Zwillinger's Call of (to?) Cthulu
By
Aggelakis,
Posted on: 2012-08-15 11:21 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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That was more of a result of hundred of years of inbreeding than a statement on evolution.|
Originally Posted by peterpeter
I'm a fan of Lovecraft's writing, but there's no denying the guy was a racist - and not just against the people we would consider minorities today. I don't think he even gave much thought to them. My impression is that he spent more time hating on southern Europeans than anyone else. He also had weird and self-evidently untrue ideas about evolution (as in The Lurking Fear). Kind of a messed up dude in a variety of ways, and his love affair with adjectives wears thin fairly quickly. Still, despite all that, I think some of his stories are well worth reading.
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As for racism against southern Europeans, well Lovecraft's formative years were during the influx of southern European immigrates during 1890s-1910s (70% of all immigrates in 1910 were southern or eastern European origin). A lot of underlying motivation for racism in my opinion is the need for some to have somebody to look down on, who are below them on the totem pole. Often this is whomever is the "strangers" to the neighborhood and it upsets them greatly when its not. In that time period it was southern and eastern Europeans that were the "strangers".
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ooooo... my favorite. But only because, at the time I read it, I LIVED in Red Hook.
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Originally Posted by InfamousBrad
I am, if anything, vaguely amused by somebody's invocation of his very early short story "The Horror at Red Hook"
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I called him "intensely xenophobic" for a reason. And it's not that shocking that the "real threats" are 'corrupted' white guys, while the evil minions are all minorities.|
Originally Posted by InfamousBrad
who, exactly, are we accusing Lovecraft of actually liking, of him actually not fearing?
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Look at any xenophobia story and the worst, most terrifying villain will always be a somehow-corrupted reflection of ourselves. Look at any xenophilia story, incidentally, and DANCESWITHWHITEGUYSAVIOR.
Lovecraft was extremely fond of white male adventurers. He idolizes men he feels fit this mould and writes of them in glowing terms.
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| Sort of a sci-fi/horror version of Rudyard Kipling's "The Pict Song" from Rewards and Faeries. |
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Own it and read it. I can't say I agree with much of it, although my differences are with his cultural filters, rather than his research. And given the extent to which he's been publicly racist himself, his interpretations are automatically suspect. |
Originally Posted by InfamousBrad
You've been seduced by the Michael Houlebecq side of the force.?
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| I am, if anything, vaguely amused by somebody's invocation of his very early short story "The Horror at Red Hook" - because while the cult's followers were mostly Slavs and Poles and Italians (who we'd now consider white) plus a few Africans, the cult leader was a college-educated rich white guy, and he was the guy who was really dangerous. |
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Never forget that squamous and ruggous will come up in the description as well. Squamous being scaled and I forget what ruggoeus is. tentacled maybe?
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Lovecraft's style is strange - mostly because he's trying to describe things, feelings and sensations that are beyond words.
His usual method is to start off in a very dry, precise "educational" way - there are usually quite a few facts, dates, references and history, real and made up, that helps to give an impression of normality and make the situation seem real - but as the story progresses, his writing becomes more and more weird, using older and rarer words and a more "poetic" style to give the impression of the previous normality breaking up as the "truth" is uncovered. |
But it's MY sadistic mechanical monster and I'm here to make sure it knows it. - Girl Genius
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Do you mean "rugous/rugose" (which means wrinkled, creased, or ridged)?|
Originally Posted by TerraDraconis
Never forget that squamous and ruggous will come up in the description as well. Squamous being scaled and I forget what ruggoeus is. tentacled maybe?
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It is unfortunate that people get defensive at critical discussions of Lovecraft's racism. The xenophobia is real and present and fairly severe. This doesn't mean that anyone has to hate Lovecraft or never read his work. It's just good to be aware of the author's biases and how they are reflected in his work. He doesn't need to be defended, as he's dead. The benefit of the doubt is inapplicable, as he made his views explicitly clear.
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I have to say that this thread has justified this month's subscription fee all by itself. 
For me personally, I can't really see how knowing HPL's personal hangups benefits me as a reader.
For a concrete example, I'll use Steven King. His New England background is a heavy influence on his settings, and the accident in which he was struck by the van and was not just nearly killed, but his body pretty much demolished for a long time had a huge influence on his later writings, from Misery to the Dark Tower. That's interesting to me. Likewise, Danse Macabre, his book about writing is interesting for the insights it gives, much as HPL's letters to the editors of Weird Tales and what-not about his views on writing horror.
I don't much care about King's political views and I don't much care about HPL's racist views (or xenophobia, which sounds like it actually is a more accurate characterization).
Is The Red Hook Horror racist? If HPL did NOT have the reputation he has, would the story be analyzed the same way? I'm hard-pressed to see the racism, especially when holding it up against other literature of the period. When does a story stand on its own and when does it have to be analyzed on the way its author's views and history inform it?
In the end, does it really matter, or is it enough for it to be a good yarn?
There's no right or wrong answer. Each of us has different things that we find interesting, especially if the reader is someone who also fancies being a writer.
For myself, I'd have to say that I enjoy HPL's work as literature first and as commentary on HPL himself a distant second. I understand, though, why others would feel differently.
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That's up to you to decide. If you do not think it benefits you personally, then that's your choice. However, that's not applicable to everyone. I find knowing about it because it has an obvious impact on what he wrote and the meaning behind his writing.|
Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
I have to say that this thread has justified this month's subscription fee all by itself.
For me personally, I can't really see how knowing HPL's personal hangups benefits me as a reader. |
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| I don't much care about King's political views and I don't much care about HPL's racist views (or xenophobia, which sounds like it actually is a more accurate characterization). |
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| Is The Red Hook Horror racist? If HPL did NOT have the reputation he has, would the story be analyzed the same way? I'm hard-pressed to see the racism, especially when holding it up against other literature of the period. When does a story stand on its own and when does it have to be analyzed on the way its author's views and history inform it? |
I think that the "death of the author" is ********, by the way. I think that's often used as an excuse to cut off certain kinds of criticism - like Orson Scott Card's homophobia.
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| In the end, does it really matter, or is it enough for it to be a good yarn? |
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There's no right or wrong answer. Each of us has different things that we find interesting, especially if the reader is someone who also fancies being a writer. For myself, I'd have to say that I enjoy HPL's work as literature first and as commentary on HPL himself a distant second. I understand, though, why others would feel differently. |
I think that it should be possible and is often necessary to be able to critique creative works in these terms (racism, for example). This doesn't mean that everyone has to hate works that have racist (or sexist, or homophobic, or any other -ism or -phobia) elements, and avoid or boycott them. But I do not see a downside to people being aware of what these things are, what they mean, and what they reflect not just about the creator, but about the culture in which the creator is able to produce such works and prosper.
If we simply offer the benefit of the doubt and take on "the death of the author" uncritically, then all that happens is that an environment in which entertainment for some is actively unpleasant to others, with no concern for the latter. I would rather that concern exist.
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Yeah, it's true... H.P. Lovecraft was EXTREMELY racist. He, after all, actually wrote a... POEM called "On the Creation of [N-word I'm not allowed to say here]." That said, I love him all the same, even with his silly ideas of minorities.
I mean, there are tv shows, movies, and books I love that clearly have elements of all kinds of -isms and -phobias that I strongly disagree with. I know they're there, I know what they are. Sometimes they annoy the living hell out of me, but I still like them.
I like Lovecraft's stories, for that matter, but I see literally no value in ignoring the problematic aspects of his work.
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No, you're reading motivations where I haven't presented any such motivations. I'm interested in exactly what I said I was interested in. I don't have any agendas that the questions are trying to serve, most especially agendas about what people "ought" to feel or believe. I'm more interested in what they DO feel and believe, quite honestly.|
Originally Posted by BellaStrega
From what you've written in your post, I don't really believe you when you say "I understand why others would feel differently." I believe you accept that others feel differently, but this post seems to present arguments as to why people shouldn't feel differently.
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This is a shortcoming of text forum communications.
It's all leading up to Zwill's Ustream performance of Shoggoth on the Roof.
To keep this slightly on topic, his short story "The Street" is one of his most openly racist ones, and as Jack was a big HPL fan, there's a name in it that quite possibly made its way into CoH, especially with the context it was used in in the story.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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A lot of the racist elements of Lovecraft's stories would have been written similarly to what he wrote, even if he had not been a racist. He uses the exotic, mysterious and frightening foreign peoples because their unfamiliarity is what makes them exotic, mysterious and frightening. In this day and age, we have a hard time imagining that we might now know what a Kurd was like or what Deepest Africa is like or what a strange vaguely Oriental (Asian - a lot of asians today would find the word offensive) personage was like or that such a person might not be mysterious and intimidating just for being that. |
Originally Posted by BellaStrega
If HPL were not racist, then The Horror at Red Hook would not have been written. If he didn't have a reputation for xenophobia and racism, The Horror at Red Hook would still be easily interpreted to include elements of xenophobia and racism because they're pretty obvious.
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There's a reason why Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan were pulp villain and hero respectively. I've mentioned this before - If you want to talk blatant, unapologetic racism then Sax Rohmer is your man.
In Lovecraft's day they didn't have television or the internet or even speedy travel. The first radio news broadcast was in 1920 (according to Wikipedia). Worldwide communication was rare not common, and while it became widespread, it was still something of a luxury to the readers of Weird Tales. If you wanted to send a message, you sent a telegram. If you had access to a telephone, it was probably a party line - a community telephone.
The point is that the world was a larger, more mysterious, less well-explored place back then. To Lovecraft's readers, the best, most compact and least expensive way of showing that something exotic and mysterious was going on is to have the people involved be exotic and mysterious people. The yardstick for exotic and mysterious was quite different back then than it is today.
It's easy to say "racist" and dismiss the fact that Lovecraft lived a long time in Red Hook himself and his descriptions of the place are impressions of his everyday experience. It seems to me too easy to dismiss the whole thing as "racist" simply because the plot requires that a lot of questionable characters of indistinct but non-European stock clandestinely move into Red Hook.
This is why I ask "what are the racist elements?" because what I keep hearing is an analysis of HPL and not an analysis of the story other than "Well, they're obvious."
Humor me. I disagree that they're obvious, or at least I disagree that they are gratuitous. These elements that are being labeled racist appear to be serving the ends of the story. THAT is a big reason right there to question whether they are really "racist" or not, or so it seems to me.
I think it's a disservice to the story to (at least give the appearance) of saying "HPL was a non-apologetic racist so that clearly makes this story racist also".
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Okay, I actually laughed out loud at that. |
Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
It's all leading up to Zwill's Ustream performance of Shoggoth on the Roof.
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Although they're too disgusting and vile to post here, I'd suggest anyone who wants to check out some of Lovecraft's "wittiest" quotes on race look for the Tumblr page called "Fhtagn Yeah - Xenophobic Lovecraft" to see them collected in semi-meme form.
WARNING: They're pretty extreme.
After reading them, re-read "The Horor at Red Hook".
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Ahahaha|
Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
Well, then if we're making racist allusions then they at least need to be accurate ones.
Is Lovecraft openly racist in his stories? Maybe I've just forgotten it. It's been quite a while since I've read him. I'm less concerned with his personal feelings about it because he's long dead and his time is long dead. I don't judge his stories any better or worse for his xenophobia. It was a different age and, as I said, even so-called "enlightened" people of the time would still come off as incredibly condescending and racist towards black people by today's standards. |
I'm just going to quote S.T. Joshi here (Joshi is a brilliant Lovecraft scholar and the author of annotated volumes of HPL's works and a biography of his life, and that barely scratches the surface of his research). Pay particular attention to the first line
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| There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft's racism, nor can it merely be passed off as "typical of his time," for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction at key points (although I might suggest that there is a considerable element of humour and parody in that passage you cite in "Herbert West"). I find Lovecraft's racism disappointing not merely because he expressed it so frequently in fiction and letters, but because this was one area where he refused to modify his thinking in light of new evidence. In every other aspect of his thought--metaphysics, politics, economics, aesthetics--he was constantly amending his views as new information came to him; but with his racism, he stuck pretty much to the prejudices he had absorbed in the reactionary New England of the 1890s. |
This is the passage he's talking about, just for reference
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Originally Posted by Herbert West - Reanimator
The match had been between Kid OBriena lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked noseand Buck Robinson, The Harlem Smoke. The negro had been knocked out, and a moments examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in lifebut the world holds many ugly things.
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I'm just a holy fool, oh baby it's so cruel
Thessalia, by Darkchildx2k
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I had to do a double-take when you mentioned this story, honestly. I just now went and re-read it on hplovecraft.com, since it had been a while for me. It was pretty much as I remembered it, except for the one bit about "the soul that was bequeathed through a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and moderation." I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to that except for this conversation.|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
To keep this slightly on topic, his short story "The Street" is one of his most openly racist ones, and as Jack was a big HPL fan, there's a name in it that quite possibly made its way into CoH, especially with the context it was used in in the story.
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I don't know. Are we just going to say that every reference to "swart men" is a racist reference to "non-anglos"? That this is a metaphor for the decay of American civilization due to the influx of lesser people? Maybe it IS such a metaphor. I've certainly never read it that way but I suppose it would be easy to do so.
This is a story about life, aging, inevitable decay, and the spirit that lives within a place despite or because of all that goes on in its environs, good or evil. Reducing it to a racist rant may possibly be correct analysis; I wouldn't necessarily argue against it after reading it again. However, doing so robs it of a lot of its magic and meaning. That is a bit of a sad thing, IMO.
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Yeah, that was pretty ugly. I've never read "Herbert West" for no particularly good reason, so I'd never seen that before. I'll have to take a look at the essay you were quoting there, it looks interesting.
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Originally Posted by Thessalia
This is the passage he's talking about, just for reference
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Ever read "The Picture in the House?"
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Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
Yeah, that was pretty ugly. I've never read "Herbert West" for no particularly good reason, so I'd never seen that before. I'll have to take a look at the essay you were quoting there, it looks interesting.
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That last line is screamingly hilarious. Anyway, honestly, do some research here. Again, S.T. Joshi is a preeminent scholar of all things Lovecraft, you can't go wrong with his stuff. Five seconds with google also got me this page, scroll down to the section entitled "The subterranean peril: Lovecraft's racism". http://www.contrasoma.com/writing/lovecraft.html/ And actually, the whole article is great. Here, I'll pull out two particularly interesting quotes:|
Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
This is why I ask "what are the racist elements?" because what I keep hearing is an analysis of HPL and not an analysis of the story other than "Well, they're obvious."
Humor me. I disagree that they're obvious, or at least I disagree that they are gratuitous. |
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There is an unfortunately large amount of Lovecraft's fiction that predominantly focus on simplistic racism. By simplistic I mean that the racism espoused does not make use of metaphor or communicate anything other than the inferiority of nonwhite races, and plays up the paranoias of foreign invasion via immigration or ‘Yellow Peril.' These stories, in addition to being poorly written, have not aged well and often blur together in the mind of the reader simply because of their indistinct and repetitive racist proselytizing. ... Lovecraft's tales of familial degeneration are often discussed in relation to the racist tropes they touch upon; "Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn And His Family" alludes to early eugenic theories regarding the similarities between ‘lesser' races and simians |
I'm just a holy fool, oh baby it's so cruel
Thessalia, by Darkchildx2k
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So your opinion is that the descriptions in The Horror at Red Hook do not serve the ends of the story and are simply gratuitous?
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Originally Posted by Thessalia
That last line is screamingly hilarious.
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The wikipedia entry for ""The Horror at Red Hook" has a quote from his wife about his reaction to parts of New York:
"Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind."
One more wacky fact from the zany world of HPL - his wife actually had Eastern European and Jewish acestors 
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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See above |
Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
So your opinion is that the descriptions in The Horror at Red Hook do not serve the ends of the story and are simply gratuitous?
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
While many people were apparently seduced (or bludgeoned, perhaps) by Lovecraft's fondness for the bang sign and ripping off better authors, I was paying a more careful attention, wracking his tomes for the true mysteries of the cosmos. And therein, these eldritch secrets were revealed to me:
Non-white men are evil. Women are evil, although it may be because they are weak and easily possessed by the devil, rather than because of any inherent capacity to do wrong, mom. The best weapon to kill a god? Tugboat. Accreditation is over-rated. All ancient societies wanted to end the world. Anything you don't like is probably trying to kill you. Schizophrenia just means you're doing a good job. English food is disgusting.
As I lived according to these principles, I noticed the deluded and weak men of my acquaintance moving further from me and conspiring behind my back to chain me in an institution for those they claim are mentally unfit to be in society. But it is they who are unfit! They who have shackled society to the whims of dark and coptic spirits, who placate their black masters (TOTALLY NOT RACIST, GUYS) in the capitol houses (OKAY MAYBE A LITTLE) and halls of parliment, they who have -- BY ZEUS'S FLAMES, IT COMES FOR ME!!!!!!
(To be clear, the *mythos* is great. But basically everything great about it was invented by other people.
The Dream Key of Unknown Kadath was okay, I guess.
I will grant that most English food is pretty gross. It gets better the more alcohol it's made with and/or served with.)
OK, flippant (and Lovecraft otaku-esque) remark aside, any time somebody brings up Lovecraft's racism and sexism, I have to ask them: who, exactly, are we accusing Lovecraft of actually liking, of him actually not fearing? I am, if anything, vaguely amused by somebody's invocation of his very early short story "The Horror at Red Hook" - because while the cult's followers were mostly Slavs and Poles and Italians (who we'd now consider white) plus a few Africans, the cult leader was a college-educated rich white guy, and he was the guy who was really dangerous.
Lovecraft said some pretty racist sounding things in his letters, and in a few places in his fiction ... but he wasn't really a racist in the sense that we think of racism, he wasn't even vaguely a white supremacist. What he was was a good old fashioned apocalyptic misanthrope, someone who believed that everything that had happened since 1630 was either dangerous or just plain no expletive good, and most of what happened before that wasn't any better, and that was why we were all going to die. H.P. Lovecraft didn't write the famous movie line, "And crawling on the planet's face: some insects called 'the human race.' Lost in time, and lost in space and meaning." But he could have.
To the (limited) extent to which there's a recurring theme in Lovecraft's horror, it is this: there are tri-racial isolate communities in the United States, and oppressed colonial peoples around the world, who have to have figured out by now that rich white people will never let them win. Sooner or later, some combination of science and theosophy will give those people weapons of mass destruction. And when that happens, they will use them, because they'll be willing to die themselves as long as they can take us down with them. Sort of a sci-fi/horror version of Rudyard Kipling's "The Pict Song" from Rewards and Faeries.