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IN THE STORIES OF NEW ENGLAND SPECULATIVE FICTION WRITER HOWARD Phillips Lovecraft, characters seem incapable of the objective detachment requisite to an aesthetic judgment. When confronted with natural spectacles that ought to give rise to a feeling of the sublime, for instance, they are too entangled in the web of Lovecraft's cosmic horror to contemplate the vast expanses of nature in a manner that would see the humanity in them uplifted.1 The land surveyor in "The Colour out of Space" takes no pleasure in observing the infinite expanse of the night sky upon his return from his first visit to the valley west of Arkham, where the ominous "blasted heath" is located: " [He] vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey [sic] voids above had crept into [his] soul" ("Colour," 55). After he hears Ammi Pierce's story about the spot, moreover, his fear drives him to "hurr[y] back before sunset to [his] hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above [him] in the open" (56). Even the grotesque fails to inspire a disinterested contemplation in Lovecraft. In "The Dunwich Horror," his characters are too fearful of the monstrous human-alien spawn they must face to engage aesthetically the spectacle of its ritualistic chanting at the top of a mountain: "The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in the mood for aesthetic appreciation" ("Dunwich," Dunwich 194). As I hope to make evident in the ensuing analysis, his characters are equally incapable of the detached and life -affirming judgment of the beautiful.
The inability of Lovecraft's protagonists to perceive phenomena with the kind of objective distance demanded by the aesthetic gaze originates in their enmeshment in "cosmic horror," a devastating experience which rouses a fear far exceeding that of merely dying. In death, our finite, individual being ceases to be, yet we can find comfort in our awareness that our cultural heritage is of value and that the community we leave behind will survive us. Lo ve craft's characters cannot find solace in these thoughts, since the horror they face is an index of the meaninglessness of the human condition. The origins of cosmic horror are...