University of Minnesota Press

Chapter Title: HYPER-CACOPHONY: Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism

Chapter Author(s): Isabella van Elferen

Book Title: The Age of Lovecraft

Book Editor(s): Carl H. Sederholm, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (2016)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b9x1f3.8

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Age of Lovecraft

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 3
ꙮ
HYPER- ­CACOPHONY
Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism

Isabella van Elferen

T his chapter studies the current Lovecraft renaissance in specu-

lative realist philosophy through the lens of critical musicology.
Lovecraft’s numinous monsters resonate significantly with concepts
introduced by speculative philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux and
Graham Harman. Analyzing the sonic and musical metaphors that
Lovecraft uses to describe cosmic realities and creatures, I argue that his
work narrates a hyper-­cacophony, which is a sonic counterpart to Meil-
lassoux’s “hyper-­chaos” (63). However, Lovecraft’s paradoxical materi-
alism, which weirdly combines ontology with phenomenology and even
metaphysics, simultaneously also causes a sharp divergence between
his fiction and contemporary philosophy. Lovecraft’s will to believe in
a metaphysical absolute is audible in each story and is diametrically
opposed to the speculative ontological absolute that he advocates at the
same time. Eager to see in Lovecraft a herald of its own project, how-
ever, speculative realism does not reflect on the philosophical paradoxes
in his work. The inconsistency in Lovecraft’s thinking becomes espe-
cially evident in his hyper-­cacophonic passages, as sound and music,
in sonic analogy to the cosmic entities they signify in his oeuvre, are
empathically presented as simultaneously material and immaterial.
Thus, the “shrieking, roaring confusion of sound” (Lovecraft, “Witch
House,” 305) that thunders through his weird universes signifies both
Lovecraft’s kinship to and his irreconcilability with contemporary phi-
losophy—­or any earthly philosophy, for that matter.

Unspeakable but Speaking: Lovecraft and Sound

H. P. Lovecraft’s stories contain many allusions to and descriptions

of sound, but none are pleasant, soothing, or even vaguely harmonic.
He generally follows the same procedures as other fantastic authors

79
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80 Isabella Van Elferen
in describing sonic phenomena: the sounds in his stories are nothing
like anyone has ever heard or do “not correspond to anything on earth”
(“Witch House,” 309; see Van Elferen). Unlike in other sorts of fantastic
literature, where sound and music often designate an idealized other-
worldliness, Lovecraft’s soundscapes invariably signify the utter terror
of the unknown and emanate from unspeakable monsters or gaping
abysses. Many have no discernible source, as they are heard in darkness
or at night. The apparent absence of a source prompts the hearers to
assume two causes for their disembodiment: they must be both ghostly
and malevolent. Often perceivers are not even sure whether they are
really hearing these sounds. The suggestion that they might appear from
some fissure between the perceptible and the imperceptible only inten-
sifies their assessment as supernatural and evil. The narrator of “The
Hound,” for example, recalls the night that he and his friend St. John
went out to a graveyard in Holland to delve for hidden treasures, but
were disturbed by “the faint deep-­toned baying of some gigantic hound
which we could neither see not definitely place. As we heard this sugges-
tion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry”
(83). Precisely the fact that this sound is only the “half-­heard, direction-
less” (83) suggestion of baying without any clear physical origin makes
it utterly terrifying. Its continuous unseen presence haunts St. John and
the narrator and eventually leads to their demise.
The sounds in “The Dreams in the Witch House” are even less well
defined and therefore more frightening than those in “The Hound.” The
main character of the story, Walter Gilman, has studied so hard at a
strange mixture of non-­Euclidean mathematics, quantum physics, and
folklore that he has become highly sensitive to any suggestion of unnat-
ural presence. His ears are particularly keen at night, when the sounds
of little scurrying feet and creaking floorboards suggest the possibility of
some spectral presence: “The darkness always teemed with unexplained
sound” (300). As in “The Hound,” disembodied sound and impeded
vision lead to sonic terror, but Gilman’s fear goes a step further: He has
come to fear the sounds behind the audible sounds, assuming presence
in each perceptible and imperceptible silence: “Life had become an insis-
tent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant,
terrifying impression of other sounds—­perhaps from regions beyond
life—­trembling on the very brink of audibility” (“Witch House,” 303).
When the sounds in Lovecraft’s stories are made by voices, the addi-
tional and crucial qualities of identity, subjectivity, and consciousness

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 hyper- cacophon y 81
come into play. A voice is not just a random sound but a communication—­
the communication, moreover, of a conscious being that decides to speak
to another being. Because it is laden with these elements of identity,
voice is an important component of Lovecraft’s literary soundscapes, in
which it has precisely the function of identifying the speaker—­that is to
say, foregrounding the fact that that speaker often defies the possibility
of identification: Lovecraft would not be Lovecraft if he did not invert
the seemingly obvious signifying chain linked to voices and communica-
tion. The voices in “The Hound” appear to be identifiable enough. The
ghostly baying that the protagonists hear is mixed with stereotypically
spooky sounds like the autumn wind and the flapping of bat wings; on
top of that, it becomes entangled with “shrill laughter” from behind a
closed door (85) and “disembodied chatter” (86). These two vocal expres-
sions are not merely spectral, as their sourcelessness suggests. The real-
ization “with the blackest of apprehensions” that the nocturnal voices
chatter “in the Dutch language” (86) complicates their identification.
While on the one hand, this qualification clearly links the ghosts to the
grave that the protagonists robbed in Holland; on the other hand, the
incomprehensibility of the language and therefore the failing of commu-
nication suggests a degree of Otherness that is monstrous and threaten-
ing. This is far from the only instance in which voice becomes in fact
the opposite of identity in Lovecraft’s stories. Indeed, that is precisely
the voice’s function in Lovecraft: whenever a voice appears in a story,
the reader can expect to find alienness described—­but an alienness that
is, like any weird entity in his work, indescribable: “Shall I say the voice
was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembod-
ied? What shall I say?” (“Statement,” 13).
Both Graham Harman (Weird Realism, 91–­92, 135–­37) and Dean
Lockwood (76–­78) discuss the inhuman, specifically insect-­like quality
that many of the alien voices in Lovecraft’s stories appear to have. This
particular voice type is the most well-­known and identifiable in Love-
craft’s oeuvre, and its description is fairly consistent across the vari-
ous stories. We do at least recognize a distinct identity in all its alien
buzziness, however Other and frightening that identity is. Despite its
recognizability, however, this voice still communicates only inhuman-
ness and cosmic malevolence. The recordings that Akeley makes of the
alien inhabitants of the hills around his house in “The Whisperer in
Darkness” contain the voice of Nyarlathotep, who is identified only as
“the other voice” in the story—­a voice that sounds like

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82 Isabella Van Elferen

a morbid echo winging its way across unimaginable abysses from un-
imaginable outer hells. . . . It was like the drone of some loathsome,
gigantic insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an
alien species, and I am perfectly certain that the organs producing
it can have no resemblance to the vocal organs of man, or indeed to
those of any of the mammalian. There were singularities of timbre,
range, and overtones which placed this phenomenon wholly outside
the sphere of humanity and earth-­life. (220)

The design of this passage is intricate. Lovecraft seems at first glance to

be describing very specific features of the voice, yet at the same time he
creates what Graham Harman calls a “gap” between the qualities of the
voice and the actual voice-­in-­itself (Weird Realism, 2–­6). First of all, the
voice is described in an indirect manner, as the narrator of “The Whis-
perer in Darkness” is listening to a recording that may or may not have
been tampered with. Second, the voice is not positively identified as any-
thing in particular but only as nothing that could possibly exist: it is sim-
ilar to, but not exactly the same as, that of a nonexisting insect, but only
if that hypothetical insect were to pretend to speak as a human, and at
the same time it is stated with conviction that the voice could never be
produced by any human or indeed any mammal. So what does it sound
like? The only thing the reader knows is what it does not sound like and
the feeling it gives the indirect listener: “It caused a sharp intensification
of that feeling of blasphemous infinity” (220–­21).
Stripping down all the indirectness and the affective performativ-
ity of this description, the subject matter of the passage is timbre, and
timbre only. This focus represents a clever authorial choice. Timbre is
simultaneously the most clearly embodied and the most indescribable of
all sonic qualities. Roland Barthes argues that timbre, which he defines
as “the grain of the voice,” signifies “the body in the voice as it sings, the
hand as it writes, the limb as it performs” (188), and he is right: when we
hear a voice, timbre conjures up the speaker’s or singer’s phantom body
just like phantom pain evokes an amputated limb. Timbre is a phantom
voice communicating the beyond-­words of spectrality. Jean-­Luc Nancy
assesses timbre as the most private of all musical experiences, a “commu-
nication of the incommunable: . . . that thing by which a subject makes
an echo—­of self, of the other, it’s all one—­it’s all one in the plural” (41).
Timbre communicates so much and yet so little: of the world of possi-
ble meanings and significations that it transmits nothing is definite. We

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 hyper- cacophon y 83
cannot even describe timbre in words other than adjectives referring to
the planes of the visual, the affective, or to temperature (see Barthes,
180): a timbre can connote darkness, or fear, or cold—­or simply noth-
ing you have ever experienced before on this earth (see “Whisperer in
Darkness,” 257).
If a timbre has never been heard on this planet, that qualification
would necessarily imply that the body evoked by this timbre does not
exist in any earthly region. The alien timbres in Lovecraft’s work, thus,
are key to his conception of the otherworldly: timbre, precisely in its
immaterial corporeality and its indescribable outspokenness, is able to
delineate the contours of a presence that is not present—­and that could
never be present. Bodiless and unnameable, but audible and identifiable,
the voices resounding through his stories offer concentrated foretastes
of the ephemeral being hovering at the brink of the universe we know.
When sound is organized into music, its connotations develop, shifting
from beings originating in other worlds to those other worlds themselves.
Even more so than sound, music for Lovecraft is hardly the metaphor
for beauty and well-­being that it often is in other fantastic literature. On
the contrary: music in Lovecraft is dissonant, blasphemous, and mad-
dening, full of “cacodaemoniacal ghastliness” (“The Hound,” 82). The
viol that drives his most famous sound story, “The Music of Erich Zann,”
is a magical instrument of a very dark kind. The old, mute German
musician in the story has little influence on the melodies played by his
instrument, and becomes haunted and possessed by that music. Zann’s
neighbor, the narrator of the story, is fascinated by the music he hears
coming from the top floor in the middle of the night. It exerts a force
that he cannot control but that puts the fear of the unknown into him:
the music is “enchant[ing] . . . with strains I have never heard before”
(47) filling him with “indefinable dread—­the dread of vague wonder
and brooding mystery, [the music] suggesting nothing on this globe of
earth” (49). As the music gradually turns into a “ghoulish howling” (52),
it becomes more and more clear that the viol plays Zann rather than the
other way around, and destructively so. Absorbed by the music against
his will, the old man sweats, fights, suffers, and dies: the narrator, spell-
bound by the same music, is forced to watch the musician’s terrifying
demise but is unable to do anything against the viol’s gruesome powers.
The music described by Lovecraft’s narrators is often heard in
the context of some arcane ritual aimed at the crossing of boundaries
between one world or reality and the other. Such music signifies the

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84 Isabella Van Elferen
actual experience of unknown realities through the forceful phenom-
enological vectors of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Hearing pound-
ing rhythms and repeated melodies, the characters in his stories are
drawn into the universes transmitted by the timbres of strange voices
and instruments that produce this music. Music in ritual, whether in
meditation, churchly ceremony or occult ritual, has the performative
function of liturgy, inducing and supporting a movement away from the
here and now. Buddhist mantras, Gregorian chant, and Satanist rites
alike are based on the same centuries-­old metaphysical assessments of
music’s spatio-­temporal lines of flight that Lovecraft deploys in his sto-
ries: music-­as-­liturgy is the melopoietic vehicle for transcendence, for a
temporary dissolution of the subjectivity into the otherworldly dimen-
sions of rituality. In Lovecraft, of course, the transcendence effected
by ritual and liturgy is horrific and world-­shattering: there is a “hellish
chant” in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (326), an “uncanny rhythm”
in “The Moon-­Bog” (47), and, most skin-­crawlingly, the “ceaseless, half-­
mental calling from underground” in the Cthulhu rituals (58). These
blasphemous liturgies lead to certain doom, as does the indescribable
music in “Dreams in the Witch House,” which engenders a

monstrous burst of Walpurgis-­rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would

be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-­time seethings which
lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth
in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of
entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain
dreaded periods. (327)

Although impressively frightening in its general outline, when read

closely this description of liturgical horror, once again, revolves less
around melodies or rhythms than around that most ephemeral of musi-
cal parameters, timbre. The “cosmic timbre” in this passage represents
the grain of a voice that is not physical, and possibly not even spatial or
temporal. This noise extending from a great and terrifying beyond offers
a sonic glimpse into realities inconceivable for our earthbound imagi-
nation. Sacralized by the setting of pagan rituality, and propelled into
an unknown outside by the forces of rhythm, harmony, and melody, the
transcendent power of musical timbre in Lovecraft’s work allows listen-
ers to reach “beyond these aegipanic cacophonies” themselves, and into
unknown dimensions (“Under the Pyramids,” 73).
Finally, some of the music that Lovecraft describes is not only inhu-
man in origin but will also never be heard by humans and has nothing

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 hyper- cacophon y 85
at all to do with the realm of the human. His introduction of the Great
Old One Nyarlathotep, for instance, happens entirely in and through
music. Nyarlathotep not only speaks through music, his entire being is
musical. In Nyarlathotep, all the other characteristics of Lovecraftian
sound prose converge:

Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell

the audient void . . . Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only
the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in
hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights
of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cit-
ies, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker
low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-­seen
columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath
space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and
darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the
muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine
of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlikely chambers beyond
Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly,
awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—­
the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.
(“Nyarlathotep,” 31, 33)

Through the void that is the universe resounds a music which is at the
same time a nonmusic, an event that is as material as it is immaterial:
Nyarlathotep can only be alluded to in words attempting to describe
impossible and unheard music. Lovecraft does exactly that, repetitively
and endlessly, so much so that “the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen
flute” (often also described as “mindless”) becomes a returning trope indi-
cating the presence of Nyarlathotep throughout his work (here in “The
Dreams in the Witch House,” 319). As a short musical motif announcing
a character before that character itself is present, these thin pipes become
nothing less than a literary leitmotif for the Great Old One. A leitmotif
is a compositional technique used in Wagner’s operas and appropriated
by composers of film music. It is a small, recognizable musical unit that
corresponds affectively to an onstage or onscreen character. By always
playing this motif when the affiliated character is present, the music
becomes inextricably linked with that character (see Gorbman, 26–­29).
This effect can be so strong that the sounding of a leitmotif can announce
the presence of a character even when that character is not (yet) visible:
just as the chromatic motif in Jaws betrays the presence of the shark, the

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86 Isabella Van Elferen
thin pipes in Lovecraft can indicate the otherwise imperceptible pres-
ence of Nyarlathotep.
Lovecraft’s creatures, thus, may be unspeakable, but they do speak,
even if humans cannot perceive their bodies, understand their message,
or—­in the case of Lovecraft’s readers—­actually hear them. It is impor-
tant to note that these terrifying disembodied sounds, hideous voices,
musical rituals, and the Nyarlathotep leitmotif are never heard by the
readers of his stories. His weird world of sound is doubly removed from
the reader, as they are told from memory by the inaudible voice of Love-
craft’s narrators. The second half of this chapter will argue that listening
to Lovecraft should remain impossible.

Hyper-­Cacophony: Lovecraft and

Speculative Realism

Lovecraft is popular in a recent strand in philosophy often designated

as “speculative realism.” The speculative realists have embraced Love-
craft because he narrates worlds that lie beyond perception, which ties
in with their attack on correlationism and phenomenology. This attack
is expressed most poignantly in Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude
(2008), in which the author tries to find an answer to what he calls “cor-
relationism” (5), the Kantian notion that thinking and being cannot be
separated from one another. Because of the primacy of phenomenology
in post-­Kantian thinking, philosophy has tended to focus on the quali-
ties an object has for us; and in the linguistic labyrinths of poststructur-
alist thought the “for us” has all but replaced the object in-­itself. Since
Kant, the absolute is obsolete: the project of speculative realism is to
rehabilitate it.
Meillassoux starts this project by trying to find philosophical ground-
ing for scientists’ seemingly fantastical statements that the universe orig-
inated 13.5 billion years ago, that the earth originated 4.56 billion years
ago, that life on earth originated 3.5 billion years ago, and humankind
originated 2 million years ago. How can this be understood, Meillas-
soux wonders; what should thinking do with these claims that objects
and creatures existed irredeemably outside the scope of phenomenology?
Basing his assertions on the evidence provided by empirical science, he
argues that it is clear that anything can have been, independently of phe-
nomenology: carbon-­dating can prove beyond doubt that there has been
a time in which humans, and therefore human observers, did not exist.
These incontestable data lead Meillassoux to introduce a number of new

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 hyper- cacophon y 87
concepts to philosophy. He defines as “ancestral” the reality in which
there were no humans, and thus no human phenomenology; ancestral-
ity is “any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species” (10).
Meillassoux’s definition of what he calls the “arche-­fossil” is equally
concerned with the empirical proof of the outside of human perception
and correlation: the arche-­fossil is “material indicating the existence of
ancestral reality” (10). In order for philosophy to be able to occupy itself
with this time and this being that exists outside thinking, he concedes,
a speculative realism needs to be put into place that addresses these
forms of a nonmetaphysical absolute. Speculative realism must be a
math-­driven philosophy that studies “mathematics’ ability to discourse
about the great outdoors; to discourse about a past [but also a future, or
a parallel time] where both humanity and life are absent” (26). He is so
confident in mathematics that he proclaims a bright new future in which
every aspect in and outside the world, within and outside the reach of
humans, will be calculated and reformulated—­even and especially the
absolute of ancestral times and of things-­in-­themselves whose qualities
are outside the grasp of phenomenology (108, 117).
The ancient universes narrated in Lovecraft’s work and the creatures
that inhabit them seem to match seamlessly with Meillassoux’s philos-
ophy. Lovecraft’s work revolves around “the fearful myths antedating
the coming of man on earth” that speak of “worlds of elder, outer entity”
that contain the secrets concerning “the pits of primal life” (“Whisperer
in Darkness” 211, 215). It is not hard to conceive of these cosmic eras as
ancestral times in Meillassoux’s definition. Time and time again, more-
over, the tireless scientists populating Lovecraft’s stories prove that these
ancestral realities exist, even though they never appear before the eyes
of any observer. The scientists’ gathering of empirical evidence in order
to chart the ancestrality of the universes they are confronted with ties
in with Meillassoux’s mathematical paradigm, which similarly endeav-
ors to calculate insight into the outside-­human-­perception. Because his
protagonists keep finding carved stones, amulets, inhuman footsteps,
or even (parts of) corpses, Lovecraft’s fiction also contains arche-­fossils,
materials that indicate the existence of the Great Old Ones in prehuman
times—­an existence that is now faded but not less real: “Their hand is
at your throats, yet ye see Them not,” says the Necronomicon (“Dun-
wich Horror,” 220).
While sharing Meillassoux’s belief that science will eventually uncover
all secrets within and beyond the nature of our universe, Lovecraft is
ambivalent about the outcomes of this process. He lets the narrator of

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88 Isabella Van Elferen
“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” make an
opening statement that shows a simultaneity of fascination and fear for
what science might reveal in the future: “Science, already oppressive
with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate extermina-
tor of our human species—­if separate species we be—­for its reserve of
unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon
the world” (24). These “unguessed horrors” are caused by the possibility
that the universe, before, during, and after the era of human life, may
consist of the infinite, mindless, reasonless chaos hinted at in Lovecraft’s
own stories. This same chaos plays an important role in Meillassoux’s
philosophy. The latter argues that the absolute, which has thus far been
hidden by the restraints of correlationism but which mathematics will
continue to lay bare, can only be reached through what he calls “the
principle of unreason” (Meillassoux, 60). Surpassing the correlationist
principle of sufficient reason by which a Kantian thing-­in-­itself becomes
unthinkable (44–­49), Meillassoux surmises that we “put back into the
thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought”
(53). A stubborn insistence on causality, he argues, has made philosophy
obscure the fact that there is no reason (see 92, 110). The speculative the-
sis he thus postulates is that precisely this unreason is absolute: it is not
unthinkable, for that supposition would imply a return to the correla-
tionist for-­us (the “cogitamus,” 50), but it necessarily and absolutely is.
Graham Harman has explored the relation between phenomenology
and unreason in related ways, but his object-­oriented ontology focuses
on the nonphenomenological qualities of objects in-­themselves rather
than on the epistemological implications of those qualities. Harman has
written extensively on Lovecraft, claiming that he is “a writer of gaps
between objects and their qualities” (Weird Realism, 4) whose weird
prose challenges conventional phenomenology. In Lovecraft’s literary
descriptions of the creatures, events, and realities his characters encoun-
ter, Harman says, a consistent gap or “fission” arises between language
and meaning: the unknown colors and quasi-­buildings occurring in his
stories could never be visualized, as the point of their description is pre-
cisely that all description of these phenomena must fail (24–­37, 241–­43).
Strictly speaking, Lovecraft’s work cannot and should not be turned
into graphic novels, films, or video games, for that would mean that the
numinous indescribability of his realities would be straitjacketed into
forms and limits. “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” for instance, tells
the reader only that some horror is “unbelievable, unthinkable, almost

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 hyper- cacophon y 89
unmentionable”—­and even that information is only third-­hand, trans-
mitted by an unreliable narrator who repeats what the voice of his friend
told him from the bottom of a grave and through a telephone (7). Exceed-
ing representation, the nameless Thing escapes limits, disclosing only an
unending outside (see Botting, 288–­91).
The nonsounding of sound in Lovecraft is eminently important in
this context. The unnameable voice mentioned in Carter’s statement,
the Witch House’s cosmic timbre, Nyarlathotep’s blasphemous flutes:
all of these are described with speechless terror, and none will or can
ever be heard. “The Dunwich Horror” features indescribably horrible
sounds that could not possibly have been produced by human anatomy.
Instead, they appear to be some unearthly, disembodied voice emerging
from an arche-­fossil, an ancient altar stone in the middle of a deserted
landscape. But the sounds cannot be sufficiently described, as both their
being itself and their qualities escape reason: “It is almost erroneous to
call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-­bass tim-
bre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the
ear” (243). But what is an “infra-­bass timbre”? Bass is a pitch range,
not a timbre; and even within that pitch range there is no such thing
as “infra-­bass.” Is Lovecraft synesthetically conflating colors (infrared)
and sounds? What are these “seats of consciousness and terror”? Is ter-
ror necessarily unconscious? Is the author implying that the ear some-
times functions as such a seat? Does that mean that terror enters the
body and the mind physically as well as emotionally? Lovecraft’s liter-
ary depictions of what his characters hear—­more intensely so than what
they see, smell, or touch—­are the antithesis of descriptions: these words
could not nor should ever be put into sound, the popularity of “Love-
craftian” music notwithstanding (see Hill; Norman). This nonexistent
timbre, with all its suggestion of impossible physicality and its evocation
of unknown fears, is a perfect example of the fission that Harman dis-
covers in Lovecraft’s work: the object in-­itself remains hidden behind
the intangible qualities that are attributed to it by a literary style best
described as an act of ontological veiling.
It is evident why Lovecraft is so highly regarded by speculative real-
ists. His unspeakable cosmic voids seem to form a perfect presentation of
the “hyper-­chaos” that is found through the speculative realist unreason-
ing aperture onto the absolute, the great outdoors, the eternal in-­itself,
whose being is indifferent to whether or not it is thought (Meillassoux,
63). When describing hyper-­chaos, Meillassoux briefly ventures into a

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90 Isabella Van Elferen
Lovecraftian topology of his own whose style Harman would doubt-
lessly describe as masterful gap writing:

What we see there is a rather menacing power—­something insensible,

and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth
monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing
every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and
frenetic transformation, or conversely, of producing a universe that
remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing
the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an inter-
val of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the
Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but
an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind,
devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness
nor wisdom, ill-­disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of
its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is
inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying, without
cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for
metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity,
even a god, even God. (64)

The kinship between Meillassoux’s philosophical speculation and Love-

craft’s literary weirdism is tangible, both stylistically and conceptually.
Lovecraft’s cosmic realities, removed from our own by “nameless aeons
and inconceivable dimensions” (“Whisperer in Darkness,” 215), are as
“transfinite” as Meillassoux’s hyper-­chaos (101–­7). The creatures he
describes are as nonphenomenological, as unreasonable, and as abso-
lute as the objects and events of the speculative realists. The sounds
in Lovecraft’s stories, originating from those timeless voids and gener-
ated by those nonphenomenological beings, would have to be concep-
tualized here as a hyper-­cacophony: his universes echo with sounds that
are inaudible, with timbres that are physically impossible, with music
that is unimaginable even for an unearthly musicologist: “The shriek-
ing, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abyss was past all
analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm” (“Witch House,” 305). As precise
as it may seem, this description of otherworldly sound in “The Dreams
in the Witch House” creates as much fission as any weird phenomenon:
although Lovecraft indicates in how many ways this sound cannot be
described, he carefully avoids any concrete hints as to what this (music/
noise/drone/cacophony) hyper-­cacophony could actually sound like.

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 hyper- cacophon y 91
Through hyper-­cacophony’s omnipotence, anything could become
audible, even an inconceivable “pandaemoniac cachinnation” (“Dun-
wich Horror,” 218). And nothing could be audible, too, in an interplan-
etary silence with no sound but “the unechoing emptiness of infinity”
(“Celephaïs,” 25). Anything could sound. Sonic dream or nightmare, cre-
ation or destruction. Or all at the same time.

Sonic Speculation: Lovecraft’s Problematic

Materialism

Despite the “weirding” of contemporary philosophy resulting from

enthusiastic appropriations of Lovecraft (Woodard), there is one, pos-
sibly unbridgeable, difference between speculative realism and weird
literature. The “gap” that Harman notes between Lovecraft’s objects
and their qualities also marks a gap in the critical assessment of his
work: speculative realism overlooks the immaterial, possibly metaphys-
ical components in Lovecraft, which become especially evident in his
hyper-­cacophonic passages.
Lovecraft’s stories almost invariably begin by an account of the sci-
entific credibility of their subject matter. His main characters are often
researchers: Henry Akeley in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” for instance,
studied mathematics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, and folklore;
Walter Gilman in “Dreams in the Witch House” is a student of quantum
physics, mathematics, and folklore. Balancing between them a verifiable
blend of abstract reasoning and superstition, these latter two disciplines
characterize the research efforts of Lovecraft’s protagonists. More often
than not, they move on the edges of the knowable, trying to find empir-
ical proof of the cosmic, the prehuman, the supernatural. Lovecraft’s
scientists, however, must always come to the conclusion that science can-
not reach and understand all. The otherworldly realities and creatures
under investigation consistently escape any attempt empirically to prove
their existence; on top of that, whatever evidence was collected always
mysteriously disappears. Many of his stories end with the suggestion
that there may be realities and beings that come from “far outside even
the Einsteinian space-­time continuum or greatest known cosmos,” and
which are “wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination”
(“Whisperer in Darkness,” 221, 235). The scientific references here serve
but one goal: to show that calculus does not suffice when attempting to
think the nameless truths in the Lovecraftian universe.

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92 Isabella Van Elferen
It is at this junction that Lovecraft’s materialism is revealed to be
problematic, paradoxical even, and that weird fiction diverges from con-
temporary philosophy. As speculative realism does, Lovecraft thinks
a great outdoors beyond perception. Unlike speculative realism, his
thinking is not driven by the calculable mathematical possibility of the
“transfinite” (Meillassoux, 103) but by the im/possibility of infinitude,
“the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy
and mathematics alike” (“Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” 281).
Thus, while Meillassoux argues that the primary absolute of hyper-­chaos
relates to the derived absolute of mathematics through abstract calcu-
lation, the numinous beings crawling through Lovecraft’s universes
explicitly do not. Because that would imply that they are and are not
at the same time, Meillassoux would have to discard them as “contra-
dictory,” nonexistent exponents of metaphysical belief systems (69–­71).
In Lovecraft’s work, there is not only room for incalculability but also
for metaphysical assumptions: there may or may not be unfathomable
worlds and Great Old Ones that fall outside the reach of science. In his
thinking about these impossible realities, he does not so much discard
empirical objectivity as doubt the extent of its objectivity:

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction be-

twixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by
virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through
which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of
the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-­sight which
penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. (“The Tomb,” 1)

Here Lovecraft finds himself diametrically opposed to speculative real-

ism: science, he claims, does not gain insight in absolute materialism,
but presents a “common veil” of “prosaic materialism” that has noth-
ing at all to do with the hidden realities of the cosmos. Meillassoux, on
the contrary, triumphantly prophecies that “it is by way of mathematics
that we will finally succeed in thinking that which, through its power
and beauty, vanquishes quantities and sounds the end of play” (108).
His response to the above passage from Lovecraft could only be that the
author is adhering to Kantian correlationism, which would rather admit
to the limits of thinking than to the principle of unreason. Right there, it
would seem, the speculative affection for the weird author must defini-
tively come to an end, for the whole speculative project is to overcome
this kind of correlationist reasoning.

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 hyper- cacophon y 93
From Pythagoras to John Cage, sound and especially music have pre-
sented philosophy with a problem that yet awaits resolution. As acoustic
vibrations generated by instruments and voices, sound and music can be
theorized through ontological materialism (see Matheson and Caplan),
but as performative events leading to aesthetic and affective experiences,
sound and music must be thought in the realm of phenomenology, which
has a much less comfortable relation to materialism (see Benson). The
heart of this problem lies in one’s definition, and this is where opinions
vary. Can music be defined as vibration only, is it a medium through
which we communicate, or does it only properly come into existence
once it is heard? Does it exist when it consists of a score only, or does it
originate in the mind of a composer? Because of their uneasy fit between
ontology and phenomenology, between materiality and immateriality,
sound and music are privileged metaphors for Lovecraft’s paradoxical
materialism. The sounds discussed in the first paragraph of this chapter
are poised right at the border between sonic ontology and phenomenol-
ogy. The disembodied sounds in “The Hound” challenge the idea that
acoustic vibrations must necessarily be physical, as they may have been
made by metaphysical beings; the diabolical music of Erich Zann takes
its listener over the limits of sanity and materiality; and the “morbid
echo” in “The Whisperer in Darkness” originates from a sphere wholly
outside matter.
The crucial importance of music for Lovecraft’s conception of materi-
alism, and for its incommensurability with speculative realism, becomes
especially evident in hyper-­cacophony. The music of the Great Old Ones
is immaterial and metaphysical as well as originary and ontological. In
“The Dream-­Quest of Unknown Kadath,” Lovecraft envisions a musical
cosmogony, a version of the Big Bang—­an arche-­sound—­that is rem-
iniscent of the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres: a mathematical
absolute. These aspects tie in with Meillassoux’s speculative absolute.
In stark contrast to the speculative hyper-­chaos, however, Lovecraft’s
hyper-­cacophony spawns metaphysical as well as materialist being:

Trembling in waves that golden wisps of nebula made weirdly visible,

there rose a timid hint of far-­off melody, droning in faint chords that
our own universe of stars knows not. . . . It was a song, but not the
song of any voice. Night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when
space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born. (“Dream-­
Quest,” 248)

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94 Isabella Van Elferen
These Gods are metaphysical entities originating in the midst of noth-
ing, borne from a bodiless voice. This very notion marks an unbridge-
able abyss between Lovecraft and speculative philosophy. One of these
entities, the unspeakable Nyarlathotep, moreover, is manifested through
a music that far exceeds even the possibility of materialism. The rele-
vant passage from “Nyarlathotep,” which was quoted earlier, gains extra
philosophical weight in the light of its contrast to speculative realism:

the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous

whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlikely chambers
beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance
slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate
gods—­the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarla-
thotep. (“Nyarlathotep,” 33)

When Nyarlathotep speaks, his voice itself is music, too: “I will tell the
audient void” (31). This godly voice suggests a divine corporeality, and
the audient void he addresses suggests listening outside perception. The
accumulated sonic paradoxes of ontology and phenomenology, mate-
riality and metaphysics pervading Nyarlathotep mythology irrefut-
ably disclose a major philosophical conflict between weird fiction and
speculative realism. Lovecraft’s stories may reflect a reasonless, inhu-
man chaos populated by arche-­squids whom nameless aeons have coag-
ulated into arche-­fossils, but within this chaos there is the ephemeral
echo of singing voices whose timbre, pitch, and rhythm are like noth-
ing you have ever heard. Suggesting absolute materialism yet escaping
mathematic calculation, unnameable yet not object-­oriented, exceed-
ing the limits both of language and of mathematics, Lovecraft’s hyper-­
cacophony represents a weird metaphysical materialism, a cosmic chant
that is to be unheard throughout all infinity.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” . . .

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