Hi! Would you ever consider doing that spirited TED talk about why Lovecraft now appeals specifically to the marginalized people he hated? I'm trying to make sense of it myself and it would really help to hear your informed opinion!! Sorry if you have already written about it or if it's maybe too personal! Hope you guys are doing well during the lockdown :)
Yeah, sure.
Lovecraft’s work deals intimately with the pain and fear associated with feeling alienated from your community, your ancestors, and even yourself.
A lot of his stories are about how there is something ‘different,’ about you or the people around you, that fills you with unease, but is also difficult to define. Your family feels malevolent to you; you feel like everyone in your small town is watching you, or has bad intentions towards you; you know that there’s something that just isn’t RIGHT about yourself.
Your community might want to force you into a religion, or even a partnership, that seems unspeakable to you, and which fills you with horror.
Sound familiar?
These themes are relatable to LGBT people, to disabled people, to non-neurotypical people, to biracial people, or to people of color who are being raised in communities in which they are an overwhelming minority.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is probably Lovecraft’s most famous story. It’s about being trapped in a small town where everyone is a part of a terrifying religion that personally hates you, everyone is being forced into horrifying heterosexual couplings of in which one of the partners is a literal monster, for the purpose of breeding, and in which the protagonist survives, escapes, and the government bluntly condemns his tormentors.
As a gay little kid growing up in conservative Maine, this was big for me.
In the end, the narrator of Shadow Over Innsmouth realizes he’s descended from the cultists of this town, and that he is becoming the thing he previously hated and feared. I also was afraid of never getting out of my town, and one day turning into someone just like the people who made my life miserable. To me, it read like a horrible cautionary tale: get out, and don’t look back. What’s going on here is wrong, and you need to pull yourself away, before the pressures of your family & community turn you into one of them.
But that’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth: a story which features alien miscegenation, sure, but not usually one of the stories that gets specifically called out when people talk abot how racist Lovecraft was.
The White Ape is probably the most racist thing Lovecraft ever wrote (also titled Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family). It’s about a man who goes to Africa, falls in love with an ape, successfully reproduces with it, and then all of his descendants are criminals and madmen, with unpleasant, twisted appearances. It’s told from the POV of one of his more distant descendants, who uncovers this information while researching his own geneology, and, upon discovering that there’s an ape in his lineage, commits suicide by dousing himself in lighter fluid and setting himself on fire.
Yikes.
And yet...this story speaks to me, too. There’s a history of serious alcoholism in my family. My mother was an alcoholic. I asked questions: her father was an alcoholic, and suffered from hallucinations as well. His father was also an alcoholic, and he beat his wife and children savagely. And his parents? I don’t know. No one was ever willing to talk to me about it. But every generation I looked back, there was more abuse, more mental illness, more violence.
The idea that, if I could look back far enough, I could discover a progenitor that had poisoned our entire family was something I dwelled on, as a kid. Would I want to know the truth? Would it make any difference? Would I have some kind of crisis if I found out that I was a descendant of a rapist, or a murderer? How would I react if I learned that I was a part of a cycle of violence and substance abuse that no one before me had managed to escape?
The White Ape is super, super racist, obviously, but it’s not just racist. Taken another way, it’s a story about dysfunction being passed down within a family. It’s a sins-of-the-father story. And if you come from an abusive home, that’s compelling.
Look, Lovecraft was a mega racist. He was also a man who struggled with mental illness his entire life, who had watched both of his parents die in mental asylums, and who never found success in his life. He was afraid all the time, and he wrote about how frightening the world was to him, and how he never felt like he was truly a part of it.
The racism sucks.
The rest of it, if you’re a person who has been mistreated or marginalized, can really resonate.
The feeling that there is something, somehow, cut-into-your-very-bones wrong with you. The constant fear of being found out. The heads of people turning as you pass, filling you with the certainty that they may somehow see you as you don’t want to be revealed. And if you were acted upon, by the universe, would anyone care? Would anyone listen to you or help? Is there even a somewhere to run?
Lovecraft’s characters live in this terrible state of fear. The man himself, racist and shockingly, often bewilderingly bigoted, lived his life in a similar state. One does not excuse the other, nor can you pick Lovecraft’s fears apart from the stories he wrote. But so many of the terrors that run under his work are ones that marginalized people know all too well, and there is a painful sort of meaning, of recognition, in that.
#I've always been resistant to the idea of throwing lovecraft out from the corpus of sff #especially when we've seen such an uptick of incredible bipoc and queer authors taking his stories and themes and spinning them to new gold #mistreated and marginalized people have true connections to what Lovecraft has written and their own lenses through which to view it #that are unique and individual #it's given us a fascinating crop of genre writers #but more to the point it's given us privately valuable themes and stories
fearful people often end up bigoted because it’s very hard, when you’re very scared, to interrogate whether or not anything you’re told is a threat is in fact actually that bad. you’re already scared. people who tell you how to navigate a frightening world full of obscure and complex dangers become trusted very quickly, because it’s such a relief to hear someone validate your own anxiety. you see people get very bigoted, very fast, when they get sucked into cults, scams, and populist movements, all of which meet in the middle, and all of which use fear to control their victims.
lovecraft was notably racist even for the time he was in. his contemporaries remark on it. but look at q-anons and terfs and antis and neo-nazis today. it’s not about education, stupidity, hatred, lack of opportunity to know any better, mental illness-- it’s just fear. fear is at the heart of everything they do, the kind of fear that makes you stupid, and violent, and insular. the kind of fear that makes you see monsters everywhere. lovecraft wasn’t afraid because he was racist. he was racist because he was afraid.
and stories about fear, about what we’re afraid of, and why, and if the fear is worse than what we’re afraid of, or if there really is something out there that’s coming to get us, and how that fear makes us stupid more often than it makes us smart, and what we do to each other out of fear, the lengths we go to, the ways we lose our humanity or deny it of others.... of course that’s good horror. that’s what horror IS.
Though I will strongly argue that his stories ARE also about mental illness and about being made other and monstrous by it, but also about surviving it.
Like the way that he's racist as shit do not get me wrong, Lovecraft is ablist as shit. The Music of Erich Zahn is this wonderful weird stew, right: it's this mess of lateral violence and connection, of the narrator being a patronizing ablist little shit to this mute violinist but also because of their shared mental illness (which he discusses explicitly, albeit in period-normal language as "nervous" disorders or "temperament" or whatever) or what he assumes is; the looming spectre of any Lovecraft story is "madness", this undifferentiated mass of "losing your mind", and it's both fundamentally, throughout the mythos, ablist as shit and also so clearly coming From The Inside, from this fear and this awareness and this experience.
The internalised ablist self-loathing in, eg, The Statement of Randolph is amazing; the way in which that underpins and fundamentally structures his relationship with Harley Warren and with how things unfold. And I think that is another element, as well: his narrators are often weak, often deeply fucked up, afraid, they freeze, they panic, they make stupid choices, they go crazy.
One of my things as a mentally ill person is that I need the word "crazy"* because I need something to describe the times (universally negative) when the inside of my head is a sharp-edged pit of knives divorced from reality that is not touched by "irrational" or whatever the fuck softer, kinder, more appropriate word you can come up with. And Lovecraft also captures that. He captures living with that, struggling with that; he also captures watching someone you love struggle with it (and succumb to it) in astonishingly accurate form, especially for what people did, in fact, deal with in terms of "treatment" from his era.
And he captures coming out the other side of it: of the shaky sense that you're PRETTY sure you're in touch with things as they actually are now, that you're, well, sane, but the now-forever-present awareness that that can happen, that you can end up where you were, that it's always there to go back to if something goes wrong.
I absolutely don't think we should lionize him; I 100% backed, for example, the change for the World Fantasy Award to something other than his head. He was a racist ablist and several other ists trashfire and I see zero need to ignore or make that palatable.
You don't HAVE TO, in order to engage with his work, and especially don't have to in order to use it as a place to start - to dig, and to make something else out of it. There's shit in there, so shove it somewhere to decompose at whatever degrees centigrade it is that sanitizes things and use it to fertilize new roses. But there is stuff in there that touches those feelings of alienation and fear and aloneness and taintedness better than almost anyone, and I don't have to think he was a role model to know that.
{*nb: not interested in a debate about this at this time; you are absolutely welcome to have your own relationship with this word, in your space. This is mine, in mine. Thank you.}
