To be fair, though, Nietzsche probably was anti-Semitic and Aristotle - when judged objectively - was a grade A moron (and a bugger for the bottle, I hear).
Whenever I see racism in Twain I always suspect it was put there with a wink to his more clever readers. We all do have to live in the times we are born in, and sometimes enlightened people hide their messages or present them with sarcasm or as parody that they know many people won’t get. I particularly like Twain’s essay “Concerning the Jews” is a screed against mistreating other human beings that makes constant derogatory comments about the French (and that seems thoroughly offensive if read flatly by today’s standards).
I don’t doubt that Twain may have been quite racist in his early years before he’d met a wide variety of people and thought things through from himself. I am quite convinced that he was extremely progressive and a humanist later on.
I must be hanging with the wrong crowd. It seems one can’t express an admiration for Lovecraft without racism being brought up. Because, by the transitive property of “listening to Elton John’s music makes you Gay,” I am now in collusion with centuries of racism by reading “The Colour Out of Space.” Reading old Tintin comics turns you into Henry Ford, or so I’m told.
Lovecraft’s obvious racism is scarcely what makes his writing endure. Also, people who enjoy zombie-based entertainment should check themselves. Whole lotta bigotry to unpack there.
But there’s still a huge gap between literature that references things we consider taboo. (Any Mel Brooks Film, Airplane!, Star Wars, Any Woody Allen film, The Human Centipede) and what we have collectively done in real life. ( Any war, any prison camp, any religious doctrine, a lot of Fortune 500 companies)
If we’re holding authors to blame, but not those that inflict those events; and sliding knowledge of those events under the covers of “fiction”; aren’t we becoming far more dangerous than “All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment, I cannot be certain”?
I read along with http://hppodcraft.com when I decided to read Lovecraft. I found listening to the podcasts after was really cool, because they did discuss the man’s racism, and his other problematic issues. They were very thorough in their discussion of his life, and how even for Lovecraft’s time, he was overtly racist.
I did enjoy reading his works, but I had to file it in my head with a big read flag reading “Problematically racist”. I’m not sure in this day and age you can really discuss his work, without acknowledging how racist it is. I think to do so is a disservice to the folks Lovecraft maligned. If you don’t acknowledge his racist crap, then you are kind of continuing it’s perpetration.
Those are the great questions. Can you choose to (I like your choice of words) “obliterate” an aesthetic reaction or should you choose to do so? I’m not certain, but I’d go with your solution of coexisting responses. Regardless, it’s an interesting conversation (and I think that was the problem identified in the article, namely the lack of conversation about racism in Lovecraft).
Lovecraft as “a product of his times” is not perfectly correct. His racism would not have seemed much out-of-place is his time, but he took to it with particular zeal. Digging deep into his private letters actually make you appreciate him as an even deeper racist than his stories suggest.
However I think it’s informative to consider his recurring themes of racial degeneracy, doomed heritage, and fallen lines together to form a more complete picture. Lovecraft’s theme of racial degeneration is very obvious, with the Innsmouth look in “the Shadow over Innsmouth” and the horrid family tree of the Jermyn family in “the Facts Concerning the late Arthur Jermyn and his Family”. His somewhat separate theme of modern people doomed by the sins of their ancestors, as “Dreams in the Witch House”, “the Alchemist” or “Rats in the Walls” is also obvious. But most of those doomed characters are also a sort of fallen aristocracy: the last male heads of well-bred, once well-to-do families which have left only ruins and dust for their modern-day heirs, such as the Jermyns or the Hydes from “the Tomb”.
Lovecraft was an Anglophile who considered the English people – and especially the English aristocracy – to be the pinnacle of civilization. Anglo-American gentry like himself were poor, unfortunate cousins. Americans without any Anglicisms to save them were even worse, and races from other continents were so far removed from “Mother England” as to be sub-human. In his personal life he spoke of his bride Sonia as something like “a well-acclimated Jew”, as if embracing the Anglo-American way of life had absolved any racial sin.
Basically, Lovecraft was the poor, last male head of once-prosperous, somewhat aristocratic line. He was probably taught from a very early age the old-world notion that blood is destiny, but nonetheless realized his line was on the edge of ruin. His writing years were after the Great War ruined most of the noble houses of Europe, but before World War II would forever bury the notion of blood as destiny. He lived in a time when he could says with certainty that everything he had ever been taught as a boy was proving demonstrably, horribly wrong. His cosmic horror is an extrapolation of that “wrongness” to the whole of human history and understanding.
You don’t have to forgive Lovecraft for his racism. Rather, it helps to understand it as a symptom of his own personal horror.
Certainly people read Mein Kampf still for historical reasons, with out agreeing with or even liking the author.
Lovecraft was an author of books and stories that can be interpreted as either being racist, or as having a racist subtext. Either one finds literary genius that somehow transcends this, or one simply forgets about his works as generically bad pulp fiction and relegates the author to obscurity
Hitler perpetrated crimes against humanity, and instigated the bloodiest war in human history. He also wrote a book that will remain of historical interest because it is somewhat relevant to understanding his rise to political power, and consequent criminality.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Ethics is a societal construct and a personal set of morals and is relative to the times (unless I misunderstood your post).
Has anybody actually answered this question? Once everyone agrees that Lovecraft was pretty racist, the issue of the award seems more about how much people like his writing or acknowledge its influence. Then again, I’m not sure why a person’s face has to be on there at all.
Yeah, well, Lovecraft has this general horror of “degeneracy” on multiple levels. “Degenerates” are associated with, and in some cases are (e.g. “The Lurking Horror”) the the alien and the monstrous. There’s a horror both of the degenerate “other” and becoming this degenerate other. At the end of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” the narrator, having brought the wrath of the federal government down on the inhabitants of Innsmouth, killing them and putting them in concentration camps, the narrator realizes - the ultimate horror! - that he, too, is one of these beings and is now sympathetic to them (another horror). There’s some ambiguity to all this as well - in “The Outsider,” the entirely sympathetic, amnesiac narrator stumbles around finding people in states of abject horror only to realize that he is the source of this terror - a walking, rotting corpse. I get the feeling that the narrator of that story was, as in many of Lovecraft’s stories, a stand-in for the author to some degree. Supposedly “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” was inspired by Lovecraft finding out his great-grandmother was Welsh, for example.
Cthulhu itself is horrific due to its utter alienness, but its “degenerate worshippers” are attributed with evil acts: human sacrifice, talking about engaging in an orgy of killing when Cthulhu arises, assassinating one of the narrators of the story. But blood libel explains the supposed human sacrifices; even taken at face-value the cult’s vision of the future still isn’t as bad as a literal reading of Christianity’s Revelations; and the narrator dies in what is apparently an accident - it’s only that two foreign gentlemen help the man that it turns into a sinister death. The story almost becomes aware of the absurdity of its own racist paranoia there.
It certainly makes some of his works more palatable. I’m not sure he would have been entirely appalled. Even with Lovecraft’s blatant racism, there’s still this weird ambiguity. He’s horribly anti-semitic. He marries a Jewish woman. He writes a story about a man finding out he’s descended from monsters. He’s inspired by finding out his ancestry is not entirely as English as he thought. The guy was more conflicted than it might appear.
Lovecraft definitely wasn’t a misanthrope. He was, for example, a serious Anglophile. That he was terrified/disgusted by everyone non-English just makes him incredibly xenophobic.
It’s hard for me to keep track of what Nietzsche liked and didn’t like. It seems so safe to just guess that if there was a thing that you could hate he hated it.
Another entertaining-but-horribly-racist early 20th century author that comes to mind is Sax Rohmer. He basically invented the modern supervillain in The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, a genius megalomaniacal sociopath complete with secretive criminal syndicates, super-weapons, cool lairs (with deadly booby traps), henchmen aplenty and evil plots to bring the West to its knees.
Unfortunately the Fu-Manchu series was also the embodiment of every ugly “Yellow Peril” stereotype and conspiracy theory to grace the Western World.
