The Love of Ruins

Scott Michaelsen, Scott Cutler Shershow

Description

Today, H. P. Lovecraft is both more popular and controversial than ever: the influence of his "Cthulhu mythos" is everywhere in popular culture, his cosmic pessimism has reemerged as a major theme in contemporary philosophy, and his racism continues to spark controversy in the media. The Love of Ruins takes a fresh look at a figure widely acknowledged as the father of modern horror or "weird" fiction. In these pages, Lovecraft emerges not as the atheist and nihilist he is often claimed to be, but as a kind of "psychonaut" and mystic whose stories, through their own imaginative rigor, expose the intellectual bankruptcy of their author's racism. The Love of Ruins is itself written in the form of letters, in order to do homage to Lovecraft's love of the form of the personal letter (he wrote more than 100,000), and to emulate Lovecraft's lifetime practice of thinking-as-corresponding.
Preface

1. Prayers

2. Warnings

3. Psychonautics, Sublimity, Love

4. Love and Ruins

5. Ruins and Race

6. Ruins, Sublimity, Laughter

7. Race and Writing

8. Writing and the Love of Ruins

9. Race, the Fourth Dimension, Apophasis

10. Race, the Love of Wounds

11. Wounds, Race, Music, and Noise

12. Race, Orientalism, Writing

13. Time Travel, White Mythology, the Library

14. Cities in Ruins

15. The Late City, the Decline of the West

16. Basalt Towers, Trapdoors, Taboos, Nameless Beings

17. Apophasis, Science Fiction, Visibility and Racism, Im-Possible Politics

18. Archive, Irruption, Eruption, Basalt

19. The Great Race, the Archive

20. Comedy and Laughter

21. Class, Socialism, Politics

22. Doubling, Indirect Racism, the Gift of Vision, Nonknowledge

23. The Fourth Dimension, Community

24. The Fourth Dimension, Community, Unworking

25. Community, Sacrifice, Cults

26. Racial Degeneration, Police, Sacrifice

27. Sacrifice, Madness, One Blood, the Invention of the White Race, Frogs

28. Untimeliness, Sacrifice, Religion

29. Religion after Religion, Dread

30. Religion, the Wholesome, Faith and Knowledge

31. Kindness, Wonder, Horror

32. Hauntology, Religion, Science, Race, and Racism

33. Modern Apophasis

34. The Weird, the Future, the Open

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• USA
• United States of America
• Literary theory
• Science fiction
• États-Unis
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 21 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438465128
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Love of Ruins
SERIES EDITORS
David E. Johnson (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo)
Scott Michaelsen (English, Michigan State University)
SERIES ADVISORY BOARD
Nahum D. Chandler (African American Studies, University of California, Irvine)
Rebecca Comay (Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto)
Marc Crépon (Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris)
Jonathan Culler (Comparative Literature, Cornell)
Johanna Drucker (Design Media Arts and Information Studies, UCLA)
Christopher Fynsk (Modern Thought, Aberdeen University)
Rodolphe Gasché (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo)
Martin Hägglund (Comparative Literature, Yale)
Carol Jacobs (Comparative Literature German, Yale University)
Peggy Kamuf (French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California)
David Marriott (History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Steven Miller (English, University at Buffalo)
Alberto Moreiras (Hispanic Studies, Texas A M University)
Patrick O’Donnell (English, Michigan State University)
Pablo Oyarzún (Teoría del Arte, Universidad de Chile)
Scott Cutler Shershow (English, University of California, Davis)
Henry Sussman (German and Comparative Literature, Yale University)
Samuel Weber (Comparative Literature, Northwestern)
Ewa Ziarek (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo)
The Love of Ruins
Letters on Lovecraft
Scott Cutler Shershow
and
Scott Michaelsen
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shershow, Scott Cutler, 1953– author. | Michaelsen, Scott (Scott J.), author.
Title: The love of ruins : letters on Lovecraft / by Scott Cutler Shershow and Scott Michaelsen.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Series: SUNY series, literature … in theory
Preface. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031425 (print) | LCCN 2016048876 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438465111 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438465128 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890–1937—Criticism and interpretation. | Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890–1937—Appreciation.
Classification: LCC PS3523.O833 Z858 2017 (print) | LCC PS3523.O833 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031425
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
LETTER ONE
Prayers
LETTER TWO
Warnings
LETTER THREE
Psychonautics, Sublimity, Love
LETTER FOUR
Love and Ruins
LETTER FIVE
Ruins and Race
LETTER SIX
Ruins, Sublimity, Laughter
LETTER SEVEN
Race and Writing
LETTER EIGHT
Writing and the Love of Ruins
LETTER NINE
Race, the Fourth Dimension, Apophasis
LETTER TEN
Race, the Love of Wounds
LETTER ELEVEN
Wounds, Race, Music, and Noise
LETTER TWELVE
Race, Orientalism, Writing
LETTER THIRTEEN
Time Travel, White Mythology, the Library
LETTER FOURTEEN
Cities in Ruins
LETTER FIFTEEN
The Late City, the Decline of the West
LETTER SIXTEEN
Basalt Towers, Trapdoors, Taboos, Nameless Beings
LETTER SEVENTEEN
Apophasis, Science Fiction, Visibility and Racism, Im-Possible Politics
LETTER EIGHTEEN
Archive, Irruption, Eruption, Basalt
LETTER NINETEEN
The Great Race, the Archive
LETTER TWENTY
Comedy and Laughter
LETTER TWENTY-ONE
Class, Socialism, Politics
LETTER TWENTY-TWO
Doubling, Indirect Racism, the Gift of Vision, Nonknowledge
LETTER TWENTY-THREE
The Fourth Dimension, Community
LETTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Fourth Dimension, Community, Unworking
LETTER TWENTY-FIVE
Community, Sacrifice, Cults
LETTER TWENTY-SIX
Racial Degeneration, Police, Sacrifice
LETTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sacrifice, Madness, One Blood, the Invention of the White Race, Frogs
LETTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Untimeliness, Sacrifice, Religion
LETTER TWENTY-NINE
Religion after Religion, Dread
LETTER THIRTY
Religion, the Wholesome, Faith and Knowledge
LETTER THIRTY-ONE
Kindness, Wonder, Horror
LETTER THIRTY-TWO
Hauntology, Religion, Science, Race, and Racism
LETTER THIRTY-THREE
Modern Apophasis
LETTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Weird, the Future, the Open
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
H. P. Lovecraft’s daily life revolved around correspondence. He is estimated to have written 100,000 letters in his relatively short lifetime, and 20,000 of these letters survive. The longest known letter consists of more than sixty handwritten pages. It is estimated that the publication of Lovecraft’s total extant correspondence will fill 200 large volumes, with letters to certain correspondents (Donald Wandrei, Robert E. Howard, and August Derleth, for example) demanding multivolume treatment. The five-volume Selected Letters contains heavily edited versions of only 1,000 of these letters.
The following is a sequence of thirty-four letters about the work of H. P. Lovecraft, each one written from Scott to Scott, who have been writing letters to each other for more than thirty years. Scott and Scott started writing to each other, at least in part, simply because they have not lived in the same city since 1981. Writing to each other has also always been our preferred mode of engaging questions of philosophy and literary theory. It’s the method by which we continue to teach each other how to think.
In publishing these letters as letters, perhaps we run the risk of being seen as comparing ourselves to the many celebrated literary correspondences of the past, such as those between Wordsworth and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, and many others. We might also be running the risk of a kind of anachronism. While written letters were the only real option for communicating long distance among, let’s say, the Lake Poets, and remained quite reasonable for Lovecraft in the 1930s, today the new technologies and latest software platforms enable something like the dream of real-time communication, always verging on the immediate and the simultaneous. Why not just talk on the phone, send emails, and generally converse about Lovecraft? First of all, we did. The following letters were preceded by two years of phone calls, emails, and an occasional text message—all discussing a shared love of Lovecraft. This prior correspondence has been more or less lost, but its evidence is everywhere in these pages. Nevertheless, all we have left are these letters; the rest is erased or in ruins.
Shifting our Lovecraftian relations into the domain of letter writing permitted us to slow things down and become less automatic or mechanical in answering. Telephones, text messages, and emails both permit and tend to solicit a reflexive response; we’ve forced ourselves, instead, to pause and ponder. An unanswered letter on a desk does press one for a response, but it can be to another rhythm and in response to a different sort of urgency.
It should be noted that the texts that follow are and are not “real” letters. On one hand, all of them originated as actual missives composed by one of us and sent to the other over the course of almost exactly one year; some of them retain traces of the specific occasions in which they were written and sent. On the other hand, all of these letters have been revised, rethought, and reordered by both of us, working at times on the other’s work, to the point that these texts are necessarily unmoored from their literal points of origin. Many of the letters have footnotes—some written by that letter’s author and some by the recipient. Thus this book is explicitly about questions of dialogue and voice: how many voices are there in a dialogue between some Scotts? The answer, no doubt, is that there are always less than and more than two .
To start this conversation, a few things were decided at the outset. We had, as we began, something like what Jacques Derrida calls an “adventurous strategy”—that is, we determined some central questions and themes to address but did not entirely predetermine or precomprehend the dialogue that ensued. We ventured on a sort of epistolary and imaginary journey through an intellectual landscape—let’s call it “Lovecraft,” for how else can it be named?—that we had not mapped out entirely in advance.
Of course, neither our dialogue nor the whole conversation about Lovecraft