Additional source unlisted, available in print:
- China Miéville’s foreward to At the Mountains of Madness
The abject itself is unwanted, but not necessarily horrific on its own merits. H.P. Lovecraft’s short horror story “The Outsider” demonstrates certain aspects of Kristeva’s notions of the abject with regards to this. Specifically, it demonstrates the powers of horrific revelation to take abjection beyond mere disgust and into the realm of horror.
In “Powers of Horror,” Kristeva speaks at first of the abject in food loathing, specifically in loathing milk, but this defines only disgust in the abject rather than the horror of it. Distaste does not make one lactophobic. One does not suddenly fear milk, or if so only for that second in which it comes into one’s taste or smell. There is no horror in this reaction, one merely ejects the abject thing in a spit take and is done. One can still open the fridge without thinking of the thing’s terror, one does not avert gaze from it when the refrigerator door opens. The object of disgust is neither pervasive, nor persistent to the disgusted. Thus is milk safe.
Kristeva says the abject is “elaborated through failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory” (233). In “The Outsider” specifically, Lovecraft defamiliarizes the protagonist’s history with a form of amnesia. Within this amnesia, however, is the perverse desire for knowledge, the lure of the abject. For the unnamed protagonist, the setting forms “a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered” (235) which is never totalizable— its time and space, like in its endless forests, are tantalizingly undefinable. They may be explored, but never charted or understood.
It is to the effect of defamiliarization, too, that Lovecraft uses the occultatio. Naïve critiques of Lovecraft often cite his purported overuse of this literary technique as though the author had intended the device itself to be horrific, rather than the revelations they signify about their material reality Lovecraft attempts to represent diagetically. Kristeva, in keeping with the unrepresentable nature of horror reflected in the Lovecraftian occultatio, tells us that “[t]he abject is not an object which is named or imagined” (229). Miéville elucidates the point in reference to HPL, saying that, “his materialism means it is not just in his creatures that horror lies” (xvi). Rather his horror, in “The Outsider” as in other stories, is, like Kristeva’s, one of “realization” (xiii) or “revelation” (Kristeva 236).
True horror must push the abject beyond disgust. The non-object subject in the mirror does not signify self to the deject, rather it defines its opposite: non-self. In “The Outsider,” the mirror’s entanglement with conceptions of self erupts the protagonist’s amnesiac non-memory with knowledge when the tactility of the object forms the joining of an alien, animal other with recognition, kin, and, most horribly, self. According to Kristeva, “forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash… The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth.”
It is in revelation, in filling or completing the knowledge withheld by lack of memory that the deject comes into horror— a pervasive, persistent abject knowledge that cannot be unremembered. In “The Outsider,” Lovecraft builds disgust for the protagonist’s body and history by defamiliarizing them, but these things do not immediately become horrific or create horror. It is only the moment of revelation, when meanings are revealed and the abject becomes significant, that this abject emotion mutates from mere disgust into the haunting that is true horror.