So this is the promised blog entry on Lovecraft and racism. Did y’all go read the essay? Meh. Well, I did, but it took me awhile to get through, so I don’t entirely blame anybody for skipping it.

What follows is partly a synopsis of what I got out of that essay, and partly just some stuff that’s been passing through my head lately. You may agree; you may disagree. You may find this whole ramble boring. You may be wondering when we’re gonna get back to LOLcats and knitting and the Guinea Pig Report, and if so, you should bear with me because you’ll appreciate the prize at the bottom of this Cracker Jacks box.

So anyway…

If H. P. Lovecraft is remembered as a pioneer in the horror genre, his racism cannot be entirely separated from his accomplishments. He had a lot of neuroses in common with today’s batch of bigots, in that he feared the degeneration of the superior race. (Phleh. I wanna wash out my mouth just having typed that.) You want “white heritage?” Here’s yer “white heritage”: Lovecraft’s conviction that white colonial culture was the apex of humanity, and that this shining Aryan gem was doomed to be pulled back down amongst the teaming and, yes, squamous hordes of blacks and Jews and Irish and other “undesirables,” inspired him to create a body of fiction that will never be forgotten.

Granted, it did inspire stories that are forgettable. Lord’s essay cites a couple of ‘em, “The Street” and “The Horror at Red Hook,” which were no more than preachy allegories demonstrating that wave after wave of “swarthy, sin-pitted” immigrants would inevitably bring down the neighborhood. But sometimes, perhaps by accident, Lovecraft’s paranoia transcended itself and wrought something more numinous, tales which put at stake not simply a single class, color, or culture, but the entire human species. Those stories of his in which alien species and inhuman monsters worm their way into the gene pool and begin to overshadow humanity are the ones Lovecraft will be most remembered for.

(Did Lovecraft precede the zombie genre? I think he must have. Most of it, anyway. Today’s omnipresent zombie apocalypse makes Lovecraft seem tame the way Dungeons and Dragons makes Tolkein seem clichéd, and with the same historical irony.)

Even the modern, enlightened reader, the gentle diversity-valuing soul who can’t bring himself to read “The Rats in the Walls” out loud without euphemizing the name of the narrator’s cat (it’s a black cat; the main character gave it a name that starts with an N), can admit a kinship with Lovecraft here. Because it’s not just the eventual assimilation of humanity, without a trace, into the inhuman hordes of Deep Ones that evokes horror. It’s the idea that, in the cosmic perspective, humanity’s survival matters very little. Even our best elements vanish into obscurity, and Lovecraft held little hope that those elements he thought best would keep themselves pure. We can sympathize with his pessimism without sharing his racist definition of “best”: Whatever virtue we have, we tend to allow it to tarnish. And then the monsters come tromping through with their big feet and exterminate us as an accidental byproduct of their own inscrutable interests.

Who among us has not from time to time felt the despair of knowing oneself a dot on a speck in an appallingly huge, uncaring universe? Lovecraft’s better stories heighten that despair, positing creatures which epitomize that hugeness, that uncaringness. Creatures that could, with a single tentacled motion, crush us entirely, leaving no trace that we ever existed, without even knowing what they’d done.

And that hits us where we live, because the entire span of human life can be seen as a race against that tentacle. How much of a mark can we leave in the Earth, how deep a footprint in history, before Cthulhu catches up with us and swallows us whole?

Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one’s self;
One thing I know that never dies,
The fame of a dead man’s deeds.

—Havamal 77

For all his failings and fears–because of his fears–Lovecraft won his race. He wrote, quite simply, about the fear of being forgotten, and, irregular writer of purplish prose that he was, still enough patches of brilliance shone through that he never will be forgotten.

…More next post. (You saw that coming, didn’t you?)