Understanding H.P. Lovecraft's Anxiety Narratives through Medical Humanities

TESIS DE DOCTORADO UNDERSTANDING H.P. LOVECRAFT'S ANXIETY NARRATIVES THROUGH MEDICAL HUMANITIES Büke Saǧlam ESCUELA DE DOCTORADO INTERNACIONAL DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA PROGRAMA DE DOCTORADO EN ESTUDIOS DE LA LITERATURA Y DE LA CULTURA SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA 2022 DECLARACIÓN DEL AUTOR/A DE LA TESIS DECLARACIÓN DEL AUTOR/A DE LA TESIS D./Dña. Büke Saǧlam Título de la tesis: Understanding H.P. Lovecraft's Anxiety Narratives through Medical Humanities Presento mi tesis, siguiendo el procedimiento adecuado al Reglamento y declaro que: 1) La tesis abarca los resultados de la elaboración de mi trabajo. 2) De ser el caso, en la tesis se hace referencia a las colaboraciones que tuvo este trabajo. 3) Confirmo que la tesis no incurre en ningún tipo de plagio de otros autores ni de trabajos presentados por mí para la obtención de otros títulos. 4) La tesis es la versión definitiva presentada para su defensa y coincide la versión impresa con la presentada en formato electrónico. Y me comprometo a presentar el Compromiso Documental de Supervisión en el caso que el original no esté depositado en la Escuela. En Santiago de Compostela, 14 de diciembre de 2022. Firma electrónica AUTORIZACIÓN DEL DIRECTOR/TUTOR DE LA TESIS AUTORIZACIÓN DEL DIRECTOR/TUTOR DE LA TESIS D./Dña. César Pablo Domínguez Prieto En condición de: Tutor/a y director/a Título de la tesis: Understanding H.P. Lovecraft's Anxiety Narratives through Medical Humanities INFORMA: Que la presente tesis, se corresponde con el trabajo realizado por D/Dña Buke Saglam, bajo mi dirección/tutorización, y a utorizo su presentación , considerando que reúne l os r equisitos exigidos en el R eglamento de Estudios de Doctorado de la USC, y que como director/tutor de esta no incurre en las causas de abstención establecidas e n la Ley 40/2015. En Glasgow, 11 de diciembre de 2022 Firma electrónica 1 ABSTRACT The aim of this dissertation is to analyze H.P. Lovecraft’s psychological problems and traumas to understand the true meaning behind his narratives that he wrote between the years 1905 and 1935. Lovecraft’s narratives, stemming directly from the author’s life, fears, anxieties, and traumas, are more than fiction and can be considered as a means to reach the hidden corners of his complex mind. Therefore, I argue that deciphering these writings as anxiety narratives will be giving a new insight about the author as well as mental illness in general. To do so, Lovecraft’s life and his literary philosophy, cosmicism, are explored, with a specific attention to the concepts of (existential) anxiety, fear, and phobia, which were predominant themes/affects in both Lovecraft’s life and his narratives. The interdisciplinary field of medical/health humanities—more specifically, narrative medicine—is used while analyzing the representation of anxiety in author’s writings. Depression, dissociation, paranoia, OCD are also analyzed for a complete portrayal and understanding of Lovecraft’s anxiety disorders. This dissertation also approaches COVID-19 from a Lovecraftian perspective to discuss its psychological effects on the individuals, and finally examines the possibility to address the author’s narratives from a posthumanist perspective. Therefore, this dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach and uses various theories, ideas, and philosophies such as existentialism, phenomenology, schizoanalysis, as well as critical medical humanities, narrative medicine and posthumanism to accurately analyze Lovecraft’s writings. In doing so, it aims to investigate the role of narrative in representing and depicting mental illness. Keywords: H.P. Lovecraft, cosmicism, anxiety, fear, narrative medicine, mental illness, medical humanities, health humanities. 9 INTRODUCTION Howard Phillips Lovecraft is one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century, whose popularity has grown radically in recent years. Although his sexist, racist, and xenophobic remarks come to mind when his name is first heard—and therefore has long been avoided—he is now more popular than ever due to his narratives which inspire recent trends such as object-oriented ontology, posthumanism and antihumanism, as well as media studies, or more specifically, game studies. However, this dissertation offers a different perspective, approaching Lovecraft’s narratives as illness stories rather than mere fiction. 1 OBJECTIVES AND HYPOTHESES Lovecraft’s literary philosophy, cosmicism, is the core concept of this dissertation due to its crucial role both in the author’s worldview and in his narratives. Indeed, analyzing cosmicism is important for having a deeper understanding of what inspires, disturbs, and psychologically and philosophically influences the author. And because at the heart of cosmicism lies anxiety, this dissertation examines every possible aspect (phenomenological, existential, psychological, neurobiological) of this affect. Anxiety is indeed unfathomable and enigmatic and for this reason it has always been an intriguing concept for different disciplines. As long as there is humanity, there is anxiety, and this might explain the timelessness of Lovecraft’s works. Also, it is both a collective and an individual affect and can be analyzed both as a subject and an object. Lovecraft represents all these aspects of anxiety in his narratives but interpreting them as mere fiction makes a deeper analysis impossible. In other words, the author’s narratives cannot be fully understood without truly knowing his life and personality. BÜKE SAǦLAM 10 On the other hand, it is important to emphasize that the aim of this dissertation is not giving a diagnosis to Lovecraft but quite the opposite: it tries to free him from misunderstandings and misinterpretations in order to make an accurate analysis of himself and his narratives. Another equally important aim of this dissertation is to explore the representation of mental illness through narratives. Mental illness is difficult, in every sense. It is difficult to have it, to make sense of it, to talk about it, to represent it, as well as to truly understand it. Although unfathomable, it is still very open to judgment, labelling and categorization. However, every person experiences mental illness in their own unique way and it is important to truly understand this individual phenomenon. Although it is impossible to accurately represent or completely make sense of this “thing,” most of the time the language is used either to talk or to write about it. Thus, the mental illness—albeit limited—finds a place in objective reality apart from the individual’s mind. It is this complex nature of mental illness that draws me to make an analysis of Lovecraft’s narratives using medical/health humanities. What is interesting is that the meaning of his narratives changes when the reader knows about the author’s life in detail. Although they may seem like horror stories at first glance, knowing about Lovecraft’s life offers us a new world to analyze. Indeed, a repetitive pattern is seen in these narratives. Moreover, this pattern points to the natural in supernatural and all of a sudden non-human elements become all too human. I was also intrigued by the possibility of making an updated analysis of the author’s possible mental illness(es) and their embodiment through his narratives, as well as to see the role, power, and limits of language in representing such abstract concepts. In this sense, the use of medical/health humanities has become almost inevitable. Medical humanities is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field and is mainly about caring, understanding, and empathizing with different conditions and personal experiences of human beings. A more technical definition is given by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods in Introduction 11 The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities: “The medical humanities, we claim, names a series of intersections, exchanges and entanglements between the biomedical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences” (Whitehead et al. 2016, 1). By its very nature, this field focuses on the vulnerabilities inherent in every human being. In other words, instead of interpreting these vulnerabilities as problems to be avoided or cured, or as negative and alien elements, this approach embraces and seeks to thoroughly understand the phenomena that make people human. Thus, it challenges the contrast between healthy and sick, strong and weak, functional and dysfunctional, by treating these features as different parts of the same whole. In this way, it also aims to address concepts that are considered undesirable and therefore marginalized or ignored by the system. Therefore, it was crucial to use the medical humanities approach when examining the layers of Lovecraft’s mind and their reflections on his art. More specifically, this dissertation adopts a critical medical humanities approach and especially draws on narrative medicine. On the other hand, it is important to clarify the reason I chose to use the term “medical/health humanities” rather than “medical humanities” or “health humanities.” In 2014, inspired by Paul Crawford’s argument and his creation of the International Health Humanities Network (2010), Therese Jones, Delese Wear and Lester D. Friedman adopted the term “health humanities” instead of “medical humanities” for its “more encompassing, contemporary and accurate” (Jones, Wear, and Friedman 2014, 25) connotation. However, the term medical humanities is still in use and because narrative medicine is originally linked to the medical humanities approach, I decided to preserve both terms. Today we see both of them used separately or together (as mental & health humanities), and while this change seems like a simple modification, I support Jones et al.’s decision of choosing a term that includes a wider audience and is more aligned with the goals of the discipline. As already pointed out by prominent Lovecraft scholars S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, and as can also be easily noticed by an avid reader, Lovecraft’s narratives draw heavily on BÜKE SAǦLAM 12 autobiographical elements. He was writing primarily for himself, and although he never became famous in his lifetime, he continued to write until his death. In this sense, this dissertation is in parallel with contemporary criticism. However, it goes one step further and aims to understand both Lovecraft and his narratives even more profoundly and accurately with the help of current theories and new approaches. As mentioned before, even today I believe that Lovecraft does not receive the level of attention he deserves; in fact, he tends to be shunned both because of his problematic worldview and because of the weird, unfathomable, and unrepresentable nature of his narratives. Indeed, although many attempts have been made to bring his works or style to the big screen, very few have actually succeeded. 1 In the video game industry, however, his style achieved great success. As seen in many new and old examples, such as “Bloodborne,” “Amnesia: The Dark Descent,” “Soma,” and “The Sinking City,” the Lovecraftian style proved its compatibility with this format. Still, his name 2 remains the biggest obstacle to wider recognition and research. Indeed, this was another reason why I chose this author and his narratives to analyze. In today’s world, which is becoming more hateful, detached, and apathetic with each passing day, there is a tendency to ignore or cover up the undesirable, which, I believe, only serves to increase hatred, disconnection, and indifference. For this reason, I find it crucial to explore the undesirable in order to further analyze the avoided layers of the human mind that can tell us a lot about the importance of perception. Indeed, I argue in this dissertation that what we essentially see in Lovecraft’s narratives is the distortion of perception. Literary representations of this distortion become clearer when the author’s writings are interpreted as anxiety narratives and analyzed accordingly. Lovecraft uses elements of the weird to depict these anxiety-inducing objects or situations, and although anxiety in his narratives seems to stem from external stimuli, upon closer examination, it is understood that it is actually the human mind that distorts reality and thus creates anxiety. Like a cataract, anxiety descends like a veil over the eyes of the beholder. Indeed, another important point I analyze in this dissertation Introduction 13 is this fluid and mischievous nature of anxiety. By challenging the boundaries that separate us from the outside world, anxiety deludes our perception of reality; in such a way that we can no longer be sure of its origin. Moreover, this dissertation is also informed by the idea that anxiety doesn’t come alone; most of the cases it brings dissociation, paranoia and OCD with itself and it is possible to find the metaphorical (or sometimes direct) representations of all these elements in Lovecraft’s narratives. Finally, this dissertation was mostly written during the coronavirus pandemic, which inspired me to compare the anxiety derived from COVID-19 to Lovecraftian anxiety, and I finally found that there are more similarities between the two than I thought. Indeed, cosmicism is more than just a literary philosophy; it takes its source from an inherent anxiety shared by all humans, and it is this uncanny familiarity that attracts and affects the reader. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that a new and unknown virus evokes a feeling similar to that of a cosmic entity found in the author’s narratives. The fact that the pandemic coincided with the writing process of this dissertation was, in a way, beneficial for the thesis; in my interview with the clinical psychologist Dr. Ceren Koç I found the chance to ask about the patient profile and reactions of patients during this period in order to compare them with the reactions of protagonists in Lovecraft’s narratives. In this way, the anxiety caused by cosmicism became more concrete and gained a more empirical aspect. 2 METHODOLOGY Different approaches, ideas, theories, and disciplines were needed to make a throughout analysis of the author’s anxiety narratives. Therefore, in addition to using Rita Charon’s narrative medicine and adopting Arthur Frank’s concept of the wounded storyteller to provide a basis for my analysis, this dissertation also draws on a) Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Stefano Micali, to name a few, to better understand the philosophical aspect and BÜKE SAǦLAM 14 phenomenology of anxiety, b) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of schizoanalysis to mainly discuss dissociation, c) Rosi Braidotti, Francesca Ferrando, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, among others, to analyze the role of posthumanism and object-oriented ontology in understanding Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives, d) Werner Heisenberg’s philosophical interpretation of quantum physics, as well as e) psychology and neurobiology to better understand the system of anxiety. Since this dissertation draws heavily on medical humanities, the use of humanities in medical curriculum in Spain is also worth mentioning. As Josep E. Baños and Irene CambraBadii state in their article, there has been an interest in the discipline in recent years: “In recent years an interest in the use of humanistic disciplines has increased in the medicine degree. This fact has been accompanied by a recognition of the importance of ethical and professional values in students of all health sciences as an inevitable necessity of their university education” (Baños and Cambra-Badii 2020, 49). 3 A very similar remark was made by Guido Giarelli while discussing the state of medical humanities in continental Europe: “In continental Europe the situation of medical humanities is quite varied: since the originally Anglo-Saxon denomination has arrived only recently, it is often necessary to look under other names to find something” (Giarelli 2020, 442). He further states: In Spain the situation is quite similar to that of Italy, with a limited and selective inclusion of medical humanities in the curriculums of faculties of medicine, as shown by a comparative analysis [22]: it is present in 39 Spanish universities, 9 of which are private (compared to 42 Italian universities, 3 of them are private). The three main disciplines offered appear to be the same, with a little difference: history of medicine is offered in 33 Spanish universities (41 Italian), philosophy (mainly bioethics) in 35 Spanish universities (31 Italian), medical anthropology in 11 Spanish universities (12 Italian). 4 (443) Finally, I used interview as one of my research tools, as it allowed me to ask specific questions to various scholars, who are authorities in their fields (neurobiology, psychology, and physics) to learn more about areas in which I have limited knowledge as well as to compare Introduction 15 different perspectives. As a result, this dissertation is divided into six chapters and begins with a theoretical examination of anxiety to analyze the concept of cosmicism and its representation in Lovecraft’s narratives. 3 STRUCTURE Chapter one, “Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism,” explores the concepts of anxiety and fear and analyzes the phenomenology of anxiety and its representation through cosmicism. In this chapter I discuss Kierkegaard’s approach to anxiety by comparing it to Lovecraftian anxiety to better understand the existential aspect of this affect. In addition, the role of medical/health humanities in analyzing the author’s anxiety narratives is discussed. Here I especially use the narrative medicine approach and Frank’s concept of wounded storyteller to examine the characteristics of the narrator in Lovecraft’s narratives. On the other hand, quantum mechanics and its meaning in relation to reality is discussed using mainly Heisenberg’s philosophical interpretation because of its effect on the author’s anxiety. Chapter two, “Dissociation as a Result of Anxiety,” discusses the neurobiological aspect of anxiety through Sapolsky’s lectures and work. The focus of this chapter is dissociation caused by anxiety and I use the protagonist of Black Swan, Nina Sayers, as a case study to further understand this phenomenon, as well as to compare and contrast it with the representation of anxiety in Lovecraft’s narratives. To do this I rely on both Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and their concept of body without organs, and two models of DID (SCM and PTM) for a better understanding of dissociation. The third chapter, “COVID, Anxiety and Cosmic Horror,” focuses on the theme of control and its link to anxiety by exploring COVID’s psychological effect on humans. Moreover, it compares Lovecraftian anxiety with the anxiety caused by the pandemic, thus turning cosmic horror into a more tangible and experienceable affect in our everyday life. The data I gained BÜKE SAǦLAM 16 from this empirical approach and interviews have served a deeper understanding of cosmicism. This chapter also examines the unknown and discusses man’s troubled relationship with it. Analyzing the relationship between the concepts of the unknown, control and anxiety gives an idea to approach Lovecraft’s narratives properly. The fourth chapter, “Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives,” explores H.P. Lovecraft’s life and analyzes his traumas and physical and mental illnesses that inspired him to form his literary philosophy. In particular, prominent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi guides me to explore and understand every detail about the author’s life in order to make an accurate analysis of his narratives. Knowing these details was crucial to finding their metaphorical projections in Lovecraft’s writings, which eventually confirmed my hypothesis that these narratives could be considered illness stories rather than mere fiction. In this sense, this chapter provides a critical examination of his selected works through medical/health humanities and analyzes the author’s possible mental disorders and physical problems with the help of current scientific developments. Chapter five, “The Question of Love, Fear, and Anxiety,” focuses specifically on the role of Lovecraft’s mother in the author’s psychological development, using Harry Harlow’s ideas on affection, mother love and mother-infant bonding. The aim of this chapter is to analyze Susan and her relationship with her son in order to see if she had an effect on the author’s anxiety. Without using Freudian psychoanalysis, I here rely solely on developmental psychology to explore the meaning of motherly comfort in general and more specifically to analyze the meaning of Susan and her representation in the author’s anxiety narratives. Exploring love was necessary to better understand anxiety and the medical/health humanities approach allowed me to find and analyze the literary representations of this very complex affect in Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives. Introduction 17 Finally, the last chapter, “Brave New Ecology and its Discontents: Limits of Anxious Body,” also draws on the medical/health humanities and examines the anti-narrative elements found in Lovecraft’s writings to analyze the representation of anxiety and its accuracy. In addition, this chapter discusses various posthumanist approaches, such as the ideas of Francesca Ferrando and Rosi Braidotti, Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects and Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, to understand if it is possible to approach Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives from a posthumanist perspective. Here I also analyze the ecophobia present in the author’s narratives and examine its connection with his anxiety. As a result, this dissertation aims to analyze every aspect of Lovecraft’s anxiety and its literary representation in his narratives, using mainly narrative medicine, to gain a deeper understanding of both the author’s psyche and the use of literature to represent mental illness. 1 As asked by a Reddit user: “Why there have been so few good Lovecraft movies?.” Another user, “neobushidaro” replies, echoing Lovecraft’s argument: “Format is wrong. The human mind can terrify itself better than any external stimulus because only a person’s subconscious knows where all of the panic buttons are and how to hit them in the right order.” https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comments/ymq5o/why_have_there_been_so_few_good_lovecraft_mo vies/ 2 As seen in the example of Lovecraft Country, the author’s name is enough for making an association with racism. 3 Translated from the original text written in Spanish: “En los últimos años ha crecido el interés por el empleo de las disciplinas humanísticas en el grado de Medicina. Este hecho se ha acompañado de un reconocimiento de la importancia de los valores éticos y profesionales en los estudiantes de todas las ciencias de la salud como una necesidad ineludible de su periodo de formación universitaria.” 4 Translated from the original text written in Italian: “In Spagna la situazione è abbastanza simile a quella italiana, con una inclusione limitata e selettiva delle Medical Humanities nei curricula delle Facoltà di Medicina, come risulta da un’analisi comparata [22]: esse sono presenti in 39 università spagnole, di cui 9 private (rispetto a 42 italiane, di cui 3 private). Le tre principali discipline offerte risultano essere le stesse, con qualche differenza: storia della medicina è offerta in 33 università spagnole (41 italiane), filosofia (principalmente bioetica) in 35 spagnole (31 italiane), antropologia medica in 11 spagnole (12 italiane).” 18 1 UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF COSMICISM 1.1 INTRODUCTION In the first chapter of this dissertation, my aim will be to analyze the concepts, problems and ideas that enabled H.P. Lovecraft to bring his anxiety narratives to life. Interpreting and examining Lovecraft’s stories using narrative medicine is important not only to discover the true meaning of his stories and redefine him as an author, but also to better understand author’s psyche. To do so, I will start by discussing the concept and phenomenology of anxiety, using the ideas of Kierkegaard, which will help me to define the elements that create Lovecraft’s narratives. His literary philosophy, cosmicism, will be further examined with the concept of reality. Advances in physics and the emergence of quantum mechanics not only worried Lovecraft in real life, but also shaped his narratives and philosophy. This new reality, which is inherently uncertain, probabilistic, and random, was creating a stark contrast with Lovecraft’s scientific materialism. As S.T. Joshi suggested: It is hardly worth remarking that Lovecraft’s wild conclusions from Einstein, both metaphysical and ethical, are entirely unfounded; but his reaction is perhaps not atypical of that of many intellectuals—especially those who couldn’t understand the precise details and ramifications of relativity—at the time. (Joshi 2013, 688) Therefore, some of the main aspects of relativity and quantum mechanics and their meaning for our reality—as well as the meaning of reality itself—will be clarified by analyzing the ideas of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 25 It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and the known three dimensions. […] Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest… had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer fantasy began… (34–35) According to Harman, in the first part of this excerpt “we find a disclaimer that neutralizes the initial cliché by calling it ‘trite and not wholly accurate,’ but which then delves into a descriptive effort that is nearly impossible to visualize in literal terms anyway” (34). In this second part: The power of language is no longer enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality. Instead, language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing […] And then comes the crowning transition, telling us that while all of this might have been intelligible enough, what comes next will enter the realm of sheer fantasy. (35) I will now go a step further and try to explain these “vertical” and “horizontal” aspects of Lovecraft’s style in relation to their role in representing anxiety. As mentioned earlier, anxiety is a profoundly complex and inherently indescribable human emotion (or characteristic) and therefore needs to be approached rigorously. In this sense, it was convenient for Lovecraft to use different styles and methods that eventually led to the creation of a new subgenre. As seen in Kierkegaard’s accounts, it is not easy to describe anxiety per se without making metaphorical comparisons or referring to its physical manifestations to make the concept more concrete and understandable. Moreover, there is no single description of it since its “appearance” changes according to one’s mental world and mood at that moment. As Kierkegaard further states: “In anxiety there is the selfish infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a choice but ensnaringly disquiets [ængster] with its sweet anxiousness [Beængstelse]” (Kierkegaard 1980, 61). He further associates anxiety with the concept of sin: “In each subsequent individual, anxiety is more reflective. This may be expressed by saying that the nothing that is the object BÜKE SAǦLAM 26 of anxiety becomes, as it were, more and more a something” (61). While this thesis doesn’t explain anxiety with sin, the idea that anxiety is (or means) something personal for each individual makes sense and is relevant to my argument. Knowing this structure of anxiety, then, it is understandable that Lovecraft used the “vertical” style to mimic the individual’s inability to find words in such a situation. On the other hand, although the “horizontal” aspect of his style may seem the opposite of the “vertical” one, both aspects essentially serve the same purpose. In this “horizontal” aspect, Lovecraft mimics a kind of compulsive talking 6 and stilted speech. 7 These over-descriptions, however, mean very little to the listener. Lastly, Lovecraft also emphasizes on the “noumenal” aspect of anxiety before making a phenomenological description of it. As Harman further summarizes: “This is the stylistic world of H.P. Lovecraft, a world in which (1) real objects are locked in impossible tension with the crippled descriptive powers of language, and (2) visible objects display unbearable seismic torsion with their own qualities” (Harman 2012, 36). 1.3.1 Understanding Lovecraft’s Anxiety Narratives through Narrative Medicine While Harman’s analysis is important to better understand Lovecraft’s style and thus its representation of anxiety, Lovecraft’s narratives cannot be truly understood without the context of narrative medicine. The discipline of narrative medicine was first defined by Rita Charon in Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness as “medicine practiced with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness” and it “has emerged gradually from a confluence of sources—humanities and medicine, primary care medicine, contemporary narratology, and the study of effective doctor-patient relationships” (Charon 2006, vii). Moreover, narrative medicine is within the Critical Medical Humanities framework. Maria Giulia Marini states in Narrative Medicine Bridging the Gap between Evidence-Based Care and Medical Humanities: “Narrative medicine as well as medical 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 27 humanities mainly developed in the twentieth and twenty-first century as a tool to give voice back to patients, fragile people, and persons who had no right to speak and claim how they lived their disease” (Marini 2016, 13). Thinking Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives as stories of illness gives the author a new identity as a “wounded storyteller” in addition to his identity as a writer of weird fiction. The concept of wounded storyteller is first defined by Arthur W. Frank in his treatise The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics where he presents “ill people as wounded storytellers” with an aim to: Shift the dominant cultural conception of illness away from passivity—the ill person as “victim of” disease and then recipient of care—towards activity. The ill person who turns illness into story transforms fate into experience; the disease that sets the body apart from others becomes, in the story, the common bond of suffering that joins bodies in their shared vulnerability. (Frank 1995, xi) As it will be examined in the following chapters, Lovecraft’s weird stories are shaped by his ideology and perspective, while actually taking their source from the author’s traumas, mental problems and existential anxiety. That’s why I call them anxiety narratives and find it crucial to analyze these writings with a medical/health humanities approach. Lovecraft was indeed both a “wounded” individual and a gifted “storyteller” and his talent was able to transform these wounds into a philosophical and existential experience. He was a relentless writer, and as discussed earlier, he mainly wrote for himself as a way of self-expression. Joshi states that Lovecraft’s “career as one of the great dreamers—or, to coin a term that must be coined for the phenomenon, nightmarers—of literary history” (Joshi 2013, 57) begins with the author’s disturbing dreams 8 after his grandmother’s death as “his boyhood dreams contain many conceptual and imagistic kernels of his mature tales” (57). He further states: “It would, of course, take a long time for Lovecraft to evolve his theory and practice of weird fiction; but with dreams like these at such an early age […] his career as a writer of horror tales comes to seem like an inevitable destiny” (57-8). Lovecraft’s writings were not limited to anxiety BÜKE SAǦLAM 28 narratives; he was also an eager essayist and letter writer. For him, writing letters was as necessary as writing “fiction,” although each served different purposes. As he explains it in a letter to his friend and writer, Long: “an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 1097). In that sense, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that writing, for Lovecraft, was expression, connection, and at the same time a coping mechanism. Literature and medical/health humanities are more interconnected than one might think. According to Tess Maginess, literature makes four main contributions to this discipline: “The first is that literature brings us closer to reality by reflecting it, mimetically. […] A reality with which we are familiar and a reality with which we are not familiar” (Maginess 2018, 10). Indeed, analyzing Lovecraft’s narratives using the medical/health humanities gives a new perspective, confronting the reader with an unfamiliar realm. Although anxiety per se is not a foreign concept to humans (as discussed earlier, in fact it is the opposite), the fact that each individual experiences it in a different way makes it difficult to decipher. Accordingly, medical/health humanities help the reader gain more insight to better understand anxiety and other related disorders such as dissociation, nightmares/night terrors, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, agoraphobia, etc. Maginess describes this kind of literature as follows: “[It] goes beyond what we know, presenting us with an otherworld of some sort — a culture, a time, a set of characters, a set of values or points of view we are not familiar with, often a world we have conceived of as marginal or hidden” (10). Maginess continues by stating that “the second contribution is literature which critiques society, which challenges our norms, our hegemonies […] and it is clear that such literature most readily contributes to Critical Medical Humanities” (10). It is indeed possible to consider Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives as critical and revolutionary since they reconstruct various 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 29 fundamental and well-established concepts such as neurosis, insanity, reality, control, among others. 9 Another important contribution is “literature which springs from metaphorical comparisons; for example, the way in which Hamlet as a play can be said to operate as representing what we now call bi-polar illness as the condition of the hero, as well as representing the State as diseased, a rank garden” (Maginess 2018, 11). This approach actually guides this thesis by treating Lovecraft’s weird stories as metaphors for his anxiety and other related mental disorders. As it was mentioned before, however, Lovecraft not only metaphorically represents his own neurosis, but also triggers the reader’s collective unconscious by pointing to the inherent and inescapable aspect of anxiety. In this way, he reconstructs the concept of neurosis. As Jung states: “I am not altogether pessimistic about neurosis. In many cases we have to say: ‘Thank heaven he could make up his mind to be neurotic.’ Neurosis is really an attempt at self-cure, just as any physical disease is part an attempt at self-cure” (Jung 1976, 169). Similarly, Lovecraft sees neurosis as the result of having a rare and somewhat superior “sensitive” mind, 10 which gives the privilege to understand the existence—and its insignificance—in a more profound way. Maginess finally states that: Perhaps, most importantly, the fourth contribution literature can make is to teach us to read both critically and imaginatively; to engender a kind of knowledge and wisdom which, though it might not make us happy, will help us to see under the surface, to see humanness in all its searing, ironic, hilarious and threnodic complexity (Maginess 2018, 11) In that sense, analyzing Lovecraft’s writings as anxiety narratives using medical/health humanities allows me to see the world through the author’s eyes by uncovering metaphors and thus sharing his experience. In Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine: The State of the Art, Alan Bleakley mentions his correspondence with Anita Wohlmann where she suggests: “Metaphors BÜKE SAǦLAM 30 enable individuals to voice disruptive, personal experiences that are difficult to describe otherwise, for example through a coherent narrative” (Bleakley 2017, 19). Metaphor is quite a common figure of speech in literary texts. But in some cases, the whole story becomes a metaphor that is very difficult to figure out with its multilayered structure and without any round or well-defined characters or a concrete narration, like in the case of Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives. Indeed, his writings can be partly compared with what Arthur W. Frank defines as the “chaos narrative,” which is one of the three types of illness narratives and “its plot imagines life never getting better. Stories are chaotic in their absence of narrative order. Events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernable causality” (Frank 1995, 97). Lack of any hope, randomness and indifferentism exist in both writings. Moreover, just like Lovecraft’s narratives, “chaos narratives are also hard to hear because they are too threatening. The anxiety these stories provoke inhibits hearing” (Frank 1995, 97–98). Obviously, illness is prominent as the main theme in the chaos narratives, while Lovecraft chooses a more subtle and metaphorical approach to represent his neurosis. Still, they both generate similar feelings such as anxiety, despair, fear, and inquietude. Frank also points to the prerequisite of narrating trauma or illness, suggesting that: The teller of chaos stories is, preeminently, the wounded storyteller, but those who are truly living the chaos cannot tell in words. To turn the chaos into a verbal story is to have some reflective grasp of it. The chaos that can be told in story is already taking place at a distance and is being reflected on retrospectively. For a person to gain such a reflective grasp of her own life, distance is prerequisite. (98) This “reflective grasp” allowed Lovecraft to metaphorically represent his crippling neurosis as well as to form his philosophy, cosmicism. As it will be seen especially in chapters 4 and 5, Lovecraft was very conscious about his anxiety disorders and took his time to observe and analyze what was going on with himself as well as to meditate on the traumas he had been 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 31 through. It was this role as an observer of his own mind and his place in the indifferent universe that made it possible to express himself artistically rather than being trapped inside. 11 However, Frank also points to the question of narrative suggesting that: If narrative implies a sequence of events connected to each other through time, chaos stories are not narratives. When I refer below to the chaos narrative, I mean an anti-narrative of time without sequence, telling without mediation, and speaking about oneself without being fully able to reflect on oneself. (98) This is the biggest difference between Lovecraft’s narratives and chaos stories since while Lovecraft’s narratives share some thematic and stylistic characteristics with chaos stories such as the pessimistic tone, unorthodox way of narration and description of an illness or trauma that is so complex, uncontrollable, and almost impossible to narrate, Lovecraft’s writings are still narratives. Frank also gives the example of Gilda Radner to emphasize on the division between narrative and anti-narrative, stating that: “Gilda Radner’s story of her treatment for ovarian cancer is not a chaos narrative, precisely because it is a narrative. But Radner allows readers some vision of the chaos” (100). Similarly, Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives “allow readers some vision of the chaos” while they cannot be completely defined as chaos narratives. On the other hand, while Radner’s story and Lovecraft’s stories are totally different in terms of subject and style, they still share a common ground in the way these narratives represent chaos. In Radner’s case “the chaos […] occurs during chemotherapy when the sleeping pills Radner takes cause her to forget, completely, whatever has happened” (Frank 1995, 100). However, “the deeper issue for Radner is the loss of control in her life; time lost during chemotherapy, real enough in itself, also represents this greater loss” (Frank 1995, 100). In the same way, in the stories of Lovecraft the chaos occurs when the protagonist confronts an alien entity/situation. However, this actually points to a deeper issue such as the author’s existential anxiety and fear of losing control. In that sense, the reason these two seemingly very different stories somehow fall under the same category of writing is because they both essentially narrate a loss of control. As Frank BÜKE SAǦLAM 32 suggests: “The chaos story presupposes lack of control” since “chaos feeds on the sense that no one is in control” 12 (100). Where there is no sense of control, chaos and anxiety begin. It is possible to suggest, then, cosmic horror (or cosmicism)—as Lovecraft understands it—was not only the perfect platform to represent this chaos and anxiety but was also a necessary factor to make sense of them. In other words, it was a prerequisite to turn chaos into a narrative. On the other hand, the reason I say “as Lovecraft understands it” is because Lovecraft reconstructed the concept of cosmic horror and did not invent it, although his unique understanding of this concept allowed him to create his anxiety narratives. In his essay, “The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius,” Sean Moreland dates back the earliest use of “cosmic horror” to 1883 which “derives from the idea of ‘cosmic emotion’ developed by English mathematician and philosopher, William Kingdon Clifford, who in turn derived it from English utilitarian philosopher, Henry Sidgwick” (Moreland 2018, 16). Moreland also cites Clifford’s 1877 essay, where he defines cosmic emotion as “an emotion which is felt in regard to the universe or sum of things, viewed as a cosmos or order. There are two kinds of cosmic emotion—one having reference to the Macrocosm or universe surrounding and containing us, the other relating to the Microcosm or universe of our own souls” (16). The most important point of this description is that it doesn’t really define the emotion itself. As Moreland comments: Clifford calls it “the cosmic emotion,” rather than specifying what emotion it is, because “the character of the emotion with which men contemplate the world, the temper in which they stand in the presence of the immensities and the eternities, must depend first of all on what they think the world is.” (16–17) While Moreland continues to examine Clifford by analyzing how the world is understood depending on cultural and historical context and scientific developments, I would like to draw attention to another important point. Defining “cosmic emotion” as something that depends on an individual’s perspective and mood parallels with the nature of anxiety that I mentioned 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 33 earlier when discussing Kierkegaard. Moreover, most of the time this cosmic emotion is almost automatically associated with anxiety. Reidar Thomte points to the following observation of Kierkegaard: “Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked by the millions and millions in this enormous household” (Kierkegaard 1980, xiii). Similarly, Moreland states that “Clifford’s ambiguous ‘cosmic emotion’ was resolved by American lexicographer, physician, and natural theologian George M. Gould into ‘cosmic horror.’” As Gould further suggests: “I have learned that many another sensitive despairing soul, in the face of the glib creeds and the loneliness of subjectivity, has also and often felt the same clutching spasm of cosmic horror, the very heart of life stifled and stilled with an infinite fear and sense of lostness” (quoted in Moreland 2018, 17). It is interesting to see that the words that could come out of Lovecraft’s mouth were said by someone who had a completely opposite worldview, since Gould associated cosmic horror “with a supposed pathological inability to recognize divinity in nature” (quoted in Moreland 2018, 17). Lovecraft’s lack of interest in the divine, then, not only prevented him from transforming his anxiety, but also enabled him to master it and, in this way, he could be able to redefine cosmic horror on which he based his anxiety narratives. Consequently, he stated that whether a story is truly a tale of cosmic horror could be tested by responding “whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the unknown universe’s utmost rim” (Lovecraft 2014, 29). Unlike his fiction, however, in his letters Lovecraft uses this cosmic emotion to “console,” as Matthew Beach argues in his article “Lovecraft’s Consolation”: “His correspondence reveals that Lovecraft understood his cosmic philosophy of time as offering consolation if not a strange form of hope to those struggling with what he called the ‘local’ problems of human existence” BÜKE SAǦLAM 34 (Beach 2019, 77). Beach points to a specific genre of letter among Lovecraft’s correspondence, which he calls “the consolation letter,” and describes it as “a genre [that] operates as an offering of sympathy to someone (the reader) experiencing suffering, pain, or loss. This sympathy is often offered not only through consoling words (of affection or advice) but primarily by forging an identification between the writer and the reader” (Beach 2019, 77). However, in his consolation letters, Lovecraft doesn’t remove the anxiety factor that dominates his cosmic view; instead, he uses it to neutralize a more “local” pain. As Beach suggests: For Lovecraft, the discussion of time is an effective tool of consolation because it places “local and individual sorrows at the small end of the telescope.” This “telescoping” of “local and individual sorrows” (and indeed all human affairs) is precisely how Lovecraft’s weird form of consolation operates. […] To help relieve pain, make it more endurable, or simply put it in perspective, Lovecraft contextualizes the reader’s local suffering within a larger framework of time. (79–80) Beach further gives Lovecraft’s correspondence with Helen Sully as an example for his consolation letters. In these letters Sully shares many personal problems with Lovecraft and consults him, while Lovecraft answers these questions from a cosmic perspective. According to Beach: His theories of cosmic time entail a more optimistic and pragmatic approach to humanity’s insignificance. As he writes Sully in a 4 December 1935 letter, “So the voice of sound reason would seem to be saying, ‘cheer up!’ There aren’t any phenomena in the cosmos really worth being mournful or depressed about.” (84) However, I would rather call Lovecraft’s approach “therapeutic” (only for certain people) than “optimistic” because he doesn’t adopt a new emotion to define his cosmic perspective. He just points to this therapeutic aspect of his philosophy, which may serve to desensitize some individuals by replacing local and overwhelming anxiety with a more “cosmic” one. Therefore, this approach can be considered as a coping mechanism based on dissociation rather than optimism. On the other hand, Beach is right in suggesting that: 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 41 materialism. They would prefer to come back to the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them. This, however, is impossible or at least not entirely possible because of the nature of the atomic phenomena (83) It was not easy for Lovecraft to adapt to changing realities, and the mentioned probabilistic and uncertain aspects of quantum mechanics in particular were some of the reasons for his anxiety. Moreover, in his 1923 letter above, it is possible to see that Lovecraft’s views on this new reality have a lot in common with the universe he created for anxiety narratives. His statement, “one thing is as true as another,” refers specifically to the concept of wave-particle duality, 16 while Einstein would not agree with his interpretation that “all the cosmos is a jest, and fit to be treated only as a jest.” More radical thoughts on the meaning of quantum mechanics had been introduced by the Copenhagen interpretation, which included the concept of complementarity based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. And in fact, what I would like to focus on when discussing cosmicism in this part is this uncertainty principle and its philosophical interpretations and implications. The uncertainty (or indeterminacy) principle was articulated by Werner Heisenberg. As he further explains it in Physics and Philosophy, “in quantum theory the uncertainty relations put a definite limit on the accuracy with which positions and momenta, or time and energy, can be measured simultaneously” (Heisenberg 2000, 109). In other words, the idea was that it would not be possible to accurately calculate the position and the velocity of a particle at the same time. This principle, however, is more than just the main property of quantum mechanics. When translated into everyday life, it refers to the change in humanity’s relationship with reality, to his/her limitations in understanding it, and therefore to the impossibility of talking about preciseness, order, or certainty. As Heisenberg states, “the general trend of human thinking in the nineteenth century”—including Elliot’s scientific materialism—“had been toward an increasing confidence in the scientific method and in precise rational terms, and had let to a BÜKE SAǦLAM 42 general skepticism with regard to those concepts of natural language which do not fit into the closed frame of scientific thought—for instance, those of religion.” The discomfort begins when “modern physics […] has […] turned it against the overestimation of precise scientific concepts, against a too-optimistic view on progress in general, and finally against skepticism itself” (Heisenberg 2000, 140). Looking at these changes, it is possible to understand Lovecraft’s frustration with quantum mechanics as it serves to deepen the division between his obsessively rational and materialist self and the anxious other represented in his narratives. In this sense, quantum mechanics becomes a tool to feed and advocate for cosmicism, especially by emphasizing the ideas of the unknown, random, and uncertain universe as well as the human being’s inability to understand it and therefore the impossibility of him/her having any significance. On the other hand, Heisenberg interprets mankind’s relationship with the unknown as follows: One may say that the human ability to understand may be in a certain sense unlimited. But the existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word “understanding.” (140) This account is important in that it implies that a fundamental change must be made in man’s understanding and interpretation, before proceeding with his/her relationship with reality. That is, a change, both cognitive and linguistic, will be necessary to truly process the newly gained knowledge and be aware of the fact that it represents only a small fraction of—almost— inaccessible reality. While this idea evokes Schopenhauer’s concepts of representation (Vorstellung) and will, 17 it actually separates itself from them due to changes in understanding the universe. Since Schopenhauer’s ideas were based on Newtonian mechanics, they now might be insufficient to interpret the “reality” of quantum mechanics and man’s relationship with it. 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 43 In his introduction to Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, Christopher Janaway states: So our first task in The World as Will and Representation is to consider the world as it presents itself to us in our minds. In ordinary human experience, and in the extension of this in the realm of scientific enquiry, we encounter objects, and these are ordered for us, necessarily, by space and time, and by relations of cause and effect […] Everything in space and time has a determinate position in relation to other things in space and time, everything that happens has a determinate cause, every action relates back to a motive and to its agent’s character, every truth is grounded in some other truth or in the evidence of the senses. (quoted in Schopenhauer 2010, xiv) Since the Copenhagen interpretation challenged causality and determinism, a new approach was necessary to interpret the changing meanings of “reality,” “will” and “representation” and our relationship with them. Lovecraft’s cosmic indifferentist approach, in this sense, resolved this problem and therefore added a new meaning to his anxiety narratives. 18 Some of his best and most famous narratives, including “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” were all written between or after 1925-1927, when the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was articulated. As Joshi states: “‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is a quantum leap for Lovecraft in more ways than one. It is, most empathetically, the first of his tales that can genuinely be termed cosmic” (Joshi 2013, 866). However, instead of just commenting on the role of modern physics in Lovecraft’s narratives, I would like to draw attention to his effort to establish a philosophy based on quantum mechanics. He knew that the above mentioned cognitive and linguistic changes were necessary to interact with this new reality. His cosmic view, which evokes Schopenhauer’s views on aesthetic experience, 19 thus has become a cognitive tool to interpret and to interact with a world based on quantum mechanics. Indeed, the reason cosmicism is so different from any other philosophy is that it literally gives reality a new meaning by destroying the concept of reality as we know it. Lovecraft did this by using BÜKE SAǦLAM 44 some ideas specific to quantum mechanics, such as the concept of the probability wave. 20 As Heisenberg suggests: This concept of the probability wave was something entirely new in theoretical physics since Newton […] The probability wave of Bohr, Kramer, Slater […] meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality. (Heisenberg 2000, 11) Thus, the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics reflects itself in the random, uncertain and indeterministic universe represented by cosmicism, causing anxiety in its narrator, just as the concept of probability created discomfort among many physicists, including Einstein. On the other hand, Lovecraft was also aware of the fact that he needed a new language to describe this new uncertain and alien realm. Therefore, the language he used in his anxiety narratives had to contain at least some words or sentences that were completely foreign to the world we know. In this sense, I would like to suggest that even the name “Cthulhu” meant more than just a fictitious name of an alien creature; what Lovecraft did here was actually pointing out a language problem, not unlike Heisenberg, who asserted that: The real problem behind these many controversies was the fact that no language existed in which one could speak consistently about the new situation. The ordinary language was based upon the old concepts of space and time and this language offered the only unambiguous means of communication about the setting up and the results of the measurements. Yet the experiments showed that the old concepts could not be applied everywhere. (Heisenberg 2000, 119) Heisenberg’s solution to this language problem makes sense: “With regard to the language […] one has gradually recognized that one should perhaps not insist too much on certain principles […] One should simply wait for the development of the language, which adjusts itself after some time to the new situation” (119). Lovecraft, on the other hand, decided to speed up this process, at least for the sake of his anxiety narratives. As he comments on the word “Cthulhu” in a letter written in 1934: 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 45 The word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch the phonetics of an absolutely non-human word. The name of the hellish entity was invented by beings whose vocal organs were not like man’s, hence it has no relation to the human speech equipment. The syllables were determined by a physiological equipment wholly unlike ours, hence could never be uttered perfectly by human throats. (quoted in Joshi 2013, 866) This is an innovative approach as Lovecraft’s choice to produce and use new and alien words proves his literary skills as well as his awareness of the necessity to establish a new philosophy on which his narratives are based. In this way, he succeeded in adding a new dimension to his anxiety narratives by creating a deeply phenomenological experience for the reader. 1.5 CONCLUSION The main purpose of this chapter was to analyze the concept of cosmicism in depth to truly understand Lovecraft’s “weird stories,” which I prefer to call “anxiety narratives.” Therefore, I started examining the concept of anxiety and its possible meanings for Lovecraft. Given his life, personality, ideology, and writings, cosmicism evolves from a literary philosophy into a platform that allows Lovecraft to represent his relationship with anxiety. As a result, his narratives become a unique way of expressing this inherent concept, making it impossible to be categorized under the mere genres of fantasy and horror. They can be better understood using medical/health humanities; considering Lovecraft’s narratives as illness stories and interpreting them as a type of “chaos story” gives them a new meaning and thus a deeper understanding of his writings. The role of scientific developments of his era was also worth mentioning since Lovecraft not only used the elements of modern physics in his writings, but he actually established a new philosophy based on quantum mechanics, which he used to represent his anxiety narratives. In this way, he could treat anxiety both as a noumenon and phenomenon. BÜKE SAǦLAM 46 1 The relationship between anxiety and the sense of loss of control will be further examined in the following chapters. 2 While there are various Lovecraft scholars, S.T. Joshi is by far the most prominent one. For this reason in this thesis I will mainly refer to his works to support my arguments. 3 Joshi also points out: “Lovecraft stated in In Defence of Dagon that ‘There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.’” (Joshi 2013, 685). 4 Dr. Thies Münchow mentions a very similar idea in his essay “Transgressing the Myth: H.P. Lovecraft’s Philosophy of Life and Its Narrative Execution” without analyzing it in detail. He suggests: “Anxiety gets canalized, the non-object becomes objectivized in form of “Cthulhu,” “Yog-Sothoth,” “Nyalathotep” and all the other “Great Old Ones.” […] In that way Lovecraft’s anti-mythology is a plausible form of myth for a secular society” (Münchow 2017, 48). This idea is thoroughly analyzed and elaborated in this chapter of the thesis. 5 Kierkegaard uses adjectives such as “cunning” and “discerning” to define anxiety: “And no Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readiness as anxiety has, and no secret agent knows as cunningly as anxiety how to attack his suspect in his weakest moment or to make alluring the trap in which he will be caught, and no discerning judge understands how to interrogate and examine the accused as does anxiety, which never lets the accused escaped, neither through amusement, nor by noise, nor during work, neither by day nor by night” (Kierkegaard 1980, 155–56). 6 Compulsive talking is defined as a “pattern of speech in which the speaker feels the necessity to continue talking. People who struggle with compulsive talking may be aware that their speech is uncontrolled or obsessive, but also feel like they need to speak to feel safe and in control. Failing to speak when the compulsion arises can result in high levels of anxiety, feelings of anger, or sense of overwhelm” (BetterHelp 2022). 7 Stilted speech is defined as a “communication characterized by situationally-inappropriate formality. This formality can be expressed both through abnormal prosody as well as speech content that is ‘inappropriately pompous, legalistic, philosophical, or quaint.’” (“Stilted Speech” n.d.). Also, it is seen as one of the characteristics of Asperger syndrome: “Individuals with the ‘classic’ variant of Asperger syndrome are described as socially odd, extremely egocentric, clumsy with poor body awareness, having a peculiar gaze, stilted language, good verbal ability, and narrow and odd interests” (Sturm, Fernell, and Gillberg 2004, 444). 8 These dreams will be further analyzed in Chapter 4. 9 This theme will be further discussed in the following chapters. 10 The concept of “sensitive” mind will be explored in Chapter 5. 11 The idea of observer can also be explained with dissociation as a result of anxiety and will be discussed thoroughly in the next chapter. 12 The question of control and its representation through cosmic horror will be analyzed in Chapter 3. 13 Lovecraft’s “sensitive” protagonists will be analyzed especially in chapters 4 and 5. 14 Even August Derleth, co-founder of Arkham House, Lovecraft's first book publisher, and the person who coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos,” couldn’t endure Lovecraft’s writings: “Derleth, himself a practicing Catholic, was unable to endure Lovecraft’s bleak atheistic vision, and so he invented out of whole cloth the ‘Elder Gods’ […] as a counterweight to the ‘evil’ Old Ones, who had been ‘expelled’ from the earth but are eternally preparing to reemerge and destroy humanity. […] This invention of ‘Elder Gods’ allowed him to maintain that the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is substantially akin to Christianity, therefore making it acceptable to people of his conventional temperament” (Joshi 2013, 862–63). 15 As Einstein comments in his famous letter to Max Born: “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘Old One.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice” (Einstein, Born, and Born 2005, 88). Till the end of his life, he tried to form a deterministic description of quantum physics. His hidden-variable theories were an attempt to achieve this aim. As Marco Genovese states in “Research on Hidden Variable Theories: A Review of Recent Progresses”: “A possible way out from these problems would be if QM represents a statistical approximation of an unknown deterministic theory, where all observables have defined values fixed by unknown variables, the so called hidden variable theories (HVT), a suggestion dating since the celebrated Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper of 1935” (Genovese 2005, 321). John Stewart Bell, however, disproved the need for local hidden variables in 1964: “Bell proved that you could rule out local hidden variable theories, and indeed rule out locality altogether, by measuring entangled particles’ spins along different axes” (Brubaker 2021). 16 “On the basis of experimental evidence, German physicist Albert Einstein first showed (1905) that light, which had been considered a form of electromagnetic waves, must also be thought of as particle-like, localized in packets of discrete energy” (“Wave-Particle Duality” 2022). 17 Or Kant’s idea of “representation” and the “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich). 1 Understanding the Concept of Cosmicism 47 18 Joshi further comments on indifferentism: “The question for Lovecraft was: how to conduct oneself with the realization that the human race was an insignificant atom in the vast realms of the cosmos? One solution was to adopt the perspective of a sort of bland cosmic spectator upon the human race” (Joshi 2013, 1043). 19 As Schopenhauer states in The World as Will and Representation: “We can avoid all the suffering that comes from objects in the present just as well as we can avoid it from those that are remote as soon as we raise ourselves to viewing them in a purely objective way, thus creating the illusion that these objects alone are present and we are not: then, as pure subject of cognition, we are rid of our suffering selves and fully one with the objects, and in such moments our needs are as alien to us as they are to the objects. The world as representation is then all that remains, and the world as will has vanished” (Schopenhauer 2010, 222–23). 20 It would be incomplete not to mention the origin of the concept of the probability wave. It dates back to the famous “double slit experiment” which “discovered that electrons, and all quantum particles, both exist as particles and probability waves. Quantum particles existing as probability waves means that we don’t know for certain where these particles are, we can only know the probability of where they will be. These particles are said to be in superposition. This means that they are in all possible states at once. Once we try to observe the state of this particle, the wave function collapses into a single state” (Andal 2014). 48 2 DISSOCIATION AS A RESULT OF ANXIETY 2.1 INTRODUCTION In the previous chapter, the concept of cosmicism and its connection to the author’s anxiety has been discussed. In his works, Lovecraft narrates his anxiety represented as the fear of unknown. However, although the words fear or horror are more frequently used when talking about Lovecraft, anxiety is the correct term to describe the affect that is present in his works. As neuroendocrinologist and Stanford University professor Robert Sapolsky, states: Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. Much as with depression, anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. In this case, people prone toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome. (Sapolsky 2004, 630) As discussed earlier, cosmicism provokes anxiety by showing how insignificant we are in the vast universe. However, to understand why the sense of insignificance leads to anxiety, first the biological aspect of anxiety and depression should be clarified in reference to Sapolsky’s work. On the other hand, dissociation is seen as a common result of severe anxiety. Therefore, I will also use the theories of PTM and SCM and will give the example of Nina Sayers from Darren Aronofksy’s 2010 movie Black Swan to better understand the nature of anxiety and depression, and thus, to thoroughly comprehend Lovecraft’s narratives. 2 Dissociation as a Result of Anxiety 49 2.2 AMYGDALA AND ANXIETY The amygdala is important for this chapter due to its role. It is located in our limbic system, 1 the part of the brain which is related to fear and anxiety. To understand the nature of anxiety, we first need to comprehend the amygdala’s function and see how it changes in an anxious brain. According to Sapolsky, brain-imaging studies are the most convincing evidence of the direct relationship between amygdala and anxiety 2 . Sapolsky worked with rats, primates, and human test subjects to investigate how various parts of the brain work, as well as to compare and contrast their unique reactions. When the amygdala is triggered, it works in a similar way both in various kinds of animals and in human beings: People with anxiety disorders have exaggerated startle responses, see menace that others don’t. […] A frightening picture that is flashed up too briefly to be even noted subliminally in a control subject does the trick to the amygdala in someone who is anxious. No wonder the sympathetic nervous system then races—alarms are always going off in the amygdala. Why does the amygdala work differently in someone who is anxious? […] major stressors and glucocorticoids disrupt hippocampal function—the synapses aren’t able to do that long-term potentiation business, and the dendritic processes in neurons shrink. Remarkably, stress and glucocorticoids do just the opposite in the amygdala—synapses become more excitable, neurons grow more of the cables that connect the cells to each other. And if you artificially make the amygdala of a rat more excitable, the animal shows an anxiety-like disorder afterward. (Sapolsky 2004, 636–38) This technical explanation is necessary to become familiar with some very basic terms related to the mechanism of anxiety, and to better understand the biology of anxiety disorders. Amygdala is one of the most relevant parts of the brain when dealing with anxiety disorders and stress, but it is not the only part that gets activated when anxiety strikes. Our sympathetic nervous system 3 is another part that gets activated when we confront a stressful situation. The hippocampus, 4 on the other hand, is related to memory and is negatively affected by narrowing the connection between nerves when the individual is faced with constant and intense stress factors (and excessive glucocorticoids, 5 the hormones that are released when faced with a stress BÜKE SAǦLAM 50 factor). However, as Sapolsky suggests, in the case of the amygdala the process is the opposite: in this case, the connection between the nerves is accelerated. Although everything is interconnected in our brain, this connection is not limited to the brain, but includes genetic, external, and social factors as well as our entire organism. Therefore, we need to analyze all these elements to fully understand the anatomy of the anxiety, or especially of an individual with an anxiety disorder. Sapolsky comments on all the major psychological stressors in his work, but I will use two that might describe the source of anxiety in Lovecraft’s narratives and Nina’s obsession: “predictability” and “control.” Sapolsky draws attention to the role of predictability in stress, using as evidence the studies conducted on rats that were given electric shocks with prior warning: Predictability makes stressors less stressful. The rat with the warning gets two pieces of information. It learns when something dreadful is about to happen. The rest of the time, it learns that something dreadful is not about to happen. It can relax. The rat without a warning can always be a half-second away from the next shock. In effect, information that increases predictability tells you that there is bad news, but comforts you that it’s not going to be worse—you are going to get shocked soon, but it’s never going to be sprung on you without warning. (Sapolsky 2004, 509) Unpredictability, ambiguity and uncertainty or anything unknown creates a stress factor for every living being. However, human beings seem to be more fragile and have a longer duration of stress responses, which can result in a variety of disorders. Cosmicism, as a literary philosophy, is psychologically unbearable as it points to this uncertainty. To feel significant and real, we must first feel that we are in control (even if we are not). Therefore, the concepts of unpredictability and control are complementary, and it is not surprising that we see uncontrollability as another stressor. According to Sapolsky: Loss of control and lack of predictive information are closely related. Some researchers have emphasized this, pointing out that the common theme is that the organism is subjected to novelty. You thought you knew how to manage things, you thought you knew what would happen next, and it turns out you are wrong in this novel situation. The potency of this is demonstrated in primate studies in which merely placing the animal into a novel cage suppresses its 2 Dissociation as a Result of Anxiety 57 ontologically precedes the shaping of the individual into an “organic” whole. (Brinker-Gabler 2014, 48) The “body without organs” is one of Deleuze’s most important concepts. As can be clearly understood from Brinker-Gabler’s description, it refers to a decentred and fluid body full of multiplicities. As opposed to psychoanalysis which defends the unity of the ego, schizoanalysis is inspired and fuelled by the dynamic and multiple nature of the psyche. According to Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. We are of the opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as “primary repression” means precisely that: it is not a “countercathexis,” but rather this repulsion of desiringmachines by the body without organs. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 9) They comment further that various symptoms of schizophrenia such as dissociation and speech disorders are far from being the evidences of a disease; rather, they are considered as a kind of reaction against the dominance of a centred self and the established “truths” regarding the human psyche that psychoanalysis 7 attempted to maintain. Another important point might be the difficulty of upholding unity when confronted by remarkable stress and pressure. 8 In Black Swan, the selection of the place and environment is perfectly suited for representing a situation in which daily stress creates the mentioned fracture in the protagonist of the movie. The story takes place in the New York City Ballet company and, because the world of ballet is known for its obsession with perfection, rigidity, and ruthlessness, the audience doesn’t have any difficulty understanding one of the main sources of stress for the protagonist. The psychological problems of Nina become more visible after she is selected for the role of the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. She is asked to perform not only Odette (the White Swan) but also Odile (the Black Swan). At this point, it is important to emphasize the fact that the main cause of Nina’s dissociation is not a sudden traumatic event; BÜKE SAǦLAM 58 rather, it seems to be the consequence of constant daily emotional burden, stress, and pressure, just like in the case of Lovecraft and his protagonists. While Nina doesn’t experience any problems in performing the part of the White Swan, the dissociation and so-called psychotic episodes start when she tries to embody the Black Swan. This is understandable, as this process forces her to confront a realm within herself that is still unknown and, also, undesirable. Again, this is no different from Lovecraft’s relationship with the unknown, but in his case unknown is mostly represented as something originating from the outside world. In the movie, the Black Swan, the evil twin of the White Swan, represents the sensual self and the dark side of one’s personality. In the original story, Odile deceives the prince, who would save Odette, trapped in the body of a White Swan, by giving her his true love. Tricked, the prince falls in love with Odile, believing she is Odette. This event leads Odette to commit suicide. 9 Nina’s dark side starts to show as she tries to fully perform Odile’s part. During this process, Nina experiences visual hallucinations, while also struggling with eating disorders, anxiety, and obsession. This inner fracture is provoked by the arrival of her double (shaped in flesh and bones as the character of Lily, another dancer in the same dance company). It is important to note that in Lovecraft’s narratives the use of double is not dominant. His approach to dissociation is more subtle, enigmatic, and atmospheric (which is why it is difficult to adapt them for the big screen) and his protagonists seem to lose their selves in the unknown. In other words, their selves seem to have been destroyed rather than multiplied, as in the case of Nina. Before continuing with the analysis of Lily, it would be better to examine and understand Nina’s psychological transformation through the hallucinations. Although auditory hallucinations are more common in real life, 10 in the case of Nina, visual hallucinations dominate, which enables the audience to fully engage with the mind of the protagonist in an easier way. As Moskowitz states: The current diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, with a strong emphasis on psychotic symptoms, differs substantially from Bleuler’s original conception, 2 Dissociation as a Result of Anxiety 59 which saw delusions and hallucinations as only secondary features of schizophrenia. For the past 30 years, specific psychotic symptoms derived from the writings of Kurt Schneider (so-called “first rank” symptoms), particularly certain forms of auditory hallucinations (voices conversing or commenting on one’s behavior) and delusions (so-called “passivity phenomena”) have been central to the diagnosis of schizophrenia. These symptoms, common in DID and easily understandable from a dissociation perspective, have led to considerable diagnostic confusion and most likely frequent misdiagnosis of DID patients as schizophrenic. 11 (Moskowitz 2011a) In the movie, various visual hallucinations indicate the transformation of Nina into the Black Swan, such as seeing black swan feathers grow out of her body, her feet becoming webbed and changes in her legs and the neck. During her last appearance as the Black Swan on the stage, we see her total transformation into Odile: she grows wings while performing her famous 32 fouettés. 12 Aronofsky perfectly emphasizes both her transformation and dissociation, by showing Nina in her own body as she finishes the coda, with her shadow in the form of a swan. Again, while all these episodes can be evidence of psychosis and symptoms of schizophrenia, we need to keep in mind the ambiguity of the term psychosis and, as commented by Moskowitz above, the existence of the same symptoms in DID. As far as DID is concerned, there are two main approaches, as defined in the article “Dissociative Identity Disorder and the Sociocognitive Model: Recalling the Lessons of the Past”: Over the past decade, two competing views concerning the genesis and nature of DID have emerged. One perspective, referred to by Gleaves (1996) as the posttraumatic model (PTM) maintains that DID is an etiologically distinct condition that is best conceptualized as a defensive response to childhood trauma, particularly severe sexual and physical abuse […] An alternative perspective on DID is afforded by the sociocognitive model (SCM). The SCM conceptualizes DID as a syndrome that consists of rule-governed and goaldirected experiences and displays of multiple role enactments that have been created, legitimized, and maintained by social reinforcement. (Lilienfeld et al. 1999, 507) As far as these two models on DID are concerned, it is safe to suggest that Nina’s condition seems to include the elements of SCM. We also see various episodes related to sexual harassment and pressure enacted by her abusive director Thomas 13 and her pathological BÜKE SAǦLAM 60 relationship with her dominant mother, 14 all of which can be considered traumatic events. Moreover, Thomas’ abusive behaviors seem to be legitimized and ignored (in one scene, Nina’s mother says that he has a “reputation”), although his abuses are known by everyone. This turns the abuse into a part of everyday life at the ballet company rather than a tragic and shocking traumatic event, although it may have the same traumatic effect on the subject. As Steve Lamberti from University of Rochester Medical Center writes about the character of Nina: Natalie Portman’s character was involved in a highly stressful competition, she had conflicted relationships with her mother and with her understudy, and she was the object of sexual advances by her director. Any of these issues alone would be stressful, but experiencing all of them at once could be emotionally devastating, particularly for a young woman who is somewhat naïve and sheltered. (Donaldson James 2010) One question would be on how traumatic events can become part of a daily routine and if it is possible to consider anxiety and dissociation as natural outcomes of this situation. As commented by Dr. Lamberti, Nina is portrayed as a fragile young woman and may be more sensitive than others, though this doesn’t change the fact that she is in a highly stressful environment. Her director is a symbol of power and is an almost fascist, authoritative figure who makes and exerts continuous demands and pressure. In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault comments on this kind of fascism as being one of the three adversaries confronted by the book: “The major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism […] And not only historical fascism […] but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 1983, xiii). This is also reminiscent of Lovecraft’s relationship with fascism in the sense that although he was subjected to and affected by mental and emotional abuse by his mother and had to endure many years of depressive and stressful home environment, which contributed to his anxiety, it still dominated his thoughts. Similarly, Black Swan tells us that Nina’s main desire is to be perfect, although she is also dominated by 2 Dissociation as a Result of Anxiety 61 this very concept of perfection and its promulgators, such as Thomas. The source of her selfharm and obsessive behaviors, as well as her anxiety and eventual dissociation, is this very desire that dominates her daily life. Moreover, the role enactment, one of the main elements of the SCM, is encouraged in her daily life both by her director (pushing Nina to lose control and release her “dark side” to transform into the Black Swan) and by her mother, who insistently wants her to remain as her “sweet girl.” In this sense, Nina is torn between two opposing demands. As mentioned further in the article by Lilienfield et. al: By role enactment, proponents of the SCM mean that DID patients adopt and enact social roles geared to their aspirations and the demand characteristics of varied social contexts. According to this view, the metaphor or concept of role does not imply that role related behaviors are the products of conscious deception. Instead, role enactments tend to flow spontaneously and are carried out with little or no conscious awareness and with a high degree of “organismic involvement” such that the role and “self” (or “multiple selves” as the case may be) coalesce so as to become essentially indistinguishable. (Lilienfeld et al. 1999, 508) It would be possible to explain certain aspects of Nina’s dissociation with the SCM, emphasizing role enactment rather than seeing it as a mere psychotic episode. It is also interesting to note that one refers to the literal meaning of the role when one discusses Nina’s embodiment of Odile. In that sense, once again, we come to understand that this specific role enactment is indeed required in her daily life. Thus, Nina’s dissociation is the consequence of a social role rather than psychosis or disease. Another element that signals Nina’s dissociation is the arrival of her double, Lily. As mentioned earlier, the concept of the double is widely used in the Gothic genre to represent the subject’s dissociation. Given that Aronofsky’s movie was inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Double, we see a very similar situation with Nina. In The Double, while we are never sure whether the protagonist’s double, Golyadkin Jr., exists, in Black Swan, the audience knows that Lily exists and represents everything that Nina would like to have, such as freedom and sensuality, in order to embody the main characteristics of a Black Swan. Nina’s anxieties increase when Lily’s BÜKE SAǦLAM 62 dance is praised by Thomas and when Lily is selected as Nina’s alternate. In one scene, Nina begs her director not to select Lily as her substitute, saying “she is after me. She is trying to replace me!,” just as Golyadkin Jr. does to Golyadkin Sr. in The Double. The source of anxiety is the same for both Nina and Golyadkin. Both fear being replaced by their doubles, who are somehow better than them in many ways. Their inner dissociation is complemented, or represented, by the external factor of the double, another person with the same or similar physical appearance. Gary Saul Morson comments on Golyadkin’s condition: “The real horror, which the hero constantly tries to ward off, is that while subjectivity is indeed unique and only one of a me can existthe real me is not mine but his, and I am the one who does not have a me! I am the pretender!” (Morson 2015, 50). The theme of falseness and pretension is mentioned by Nina’s director when he praises Lily’s dance. He says: “She is not faking it,” apparently comparing her style with that of Nina. From the very beginning of the movie, Lily seems to be the real Black Swan with her carefree and sensual personality. Nina, not having any of these personality traits, does indeed seem to fake them when she tries to transform herself. At the end of the movie, she metaphorically kills the White Swan inside her, failing to maintain two opposite forces in herself. The dissociation ends with self-annihilation. Dissociation, as a result of daily stress and social requirements, is quite a natural outcome, both as a passage from one psychological state to another and as a mental transformation. Some models of DID, such as PTM and SCM, as well as the thoughts of Moskowitz and the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, demonstrate the complexity of this phenomenon. Various terms regarding human psychology are incapable of fully defining their objects and indicate the impossibility of naming or categorizing certain conditions. As Moskowitz rightfully states, the disorders that are considered diseases may not actually be illnesses—at least not in every case. What we call a disease may reflect our personal ideology and subjective thoughts on certain 2 Dissociation as a Result of Anxiety 63 concepts such as reality, normality etc. After all, there is not, and cannot be, any single objective thought on these abstract terms. Things that are normalized by the society (such as abuse and pressure) may not be normal, while the reactions to or consequence of this stress (such as dissociation) may be totally normal and natural. An ambivalence resides in every human being, and it is normal to have multiple selves rather than one single centered self. Although, in some cases (such as Nina’s situation), it would be hard to deal with these opposite forces (especially when they are pushed by external factors rather than experienced naturally). The subject would remain singular (or, even worse, would disappear), as in the case of Nina (and many protagonists of Lovecraft). The sense of insignificance creates stress and leads to desperation. Moreover, its meaning and definition change depending on the person or situation. Indeed, man’s discovery of his insignificance in the vast universe may create a similar psychological effect as experiencing the feeling of imperfection, as seen in Nina’s case. As Sapolsky states: “We saw that certain features dominated as psychologically stressful: a loss of control and of predictability within certain contexts, a loss of outlets for frustration, a loss of sources of support, a perception of life worsening” (Sapolsky 2004, 592). However, on closer inspection, we see that the element of control is the common ground of these two cases. 2.4 CONCLUSION The focus of this this chapter was dissociation as a result of anxiety. To do this, I discussed the fictional case of Nina Sayers, who suffers from various mental disorders such as anxiety disorders, OCD, and dissociation, and thus gained a better understanding of the relationship between anxiety and dissociation. Also, I examined how the feeling of the insignificance varies and can be experienced in totally different situations. Finally, these analyses led me to investigate the concept of control. BÜKE SAǦLAM 64 1 As Sapolsky states in his lecture on the limbic system at Stanford University: “Originally, the limbic system was not known as the ‘limbic system’ but instead had a name reflecting the fact that people started off studying it in rats. And you take a rat brain [and there is] the olfactory bulb. This is the olfactory system of a rodent brain […] The olfactory bulb and its projections are 40% of the brain of a rodent. And when people began to understand where the neurons in the olfactory bulb were sending their projections [… they] began to call this region the ‘rhinencephalon’, the ‘nose-brain’. Because, this is what was processing all this […] great amount of olfactory information coming in. And this area that we now know […] as the ‘limbic system’ at the time was called the ‘rhinencephalon’ […] if you are a rat, there’s not an emotion on earth that’s not intertwined with olfaction” (Stanford 2010a). 2 As Sapolsky states: “Some of the most convincing work implicating the amygdala in anxiety comes from brain-imaging studies. Put people in a scanner, flash various pictures, see what parts of the brain are activated in response to each. Show a scary face, and the amygdala lights up. Make the pictures subliminal – flash them for thousandths of a second, too fast to be consciously seen (and too fast to activate the visual cortex), and the amygdala lights up” (Sapolsky 2004, 636). 3 “The sympathetic nervous system kicks into action during emergencies, or what you think are emergencies. It helps mediate vigilance, arousal, activation, mobilization” (Sapolsky 2004, 58). 4 “Just as there are different types of memory, there are different areas of the brain involved in memory storage and retrieval. One critical site is the cortex, the vast and convoluted surface of the brain. Another is a region tucked just underneath part of the cortex, called the hippocampus” (Sapolsky 2004, 406). 5 “Two hormones vital to the stress-response, as already noted, are epinephrine and norephinephrine, released by the sympathetic nervous system. Another important class of hormones in the response to stress are called glucocorticoids” (Sapolsky 2004, 73). 6 Or as the article “Dissociation and Symptom Dimensions of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Replication Study” suggests: “A number of previous reports have suggested that OCD might be associated with memory-related problems […] Concerning obsessive-compulsive symptoms, it is discussed that compulsive checking in particular is associated with impaired reality monitoring (which refers to the capacity to discriminate between memories of events that really happened and memories of events that were only imagined) […] Low confidence in memory might be seen as an expression of perfectionism in some patients with OCD, meaning that they wish to have a perfect memory (and are therefore dissatisfied with their memory)” (Rufer et al. 2006, 148). 7 Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to schizophrenia is almost metaphorical and emphasize the mistake of oversimplifying such complex disorders by labeling them. They don’t try to blame the society nor to normalize or to justify such a condition. As they state: “When we say that schizophrenia is our characteristic malady, the malady of our era, we do not merely mean to say that modern life drives people mad. It is not a question of a way of life, but a process of production” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 34). 8 At this point it would be better to add the thoughts of Sapolsky regarding the issue, as a neurobiologist. According to him the condition is totally the opposite, as he states in his lecture about schizophrenia at Stanford University: “Back in the 1960s, when all sorts of laudable things happened along certain cultural lines, there amid that was one horrifically damaging idiotic thing that emerged in psychiatry at the time, which was a minority view in psychiatry, a lunatic fringe view, that, basically, schizophrenia is not so bad. Schizophrenia has all sorts of hidden blessings. And soon, it had frameworks of things like schizophrenia is the disease of being healthy in a crazy world. Schizophrenia is the disease of having insights into life that other people cannot […] This is not a disease of hidden compensations and more insight into the world. This is one of the most horrific ways that biology can go wrong” (Stanford 2010b, pt. 42:43-44:58). 9 Swan Lake has many different endings. See: https://pascb.com/ballet-lessons-swan-lake/. 10 “While the majority of hallucinations reported in primary psychotic disorders are auditory, they may also be visual, olfactory, tactile, or gustatory” (Teeple, Caplan, and Stern 2009, 27). Though Moskowitz claims: “auditory verbal hallucinations or voices (and some passivity phenomena such as thought withdrawal or insertion) should, on the balance of the evidence, be considered dissociative rather than psychotic in nature” (Moskowitz 2011a). 11 Another type of “delusion” can be seen in major depression as well, as Sapolsky suggests: “In a subset of such patients, the sense of grief and guilt can take on the quality of a delusion. By this, I do not mean the thought-disordered delusions of schizophrenics; instead, delusional thinking in depressives is of the sort where facts are distorted, overor underinterpreted to the point where one must conclude that things are terrible and getting worse, hopeless” (Sapolsky 2004, 539). 12 For the definition see: https://www.britannica.com/art/fouette-en-tournant. 13 There are different ideas regarding the behavior of the director, Thomas, although in the article I considered it as an abuse. As Julie Sexeny comments: “He reframes her notion of perfection to include letting go and the value of surprise. But when he suddenly kisses her and she bites him in return, it is unclear what to make 2 Dissociation as a Result of Anxiety 65 of this. Is this an abuse of authority? Is he, like her mother, crossing boundaries in order to control her? Or does he cross a boundary with her precisely in order to test her ability to draw a line between them?” (Sexeny 2015, 53). 14 In various scenes the audience witnesses the problematic and pathological relationship between Nina and her mother. As Julie Sexeny states: “Nina’s control of her own self—especially her body—is reflected in the control her mother (Barbara Hershey) exerts over her. Even though she is a young adult, her mother wakes her and puts her to bed, feeds and dresses her, cuts her nails and surveys her body for any signs that she has cut or scratched herself” (Sexeny 2015, 53). 66 3 COVID-19, ANXIETY AND COSMIC HORROR 3.1 INTRODUCTION Considering the current global situation and its uncanny connection to Lovecraftian horror, I would like to dedicate this chapter to the psychological outcomes of COVID-19 and try to interpret them through a Lovecraftian point of view. In this chapter my main aim will be to draw attention to the common elements between the sensation that arouses Lovecraft’s anxiety writings and the psychological impact of COVID on our daily lives. In order to better understand the nature of a pandemic and its neurobiological impact on the people, I have taken two online courses, “Human Behavioral Biology” given by the Stanford University professor Robert Sapolsky and “Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life” (Mason 2020a) given by the University of Chicago professor Peggy Mason. Moreover, I conducted an interview with Prof. Mason 1 specifically for this chapter in which we discussed Lovecraftian horror, fear of the unknown, anxiety and COVID. The main aim of the interview was to discuss some basic concepts that we see in Lovecraft’s narratives such as fear, unknown and madness from the point of view of a neurobiologist, as well as to discuss COVID and anxiety. Another interview I made was with clinical psychologist Ceren Koç, 2 who is a part-time lecturer at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and works as a psychotherapist at Mentha Psychotherapy and Psychiatry, Istanbul. The aim of this interview was to understand the patient profile and common psychological disorders during this pandemic as well as to discuss the connection between the fear of the unknown and COVID. In this sense, this chapter gathers people and ideas from different disciplines and professions, to better understand people’s stress responses, nature of a pandemic and the source of the anxiety in Lovecraft’s narratives. 3 COVID-19, Anxiety and Cosmic Horror 73 representation of his mental condition and the inherited collective fear of human beings; a mixture of the known and the unknown. However, both situations are equally anxietygenerating. Understanding the concept of the unknown and its representation in Lovecraft’s narratives can help us better understand the connection between the unknown and COVID. As suggested before, there seems to be an uncanny link between Lovecraftian anxiety and our emotions while living with a global pandemic. Moreover, during the pandemic, those who are more sensitive to uncertainty seem to react just like a typical character from Lovecraft’s narratives. As stated in The COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome Scale: Development and Psychometric Properties: The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been with us since the end of 2019 and has brought profound changes to the way we live. These changes seem to have led to a surge of pandemic-related psychological distress including fear, anxiety, perceived threat, and stress […] There is a wide literature base that has shown that those suffering from pandemic-related psychological distress tend to exhibit elevated levels of post-traumatic stress, general stress, anxiety, health anxiety, and suicidality which may last well beyond the course of the pandemic. (Nikčević and Spada 2020, 1–2) Whether a pandemic can cause permanent psychological damages was one of the questions that I asked both to Mason and Koç. Mason replied: What are the long-term effects of COVID, we don’t know […] and then we don’t know how people are reacting to this incredible upheaval in the way that we live which is in my lifetime unparalleled. 9/11 was a big deal in the U.S. and this is way more invasive. (Mason 2020b) Koç remarked: Depression and anxiety may leave a mark. Economic recovery will also take time which would make the depression last longer. There may be permanent changes in social habits as well as changes in professional life […] But we shouldn’t forget the fact that human beings are adaptive species. There may be permanent impacts but I believe, in time, we will adapt to the new normal. (Koç 2020) BÜKE SAǦLAM 74 These three statements show that the pandemic indeed has a psychological impact on people and may have long-term effects on certain individuals, although it is not possible to give an exact response yet. However, we can still make a comparison between Lovecraft’s characters’ reactions when they confront something unknown and menacing, and people’s real-life reaction against COVID. For instance, when we look at one of Lovecraft’s most famous narratives, “The Color Out of Space,” we see some similar elements. Donald R. Burleson summarizes the story as “[a] darkly atmospheric tale treating of the slow and morbid demise of a farm family on whose land a meteor has fallen, a meteor spreading a kind of alien poison that scintillates with a bizarre color not of the familiar spectrum” (Burleson 2009, 106). The narrator tries to discover what actually happened in the mentioned barren land, talking to an old man named Ammi Pierce who “relates the story of the meteor that fell on the Nahum Gardner place and spread the ‘grey brittle death.’ According to Pierce, the Gardner family gradually came to ruin, mentally and physically, after the meteor lodged in the ground beside the well” (106). The description and the effects of the meteor resemble a kind of illness or a disaster that was not known or heard before, and damages everything it interacts. The meteor is described as a totally alien entity, as commented by Joshi: “Scientists […] who come to examine the object find that its properties are of the most bizarre sort: the substance refuses to grow cool, displays shining bands on a spectroscope that had never been seen before, and fails to react to conventional solvents applied to it” (Joshi 2013, 901). It is possible to compare the meteor, which is both novel and detrimental, with COVID which is a new pathogen and is similarly harmful both to physical and mental health. 5 Joshi summarizes some of the negative impacts of the meteor: Nahum’s harvest of apples and pears, though unprecedently huge in size, proves unfit to eat; plants and animals with peculiar mutations are seen; Nahum’s cows start giving bad milk. Then Nahum’s wife Nabby goes mad, ‘screaming about things in the air which she could not describe’; she is locked in an upstairs room. Soon all the vegetation starts to crumble to a greyish powder. Nahum’s son Thaddeus goes mad after a visit to the well, and his other sons Merwin and 3 COVID-19, Anxiety and Cosmic Horror 75 Zenas also break down. Then there is a period of days when Nahum is not seen or heard from. Ammi […] finds that the worst has happened: Nahum himself has snapped, and he can only utter confused fragments. (901-2) So, the narrative deals with an unknown and harmful entity, which both damages the environment and affects people physically and mentally. Moreover, all the family members who somehow interacted with the “meteor” lost their minds. Although not as dramatic as in the story of Lovecraft, the serious psychological impacts of COVID cannot be ignored. The most common psychological impacts of the pandemic, as mentioned before, are depression and anxiety. As it is summarized on the website of WHO: In public mental health terms, the main psychological impact to date is elevated rates of stress or anxiety. But as new measures and impacts are introduced— especially quarantine and its effects on many people’s usual activities, routines or livelihoods—levels of loneliness, depression, harmful alcohol and drug use, and self-harm or suicidal behavior are also expected to rise. (World Health Organization 2020) Another important similarity between the destructive unknown entity, the color, (or the general concept of the unknown in most of Lovecraft’s narratives) and COVID is their very natures. Both are obviously harmful, new, and mostly unknown. All these properties have a negative connotation, but they are not inherently evil. As Joshi comments on the nature of the meteorite: To be sure, the meteorite causes great destruction […] but perhaps this is an inevitable product of the mingling of our world and its own. In order for an animate being to be morally culpable of “evil,” it must be conscious that it is doing what is regarded as evil; but who can say whether the entities in “The Color out of Space” are conscious at all? (Joshi 2013, 904) Although a fictional meteorite and a real-life virus are totally different from each other, their structures are more or less the same. Both the sensation they arouse and the physical and emotional impact they cause are similar while we cannot talk about evil. Even so, the consequences are still negative. As Joshi states: BÜKE SAǦLAM 76 But Lovecraft has rendered the plight of the Gardner family inexpressibly poignant and tragic, so that although we cannot “blame” the meteorite for causing their deaths, we still experience a tremendous sense of sorrow mingled with horror at their fate. It is not merely that they have been physically destroyed; the meteorite has also beaten down their minds and wills, so that they are unable to escape its effects. (905) It is interesting to see how the reader feels as if she/he witnesses a disease or a natural disaster that affects his/her loved ones. Again, we see how similar the natures of COVID and the fictional meteorite are. Moreover, the example of meteorite brings us to another very common theme in Lovecraft’s tales which is the theme of indifference. Just like a novel virus in real life, the unknown entities in Lovecraft’s narratives are not disturbing because they are evil; they are menacing because they are indifferent. There is no rational explanation regarding their aims or natures, and for this reason they generate anxiety. Lovecraft’s characters cannot deal with the alien situation, nor do they fight back simply because of a lack of motive on the part of the “enemy.” Knowing whether a certain thing or a situation is good or evil relieves us as it makes us comprehend the circumstance and act accordingly. In this sense, confronting with something evil is better than confronting with something unknown, uncertain or without any motive. I will discuss the concept of indifference once I analyze the theme of control and chaos but now, let’s take a look at an account of a family member of a COVID victim, which summarizes the mentioned ideas. The account was made by Fiana Tulip after Trump himself caught COVID. The statements of Tulip, who has lost her mother because of COVID, were published by People as follows: Tulip said her “thoughts are with everyone who has lost a loved one to this virus” and added that COVID-19 “doesn’t care about your politics.” “It doesn’t care about your religion, it doesn’t care if you trust the scientists or the epidemiologists,” she said. “It doesn’t care if you are the president of the United States.” (Neumann 2020) 3 COVID-19, Anxiety and Cosmic Horror 77 This account is important for my argument since it points to the indifferent nature of disease and emphasizes on our (or our titles’) insignificance. This very down to earth statement about a tragic real-life situation shares a lot in common with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. 3.3 THE SENSE OF CONTROL AND COVID The theme of control and the concept of indifference are very related to each other. Actually, they simply complement each other; the indifference and the unknown certainly affect our sense of control. Besides, these concepts constitute another common ground between Lovecraftian horror and COVID. As mentioned earlier, we—as human beings—would prefer to foresee things and understand the motives of a certain situation in order to feel the mentioned sense of control. However, confronting with something unknown or indifferent prevents us from establishing the necessary illusion, thus, generates panic and anxiety. For this reason, I wondered whether the illusion of control is something vital for human brain to survive. Prof. Mason replied my question, saying: I think it is vital for any brain to survive. I don’t think we [humans] are special case. I don’t find it very interesting to look for human exceptionalism. I think there is a huge evolutionary advantage to craving […] So, everything that is in us, is in us because one way or another it served us well […] Everything, including all of those emotions evolved, they had/has some advantage. (Mason 2020b) Koç, on the other hand, states: Certainty comforts people, we want clearness. Especially it comforts people when there is an end date for some negative situation. Given that people have tendency to focus more on the result rather than the process, certainty and control make them relaxed […] Uncertainty always creates anxiety […] We can’t cope with a problem which we can’t control. One cannot fight if he/she doesn’t really know his/her enemy. One determines his/her strategy knowing the enemy’s characteristics. (Koç 2020) It is possible to argue that illusion of control is something necessary and important in order to be able to survive mentally and physically. COVID, just like the meteorite itself in BÜKE SAǦLAM 78 Lovecraft’s story, is not something evil per se. Yet, it still causes physical and psychological damage on the people. Moreover, as mentioned before, COVID might actually be more terrifying and threatening because of this very “vagueness.” It sounds counterintuitive but evil doesn’t cause anxiety. Evil causes other emotions such as anger, desire of revenge or fear but not necessarily anxiety. For this reason, Lovecraft’s characters feel anxiety; the fictitious world Lovecraft created, his cosmic “horror” is not actually evil; it is indifferent. As Joshi cites one of Lovecraft’s letters, where he states: I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connection with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. (quoted in Joshi 2013, 1043) Lovecraft’s belief and claims are painfully logical although it would be very hard to mentally survive and act accordingly in this kind of world. As human beings, we need to interact with life. We need to make an action and see its reaction. It is important not only because of the necessity of a sense of control but also to establish a sense of reality. All these thoughts lead us to the question of good and evil. Just like many other man-made creations, opposite concepts and moral values have been established by human beings for human beings, to guide as well as to comfort them in the vast and unknown universe. Therefore, naming or categorizing things is necessary for us. Giving names to various complicated things makes them concrete and thus, serves to comfort us. However, as Lovecraft states, the reality is the other way around: “Value is wholly relative, and the very idea of such a thing as meaning postulates a symmetrical relation to something else. No one thing, cosmically speaking, can be either good or evil, beautiful or unbeautiful; for entity is simply entity” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 1044). Still, he develops a coping mechanism in order to deal with such an indifferent universe. As he states: “I follow this acceptance [of traditional folkways] purely for my own personal pleasure—because I would 3 COVID-19, Anxiety and Cosmic Horror 79 feel lost in a limitless and impersonal cosmos if I had no way of thinking of myself but as a dissociated and independent point” (Lovecraft, quoted in Joshi 2013, 1045). He also claims: “Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally & pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of ‘lostness’ in endless time & space” (Lovecraft in Joshi 2013, 1045-46). Another—yet complementary—reason the psychological impacts of both COVID and cosmic horror are so similar is that they both increase our level of sensitivity and alertness. Lovecraft’s indifferentist view and its representation in his narratives allows us to see the world from a totally different perspective and, thus, generate intense feelings that are unusual to us. It challenges our established beliefs about the universe and our position in it; thus, it invades our comfort zone. His narratives show what would happen when we confront chaos all of a sudden. They question whether the world we see is as stable and simple as we want to believe, with certain rules or values we established, or does it have its own indifferent agenda. And if the correct answer is the second one, then what would happen if it showed us a glimpse of its indifference? In simplest terms, it means chaos for people. As a novel virus that brought total chaos to the world, we can consider COVID an example of nature’s indifference as well. It temporarily (or maybe in some respects, permanently) changed our points of view towards life and made us experience new and frightening feelings during this process. Maybe, to a certain extent, the pandemic obliged us to adopt Lovecraft’s painful perspective on the universe. And in order to deal with it, we are advised to develop some coping mechanisms as Lovecraft did. In the article, “Impact of COVID-19 on the Mental Health of Surgeons and Coping Strategies,” 6 positive lifestyle behaviors and mindfulness are given as examples of coping strategies: Capitalizing on coping strategies akin to positive lifestyle behaviors can vastly improve mental health well-being. Eating healthy food, engaging in regular physical activity, practicing good sleep hygiene where possible, and guaranteeing sufficient rest between shifts have been recommended by the World Health Organization […] In addition to positive lifestyle changes, compliance with mindfulness-based programs have been shown to reduce BÜKE SAǦLAM 80 symptoms of burnout in doctors […] Similarly, research has shown that specific relaxation techniques (i.e., progressive muscle relaxation) based on elements in mindfulness has been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and promote sleep quality in patients with COVID-19. (Balasubramanian et al. 2020, 1641) Coping mechanisms are crucial in any anxiety-generating situation in order to re-establish the sense of control. Approaches or ideas such as “you can’t control the others/other things, but you can control yourself” are not new but still effective tools to continue living with the mentioned illusion of control. Although we know that a pandemic and a philosophy (cosmicism) are not the same thing (as the first one being a global and inevitable disaster or crisis and the second one being a personal preference or ideology), both of them generate the same kind of feelings and reactions. As mentioned before, they both have the capacity to change our perspective on the world and on ourselves, along with creating anxiety, fear, and stress and obliging us to develop new coping mechanisms. In this sense, their very essence somehow seems to share interesting similarities. This may be because in both cases we deal with an unknown matter. As Lovecraft states: Man’s relations to man do not captive my fancy. It is man’s relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. 7 (quoted in Joshi 2013, 686) As Joshi comments on Lovecraft’s lines above: “This is Lovecraft’s first explicit expression of the view he would later call ‘cosmicism.’” (686). Indeed, Lovecraft perfectly sums up his perspective on the universe. In his equation an alien entity is required. This explains the reason we can be able to talk about the similarities between the two-seemingly-different concepts. COVID is nothing but the painful interaction between man and a novel virus, which was totally alien and unknown to us until now, 8 just like Lovecraft’s characters’ encounter with an extraterrestrial or totally alien entity. Anything alien or unknown is naturally menacing to us. And only after such an interaction (between man and the alien), we can feel as we feel right 3 COVID-19, Anxiety and Cosmic Horror 81 now during a pandemic; anxious, fearful, depressed, desperate, etc. And all these feelings and reactions, as natural outcomes of an encounter with the unknown, lead both us and the characters of Lovecraft to adopt a nihilistic attitude towards life. Once we see how powerless, desperate, and small we actually are, our points of view change. Joshi defines the concept of cosmicism as follows: Cosmicism is at once a metaphysical position (an awareness of the vastness of the universe in both space and time), an ethical position (an awareness of the insignificance of human beings within the realm of the universe), and an aesthetic position (a literary expression of this insignificance, to be affected by the minimizing of human character and the display of the titanic gulfs of space and time). (686) If not a conscious ideological choice, one needs to experience an extreme situation in order to adopt such a point of view. It seems that a pandemic is pretty effective to generate some kind of skepticism towards life by questioning very basic elements about our position in life. The unknown violates our sense of control and makes us experience various emotions such as anxiety, shock, and fear. All these feelings make us think over the concepts such as the fragility of life and insignificance and smallness of people, as mentioned before. After all this process we start questioning things that we have not questioned (or did not need to question) before. Finally, all these steps lead us to chaos and desperation. 3.4 CHAOS, DESPERATION AND COVID In the last step, Lovecraft’s characters confront a total chaos that makes them feel totally desperate, broken or defeated and sometimes even causes them to lose their minds or lives. A very similar situation can be seen in real life when confronting COVID. As it was stated in Societal Pandemic Burnout: A COVID Legacy: Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. Burnout in the course of dealing with a pandemic can make you feel emotionally drained and unable to function in the BÜKE SAǦLAM 82 context of many aspects of life. Burnout can lower your motivation and cause you to feel helpless, hopeless, and resentful. (Queen and Harding 2020, 873) Once again, we are dealing with the question of the fragility of the human mind. Actually, the famous first paragraph of one of Lovecraft’s most popular stories, “The Call of Cthulhu,” perfectly sums up Lovecraft’s thoughts on the nature of human mind and its relationship with the unknown: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, 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 of 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 2014, 381) In my interview with Mason, another question I asked was whether the human mind is as fragile as Lovecraft claimed. She stated: “Personally, I do think we walk on a razor edge of psychological health. I could be wrong about that but I think that everyone falls of that razor edge every once in a while […] So personally, I think it’s the much bigger challenge than physiological maintenance” (Mason 2020b). As mentioned earlier, both cosmicism and a reallife pandemic share a common ground as they both have psychological impacts on the individuals as well as a capacity to modify or manipulate our established beliefs and ideologies. For this reason, we could be able to compare and contrast these two concepts and see that they both create almost the same mental process; starting with a feeling of shock after confronting with something unknown which damages our sense of control and eventually leads us to desperation or “burnout.” The symptomatic similarities exist in the last phase as well, as the mentioned burnout can be seen as something Lovecraft’s characters experience after they confront an alien situation. Or simply adopting the philosophy of cosmicism can make us experience such an emotional phenomenon, sometimes accompanied by nihilistic thoughts. A (cosmic) indifferentist point of view is frequently seen in Lovecraft’s personal writings as well: 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 89 How prototypical that it was not family ties, religious beliefs, or even—so far as the evidence of the above letter indicates—the urge to write that kept him from suicide, but scientific curiosity […] He was one of the most prodigious autodidacts in modern history, and he continued not merely to add to his store of knowledge to the end of his life but to revise his world view in light of that knowledge. (Joshi 2013, 147) It is important to note that the aim of this chapter is not repeating the important events in Lovecraft’s life or to make an emphasis on his vast store of knowledge but to understand how and why he interpreted and used all these elements to build his indifferentist perspective. 4.2 THE FORMATION OF COSMICISM 4.2.1 Lovecraft’s Mental Health and Traumas Throughout his life Lovecraft suffered from various mental disorders and neuropsychiatric problems and he was fully aware of his condition. He once commented on the symptoms he experienced during his childhood: “My own nervous state in childhood once produced a tendency inclining toward chorea, although not quite attaining that level. My face was full of unconscious & involuntary motions now & then—& the more I was urged to stop them, the more frequent they became” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 98). Joshi further comments: Lovecraft does not exactly date these chorea-like attacks, but context suggests that they occurred before the age of ten. All this led J. Vernon Shea to suspect that Lovecraft might actually have had chorea minor, a nervous ailment that ‘manifests itself in uncontrollable facial tics and grimaces’ but gradually dissipates by puberty. (98) The reason I chose chorea minor as my starting point is because of its huge impact on Lovecraft’s social and emotional life during his childhood and adolescence. Looking at his life and fiction, the effects of the chorea are clearly seen. Indeed, the neuropsychiatric symptoms of his chorea did not only affect his school performance but also contributed to his paranoia of becoming mad. But before continuing with the analysis, it would be better to take a deeper look at the disorder itself. BÜKE SAǦLAM 90 Chorea minor is not an independent disorder but is caused by a bacterial infection 1 and is linked to various psychiatric problems, as stated in “Neuropsychiatric Manifestations of Sydenham’s Chorea: A Systematic Review”: Neuropsychiatric symptoms are reported to be highly prevalent in individuals with Sydenham’s chorea. Studies have focused on OCD, anxiety, mood disorders, psychotic features, tics, and ADHD. Some symptoms are not specific; for example, parents have described emotional liability, irritability, and regressive behavior. (Punukollu et al. 2016, 22) Even if it is not possible to know whether Lovecraft’s symptoms were entirely caused by chorea minor or to what degree was it the reason behind his troubles, some of the mentioned elements were indeed present in Lovecraft’s case. As Joshi comments: “In an earlier letter Lovecraft stated that ‘As an infant, I had been restless & prone to cry.’ He refers to the effect of his maternal grandmother in correcting ‘my increasingly boorish deportment—for my nervousness made me a very restless & uncontrollable child.’” (Joshi 2013, 97-8). Lovecraft’s statements are in parallel with the above statements of the parents. However, there is still another ambiguous factor: it is not clear whether chorea minor was the reason—or partial reason—of Lovecraft’s psychological state or if it was vice versa, as he believed. 2 Lovecraft’s poor school attendance and his inability to finish high school, again, support the idea that he indeed might have had chorea minor. As it is remarked in the article of Punukollu et al.: Sydenham’s chorea causes a high burden of distress to patients and their families. Patients suffer from unpredictable periods of abnormal movements and behavior disorders, with missed school days and poor school performance causing a significant reduction in functionality. (Punukollu et al. 2016, 22) Lovecraft had had four nervous breakdowns until he was 18: in 1898, 1900, 1906 3 and 1908. Moreover, in 1899 he suffered from irregular heart action 4 and fainting fits. 5 The first nervous breakdown occurred when he started going to school, while the last (and the worst) one occurred when he was in high school 6 . His dreams of going to the university were shattered 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 91 since he couldn’t finish high school. As he stated: “My health did not permit me to go to the university—indeed, the steady application to high school gave me a sort of breakdown” 7 (quoted in Joshi 2013, 185), Again, Lovecraft seems to believe that the school was the reason of his breakdown. Although the school attendance seems to trigger something in Lovecraft, 8 the major reason that prevented him from finishing high school might be his chorea minor. Moreover, Lovecraft felt like an “alien” because of his inability to “function” properly, executing the most basic tasks of his age such as attending school regularly and entering a university. 9 Not knowing the exact reason of these “abnormalities” (although they were expected side effects of an illness rather than the products of an organic mental disorder) must have terrified him even more. This sense of alienation and lifelong fear of madness date back to his childhood and reflect themselves in his narratives, especially in the ones written during the high school years. His first short story, “The Beast in the Cave,” can be read as an allegorical account of this panic. Written in 1905, the story is about a man who gets separated from his group and gets lost while touring a mammoth cave. Afterwards his torch burns out, he finds himself in total darkness and desperation. He cries for help only to attract the attention of a kind of beast. Thinking it must be a wild animal, he throws rocks towards the beast to protect himself. The creature collapses, the narrator escapes and, finally, meets with the guide. They go back to the place where the creature was wounded to examine it, only to find a dying man. “The Beast in the Cave” has many “Lovecraftian” elements like the fear of the unknown, paranoia and anxiety. The fear of the unknown not only derives from not knowing what the creature is, but also not knowing what will happen to the narrator. The panic intensifies when the torch fades: “Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total and almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth” (Lovecraft 2014, 1). The darkness continues to be the antagonist of the story, as if it were the real danger: “The tension on my brain now became frightful. My disordered fancy conjured up hideous and fearsome shapes from the BÜKE SAǦLAM 92 sinister darkness that surrounded me, and that actually seemed to press upon my body” (3). The representation of darkness as something dangerous, unknown, sinister and, even, hallucinating reflects Lovecraft’s mind as well as his confusion regarding his own mind. The beast’s message, on the other hand, is clear: the result of being trapped in such a mind means transforming into an animal-like mad man. Lovecraft was afraid of becoming mad and this anxiety became a frequent theme in his stories, mostly represented through the rational narrator who loses his mind when confronts the “unknown.” 10 As Joshi comments on the protagonist of the story: “Like many of Lovecraft’s later protagonists, outward rationalism collapses in the face of the unknown” (Joshi 2013, 170). Having different neuropsychiatric symptoms but not knowing their exact reason clearly fed Lovecraft’s—almost—innate anxiety. Continuing with the theme of chorea, Joshi’s comment below points to a connection between Lovecraft’s neurological symptoms and his fourth breakdown: 11 Since we are generally left in the dark about the nature of this breakdown, we can work only on conjecture. We have two pieces of external evidence. One comes from Harry Brobst, who spoke to a woman who had gone to high school with Lovecraft: “She…described these terrible tics that he had—he’d be sitting in his seat and he’d suddenly up and jump—I think they referred to them as seizures. […] This certainly is a remarkable account, and it suggests that Lovecraft’s chorea minor (if indeed he was afflicted with that disease) had not entirely worn off even by this time. (186) Lovecraft’s second story, “The Alchemist,” which was written during the time of his fourth breakdown in 1908, is worth analyzing. Just like “The Beast in the Cave,” this story also deals with the themes of the fear of the unknown and the inevitable end, but this time with more autobiographical elements and by adding his idea of the “cursed lineage.” The narrator, Antoine, lives in a once-splendid old chateau of his ancestors. Just as in Lovecraft’s own case, by the narrator’s time, the chateau and the family have already lost their glory. Antoine never knows his parents and was raised by an old servant, Pierre. He narrates his lonely and isolated childhood as follows: 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 93 I was an only child, and the lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my aged guardian in excluding me from the society of the peasant children […] At the time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company. Now I know that its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line. (Lovecraft 2014, 8) The story not only reflects Lovecraft’s loneliness as a child and the financial problems he and his family faced, but it also connects his isolation with the mentioned “curse.” Antoine learns that the curse is that all his ancestors died at the age of thirty-two. The beginning of the curse dates back to the 13th century when Antoine’s ancestor, Henri the Comte, kills a dark wizard named Michel Mauvais. The wizard’s son, Charles Le Sorcier, curses him and his descendants giving them a life span of thirty-two years in revenge. The curse resembles a genetically transmitted disease to which the narrator decides to put an end by not having any children: “Upon one thing I was absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for since no other branches of my family were in existence, I might thus end the curse with myself” 12 (Lovecraft 2014, 10). Later Pierre dies, and Antoine waits for his end to come: “Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human creature within the great fortress, and in my utter solitude my mind began to cease its vain protest against the impending doom, to become almost reconciled to the fate which so many of my ancestors had met” (10–11). Looking at Lovecraft’s life, it is not hard to associate “the impending doom” or “fate” with mental disorder that caused his parents to end up at the same psychiatric hospital. However, Antoine decides not to give up but to fight until the end: “In what strange form the curse should overtake me, I knew not; but I was resolved, at least, that it should not find me cowardly or a passive victim.” At the end of the story Antoine succeeds in killing the “curse,” who was actually Charles Le Sorcier. Lovecraft gives “The Alchemist” a happy ending, with a protagonist who manages to avoid his “inevitable” end by taking necessary precautions and by fighting instead of escaping. However, the ending contrasts with the period in which the story was written since this was a BÜKE SAǦLAM 94 difficult year for Lovecraft, who was dealing with chorea symptoms and academic frustrations that led to his most serious nervous breakdown and fed his fear of madness. It is also worth emphasizing that with this story, Lovecraft reflects one of the most common precautions the people with mental disorders take, which is avoiding having children. As it is remarked in the article, “Prenatal Genetic Counselling for Psychiatric Disorders”: Studies have shown that people often overestimate the chances for future children to develop psychiatric illness and this can have an impact on childbearing decisions and provoke anxiety. […] Accordingly, people with psychiatric problems and their families have expressed desire for prenatal genetic counselling and/or genetic testing to address their concerns about the risks of psychiatric illness for their children. (Inglis, Morris, and Austin 2017, 6) Joshi continues with the debate on Lovecraft’s symptoms as follows: Brobst, a Ph.D. in psychology who was trained as a psychiatric nurse, considers the possibility of “chorea-like symptoms” and also conjectures that a hysteroid seizure—a purely psychological ailment without any organic basis—may have been involved. Whether these seizures were the actual cause of his removal from high school is something that cannot now be settled. (Joshi 2013, 186) Today we know that the seizures are indeed present in chorea minor. As analyzed in “Acute Rheumatic Fever Presenting with Sydenham’s Chorea”: The differential diagnoses of Sydenham’s chorea include atypical seizures, tics disorders […] Patients with Sydenham’s chorea can have psychological and psychiatric manifestations such as depression, anxiety, personality changes, emotional lability, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), tics and attention deficit disorder. These are believed to be secondary to the motor difficulties, although sometimes these symptoms can precede the onset of chorea. (Woo, Liu, and Young 2003, 200) In time, Lovecraft’s psychiatric manifestations might have preceded the motor difficulties caused by chorea. This idea may explain his “mental weakness,” which he attributes to genetic factors. 13 Not only Lovecraft’s chorea and his anxiety and fear but also abandoning high school and the subsequent tension between him and his mother Susie 14 can be linked to his fourth 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 95 breakdown. Apparently, during this period Lovecraft went into heavy depression. 15 Joshi further comments: “As a result, the period 1908-13 is a virtual blank in the life of H.P. Lovecraft […] It is also the only time of his life when the term ‘eccentric recluse’ […] can rightly be applied to him” (Joshi 2013, 188). Not only the tension caused by the economic problems but also Susie’s mental deterioration 16 affected her attitude towards her son, as Joshi points to Clara Hess’s statement: “Mrs. Lovecraft talked continuously of her unfortunate son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze at him” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 193). 17 The relationship between Lovecraft and his mother 18 was highly complex and will be thoroughly analyzed in the next chapter. For now, it is better to look only at “The Outsider” to better understand the author’s feeling of profound alienation caused by the mentioned reasons. “The Outsider” was written in 1921, the year Susie died, and tells the story of a very lonely individual who never left his castle nor knew any other person in his life and learnt outside world only from the books of his library. It begins with a sincere account which seems to reflect Lovecraft’s own feelings about his past: Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me— to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. (Lovecraft 2014, 176) The protagonist describes the castle he lives as “infinitely old and infinitely horrible” and “the stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations” (176). He dreams about being with other people and craves for light. So, one day he decides to free himself: “Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for BÜKE SAǦLAM 96 hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forest” (177). Dark trees, putrid moat, endless forest, all creates a contrast with the ideas of light, gay crowds, and sunny world, and they can be interpreted as the metaphors of Lovecraft’s gloomy childhood memories and depression. The forest metaphor becomes even more apt given its widespread use as a symbol of danger, chaos, anxiety, insanity, and mental illness. 19 Moreover, the “accursed smell” of “the piled-up corpses of dead generations” may be related to Lovecraft’s idea of cursed lineage. Lovecraft’s desire to overcome his depression is seen in narrator’s attempt to abandon his castle in search of light. The narrator then starts climbing up the wall to reach the black tower to be able to see the sky. However, this is not an easy process: “But more ghastly and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for climb as I might, the darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill as of haunted and venerable mould assailed me” (177). The narrator doesn’t give up and finally reaches his goal and sees a group of people at a party. This might have been the narrator’s chance to socialize after a long period of depression and isolation had the crowd not fled once he entered the room. Without understanding what/who was the thing that appeared next to him and frightened the crowd, he starts searching the room and finds out that the source of horror was himself. The tragic story finishes with a bitter acceptance, as the narrator says: “I know that light is not for me […]; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. […] I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men” (181). While the narrator fails to overcome depression and loneliness, he accepts and learns to live with his mental illness and physical flaws, which almost give him a privilege by making him different and unique. In other words, he finds peace in his condition. Traumatic life events are another important subject to discuss when it comes to Lovecraft’s anxiety and its representation in his narratives. Throughout his life, Lovecraft witnessed various 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 97 family tragedies, starting in 1893 with his father’s commitment to a mental hospital. 20 Rather than Winfield’s illness, which was probably syphilis, 21 my focus will be on its impact on Lovecraft and his mother. Winfield’s years at the mental hospital affected Lovecraft’s mother the most. As Joshi states: The trauma experienced by Susie Lovecraft over this excruciating period of five years—with doctors ignorant how to treat Winfield’s illness, and with periods of false hope where the patient seems to recover only to lapse into more serious physical and mental deterioration—can only be imagined. (Joshi 2013, 43) Winfield’s hospitalization and his death at a mental hospital with unanswered questions about his disease must have fed Lovecraft’s fear of madness. 22 Moreover, this tragic event affected Susie’s mental health 23 as well as her relationship with her son. Joshi remarks: The immediate effect of the hospitalization of Winfield Scott Lovecraft was to bring the two-and-a-half-year-old Howard more closely than ever under the influence of his mother, his two aunts […], his grandmother Robie, and especially his grandfather Whipple. Naturally, his mother’s influence was at the outset the dominant one. Lovecraft remarks that his mother was “permanently stricken with grief” upon her husband’s illness, although one wonders whether shame and loathing were intermixed with this emotion. (48–49) After Winfield’s death, Whipple became Lovecraft’s father figure. 24 He even played a crucial role in treating Lovecraft’s fear of the dark. As Joshi states: “Whipple cured his grandson of his fear of the dark by daring him at the age of five to walk through a sequence of dark rooms at 454 Angell Street” (49). This can be considered as a great achievement, considering Lovecraft’s anxious and phobic personality. Also, the weird seems to connect Lovecraft with his grandfather. Joshi comments on this subject while he discusses the possible literary sources and inspirations of Lovecraft’s first prose fiction: A still more likely source, perhaps, would be his grandfather Whipple, the only member of his family who appears to have enjoyed the weird. As Lovecraft states in a late letter: “I never heard oral weird tales except from my grandfather—who, observing my tastes in reading, used to devise all sorts of impromptu original yarns about black woods, unfathomed caves, winged horrors (like the ‘night-gaunts’ of my dreams, about which I used to tell him), old witches with sinister cauldrons, & ‘deep, low, moaning sounds’. (78) BÜKE SAǦLAM 98 The topic of the “night-gaunts” is also worth analyzing. Lovecraft expresses the way his grandmother Robie’s death in 1896 affected Susie: “The death of my grandmother plunged the household into a gloom from which it never fully recovered. The black attire of my mother & aunts terrified & repelled me to such an extent that I would surreptitiously pin bits of bright cloth or paper to their skirts for sheer relief” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 56-7). His nightmares of “night-gaunts,” started during this period, represent Susie’s grief: And then it was that my former high spirits received their damper. I began to have nightmares of the most hideous description, peopled with things which I called “night-gaunts”—a compound word of my own coinage […] In dreams they were wont to whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed, the while fretting & impelling me with their detestable tridents. (quoted in Joshi 2013, 57) Clearly, the concept of the “night-gaunt” took its inspiration from Lovecraft’s mother’s and aunts’ black attires, which they wore for mourning. In his account above, Lovecraft claims that his grandmother’s death “plunged the household into a gloom from which it never fully recovered.” Susie’s melancholy must have affected Lovecraft deeply. The description of the “night-gaunts” in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” give additional clues about it: But Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces […] And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts. (Lovecraft 2014, 464) The faceless black beings, who “never speak, laugh or smile” but only “clutch and tickle” seem to represent his mourning and depressed mother. However, this was not the hardest mourning period for Lovecraft. Whipple died in 1904 and subsequent events became a turning point for the author. As Joshi comments: “This was probably the most traumatic event Lovecraft experienced prior to the death of his mother in 1921” (Joshi 2013, 143). Even if there were no breakdowns till 1906, Whipple’s death, in addition to the economic problems caused by it, seriously affected Lovecraft. 25 He and Susie 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 105 shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself!” (922). Instead, he decides to live with it. Lovecraft’s fear of madness can be better understood with the concept of prospection, which is “a key element in positive psychology based on the human ability to imagine thoughts and images about the future. It is said that we are influenced by the past but drawn into the future, and this notion has significant implications for anxiety” (Rachman 2020, iii). While Lovecraft’s fear was rooted in the past, fear itself was related to the future. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze it using the recent construct of “prospection” in addition to traditional psychotherapy which is “essentially retrospective” (Rachman 2020, 67). As Rachman further explains: Psychoanalysis and its derivates focus on the person’s early childhood history to unravel the putative roots of their psychological problems—oral, anal, oedipal stages of sexual development, and so forth. Behavior therapy focuses on the patient’s reinforcement history and current avoidance behavior. In contrast, prospection focuses on the person’s prevailing anticipations, intentions, goals, desires. This forward-looking concept is a major component of positive psychology and has an important bearing on anxiety. Anxiety is essentially prospective. (67) While knowing Lovecraft’s past is essential, the analysis of his anxiety and fear would be incomplete without a prospective approach. For this reason, Lovecraft’s narratives are of great importance as they serve both as the author’s illness stories and reflect his anticipations and fears about the future. On the other hand, it is important to take a look at Lovecraft’s scientific interests and the way he used them in his stories to better understand his anxiety. 4.2.2 Lovecraft’s Scientific Interests Apart from tragic life events, mental disorders and traumas, Lovecraft’s scientific studies are worth further mentioning for their relevance to his anxiety and their role in his narratives. BÜKE SAǦLAM 106 Lovecraft’s interest in science started in 1898, the year when he had his first nervous breakdown. 27 After four years, he discovered one of his biggest passions of his life: astronomy. 28 It became a source of both pleasure and pain and affected his world view profoundly. As he states in 1922 essay “A Confession of Unfaith”: By my thirteenth birthday I was thoroughly impressed with man’s impermanence and insignificance, and by my seventeenth, about which time I did some particularly detailed writing on the subject, I had formed in all essential particulars my present pessimistic cosmic views. The futility of all existence began to impress and oppress me; and my references to human progress, formerly hopeful, began to decline in enthusiasm. (Lovecraft, quoted in Joshi 2013, 182) This is an important account to see the pessimistic root of Lovecraft’s indifferentist view, as he writes in 1929: “I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process” 29 (Lovecraft in Joshi 2013, 1043). Apparently, Lovecraft’s opinions changed over time, and he finally decided to adopt the indifferentist attitude. Joshi further comments: “He discovered astronomy just before the time when it was beginning to transform itself into astrophysics and enter the realm of philosophy with Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity in 1905” (122). Yet, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Lovecraft’s acceptance of quantum mechanics took time due to his firm materialistic beliefs. As Joshi states, especially Hugh Elliot’s ideas on materialism supported Lovecraft’s beliefs and affected his philosophy: 30 In this sense, “From Beyond” (1920) is worth analyzing as it brings together many important factors such as the inspiration Lovecraft took from Elliot, 31 the ideas of quantum mechanics, and his own ideas about human limitation and incapacity to comprehend the vast universe: “What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 107 to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.” (Lovecraft 2014, 132) Crawford Tillinghast’s above monologue shows a parallelism with Prof. Sean Carroll’s definition of quantum mechanics: Quantum mechanics is a whole new way of thinking […] There is a complex relationship between what the world is and what you see when you look at it, and that relationship involves the idea that you can never predict precisely what you will see, but you can simply say the probability of what you will see. Historically, physics has always been set around these ideas of observation and measurement, but in quantum mechanics, we have to rethink the fundamentals of what it means to even measure something. (Carroll 2020) What’s anxiety-provoking in “From Beyond” is not only human’s innate inability and the shattering ideas of quantum mechanics, but also the loss of control; especially for the people who founded their realities on classical physics. Also, given the sense of control and certainty materialism provides, Lovecraft’s unease with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle 32 makes sense. As Joshi comments on a letter that Lovecraft wrote about quantum theory in 1930: The point Lovecraft is trying to establish is that the “uncertainty” of quantum theory is not ontological, but epistemological; that it is only our inability (an inherent inability, not merely some deficiency in our sense-perception or general reasoning capacity) to predict the behavior of sub-atomic particles that results in uncertainty. Even this admission must have been a difficult one for Lovecraft to make, for it shatters the theoretical possibility […] that the human mind can someday absolutely predict the course of Nature if it has enough evidence at its disposal. (Joshi 2013, 1038-39) In “From Beyond,” Lovecraft further describes anxiety caused by the mentioned reasons (human’s limitations, the lack of control and the unknown) using the idea of the alternate dimension. The narrator’s friend, Tillinghast, creates a machine that emits ultra-violet waves so that the person can see the alternate world: “I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break BÜKE SAǦLAM 108 down the barriers. […] We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation” (Lovecraft 2014, 132). Using the machine, both the narrator and Tillinghast don’t only detect the alternate world, but they also see strange and dangerous creatures living there: “Remember we’re dealing with a hideous world in which we are practically helpless…Keep still!” (134). By using the idea of a device that enables to see beyond the visible by affecting the brain, Lovecraft makes the unknown tangible. At the end of the story, the narrator destroys the device—thus, any chance to physically confront with the unknown—but anxiety remains and, even, gives way to paranoia: “It would help my shaky nerves if I could dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary” (137). A similar kind of paranoia can be traced in Henry W. Akeley’s letter in “The Whisperer in Darkness”: “It is true—terribly true—that there are non-human creatures watching us all the time. […] The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it” (Lovecraft 2014, 726). Quantum theory, leaving no room for control or certainty, was understandably unsettling for an anxious person like Lovecraft. In the end, though, he started to get along with Einstein’s ideas: Lovecraft fairly quickly snapped out of his naïve views about Einstein and, by no later than 1929, actually welcomed him as another means to bolster a modified materialism that still outlawed teleology, monotheism, spirituality, and other tenets he rightly believed to be outmoded in light of nineteenthcentury science. In so doing he evolved a metaphysical and ethical system not at all dissimilar to that of his two later philosophical mentors, Bertrand Russell and George Santayana. (Joshi 2013, 688) However, it is important to note that Lovecraft’s acceptance of quantum mechanics and his adoption of cosmic indifferentism did not remove the underlying pessimism found in the author’s philosophy. This is interesting as it shows the differences in response between people. 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 109 In other words, cosmic indifferentism, which in Lovecraft’s case is essentially anxietyprovoking, can be comforting to others. According to Rebecca Elson, who was a CanadianAmerican astronomer and writer, the vast and indifferent universe could actually be an “antidote to fear of death,” As it is seen in the first lines of her poem of the same name: “Sometimes as an antidote / To fear of death, / I eat the stars” (Elson 2018, 60). Elson’s poetry was read by astrophysicist Janna Levin, to which Maria Popova commented: Janna prefaces her reading with a Bohrsian reflection on the relationship between science and poetry, between the objective and the subjective, concluding with an […] observation of how the tension between these seemingly dipoles can dissolve upon closer inspection: “We are all navigating an external world—but only through the prism of our minds, our own subjective experience…The majesty of the universe is only ever conjured up in the mind.” (Popova 2020) Apparently, the effect of a vast and indifferent universe on man varies depending on his perspective; thus, “cosmic horror” may turn into “cosmic comfort” or “cosmic beauty.” In my interview Prof. David Wallace states: “We’ve evolved to exist and thrive on earth, so parochially, those natural forces are reasonably friendly to us. And just as there’s nothing in physics that particularly looks out for our interests, there’s nothing that actively wants to kill us.” In this sense, cosmicism can be fearful and anxiety-provoking or comforting and beautiful depending on one’s point of view. 4.3 CONCLUSION Lovecraft’s traumas, nervous breakdowns, mental and physical problems, relationship with the family members, and scientific interests (especially astronomy) all had an influence on the formation of cosmicism. Since he was a highly sensitive person, anxieties, fears, and phobias were always present in his life. For this reason, these anxiety-provoking elements, as well as the anxiety itself, have been analyzed, along with their representations in his narratives. Moreover, Lovecraft’s possible chorea minor was analyzed with today’s data and investigations. BÜKE SAǦLAM 110 As a result of all this, it is again convenient to call his stories “anxiety narratives,” since deciphering his fantasy stories turn them into “metaphorical illness stories,” which can only be completely understood using medical/health humanities. In the next chapter the same approach will be used to thoroughly analyze Susie’s share in Lovecraft’s anxiety. 1 Today we know that chorea minor is a result of a common infection: “Sydenham’s chorea is temporally associated with group A β-haemolytic streptococcus infection, and this association is supported by laboratory studies. The diagnosis fulfils the Jones criteria for rheumatic fever. Streptococcal pharyngitis, caused by group A streptococcus, is a common bacterial infection in children and young adults. Most infections are uncomplicated and respond easily to appropriate antibiotics. Infections may be so minor – resolving without intervention – that affected individuals do not seek medical attention. The causal relationship between group A streptococcus infection and Sydenham’s chorea is supported by clinical and epidemiologic observations” (Punukollu et al. 2016, 16). 2 As it was quoted earlier, Lovecraft seems to believe that his nervousness would cause chorea: “My own nervous state in childhood once produced a tendency inclining toward chorea, although not quite attaining that level” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 98). 3 As Joshi comments: “Lovecraft returned to Hope High in September 1905, but his transcript states that he left on November 7 of that year, not returning until September 10, 1906 […] This is no doubt the period of his ‘near-breakdown’ of 1906. There is not much evidence as to the nature of this illness […] It is surely peculiar that Lovecraft does not admit to a ‘near-breakdown’ in 1904, when he faced the trauma of Whipple Phillips’s death and the move from 454 Angell Street; the 1906 breakdown does not appear to have been as serious as its two predecessors (1898 and 1900), even if it did mean his withdrawal from high school for nearly a year” (Joshi 2013, 149–50). Some possible reasons of this third breakdown may be the stress caused by the death of his grandfather, the change of his living space, his possible Sydenham’s chorea and the pressure derived from his schoolwork. 4 Lovecraft mentions this problem while he is talking about his violin lessons: “I had a very irregular heart action—badly affected by physical exertion—& such acute kidney trouble that a local practitioner would have operated for stone in the bladder had not a Boston specialist given a sounder diagnosis & traced it to the nervous system. That was when I was 9” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 102). 5 As Lovecraft notes: “My family kept me away from gymnasiums after I had a fainting fit in one at the age of 9” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 108-9). 6 Joshi further comments: “Although Lovecraft maintains in the above letter that ‘in time the tendency died down’ and that his entrance into high school ‘caused me to reform,’ I shall have occasion to refer to possible recurrences of these chorea-like symptoms at various periods in Lovecraft’s life, even into maturity” (Joshi 2013, 98). 7 He similarly stated: “In 1908 I should have entered Brown University, but the broken state of my health rendered the idea absurd. I was and am a prey to intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness which prevents my continuous application to anything” (Lovecraft, quoted in Joshi 2013, 185). Also this account supports the idea that he might have been the victim of an untreated chorea minor. 8 As Joshi states: “Lovecraft’s breakdown—whether purely mental or nervous or a combination of mental and physical factors—was, clearly, something related to his schoolwork” (Joshi 2013, 187). 9 In one of his statements Lovecraft calls himself an alien: “In 1918 he states: ‘I no more visit the Ladd Observatory or various other attractions of Brown University. Once I expected to utilize them as a regularly entered student, and some day perhaps control some of them as a faculty member. But having known them with this ‘inside’ attitude, I am today unwilling to visit them as a casual outsider and non-university barbarian and alien.’ This sense of alienation presumably began soon after his collapse in 1908” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 195). 10 As discussed in the previous chapter, the unknown (which in this case, represents mental illness) was hardly something unknown for Lovecraft. He was aware of his genetic vulnerability, and for him, the question was not “what” but “when.” 11 Lovecraft’s fourth breakdown, which occurred in 1908, can be considered as one of the most severe and troublesome events in Lovecraft’s life, causing a huge emotional damage and changing his life in many aspects. As Joshi remarks: “What derailed that future—and what ensured that Lovecraft would never lead a “normal” life— was his fourth “near-breakdown,” clearly the most serious of his life. In some ways he never recovered from it” (Joshi 2013, 184). Lovecraft states: “In 1908 I should have entered Brown University, but the broken state of my 4 Trauma, Madness, and Changing Perspectives 111 health rendered the idea absurd. I was and am a prey to intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness which prevents my continuous application to any thing” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 185). 12 A similar tendency is seen in the case of the character, Steven Crain, in The Haunting of Hill House (2018). In the Netflix adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel of the same name, Steven undergoes vasectomy to avoid transmitting the “madness” that is present in his genes. 13 Lovecraft, witnessing the various problems of his family members, tended to see his mental “weakness” as an outcome of genetic factors: “I didn’t inherit a very good set of nerves, since near relatives on both sides of my ancestry were prone to headaches, nerve-exhaustion, and breakdowns” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 97). 14 Not being able to finish high school did not only cause a life-time poverty for Lovecraft but also increased the tension between him and Susie. Joshi says: “Scott rightly conjectures: ‘However she [Susie] adored him, there may have been a subconscious criticism of Howard, so brilliant but so economically useless.’ No doubt her disappointment with her son’s inability to finish high school, go to college, and support himself did not help this situation any” (Joshi 2013, 192-3). 15 As Lovecraft further remarks: “when I was 18 I suffered such a breakdown that I had to forego college. In those days I could hardly bear to see or speak to anyone, & liked to shut out the world by pulling down dark shades & using artificial light” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 188). 16 Joshi states: “What was his mother doing in this entire situation? […] Recall her own medical record at Butler Hospital (now destroyed) as paraphrased by Winfield Townley Scott: ‘a woman of narrow interests who received, with a traumatic psychosis, an awareness of approaching bankruptcy.’ This assessment was made in 1919, but the condition must have been developing for years, at the very least since the death of Susie’s own father, Whipple Phillips” (Joshi 2013, 192). 17 It is important to note that Susie may have been one of the reasons why Lovecraft was uncomfortable with his own appearance throughout his life. Joshi says: “by the age of eighteen or twenty he had perhaps reached his full height of five feet eleven inches, and had probably developed that long, prognathous jaw which he himself in later years considered a physical defect” (Joshi 2013, 194). “Harold W. Munro testifies that as early as his high school years Lovecraft was bothered by ingrown facial hairs” (194). “As late as February 1921 […] Lovecraft writes to his mother of a new suit that ‘made me appear as nearly respectable as my face permits.’” (194). 18 Joshi comments on Lovecraft’s relationship with his mother: “Lovecraft’s wife, although she never knew Susie, makes a plausible claim that Susie ‘lavished both her love and her hate on her only child.’” (Joshi 2013, 193). Lovecraft was deeply affected by this as he “himself once (and only once) admitted to his wife that his mother’s attitude to him was (and this is his word) ‘devastating.’” (Joshi 2013, 194-5). Joshi further comments: “It is often conjectured that she was transferring to her son the hatred and disgust she felt at her husband after he was stricken with syphilis, and I think this is very likely” (194). 19 As Charlotte Scott states in her article, “Dark Matter: Shakespeare’s Foul Dens and Forests”: “The history of anxiety associated with the forest is predominantly universal (largely based on a primal fear of darkness and predators) but that sense of threat in darkness was translated by the church into a sense of spiritual blindness or removal from God. In Christian terms, forests were representative of both error and separation and their wandering paths were a challenge to those who had strayed and erred to find salvation” (Scott 2011, 19). She further suggests while analyzing Titus Andronicus: “The forest becomes a place of madness and horror, and that which was once gentle is now fatal. […] The forest is never secure or stable; it is never essential or consistent but rather a map of the desiring or diseased mind, a backdrop for transformations and a space for the solitary – for the hunter and the hunted” (16). 20 “The illness that struck Winfield Scott Lovecraft in April 1893 and forced him to remain in Butler Hospital in Providence until his death in July 1898 is worth examining in detail” (Joshi 2013, 39). 21 “M. Eileen McNamara, M.D., studying Winfield’s medical record, concluded that the probability of Winfield’s having tertiary syphilis is very strong […] Winfield displayed nearly all the symptoms of tertiary syphilis as identified by Hinsie and Campbell: ‘(1) simple dementia […]; (2) paranoid form […]; (3) expansive or manic form […]; or (4) depressive form’” (Joshi 2013, 40). 22 Joshi states: “Lovecraft must have known that something was not quite right here: he knew that Butler Hospital was not a place for the treatment of ordinary physical maladies but was in fact an insane asylum.” He further adds: “I do not think that Lovecraft knew very much about his father’s illness and death, but I think he wondered a great deal” (Joshi 2013, 45). 23 “When Susie herself was admitted to Butler Hospital in 1919, her doctor, F.J. Farnell, ‘found disorder had been evidenced for fifteen years; that in all, abnormality had existed at least twenty-six years.’ It is no accident that the onset of her ‘abnormality’ dates to 1893” (Joshi 2013, 43). BÜKE SAǦLAM 112 24 “For his part, Whipple Van Buren Phillips proved to be an entirely satisfactory replacement for the father Lovecraft never knew. Lovecraft’s simple statement that at this time ‘my beloved grandfather…became the center of my entire universe’ is all we need to know” (Joshi 2013, 49). 25 As Joshi comments: “The death of Whipple Philips and the loss of his birthplace in 1904 cause Lovecraft seriously to consider suicide” (Joshi 2013, 428). 26 Joshi further states: “Wilcox is a name from Lovecraft’s ancestry” (Joshi 2013, 855). 27 “The year 1898 was certainly an eventful one for Lovecraft: he discovered Poe and science, and began learning Latin; he first began attendance at school; and he had his first nervous breakdown” (Joshi 2013, 97). 28 “[…] it was in the winter of 1902-03 that Lovecraft discovered astronomy. (Joshi 2013, 119) 29 This sentence was cited in the previous chapter to discuss another topic. 30 “The English writer Hugh Elliot (1881-1930) was never held in much esteem as a philosopher, since he was merely a popularizer of the subject and not a pioneer in any capacity […] I cannot find any evidence that Lovecraft read any other work of his except Modern Science and Materialism, but this book encapsulated the doctrine of pure materialism ably enough to give him a clear foundation for his metaphysics” (Joshi 2013, 448). 31 As Joshi states: “But the clearest borrowing from Elliot relates to the central weird phenomenon of the tale—the fact that every particle of space is populated by a mass of loathsome creatures that can flow through our own bodies. This is really nothing more than a horrific presentation of a common fact that most material objects consist largely of empty space” (Joshi 2013, 523). 32 Werner Heisenberg said: “The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible… atoms are not things” (quoted in Abdul 2019, 721). 113 5 THE QUESTION OF LOVE, FEAR AND ANXIETY 5.1 INTRODUCTION The previous chapter already discussed Lovecraft’s childhood traumas, physical and mental problems to better understand the nature of his anxiety. This chapter will go a step further and focus specifically on the relationship between Lovecraft and his mother and analyze the author’s early emotional development, using Harry Harlow’s ideas on mother love and maternal bond. Therefore, my first goal will be to understand whether the toxic relationship between Susie and her son was the starting point of his cosmicism. The second aim of this chapter is to understand the way Lovecraft depicted mental illness in his writings. While anxiety and fear are two prominent themes of his fiction, it is important to remember that these may actually be visible consequences or symptoms of more subtle and complex mental disorder(s). Given that Lovecraft’s life and writings are intertwined, identifying and deciphering the metaphors in his writings allows me to truly understand both the true meaning of his narratives and his own mental disorders and pain. For this reason, the role of medical/health humanities will be huge in my analysis. The focus so far has been on fear, anxiety, and depression; however, it is not possible to understand these concepts without analyzing the question of love. 1 As Deborah Blum asks in Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection: “And yet, can you understand love without understanding hurt?” (Blum 2002, 207). BÜKE SAǦLAM 114 An extensive analysis of Lovecraft’s microcosm (traumas and mental illness in addition to Susie’s role on his psychological development) is necessary to continue with the analysis of the “macrocosm” (cosmicism) he created. 5.2 S“MOTHERED”: UNDERSTANDING THE MOTHER’S ROLE IN LOVECRAFT’S ANXIETY NARRATIVES The University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Harry Harlow’s influential paper, “The Nature of Love,” starts with the following statement: Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned mission as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. (Harlow 1958, 673) Harlow’s experiments with infant rhesus monkeys were groundbreaking as they scientifically proved the importance of mother love, the mother-baby bond and contact comfort, which were some of the ideas that were totally rejected by the scientists 2 of that era. Rhesus monkeys’ complex, sophisticated and human-like systems (contrary to other popular subjects such as rats) allowed Harlow to observe, discover and prove the effects of love in human beings. One of his most important and famous experiments was the surrogate mother experiment where two surrogate “mothers” (one was made of terrycloth and other one was made of wire) were given to a baby rhesus monkey: In our initial experiment, the dual mother-surrogate condition, a cloth mother and a wire mother were placed in different cubicles attached to the infant’s living cage […] For four newborn monkeys the cloth mother lactated and the wire mother did not; and, for the other four, the condition was reversed. (Harlow 1958, 676) Harlow wanted to see which “mother” the baby monkeys would prefer. If they preferred the wire mother with food, then it would mean that the behaviorists and neo-behaviorists like 5 The Question of Love, Fear and Anxiety 121 Figure 2: Infant rhesus monkey's reaction during its mother surrogate's absence in the open-field test, Harlow Primate Lab, 1958. 2 Ainsworth’s strange-situation test, which is very similar to open-field test, also shows the differences between securely attached and insecurely attached infant’s behavior. In this test: Mother and infant arrive at the lab together and settle themselves in a playroom. A friendly researcher welcomes them and then sits quietly in a corner. Toys and games litter the cheerful room and, typically, once there, surrounded by all the bright plastic possibilities, the baby crawls off to explore […] A few minutes later, the mother leaves the room; the baby is now alone in that fascinating but still strange place. Only the unknown researcher remains. Then, after a few minutes or so, the mother returns. (Blum 2002, 165) As expected, during the absence of their mother, the infants’ responses are pretty similar to those of the baby monkeys. As Blum puts: “Without their mother, many of the children stopped playing, some cried. They might tearfully look around, search the room, toddle toward the door in search of the missing parent” (166). However, “sometimes, a child would continue playing in his mother’s absence and, upon her return, still relaxed, merely look up, beaming. Ainsworth classed these children as beautifully, securely attached” (166). Thus, Ainsworth once again proves that mother love and true mother-child bond can indeed eliminate the infant’s fear of the unknown. Ainsworth also finds the chance to visit the subject families in their houses and observes the relationship between the mother and the child and “found that the mothers of 2 This photo was taken from Harry Harlow’s article “The Nature of Love” which can be found in the works cited. The content is in the public domain as stated by APA PsycNet. http://rightslink.apa.org/journal/196002805-001 BÜKE SAǦLAM 122 securely attached children were acutely tuned to their children. They were responsive to the cry and the smile, quicker to pick up a crying child, inclined to hold a baby longer and with more apparent pleasure” (Blum 2002, 167). As discussed previously, Lovecraft wasn’t calm as an infant. This might be—at least partially—related to the lack of a secure attachment. Joshi cites one of Lovecraft’s accounts: “My own headaches and nervous irritability and exhaustion-tendency began as early as my existence itself—I, too, was an early bottle baby with unexplained miseries and meagre nutriment-assimilative capacities…” 5 (quoted in Joshi 2013, 97). Joshi also mentions an important remark of Kenneth Faig: “So, in addition to all her other worries, Susie had her infant’s colic.” and comments: “Early weaning was common practice at the turn of the century and for a long time thereafter; but Lovecraft’s remark suggests that his weaning occurred even earlier than was the custom” (97). Infant colic indeed says a lot about the mother-child bond and is also related to mother’s anxiety. As the article “Infant Colic: Mechanisms and Management” states: Family stress, maternal anxiety, and the transmission of tension from mother to infant might play a role in the aetiology of infant colic. Indeed, maternal anxiety disorders were a robust predictor for infant colic, even after controlling for potential confounders such as maternal age, education, and parity. Furthermore, mothers with a high trait anxiety score had a twofold higher risk of having an infant with colic than mothers with low trait anxiety scores. (Zeevenhooven et al. 2018, 485) As discussed in the previous chapter and continues to be analyzed in this chapter, Susie’s problems were not limited to anxiety disorders. However, her anxiety apparently affected Lovecraft when he was a baby and maybe even started his life-long obsession with the unknown. While it is totally normal to be afraid of the unknown, 6 mother love and secure attachment help the infant to cope with it. Because, while transmitting security and trust to her child, mother doesn’t deny or eliminate the factor of the unknown; she simply transmits the idea (and feeling) that he/she is not alone or helpless inside the unknown. Thus, the mother metaphorically teaches 5 The Question of Love, Fear and Anxiety 123 her son how to survive, mentally and emotionally, in this uncertain world. However, in Lovecraft’s case a chronic existential anxiety is seen. As Sapolsky puts: For primates the definition of a stressor expands beyond merely a physical challenge to homeostasis. In addition, it includes thinking you are going to be thrown out of homeostasis. An anticipatory stress response is adaptive if there really is a physical challenge coming. However, if you are constantly but incorrectly convinced that you are about to be thrown out of balance, you are being an anxious, neurotic, paranoid, or hostile primate who is psychologically stressed. (Sapolsky 2018, 126) Lovecraft’s anxiety continued throughout his life and symptoms like “constant but incorrect” thoughts about “thrown out of balance,” which demonstrated itself mainly in fear of madness, were present. Cognitive distortions play an important role in anxiety disorders and it is possible to see their metaphorical representations in Lovecraft’s writings. This again supports my argument, which is to understand his writings as personal narratives rather than mere fictions. As Brad Lewis states: “Clark finds that personal ‘narratives give voice to the ill, the traumatized, and the disabled’ and restore the insights and wisdom they have achieved— wisdom that is often lost by medical research and clinical ‘case studies’ that too often turns people into statistics and diagnostic labels” (Lewis 2014, 439). However, before analyzing these examples, it would be better to explain cognitive distortion in anxiety disorders. In “The Anxious Child: Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment Strategies,” Kendall et al. define distortions as “dysfunctional thinking processes” (Kendall, Howard, and Epps 1988, 284) and state that: In anxiety and depression, there are misperceptions of the demands of the environment, self-criticism, underappraisal of personal abilities, and characteristically—limited acting-out, aggressive, impulsive behavior. These children are not undercontrolled, but show a tendency toward overcontrol. Associated with overcontrol are characteristics of cognitive distortion. (284) In their article on children’s anxiety and threat perception abnormalities, Muris et al. focus specifically on anxious children’s perception of danger and threat: BÜKE SAǦLAM 124 According to Kendall’s theory of childhood anxiety, pathological fear and anxiety result from the chronic overactivity of schemas around themes of danger and death. […] One example of such a cognitive distortion is interpretation bias, which reflects anxious children’s tendency to more readily interpret ambiguous situations as threatening. (Muris et al. 2000, 124) Threat perception abnormalities related to anxiety are seen in many of Lovecraft’s writings. In “Dagon,” the narrator describes the land onto which he washed up and its surroundings as follows: Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear. (Lovecraft 2014, 26) The narrator continues perceiving neutral things/situations negatively, attributing them evil features: “The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet” (26). Similarly, in “What the Moon Brings,” the moon is perceived and depicted as something evil and threatening. “Moon-cursed waters” (Lovecraft 2014, 229), “hateful moon” (2014, 229), “evil moon” and “leering and treacherous yellow moon” can be given as examples in addition to the narrator’s clear statement in the beginning of the story: “I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous” (229). Another example can be found in “The Lurking Fear” when the narrator comments on the landscape: The ancient lightening-scarred trees seemed unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men’s skulls swelled to gigantic proportions. (239) Finally, in “He” Lovecraft’s dislike for New York becomes the story’s source of horror: “I have said that I was alarmed, yet to my soul nothing was more deadly than the material daylight 5 The Question of Love, Fear and Anxiety 125 world of New York” (359). In all these examples “horror” is born as a result of narrator’s distorted perception. All the mentioned things (sun, moon, trees and vegetation, and even New York), what would otherwise be natural and normal, are the sources of fear and anxiety for the narrators in Lovecraft’s writings. It is therefore a pertinent question whether Lovecraft’s literary techniques for creating cosmic horror actually derive from his threat perception abnormality. However, in order to answer this crucial question, it is necessary to complete all the analyzes. Another important point to mention in Lovecraft’s analysis is the theme of overprotection. As is known, Susie was always overprotective with her son. Joshi comments: There is no question but that his mother both spoiled Lovecraft and was overprotective of him. This latter trait appears to have developed even before Winfield’s hospitalization in 1893. Winfield Townley Scott tells the following story: “[…] Mrs. Lovecraft refused to eat her dinner in the dining room, not to leave her sleeping son alone for an hour one floor above. When a diminutive teacher-friend, Miss Ella Sweeney, took the rather rangy youngster to walk, holding his hand, she was enjoined by Howard’s mother to stoop a little lest she pull the boy’s arm from its socket. When Howards pedaled his tricycle […] his mother trooped beside him, a guarding hand upon his shoulder.” (Joshi 2013, 98-9) The following event in 1917, mainly told by Lovecraft’s two friends (W. Paul Cook and Rheinhart Kleiner), once again demonstrates Susie’s pathological approach to her 27 years old son: Both Cook and Kleiner are united on the extreme solicitude exercised by Susie and Lillian over Lovecraft. Cook notes: “Every few minutes Howard’s mother or his aunt, or both, peeped into the room to see if he had fainted or shown signs of strain…” Kleiner tells a more remarkable story: “I noticed that at every hour or so his mother appeared in the doorway with a glass of milk, and Lovecraft forthwith drank it.” It is this constant babying of Lovecraft by Susie and Lillian that no doubt helped to foster in Lovecraft’s own mind a sense of his “invalidism.” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 408–9) Susie’s mental problems were already discussed. However, it is also important to find their metaphorical representations in Lovecraft’s fiction. In many of his writings, the mother character is represented as a passive and weak individual who is—or eventually becomes— mentally unstable. In “The Shunned House,” “the widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from BÜKE SAǦLAM 126 the shock of her husband’s death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house” (Lovecraft 2014, 317). Rhoby’s tragedy indeed evokes Susie’s story, whose mental health deteriorated after her husband’s death and who was eventually confined to a mental asylum. Lovecraft continues with the details regarding Rhoby’s madness as follows: “Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors” (318). Indeed, it is possible to draw a parallel between Susie and Lovecraft’s character, Rhoby, as the following account by Clara Hess gives a rather detailed information about the symptoms of Susie’s mental disorder and show the resemblance between two women: “I remember that Mrs. Lovecraft spoke to me about weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark, and that she shivered and looked about apprehensively as she told her story” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 427). She also recalled: “The last time I saw Mrs. Lovecraft we were both going ‘down street’ on the Butler Avenue car. She was excited and apparently did not know where she was” (quoted in Joshi 2013427). In “The Color Out of Space,” when the contagious madness finally reaches Mrs. Gardner, she “screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns” (Lovecraft 2014, 646). Just like Rhoby Harris, after this incident Mrs. Gardner is confined in the attic. 7 On the other hand, in “The Outsider,” the narrator says: “I think that whoever nursed me must have been shockingly aged, since my first conception of a living person was that of something mockingly like myself, yet distorted, shriveled, and decaying like the castle” (177). Finally, Susie’s overprotection also finds itself a place in “The Thing on the Doorstep” as the narrator comments on Edward Pickman Derby’s situation: Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which 5 The Question of Love, Fear and Anxiety 127 startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange, secretive inner life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom. (991) Looking at the inferences he made, this story also draws attention to Lovecraft’s selfawareness. The narrator openly talks about the negative consequences of overprotection, like preventing Derby to develop necessary social skills: 8 In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were fostered by overcareful parents; so that he never travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a struggle in the business or professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that this formed no tragedy. (991) Harlow’s experiments with the cloth mother also support Lovecraft’s lines. As Blum remarks: Harry also came to realize that a cloth mother’s impenetrably passive nature made her a hopeless parent. She might be as cuddly as a fleece, but fluffy availability was never going to be enough. And it wasn’t just that cloth mom didn’t hug back. It was all the other things she didn’t do: She didn’t teach, direct, or steer the baby towards others. From cloth mom, the baby really learned more isolation, separation from others. (Blum 2002, 192) Moreover, when Lovecraft is compared with the infant rhesus monkeys raised by an inanimate surrogate mother, a further resemblance is seen: Surrogate-reared animals are like alien monkeys from the planet nowhere. The cloth-mother-raised babies didn’t engage in any of that all-important schmoozing. They didn’t play with other monkeys; they didn’t swing into the usual spring mating season. They had no idea what to do with other monkeys— as friends, as enemies, as potential mates, as casual companions. No one had showed them the social ropes and they simply couldn’t find them without help. (Blum 2002, 192–93) Blum’s comparison of the surrogate-raised babies to “alien monkeys” makes sense in the same way Lovecraft felt like an outsider or an alien 9 . As he further tells: “Amongst my few playmates [at the age of five] I was very unpopular, since I would insist on playing out events BÜKE SAǦLAM 128 in history, or acting according to consistent plots” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 104). All the information regarding Lovecraft’s social life during his childhood show that he simply didn’t know how to play with his peers. Joshi gives the example of Lovecraft’s cousin, Ethel M. Phillips: “She confessed in an interview conducted in 1977 that she did not much care for her cousin, finding him eccentric and aloof. She became very irritated because Lovecraft did not apparently know how a swing worked” (105). Lovecraft was well aware of his own inability: “The children I knew disliked me, & I disliked them. I was used to adult company & conversation […] I had nothing in common with the infant train. Their romping & shouting puzzled me. I hated mere play & dancing about” (quoted in Joshi 2013, 104). Neither Lovecraft nor Harlow’s “alien” rhesus monkeys raised by cloth mother knew how to interact with their peers. And just like other autobiographical themes, this sense of alienation is also frequently represented in many of his narratives. A clear example is seen in “The Outsider,” when the narrator says: “For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men” (Lovecraft 2014, 181). In “The Silver Key,” Randolph Carter “sought friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were distant and out of touch with him, for they could not have understood his mental life” (431). It is important to note that, at first it was Lovecraft’s social awkwardness that prevented him from having friends. In time, though, his intellect and rare interests gave him an added eccentricity, replacing his awkwardness and reclusiveness with some kind of snobbery. This so-called mental superiority, which somehow excuses his difficulty in forming social relationships, became a frequent theme of his writings. What is more, he also associated superior intellect with madness. In “‘His madness Held No Affinity’: Reimagining Arkham Asylum,” Benjamin Noad states: Madness is triggered by cataclysmic interactions with the cosmic unknown. There is something particularly privileged about Lovecraft’s view of mental 5 The Question of Love, Fear and Anxiety 129 illness, privileged in the sense that it represents for Lovecraft an elite state of knowledge […] Lovecraft has a surprising and […] idealized view of madness. While the author is known for his racist views and adherence to notions such as the late nineteenth-century idea of social “degeneration”, his fiction tends to sympathize with those who have become mad. Lovecraft’s “mad” characters undergo constant and endless suffering perhaps mirroring his own misanthropy, potential depression, and general despair at the world. By reading this impulse in Lovecraft’s asylums, and with some awareness of his family history, a sense of seclusion emerges; a haven for the Weird reader as much as for the Weird character. (Noad 2021, 45) Indeed, Lovecraft’s complex relationship with madness (madness as something to be afraid of vs. madness as a privilege and a proof of superior intellect and perception) requires careful analysis due to its direct link to cosmicism. The author’s obsession with madness, originated both from his parents’ and his own mental illness, is reflected in his writings and madness is represented as something both admirable and fearful. Moreover, the protagonist does not go mad just because of the horror of the cosmic unknown, but because of his own particular intellect which allows him to fully comprehend this horror. In this sense, the profound perception becomes both a blessing and a curse. As discussed in the previous chapter, 10 Lovecraft usually uses the term “sensitive few” to describe people with this rare characteristic. In “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” the narrator comments on the psychological effects of a horrific event as follows: “It is fortunate that they were all strong men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed” (Lovecraft 2014, 559). On the other hand, in “The Shadow Out of Time,” the Great Race’s choice points to a connection between higher intellectual capacity and cosmic unknown, as it chooses: The best discoverable representative of the highest of that period’s life-forms; entering the organism’s brain and setting up therein its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process was set up. (1035) Therefore, the sensitive individual, who is thought to be “queer” or insane, becomes the “chosen one” because of his mental abilities. BÜKE SAǦLAM 130 However, Lovecraft’s approach to madness is not limited with this rather “schizophrenic” interpretation. His understanding of madness as well as his love-hate relationship with it is very ambiguous and almost unfathomable but is still traceable in his works. As Noad further states: For Lovecraft, madness is always an empathetically reasonable response to the threat of impossible, incomprehensible, and unknown things from elsewhere; in Lovecraft’s sanatoriums, madness is demonstrated as a sane response to cosmic horror, rather than a form of criminal transgression. (Noad 2021, 44) One of the characteristics of the mentally ill is, then, his/her ability or wish to see “beyond” or to confront with the unknown. Again, in “From Beyond,” the narrator’s friend, Crawford Tillinghast, finds “a way to break down the barriers” between the world people know, see, and interact with and other worlds they can’t normally reach, so that they can “see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight” (Lovecraft 2014, 132). Tillinghast claims he has seen “truth” and wants to show it to narrator. After this experience, however, Tillinghast dies and the narrator is deeply traumatized because of what he saw. “Truth” turns him paranoid: “I never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary” (137). Moreover, Lovecraft stresses the painfully personal and abstract nature of mental illness, depicting his characters as extremely alone in their experiences. No one else sees or knows what they saw or knew and, for this reason, people can’t understand or empathize with their fear and pain. In “The Nameless City,” the narrator is the only person who has ever seen the legendary nameless city: “I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows” (165). Similarly in “The Lurking Fear” the narrator says: “Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had never concealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on that spectral and desolate mountain” (238). In “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” the narrator defines Charles Ward as psychologically unique: “His 6 Brave New Ecology and Its Discontents: Limits of the Anxious Body 137 approach anxiety as a non-human entity, a disease, and the actual storyteller of Lovecraft’s narratives. This post-anthropocentric approach will combine the disciplines of medical/health humanities and posthumanism and thus, will help me to make a more updated and accurate reading of the author’s writings. In this way, also I will be able to analyze changing anxieties and their direct relationship with the uncontrollable nature. Finally, I will try to answer whether a posthumanist reading of Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives is possible. 6.2 ANTI-NARRATIVE AND ANXIETY So far, Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives have been analyzed using mainly narrative medicine, even though their focus is inherently chaotic and beyond narration. This approach allowed a better understanding of the author’s mind, philosophy, and mental illness by uncovering and deciphering hidden and subtle meanings, and more importantly, it showed the impossibility of considering his writings as mere fiction or horror stories, by giving the role of the wounded storyteller to Lovecraft. However, as discussed earlier, anxiety eventually transcends any kind of description, and most of the time words and language become insufficient to reflect its true nature. 1 This points to anxiety’s own reality, which is impermeable to any kind of narrative form that follows strict linguistic rules. In “Before Narrative: Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain,” Sara Wasson gives the following example: Lara Birk writes in her autoethnography that severe pain “not only ruptured the coherence of my narrative, it precluded coherence as a narrative possibility;” in her case, she found “the embodied narrative of the person in pain is unpredictable, unreliable, and seemingly unsuitable for communication.” People living with chronic pain describe how their experience is disbelieved when it does not accord with expected narrations. (Wasson 2018, 107) In the same way anxiety “precludes coherence as a narrative possibility” and allows Lovecraft to be experimental in his writings and gives them its weird, unorthodox and liminal BÜKE SAǦLAM 138 form that can be considered both as narrative and anti-narrative. Carl H. Sederholm points to “Nyarlathotep,” stating: One of the biggest challenges of reading “Nyarlathotep” is understanding what happens to the narrator’s voice somewhere between the penultimate and the concluding paragraphs. […] There are at least two key moments when the narrator’s voice seems to disappear from the narrative altogether, thereby allowing some other voice and perspective to potentially enter into the tale. (Sederholm 2022, 301) This approach is important because of its posthumanist connotation 2 and because it points to the stylistic aspect of the author’s narratives, since by adding the voice of chaos or anxiety itself, Lovecraft interrupts his seemingly traditional narrative. Sederholm points to the structure of the opening paragraph: “Nyarlothotep … the crawling chaos … I am the last … I will tell the audient void…” (Lovecraft 2014, 138), which is followed by the narrator’s account of a past event when he first saw and defied Nyarlathotep. The narrative then concludes with a vague and surreal depiction of an “outside” that is beyond comprehension. As Sederholm further comments: “The narrative voice, once so confident and rational, is now impersonal, distant, and lost. To underscore the point, Lovecraft turns from the narrative ‘I’ that he has used in the story so far” (Sederholm 2022, 304). By eliminating the narrative voice and giving a way to chaos, Lovecraft adds anti-narrative qualities to his anxiety narrative. While using these elements makes the narrative more original and weirder—therefore Lovecraft’s preference to use them in his narratives makes sense, from a medical/health humanities perspective this can be interpreted as the only way possible for the author to approach his own anxiety. Just as in the case of chronic pain, anxiety defies coherence and shapes Lovecraft’s narratives. In her article, “Mean Streets: Tracking the Dispositives of Address(es) with China Miéville’s ‘Reports of Certain Events in London’,” Nicola Galubitz includes Miéville’s comment regarding “The Call of Cthulhu”: 6 Brave New Ecology and Its Discontents: Limits of the Anxious Body 139 “[T]here is no story, only the slow uncovering, from disjointed information and discarded papers, of the fact of the Weird,” writes China Miéville (the author, in a handbook article) about H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” Miéville calls Lovecraft’s “antinarrative” “exemplary of Weird Fiction” because of its bricolage technique and its unprecedented, unrelatable monster, patched together out of several species. (Glaubitz 2021, 162) Anti-narrative elements found in Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives both serve to construct their weird base and to accurately represent the author’s anxiety. As Wasson further states: Scholars of class, feminism and postcoloniality have identified many ways in which a narratively coherent self is a cultural construction imbricated with privilege. […] Similarly, Laura Salisbury, drawing on Angela Woods, warns that “linear narratives that stress deep psychological continuities across time and expressive, confessional “I” … might privilege and render problematically universal modes of subjectivity and self-expression that are, in fact, culturally and historically contingent. (Wasson 2018, 107–8) Since anxiety is weird and visceral, it transcends any cultural or linguistic constructions, including the narrator himself. In other words, anxiety overrules its human host by taking over his logical and well-structured narrative voice. Sederholm states: For Lovecraft, calling attention to the ways human perception weakens and falls, particularly when faced with a cosmic perspective, is of paramount importance. […] He was especially interested in exploring moments in which his characters faced problems that were “unintelligible but real”. (Sederholm 2022, 302–3) He further comments: “It is precisely this kind of breakdown that Lovecraft articulates at this point in ‘Nyarlathotep;’ it is also the primary reason why the narrator disappears in his own narrative. He is no longer the confident and rational being he once was. His thinking is becoming weird.” (303). This Weird element, again, evokes the loss of coherence that is present in illness stories. In her article, Wasson gives the example of Lous Heshusius, “the author of Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account,” who “has suffered profoundly from chronic pain for many years” (Wasson 2018, 109). Commenting on her work, Wasson further suggests: “Heshusius’s work can certainly be approached as dramatising the way that illness BÜKE SAǦLAM 140 experience can destroy one’s sense of a coherent narrative self” (110). Wasson’s article contains an excerpt from Heshusius’s work, where the author states: I try to speak to doctors about the severity of my pain. My words float strangely in the air. As I pronounce them, I myself become a spectator. As soon as I begin to speak, I am no longer there. Someone else is speaking these words. Someone who has not suffered the pain, for it is much worse than she says. How can she say so little? […] How can she, how can I, express this prelanguage torment? (110) When Lovecraft’s and Heshusius’s texts are compared, it is really hard to ignore the uncanny similarity between the “disappearing” subjects. In both cases, when anxiety and pain take over the narratives, the originally present narrative voice “I” dissolves, transforming these narratives into pure chaos or anti-narratives. While this may seem like dissociation (and it may be, to a certain degree), it actually marks a transition to a realm beyond language (or prelanguage, as Heshusius puts it). And this realm, according to Wasson, can be liberating for the author: [Heshusius] experiences a moment of mindful awareness that overflows with solace. As Mark Sullivan and David Zucker explain, mindfulness requires resisting turning experience into narrative. Heshusius finds this state profoundly beneficial, describing a “disappearing me”, “surrendering these things called ‘I’ and ‘pain’”. Furthermore, writing also yields benefits to Heshusius that are not best read as functions of a “coherent” narrative self. It offers a relief to the degree that it helps her feel heard and witnessed in the moment. (110) In this sense, concentrating on the anti-narrative qualities in Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives is indeed a beneficial method not only to better understand his texts as illness narratives, but also to witness his anxiety in its purest form. However, in her article Wasson also draws on “affect theory,” which she defines as follows: “Affect theory is concerned with the inseparable entanglement of the somatic, the social and (in some of its incarnations) the emotional. This scholarship seeks language to describe emergent, visceral, often inchoate forces: as Joel Burges and Amy Elias say, this scholarship ‘is the effort to understand the present as it plays out in somatic contexts’” (108). 6 Brave New Ecology and Its Discontents: Limits of the Anxious Body 141 While in this chapter I won’t be using affect theory, this approach is still worth mentioning due to its relevance to my analysis regarding author’s anxiety. In their article, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” Seigworth and Gregg describe affect as follows: Affect […] is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1) On the oher hand, affectivity is about man’s subjective reaction to the happenings: “Affectivity, in this sense, is when something happens to us, and we react to it. We react according to the capacities we are able to mobilise. That is, the same impulse will propagate and crystallise in quite distinct manners, depending on who is being affected” (Sharma and Tygstrup 2015, 14). Affect and affectivity are quite important when it comes to complex and multifaceted concepts such as anxiety, which can be treated as an emotion or as something even more subtle and visceral than that. As it will be throughly analyzed in the second part of this chapter, anxiety can be seen as a “force” or “impulse” as well as our “reaction” to this force. It can be originated from inner senses or/and outer elements. Depending on the perspective, then, it can be both the object and the subject, and can be represented both as a non-human entity and as something totally anthropogenic. The reason this chapter begins with anti-narrative is, then, to show how our understanding changes and expands depending on the existence of a narrator or his disappearance from the “narrative” (which gives way to anti-narrative). While I have so far treated Lovecraft as the “wounded storyteller,” shifting the focus from the subject (or the narrative voice) to the non-human object helps me better understand the author’s anxiety and its limits. BÜKE SAǦLAM 142 6.3 A POSTHUMANIST READING OF LOVECRAFT’S ANXIETY NARRATIVES: IS IT POSSIBLE? In “An Eldritch Crisis: Capitalist Paradigms in the Cthulhu Mythos,” Daniel Doncel refers to Lovecraft as a “crisis author”: Reading Lovecraft in the twenty-first century requires an awareness of how our common-sensical worldviews are shattered by reality. Because at the end of the day he is a crisis author, it is reasonable to say that the reason his fiction is appealing to contemporary audiences is because it deals with the very same kinds of crises we deal with here and now, in a capitalist world growing more decadent every day. The themes and narrative structures of the Cthulhu Mythos resonate with our own existential issues in that they all consist of the contradiction between a collapsing worldview and its resistance to being substituted by a more accurate one. They resonate, in a word, with a capitalist worldview that is the only thing we have been taught to see, and that is quickly proving to be a lie. (Doncel 2022, 141) What’s impressive about Lovecraft’s narratives is the range of anxiety they represent. Indeed, his narratives cover many faces of anxiety, from the most personal and private type of anxiety stemming from traumas, family problems, and mental disorders, to a more existential type, and even those of purely social, economic, and environmental origin. This extensive representation of anxiety makes the author’s narratives reusable—and reinterpretable—by recycling them in all kinds of troubled times. But what is even more fascinating is that Lovecraft not only describes his experience of anxiety, but also accepts anxiety as an incomprehensible, semi-autonomous, and chaotic force and tries to convey it in its purest form. This creates the anti-narrative qualities mentioned earlier and allows for a posthumanist approach that will serve to further analyze anxiety as a non-human entity and subject. However, before continuing with the analysis, it would be better to clarify the concepts and theories that I will use, and their relationship to my argument. The ideas of posthumanism are crucial to better understand the meaning of Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives in today’s world of crisis. In Philosophical Posthumanism, Francesca Ferrando cites Andy Miah’s definition of posthumanism as follows: 6 Brave New Ecology and Its Discontents: Limits of the Anxious Body 143 “A crucial premise of posthumanism is its critical stance towards the idea that humans are superior species in the natural order.” In the following, he clarifies, “In this sense, the ‘post’ of posthumanism need not imply moving beyond humanness in some biological or evolutionary manner. Rather, the starting point should be an attempt to understand what has been omitted from an anthropocentric worldview.” (Ferrando 2019, 23) Rosi Braidotti, on the other hand, states that “[l]ife is not exclusively human: it encompasses both bios and zoe forces, as well as geo-and techno-relations that defy our collective and singular powers of perception and understanding” (Braidotti 2019, 51). Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives, novel and “weird” for his time, make complete sense when read in today’s quasi-posthumanist world. As a matter of fact, from a contemporary point of view, it is possible to say that the anxiety in his narratives stems from the subject’s awareness of his own “posthumanity.” As Braidotti suggests: Posthuman subjects establish relations on at least three levels: to one’s self, to others and to the world. The world can be defined as a complex set of environmental, social and affective ecologies. […] The knowing subject is not Man, or Anthropos alone, but a more complex assemblage that undoes the boundaries between inside and outside the self, by emphasizing processes and flows. Neither unitary, nor autonomous, subjects are embodied and embedded, relational and affective collaborative entities, activated by relational ethics. (51) However, in Lovecraft’s narratives, the sensitive protagonist’s almost instinctive awareness of his own posthumanity doesn’t mean that he automatically understands, accepts, and embraces this idea and its connotations. On the contrary, this idea disturbs him, making him deeply uncomfortable and pathologically anxious, and even breaks him on several occasions. According to Braidotti, “posthuman subjectivity is a transversal alliance that nowadays involves non-human agents. This means that the posthuman subject relates at the same time to the Earth—land, water, plants, animals, bacteria—and to technological agents— plastic, wires, cells, codes, algorithms” (51). However, Lovecraft’s posthuman subject doesn’t want to be an “assemblage” without “boundaries,” and contrary to Braidotti, he doesn’t find BÜKE SAǦLAM 144 any comfort in this “cross-species transversality.” 3 This creates one of the main conflicts and reflects itself, again, as anxiety. 6.3.1 Anxiety as Both Subject and Object Interpreting Lovecraft’s narratives using posthumanist ideas is not new. In fact, it has become a popular trend in recent years, especially with the ongoing pandemic and environmental crisis. As Natasha Rebry Coulthard states in “Lovecraft’s Viral Networks: A Contaminated Ethics for the Chthulucene”: “The steadily-expanding body of posthumanistoriented Lovecraft scholarship in recent years reveals his work as an important source of nonanthropocentric sentiment in line with current scientific and philosophical theories of humannonhuman intimacies” (Coulthard 2022, 143). What I would like to do, however, is to treat anxiety—represented through the unknown—as the subject, instead of the wounded storyteller or protagonist (or Lovecraft himself). At first this may seem to require a shift of focus from subject to object, but we will eventually see that there is no real subject or object in Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives. This parallels with what Ferrando states when discussing posthumanism: “In the economy of knowledge, humans are both subjects and objects: even when trying to avoid anthropocentric positions, humans are still communicating specific and situated human understandings in a human language to other human beings” (Ferrando 2019, 23). This is important for two reasons: it points how intertwined subjects and objects actually are—as in the case of Lovecraft’s narratives—and emphasizes the impossibility of getting rid of the anthropocentric view completely. While in his narratives Lovecraft preferred to highlight the vast cosmos (or the background) instead of humans, he did it as a human being, using a human language. In this sense, it is not possible to completely ignore the human source (or host) while treating maddening anxiety as the “subject” or the non-human narrator/entity. Still, approaching 6 Brave New Ecology and Its Discontents: Limits of the Anxious Body 145 this unknown and unfathomable force as a somewhat semi-independent entity or a disease (or parasite), will give us a new understanding. Indeed, what is seen in Lovecraft’s anxiety narratives is similar to the process of infection development. From the moment the protagonist meets the unknown force, his mental and physical health starts to deteriorate. Or, in other words, the unknown force establishes power and control over the protagonist. As it was seen earlier in the example of “Nyarlathotep,” sometimes it takes man’s narrative ability away. In other cases, like in the popular example of “The Colour Out of Space,” it takes man’s sanity and, eventually, life away. As it was already discussed in previous chapters, however, this force is impersonal and cannot be categorized as something bad or evil. But although it is something beyond words and man-made categories, it has still serious negative effects on the subject. Indeed, the reader often “identifies” this force by its devastating effects on the protagonist. In “Hypnos,” for instance, the protagonist (a sculptor) and his only friend (with whom he met for the first time in a railway station while the friend was unconscious) decide to study the unknown, as well as to transcend and further explore it through dreaming, with the aid of some “exotic drugs.” However, it is not possible to talk about these studies since “they held so slight a connection with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep—those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men” (Lovecraft 2014, 224). The unknown, again, resists any attempt of description, and can only be “suspected” while dreaming and only by imaginative (or sensitive) few 4 (like Lovecraft himself). The protagonist then points to our superficial perception of the everyday world, stating that: “The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked back by the jester’s BÜKE SAǦLAM 146 whim” (224), echoing the ideas of cosmicism. While commenting on the cosmos and unknown, Lovecraft also makes a reference to Einstein (as mentioned before), stating: “One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect” 5 (224). As mentioned, Lovecraft was still frustrated at the time “Hypnos” was written because Einstein’s revolutionary ideas about cosmos was challenging his materialism. In this sense, the protagonist’s wish to “try to do more than suspect,” by delving into the unknown, may reflect Lovecraft’s search for a solid theory which would not go against his philosophy. After these reflections on the vast universe and unknown, which is basically a blend of Lovecraft’s philosophy of cosmicism and his ideas about ongoing scientific advances, the protagonist tries (but fails) to describe his experience. Still, he gives us some clue about its effects: Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments— inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told—for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space—things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every period of revelation some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and present, rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fearhaunted abysses, and occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and typical obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds or vapours. (Lovecraft 2014, 224–25) Although unfathomable, the unknown still has a kind of somatic effect on the protagonist. What he feels resembles floating along “shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses.” The unknown, then, is associated with feelings of shock, fear, and anxiety, and even includes obstacles with tactile features. Indeed, Lovecraft’s well-known disgust toward slippery and viscose things and surfaces, as well as to anything suggestive of aquatic animals (these are also some common physical characteristics of his many cosmic deities), makes the experience even