Lovecraft the Ironist

By Jon Cogburn

In Michael LaBossiere's post on H.P. Lovecraft's racism he considers and critiques three arguments attempting to exculpate Lovecraft: (1) that his racism was unremarkable for a person of his time, ethnicity, and class, (2) that he had other qualities that offset the racism, and (3) that Lovecraft was an all purpose hater and should really be considered a misanthrope rather than a racist per se. Then  LaBossiere considers and endorses a fourth defense, that the merits of an artist's works are independent of her personal qualities:

My own view of Lovecraft is that his racism made him a worse person. However, the fact that he was a racist does not impact the merit of his works—except to the degree that the racist elements in the stories damage their artistic merit (which is an issue well worth considering). As such, Lovecraft should be condemned for his racism, but given due praise for the value of his work and his contribution to modern horror.

For the most part* I agree with this would like to here begin assessing some of the considerations with respect to the work itself.

Popular criticism on this issue is in general is a mess for two reasons. First, evidence that a person ever said anything racist is taken to be sufficient to condemn everything the person ever said as racist. Consider, for example, this representative blog post about a racist poem Lovecraft wrote in 1912. The poem was written over twenty years before Lovecraft began writing the stories that we associate with him. Or consider the outrage a few years ago when it was discovered the Philip Larkin made some anti-immigrant/racist jokes in his private letters with Kingsley Amis. Larkin's poetry doesn't have any racism in it and his public life was consistently opposed to racism (for example, he reviewed and championed American jazz music). But for a while it really looked that his poems would be driven out of the canon. Independent of how these things should influence how we read literature, it should be clear that the process of judging people via the worse thing they've ever done or said is a destructive and hypocritical standard. I don't know the extent to which it's fair to say Lovecraft was a racist, as opposed to saying that he said some racist things. The strongest evidence I've seen from one letter and story ("The Horror at Red Hook") points to the period when he lived in New York City (again, prior to the Cthulhu era) when he was so impoverished he lost forty pounds and his marriage was falling apart as he had a nervous breakdown. Second, popular criticism is in generally completely incompetent at separating out narrative from authorial from textual voice. In this post, I showed how collapsing these things with respect to Jack Kerouac's On the Road leads to uncharitable and destructive misreadings.

This semester I'm teaching the eight stories that are commonly regarded as Lovecraft canon. All of these were written after he'd failed in New York and was forced to move back to Providence. Not only are the four we've covered so far not racist, but two of them ("The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Whisperer in Darkness") are anti-racist in very important ways.

It's quickest in Whisperer. For most of the story, the narrator has been receiving letters from a folklorist who is under attack by aliens from the woods and their human servants. The folklorist has found out too much about them and is only still alive because they don't come out during the daytime or under a full moon and because his steadily decreasing supply of dogs attacks them. The letters get more and more frightening until the last letter, where the folklorist says it was all a misunderstanding and invites the narrator to visit him. Of course the visit doesn't go well. I should note that this is my favorite Lovecraft story so far. There isn't a hint of pulp about it and the slow increase of horror reveals is paced perfectly (they pile up so quickly in "The Colour of Outer Space" that the effect is inadvertantly comic). And right in the middle of the final letter praising the monsters we get this:

The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond all space and time – members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants.

The narrator's pen pal is instantiating a standard racist trope, but with respect to the monsters being biologically superior to human beings. But neither Lovecraft nor the story itself is in any way endorsing the trope itself here. In fact, by the end of the story it's clear that the monsters are technologically advanced, but use that advance for horrific ends (among other things, tricking people to become brains in vats). To the extent that the text is juxtaposing the relation between monsters and humans and the relation between colonizer and colonized, it functions to absolutely deflate the pretensions of the colonizers.

Then, when the narrator very stupidly decides to visit his penpal, as he is taking the train he himself engages in a bit of a nativist reverie:

I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and souothern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections where modernity had touched. There would ber odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape – the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilizes the soil for shadowy, marvelous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.

If one stupidly collapsed narrative and textual voice, one would conclude that the story expresses a hatred of foreigners. But this would be a terrible misreading of the text. This kind of folk romanticism is exactly what leads the narrator to almost being turned into a brain in a vat. It's a key part of the trap.

Lovecraft pulls of a very difficult trick. Far, far too often people recoil from racism into what Edward Said calls orientalism. The stock racist fears and hates the other. The stock orientalist takes herself to be praising the other, but in reality is just using the other as a foil to flee from what she hates in her own culture (French academics are terribly aware of the fact that Americans, Canadians, and Brits standardly use French philosophy in just this way). But the orientalist's love of a caricature can end up being just as destructive as the racist's. It did not work out well for the Native Americans who had to walk through cold London streets with gold plated necklaces playing step 'n fetch it in an attempt to get English people to go attempt to find their riches in the new world. Or consider the bit from the movie Smoke where one of the main characters talks about how his grandfather hated the movie "Dances with Wolves" because it's the kind of thing only made after a genocide has been successful.

Stock racism, recoil from the other, is intimately connected with scientific racism, which was devised only because the people at the time had no idea that European infectious diseases wiped out tens of millions of Native Americans and Africans in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. When the second wave of settlers came it was possible (over the course of a number of bloody wars) to defeat the few survivors of that holocaust. But why was it possible to ultimately win every such war? The colonizers did not compare their experiences with the notes from the original explorers and so had no idea that they were walking in the ruins of great civilizations. Instead they assumed that the people were inferior in some way that helped morally legitimate robbing and killing them. If you kick someone unjustly it's much easier to double down and convince yourself that they deserved to be kicked than it is to realize you've done something unjust. And the new science leaped into the breach here, providing explanations of how non-Europeans were further down the chain of being.

But there is another kind of anti-scientific, romantic racism. Defenders of Heidegger always demonstrate their own ignorance and culpability with respect to racism by bringing up the old canard that Heidegger critiqued "crude biological racism." As if this were exculpatory. The smallest bit of historical research reveals that Hitler himself wasn't a "crude biological racist" but rather based his racism in the German romantic tradition that assigned to folk a mythical status. Heidegger's weird statements about the Greeks and the Germans and the German language is just a part of this trend which gained the most steam in the 19th century. It was this kind of racism that allowed Eichmann to claim that he was a philosemite in his trial. He was, according to himself, a Zionist trying to get the Jewish folk their own homeland, but the war tragically intervened. Holocaust deniers do this same trick today. And while orientalism is not scientific racism, it always  has a tendency to shade into romantic racism. Note that as a child and young man Lovecraft was an orientalist and even gave himself an Arab sounding name, Abdul Alhazred, which he later used as the name of the writer of the Necronomicon in the Cthluhu.

In Form and Object Tristan Garcia claims that what is essential to all forms of racism is the idea that individuals are nothing more than indiscernible placeholders for their ethnicity. Both scientific and romantic racism tend towards this.

What I take to be remarkable about Cthulhu as an anti-racist text is that it undermines both scientific and romantic racism. The latter is probably clearest in the fact that he makes Abdul Alhazred (his younger self) the author of the Necronomicon. I'll say more about this below though. Autobiographically, Lovecraft is rejecting both previous phases of his life, his pre-marriage orientalism and his racist breakdown in New York (I suspect that both are related to the fact that his wife was Jewish, the former giving him the courage to marry a Jewish person, given his background, the latter related to the fact that the marriage ended up failing). I'm not sure this has anything to do with the interpretation of the story though. In any case, in addition to people not being able to separate out narrative from authorial from textual voice, that it undermines both forms of racism is probably the reason that it is not given the credit it deserves.

Cthulhu is not pleasant reading. The narrator of Cthulhu, and the newspaper articles he quotes, are incredibly racist, e.g.: "blackest of the African voodoo circles," "degenerate Esquimaux," "mongrel prisoners," "a hundred mongrel celebrants," "a very low, miexed-blooded, and metally aberrant type," "negro fetichism," "foreign mongrels," "mixed blood," "queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes."

The narrator is a racist, embodying the attitudes that Lovecraft himself seemed to have embodied during his breakdown in New York. People of mixed ethnic heritage are an object of horror on a par with the way horror often trades in Levitical (e.g. a fish with feet) type combinations of things that our conceptual schemes deem separate. Yet it is the relatively new scientific racism of the time that is informing the very conceptual scheme that deems them separate. Even the early British colonialists in India intermarried with native people. The practice didn't stop until the Victorian era (Wiliam Dalrymple argues that the Empire was weakened substantially by it's own racism because the end of intermarriage prevented England from co-opting native leaders the way the Romans had). And Roman historians like Livy don't find skin color to be something worth remarking on at all.

But the whole point of Cthulhu is to undermine the narrator and his scientific pretensions. His whole tone is as of a dispassionate scientist in search of truth, and throughout the whole story he goes to nearly ludicrous lengths to discount evidence of the monstrous. Moreover, the only white people who are sensitive to the truth in the story are the artists and poets, who are like the colonized in that they believe the truth. Lovecraft places himself as the writer implicitly on the side of the artists, poets, and various colonized and interracial people that the narrator denigrates. His narrator, on the other hand, is on the side of the racist scientific consensus of the time. But the whole story works to undermine the narrator in precisely this regard.

Why isn't this abundantly clear to readers? It would be if Lovecraft simply inverted the normal scheme of scientific racism in the way the orientalist does. If he clearly presented Cthulhu as the great hope for humanity, then it would be very obvious that the story is anti-racist. And indeed, recent rewrites of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings such as Jacqueline Carey's The Sundering do just this, with Sauron being a Christ figure whose sacrifice keeps the elf god from creating a pure, crystalline world of lifeless perfection. And one could do for Lovecraft's mythology what Carey had done for Tolkien's. Cthulhu is the God of the oppressed, the artists, the poets. In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, but we the wretched of the earth will wake him.

But part of the literary and moral brilliance of Lovecraft is that he doesn't do this.

The dumbest thing Tolstoy ever said is that the regeneration of Russia will come from the serfs. It's the romantic idea that suffering is somehow ennobling. But if the kind of horrendous suffering visited on the Russian serfs were ennobling, then there wouldn't be anything wrong with it. Nietzsche was wrong. What doesn't kill me paralyzes me, often ethically as well. Russian history shows what can happen. We should never forget that Stalin's various moves against those he deemed kulaks were broadly popular and that to some extent he had to do that because Lenin's NEP was so unpopular.

Cthulhu is really scary. No one is going to make a "Dances With Cthulhu" movie. The narrator really has no idea why people would want to awaken Cthulhu, nor what would happen if it were awoken. All he knows is that his own culture is based on cosmic lies.

Part of the evil brilliance of oppression is that it sustains itself by making the cost of its downfall as high as possible. This is (in part, global warming and a near famine played a role) what is playing out in Syria today. Without Assad you'll get fundamentalism and civil war. Of course the Assads of the world do everything possible to make this the case. But it's still the case. Lovecraft's essentially tragic world view sets this into relief.

[*There are some deeper issues about the relationship of morality and art Graham Bounds and I are working on.  A very rough draft of a paper can be found here.]