WES HOUSE
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the mastermind of cosmic horror,
brought madness and existential dread to new heights. He ruptured the
imagination in tandem with history itself becoming unimaginable in the early
20th century. His mythologies seep into the works of Ridley Scott, Stephen
King, Guillermo del Toro, Joss Whedon, and countless others, and his stories
are rigorously dissected in academic schools ranging from speculative realism
and object-oriented philosophy to posthumanism and human-animal studies. Video
games are indebted to his cosmic universe and the grotesque monsters that
within it abound. And cruder, yet ingenious, Lovecraftian appearances have been
resurrected in popular culture, ranging from South Park and heavy metal to pornography and sex toys. But he is also a man whose
virulent racism and bigotry induced in him a “poetic trance,” as Michel
Houellebecq once phrased it.
So long as modern stories of white genocide, superpredators,
and the alleged master race find fertile ground on American soil, the
contemporary relevance of Lovecraft will extend beyond what some fans care to
admit. His bigotry and race-inflected narratives can’t be wished away, cherry-picked,
or swept under the rug in favor of his more widely known literary techniques
and accomplishments—especially as hell-bent right-wing insurgents proudly claim him as a true elaborator of reactionary
horrors. His stories and politics are still breathing, even the most defiled
and rotten among them.
Making no efforts to conceal his bigoted theories, Lovecraft
took to pen and publication with the most grotesque appraisals of those he
deemed inferior. His letters overflow with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of
an underground Jewry pitting the economic, social, and literary worlds of New
York City against “the Aryan race.” He warned of “the Jew [who] must be
muzzled” because “[he] insidiously degrades [and] Orientalizes [the] robust
Aryan civilization.” His sympathies with rising fascism were equally
transparent. “[Hitler’s] vision . . . is romantic and immature,” he stated
after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. “I know he’s a clown but god I like the
boy!”
And his contempt for blacks ran even deeper. In his 1912
poem entitled “On the Creation of Niggers,” the gods, having just designed Man
and Beast, create blacks in semi-human form to populate the space in between.
Regarding the domestic terrorism of white minorities in the predominantly black
Alabama and Mississippi, he excused them for “resorting to extra-legal measures
such as lynching and intimidation [because] the legal machinery does not
sufficiently protect them.” He lamented these sullen tensions as unfortunate,
but nevertheless says that “anything is better than the mongrelisation which
would mean the hopeless deterioration of a great nation.” Miscegenation
permeates his letters and stories as his most corporeal fear; he insists that
only “pain and disaster [could] come from the mingling of black and white.”
His prejudice, like that of many figures who’ve achieved the
status of cultural icon, is often treated with apologia, disregard, or as a
personal flaw within an otherwise great man. Never was this clearer than in the
debate in 2010 surrounding the World Fantasy Award, a prestigious literary
prize for fantastical fiction molded in the caricatured bust of Lovecraft himself, which a number
of writers came to petition. Established in 1975 in Lovecraft’s home city of
Providence, Rhode Island, the “Howard” award was intended to “give a visible,
potentially usable, sign of appreciation to writers working in the area of
fantastic literature, an area too often distinguished by low financial
remuneration and indifference.” Like most awards named after an artist, it was
intended to acknowledge Lovecraft’s precedent in the field of fantastical
fiction.
But as his racism and xenophobia became more widely known
and discussed, it became obvious how flippant and egregious it was to
potentially award black nominees with the face of a man who
once proclaimed that “the Negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all
White and even Mongolian races.” As Nnedi Okorafor, the first black person to
ever win a WFA for Best Novel, put her internal conflict, “A statuette of this
racist man’s head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man’s head is one
of my greatest honors as a writer.” The award was remodeled in 2016, but not
without the kicking and screaming of Lovecraft’s pious defenders. Prominent
Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, who has made insightful contributions to the
study of weird fiction, refuted the arguments for changing the award stating that
1) the award “acknowledges Lovecraft’s literary greatness . . . [which] says
nothing about the person or character” and 2) “it suggests that Lovecraft’s
racism is so heinous a character flaw that it negates the entirety of his
literary achievement.”
The first comment is particularly strange, considering the
award is the mold of an actual person rather than a literary reference. If the
goal is to highlight the genius of the author, why not make the statuette
reflective of his universe rather than of the literal face of the man himself?
After all, Lovecraft was the creator of an influential cosmos replete with
landscapes of unfathomable
monsters and profound
alien architectures. There is no drought in the search for Lovecraftian
imagery to pay homage to his legacy and precedent in the field of weird
fiction.
But Joshi’s second point is more telling, as it pits
Lovecraft’s racism against his literature. He tries to save the latter by
separating it from the former. But the need to “save” a man dubbed the “horror
story’s dark and baroque prince” by Stephen King is itself questionable. His
legacy is firmly planted. His cosmology sprawls from popular culture to niche
corners of scholasticism. Complaints of a potentially tarnished reputation are
more concerned with bolstering the illusion of Lovecraft as a sacrosanct
figure. Even further, to divorce his racism from his literary creations would
be a pyrrhic victory; what results is a whitewashed portrait of a profound
writer. And from a criticism standpoint, what’s lost is any meaningful
grappling with the connection between Lovecraft’s racism and the cosmic
anti-humanism that defined his horror.
In 1927, Lovecraft’s oft-quoted take on cosmic horror
appeared in Weird Tales: “Now all my tales are based on the
fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no
validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.” One must “forget that
such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such
attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, [have] any
existence at all.” Crucial to all of his stories is the question of the
outside, which breaks in from unknown dimensions and upsets his character’s
perception of space, time, and history.
Traditionally, horror stories concern a monstrous perversion
of the status quo, with characters seeking its resolution or restoration by extraordinary,
and sometimes desperate, means. Even if all goes to hell, the protagonist’s
attempts were nonetheless depicted as both noble and practical. But Lovecraft’s
stories went further, accomplishing what Mark Fisher, in The Weird and
the Eerie (Repeater), calls “catastrophic integration,” where the outside breaks
into “an interior that is retrospectively revealed to be a delusive envelope, a
sham.” That is: the main character will encounter unknown entities,
dreamscapes, dimensions, and underworlds that shatter all previously held
notions of science, history, and humanity. Characters would discover cities
with “no architecture known to man or to human imagination” which contain
“monstrous perversions of geometrical laws attaining the most grotesque
extremes of sinister bizarrerie.” Lovecraft’s monsters were even more
perplexing than his cities, displaying physiologies that defied all known
biological principles, “outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of
man.” Rather than a return to the status quo, in Lovecraft’s conclusions the
universe is revealed to be impossibly bleak and beyond possible human
understanding. There is no hero in these tales. There are but two options his
characters are thus faced with: go mad or run.
Knowing the primacy of existential dread within Lovecraft’s
stories, is it then possible to separate his racism from his creative output?
In the end, is Lovecraft’s nihilism ultimately colorblind, “All Lives Don’t
Matter in the Vast Cosmos-at-Large”? Not quite. As Jed Mayer argues in The Age of Lovecraft, the “mingling of
horror and recognition that accompanies the encounter with the nonhuman other
is one that is vitally shaped by Lovecraft’s racism.” The admixture of his
maniacal bigotry and hysterical racism ignite stories of nihilism often based
on the master-race ideology. In the same anthology, China Miéville writes that
“the anti-humanism one finds so bracing in him is an anti humanism predicated
on murderous race hatred.” This provides all the more reason to place
Lovecraft’s racism at the forefront of examinations of his oeuvre.
*
One of Lovecraft’s notable tales concerns a troubled
detective who comes across a “hordes of prowlers” with “sin-spitted faces . . .
[who] mix their venom and perpetrate obscene terrors.” They are of “some
fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern” beyond human understanding, but still
retain a “singular suspicion of order [that] lurks beneath their squalid
disorder.” With “babels of sound and filth,” they scream into the night air to
answer the nearby “lapping oily waves at its grimy piers.” They live within a
“maze of hybrid squalor near an ancient waterfront,” a space “leporous and
cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds.” One could be forgiven for
mistaking this space as an evil abyss populated by beasts from the mythical Necromonicon. However,
this vignette is from his short story, “The Horror at Red Hook.” And the
accursed space is not some maleficent mountain of the The Great Old Ones, but
the Brooklyn neighborhood right off the pier. The brutish monsters, conduits for
a deeper evil, are the “Syrians, Spanish, Italian and Negro[s]” of New York
City.
In all of his collected works, this may be the one where his
racist opinions are made the most explicit. A relatively straightforward
detective story, “The Horror of Red Hook” unfolds in Lovecraft’s typical
fashion; the deeper evil is slowly brought to light in scenes of intermixing
immigrants whose neighborhood is revealed in the final act to be the literal
gateway to hell. Strong anti-immigration sentiments and gaudy displays of
sympathy for racist policing appear throughout, with references to immigrants
that range from “monsters” to “contagions.” We see blacks and immigrants, the
bringers of chaos in American law and order, subjected to a scientific scrutiny
that perceives them as a danger to the master race.
The story was instigated by Lovecraft’s tenure in Brooklyn
from 1924 to 1926, a time of shifting demographics, greatly affected by the
Great Migration of blacks from the South to the Midwest and the North. In one
letter, Lovecraft describes living in Brooklyn as being “imprisoned in a
nightmare.” And upon leaving, he swore that “not even the threat of damnation
could induce me to dwell in the accursed place again.” His wife Sonia recounted
that “whenever he would meet crowds of people—in the subway, or at the noon
hours, at the sidewalks of Broadway or crowds, whoever he happened to find
them, and these were usually the workers of the minority races—he would become
livid with anger and rage.”
It should come as no surprise that a racist imagination
possess an uncanny ability to concoct the most outlandish and fiendish
representations of minorities and immigrants; preexisting social hierarchies
and political forces give those depictions life and validity. Darren Wilson’s
horror-ridden tale of the death of Mike Brown, delivered to a grand jury on
September 16, 2014, shows one strain of the continuous thread of black youth
enlivened in the racist imaginary as a monstrosity to be met with force. It’s
the tale a child, if child he may be called, whose presence and demeanor were
so dangerous that the only solution was a bullet to the brain. “I’ve
never seen anybody look that, for lack of a better word, crazy,” Wilson testified. “That’s the only way I can describe it,
it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.” In Wilson’s story, even the
spraying of firepower can’t stop Brown, who begins to feed on the violence.
Wilson claims that “at this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to
run through the shot.” Therefore, in a desperate move, the grand jury is
told, the fatal silver bullet was fired and “when it went into him, the
demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean I
knew he stopped, the threat was stopped.”
Yet another racist campfire tale from an unreliable
narrator. It’s so cliché it should be criminal. Yet Darren Wilson is alive and
Mike Brown is dead. In a just world, referring to an 18-year-old as a
bullet-thirsty maniacal demon beyond human understanding would not only be
insufficient in any court of law—it would qualify as perjury or pure insanity.
But the main goal of Wilson’s monster-laden narrative wasn’t to state any
verifiable facts. It was to conjure fear. For this, his story didn’t need to be
true. No story of any cop killing a black man, child, woman, or trans person
needs to be true. But like any convincing piece of fantastic fiction it must at
least engage with some level of world-building, pulling from an already
established mythos that defines how the world works.
Lucky for Wilson, stories of the “Negro Beast”, the “Big
Black Brute”, and the “Superpredator” already proliferate in the white
supremacist, capitalist mythos and prove useful for reactionaries in enforcing
and imagining political ends. Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, Shereese Francis, Trayvon
Martin, and Jordan Edwards are but a few of the countless whose skin, presence,
demeanor, and even mental illness provoked a fear that is entirely “plausible”
within the stories we are told and re-told about race. Right-wing and liberal commentary on “black on black
crime” and “the poverty of black culture” reads like a mere refinement of
Lovecraft’s racist intonations about “patterns of primitive half-ape savagery”
and “shocking and primordial tradition.” The essential message of black
depravity and lowliness remains firmly intact in both.
This isn’t to suggest that Darren Wilson is a specifically
Lovecraftian storyteller, but to show how the weight of fantastic imagery can
and has been violently deployed against people of color. Lovecraft was a writer
who breathed life into the reactionary anxieties and racist horrors of shifting
social and global paradigms, including those of “race relations,” war,
revolution, and class struggle. He was not only the “modern pope of horror” but
also its grand wizard.
Lovecraft didn’t write himself out of his mythical universe,
nor did he separate that universe from the real world unfolding before him. He
was both an active product of his time as well as an elaborator of specific
historical fears about “the decline of the West.” While he succeeded in
shocking the mind out of the mundane and shattering conceptions of rationality
and reason that were trying desperately to hold in the early 20th century, he
couldn’t face the horrors that bled into his own psyche.
_____
De LITERARY HUB, 26/09/2017
Imágenes:
1 Lovecraft
2 Del Catálogo de SEARS para Halloween, 1912
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