Corps, réel et écriture chez HP Lovecraft. Pistes sur la création et la psychopathologie

Abstract

Objectives

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American writer whose work renewed fantasy literature and inaugurated a new genre. His first master was Edgar Allan Poe, but he was also influenced by Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen. Author of numerous novels and short stories, but also of a rich correspondence of several tens of thousands of letters (as many as 100,000, according to one count!), his world is haunted by the degeneration of bodies, the dissolution of the limits of reality, and the danger of the Other and the intense anguish that it provokes. Preferring the mediation of writing to the real physical presence, Lovecraft expresses a generalized xenophobia tending to racism and based on the disgust caused by the body of the other. The objective of this work is to grasp the psychic dynamics of this writer from two points of view : that of psychopathology and the various diagnoses that have been made, and that of his creative capacity.

Method

Lovecraft's personal history as well as his literary work, his correspondence, and the testimonies of people around him are used as material to decipher his creative process, the signs of his subjective position as well as those that could be related to psychopathology.

Results

Writing, from childhood on, represented for Lovecraft a safeguard against the dangers of the outside world, the screen that protected him from contact with others and therefore also from reality. Lovecraft's literary genius is absolutely inseparable from his being. Lovecraft became by his own means a being of writing, a scriptbeing rather than a talkbeing. The hypotheses about his (psycho)pathology, numerous and sometimes contradictory, can in no way account for his literary talent. It is rather his dreams that guide him in the writing of his short stories.

Discussion

More than an art, more than a formatting of his anguish, more than a deposit and emptying of jouissance, writing for Lovecraft sets up the imaginary screen on which the unbearable real is signified and seized as reality. Writing is for him an addictive, continuous, protective, and necessary exercise : he never stops writing. By its extraordinary extent – novels and correspondence – it occupies the place of the Imaginary, a space where the registers of the Symbolic and the Real are linked together. Thus, for him, the dream becomes a direct and continuous source of creation. The sort of autobiography that has gradually emerged from his correspondence, the testimonies of those who knew him, as well as the reading of his work, have made it possible to establish various psychopathological diagnoses about him that will be submitted for discussion.

Conclusion

Lovecraft's personal journey is that of an unfortunate creator, but one whose writing nonetheless contributed to his survival. For it is also an extraordinary journey of self-therapy. Lovecraft did not achieve fame or fortune during his lifetime, but since he could not do otherwise, he wrote incessantly until his death, without really worrying about success. Writing, from childhood, represented a safeguard against the dangers of the outside world, the screen that protected him from contact with others and therefore also from reality. For Lovecraft, writing is a sinthome and he managed to build up a public, admittedly small, but intelligent and admiring, on which he relied, allowing for the gradual construction of a network of social relations, first mediated by writing and then, as time went by, more and more directly.