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Originally Posted by justhinking  So how come everyone's so sure we're less racist in general? I think these days we're just more politcally correct (ie afraid to be honest about our views), let's us keep our biases unchallenged so long as we don't present them directly. Personally I'm against the whole political correctness thing - it's the attitudes behind words that are offensive, not the words themselves surely? There's also the fact that even without being racist many people have simply shifted the emphasis to culture and belief in their own innate cultural superiority.
To get back to the issues at hand though I think that really HPL was writing in a different time but also writing to acheive certain effects - to many people in the culture he was writing for places like the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the pacific islands were all somewhat exotic, mysterious, dark, foreboding places (it's the alien and unfamiliar which inspires terror, surely something HPL makes something of a point of). Equally use of rural folk hiding dark and terrible secrets presents the familiar and non-threatening as alien so it's a literary device as well. I don't think that HPL dwells heavily on racial or cultural issues, rather he uses cultural biases already inherent in the culture and time he was writing in to achieve certain elements of tone and foreshadowing in his works. |
Nice post there, and there's certainly some truth to it. However, if you go and read Lovecraft essays, his poetry, his letters ... he was often quite viciously racist. "Vitriol" doesn't even begin to cover it, in many cases (see, for instance, some of his letters in the recent
Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, or his letters to Frank Belknap Long about New York's lower East Side, just from a visit, before he lived there -- let alone those he wrote to his aunts when he was living in New York -- at one point even his aunt Lillian took him to task for his extreme views, and that is really surprising! And this really does tie in very strongly with his fiction, as well... "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is a story based entirely on the idea of miscegenation, and its effects toward "devolution" -- the horror lies in the protagonist's not only accepting this part of his heritage, but finally glorying in it.
And any look through his poetry you'll find numerous racist slurs, slanders, and bigoted ethnic remarks, from "Ye Ballade of Patrick von Flynn" to "To General Villa", to the now-infamous "On the Creation of Niggers". It's an unfortunate fact, but a fact. And this is one aspect of his thought where Lovecraft showed very little, if any change, as he went through life, despite the fact that already there was a turn in the tide among the scientific community on this -- it hadn't reached its height, by any means, but the sorts of views he espoused were indeed becoming eroded by scientific evidence rather quickly; and in nearly every other area of his life, he made adjustments for new information that challenged his views -- but not this. This was blind prejudice, nothing more.
However, that said... yes, he was writing for another time, and from a different perspective. And he did use these feelings to create some powerful fiction that doesn't have to be read as racist, necessarily (though it's darned near impossible to avoid that with such things as the "Six Shots in the Moonlight" chapter of
Herbert West -- Reanimator, or "The Horror at Red Hook", for instance). And, while it's no excuse or defense -- as an historical figure, none is really needed at this point, however regrettable the views were -- he was hardly alone among the literati in having such views. T. S. Eliot expressed views every bit as pungent as HPL; so did Ezra Pound. Yet one doesn't see that much criticism of them for those views. I think that's because Lovecraft still has a lot of "fans" rather than the sorts of readers who would normally read
and publicly discuss Eliot or Pound. It's the price of a certain sort of fame.
I've no problem admitting Lovecraft's fault here -- he was a big enough man otherwise, and a good enough artist, that it by no means overshadows his work. And, overall (there were apparently some actions he took in school where outspoken anti-Semitism was concerned) he was the soul of generosity and kindness when he dealt with people even when they may have belonged to ethnic groups he disliked. It was his expression of those views on paper that has kept them alive today, not his actions otherwise. As you say, our time tends to be hypersensitive to this because of our peculiar historical associations with such (World War II, the various genocides undertaken since then, which have so quicly become public because of the speedy access of information, whereas in other ages it might have taken years, decades, or even centuries for the facts to come out). And I'll agree that I am extremely dubious that racism (or, better, ethnophobia) has done much more than gone underground, considering how easily it erupts periodically when a society is undergoing stress. I don't think we're anywhere near as civilized as we like to think. In some ways, I think we're considerably less civilized (albeit more technologically advanced, and having more scientific knowledge) than some earlier periods in history... at least, where the literate are concerned.
But, as I said, I don't think we need duck the issue where Lovecraft is concerned. If we can get past our own prejudices on this front, I think we'll find there's much more to be gained by reading him as he was, taking the blemished and the fair, and simply seeing him as he was, not as either a saint or a devil, but a very intelligent and complex man who refuses to fit into any easy mold....