H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

Houellebecq wrote H. P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie in 1991, three years before publishing his debut novel, Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte). His book on Lovecraft, translated into English in 2005, is the avant-garde which precedes Houellebecq's great war machine. I would consider the oeuvre a pseudo-auto-biography, reminiscent of Baudelaire's perception of Poe, of Nietzsche's Schopenhauer as Educator and, clearly of Savater's graduation thesis on Cioran. To make it clear, Nietzsche's Schopenhauer is Nietzsche himself, along with his Wagner: it is a way of writing about oneself indirectly. What I find fresh and pioneering about Houellebecq's essay is his discovery of an alternative route to world nihilism. To name some of the others: 1) Schopenhauerian – Wagnerian (as Baudrillard has put it); 2) Palahniuk's post-existentialism from Fight Club, Pygmy and Rant; 3) Baudrillard – Žižek – The Matrix; 4) Lars von Trier. Against the World is in fact a way of attacking Nietzsche through Schopenhauer, something that many of Nietzsche's disciples won't appreciate. To say No to life is to go against the test of the eternal return, to choose damnation and resentment over life's affirmation. A Nietzschean cardinal sin! However, one can acknowledge that it is sometimes difficult to endorse life when the feelings of alienation (more exactly fear and hatred against the world) seem to prevail over one's natural (?) inclination to harmony, peace and balance.

Certainly a better analysis of H. P. Lovecraft's literary themes than biography of his life, and Lovecraft is not so abstruse that one would need a separate text to understand his work. There are still some interesting parts, namely Houllebecq's summary of Lovecraft's racism, contempt for modernity, and disregard for sex and money, both in his life and his books, and they are what make this biography worth reading, though they might have worked better as an introduction to a collection of Lovecraft's short stories.