Of Human Artifacts: The Cases of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti

[A Defrocked Academic]

Of Human Artifacts: The Cases of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti

“[Lovecraft] strove to the end of his life to do what no other horror writer had done before him nor will ever do: lay bare his consciousness in an artifact.”
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010 edition, p. 184)

1. What is an artifact?

I will here use the word artifact in the sense of more or less any object that derives from intentional human activity. I am, however, mainly concerned with artifacts that function as “texts” in a conventional sense, such as books and recordings. These become especially interesting when viewed through the prism of the extended mind hypothesis, according to which objects such as notebooks can form part of the minds of human beings within a so-called coupled system (Clark & Chalmers 1998:8).

2. Romance and artifice

Romanticism is not the first artistic movement that comes to mind when thinking about H.P. Lovecraft, but the case can nonetheless be made that Lovecraft was a romantic. His romanticism is, however, obscured by his literary preoccupations. These fall short of the conventional “complete package” in the sense that Lovecraft predominantly wrote about situations or ideas rather than about human beings.[1] When humans appear in Lovecraft’s fiction, they do so in the form of devices.[2]

Lovecraft was sensitive towards nature but even more so towards human artifacts in the form of architecture, literature and poetry (and, of course, towards political, scientific and philosophical thought). In a remarkable essay, Matt Cardin has observed that “[…] Lovecraft was gripped by an ingrained and, we might say, “classical” sense of sehnsucht, the ‘infinite longing that is the essence of romanticism,’ as E.T.A. Hoffmann famously formulated it.”

In their fiction, both Lovecraft and Ligotti are sensitive to the allure of the artifact, but their characters are drawn to differing allures. Ligotti’s characters gravitate towards the dilapidated present rather than Lovecraft’s gambrel-roofed past, searching perhaps for the reassurance given us by silent, broken things that, no matter what they might tell you, things are indeed as bad as they feel. As in Lovecraft’s case, the aesthetic of crumminess and brokenness found in Ligotti’s fiction mirrors the author’s real life inclinations. In a 2004 interview, Ligotti states that “[he] always enjoyed the spectacle of abandoned, decaying, and burned-out buildings and houses.”

3. Man is man’s delight, but hell is other people

“The Bungalow House” dramatizes the allure of human artifacts. For the protagonist of the story, the value of the initial, mysterious recording lies not only in its description of a crummy, derelict bungalow house filled with dead and dying vermin, but also in its very existence: the existence of an artifact providing a mediated connection to another human mind.

If viewed as cast-off elements of an extended mind, texts are the only part of another person’s consciousness that can be more or less directly accessed. While far from perfect representations of a mind, artifacts provide less distorted access than can flesh-and-blood interaction. Conversation is not the optimal venue for the exchange of complex thoughts, although for many this consistently shambolic activity has value in itself. For the more reticent or schizoid among us, however, interacting with talking meat is less appealing than interacting with – or anonymously contemplating – disembodied observations and ideas in written form. Lovecraft’s extensive correspondence is a testament to his enthusiasm for mediated interaction.[3]

4. An ingenious sham

Posit that

I. there is nothing to do,
II. there is nowhere to go,
III. there is no one to know.

As long as we have not made an end of it, we are condemned to be somewhere and to do something. Social instinct compels most of us to seek out others, so the lack of anyone to know is another serious inconvenience.

What to do? One answer lies in the fact that we are not (in a contemporary first-world society) obligated to know anyone – which is impossible to begin with. What we can do is to spend our time contemplating and consuming artifacts (books, films, forum posts) while avoiding any contact with their unknowable creators. Although less attractive than non-existence, the life of a recluse is not the worst mode of being imaginable.

Now consider the plot of “The Bungalow House”. Although there is no one to know, it appears that someone has been producing artifacts that – albeit in mediated fashion – provide facsimiles of the unachievable: interaction with another human being. Moreover, the artifacts hint at the possibility of interaction with someone whose sensibilities and impressions are uncannily similar to the narrator’s own.

Ultimately, the narrator’s insistent attempts at penetrating beyond mediated, one-way interaction into direct contact with the creator of the mysterious tapes leads to the murderous breakdown of the arrangement. It turns out that the protagonist, suffering from an apparent case of split personality, has been communicating with himself.

The sense of recognition and kinship initially felt by the protagonist is thus the product of a tragic yet ingenious sham: a mind in unknowing communion with itself, circumventing the third law of conscious existence. In a world in which there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to know, the accomplishment of the unnamed narrator must be considered a singular act of defiance.

[1] See S.T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft and the ‘Big Issue’”, collected in Lovecraft and a World in Transition (2014, Hippocampus Press), for a defense of Lovecraft’s specialization or, as some would have it, deficiency as an author.

[2] Similar charges, such as “reduction of human characters to ciphers” (Laird Barron, More Dark) have been leveled against Ligotti – perhaps more unfairly.

[3]In the interest of avoiding the cosmic wrath of S.T. Joshi, I hasten to add that Lovecraft traveled widely, was part of the Kalem Club, visited R.H. Barlow in Florida, and so forth.