"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." — from his Supernatural Horror in Literature
"My best work is for my friends. What I do for pay is done because I must live, but it's hack work, and my heart's not in it."
"The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life."
"Why do you say that this thing is new? The dreams of men are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon, and this was fashioned in my dreams."
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) built the "dark" themes of Ni into a systematic literary doctrine. Cosmicism, his own name for it, is no optimistic "cosmism" of some Ne egos and LIE's. Lovecraft's view holds that humanity is a momentary accident on a doomed mote, that the universe is neither hostile nor kind but indifferent at a scale that annihilates meaning, and that all our sciences, piecing together dissociated knowledge, will someday open "such terrifying vistas of reality" that we shall go mad from the revelation or flee into a new dark age — a rationalistic, even if pessimistic conclusion. He is the modern pop culture patron saint of the negativistic Ni-register, with a slight accent from the Beta NF dreamers and dramatists.
The method of his mind was skeptical-analytical all his life. As a self-educated boy, he fell in love with astronomy — hectographing his own journals at thirteen — and his first public campaign was a teenage newspaper war of debunking waged against a professional astrologer. He grew into a militant mechanistic materialist who spent his life debating this against every believing correspondent he could recruit (like in his decades-long debate with the evangelical Maurice Moe). He debunked spiritualism, despised occultism as fraud, and grounded his horror precisely in the sciences. His actual trade, insofar as he had one, is telling: he lived as a revisionist — an editor, corrector, and ghost-rewriter of other people's defective texts. Dying at forty-six, he kept a diary of his own canter symptoms for the interest of medicine — the detached observer, taking notes on his own dissolution, and finding a certain dark pleasure in it.
His work of nonfiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature, is exactly what the type would produce: he traces the evolution of the genre in time and critically ranks ut, with the analyst's severity ("atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation"). It's also notable that his universe is defined not by tragedy, EIE-style, by indifferentism — emotional detachment elevated to the structure of reality. He is this blog's second ILI of American dark letters (or third, if you count Dickinson), and the lineage is direct: Lovecraft canonized "eccentric and saturnine journalist" Ambrose Bierce in his own critical history of the genre. Stories like The Shadow Out of Time and At the Mountains of Madness are structured around a character's anticipation of a horrific, cosmic truth that, as in Talanov's list of ILI traits, seems to "float" from the future into the present, creating his trademark sense of dread.
Lovecraft's tales are often built as case files — affidavits, newspaper clippings, diaries... Their effect comes from the rationalist collating dissociated evidence until the conclusion becomes unavoidable. The Call of Cthulhu is literally a man assembling documents, At the Mountains of Madness is a scientific expedition report. The Beta accent shows itself in his aestheticism, occasional ascending rhetorics and the mythos itself as a shared legendarium of collective mythology to a circle of devoted younger writers, which formed against him.
Talanov's Q/D functions are notoriously the most problematic with ILI (and IEE), who often blur them. "Separation of elitism", Qe, is supposedly the weakest and most unvalued of ILI, but Lovecraft's xenophobic aristocratic-elitist views ("Lovecraft's early political views were conservative and traditionalist... In his view, power needed to be restricted to those who are sufficiently intelligent and educated," claims Wikipedia, later qualifying that older Lovecraft supported government interventionism, partially disclaiming hereditarian attitudes but maintained the aristocracy of intellectuals), not uncommon among some ILI's — obsession with the notion of decline in time and mental degeneration can do it — seemingly contradict that. On the other hand, Lovecraft lacked the physical component of Qe, seemingly not minding much that aspect of living in poverty. He wore his shabby coat, and, unlike many LSI's, sought no rank or office. Even his collective mythology being deliberately opened to other writers, who were invited to borrow the gods and add their own, is not a Qe-ish gesture — writers high in Qe tend to be more protective of their own intellectual output, being quite touchy at the thought of its possible "contamination" — think of Anne Rice's attitude to fanfiction and criticism. It's also worth noting that Lovecraft's theoretical racism seems to have been worse than his practical one (he married Sonia Greene, a Jewish woman) and he maintained a wide and friendly correspondence with people who crossed every line his doctrines drew. His circles were radically open — teenage fans admitted to equal correspondence with the master. He violated De in the ideological superstructure, while able to be quite De-ish separate from that. The mere notion of being a critic can lead to accusations of "who gives you the right to say such things, do you think you're better than us?!" and accusations of having a high Qe. However, I'd argue criticism doesn't actually require much Qe — although one can mask as the other, the critic's authority-claim is inherently epistemic ("this judgment is incorrect"), not social ("I am above you").
The reactionary in the squalid room, preaching aristocracy to a wide-open door, may be a distinct ILI subtype. For this reason, Lovecraft reminds me of the streamer Asmongold, in a "first time as tragedy, second time as farce" way: the streamer promotes an elitist right-wing ideology, extremely notoriously lacks physical disgust, relatively open to contact...
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