Thoughtcraft

A Matter of Life and Death in Poe and Lovecraft

Abstract

Recent psychoanalytical and philosophical discussions on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft have changed their pejorative images as popular pulp writers. Unique styles these writers perform when describing various objects including a house, a tarn, an eye, a monster, and a city open up a speculative realm of indetermination between the animate and the inanimate. This problem discussed by Sigmund Freud in his two crucial works, “The Uncanny” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, finds new expressions in some contemporary philosophical ventures such as speculative realism and object-oriented ontology whose leading figures are Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman respectively. Departing from Meillassoux’s concept of rupture, associating it with Freud’s reflections on the indetermination, and finally drawing on Harman’s interpretation of Lovecraft, this article will explore how the membranous structures of the human mind are portrayed by Poe and Lovecraft. It will argue that Poe’s and Lovecraft’s works, as exemplified by the referred short stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Call of Cthulhu” and “At the Mountain of Madness,” perform in different ways what may be called the thoughtcraft. The animate and the inanimate come into an indirect contact in the membranous surfaces crafted to produce indetermination and speculative thought.