“The smell coming off her was all about change.”
–Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels, 2016
When teaching the Literature of Science Fiction at CSU Long Beach, one of the key texts I often assign is At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, a short novel originally published in 1936 that points the way toward the blurring of genre boundaries so prevalent in the work of the most memorable fabulists of the past few decades, Steve Aylett, Steve Erickson, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, and Jack Womack foremost among them.
The students’ reaction to Lovecraft is often split down the middle; there are those who adore Lovecraft’s work and those who revile it. One student believed that, due to Lovecraft’s documented racism, no one should be allowed to read his work. Her fear, apparently, was that by exposing ourselves to Lovecraft’s fiction, we would in turn be laying ourselves naked to the author’s worst character flaws. It was as if she believed that reading H.P. Lovecraft might lead one to become H.P. Lovecraft, almost as if the supernatural phenomenon of body possession Lovecraft wrote about so often in his fiction (e.g., The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” etc.) was possible in the real world. My syllabus, due to its inclusion of Lovecraft, was somehow putting the students at risk of having their precious bodily fluids spoiled irreversibly by transgressive notions forged way back in the Jazz Age.
Needless to say, this is an odd viewpoint for a student—particularly a Creative Writing major—to hold. If anyone could separate the work from the author, you would think it would be another writer. As a writer myself, I find such a puritanical stance to be completely antithetical to artistic expression. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, it shouldn’t be necessary to invoke the words of George Santayana (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”), but apparently for some it is necessary. It should be obvious that only by remembering the past and building on it can any form of literature evolve.
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The Ballad of Black Tom
We see this evolutionary process displayed beautifully in two recent works of imaginative literature. Victor LaValle’s metatextual 2016 short novel, The Ballad of Black Tom, is to Lovecraft’s 1927 story “The Horror at Red Hook” what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Shakepeare’s Hamlet. LaValle’s haunting tale of a Harlem musician accidentally swept up in a twilit realm marked by rampant demon worship and unchecked police brutality illuminates the Roaring Twenties in which Lovecraft wrote his original story while also commenting slyly and ruthlessly on the directed acts of violence that seem to overshadow our own world. LaValle’s tale occurs in the previously unexplored margins of “The Horror at Red Hook,” breathing a disturbing form of three-dimensional life into Lovecraft’s pulp characters (particularly Irish police detective Thomas F. Malone) that the original tale never even attempts. Like all great pastiches, The Ballad of Black Tom enables one to revisit Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” from a startling new perspective that succeeds in deepening the experience of reading the original. If Lavalle had taken my student’s advice and ignored the lessons that can be learned from immersing oneself in the dark worlds of Lovecraft, The Ballad of Black Tom would never have been written, and the field of weird fiction would be much poorer for it.
In Stephen Graham Jones’ 2016 novel, Mongrels, the werewolf archetype is turned upside down and inside out in so many imaginative and convincing ways that one might wonder if the author was personally acquainted with lycanthropes himself. Clearly, the author has spent a lifetime thinking about werewolves and how such an ancient superstition might relate to the brutal realities of our own world. Like almost all horror archetypes, the werewolf has often been used in the past to create stories that are reactionary at their core. The fear of the Other pervades many of the original werewolf/manbeast tales that emerged from Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, as Dr. Robert Curran points out in his 2009 book, Werewolves. A telling example, taken from American cinema, is Edward Dmytryk’s 1943 Universal horror flick, Captive Wild Woman, in which an African ape named Cheela transmogrifies into a naïve, dark-haired, “exotic” beauty named Paula Dupree (portrayed by Acquanetta). Whenever Paula is overcome with sexual jealousy, her coffee-colored flesh darkens by degrees until she literally metamorphoses into a black woman, “devolves” further into a half-human/half-ape beast that looks exactly like a werewolf, sheds all trace of her “civilized” exterior, then gives in to her inherent, genetically predestined bloodlust.
To underscore the racial subtext further, it’s worth noting that Universal featured Acquanetta in several different B-films during World War II in a desperate attempt to groom her into their next big horror star. Unfortunately, when executives at Universal discovered that Acquanetta’s “exotic” features stemmed not from Venezuela, as her managers claimed, but from the fact that she was African-American, Universal summarily dropped her contract. Acquanetta never starred in another film again, and was forced to abandon Hollywood soon after Universal barred her from the lot due solely to her race. Captive Wild Woman is a prime example of a “werewolf” tale in which the fear of the Other is reflected in both the foreground plot as well as in the background politics that produced the film.
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Stephen Graham Jones is well aware of this dark side of werewolf history and makes use of it throughout Mongrels, in which the protagonist’s outsider status and seemingly endless encounters with distrust, paranoia, and xenophobia fuel the plot far more than the core fantasy element (which might very well have come off as superficial in a lesser novelist’s hands). As the late Theodore Sturgeon often advised, a good writer should always “ask the next question.” Jones is the type of novelist who always “asks the next question.” In Mongrels, he is in complete control of his central metaphor and explores every possible thematic tributary without once glancing away from the disturbing implications. If the werewolf’s connection to past tales of xenophobia had dissuaded Jones from reconfiguring the well-worn archetype into the magical fable that is Mongrels, the literary world would have lost one of the most impressive coming-of-age novels written in the past twenty years.
A legitimate purpose of literature, not unlike the wise alchemists of old, is to appropriate base elements and transmogrify them into dangerous visions for a strange and uncertain new century. Victor LaValle and Stephen Graham Jones have proven themselves as adept at this type of magic as H.P. Lovecraft himself when he transformed the most staid elements of nineteenth century Gothic literature into numerous compelling, influential classics of the phantastique, At the Mountains of Madness a touchstone example. If the literature of science fiction and fantasy has ever been about anything, it’s been about change. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the past, there can be no change—only stasis, paralysis, and eternal stagnation.
Robert Guffey‘s most recent book is Until the Last Dog Dies (Night Shade/Skyhorse), a darkly satirical novel about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that affects only the humor centers of the brain. His previous books include the journalistic memoir Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security (OR Books, 2015), a collection of novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014), and Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form (TrineDay, 2012). His website is Cryptoscatology.com.
We cannot look at the values of people nearly a century dead without looking at the culture around them. We cannot judge these people by our standards, they are so far removed to be an entirely different context. Humans are capable of such horror, look at the last year alone with the inhumanity that surrounds Harvey Weinstein.
We do not arrive fully formed, we are not free from the bias of our parents, our peers, they inform us.
That we are thankfully more informed has been a slow progress for over 100 years through tough fights and gradual sands of change.
To discount Lovecraft, or anyones output, because of a view that is unrelated to their work is.. unfortunately a childish knee jerk reaction.
Humans are not just one things – being equally capable of great works of art and atrocity, of kindness and animosity.
People just ain’t no good… they’d stick by you if they could.
We, ourselves, will no doubt be found wanting in some ethical view that we currently see as advanced in 100 years.
However, Mr Guffrey, a great article, and makes me want to read many of these books > I’ve gone and ordered Lovecraft Country and Black Tom (as audible have it on the kindle cheap)
Are you also assigning Ballad of Black Tom?
@@@@@Mr Marshalsea,
People always handwave Lovecraft’s racism as a product of his time. This is inaccurate. Even people of his time thought Lovecraft by their own standards was a horrible racist. This is well documented.
I love Lovecraft’s work and would never tell people not to read it because of his racism but you can’t just explain everything away as “Oh, it was a different era.”
@0: An issue with Lovecraft is how much his racism drove (and was intended to be shown by?) the fear-of-the-Other that underlies most of his work. The folly of this fear is called out in Emrys’s Winter Tide, in which Lovecraft’s humanoids wind up in the same desert camps as Japanese-Americans, with as much justification. There may be more art in Lovecraft than in “The Cold Equations”, but they are both driven by irrational fear.
I agree that preventing people from reading his work is a step too far, but I’m tempted to say his work should come with advance warnings, much as (e.g.) Birth of a Nation should. (For those who say he should be read without preconceptions, I suggest that every reader approaches every work (even those without the background of controversy that Lovecraft has) with preconceptions; it’s reasonable to warn readers that they may have to dig through manure to get to the pony.
@1: Lovecraft was an outlier for his own age; there are documented instances of his contemporaries taking him to task for the overt racism in his non-fiction writing (as distinct from the covert racism of his fiction).
lovecraft was an original and paved the way for modern horror…some like him, some don’t.
but judge the authors works on the works themselves and not the personal views of the author.
if you’re going to discount an authors work on the basis of their racial/political views, then you might as well discount pretty much most works of literature from bygone eras since most authors of other epochs would’ve been racists against some culture or another.
great article.
Those who want to prevent others from reading works because they are upset by the author’s views or ideas in his works are those who would be the first to help pump the fuel into Montag’s flamethrower.
I agree about a warning about all the prejudice. I’ve read quite a few of Lovecraft’s stories. The racism isn’t something that triggers me, but it might trigger other people. It doesn’t hurt to present the author’s views on the world along with his work. I am tutoring a young woman in English as a Second Language, and pointing out in the workbook we’re using those questions about the readings and the definitions given for some words that are sexist. Prejudice can be challenged throughout the reading of a book.
Another very interesting novel that elaborates on Lovecraft’s racism (although its not its main theme) is Paul Lafarge’s “The Night Ocean”.
Lovecraft was easily the most important influential fantasy writer of the 20th Century, and his influence has extended well beyond the scope of his genre into the pop culture in general. So he’s essential reading if you want to understand science fiction / fantasy / horror / weird fiction, and he’s recommended reading if you want to fully appreciate the early 21st Century zeitgeist.
That said, Lovecraft’s racism is something that can’t be papered over or turned away from. Firstly, because a proper critical reading considers the world the author wrote within not so that one can say things like, “Oh, well everybody was a racist then,” but so that one better understands what’s happening in the text. Secondly, because (as several people have already observed) Lovecraft’s racism was egregious even by the racist standards of his era. HPL’s racism wasn’t the casual racism of another pulp author writing a Stepin Fetchit-style African-American butler into a story or pitting a hero against an inscrutable and cruel generically Asian evil mastermind; HPL’s racism was writing an entire sonnet about how much he hated those with African ancestry (I will not type the title here, but it’s easily found online), ghost-writing a short story for another author in which the final ultimate horror revealed by the last line turns out to be miscegenation (“Medusa’s Coil,” credited to Zealia Bishop), and writing a story under his own name that is very little more than a xenophobic anti-immigrant screed (“The Horror at Red Hook”). Thirdly, because Lovecraft’s racism, for both worse and better, informed the cosmic alienation that was one of the chief, uniting themes of his work. And fourthly, because Lovecraft was a speculative lit author, and his racism represents a profound failure of imagination on the part of a highly creative man.
That fourth point is important, I think, when you compare HPL to his peers. Particularly Robert E. Howard; I don’t mean to gloss over the race issues in Howard’s own work, but it is worth observing, I think, that Howard’s preoccupation was with the enervating effects of civilization, and so while Howard might not be able to conceive of a person of color or a woman who was the equal of one of his protagonists, he could conceive of people of color and women who were superior to white men in general, and/or who possessed agency and/or were virtuous (e.g. possessing wisdom or education lost to “civilized” men); this is an interesting thing. Howard was imagining, which is, I think, the most important thing we ask from our writers of fantasy and science fiction; his imagination wasn’t completely free and clear of the biases you might find in most Southerners in the early 20th Century, but he did push against them in his work (one wonders if he might have grown even further if he’d allowed himself a longer lifetime). Lovecraft, despite having some gift for imagining the cosmic or inexpressible, couldn’t imagine anybody who wasn’t either himself or a reflection of his worst, deepest prejudices.
To ignore that is to not fully read an important author who ought to be read.
I’m not sure separating the work from the author is the appropriate concern here. Most books are informed by their authors’ deeply held beliefs, deliberately or otherwise. Lovecraft’s work certainly was, for good and ill. Separating the work from the reader is perhaps a better goal when trying to be a fan, or an academic interrogator, of problematic things. “Mountains of Madness” won’t automatically infect you with bigotry–especially if you’re willing to acknowledge, alongside the awe-inspiring panoramic sweeps of Deep Time, that oh boy are shoggoths a problematic depiction of freed slaves.
The idea of a book that does irreversibly infect readers with abhorrent ideas is, of course, itself pretty Lovecraftian.
“One student believed that, due to Lovecraft’s documented racism, no one should be allowed to read his work.”
I understand why the World Fantasy Award changed the physical award so that it’s no longer Lovecraft’s head. I understand that Lovecraft’s racism was, as several have already commented, beyond that which was “normal” for his era. And I understand his racism does infect several of his stories to an intrusive degree (“The Horror at Red Hook” being one of the chief among them).
But for a student to say “no one” should be allowed to read his work at all? Idiotic. I could argue that his work should be analyzed more, especially by creative writing students, because his work combines original ideas with those extreme views. We learn from both the paragons of the art and from the mistakes. After a reaction like that, I’d be tempted to have them read “The Horror at Red Hook” and ask how they’d edit or change it, but “The Ballad of Black Tom” got there first.
Too many people these days want to throw out and bury art based on the beliefs/acts of the artists. Sometimes, that’s appropriate, such as when the art is being used to fund the objectionable beliefs/acts. But Lovecraft has been dead for almost 80 years. He can’t benefit from people reading or discussing his work. And I think engaging with that work, and pointing out the evil it contains (both fictional and real), can turn that art into something which builds rather than destroys, lest we all become examples of what happens when we ignore Santayana.
On one hand, the idea of polluting one’s mind by reading an author sounds ridiculous. But on the other, it’s undeniable that some people take on the ideas of the authors they read and accept them as their own, even if they originally didn’t. Marketers know well that repetition, on its own, works, even of people who aren’t initially well disposed to the idea. So the fear of your student isn’t entirely baseless and it shouldn’t be dismissed offhand by saying: “Do you call yourself a writer, or what?”
I don’t mean that the correct answer is not exposing yourself to ideas you don’t want to acquire. That puts people in a dogmatic and fragile position, and in fact in more danger of eventually changing their mind in ways they didn’t want, because they lack the critical thinking you get with a broad exposure to different ideas.
What I mean is that the fear should be addressed and dealt with. What is it that makes people absorb ideas from authors? When is it a good thing to change your mind, and when isn’t it? And so on.
I have some sympathy with the fear of exposure to ideas – simply because we are unable to be rid of ideas once we have encountered them. They don’t wash off and their distastefulness remains constant every time they are evoked. To avoid them is to avoid the discomfort associated with experiencing them over and over again – a visceral experience of revulsion, fear, horror.
On the other hand, revulsion is a strong sign that you are not taking that idea on board and identifying with it such that it becomes a part of your worldview. You’re actually doing the opposite and rejecting it as abhorrent. There is fear that, just like the author who wrote the troubling story, some readers will embrace it and find it thrilling instead. That would mean that the text of the story is passively encouraging a set of people to hate you, the abhorring reader, and given the nature of what you’re discussing I think that’s worth a moment to think about.
It isn’t that without remembering the past we are doomed to repeat it. It repeats if it isn’t examined, understood and let go. Remembering it without criticism is a guarantee of repeats. This necessity of examining, accepting and moving on from the past is of primary importance to all of us as we don’t want to pass on the burdens of the dead. The horror, the horror.