To be clear, Lovecraft was exceptionally bigoted for his time. I read a lot of contemporary fiction to him, and yes, it is all bigoted, but Lovecraft goes an extra mile. Contemporaries have issues like assuming racial hierarchy (darker skinned characters are subservient or morally less pure) as a matter of short hand. Lovecraft has characters go mad, kill their own children, and blow their own brains out when they discover their blood is "tainted".
Lmao I wrote my dissertation on this! Though I argued that he was not exceptional for the times. This was the era in which the SS said the Americans were being excessive with the one drop rule; theories of scientific racialism, the great chain of being as applied to human racial hierarchy and so on were born in America. My argument was that back then amongst many literate and scientific circles, white supremacism was accepted as a matter of fact rather than political extremism. Lovecraft is also more interesting than people tend to dismiss him as; he is not a simple bigot, he was a self-loathing scientific racialist who viewed himself as a medical invalid - disqualified from the racial hierarchy, and was deeply saddened that he couldn't join the US army in time for WWI in order to be killed by shrapnel or bullet. There is a short story he wrote which illustrates this perfectly, wherein a Prussian captain begins executing his submarine crewmates, noting they were all weak Rhinelanders or Alpenine Germans, all inferior to his own Prussian stock. It's not a generous take on the racialist mentality. Lovecraft subscribes to theories on scientific racialism, but not the theory itself. He applies it to its limits just as he did to recent theories on relativity, the scale of the cosmos or the notion of evolution. It's why in his stories none of the White Americans are as pure and supreme as they think; not as distinct in race, differing from elder things or atavistic things only in
degrees and not by
kind. He's a racist who says there's no evidence basis for race in the face of theories on natural selection or evolution, just like how the cultists who worship Cthulhu as god have no proof Cthulhu is a god. It's important that you have characters who assert themselves as separate from other "races" as minute as crossing a river, e.g. a white English man separate from another white Welsh man, but they discover they are not even in a discreet category separate from a freaky fish boi. He separates what the chars believe to be true from what is true
This kind of weirdness about Lovecraft's attitudes towards race is probably why he is more popular amongst non-white readers than amongst white readers lmao. Except one of my white professors, who disliked his work not because of his views, but because she hated his pulpy prose style - fair enough, it's not for everyone.
There is a similar but different rich vein of debate on Poe and racism, or Conrad and racism, which I would love to go into if people are interested. I think some people here may have already seen that infamous thing about "DON'T BRING UP THE ORANGUTAN."
One of my favourite arguments was over one British explorer who wrote a journal entry about seeing a hairy thing that used primitive tools in the jungles of Borneo. The controversy was caused in that no one could figure out whether he was being racist about a local or if he was describing an orangutan
Author
Topic: 2022 Hot Fresh Reading Challenge Thread (Read 5009 times)