Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer
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prison, has not elevated him to dizzying heights but simply placed him on a level ground, natural to everyone else. But determined to make the most out of his position, he proceeds with a “frantic craving” in his quest for acceptance and love. Ultimately he arrives at the castle of lights, the goal of his childhood dreams.
His innocent heart is filled with delight as he observes the inviting “open window, gorgeously ablaze with light, and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry.” But as he gathers sufficient courage and attempts the actual social contact his inner nature demanded, he does so only to step from his “single bright moment of hope to (his) blackest convulsion of despair and realization.” He experienced the psychological blow of social rejection and isolation.
To his anxious and subjective mind it did not appear as if his peers’ reaction was due to his different interests, in part , the consequence of his superior intellect, which made him prefer the acting of historical roles to the childish games of others…. (One who knew him in childhood later referred to him as “crazy as a bedbug.”) No, he perceived himself as shunned because of the actual revulsion and nausea caused by his hideous ugliness. Mother had been right! He was a loathsome monster! Seeing his image in the mirror of the mind, the psychological eye perceived only a distorted abnormality, that had “by its simple appearance” turned a group of playing children into “a horde of delirious fugitives….”
This cataclysmic collapse of his self-concept brought him “avalanche of soul-annihilating memory,” he could understand now “all that had been….” He knew now why he had not been allowed to come in contact and play with other children, why his mother always needed to protect him and keep him away from others, he knew the truth about his hideous deformity…. How could he know that in reality he was a rather handsome child with a monstrous mother in the throes of growing personality disintegration…? This traumatic experience had far-reaching and long-lasting effects, and the dreamer from Providence never completely overcame his feelings of ugliness and social inadequacy. For the rest of his life he was more or less a recluse, going out at night and preferring to deal with his friends through correspondence. It is true that in his latter years, particularly the last decade, he was able to compensate for this handicap to a great extent, perhaps due in part to his brief marriage and his New York “exile,” which contributed to make him more fully human. But “The Outsider” was written before he was exposed to the healing effect of those influences.
Returning to the text of the story, we notice that the experience of such completely negative self-concept produced a tremendous burst of anxiety in his young but lacerated mind, and that “in the supreme horror of that second” he repressed his excruciating self-awareness as well as the traumatic event leading to it…he “forgot what had horrified” him. He tried to retreat once more to the consolation of his mother, to the relative security of his home—but the door was closed: things would never be the same again.
He rationalized, saying that he was not sorry for his alienation, and turned for companionship and inspiration to the inner world of fantasies and dreams, riding with the “mocking and friendly ghouls”—the “night gaunts” of his dreams—in the catacombs of his own imagination. In his extreme introversion, he realized that “light was not for (him), nor any gaiety,” save that produced by his own fantastic creations. And in his “new wilderness and freedom,” his independence from others, he “almost welcomed the bitterness of alienage,” realizing always that he “was an outsider, a stranger in this century and among those who are still men,” among those still able to find happiness through interpersonal relations. Rejected by his peers, oppressed by his mother, and misunderstood by all, he renounced society and the twentieth century. Finding security and esthetic pleasure only in the past, he often reminisced the “happiness” of his childhood in his latter years, and turned to the eighteenth century for beauty and inspiration. As August Derleth, his first biographer, noted, he remained an outsider all his life, and his spirit flourished in his rightful and beloved eighteenth century. His unique genius and imagination allowed his mind to fly at prodigious heights well beyond the reach or conception of common men, but like all mortals, his life was the product of an accidental combination of heredity and environment that could not have resulted in a different outcome.
“The Outsider” is a powerful and touching statement about the early years of the “gentleman from Angell Street.”
2. AN ANALYTICAL INTERPRETATION: ALLEGORY OF THE PSYCHE
“The Outsider” almost appears to have been written in order to fit the analytical theory of Carl Gustav Jung. Even though interpretations using Freudian psychoanalysis or Adlerian individual psychology, among others, are also possible, Lovecraft’s tale acquires unusual psychological significance when viewed as an allegorical voyage through the Jungian conception of the unfolding human psyche and its fundamental conflicts. Even though Lovecraft’s letters show that he was well aware of Jung’s theory, the question of whether this story is a case of conscious artistry or a manifestation of the author’s own unconscious and dynamic psyche, is not settled.
The subterranean castle in the tale stands for the Collective Unconscious, the unfathomable psychic ocean common to all men, and containing “rows upon rows” of “antique books” or archetypes. The archetypes, or primordial images, are the psychic representations of the primordial experiences of the species throughout eons of evolution: they are the depository of the ancestral wisdom of the human psyche. (For the reader unfamiliar with Jung’s analytical theory, J. Jacobi’s The Psychology of C.G. Jung, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1962, would provide an ideal introduction.)
As a child is conceived and later born, his psyche is composed of global, undifferentiated contents. These contents are dependent on the genetic factors which determine the unique development of his brain. During the first months, even years, of life, the unconscious contents become gradually differentiated through the process of individuation, into the psychic structural constructs characterizing the normally functioning adult psyche. It is to this slow and gradual process of psyche development that the outsider, the archetypal prototype of the ego, is referring, when mention is made of the “years” passed in the castle, although he “cannot measure the time.”
“I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible.” The budding ego emerges slowly and gradually from the depths of the unfathomable Collective Unconscious. The contents of the unconscious are infinitely old (the hereditary predispositions and instincts accumulated through literally millions of years of organic evolution), and infinitely horrible, at least as perceived from the point of view of the conscious ego (the narrator) because of their primitive, savage, undifferentiated, and archaic nature. These unconscious elements “silently wave twisted branches far aloft,” manifesting themselves distortedly in dreams and nightmares, striving to assert themselves and acquire a charge of libidinal energy.
“There was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations,” the countless generations of ancestors, transcending the family, going back beyond this origins of the tribe, the nation, the race, and even the species, to our subhuman and animal ancestry, and even to the primordial slime where life first originated…. The experiences of countless generations exposed to similar types of conflicts or situations, with individual survival on the balance, have resulted in the natural selection of those reactions or predispositions with adaptive, or survival, value. Or, more specifically, those combinations of genetic alleles making such adaptive reactions more probable, tend to increase in frequency within the gene-pool of the species, until becoming universal. From the piled-up corpses of dead generations we have inherited ancestral tendencies, such as fear of snakes and fear of the dark. The presence of such fears in primitive man would increase the probability of his surviving to reproductive age (escaping the predaters of the night and the poisonous bite of snakes), while those members of the tribe unable to experience or develop such fears seldom lived to pass on their genetic flaw…and even though in modern times such fears, as well as many other unconscious tendencies and predispositions, have ceased to have significant adaptive value, they form part of our inseparable heritage.
“It was never light” in the unconscious castle, because neither consciousness