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EXAMPLES OF H. P. LOVECRAFT'S USE OF MOTIFS COMMON TO THE BURKEAN AND Kantian notions of sublimity abound in his fiction: phenomena whose principal characteristics are their formlessness, infinite expanse, or superhuman might; a subject's encounter with the negative or, put another way, symbolic presentation of what would be described in the fiction of a humanist as its noumenal self; and the limits of language1 to represent adequately both the awe-inspiring spectacle and the subject's experience of the violation of the limits of being. Lovecraft's pronouncements on "cosmic horror," the effect he aimed to convey in his stories, seem to encourage a sublime reading of his work. Cosmic horror - that fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance - compels the expansion of the experiencing subject's imagination. Two recent studies, moreover, elaborate on the relevance of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes, respectively, in Lovecraft's myth cycle. In "Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime" (1991), Dale J. Nelson defends the idea that cosmic horror is coeval with religious feeling in Burke. In "Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime" (2002), Bradley A. Will argues that the force of cosmic horror is based upon Lovecraft's presentation of the unknowable rather than merely the unknown in his fiction.
Beyond superficial, thematic comparisons, however, can we really speak of sublimity in Lovecraft? Regarding the Burkean sublime in his fiction, does the subject's imagination partake in the ascending movement of the phenomenon in question, and is the phenomenon itself an index of a life -affirming notion of the absolute? With relation to the Kantian sublime, is the subject's supremacy over nature affirmed by its ability to reason in Lovecraft? In other words, is the sublime turn, a commonplace and pivotal aspect of the aesthetic category of sublimity, discernable in the Lovecraft Mythos? The pitfalls of both Nelson's and WiIl's essays hinge on this last question. While the strength of Nelson's analysis lies in its convincing elaboration of the pertinence of certain aspects of the Burkean sublime to Lovecraft's cosmic viewpoint, he is reluctant to acknowledge Burke's and Lovecraft's valorizations of objective properties that emphasize the heterogeneity of the experiencing subject.2 This in...