Like many who identify as goth or alternative, I have a long and complicated history struggling with my own mental health issues. Those struggles have given me an unwanted and uncomfortably familiar acquaintance with nihilistic feelings and sentiments like pessimism, alienation and resentment. As humans we all experience these at some point in life, of course, and the first time we do often prompts us to answer some existential questions about our lives. What beliefs define who we are? What values give us purpose? What is it that makes our lives meaningful? Some people can readily answer these questions when nihilism first asks, being able to quickly identify the things that give them a feeling of purpose in their lives. For some of us, though, our answers remain elusive and it feels like futility, alienation and resentment breathe down our necks, waiting for a response. Personally, like I’m sure many can unfortunately relate, nihilism reared its ugly head to demand my answers when my own mental health struggles were at their worst. And I couldn’t identify a single belief or value in my life that was strong enough to reject the meaninglessness it threatened me with. At that time, reconciling my own existence with some kind of meaning or purpose seemed like an impossibility, one that I’m not ashamed to admit, the only resolution, the only escape, that made sense was my death. For far too many, this ‘resolution’ to nihilism’s threat that nothing in life has any meaning becomes a horrible reality, one that tragically results in more and more people resorting to suicide.
But even trying to begin grappling with these kinds of questions of meaning in our current social hellscape isn’t made easy. Between the absurd amount of our time consumed by late-stage capitalism’s grinding monotony and the mobile sources of existential terror we all have in our pockets incessantly trying to take what’s left of it, it seems like we live in a world intent on preventing us from realising a sense of purpose in our own lives. So with modern life providing these kinds of obstructions, where can we go to try and determine the meaning in our lives? Personally, literature was always my go-to, tried and tested means of escaping from reality, and like many others in this particular community, gothic literature appealed to me. It’s more fascinating, supernatural elements were pleasantly distracting while the darker aspects of reality it portrayed always let me come to terms with them. But when I felt that despondent, reading the classics, Dracula, Frankenstein, Poe, etc., simply didn’t cut it for me. Instead, at the worst point of the lockdowns in 2020, when all the usual distractions of modernity came to a grinding halt, I decided to give H. P Lovecraft another try. I started with an audiobook of At the Mountains of Madness, more to try and kill some time while getting my government-approved hour out of the house than any conscious effort to approach Lovecraft. After finding it a bit too miserable in my teenage years, I didn’t expect much, but At the Mountains of Madness struck a chord in me. I don’t know if it was because of how miserable the lockdowns were or if it was because I was only 10 months out of a psych ward, but the meaninglessness portrayed on the pages (or in this case, being beamed directly through my headphones) was unexpectedly consoling.
I won’t spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t read it (it’s definitely worth the time to read), but the story is narrated by a scientist named Dyer who retrospectively relays the events of a failed expedition to the Antarctic tundra. Dyer begins the expedition with an optimistic kind of fascination, but when his party uncover evidence of an unfathomably ancient alien race who seem to have created humanity, without meaning or purpose and on nothing more than a whim, he questions his own sanity and how he perceives all of existence. After finishing At the Mountains of Madness, I was left wanting more and I went headlong into the rest of Lovecraft’s works. The more Lovecraft stories I read, the more the meaninglessness in his weird became strangely, paradoxically, liberating. As The Dunwich Horror’s monstrous Wilbur Whateley challenged the validity of its characters’ conceptions of the world, I started to question my own. And when the titular, ancient entity in The Call of Cthulhu, presented the characters with their own insignificance, I found that their being driven to absolute despair was a kind of existential comfort I hadn’t expected from what was supposed to be a chill listen on a walk. When my depression had been at its worst, I felt like I was staring into a void, seeing nothing of value to make my life seem worth living. I had been staring into that nihilistic meaninglessness for so long that I hadn’t really realised that it had stared suicidal ideation back into me, not until it had a fatal grip on my mind. But when I read Lovecraft, I was a bystander, watching someone else staring into a void. Granted, the void Lovecraft created stared back with tentacles and goatish eyes, but the point was that I was sitting safely on the sidelines, looking through fictitious eyes as they stared into an equally fictitious void. When that void stared back into them, it looked back into the characters, it didn’t, it couldn’t, look back into me. The separation that literature creates between us as readers and what happens on the page separated my mental and emotional experiences from those that the characters experienced. And that separation let me, for the first time in a long time, stare into meaninglessness and in a way that I could actually question what gave my own life meaning without driving myself mad.
For anyone familiar with Lovecraft, the narrative structure of At the Mountains of Madness is typical of his tales, collectively referred to as the ‘Chthulhu Mythos’, which see his unsuspecting characters encounter anomalous entities from beyond our conceptions of time and space that provoke existential anxieties so intense they often descend into madness. Lovecraft’s mythos belongs to a classification of literature known as ‘weird’ fiction. Weird fiction is incredibly difficult to accurately define, so for the sake of not miring this article in the debates and jargon of weird scholarship, it essentially emerged as a sub-genre of sorts of the gothic. The weird takes inspiration from gothic tropes and techniques while incorporating elements of fantasy and horror, with Lovecraft standing as its most [in]famous author, popularising the mode in the early 20th century. While the weird has evolved since Lovecraft, it is still influenced by and associated with his tropes and techniques, like stating that something is ‘indescribable’ before launching into a lengthy and detailed attempt to describe it. Making light of Lovecraft’s linguistic repertoire aside, his greatest influence on the weird might be that, in his own words, weird tales “are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large”. I felt like this statement validated my nihilistic interpretation of Lovecraft’s work, and the thoughts and feelings it provoked were what initially motivated me to begin studying the weird, culminating in my undergraduate dissertation, The Literary Portrayal of Nihilism in the Weird: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Response to H. P. Lovecraft. That study positions the weird as a way of understanding nihilistic sentiments and describes how both authors reflect different responses to nihilistic meaninglessness.
During the process of researching and writing that dissertation, I came to realise that the weird not only allows people to grapple with questions of meaning, but that contemporary weird authors, like Kiernan, use it to actively guide us towards an optimistic response to the meaninglessness of nihilism. Having reached a point where I personally don’t feel meaninglessness straining against my day-to-day life, I think that highlighting how contemporary weird literature gives voice to the thoughts and emotions those of us who have experienced suicidal ideation can find difficult to express, even to those closest to us, is of vital importance. In a new study, titled Overcoming Oblivion: The Contemporary Weird’s Rejection of Nihilistic Meaninglessness, I intend to critically examine several works from some of the most prolific authors of the modern weird; Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jeff VanderMeer and China Mieville, significantly emphasising how their literary techniques allow us to address suicidal ideation as a philosophical, as well as psychological, crisis that arises from nihilistic perspectives of the world. Ultimately, Overcoming Oblivion will try to establish modern renditions of the weird as a space where we can directly address meaninglessness, where we can safely stare into the abyss to create values, beliefs and meanings that invalidate nihilism’s sensations of futility, alienation and resentment, without those sensations claiming a hold of us.
Over the next year, this blog will provide updates on the research I am undertaking for Overcoming Oblivion, introducing the authors and their work and how they relate to the concepts the study will analyse. The next post will introduce and contextualise nihilism and the ideological approach the studywill take towards suicidal ideation, hopefully with substantially less depressing flair than this first article. As Overcoming Oblivion will rely heavily on the framework that was outlined in The Literary Portrayal of Nihilism In the Weird, edited chapters of that dissertation will be made available exclusively through The Mourning Paper to clarify the existing relationship between the weird and nihilism. My hope is that, by making this research as accessible as possible, someone currently struggling to find their own sense of meaning might find somewhere new and safe to begin to realise that the value of their life is inherent to them as a valuable, meaningful individual, regardless of what any conception of the world says to the contrary.
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