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THE FOUR FACES OF THE OUTSIDER, by Dirk W. Mosig

H. P. Lovecraft did not write to entertain, nor did he tailor his impressive fiction with the paying market in mind. Instead, he relied on his work as a revisionist or ghost-writer, and on the meager pro­ceedings of the rapidly vanishing Phillips estate, for the small but reg­ular income which allowed him to lead a frugal existence. When Love­craft turned his encyclopedic mind to the careful craftsmanship of one of his memorable tales, he did so to attain a measure of artistic self-ex­pression. As becomes obvious from even a superficial reading of his published letters, he did not care if his work found an appreciative pub­lic. A perfectionist, he was never satisfied, even with his greatest masterpieces. Nevertheless, he never abandoned completely his at­tempts at creative self-expression—at communication. His works posses remarkable depth, and it is up to us to attempt to understand the message of the gentleman from Providence.

“The Outsider” is undoubtedly one of the finest tales to come out of Lovecraft’s pen. It is also one of the most profoundly meaning­ful and symbolic, albeit often baffling and enigmatic for the critic. Working under the assumption that there is no such thing as “correct” interpretation, the present study attempts to investigate the “message” in Lovecraft’s powerful story from four different viewpoints. “The Out­sider” lends itself quite readily to a psychoanalytic interpretation, but it also becomes meaningful when viewed from a more metaphysical frame of reference. Its autobiographical overtones have been discussed by many, while it is also possible to translate this narrative in terms of Lovecraft’s philosophical Weltanschauung. Finally, there is also the traditional interpretation within the context provided by other Love­craftian tales (such as “Pickman’s Model,” “The Dream-Quest of Un­known Kadath,” etc.) identifying the outsider as a human child kid­napped by ghouls and growing up in their subterranean abode. An un­usual variant of this type of interpretation was offered by David Brown (Nyctalops 8) who suggests that the outsider’s identity is Richard Upton Pickman, antihero of “Pickman’s Model,” who is changing into a ghoul. But even if Lovecraft’s Mephistophelic characterization of the ultimate artist were indeed the true fictional identity of the outsider, this would tell us little about the meaning, the implications, the message that Lovecraft is trying to communicate in his paroxysm of ecstatic self-expression.

In the following pages we will attempt to present the main outlines of the four interpretations mentioned above. No claim is made as to the validity or exhaustiveness of any of these different apprecia­tions of the same tale. Naturally, alternative explanations are also pos­sible, and may be equally valid. Nevertheless, in our conclusion we will attempt to evaluate the four suggested views on their merits, that is, their ability to account for available data on Lovecraft, his works, and his views. Finally the personal preference of the author will be stated, a view necessitated by his personal bias and perhaps not arrived at in complete objectivity.

1. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIC INTERPRETATION: H. P. LOVECRAFT, OUTSIDER

Taken as an autobiographic statement, the tale begins as a re­lation of Lovecraft’s unhappy childhood, full of “fear and sadness.” The anxiety and depression of the child, deprived of a paternal figure at the age of three, controlled by an over-protective mother, and rejected by his peers because of the unique interests generated by his precocious genius, are easily understood.

Lovecraft spent countless of the “lone hours” of his childhood in the “vast and dismal chambers” of his grandfather’s library, whose “maddening rows of antique books” provided the main source of enter­tainment in his solitude. From such books he “learned all that (he) knew,” without the urging or guidance of any teacher.

Such was the lot of this “dazed” twentieth century Poe, this genius destined to meet a “barren” existence, full of disappointments and unfulfilled expectations which would leave him “broken” and eter­nally dissatisfied with even his most brilliant creations.

And yet, as shown by the letters in which he referred to this period as the happiest of his life, Lovecraft was “strangely content” (proof of the relativity of all things) and clung desperately to the “sere memories” of his childhood, when his mind threatened to sink into the pits of melancholy and despair that moved him to repeatedly consider and defend the idea of suicide, even though he was only thirty-one years old when this tale was written.

In a continuous stream of morbid childhood memories, Love­craft continues to describe the dampness of his abode and the peculiar odor of the gigantic library room, always producing an atmosphere of “brooding and fear” and shadows…to the extent that the child had to light candles for relief. Perhaps we can even trace Lovecraft’s prefer­ence for the nocturnal hours to this unique early development.

He refers to his thirst for acceptance, his desire to belong, his need for warmth, affection, and friendship, and compares his goal to the “black inaccessible tower” that reaches into the “unknown outer sky,” the heaven of social acceptance, but which “cannot be ascended save by a well nigh impossible climb….”

The period of isolation and solitude is perceived by the child’s mind as countless years slowly and agonizingly grinding by, and no memory is kept of the adults that cared for him, particularly of the fa­ther he hardly knew…. In his neurotic mother he only could see a dis­torted, shriveled image of himself.

As a child, Lovecraft naturally considered himself as akin to other children, whose youthful pictures he saw in the books—at least until his mother told him that he was utterly hideous, ugly, and differ­ent from all other children…and that other youngsters would probably be repelled and horrified by his mere appearance. Sarah Phillips Love­craft, who died a diagnosed psychotic the same year “The Outsider” was written (1921), deeply resented her husband’s general paresis, a hatred that was displaced to the child, only to produce deep guilt feel­ings and anxiety to the troubled woman. The reaction formation which followed her inability to cope with her neurotic and moral anxiety re­sulted in the compulsive overprotection that characterized her relation­ship with the child. But her deep hostility toward her son occasionally broke through her defense mechanism, as when she succeeded in mak­ing him feel ugly and distorted (a feeling that he was never able to completely overcome)—all the while rationalizing that she was doing this for the child’s own good, keeping him close to her, under he “protection,” and away from other children and the rest of the world that might try to hurt him. The added imminence of financial disinte­gration was the final stress she could not endure, the straw that broke the remaining thread of sanity in a wretched woman who was to spend her last years in the insane asylum. And her son was not by her death bed when she was stricken by her final illness….

In his abysmal solitude, the child would often lie, outside, un­der the “dark, mute trees,” and “dream for hours about what (he) read in the books,” picturing himself among the “gay crowds” that must ex­ist in the “sunny world” beyond his “infinitely old and infinitely horri­ble” prison-home. He tried to escape, but as he moved away from the house, his anxiety and his insecurity became unendurable, the air be­came “filled with brooding fear,” and he ran swiftly back in defeat. So, through what to him appeared to be endless twilights, he “waited and dreamed, not knowing what (he) waited for.” Finally, his longing for light, for happiness and acceptance, “grew so frantic, that (he) resolved to scale the tower,” fall thought he might, in his desperate attempt to reach out and attain his impossible dream. Life was not worth living any longer “without ever beholding light,” without joining the illusive world of gaity, of belongingness, of love.

The decision to reach out to others was not an easy one, and is represented in the story as the perilous, slow, and arduous ascent of the tower, with frantic hope mixed with mounting anxiety and incertitude. But finally, coming out of his shell, he emerged from his precocious seclusion.

The realization that his peers were not equally encumbered by a crippling psychological environment, is for him a grotesquely unbe­lievable shock. This act of the will, this emergence from his psycho­logical prison, has not elevated him to dizzying heights but simply placed him on a level ground, natural to everyone else. But determined to make the most out of his position, he proceeds with a “frantic crav­ing” in his quest for acceptance and love. Ultimately he arrives at the castle of lights, the goal of his childhood dreams.

His innocent heart is filled with delight as he observes the inviting “open window, gorgeously ablaze with light, and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry.” But as he gathers sufficient courage and attempts the actual social contact his inner nature demanded, he does so only to step from his “single bright moment of hope to (his) blackest convulsion of despair and realization.” He experienced the psychologi­cal blow of social rejection and isolation.

To his anxious and subjective mind it did not appear as if his peers’ reaction was due to his different interests, in part , the conse­quence of his superior intellect, which made him prefer the acting of historical roles to the childish games of others…. (One who knew him in childhood later referred to him as “crazy as a bedbug.”) No, he per­ceived himself as shunned because of the actual revulsion and nausea caused by his hideous ugliness. Mother had been right! He was a loathsome monster! Seeing his image in the mirror of the mind, the psychological eye perceived only a distorted abnormality, that had “by its simple appearance” turned a group of playing children into “a horde of delirious fugitives….”

This cataclysmic collapse of his self-concept brought him “avalanche of soul-annihilating memory,” he could understand now “all that had been….” He knew now why he had not been allowed to come in contact and play with other children, why his mother always needed to protect him and keep him away from others, he knew the truth about his hideous deformity…. How could he know that in reality he was a rather handsome child with a monstrous mother in the throes of grow­ing personality disintegration…? This traumatic experience had far-reaching and long-lasting effects, and the dreamer from Providence never completely overcame his feelings of ugliness and social inade­quacy. For the rest of his life he was more or less a recluse, going out at night and preferring to deal with his friends through correspondence. It is true that in his latter years, particularly the last decade, he was able to compensate for this handicap to a great extent, perhaps due in part to his brief marriage and his New York “exile,” which contributed to make him more fully human. But “The Outsider” was written before he was exposed to the healing effect of those influences.

Returning to the text of the story, we notice that the experience of such completely negative self-concept produced a tremendous burst of anxiety in his young but lacerated mind, and that “in the supreme horror of that second” he repressed his excruciating self-awareness as well as the traumatic event leading to it…he “forgot what had horrified” him. He tried to retreat once more to the consolation of his mother, to the relative security of his home—but the door was closed: things would never be the same again.

He rationalized, saying that he was not sorry for his alienation, and turned for companionship and inspiration to the inner world of fantasies and dreams, riding with the “mocking and friendly ghouls”—the “night gaunts” of his dreams—in the catacombs of his own imagination. In his extreme introversion, he realized that “light was not for (him), nor any gaiety,” save that produced by his own fan­tastic creations. And in his “new wilderness and freedom,” his inde­pendence from others, he “almost welcomed the bitterness of alienage,” realizing always that he “was an outsider, a stranger in this century and among those who are still men,” among those still able to find happi­ness through interpersonal relations. Rejected by his peers, oppressed by his mother, and misunderstood by all, he renounced society and the twentieth century. Finding security and esthetic pleasure only in the past, he often reminisced the “happiness” of his childhood in his latter years, and turned to the eighteenth century for beauty and inspiration. As August Derleth, his first biographer, noted, he remained an outsider all his life, and his spirit flourished in his rightful and beloved eigh­teenth century. His unique genius and imagination allowed his mind to fly at prodigious heights well beyond the reach or conception of com­mon men, but like all mortals, his life was the product of an accidental combination of heredity and environment that could not have resulted in a different outcome.

“The Outsider” is a powerful and touching statement about the early years of the “gentleman from Angell Street.”

2. AN ANALYTICAL INTERPRETATION: ALLEGORY OF THE PSYCHE

“The Outsider” almost appears to have been written in order to fit the analytical theory of Carl Gustav Jung. Even though interpreta­tions using Freudian psychoanalysis or Adlerian individual psychology, among others, are also possible, Lovecraft’s tale acquires unusual psy­chological significance when viewed as an allegorical voyage through the Jungian conception of the unfolding human psyche and its funda­mental conflicts. Even though Lovecraft’s letters show that he was well aware of Jung’s theory, the question of whether this story is a case of conscious artistry or a manifestation of the author’s own unconscious and dynamic psyche, is not settled.

The subterranean castle in the tale stands for the Collective Unconscious, the unfathomable psychic ocean common to all men, and containing “rows upon rows” of “antique books” or archetypes. The archetypes, or primordial images, are the psychic representations of the primordial experiences of the species throughout eons of evolution: they are the depository of the ancestral wisdom of the human psyche. (For the reader unfamiliar with Jung’s analytical theory, J. Jacobi’s The Psychology of C.G. Jung, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1962, would provide an ideal introduction.)

As a child is conceived and later born, his psyche is composed of global, undifferentiated contents. These contents are dependent on the genetic factors which determine the unique development of his brain. During the first months, even years, of life, the unconscious contents become gradually differentiated through the process of indi­viduation, into the psychic structural constructs characterizing the nor­mally functioning adult psyche. It is to this slow and gradual process of psyche development that the outsider, the archetypal prototype of the ego, is referring, when mention is made of the “years” passed in the castle, although he “cannot measure the time.”

“I know not where I was born, save that the castle was in­finitely old and infinitely horrible.” The budding ego emerges slowly and gradually from the depths of the unfathomable Collective Uncon­scious. The contents of the unconscious are infinitely old (the heredi­tary predispositions and instincts accumulated through literally millions of years of organic evolution), and infinitely horrible, at least as per­ceived from the point of view of the conscious ego (the narrator) be­cause of their primitive, savage, undifferentiated, and archaic nature. These unconscious elements “silently wave twisted branches far aloft,” manifesting themselves distortedly in dreams and nightmares, striving to assert themselves and acquire a charge of libidinal energy.

“There was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations,” the countless generations of ancestors, transcending the family, going back beyond this origins of the tribe, the nation, the race, and even the species, to our subhuman and animal an­cestry, and even to the primordial slime where life first originated…. The experiences of countless generations exposed to similar types of conflicts or situations, with individual survival on the balance, have re­sulted in the natural selection of those reactions or predispositions with adaptive, or survival, value. Or, more specifically, those combinations of genetic alleles making such adaptive reactions more probable, tend to increase in frequency within the gene-pool of the species, until becom­ing universal. From the piled-up corpses of dead generations we have inherited ancestral tendencies, such as fear of snakes and fear of the dark. The presence of such fears in primitive man would increase the probability of his surviving to reproductive age (escaping the predaters of the night and the poisonous bite of snakes), while those members of the tribe unable to experience or develop such fears seldom lived to pass on their genetic flaw…and even though in modern times such fears, as well as many other unconscious tendencies and predispositions, have ceased to have significant adaptive value, they form part of our insepa­rable heritage.

“It was never light” in the unconscious castle, because neither consciousness nor reason can exist in the depths of the primordial, archetypal jungle. There was one “black tower,” a symbol for the pro­cess of individuation, which reached above the unconscious forest, into the “unknown outer sky,” the one” point of contact of the global, undif­ferentiated, unconscious psyche, with the real and objective world. This is the tower that the emerging archetypal ego must ascend, at all costs, to behold the light, to reach consciousness.

The outsider’s only memory of a living thing is that of “something mockingly like (himself), but distorted, shriveled, and de­caying, like the castle.” This is a reference to either the other archety­pal processes in the unconscious (such as the archetypal persona), or, more likely, specifically to the budding archetypal nucleus which will later lead to the development of the foul and loathsome Shadow, the ego’s inescapable “dark brother”….

“Bones and skeletons strewed the stone crypts deep below the foundations,” symbolizing the axial archetypal systems at the very bot­tom of the Collective Unconscious, in the deepest layers whose contents can never be made conscious. These skeletal systems, these genetically coded ancestral potentialities, lie dormant until experience activates them. A skeleton cannot move without muscles, and an archetype can­not manifest itself unless the organism experiences stimuli correspond­ing to an archetypal model of reaction. But for the archetypal ego, these “bones and skeletons” appear as “natural everyday events.”

The outsider has learned all (he) knows from the “mouldy texts” of archetypal lore, without the urging or guidance of a teacher, that is, impelled by innate instinctual forces and archetypal memories.

Note that “there were no mirrors in the castle,” because there can be no opposites, no mirror images, in the unconscious, before the individuation of the contents of consciousness. The principle of oppo­sition in the human psyche always applies to a conscious vs. an uncon­scious system (i.e., ego vs. shadow, persona vs. soul image, introver­sion vs. extroversion, feeling vs. thinking, sensation vs. intuition), but there can never be opposition between two unconscious constructs or functions: there are no mirrors within the castle….

“Through endless twilights,” the archetypal ego “dreams,” ex­pressing itself in fantasy images and symbols of the unconscious, until the time for individuation is ripe. Then, with a frantic longing for light, or psychic consciousness, the outsider ascends the “black tower,” and reaches the realm of the Personal Unconscious, the crypt lying above the subterranean castle of the Collective Unconscious, at the bor­der of consciousness. This crypt contains countless oblong boxes, which are to become the depository of forgotten-and repressed material during the lifetime of the individual.

At last, the stone trapdoor, the portal to consciousness, is found and forced open, as well as the final barrier, the iron grating, through which shines “the radiant full moon.” In the symbolic lan­guage of the psyche, according to analytical theory, the moon stands for a manifestation of the mother archetype as well as for the mother com­plex, when it appears in dreams. (The mother complex consists of ex­periences and other material repressed out of the conscious sphere, and encapsulated by the unconscious, which cluster around the powerful nu­clear element providing by the Great Earth Mother archetype—the “magna mater”—derived from ancestral experiences with mothers throughout the ages.) Fittingly enough, the outsider states that the moon, the mother archetype, has previously appeared only “in dreams and in vague visions,” in ancestral “memories.”

The stumbling that follows the veiling of the moon, or mother symbol, by a cloud, represents the extreme dependency of the emerging consciousness of the growing infant on the interaction with the maternal psyche. And as the moon comes out again, the view from the border­line of consciousness is clear again, though “stupefying.” The emer­gence of the conscious ego is not the end but only the beginning of the psychic quest, because the goal of personality development is not the emergence of the ego, but the realization of the Self….

The following wanderings of the outsider represent the odyssey of the human psyche toward the fabled castle of lights, the Self. The outsider’s progress is not fortuitous, as a kind of “latent memory” guides him, since the transcendent function of self-realization is also an archetypal process. It is significant here to notice that the outsider sometimes follows “the visible road,” or the way dictated by reason and experience, but sometimes leaves it “to thread across meadows where only the occasional ruins” bespeak “the ancient presence of a forgotten road,” or, in other words, pursues his goal following the path indicated by the unconscious wisdom of the archetypes, a path which may appear at times as illogical or irrational,but is nevertheless psychically neces­sary. The tendency to strive for self-realization is innate, encoded in the genetic combinations carrying the “latent memories” or archetypes from our ancestral past.

In this quest, the outsider has become the “wandering hero,” the traditional symbol of man’s voyage toward Selfhood, of the ego’s longing for the ultimate expansion of consciousness. Finally, he reaches his destination, the “ivied castle” whose windows are “gorgeously ablaze with light.” The castle of lights stands for the Self, the unification of consciousness and the unconscious, the realization of the total psyche. This is, according to Jung, the purpose of human ex­istence, even though complete equalization, complete self-realization, is not possible, because the lack of gradient implies total entropy—the flow of libido coming to a standstill—and this cannot occur save in death, the goal of all life. (One reason why total entropy never occurs during the individual’s striving for wholeness, is that the psyche is only a partially closed energy system, with energy loss due to work, and en­ergy gain through food).

The outsider peers through a window of the ivied castle and finds there a merry company, the contents of consciousness, rationality, sanity…but as he enters in an attempt to join or integrate with the rest, consciousness reacts not only to him and his feeble persona, but to the inevitable and escapable Shadow that always accompanies him (and ev­ery human being), the unconscious and inseparable opposite of the ego which in one instant shatters the illusion of rationality and the hopes of self-realization.

The final horror comes in the moment of truth, when the ego perceives its own Shadow, its unconscious opposite reflected in that fateful mirror. The outsider sees the atavistic nightmare that always lurks at the threshold of rationality, and which Lovecraft so skillfully described as “the compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwel­come, abnormal, and detestable,” all that the ego abhors, rejects, and represses because of rational, esthetic, or ethical reasons: his “dark brother” who becomes blacker, denser, and more powerful the more it has been alienated from consciousness. It is “the ghoulish shade of de­cay, antiquity and dissolution,” the conglomerate of all the ego per­ceives as ultimate evil, clustered around the archaic, undifferentiated Shadow archetype. “It was the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide,” of that which (from the point of view of the shocked and horrified ego) should have always remained underground, buried in the unconscious. With deep loathing, the outsider notices that the apparition presents “a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape,” being the distorted, unconscious parody of the conscious ego.

Then, as the outstretched fingers of the outsider touch those of his unconscious and nightmarish mirror image, an instant of ego-shadow fusion occurs, that goes beyond mere recognition or under­standing. This is the closest the outsider ever comes to self-realization and psychic wholeness…. For the cataclysmic revelation of the Shadow within himself, the understanding that he and the monstrous abomina­tion standing before him are one, instantly shatters sanity as he experi­ences (and is unable to cope with) the most traumatic experience of hu­man existence.

In that instant “there crashed upon (his) mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory.” As consciousness and unconsciousness touch, fuse for an instant, “all that had been” becomes evident, all is understood in a moment of terrible insight. But the flood of anxiety is unendurable, awareness of the truth is too painful, and a desperate repression occurs. With this regressive flow of energy or li­bido, the outsider “forgets” what has horrified him. “The burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images,” that is, in the chaos of opposing systems within the psyche. The price of unification, of Selfhood, is too high, and it is better to live in ignorance than to ac­cept the awful reality of man’s atavistic and unconscious nature. This utter failure leaves the outsider “dazed, disappointed, barren, bro­ken”…. Lovecraft, the pessimistic realist, is telling us that self-realiza­tion is an impossible dream.

The outsider escapes from the now empty and desolate castle, in a dream under the ever present moonlight. An attempt to return to the subterranean castle, to regress to the claustraum, to find total oblivion in a reversal of the individuation process, fails. The ego can­not escape from the world of consciousness and reality: the stone trap-door is immovable.

His “new freedom” is provided only by insanity, and the out­sider, unable to recover from his “soul-annihilating” experience, rides now with the “mocking and friendly ghouls,” his archetypal fantasies and complexes (or perhaps his fellow inmates in the insane asylum). But in his bitterness he almost welcomes the new freedom of schizophrenia, the new wildness of breaking away from reality—of be­ing “an outsider among those who are still men,” who are still sane and have not yet felt the icy fingers of terror and the holocaust of ego-dis­integration in the ultimate confrontation with the Shadow.

Lovecraft, familiar with Jungian theory, was well aware that few, if any ever achieve any significant approximation to Jung’s ideal­ized ego-expansion and self-realization. In his conviction that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind the correlate all its contents,’ the dreamer from Providence has painted a gloomy and devastating picture of man’s destiny: not a glorious psy­chic integration, but the ever imminent collapse of the ephemeral illu­sion of rationality.

3. AN ANTIMETAPHYSICAL INTERPRETATION: THE ABSURDITY OF POST-MORTEM DESTINY

H. P. Lovecraft, a rationalist, a logical positivist with abso­lutely no belief in the supernatural, used his celebrated tale “The Out­sider” as medium to convey, in disguised form, his sardonic contempt for the incongruity of metaphysical beliefs and dogmata such as life af­ter death, immortality, and resurrection. With the searing irony of the materialistic philosopher, he unleashed this piece of macabre sarcasm on the vain hopes and illusions of a gullible world.

The subterranean castle is simultaneously Lovecraft’s cynical conception of heaven and of the kingdom of Dis on the pattern of Dante’s Inferno, while the outsider is a corpse that has been dead and buried for countless years. Some uncanny psychic residue allows this “carrion thing,” this unnatural denizen of the tomb, to become an ani­mated corpse and continue his unthinkable existence in the underground vaults of the cemetery. Lovecraft has granted, for the sake of argu­ment, man’s survival after death, and is ready to carry this notion to its absurd implications.

The living corpse exists in the “subterranean castle,” sole sur­vivor among the “piled-up corpses of dead generations,” while his dete­riorated brain retains only vague memories of the past. The “mouldy books,” containing the traditional beliefs of his ancestors, convey to him hopes and dreams of light, of happiness, of rebirth, of future glory…. Lying in his underground crypt-vault-castle, and “unable to measure the time,” he dreams of rejoining the world of the living, the world of light and of gay figures he sees in the books and which always evoke half-memories of his mundane past. He dreamed and waited, “not knowing what he waited for.” Finally, his longing for light “grew so frantic,” that he decided to climb the single “black tower” leading “to the unknown outer sky.” With tremendous effort, the rotting and inconceivable monster manages to scale this sole avenue of escape, and achieves his unholy resurrection as he emerges from the crypt. He finds himself standing in the midst of the graveyard where his body was laid to rest in the unmeasurable past, something for him “abysmally un­expected” and producing the “most demoniacal of all shocks,” since he had fancied himself the inhabitant of a castle and not a denizen of the underworld…. Lovecraft, to show us that the metaphysical dream is sheer insanity has allowed life to linger in this disintegrating corpse, and now has resurrected it, returning it to the world of the living.

The grisly creature, still nursing a frantic craving for light, for companionship, for happiness, and even for the mythical glory of heaven, runs swiftly and eagerly under the moonlight, guided by remote recollections from his distant past. He recognizes landmarks and buildings, rivers and bridges, but he finds them all changed, altered, aged, and crumbling, an indication of the long time elapsed since the grim reaper put an end to his natural life. (Incidentally, this is an idea that was later elaborated by Lovecraft’s friend and fellow author, Clark Ashton Smith, in “Xeethra.”)

This decaying, pitiful parody of living men ultimately arrives at his destination, the “venerable ivied castle” where he once lived or reigned, noting here also the ravages of time. The castle was “maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness…the moat was filled in, and…some of the well-known towers were demolished.” But, without attempting to understand the implications of the changes that time has brought to the places he knew in the far past, he is at­tracted “with interest and delight” by “the open windows,” through which he observes an “oddly dressed company,” “making merry and speaking brightly to one another.” He sees in all this “gorgeous light and revelry” the fulfillment of his hopes, the glory he had only dated dream of before.

In his brightest “moment of hope” he decides to enter the castle of life and steps through one of the low windows to join the gay party…only to sink into his blackest moment of despair. At the sight of the putrefying corpse creeping in through the window, “there descended upon the whole company” a panic “fear of hideous intensity,” that Lovecraft paints in vivid and unforgettable colors. Everyone fled madly, stampeding desperately from the unthinkable apparition that now stood there, “alone and dazed,” in the throes of melancholic an­guish, unable to comprehend the reason for this sudden manifestation of delirious terror. He clings to the tenuous hope that the horrified mass reaction was due to something “that might be lurking near” him….

When he sees that fateful reflection in the mirror of reality, he does not perceive the nightmarish image as his own, since in his dreams he had always conceived himself as “akin to the youthful figures” in his books…and now is confronted with the “putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation,” with a “carrion thing” that “the merciful earth should always hide.” With horror, he detects in “its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape.”

As he stumbles, he touches “the rotting outstretched paw of the monster” but feels only “the cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.” In that mind-shattering instant he realizes the truth, he remem­bers the past, he recognizes the “altered edifice” where he now stands, and worst of all, he becomes agonizingly aware of his own condition. Overwhelmed by this nightmarish revelation of ultimate horror, this cruel mockery of all his dreams and hopes, the outsider sinks to the most abysmal depths of despair. But in that moment of supreme an­guish, his tortured mind dissociates his painful awareness, and he expe­riences the merciful oblivion of amnesia.

In his mordant yet morbid humor, Lovecraft shows us now this tragic and pitiful parody of immortal man running blindly and franti­cally back, attempting to return to the graveyard, to the earth where he belongs—only to find the slab to the subterranean vault immovable. He experiences no regret, since he can only abhor the prospect of continued and meaningless existence in the crypt. Now he rides with the “friendly ghouls,” the necrophagous scavengers who become his sole companions in a final gruesome and grotesque mockery of man’s impossible dreams.

The outsider finds not the glory of Heaven, nor even the tor­ments of Hell, but only the “unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid….” Man’s ultimate fate, man’s final destiny, is not the glory of supernatural existence, but the feast of the maggots.

With “The Outsider” Lovecraft achieved an equally effective, yet vastly different statement on the absurdity of immortality, as Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. To cease to exist is certainly preferable to the kind of unholy survival found in the outsider, and to conceive of any other kind of personal survival in a mechanistic and purposeless cosmos was a vastly more absurd proposition for the thinker from Providence.

4. A PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION: MAN’S POSITION IN A MECHANISTIC UNIVERSE

That H. P. Lovecraft was a first rate thinker and philosopher is shown by such brilliant essays as “Materialism and Idealism: A Reflec­tion” and “The Materialist Today,” as well as by the numerous and pro­found philosophical speculations found in his extensive correspondence. His works of literature, such as “The Outsider,” cannot be appreciated or interpreted independently of his serious convictions. If Lovecraft was trying to communicate a deep message to mankind, it is here, in his philosophical works, that we shall find the key to the deepest and most significant meaning of all his unique fiction.

Lovecraft was a mechanistic materialist, influenced by Haeckel, but going far beyond the nineteenth century rationalist. He was an ardent believer and supporter of science and scientific method. A conservative in matters of art and morality, he showed himself to be an extreme modernist in his intellectual outlook. He was convinced of the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and to a much lesser ex­tent, of the modern discoveries of psychoanalysis. His deepest scien­tific interest was in the area of astronomy, an interest which he main­tained until the end of his short life.

Although he greatly appreciated the esthetic beauty of the myths and traditional beliefs of the past, he fully accepted the implica­tions of the information available to his probing scientific intellect, and abandoned all traces of religious and superstitious beliefs at an early age. He conceived the cosmos as entirely purposeless and mechanistic, and man’s position therein as a mere insignificant accident lasting an in­stant in eternity.

Lovecraft had the unique ability of being able to achieve com­plete intellectual objectivity. He was capable of detaching his con­sciousness, of achieving a frame of mind of “cosmic outsidedness” and becoming a dispassionate observer of man and the universe. He was able to conceptualize a cosmos where our entire universe was reduced to a grain of sand, a mere atom in infinity, and at the same time to observe the amusing behavior of his fellow men with the same objectivity with which we might study the antics of ants, rats, or monkeys. His incisive mind was quick to spot the inconsistencies and incongruities of human hypocrisy, and he condemned the blindness of the fanatic theist together with the unjustified hopes of the idealistic atheist.

Lovecraft’s view of life was essentially pessimistic. He felt that most people are basically unhappy, and that a life of suffering is not preferable to the oblivion of death. Seriously contemplating sui­cide, he decided against it on the grounds that the esthetic pleasure he derived from the study of eighteenth century art slightly tipped the scales in favor of life. He considered the quest for truth, for new knowledge, the sole possible justification for the existence of the human species, and his eternal question was “What is reality?”

For Lovecraft, man, as well as the cosmos, has no purpose, no final goal. A rock, a man, a planet, and the entire universe, all are equally meaningless, and equally valuable in a purposeless cosmos. Life did not exist a moment ago, and will have ceased a moment hence, and the memory of man will be eternally forgotten. But man must live by the relative values imparted by culture and tradition, and from these he derives an illusion of security and stability. These values and tradi­tions Lovecraft accepted as long as they did not contradict what his cold, rational intellect knew to be true. He opposed the blind icono­clastic fury of those all too willing to tear down what they could never replace.

Nevertheless, Lovecraft was intellectually too perceptive to be­come a philosophic missionary. With unparalleled objectivity, he was able to realize that a complete awareness of reality is not necessarily the best for all men, and that for many an illusion is preferable to the truth. Man exists for the merest instant, and anything making life less puhishing and more endurable has relative value.

Lovecraft had little faith in man’s ability to cope with reality, and in his brilliant letters and fiction predicted what we now call “future shock.” With deep regret he prophesied man’s retreat into in­sanity or the superstitions of a new dark age when faced with the new discoveries of science pointing toward the abysmai insignificance of man. The introductory paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu” provides an excellent summary of Lovecraft’s views, and also supplies us with the essential key for the interpretation of “The Outsider” within the frame­work of his mechanistic philosophy:

“The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas if infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowl­edge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

Lovecraft has been often misunderstood in this paragraph as opposing scientific progress. Nothing could have been further removed from his intention. He simply stated what he perceived as the in­evitable and deplorable consequence of man’s inability to cope with the new horizons opened by science, while still regarding knowledge as the ultimate good. That his pessimistic prophecy was justified becomes evident when we witness the growing interest in, or rather, retreat to, the occult, astrology, magic, religion, witchcraft, and superstition, the countless new cults emerging everywhere, the fads of pseudo-mysti­cism, the drug-culture…. All the frantic attempts at regaining some of the lost security destroyed by Galileo, and Darwin, and Freud, and Ein­stein, and Skinner, and countless others….

It is this ultimate conflict of man facing the cosmos and react­ingwith horror to the realization of his impotent insignificance, that constitutes the theme of “The Outsider.”

The subterranean castle is the womb, where embryonic man is being shaped by his inherited potential and genetic charac­teristics. He experiences the pains of birth trauma after the arduous travel up the vaginal tower. Man is filled with dreams and expectations, with illu­sions about his own destiny. He strives for happiness, freedom, dig­nity, knowledge…. The cherished traditions of the past tell him that he is the lord of creation, the center of the Universe. He sees himself as the ultimate product of evolution, the culmination of all life. In his quest for knowledge and perfection, he hopes to find an answer to all questions in science, and sees in this castle of truth, the key to ultimate happiness.

But when the narrator reaches his destination and enters the bastion of reality, he finds not happiness, security, and fulfillment, but only the bare, cruel, merciless truth. As he correlates the body of dis­sociated knowledge, he achieves instant comprehension of reality. He knows “all that had been.” A terrifying vista of reality has been opened for him, and of his “frightful position” therein. In the mirror he sees reflected, not the lord of creation, but the loathsome, abominable ver­min polluting a grain of sand in a purposeless universe. He recognizes himself as a meaningless atom of corruption, an ephemeral infection in the accident of Life. No destiny, no purpose, no dignity, no mean­ing….

Unable to cope with this “soul-annihilating” revelation, “in the supreme horror of that second” man forgets the truth and runs franti­cally back to the hopes and superstitions of the past, but finding the stone trapdoor closed, collapses into the “new freedom” of insanity. He can never be the same again. He is an outsider. He knows.

This ultimate conflict, the final confrontation of man with re­ality is a recurrent theme in Lovecraft’s fiction. The outcome reflects Lovecraft’s pessimistic view of human nature and perfectibility. Love­craft, as a thinker, was a realist, and painted reality as he saw it in the powerful strokes of his incomparable fiction. He wrote with the real­ism of Richard Upton Pickman, Lovecraft’s uncanny self-portrait in “Pickman’s Model.” “The Outsider” provides a vivid representation of man’s pathetic helplessness in the cosmos.

5. DISCUSSION AND EVALUATION

The autobiographic interpretation is quite appealing, because it seems to fit well with known facts of Lovecraft’s life. To suggest that all the similarities between settings and incidents in “The Outsider,” and events or places in the life of the Providence author are mere coin­cidences, would be nothing short of preposterous. Nevertheless, al­though biographical data may have provided some of the “form” or set­ting in this excellent tale, it does not necessarily follow that the mean­ing of the story is to be read as an expression of Lovecraft’s hypotheti­cally frustrated gregariousness. Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft’s inti­mate and long-time friend, for example, disagrees emphatically with the notion that Lovecraft had a “social inferiority complex,” and insists that he “never made the slightest attempt to reach out for liking .and under­standing” (Nyctalops 8). “The Outsider” may not be Lovecraft’s cry of social anguish after all.

The analytical interpretation is also attractive, and there appear to be too many similarities between Jungian theory and Lovecraft’s chiller for this to be dismissed as coincidence.

H. P. Lovecraft, as a craftsman of consummate skill, was a perfectionist, always searching for the mot just, and constantly revising his tales before arriving at their final form. He also constantly incorpo­rated bits of factual knowledge stored in his encyclopedic mind into the fabric of his fiction, giving them an added element of believability, so essential in achieving the temporary “suspension of disbelief” in the reader. Since Lovecraft’s published letters gave ample evidence of his familiarity with both FreudJan and Jungian psychoanalysis, it is plausi­ble that he may have intentionally incorporated into many of his takes some of the universal symbols that lung was so fond of interpreting as verifications of his theory of dreams.

There is some specific evidence in Lovecraft’s fiction and po­etry that he intended a psychological meaning for at least some of his works. For example, “The White Ship” described a voyage through the psyche, and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” takes place en­tirely in the dream-world of the narrator. And out of his poetry, con­sider the following lines from “Aletheia Phrikodes”:

“Things vague, unseen, unfashion’d, and unnam’d

Jostled each other in the seething void

That gap’d, chaotic, downward to a sea

Of speechless horror, foul with writhing thoughts.”

Nevertheless, our analytic interpretation is quite vulnerable to the accusation of subjectivism—too many assumptions are made which cannot be empirically verified. And besides, even if a psychological interpretation is adequate, why this particular one? Why not a Freudian explanation based on Lovecraft’s hypothetically repressed “sex instinct” (note the phallic symbolism of the “black tower”), or perhaps on a pathological manifestation of a deep-rooted “death instinct” (notice his perception of himself in the mirror as an already decaying corpse), or perhaps the monstrous image in the mirror represents the instincts of the Id perceived in a paroxysm of neurotic anxiety? Or perhaps the Adle­rian “will to power” will supply a better answer; the “striving for supe­riority” that compensates for the outsider’s abysmal inferiority complex may be what is meant by the ascent of the tower, while the castle of lights is the “directive fiction,” the goal of his “life-style”…. Or is the question perhaps “how can you make words mean so many different things…?”

The main defect of all the possible psychoanalytic interpreta­tions, is that the theories on which they are based are themselves built on hypothetical constructs of doubtful validity. Such theories are usu­ally judged merely by their usefulness in the clinical setting, and not in terms of any absolute parameter of truth or falsehood. And the inter­pretations can hardly be more valid than the theories they are based on….

For this reason, although this type of explanation is very at­tractive, and although Jung’s analytical theory may appear to fit the story better than other similar theories, such interpretations must be taken with a grain of salt.

The anti-metaphysical interpretation is the most shallow and superficial of the four presented in this study. Although interesting and perhaps amusing, and in spite of being compatible with Lovecraft’s per­sonal beliefs, it simply does not fit with his personality, always charac­terized by those who knew him well as one of tolerance and kind under­standing. Lovecraft just did not possess the morbid and caustic humor implied by this interpretation. And, besides, the kind of survival shown in the tale does not correspond to traditional metaphysical no­tions. When engaging in this type of polemic, Lovecraft could do much better, as we can see in some of his letters to M. Moe and others, as well as in his essay “The Materialist Today.” This interpretation is perhaps the least valid of the four presented.

The philosophical interpretation is another matter altogether. It fits well with Lovecraft’s Weitanschauung and with the context pro­vided by his other writings. Lovecraft, a scientist at heart, never tired of defending his views in letters to his friends, but being also a keen observer of human nature, did not expect others to share his convic­tions. He was a visionary able to foresee the general rejection of mate­rialistic and iconoclastic science by those in which it produced too much dissonance. The interpretation of “The Outsider” within the framework of his cosmic-minded mechanistic materialism is probably the most valid of the four versions.

Even though Lovecraft has achieved what appears to be a per­manent place in world literature with his powerful dramatic fiction, he has been generally neglected in the past as a significant thinker, perhaps due to the fact that most of his works appeared initially in pulp maga­zines and amateur publications. Now that his selected letters have been published in five volumes, and some of his essays are becoming more readily available, recognition will come, even if belatedly, to this great “thinker from Providence.” It is the present author’s conviction, after having carefully studied Lovecraft’s letters, essays, and fiction, that he has had no peer as a materialistic philosopher, and that his realistic Weltanschauung is becoming more relevant today than ever before, now that the scientific analysis of behavior seems to have made the final statement in favor of determinism….

POSTSCRIPT

After finishing the foregoing article, I realized that I had ne­glected to consider an alternative explanation of “The Outsider” which is consonant with both Lovecraft’s philosophical outlook and available biographical data, and which may yet turn to be the best interpretation of all. Perhaps the reason it escaped me at first is because it is so obvi­ous.

Here, then is the fifth face of The Outsider: A Critique of Progress.

The underground castle stands for the Past, the level ground is the Present, while the castle of lights is the Future. Man emerges from the past with high dreams and hopes for the future, but encounters only abysmal disillusionment. In the past there was safety and security, and the frightful revelations of the future are too much to bear. Man expe­riences “future shock” and runs blindly back in a frantic attempt to re­turn to the tranquillity and stability of the past. But the buried past cannot be regained: the stone slab is immovable. The past is dead, and now alienated Man must continue a meaningless existence in an ever changing present, from which the only escape is the regression of in­sanity….

This interpretation is really a twist of the “philosophical” ex­planation in the previous pages.. Of course, many other alternative elucidations are also possible, and the reader will have to decide which is most satisfactory.