The Shadow Over H.P. Lovecraft
Recent works inspired by his fiction struggle to reckon with his
racist fantasies.
REFERENCE PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT H. BARLOW
New Republic, Siddhartha Deb
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/siddhartha-deb>/March 19, 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY CLAY RODERY
Eight decades after the writer H.P. Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer,
having published in his lifetime only one book, riddled with printing
errors, his name appeared on billboards throughout the United States.
Promoting the HBO show/Lovecraft Country/, the advertisements seemed to
suggest that Lovecraft, who died in 1937 in penury in his hometown of
Providence, Rhode Island, had finally returned home as an unofficial
monarch, king of a genre of horror writing that, especially in the past
decade, has provoked an energetic wave of new fiction inspired by
Lovecraft’s trailblazing example.
But the devil, in Lovecraft’s case, is in the details. The signature
poster of the show features the actors Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan
Majors, octopoid tentacles flickering around their faces. The tentacles
are found everywhere in Lovecraft’s fiction; Black protagonists are not.
Based on a 2016novel <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780062292070>by Matt
Ruff, the show depicts a cast of Black characters dealing with magic in
a segregated America, including the New England territories where
Lovecraft set most of his fiction. Premiering in August, when the United
States was reeling from thehighest
<https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200831-weekly-epi-update-3.pdf?sfvrsn=d7032a2a_4>number
of coronavirus infections in the world as well as the virulent racism of
a reelection-seeking Donald Trump,/Lovecraft Country/appeared to offer a
reclamation as well as a homecoming, seemingly delighting in the
writer’s genre tropes while forcefully excising his racism.
This is standard practice in contemporary American writing inspired by
Lovecraft. Ruff makes a critique of Lovecraft’s racism a central aspect
of his story, particularly in the fraught interaction between the
father-son duo Montrose and Atticus. Before we’ve gone far in the novel,
on page 15, Montrose digs out from the Chicago library system a literary
journal featuring the Lovecraft poem, “On the Creation of N------.”
Montrose, portrayed as burdened, even embittered, by his experience of
racism, wants his son to understand the worldview of the writer whose
fiction he has fallen in love with. A reading list at the end of the
novel, meanwhile, offers a number of nonfiction works on segregation as
well as fiction by Octavia Butler and Victor LaValle as a seeming
corrective.
The author Kij Johnson makes a similar move in her quasi-feminist
novella,/The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780765391414>/. In the book’s
acknowledgments, she writes, “And I must of course acknowledge
Lovecraft’s/The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath/. I first read it at ten,
thrilled and terrified, and uncomfortable with the racism but not yet
aware that the total absence of women was also problematic.” Victor
LaValle’s/The Ballad of Black Tom
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780765387868>/begins with the dedication,
“For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings.” And in Paul La
Farge’s/The Night Ocean
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781101981092>/—which, unlike the above
genre examples, is a work of literary fiction—the plot revolves around
the narrator Marina Willett’s attempt to trace her missing husband,
Charlie, an African American writer obsessed with the work and life of
Lovecraft.
In the energetic sphere of commentary and fandom that surrounds
Lovecraft and his growing influence, the same approach is evident. “I
would address the issue of Lovecraft’s racism first,” the horror writer
Mary SanGiovannisaid
<https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=lovecraftian-cosmic-horror>last
year in an interview with/Library Journal/meant to offer a guide for
librarians on Lovecraftian fiction. On occasion, the desire to address
Lovecraft’s racism has led to disputes prefiguring many of today’s
debates over cancel culture. In 2015, after a campaign led by the
writers Daniel José Older and Nnedi Okorafor, the World Fantasy
Conventionstopped
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/09/world-fantasy-award-drops-hp-lovecraft-as-prize-image>handing
out a Lovecraft bust to its winning writers, replacing this with the
representation of a tree in front of a full moon.
Yet confusion rather than clarity hangs over Lovecraft and the relation
between his writing, his racism, the world he lived in, and the one we
live in now. Was Lovecraft racist because he was an insular New
Englander, limiting himself largely to Providence after a serious mental
crisis provoked by encountering the immigrant population of New York?
That is one interpretation, and not entirely without substance, given
that Lovecraft channeled his troubled experience of New York into the
story “The Horror at Red Hook.” Or was his racism an expression of the
times Lovecraft lived in and not entirely germane to his fiction, as
S.T. Joshi, biographer and one-man critical industry on Lovecraft,argued
<http://stjoshi.org/news2015.html>whileprotesting
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/11/hp-lovecraft-biographer-rages-against-ditching-of-author-as-fantasy-prize-emblem>vehemently
against the cancellation of the Lovecraft bust?
Both arguments sequester Lovecraft, either in time or in space, and yet
everyone argues for Lovecraft’s continuing validity as a writer, his
relevance so contemporary that it has, in recent years, burst beyond the
subculture of horror and into the mainstream. Known today both as “weird
fiction,” as Lovecraftcalled
<https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/nwwf.aspx>his own
work, as well as “cosmic horror,” his writing is an unending source for
films, from 2016’s/The Void/to a 2019 adaptation of/The Color Out of
Space/. Lovecraft himself is to be the subject of aforthcoming project
<https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/12/benioff-and-weiss-lovecraft-movie>fronted
by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—the duo behind the/Game of
Thrones/show—who plan to adapt Hans Rodionoff’s graphic
novel,/Lovecraft/. In music, video games, cartoons, plush toys,
politics—the satirical website “Cthulhu for America
<https://cthulhuforamerica.com/>” launched in 2015 and is still
going—and in the school of philosophy known as “speculative realism,”
Lovecraft is rampant. Still, the question remains: Are horror and racism
so easily separated in our times, or are they far more deeply
intertwined than the mainstreaming of Lovecraft can admit?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lovecraft’s racism was neither the accidental byproduct of provincialism
nor a simple reflection of his zeitgeist. It percolated down into the
very bones of his writing, including some of his most powerful works of
fiction, the stories “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,”
and the novella-length “At the Mountains of Madness.” Written during the
1920s and 1930s, these texts offer a relentless vision of man
confronting the horror of an indifferent universe. Man is, of course,
always white, from the neurotic New Englanders who tend to be
Lovecraft’s narrator-protagonists to the hardy Nordic types who serve as
working-class ballast. Between man and monster dance the nonwhite
peoples of the world.
In “The Call of Cthulhu,” published in 1928, the narrator describes his
gradual awareness of the Cthulhu cult, a global alliance of Inuit (to
whom he refers with a slur), mixed-race “West Indians or Brava
Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands,” and “undying leaders of the
cult in the mountains of China” that hopes to resurrect Cthulhu, one of
a species of ancient extraterrestrial beings whose presence on Earth
long precedes the advent of Homo sapiens. An accidental knowledge of
this cult has claimed the life of the narrator’s uncle, a Brown
University professor, at the beginning of the tale. By the end, in an
arc composed of stories nested within stories and a world-spanning
journey that takes us from Providence to New Jersey, Louisiana,
Greenland, New Zealand, and Oslo, we are made to understand that the
narrator, too, will be eliminated by this cult determined to continue
its secretive program of restoring Cthulhu.
Overwrought though this might appear in summary, “The Call of Cthulhu”
is Lovecraft’s most iconic work (and one that his contemporary Jorge
Luis Borges would pay tribute to half a century later in his own far
more minimalist riff, “There Are More Things”). It is an imaginative
rendering of a cataclysmic cultural and racial anxiety that first began
to shape itself clearly in the early twentieth century. This was the
fear of a white, Christian West in decline and under severe threat from
other groups, a fear that comes across as eerily contemporary, and whose
most overt expression in recent times has been from Trump and his
supporters.
Lovecraft’s worldview was influenced by other writers, men who were not
working, like him, in the trenches of genre fiction, but who were
advocating national and world policies through seemingly respectable
nonfiction books. These include William Benjamin Smith, who
published/The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn/in 1905;
Madison Grant, who brought out/The Passing of the Great Race/in 1916;
Lothrop Stoddard, whose bestselling/The Rising Tide of Color Against
White World-Supremacy/was published in 1920; and the German philosopher
Oswald Spengler, the first volume of whose/The Decline of the
West/appeared in 1918 and inspired, among others, Adolf Hitler and the
Italian fascist thinker Julius Evola, the latter in turn aninspiration
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/julius-evola-alt-right/517326/>for
Trumpian figures like Steve Bannon.
Provoked by the outcome of the Civil War in the United States, the
“internal” slaughter of World War I in which European armies turned
their advanced weaponry upon one another, the Bolshevik Revolution, and
the rise of anti-colonialism, but provoked, too, by the paradoxical
effects of the success of a colonial system that had knitted the world
closer together—a globalization avant la lettre—these books expressed
immense anxiety and paranoia. Lovecraft, for his part, was not a passive
recipient of such ideas. He referred to Spengler often, arguing that the
German had merely popularized conclusions he himself had arrived at long
ago. Not only did Lovecraft read Smith, a professor of mathematics at
Tulane University; hededicated
<https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:425206/>his poem
“De Triumpho Naturae: The Triumph of Nature Over Northern Ignorance” to him.
Lovecraft’s loathing of Africans, of America’s native-born Black
population, of immigrants, nonwhite peoples, and Jews finds expression
in ways large and small in his fiction, and this in spite of his brief
marriage to Sonia Greene, a Jewish immigrant whobankrolled
<https://www.wired.com/2007/02/the-mysterious-2-2/#:~:text=In%20the%20last%20year%20or,days%20out%20of%20the%20month>his
fiction and later wrote a memoir about life with him. There is, of
course, the near-demented roll call in “The Horror at Red Hook” of
“unclassified slant-eyed folk who used the Arabic alphabet” and Syrian,
Spanish, Italian, and Black “elements impinging upon one another.” In
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” a story of a New England port town that is
“depopulated” by federal agencies, its residents taken to “concentration
camps” because they are discovered to be hybrid creatures, offspring of
humans and an undersea species, the slippage between nonhumans and
nonwhite peoples—“South Sea islander[s],” “Chinese,” “East-Indian or
Indo-Chinese”—is constant.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
And yet, as contemporary writers influenced by Lovecraft make evident,
in their Lovecraft-inflected fiction as well as in their contextual
comments, there is a strange power to his writing. Edmund
Wilson,discussing
<https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1945-11-24/flipbook/100/>Lovecraft
in/The New Yorker/in 1945, was summarily dismissive:
The principal feature of his work is an elaborate concocted myth …
assum[ing] a race of outlandish gods and grotesque prehistoric
peoples who are always playing tricks with time and space and
breaking through into the contemporary world, usually somewhere in
Massachusetts.
But Lovecraft has outlasted Wilson, his “tricks with time and space”
allowing him to strike contemporary notes in a manner that far exceeds
that of many of his more respectable literary peers. Amitav Ghosh in/The
Great Derangement <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780226526812>/has
written about how realist fiction from the nineteenth century onward
embraced the bourgeois and the rational at the expense of the
supernatural or exceptional, a hierarchy of aesthetic values that
reduced the varied world to mere backdrop and that now means realist
fiction struggles to deal with the cataclysmic nature of climate
collapse. Lovecraft, with his contempt for realism, managed to capture
both the world he lived in as well as the one we live in now.
His depiction of civilizational ruin, coupled with attention to
landscape, allows him to sound as if he is addressing our apocalyptic
present of climate change, pandemics, and a ravaged, postindustrial,
post-agricultural environment. “At the Mountains of Madness” opens with
the narrator protesting “the melting of the ancient ice-cap” of the
Antarctic, an eerie pronouncement even if the narrator is talking about
a scientific expedition’s plans to drill through the permafrost in order
to recover fossils. In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the narrator notes
almost in passing how “a fertile and thickly settled countryside” has
turned into ruin with “the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore,
which robbed the soil of its best protection and opened the way for
waves of wind-blown sand.” When it is suggested that an alternative
cause for the decline of Innsmouth and its surroundings might be an
epidemic, “probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or
somewhere by the shipping,” Lovecraft can sound especially uncanny.
These lines do not reveal some kind of oracular capacity in Lovecraft.
What they show is that he was, in spite of his reputation as a recluse,
drawing on the sensitivities of his time as a purveyor of a kind of
global fiction. Depending heavily upon the landscape of New England, his
Rhode Island and Massachusetts are nevertheless connected, uneasily,
with other places and other times. They are Puritan settler colonies
looking back nostalgically at England, Rome, and Greece, in denial of
indigenous and nonwhite immigrant populations. At the same time, they
are also linked to the rest of the world by capitalism, trading—as a
character in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” puts it—“with queer ports in
Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds
of people.” The result is writing that is simultaneously inward looking
and outward facing, disturbing and engaging at the same time.
For Lovecraft did not derive inspiration only from the racists and
eugenicists of his era. Fueled by an autodidact’s curiosity, he drew
heavily from Western artists, mystics, and scientists who offered
parallel modes of engaging with the bewildering world that had been made
visible by colonialism and capitalism. “The Call of Cthulhu” begins by
invoking the Theosophists, a mystical order founded in New York City in
the late nineteenth century by the Russian immigrant Helena (“Madame”)
Blavatsky and later relocated to India. In “At the Mountains of
Madness,” Lovecraft repeatedly compares his fictional polar mountain
range populated by extraterrestrials to the paintings of the Russian
mystic Nicholas Roerich, whose eerie depictions of the Himalayas
Lovecraft encountered in a New York museum where they are still to be
found today.
Often, Lovecraft’s use of such material—as in his invention of the
occult ur-text Necronomicon, written by the “mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred”—veers into what Edward Said termed Orientalism. Yet
Lovecraft’s attention to nature and to far-flung worlds also creates the
addictive, melancholy beauty of some of his writing, with landscapes
that are otherworldly and yet hauntingly familiar. Victor LaValle writes
of reading Lovecraft for the first time at ten and getting “serious
shivers” from the phrase “secrets, and wonders that planets tell planets
alone in the night.”
Like the Theosophists and Roerich, Lovecraft constructed his own
elaborate mythology, picking and choosing from his voracious readings in
biology, astronomy, and geology. China Miéville, a fantasy writer and a
Marxist, notes the way in which Lovecraft’s “pantheon and bestiary are
absolutely sui generis,” and how he—along with contemporaries like H.G.
Wells and M.R. James—privileged the tentacle as a monstrous appendage
for the first time in Western fiction. Yet, Miéville writes, “Though his
conception of the monstrous and his approach to the fantastic are
utterly new, he pretends that they are not.”
Jamie Chung, Michael K. Williams, and Aunjanue Ellis in the season one
finale of Lovecraft Country
ELI JOSHUA ADÉ/HBO
A modern, settler colonial figure disconnected from folk renditions of
monsters and heavily influenced by contemporary theories of biology,
Lovecraft invents his own tradition, pretending that his tentacled
monsters have always existed. This tendency to invent a remote past—the
Necronomicon; the nonwhite, non-Western Cthulhu cults—marks Lovecraft
out as a man of his time. There is a demented genius to many of these
inventions, including his fictional alien language: “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu
fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn.” At the same
time, his fertile world-building and invented histories are also a
manifestation of the anxieties of the West in the early twentieth
century, a grappling with its own status as what Max Weber called a
“disenchanted” society in a larger world filled with threatening,
non-modern societies of magic. (The non-Western, colonized world had its
own anxieties, about being behind rather than falling behind, and it
came up with its own invented traditions, such as the Indian “ancient”
text aboutVimanas
<https://newrepublic.com/article/121792/those-mythological-men-and-their-sacred-supersonic-flying-temples>or
mythical aircrafts.) And of course, it places him solidly in our
present, where our own invented traditions attempt a response to
anxieties that are remarkably similar to Lovecraft’s.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
We live, once again, in a world rendered frenetic by its own success. In
the post–Cold War era, the West and the Western way of capitalism are
seemingly triumphant. A passport from a G7 country signals membership in
the upper tier of humanity; one from a “failed state” is tantamount to a
death certificate when attempting to cross borders. Yet, as the
eruptions of Trump and Brexit, the armed gathering of self-described
“Western chauvinists
<https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys>”
the Proud Boys, and clusters of adult males from the United States, the
U.K., Canada, Australia, and Germany on 4chan make apparent, a
significant number of people feel once again that the West and white
nationalism are under threat. Even the books promoting these views sound
the same as they did a century ago: bestsellers like Patrick
Buchanan’s/The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant
Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization/, Jonah
Goldberg’s/Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism,
Nationalism, and Socialism Is Destroying American Democracy/, and pretty
much everything from Charles Murray and Samuel Huntington.
Invented monsters and mythologies thrive again,
but on the manic, proliferating outlets of the internet rather than in
the fiction pages of pulp magazines.
Invented monsters and mythologies thrive again, but in the public realm
and on the manic, proliferating outlets of the internet rather than in
the fiction pages of pulp magazines. TheQAnon movement
<https://newrepublic.com/article/161103/qanon-cultification-american-right>,
which believes leading Democrats to be human-trafficking pedophiles
operating out of pizza restaurants and underground military bases in
order to harvest a chemical called “adrenochrome
<https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/1/17253444/qanon-trump-conspiracy-theory-4chan-explainer>”
from the bodies of their victims, is among the most obvious of such
manifestations. There is the “cult of Kek
<https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/05/08/what-kek-explaining-alt-right-deity-behind-their-meme-magic>,”
a frog that connects Trump to frog-headed deities from ancient Egypt, as
well as Trump himselfspeaking about
<https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/31/trump-biden-conspiracy-theory-406729>the
“people that are in the dark shadows” who control his political
opponents. The horned man who was perhaps the most visually striking of
the Trump supporters to break into the U.S. Capitol posted elaborate
fantasies on YouTube that pulled together “Eastern occult traditions,”
“Captain America,” and Lovecraft.
Lovecraft shows up with prominence on the right-wing website
Counter-Currents, where careful considerations of his writing are
trailed by racist and antisemitic comments and discussed alongside books
titled/White Nationalist Manifesto/. Connecting such febrile outpourings
with dour policy books about the end of the West are high-culture
figures like the French writerMichel Houellebecq
<https://newrepublic.com/article/156003/michel-houellebecqs-fragile-world>,
who, before his rise to fame as a novelist of ideas giving voice to
white European men under threat from women, immigrants, and Muslims,
wrote a book about Lovecraft, describing him as “one of the greatest”
writers of the fantastic who “pursued racism brutally to its most
profound source: fear.”
Nevertheless, very little of this present reality and its abiding
connections to the past is acknowledged in most contemporary adaptations
of Lovecraft’s fiction. The disavowals of Lovecraft’s racism follow,
instead, the methodology of liberal capitalism: a generalized posturing
that racism is largely a matter of the past or of uneducated white
masses; a picture of the present as a scene of joyous diversity; and, as
Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda put it in anessay
<https://lithub.com/on-whiteness-and-the-racial-imaginary/>on writing
and questions of race, “the enduring American thing of seeing race as a
white and black affair … accompanied by the trope of the discount: the
one that fails to extend to other people of color an authentic fullness
of experience, a myopia that renders them in the terms of the ‘not really.’”
The HBO show of Ruff’s novel is, perhaps, the most egregious example of
such failure. Whereas the book limits itself to referencing the Tulsa
riots of 1921 and a cast of heterosexual characters, the television
series shoehorns in the white gynecologist J. Marion Sims (whose Central
Park statue wascanceled
<https://time.com/5243443/nyc-statue-marion-sims/>in 2018), the murder
of Emmett Till, and queer characters functioning in a system that is
homophobic as well as sexist and racist. “The series shamelessly
name-drops events and figures from Black history as if crossing off
squares on a racial Bingo card,” the poet Maya Phillipswrote
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/arts/television/lovecraft-country-season-finale.html?fbclid=IwAR31fhH0mX31xMEeXiy2K4x_weeRcxi2XlIgOWRNO2M6Hye5UB76qe8qsjc>in
a recent review in/The New York Times/. “The series seems to want to
upend racial and sexual stereotypes … but more often ends up reinforcing
those same stereotypes, serving offensive messages about Blackness,
queerness, sexuality and gender in tasteless, gratuitous ways.”
The show’s failure is surprising:/Lovecraft Country/was produced by
Jordan Peele, whose films/Get Out
<https://newrepublic.com/article/140879/get-out-menace-society>/(2017)
and/Us
<https://newrepublic.com/article/153367/jordan-peeles-us-goes-rabbit-hole-identity>/(2019)
did so much to infuse horror brilliantly with contemporary, complex
accounts of racism. It is worth noting that the most incisive episode in
the show, set in South Korea, is wholly original to the television
series and borrows nothing from the novel. For the most part, though, as
Phillips points out, the HBO series simply offers “the message that
racism is bad and that Black people have suffered—hardly anything
enlightening, and hardly worth borrowing tragedies from history for
those brief, ornamental reminders.” The episodes are free with
superficial references to Black culture—W.E.B. Du Bois’s portrait in the
background at a library used by the characters, or the radio playing
James Baldwin at his famous Cambridge University debate with William F.
Buckley Jr. as the protagonists drive to Massachusetts—while devoting
significant screen time to disturbing acts of violence by, as well as
toward, its protagonists. The show is not alone in such missteps. The
portrayal of Montrose in Ruff’s novel as abusive toward his son and
almost always angry in the presence of white people has no nuance. Nor
does his rejection of Lovecraft’s writing or his anger at his son’s
joining the U.S. military. He serves simply as a foil—the bad Black man,
unassimilated in contrast to his more liberal son and half brother.
Kij Johnson’s novella,/The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe/, published in
2016, is stylistically wonderful, enthralling in its exploration of
women and their hunger for knowledge in a male-dominated world for much
of the narrative. At its best, it is reminiscent of the writing of
Ursula K. Le Guin, who blurbed the novella. Yet, once the protagonist
Vellitt Boe leaves her capricious, cruel fantasy realm behind, there
follows a panegyric to this world. Johnson’s characters exult over its
gasoline, commercial signs, coffee shops, and its universities—“Harvard
Yale UW Mizzou Minnesota Menomonie Baker Oxford Cambridge
Sorbonne”—where anyone can, apparently, study anything. Race has been
quite absent from the novella, but now, suddenly, in Montana, “there are
women everywhere and people in different colors, and it’s all amazing.”
Almost without intending to, and yet inevitably so, it slips back into a
warped contemporary version of Lovecraft’s Orientalism, of non-Western,
“foreign”-sounding places—“Sarnath, Sarkomand, Khem, and Toldees”—where
cruel, capricious gods rule in place of benign capitalism and gasoline.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The exception among these contemporary renderings is LaValle’s
novella/The Ballad of Black Tom/. Set in the 1920s and riffing off
Lovecraft’s Red Hook story, it is equally a comment on contemporary
life, including the Black Lives Matter protests, anti-immigrant
violence, and climate change. A loving father-son relationship is at the
heart of the story, with its protagonist, Tommy Tester, hustling for a
living between Harlem, Flushing, and Red Hook until his father is
brutally murdered by a private detective working with the police.
Instead of/Lovecraft Country/’s superficial gestures of anti-racism,
LaValle’s novella leads its protagonist to a genuinely radical
realization: the knowledge that Cthulhu might be vastly preferable in
his inhumanity to the anthropocentric, and racist, violence of the
police and military as well as the more covert systemic oppression that
killed his mother earlier, through sheer overwork. “I’ll take Cthulhu
over you devils any day,” he cries out in protest as he becomes Black
Tom, foreseeing an apocalyptic future where the seas rise and cities
built on gasoline, inequality, and police violence are swallowed up by
the oceans.
For the most part, though, the mainstreaming of Lovecraft does not
connect past with present or understand how these currents of time run
into one another. It cannot, given its attachment—in spite of all
evidence to the contrary—to the claim that we live in the best of all
possible worlds, a claim likely to derive a sudden boost from Trump’s
electoral defeat. This Whiggish position, captured in theunofficial
slogan
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/28/obama-hillary-clinton-convention-speech-trump>“America
Is Already Great,” treats racism as bounded, in time, in space, or in
class, as something to be depicted from the vantage of our supposedly
cosmopolitan, post-racial present, where it is all too easy to filter
out the dross while keeping the magic and the fantasy.
The power of Lovecraft’s fiction, however, derives from the close
proximity in it of racism and wonder, of hierarchy and marginality, an
entangling that continues into our times. Writing poetry denouncing
pacifists for opposing the entry of the United States into World War I,
all machismo and bluster in words (“They say our country’s close to war,
/ And soon must man the guns; / But we see naught to struggle for— / We
love the gentle Huns!”), Lovecraft comes across as a contemporary
internet troll. In other ways, however, he was marginal, the fiction he
wrote lacking all respectability and cultural status, an oddball who
mirrored today’s vulnerable, marginalized subcultures attempting to
insert imagination and fantasy into their desiccated lives.
It should not be surprising that these uncomfortable juxtapositions and
their visceral, cross-wired intimacies resonate with us today. That is
the horror of our present circumstances, of boundaries dissolved by the
internet and chains of global consumption, of walls and barriers raised
by nationalism and racism, of the unwitting invitation into our
existence of things not human, things that mutate and stalk and
proliferate while we struggle not only with the apparent divisions
between self and other but with the divisions between self and self.
This is a time made perfectly for Lovecraft’s tainted legacy.
Siddhartha Deb
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/siddhartha-deb>@debhartha
<https://twitter.com/debhartha>
Siddhartha Deb is the author most recently of/The Beautiful and the
Damned: A Portrait of the New India
<http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Damned-Portrait-New-India/dp/0865478732>./
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