Emina
Melonic is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
Originally from Bosnia, a survivor of the Bosnian war and
its aftermath of refugee camps, she immigrated to the United
States in 1996 and became an American citizen in 2003. She
has a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Her writings have appeared
in National Review, The Imaginative Conservative, New
English Review, The New Criterion, Law and Liberty, The University
Bookman, Claremont Review of Books, The American Mind
and Splice Today. This article originally appeared
in American Greatness.
It would be far
too easy to dismiss the American writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
as an occasional writer of pulp fiction. He is one of the
masters of the horror genre but he also has a rightful place
in American literary canon. Any horror novel worth 
reading
is about more than gore or an endless series of evil acts.
The best showcase the writer’s ability to distinguish
right from wrong. (For that matter, the same is true about
horror films). The perennial ideas about power, greed, passion,
and often misplaced love should be the elements of a worthy
horror story.
One of his most
famous stories, “Herbert West—Reanimator”
was published serially in 1922, and it tells a tale of a scientist
who is rejected by the establishment of his medical school,
the fictional Miskatonic University Medical School. West is
not just a man with a penchant for an occasional rebellion.
There is a reason why his methods are perceived as unethical
and, well, weird. West was obsessed with bringing people back
to life from death by injecting them with a substance wholly
created by him.
“His views,”
writes the narrator of the story, “which were widely
ridiculed by the faculty and his fellow students, hinged on
the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned
means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated
chemical action after the failure of natural processes.”
He believed that “the so-called ‘soul’ is
a myth,” and “like most youths, he indulged in
elaborate day-dreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous
forgivenesses.”
The narrator,
who somehow found himself to be West’s assistant in
tracking the fresh corpses, is uncertain as to why he hasn’t
rejected West’s strange friendship. He is essentially
an accomplice in West’s depraved and unethical acts,
and in many ways, it is the narrator who becomes a far more
intriguing character in this story. We witness West through
the narrator’s eyes, and his ethical questions also
challenge us.
Throughout the
story, West never becomes a caricature of a mad scientist
but rather a man possessed with a desire to extend life for,
presumably, good purposes. Although acting in a similar manner
as Dr. Frankenstein, West also differs in his approach because
he’s not interested in deconstruction of a body. Despite
the fact that he doesn’t believe that soul exists, West
desires to keep the body intact. But these desires come at
a terrible price. Visions of darkness and the depths of evil
into which a man can sink are nearer than we wish to admit.
Lovecraft describes this inhuman territory and a region of
West’s being so chillingly: “Not more unutterable
could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself
had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one
inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernal terror
and unnatural despair of animate nature.”
What West fails
repeatedly to acknowledge is that human beings are not brains
in vats. Their full embodiment is not only of a physical type
but of the spirit itself. In denying this, West has denied
his own existence as well because of his power-seeking obsession.
As the narrator observes, “Herbert West’s existence
was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown,
in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore
to perpetual animation the graveyard’s cold clay.”
The emptiness
and meaninglessness of his life then leads us to the question
whether West even has a soul or has he annihilated it at some
point in his life? The core of his mad project is an extension
of life, and by implication the denial of death. To deny death
is to deny humanity, and no matter how much West rejects spirit,
his delusions (however logical, rationalistic, or scientific
he may pretend them to be) have turned him into precisely
the kind of reanimated corpse he is attempting to create outside
of himself. He may consider himself the reanimator but the
very center of his being is devoid of any anima.
“Weird tales,”
as Lovecraft liked to call the stories, believed his work
meets the requirements of significant literature; and he took
his ‘craft’ very seriously. His stories gives
us a glimpse into the recesses of our minds that we dare not
examine long because there is always an ethical choice to
be made. Despite the fact that Lovecraft was an odd man himself
(with a strange marriage, and an even stranger relationship
with his mother to whom he developed a rather unhealthy attachment),
he produced stories of great imagination and detail. He defended
the horror story as a valid genre, as well as the place of
a writer in that genre, given the fact that horror writers
are often dismissed, and not considered ‘real’
writers. (Stephen King writes about this in his superb memoir
and one of the best books about the writerly vocation, On
Writing).
On one occasion,
Lovecraft wrote,
The imaginative
writer devotes himself to art in its most essential sense
. . . He is a painter of moods and mind-pictures—a capturer
and amplifier of elusive dreams and fancies—a voyager
into those unheard-of lands which are glimpsed through the
veil of actuality . . . Pleasure to me is wonder—the
unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the
changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.
To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in ephemeral;
the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these
are to me the springs of delight and beauty.
Lovecraft was
a deeply philosophical writer, and his stories prove that
probing into human consciousness can lead into the dark abyss
that may or may not look back into us. The stories are mirrors
into our souls, and as much as we get a good scare when we
read them, more importantly they invite us to see the dangers
of how far man can go in his quest to become a god.
