Weird Realism

“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…” (DH 389)

Lovecraft’s first description of a Cthulhu idol runs as follows: “If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing… but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful…” (CC 169; emphasis modified).

But if we define pulp as fiction unaware of its medium, there is a problem with any dismissal of Lovecraft as a pulp writer: namely, Lovecraft was by no means unaware of his medium, as one of his key theoretical works makes clear

These phenomena are strikingly similar to academic art as defined and denounced by the great art critic Greenberg. In his Sydney lecture “Modern and Postmodern,” he states it as follows: “Academicism consists in the tendency to take the medium of an art too much for granted.”23

Rhetoric is the art of the background, and if philosophy is not the science of the background, then I do not know what it is.

To worship the content of propositions is to become a dogmatist. The dogmatist is someone who cannot weigh the quality of thoughts or statements except by agreeing or disagreeing with them.

Heidegger’s counter-claim is that most of our interaction with things is not with things presented to the mind, but rather with items silently taken for granted or relied upon

The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life.”13

Beyond the entertainment value of this passage, it may be one of the most important things Žižek has ever written.

Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and its Beyond. If one says “Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it’s the only life you’ve got!” it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (“Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air–think about eternity!”), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides (“Bring eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!”), we get another profound thought.

I regret that, after examining these books, I am no more enthusiastic than before. The principal feature of Lovecraft’s work is an elaborate concocted myth… [that] assumes a race of outlandish gods and grotesque prehistoric peoples who are always playing tricks with time and space and breaking through into the contemporary world, usually somewhere in Massachusetts.4