The Protoplasmic Imagination: Ernst Haeckel and H. P. Lovecraft

ABSTRACT:This essay traces an imaginative history of protoplasm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a material that still exists today, though, with the advent of DNA and cellular biology, in a somewhat different form. For the biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and the short story writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), protoplasm was the key to the specific nature of evolved life. Not only was it the material that, in the living organism, was given shape, but it was also the place where the hereditary information of what shape to give was passed on from one generation to the next, making evolution possible in the first place. For Haeckel, it was the missing piece in the puzzle that Darwin had almost completed, and with it the whole mystery and wonder of life was within explanatory reach. For Lovecraft, on the other hand, it was the very essence of the shapeless, primitive, and fundamentally menacing quality of life that civilization had to keep at bay. Though protoplasm plays a very different role in modern science than it did then, its imaginative legacy lives on in a whole range of fiction genres nowadays, and Haeckel's and Lovecraft's both very different and very similar conceptions provide a starting point for exploring a conception of biological life that is far from dead.