hpl: bigoted newt, or just misunderstood?

[Jesus Prime]

It's more horrifying than anything the man himself could have described.

[Enkil]

Lovecraft seems to be very racist to me. Espicially after he lived in New York. There's all sorts of racist comments in all of his stories, you just need to read closely enough.

[Jesus Prime]

Yeah, that is true. But he didn't lynch anyone, and he took a lot of his views from the consensus of the day - it was considered scientific "fact" at the time that black people were of an inferior stock to whites, as S.T. Joshi points out. So a lot of writing around the time would have similar undertones, and singling H.P. Lovecraft out rather than looking at the era itself is a bit anal-retentive.

[E.A. Lovecraft]

Let's face it, no matter how you paint it, Howie was a racist turd.

[odin2]

But like JP say's so was the rest of the world...

[Enkil]

Just because he didn't lynch anyone doesn't mean he was a racist, it just means he didn't have enough gall to kill someone.

[Jesus Prime]

I didn't say he wasn't a racist, I'm saying you shouldn't complain about the cold when you've got smallpox.

[Enkil]

Point taken.

[JJ Burke]

the article suggested that hpl was not only racist in passing, but that he had a sort of festering contempt for 'impure' ancestry. not just in the occasional unflattering description of minor characters or groups ('swarthy' people, etc.).. but it's postulated that the story of the deep ones, and their interbreeding with humanity, is tied to hpl's deeply personal sense of disgust at the breakdown of cultural dividing lines.

i guess my real question is whether anyone has stopped in the middle of a lovecraft story and said 'holy guacamole, this guy is one bedsheet short of a klan rally!' ..or, like me, did you let those remarks slide, considering them irrelevant to the story?

[Enkil]

In his essay "H.P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life.", Michel Houellebecq addresses Lovecrafts racism somewhat extensively (I do use the word loosely). I guess I'll quote what I can find off hand, without reading the enture essay over.

"The other great cause of my suprise was his obsessive racism ; never in the reading of his descriptions of nightmare creatures could I have divined that their source was to be found in real human beings. For the last half-century the analysis of racism in literature has focused on Celine, yet Lovecraft's case is more interesting and more typical. In his writing, intellectual constructs and analyses of decadence play but a very secondary role. As an author of horror fiction (and one of the finest) he brutally takes racism back to its essential and most profound core: fear. His own life is an illustration of this. A country gentlemen, convinced of the superiorority of his Anglo-Saxon origins, he felt only a remote disdain for other races. His stay in New York's underbelly, in its slums, would change all that. The foreign creatures became competitors, enemies, who were close by and whose brute strength far surpassed his. It was then, in a progressive delirium of masochism and terror, that came his calls to massacre."

[E.A. Lovecraft]

But like JP say's so was the rest of the world...

I didn't say he wasn't a racist, I'm saying you shouldn't complain about the cold when you've got smallpox.

The world population did not consist entirely of racists.

Lovecraft was quite capable of changing his opinions via rational thought, yet he went to his grave refusing to give up his belief in Aryan supremacy. Like it or not, the man had a reprehensible character flaw. How many like-minded contemporaries he had is a moot point.

[Adrian]

Ahem.

HPL was holding a firm notion that the British were actually superior to the Cthulhu Cult disciples. As you know the disciples consist of the "scum of the human race". HPL used the Necro and the Urilia Text knowingly in his work; in fact based his later work around it.

Now, in the Urilia it is stated that the Race Of Man is of the blood of Kingu. He didn't mean the "aryan race". Some of you hold racist phobias: HPL meant that there's the human race that has more civilized countries and regions than others and the less "developed" citizens naturally have no power reckognizing evil from the good. When man succumbs to the evil he goes through the symbolic reverse evolution: crawling on paws and roaring like a dragon, not to mention obtaining sexual freedom that at that time was unacceptable to the public which was based on conservative and capitalist people who weren't racist while using slave labour: it was worse, they held negros as things to buy and sell for work they didn't want to do themselves.

What some of you here have ignored is that HPL was merely a reflection of the times and equally powerful at creating symbols and archetypes from them. All religions and civilizations have been racist, if you want to call it. Ironically everyone seems to label HPL "racist" while few notice how HPL tore down the very things he seemed to loathe: religions crumble and civilizations fall. The rule of the Ancient Ones and the inferior races seems inevitable and HPL tells us, that the superior race (saxon or the british or the americans or anyone who happens to randomly be born with a pale skin) is worth shit and will be squashed as the insects we are.

[Jesus Prime]

But like JP say's so was the rest of the world...

I didn't say he wasn't a racist, I'm saying you shouldn't complain about the cold when you've got smallpox.

The world population did not consist entirely of racists.

Lovecraft was quite capable of changing his opinions via rational thought, yet he went to his grave refusing to give up his belief in Aryan supremacy. Like it or not, the man had a reprehensible character flaw. How many like-minded contemporaries he had is a moot point.

I know he's a racist, and I accept that. But just as "Birth of a Nation" gave so much to cinema, Lovecraft's work can't be discarded because the man didn't like the "darkies". Shakespeare can be pretty intolerant of a lot of things - especially gypsies - but no one seems to care about that.

[Adrian]

The Shakespeare - Lovecraft comparison, in my eyes, is valid and while this is somewhat outside the literary world Stalin and Communism has never been publically condemned, while Hitler and National Sotialism is frowned upon. When someone starts calling HPL racist it is using the same double standards. It's saying like if someone was trapped in a cave with dead bodies and he didn't have anything to eat but those things, and he does eat them, then he's cannibal. In fact that man would be a survivalist.

HPL feared/disliked people that were of different skin colour. So what, at least it was better than to be afraid of electricity or algebra.

[Jesus Prime]

Actually, Stalin and Stalinism should be vilified. Stalin was not a Communist. He used the Communist Party as his meal ticket to the top, but when he got there, he didn't adhere to a single Commie principle. Hell, he wasn't even left-wing in the slightest. Hitler was more leftwards leaning.