Yeah, I’ve read many a series ass-backwards because it looked interesting and that was what was there. It’s definitely a Library thing.
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It just makes no difference to me. I’m not one of these “Social Justice Warriors” who judge every last bit of artistic work based on how it handles issues of sexual, racial, ethnic, et. al. relations. It’s one thing to judge a contemporary piece of writing that revels in ignorant racism because contemporary American society is a bit more aware of such things and, amongst some folks, that type of ignorance is odious (as, indeed, it is). However, to expect the same level of social conscience of writers from past times sets a dangerous precedent. If we shun Lovecraft’s work because it has a nasty undercurrent of racism, then what about the works of Poe, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and virtually every other American or British writer of the period?
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That doesn’t wash. Even for his time he was an odious racist. Try reading his letters.
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I’ve read everything the man ever wrote–letters, scraps on postcards, “The Nigger.” I just don’t care how odious a racist he was. I don’t see why any of that matters in regard to the quality of his fiction.
I would like someone to explain to me why and how his goofy beliefs about race weaken or otherwise affect negatively the quality of his canonical writings.
To give a nontheoretical example, I’ve taught Lovecraft in a number of college-level courses over the years and, using the second part of “The Call of Cthulhu” as a touchpoint, addressed how HPL portrays “degenerate” cultist stereotypes with my students. I’ve asked them many, many times if said portrayals derailed the story for them or even made them uncomfortable. Their replies were almost universally, “Of course it did…but wasn’t this guy from the 1920s? Didn’t everyone think like that back then?”
“More or less,” I explained. “But even so, does it matter to you now?”
They all–and I mean all–shrugged and said, “No. It’s just a horror story.” One fella, a young black man from Pittsburgh, even added: “It ain’t like it’s a Ku Klux Klan recruiting pamphlet.”
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Except they didn’t “all” think like that. It changes the read of “degenerate cultists” or the people in Innsmouth and their breeding once you know of his exceptional preoccupation with race mixing and that this may just be a thin gloss on that.
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Again, why should I care? Now, there’s a sizable amount of teachable content there, illustrating early-20th-Century attitudes toward race mixing* and issues of cultural/racial interaction…but that’s one of the reasons why we continue to read fiction from the past–to see how folks thought at one time in order to understand how we think today.
*Early 20th-Century attitudes toward race mixing are only marginally more idiotic than early-21st-Century attitudes toward race mixing. It may not be as unusual today to see interracial couples in public, but when was the last time you saw an interracial couple on a television programme produced in the US? Homosexual couples are more accepted than interracial couples. Though more folks today have no problem with interracial couples, the vast majority still do–and I’m not just talking about Caucasian Americans. Racism is incredibly rampant amongst folk of Latino descent, especially Latinos originating from Mexico. I was floored to discover that many Mexicans would rather see their children marry “Indios,” whom they regard as the lowest of the low, than black people. Many Asians recoil from interracial marriages and relationships involving blacks as well. This is just an aside, really, but the fact of the matter is that racial attitudes today aren’t much different than they were in HPL’s day. It’s just not as accepted to speak about them freely in public anymore…which is, I suppose, a kind of progress, though not much of one, sadly.
Having digested things a bit:
Miscegenation, the corruption of blood and more general racism are major recurring themes in his work. I do think that focusing on them too much misses what I think is Lovecraft’s biggest achievement, creating a scientific(-ish) cosmic horror. The main “gods” in the Mythos are really aliens, magic spells are really high-level mathematics (e.g. “Dreams in the Witch-House”), and the horror stems from the realization that the immense forces of the universe just plain don’t care about humans. The racist tropes are occasionally played with a bit like in True Detective and other works, but in the main it’s the cosmic horror stuff that I read him for and see most copied (the game Quake, the movie Event Horizon, and Stephen King’s story “The Mist” just off the top of my head, and I could make a very long list.)
Even though I’m a big Lovecraft fan I wouldn’t be adverse to replacing him on the award for the reasons brought up. The tricky part is that Lovecraft isn’t on there for being a great writer, it’s for being aninfluential writer. Poe already has the Edgar awards for mystery writing, as is appropriate for the inventor of the modern detective story. So who else has a similar or greater impact on the genre? Fritz Lieber? Robert E. Howard? Jack Vance (if only through D&D magic)? Jorge Luis Borges? J.R.R. Tolkien? Michael Moorcock? A non-white non-male I’m totally missing?
I’d be down with Tolkien though I am a Butler fan.
Some people bend over so far backwards to be politically correct that their heads go up their asses.
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There were definitely some Lovecraft stories where I read “degenerate” as “inbred” especially because he usually uses it to describe isolated people. People marrying their close relatives for many generations can legitimately cause problems that have nothing at all to do with race. Corruption of the blood definitely takes on a different tone when you are talking about alien beings from space than other races as well.
Lovecraft is overtly racist in many places, but I don’t even think that this whole degeneration theme requires racism to make it work.
Not disagreeing that all slavery is abhorrent, but in ancient Greece and Rome it wasn’t racially based in the same way as it was in the US. IIRC Plato was briefly enslaved (he was captured by pirates and put up for sale, but his students ransomed him) and Diogenes certainly spent time as a slave.
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Karl Popper thinks that Plato is very much overrated, and is frequently used to justify all sorts of things that have no place in contemporary society.
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Yeah, I’m with Popper there. I’m not sure that Philosopher-Kings are ethically or logically defensible. Much more of an Aristotelean myself.
Good point. Didn’t know that about Plato or Diogenes. Makes sense with Diogenes. Traveling the world in search of an honest man… doesn’t that officially qualify as “asking for it?”
Lovecraft is overtly racist in many places, but I don’t even think that this whole degeneration theme requires racism to make it work.
You’re right that it’s not a requirement, as say the way it was hadled in True Detective. Lovecraft’s father died in an insane asylum, so he definitely had personal reasons for the theme beyond his racism. I would say it’s a manifestation of racism in the major story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” though. Yes, spoilers Deep Ones aren’t human, but the whole cult worshiping them is said to have originated among depraved Pacific Islanders, and I think it’s reasonable to say that the fishy men are stand-ins for the unwashed hordes of immigrants that were polluting Lovecraft’s beloved New England.
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I had a philosophy professor in undergrad who was asked in a class who his favourite philosopher was. He said, “Artistotle. Of course, everything he said was empirically false.”
I think we read Plato and Aristotle for the same reason we learn about the raisin pudding model of the atom.
Lovecraft was sure racist. I just think Nickle is totally wrong when he says that xenophobia is the linchpin of the work. I think it could be taken out by a competent editor and leave most of the stories intact (and made better). In the Dunwich Horror he talks about backwater New England towns:
They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.
Given that he specifically mentions inbreeding, I don’t think he is talking about some kind of racial impurity there, but maybe he is. I managed to read quite a few Lovecraft stories with themes of “degeneracy” without imagining it was meant to relate to race. Obviously after reading enough, though, some very overt racism in places tipped me off and I to understddd what he probably meant, even if it wasn’t what I read.
I first read HPL in 1986, finding a copy of “Haunter of the Dark” in a library 30 miles away, I put in a request for a book transfer ( 30p being the admin charge ) and waited for the UK library system to grind!
About a month later a card was delivered to my bedsit telling me to come collect the book.
( I had discovered Lovecraft through the pages of Fangoria and iirc Steven King had mentioned him as an influence in one of his novels.)
Anyway, on the 21st of October 1986 ( I got to own that copy of that book a year later when it was deleted ( my best mates mum was head librarian at the time )) I took delivery of " The Haunter of the Dark and other tales of horror " …
The Outsider hooked me and The call of Cthulhu, The rats in the walls, The Dunwich horror and Haunter of the dark are still amongst my all time favourite reads.
Lovecrafts racism is visible in his work, and he obviously loathed inbreeding. However I had always felt that he was aware of it in his work and that the themes he wrote about with the elder gods and Cthulhu kinda added a perspective to it that belittled his own prejudice.
Knowledge of the true reality of mankinds position in the universe always destroys his narrators…
HPLs influence was incredibly far reaching and the recent revival of interest in his work is remarkable!
As observed in other comments, racism is alive and well in the general population in all parts of the world and to think otherwise is naive and a little blinkered.
I’m always horrified to observe it in people I considered friends!
Calling someone out on it will cause a lot of back peddling and apology but the roots of it run deep!
Anyhoo I love HPLs work and Charles Stross has recently proven to me that the Mythos has an unhealthy future in the 21st century…
I remember watching The Mask of Fu Manchu for a film class. The line that stuck in my head was Karen Morley’s “you yellow people!”
But isn’t that where the heart of racism often lies? The words and comparisons that Lovecraft uses (“mongrels” comes to mind) suggest that he considered certain other races to be subhuman. To his mind, those creatures were not members of his own species.
I distinctly remember the first time that I caught on to Lovecraft’s xenophobia. It was after completing “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family”. If that isn’t a fear-of-miscegenation story, I don’t know what is.
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