“Venerable Flesh” and the Cosmopolitan “Corpse-City”: A Lovecraftian Dialectic

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Andrew Gipe-Lazarou

Virginia Tech, USA

 

“…accursed hashish-dreams of endless brick walls bulging and bursting with viscous abominations and  staring insanely with bleared, geometrical patterns of windows – confused rivers of elemental, simian  life with half-Nordic faces twisted and grotesque in the evil flare of bonfires set to signal the nameless  gods of dark stars… death and menace behind furtive doors – frightened policemen in pairs – fumes of  hellish brews concocted in obscene crypts…” Weird-fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft, conveys his traumatic  first experiences outside colonial New England in the spring of 1922, by compositing the architecture  and biology of Hell’s Kitchen, in real time, into a scene of putrefying urban flesh. 

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Throughout his life and work – documented across more than 60 short stories and 100,000 personal  letters – Lovecraft deploys the semiotics of architecture and landscape with extreme bias. Asserting his  own English heritage as the ‘dominant culture’ of the North American continent, he presents the  ‘venerable flesh’ of colonial New England as ‘a natural, organic growth – as profound, ingrained, &  inevitable as our typical physiognomies & mental processes’ ‘expressing itself in architectural forms  perfectly suited to the topography’. The grotesque transgression of this tissue is the ‘cosmopolitan  chaos’ of the modern city – ‘brick and stone horizons’ ‘of aimless speed and magnitude’ occupied by ‘a  bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to eye, nose, and imagination’. 

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This paper explores the impact of cultural bias on the anthropomorphism of architectural bodies. It  builds on Frascari’s discourse of monsters and semiotics with the dialectical teratology of master myth maker, H.P. Lovecraft, by comparing his interpretations of venerable colonial and condemnable  cosmopolitan scenes, then examining the weird-fictional spatialization of their conflict across a selection  of personal correspondences and short stories. These include accounts of his ‘vampiric’ brownstone  apartment in Brooklyn (‘which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds  of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth’); a failed attempt to redesign it with ‘preservative’  colonial antiques; ‘nocturnal pilgrimages’ through the historic tissue of Greenwich Village (‘saturating  myself with the colonial atmosphere that means mental life for me’); his terror upon witnessing the  ‘loathsome and insidious decay’ of old New York; and the myths which accompany them, namely his  short stories He (1926), The Horror at Red Hook (1927), and Cool Air (1928). 

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Lovecraft’s nativist reaction to the changes taking place during his lifetime are informed by decades of  public debate throughout the United States about unrestricted immigration (accounting for more than  15 million people) between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, resulting in three national  immigration bills setting quotas for all countries outside the Western Hemisphere, preventing  immigration from Asia, and establishing the Border Patrol as a federal agency. He presents his  conclusive, corporeal condemnation of these developments in 1926, after two years attempting to live  in New York City, concluding that “…this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old  New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling  body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as  it was in life […] New York is dead & the brilliancy which so impresses one from outside is the  phosphorescence of a maggoty corpse.”