that ammonia was discovered by an alchemist boiling toads in urine in his quest to find the Philosopher's Stone. His intention and design have absolutely nothing to do with the result.
And while we are on the subject of logical fallacies, let me note the question-begging circularity of appeal to an author's intent in most cases. How is it that we know the intent of the author, usually, except for the internal evidence of the text anyway? Suppose the author has not left a record behind, say, in a letter to a friend, explaining what he meant. Then it is completely circular to derive the "author's intent" by exegesis of the text and then to pretend you have arrived at some kind of external control.
But suppose the author has commented on his work. Often such comments only serve to underscore how beside the point the author's intent (or more truly, the author's opinion about the work) really is. Some examples may be in order here. I have read certain remarks by Ingmar Bergman about his film Through a Glass Darkly, in which he denies that he is treating the struggle of the modern soul with God, as he did in The Seventh Seal, for example. But any viewing of the film makes it absolutely clear that Bergman is not to be trusted on the point, any more than is Lovecraft when he derides his own The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a worthless effort.
In his Danse Macabre, Stephen King explicates the subtext of Blatty's The Exorcist as posing the parental horror of one's daughter's sexual awakening. The very real anxieties of puberty
give teeth to what would otherwise be the silliest extravagance. Subsequently, King said that his own rather similar novel Carrie is about feminism and the awakening power of American women in society. Nonsense. Clearly what horror his early book possesses is derived from precisely the same subtext as The Exorcist. The author is simply not to be trusted. He did not tell the tale he thought he did. Author's intent? Who cares?
In a letter to a friend, M.R. James once had to unravel the intended meaning of "Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance," one of his more recondite ghost stories. The reader did not get it. But then I say James did not give it! The story did not mean what he meant for it to mean if that desired meaning did not come through. It is like a joke: if you have to explain it, it isn't funny. But if it chances to be funny for different reasons than you intended ("Wait a minute! That wasn't the joke of it...!"), then you, the teller, are wrong and the joke, the text, is right.
As is well known, Lovecraft had his own private opinions as to the proper pronunciation of "Cthulhu" and the translation of the title Necronomicon. He thought the former should be said
"Clooloo," while the latter meant "Image, i.e., Book, of the Laws of the Dead." Both items cast authorial intent into a cocked hat, which was, as it happens, Lovecraft's preferred headgear.
A friend asked him how on earth he ever came up with a spelling like "Cthulhu" if he wanted it said "Clooloo"! He replied in feigned injury that after all it wasn't his choice: ask the aliens whose coinage it was! Here Lovecraft himself retreats into the "differance" between signifier and signified (actually, as Derrida says, only between signifier and signifier, since both versions of the name are merely pointers to the mollusk-headed signified himself!). Lovecraft himself expressly rejects authorial intent!
And as for the ¬Necronomicon¬, the name came to Lovecraft in a dream, and he had, like us, to guess at its meaning. And he guessed wrong! As S.T. Joshi demonstrated, by the rules of Greek
grammar, "Necronomicon" must mean simply, "Concerning the Dead." As with stories like "The Statement of Randolph Carter," which came right out of his dreams, it is just meaningless to ask after author's intent. I personally do not feel obliged to cough or bark "Clooloo" or to pretend Necronomicon means "Image of the Laws of the Dead." Furthermore, I wonder why we should take stories like "The Statement of Randolph Carter" as exceptions to the rule instead of as calling the tune for all the rest, showing how the author's intent is merely an epiphenomenon.
Let me attack the privileged author from a couple of other directions. Even on a more conventional reading of Lovecraft's texts we can see that the text is sent sailing away from the author's pier by a shove from the author himself. In "The Whisperer in Darkness," Lovecraft employs a famous in-joke. The scholarly Akeley (or has he by this time been displaced by an alien?) drops a reference to "the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton." Obviously, Lovecraft is tipping his periwig to Clark Ashton Smith, and he expects some readers in the Weird Tales audience to recognize this. The salute to a friend is the author's intent. But is this the meaning of the reference in the story? Are we supposed to understand Wilmarth as understanding Akeley to refer to the fantasy writer Clark Ashton Smith? No, of course not. The integrity of the narrative would be ruined by such an explicit aside to the reader.
(Yet as soon as we have made this observation we must admit that several explicit references to Smith as an artist of Pickmanesque weirdness ¬do¬ mark (or mar) other Lovecraft tales. Is there any difference in the long run? Here we have another contention of Derrida, that there is no real distinction between a phrase spoken in seriousness here in the text and in irony there in thetext, or at least that the line between them is drawn in invisible ink).
Again, "The Whisperer": What is the relationship between the intent and the persona of the writer? The text has passed from Lovecraft's hands as soon as he begins writing (falsely) the testament of Albert Wilmarth. Wilmarth, not Lovecraft, is the first-person teller of the tale. Wilmarth takes an unconscionably long time to piece together the terrible truth. The reader is way ahead of him. So is Lovecraft, obviously. Why is Lovecraft in any essentially different position than the reader? Neither one is Wilmarth. Neither is the text. Both may have opinions about the text and what happens in the story. The text stands between the two, identical with neither.
Irony complicates the whole business as well. The narrator of "The Haunter of the Dark" clearly disdains the wild occult hypotheses about Robert Blake's death, but it is equally plain that Lovecraft means the reader to believe the occult version. Which shall we say is the stance of the text?
I once read a letter to a newspaper advice column in which a wife expressed puzzlement over her husband's odd request that before having sex she bathe in cold water and then lie absolutely still in bed. The "narrator" was not playing dumb; she was genuinely oblivious to the fact that her husband was a closet necrophiliac. Lovecraft knows better; he is making his narrator seem similarly conventional and unimaginative. But the effect is the same. What is the difference between the two texts?
You might say that the woman could not have been so dense; surely she was just having Ann Landers (or whomever) on. If you are right, then you confirm my point yet again, for suppose the writer had made up the story, but then a reader read it and was startled to recognize that she had the same situation and now, to her great shock, understood it (and reached for the phone to call a therapist!). Would the ironic intent of the letter writer make any difference? Without any clear clue as to ironic intent, the text may be taken as straightforward, no matter what the author intended.
Darrell Schweitzer once suggested that a certain story attributed to Sheridan LeFanu in one of August Derleth's anthologies might have been a pseudepigraphical hoax on Derleth's part. If he could circulate his own work under Lovecraft's name, why not LeFanu's? Schweitzer, with his characteristic condescension, has always pointed with ironic superiority to the pathetic seriousness with which poor pundits have wrestled with this theory -- even though Schweitzer himself merely floated it as a joke! But so what? His "author's intention" is utterly irrelevant. His theory (which I am not competent to weigh) might have greater merits than he realized.
That a text may be susceptible to many possible interpretations should be manifest to Lovecraftians. Again, allow me a few examples. First, in an article on "The Hound" ("Who Killed St. John?" Crypt of Cthulhu # 48) Peter F. Jeffery showed how the details of the text can support a legion of quite distinct views at to what the Hound is, what the bats represent, who or what is making the sound, what kills the narrator's friend, etc., etc. Deconstruction maintains that such "undecidability" is characteristic of every text, though often only a very close reading will reveal it. Jeffery said that he only began noticing the different possibilities after he and a friend had reread the tale many times over the years and only later thought to compare notes. Each had hitherto assumed his was "the" clear meaning and that intended by the author. Maybe we ought to compare notes more often.
As William Fulwiler has noted, there is an ambiguity in "The Whisperer in Darkness" as to whom Wilmarth is talking with behind the face and hands of Henry Akeley. Is it one of the crustacean aliens? So it would seem from the buzzing voice. Yet there is the earlier reference on the record transcript to Nyarlathotep assuming "the waxen mask and the robe that hides" in order to come down among men. So was it the Crawling Chaos himself? Did he speak in the flesh to Wilmarth as he once did to Randolph Carter?
Steven J. Mariconda pointed out that in a letter Lovecraft mentioned how he had strengthened the ending of the story from an earlier draft in which Wilmarth, I believe, had simply noticed that one of the metal cylinders must contain the severed brain of Akeley, confirming his worst fears. The possibly waxen effigies of Akeley were a later addition, which supplemented the story (and in precisely the double way pointed out by Derrida in his famous deconstruction of Rousseau: "supplement" both as addition and as replacement). Before this change, the phonograph's reference to the waxen mask pointed to nothing. Now it is made to point to the figure in the chair, which was originally certainly nothing but one of the aliens.
Well, where does this leave the reader? Here we have an aporia, a self-contradicting loop in the story. It may have come from the clumsy rewriting of the story by Lovecraft, accidentally leaving clues that point in opposite directions. The author's "intention," in this case, was probably completely ¬un¬intentional: he simply neglected to go back and smooth out a rough spot. But the reader will have some narrative sense! So we resolve it one way or the other. But the text will have none of it! It remains stubbornly and irreducibly polyvalent. And wherever such polyvalences can be discerned by close reading of the text, they equally defy authorial intent even where we can show there ¬was¬ such intent, not mere sloppiness. I am trying to show how wedges such as this force the text from its author's hands, from its mother's womb, to take up an independent life in interaction with the reader. It will in some measure turn out as a different story depending on which horn of the textual dilemma you elect to grasp as you read the text.
Richard Lupoff's interpretation of "The Whisperer" in his sequel to it, "The Facts in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley," further attests the undecidability of the text. As is well known, Lovecraft everywhere employs the technique of leaving open a more innocuous alternative explanation, putting in some doubt the narrator's own conclusions. The narrator of "The Shadow out of Time," for example, leaves open the possibility that all his experiences might after all be no more than psychotic delusion, though he is dreadfully certain they are not. No doubt Lovecraft's intent is for the reader to accept the reality of the story's horrors.
But Lupoff has decided to believe the alternative possibility provided in "The Whisperer in Darkness." In his reckoning, the Whisperer in Akeley's easy chair was an propped-up form wired to the cylinder containing Akeley's brain. The letter Wilmarth received which had been typed, not handwritten, was really from Akeley after all; he had already agreed to be transferred to the cylinder and was obviously in no position to write by hand! So he dictated the letter. Everything that letter says about the benign intentions of the aliens is true! He merely hides from Akeley the
truth of how far things have proceeded for fear it would prove to be too much for him all at once.
(Even if the buzzing voice of the Whisperer should require us to identify it as an alien, we may still surmise it to have impersonated Akeley with the latter's permission.) But, you may ask, what of the overheard conversation downstairs in the wee hours? It settles nothing. Even with its reference to a "cheap imposture," it could, on Lupoff's reading, refer to Akekley's benign deception of his friend. And the rest is a mass of disjointed fragments. The passage is a microcosm of the whole story and demonstrates the undecidability of the text. It is ambiguous, and no interpretation can totalize it.
Another example, more briefly told, would be the case of "Dagon." The vision of the scaly paw of the ichthyic giant at the end of the story -- are we to judge that the monster has followed the narrator half across the world? Or that the paw is a figment of the narrator's delusion? In the latter case, we may suppose either that he had actually seen the fishy titan on the island, and the sight drove him to madness, the climactic vision being a product of it, or that both visions of the thing were madness-inspired. I have always taken the story to mean the narrator actually saw the monster both times. I was quite surprised to learn that S.T. Joshi took the second sighting to be hallucination, with the first, I suppose, being real. If we asked Lovecraft himself, I cannot see how his answer would be any more than another opinion about it. The phenomena of the text speak for themselves, albeit not unequivocally, and they must be left to do so. There can be no court of higher appeal.
Those who invoke the author's intent are going back to the medieval practice of settling questions by appeal to author-ity (Magister dixit). Deconstructionists, on the other hand, embrace
the Enlightenment principle of inductive inquiry: ¬ipse dixit¬, "the thing speaks for itself." Anything else is to flee from the light of science and its unwelcome revelations into the peace and safety of a new dark age, as someone has said.
Let me return to the idea of the "meaning" of the text being posterior to the text, in the mind of the reader, not anterior to it, in the mind of the writer. One of the landmarks of 1970s Lovecraft scholarship was Dirk Mosig's "The Four Faces of the Outsider" (now in Darrell Schweitzer, ed., Discovering H.P. Lovecraft, Starmont House, 1987) in which he actually spelled out ¬five¬ quite plausible autobiographical, Jungian, culture-critical, and other interpretations of the title story. I myself added a sixth in my article "Homosexual Panic in 'The Outsider'" (now in my collection H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, Starmont, 1990).
All of these readings are occasioned by some clues in the texts. By "clues" I mean data which seem to be pointers but which in fact only assume such coordinates once they are isolated in particular selective abstractions from all the rest of the textual data. Depending on which Gestalt pops out of the field of signifiers, the data will or will not function as markers of this or that meaning.
Or consider the succession of paradigms of Lovecraft interpretation. For many years Lovecraft's texts were read through the framework of the Derleth Mythos (the interesting origin of which I will take up again in a moment). Read this way, as I did in my youth, the texts seem to be about the efforts of the Old Ones to throw off the yoke of their masters the Elder Gods. The Derleth Mythos was succeeded by the Yog-Sothoth Cycle of Myth model framed by Dirk Mosig and Richard Tierney. The new perspective came as much from reading Lovecraft's stories as allegories of the "futilitarianism" of his letters as it did from paring away Derlethian accretions not present in the texts. But, as I have just implied, Tierney and Mosig were themselves augmenting the texts with something not present in them, Lovecraft's letters.
David Schultz has argued with cogency that there is no "Cthulhu Mythos" anywhere to be found in Lovecraft's works. Where there are indeed various names repeated for the sake of atmosphere, Lovecraft never would and in fact never did abstract from these datum, as Francis Laney, August Derleth, and Lin Carter did, some sort of system of myths or religion. The stories are not only not about the Mythos, but there is no Mythos, no such abstraction, in the stories.
I would now like to apply Schultz's insight to the whole question of meaning in Lovecraft's texts (any by extension, to any texts): the systems of meaning posited by Derleth (Good versus Evil deities), Tierney ("cosmic thunder heard afar off"), Mosig (Jungian archetypes), the early Burleson (mythic hero archetype), Joshi (cosmicism) are all like the "Mythos" -- abstractions that are simply not given in the text but which may be selectively composed on the basis of data chosen from the text.
Any such candidate for the text's "meaning" can be read out of the text but cannot be said to be in the text, or ¬behind¬ the text. But, you may protest, the others besides the "true" one are
misreadings! But deconstructionists, notably Paul de Man, say ¬all¬ readings are in a sense misreadings in that none of them is necessitated by the text. The very ambiguity that makes possible a plurality of interpretations rules out any of them being definitive. Any interpretation of the text, de Man argues, is a kind of allegorizing or midrashic embellishment, a retelling, of the story. (Harold Bloom has properly noted the parallels between deconstruction and Kabbalistic gematria, but I think rabbinic midrash is a more helpful parallel).
Thus David Schultz's article "Lovecraft's New York Exile" (Crypt of Chtulhu # 30) is only one small step removed from fictions like Peter Cannon's Pulptime or Richard Lupoff's Lovecraft's Book, which pretend to account for the origin of a particular Lovecraft tale by telling another story involving Lovecraft himself as a character, in which an imagined biographical circumstance leads HPL to write "The Horror at Red Hook" or "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Interpretive biographical pieces like Schultz's, which attempt in all seriousness to sketch events in Lovecraft's life in order to explicate the origins of "The Call of Cthulhu" or "He," differ from the admitted fictions of Cannon and Lupoff only in denying their own midrashic, speculative, narrative (and thus fictional) character. De Man is right: every interpretation of a story is a new recension of the story or a new story based on the old.
You may think Derleth's exegesis of Lovecraft clearly wrong, but he is too easy a mark. The relative merits of the other competitors are much closer, and indeed every supposed advance in interpretation merely serves to show how tenuous were the previously "assured results of scholarship." To claim author's intent is on your side is merely to claim author-ity over the interpretation of the text, that you own it, and that a heretic like Brian Lumley cannot play the game.
Derleth's treatment of Lovecraft's texts is highly interesting from a deconstructionist standpoint. How did he ever get the idea of a dualistic struggle between opposed sets of cosmic entities? He deconstructed Lovecraft. Here I would like to move from the deconstructionist claim that there are many readings of the text to the related notion that there is in fact an intended meaning still discernible (as anyone with common sense, Derrida and Burleson included, can see in most cases), but that implicit in the text is a subverting counter-meaning disclosed by a close reading of the text which reveals certain clues pointing against the grain of the author's intent. Such clues function as Freudian slips in everyday speech. And that is just what they are. They act as Archimedean levers enabling the deconstructive critic to pull up the hidden remains of a subterranean structure that changes the contour even of the surface meaning once the counter-meaning becomes visible.
I see here another parallel with Mahayana Buddhism, one which I have since been relieved to see had previously been picked up by critics. I am thinking of the dialectic of Nagarjuna, which among many things tells us that in the world of appearances (signifiers), all is divided and bifurcated (cf. Derrida's "differance"), but on the level of the Void (the groundlessness below every posited metaphysical ground, the an-archy) there is pure Truth- or Buddha-nature. (Granted Derrida allows no prior oneness, but keep in mind that Buddhism, too, is anti-metaphysical: there are no dharmas, no essences, in the Void, The condition for existence in both Derrida and Nagarjuna, I think, is bifurcation and differance).
This being so, every truth that is uttered in this world of differance must be at most a gaping half-truth. What other kind of truths could there be in such a split world? Implicit in every truth is a silent Other, an unspoken, opposite half-truth, present in the spoken half-truth only as a "trace." It is actually absent, but conspicuous by its absence, as we say, and that conspicuousness of the absent is the "trace" of the absent. The paradoxical and hidden presence of the absent. Where the text is silent it harbors a reservoir of silent counter-truth.
I feel I must supply a brief (and I hope only partially misleading) illustration of how the silence of the text is part of the text. I would suggest that the silence after the last word of "The Silver Key" is a crucial part of the narrative, as important a part of the plot as anything described in words in the text, for it frames the story. It silently stakes out the rest of the territory without actually telling us what happened next. Yet, paradoxically, we only become aware of this once the silence is broken by the writing/reading of the forced and ill-advised sequel "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," urged upon Lovecraft by his fan-friend E. Hoffmann Price.
Reading the sequel we immediately become aware that the original story has become completely subverted and relativized by the alien sequel (The same is true with any sequel). Here again, to have "supplemented" the story is to have subtracted the original story precisely by adding to it, since "The Silver Key" did not simply lack a sequel; its very integrity presupposed the lack of a sequel. When the final silence was dispelled, the story was changed and indeed rewritten in light of its new issuance, just as much as if Price had managed to persuade Lovecraft to go back and rewrite the text of "The Silver Key."
But Lovecraft himself has performed precisely the same maneuver by supplementing the earlier "The Statement of Randolph Carter" with "The Silver Key" itself. In the earlier tale, we have no real idea of who Carter is. "Carter" simply provides a name for the "I" of the colorless narrator. We don't yet know who he is, what he brings to the tale and its telling. Nor do we need to, for the tale is self-sufficient. That is going to change as soon as we read "The Silver Key" (or The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath), in which an originally unanticipated personality is going to be supplied for Carter, and which will recolor the text of "The Statement of Randolph Carter" when we reread (and thus rewrite) it subsequently.
Here I cannot resist quoting a passage from Derrida's essay "Living On," which applies to Lovecraft's "The Statement of Randolph Carter" in a startling way. In this text you will recognize the "narrative voice" that Blanchot, in L'entretien infini, distinguishes from the "narratorial voice." The narrative voice, he says, is "a neutral voice that utters the work from the placeless place where the work is silent." [That is, from the personality and experience of the narrator from offstage.] ... This "voicelessness" distinguishes it from the "narratorial voice," the voice that literary criticism or poetics or narratology strives to locate in the system of the narrative, of the novel, or of the narration. The narratorial voice is the voice of a subject recounting something, remembering an event or a historical sequence, knowing who he is, where he is, and what he is talking about. It responds to some "police," a force of order or law ("What 'exactly' are you talking about?": the truth of equivalence). In this sense, all organized narration is "a matter for the police," even before its genre (mystery novel, cop story) has been determined. The narrative voice, on the other hand, would surpass police investigation. (Deconstruction and Criticism, pp. 104-105)
"The Statement of Randolph Carter" is a police report, both literally and in Derrida's sense. Its narratorial voice, the recitation of the facts, comes through loud and clear, but its narrative voice, who Carter is, remains a mystery hidden in a placeless place, the silence bordering the text and thus making it finite and so defining it.
I say "The Silver Key" (and before it, "The Statement of Randolph Carter") was self-sufficient, but no text is an island. Its integrity is breached by the addition of another text. This is the inevitable fate of all texts, which cannot successfully seal themselves off from other texts. The very fact that a text is susceptible to being rewritten by supplementation, in other words, that a sequel, once written, does cause the original to be read in a new way, attests to what deconstructionists call "intertextuality." Every text is to a great degree a function of the many texts which influenced it, from which it borrows, to which it refers. And it, in turn, reflects back on them when we read, and thus rewrite, them in light of it.
Structuralist critics had gone almost so far when they showed how fruitfully one might treat a whole set of kindred texts (say all Greek tragedies about young men) as a single "megatext" and discern common patterns in them (Derrida would say, "impose common patterns onto them"). Levi-Strauss showed convincingly, to my mind, how all versions of a myth could be combined for purposes of structural analysis; a whole myth-cycle could be exegeted as if it were a single myth.
Lovecraftian scholars have pretty readily granted that all of Lovecraft's stories might be interpreted as a single megatext, as when Mosig says the stories can all be considered parts of the Yog-Sothoth Cycle, when Derleth discusses which stories "belong" to the Cthulhu Mythos, when Peter Cannon compiles all the dates from various stories into a startlingly coherent megaplot in his The Chronology out of Time. In fact, they were illustrating intertextuality when they interpreted Lovecraft's stories by reference to his letters. They treated Lovecraft's actual letters as if they were part of the text of the stories, like, say, Akeley's letters in "The Whisperer in Darkness."
But back to my question: where did Derleth derive his reading of Lovecraft? I will not here rehearse my arguments in a series of essays including "The Lovecraft-Derleth Connection" and "H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos" (which you may find in H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos), but let me now suggest that what Derleth did was, first, to discern the aberrant clues in Lovecraft and make explicit their counter-truth.
In my earlier essays, I admitted that on the whole the consistent thrust of Lovecraft's fiction was just as Joshi and Mosig described it: nihilistic, anti-human pessimism. But, I argued, Derleth had picked up a few odd bits and pieces that seemed to point, or could at least be naturally read as pointing, in a different direction: the Old Ones had been imprisoned by their betters. Else why was the seal of the Old Ones emblazoned on the sunken tower of Cthulhu's confinement? Whence the Old Ones' signs spoken of in hushed tones by Zadok Allen, which were once effective against the Deep Ones? Whence the exorcistic formulae used to such effect by Henry Armitage? Strange things to find in texts where the loud and clear message is that humans are negligible jokes played by superior and super-moral races. Derleth saw the "traces" of the Other of the Lovecraft Mythos and articulated the Cthulhu Mythos as that Other. By deconstructing Lovecraft, Derleth had freed Wilbur's invisible monstrous brother and sent it rampaging.
And, second, Derleth had grasped the intertextuality of Lovecraft's texts (albeit tracing its woof along a different direction than that pursued by Mosig in the latter's use of Lovecraft's letters). He took it quite seriously when Lovecraft had Akeley refer to "The Yellow Sign" in such a way that the whole story by Chambers is presupposed. What are simple references to the Dholes and the Voorish Sign, Hastur, Yian, and Bethmoora, Bran and the Serpent Men of Valusia, supposed to mean if not to make these earlier texts part of the present story? These references are sturdy threads weaving Lovecraft's stories in which they occur firmly into the same tapestry with the stories to which they allude. Derleth, seeing clearly the intertextuality of Lovecraft with his sources, felt free to explicate Lovecraft's aberrant clues, hints, and traces by mining the rich veins of Dunsany, Machen, Bierce, and Chambers.
Brian Lumley would later perform the same intra-organic (intertextual) blood-doping operation between Lovecraft and his source Edgar Rice Burroughs in Lumley's Hero and Eldin tales. I have argued elsewhere ("Randolph Carter: Warlord of Mars," in Tekeli-li! # 1) that Lovecraft's own "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is already significantly Burroughsian in both inspiration and flavor. Lumley has seen this and just gone back to the source for more Burroughs-style action-adventure in his own controversial Dreamworld novels.
I have sought here to illustrate some important features of deconstruction, as I understand them so far, with reference to texts familiar to my readers, the stories of Lovecraft, and in so doing to make the work of Donald Burleson more understandable to outsiders by trying to explain some of the things he seems to take for granted. In the process of doing this, I hope also to have shown that there is a certain philosophical affinity between Lovecraft and the deconstructionists, particularly Jacques Derrida. The two seem to share important insights as to the final an-archic chaos that grounds reality, as well as a humbling demotion of man/author from the center of things. In short, I should like to say that deconstruction is a truly Lovecraftian way to approach Lovecraft's texts. Dr. Burleson is to be congratulated for opening up this particular space for interpretation, and for showing that in a textual universe which streams forth from idiot chaos, no one interpretation can rule.
