HP Lovecraft, the New Babel and the witch hunt 2.0

The controversy raised to the Hugo Awards 2020 on the literary and "ideological" legacy of HP Lovecraft has reopened the question, which exploded ai World Fantasy Awards 2011, of the alleged racism of the Providence Dreamer, which would make him a problematic author for some. But how much did HPL's "racialist" beliefs really influence the genesis of his work, and especially the drafting of The Horror at Red Hook, your most controversial story, a manifesto of the revulsion felt towards the city of New York?

di Marco Maculotti

Cover: Hieronymus Bosch; part 1 of 2
Originally published in 'Lovecraftian Studies 19', Dagon Press, Spring 2021

To pretend that the greatness of an author like HP Lovecraft you can measure how fervent advocate of human rights he was would be like asking Thomas Ligotti to take on the role of the anti-abortionist. What would it mean to censor today, almost eighty years after his death, the work of the greatest genius of fantastic literature of the last century by virtue of the alleged racism that, according to some, would be at the basis of his thought and, therefore, of all his mythology? Yet, there are (especially in the United States) people who would like to remove the figure of the Providence genius from the collective memory and the tales of him in the Cthulhu cycle from library shelves, lamenting the problematic some of his ideological views. The picture, grotesque to say the least, is presented as a bitter confirmation of the psychosocial mechanisms which, almost thirty years ago, Robert Hughes he traced in what he calledΒ Culture of whining.

It is not surprising then that the classification as racist of the worldview and even of certain nuances of Lovecraftian literary work today more than ever: it derives from it, according to today's fashion, the work of demonization aimed at annihilating characters of the past for some of their beliefs today seen as politically incorrect, by virtue of an extremist and Manichaean reasoning unable to decipher the complexity of reality except in an extreme perspective based on the alleged existence of two absolute and antithetical poles, that of absolute Good and that of equally absolute Evil, without shades of gray between the two. Not infrequently - ridiculous to say - the people who make these accusations are known by the public as authors of horror and fantasy fiction, and as such they are presumed to have been indelibly influenced by Lovecraft's work, which is often they recognize themselves. This was the case, first of all, of the controversy raised by the African-American writer Nnedi okorafor ai World Fantasy Awards 2011 and more recentlysenseless attack on George RR Martin al Hugo Award 2020, who, for citing HPL and John W. Campbell (another of the fathers of science fiction to the stars and stripes), was absurdly accused of promoting a vision white, patriarchal and racist (sic!) and therefore "not very inclusive" of the fantastic narrative.

As we will see shortly, ST Joshi, the world's leading expert on Lovecraft and his work, has repeatedly lashed out against this simplistic view of things, and has also done so recently, with the publication of an article in the magazine The Truth Seeker, Vol. 146/2020, with which he would like to clarify once and for all. Joshi happens to be a scholar of Indian ethnic ancestry, and therefore, in that person color, not accused of being prejudiced on the matter, so to speak. In other words, Joshi certainly cannot be accused of being a "white supremacist" or anything remotely similar to a right-wing extremist. And, in any case, undoubtedly his opinion on the issue is much less clouded by prejudices than that of the various Okorafor on duty.


The "Okorafor affair" and Joshi's opinion

Nnedi Okorafor raised the issue in 2011, when he won the World Fantasy Award, whose trophy consisted of a bust of HP Lovecraft, complaining that, having been awarded, she had "placed a statuette representing the head of a racist at home" (sic!). The Award committee took the allegation very seriously and effectively censored the Lovecraftian bust, replacing it with the representation of a tree that surrounds the moon with its branches. This decision is legitimately criticized, as Joshi noted, who underlined its superficiality and a bad faith based more on prejudice than on knowledge of HPL's work [1]:

Evidently, this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a 'vicious racist' like Lovecraft has no business being honored by such an award. […] Seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.

Okorafor was so obsessed with Lovecraft to the point of posting on her profiles social a photo of her taken at the Providence Master's tomb, with a caption certainly not the happiest: Β«I visited HP Lovecraft's grave today and paid my respect. He was probably rolling in his grave than him. He'll be ok. These are different timesΒ».

But where did Okorafor's outrage come from? Precisely from a poem that the young Howard Phillips wrote in 1912, entitled On the Creation of the Niggers - a poem that, as Joshi notes, was never published and probably only read by the author and at most a few close friends - and the story, central to the genesis of the "Myths of Cthulhu", written in 1925 in the middle of the so-called " New York trauma ", The Horror at Red Hook, of which here we will highlight the real interpretations, which have little or nothing to do with an alleged xenophobic anti-African American sentiment of the author. The distrust of the young Lovecraft towards the "racial melting pot" of New York in the 20s is well known, but to argue that the mythopoeia on which his literary work is based is intimately connected to it is a simplification that does not find a actual foundation.

ST Joshi

Joshi himself underlines the need for Lovecraft's thorny issue of racism to be read within a much broader and more complex conceptual framework, and thus avoiding demonizing the author in question for a handful of comments "over the top Which certainly have nothing to do with the core of his poetics. While not denying that some positions of the Providence writer, expressed above all in private correspondence, can legitimately give rise, in the eyes of a contemporary reader, to the unwelcome accusations of xenophobia, and by stigmatizing certain positions of him, Joshi greatly resizes the myth of the "racist Lovecraft", pointing the finger at the bad faith and malevolence with which some approach his work [2]:

[…] Lovecraft is often attacked for his racism. Of course she was a racist: but this element occupies a relatively limited space in her philosophical thinking and even less in his fiction. Many of those who take it out on him about this do not make the slightest effort to understand what the roots of this thought are (roots that lie as much in his formation in New England, under the banner of a conservative Protestantism, as in the spread of racism in the America of his time). They use racism only to criticize it: annoyed by the fact that Lovecraft has entered the literary canon and the breadth of his influence, they never miss an opportunity to use the issue of racism in order to denigrate a writer they do not like for other reasons.

Joshi, therefore, does not deny that during his life Lovecraft embraced positions that can be classified as xenophobic, but sharply shifts the focus of the question to a much more complex vision, which can go beyond the absurd Manichaeism that seems to be so fashionable in the recent decades when it comes to accusing influential people of the past for ideological reasons.

READ MOREΒ  Arthur Machen and the panic charm of the uncanny

That Lovecraft's literature and even more private correspondence are studded with more or less evident traces of a thought tending to consider the so-called W (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) - in which the author himself was inserted by virtue of the Anglo-Saxon origins of his family - is peaceful and it would make little sense to deny it. But much more stimulating, if one really wanted to try to understand Lovecraft's mentality, also taking into account his shadow sides, it would be to identify some conceptual coordinates, according to which to frame the potentially controversial passages of his work within a larger framework. , based above all (as we will see in the second part of our intervention) on his critique of anthropocentrism and the modern world, with particular regard to its capitalist and mercantilist structures, depersonalizing the individual and destroying the elements of social cohesion that only in his opinion could give the former a sense and a direction during his stay in this world.


New York and the case Red hook

But first things first. The horror in Red Hook it was written, as has already been said, during that short period of time that we have defined "New York trauma", that is to say to that period of time in which the author, following his marriage to the Ukrainian writer and publisher of Jewish origin Sonia Greene, lived in the Big Apple: an experience that for the "provincial" Howard Phillips was a real trauma, deriving from the sudden passage from a "family" and rural reality such as that of New England in which he was born and raised and that NYC ultra-subway. In a letter to Donald Wandrei of 1927 Lovecraft wrote [3]:

New York is a dead city and the glow that impresses the stranger is the phosphorescence of a decaying corpse.

The same French writer Michel Houellebecq, certainly adding much of his own, he analyzed in his monograph dedicated to the Providence Dreamer the complications of the New York period in Lovecraft's psyche, to the point of leading him to "a real racial neurosis" [4], and emphasized how they were somehow central to the genesis of the "Myths of Cthulhu", closing "It is the deepest secret of Lovecraft's genius and the pure source of his poetry: he managed to transform his disgust for life into hostility activeΒ» [5]. Observation also noted by Joshi, according to which [6]

[...] without the experience in New York the myth of Cthulhu probably would never have been born, or at least it would not have been born as we know it: because it is from the intuition of walking in a dead city, populated by animated organisms "that have nothing to do with what it was when alive "(He) which originates the invention of the colossal non-living forms of the mythical cycle, from Cthulhu to the other inhabitants of the submerged metropolis. If R'lyeh is not New York, she certainly bears the stigmata ...

It must be admitted that Lovecraft's painting of Red Hook is certainly not a hymn to integration and multiculturalism, as can be seen from some of the most controversial passages of the story. [7]:Β 

Red Hook is a maze of squalor and immigration near the old harbor front, opposite Governor's Island […]. The population is an inextricable tangle, an enigma: Syrians, Spaniards, Italians and Negroes live on each other, with American or Scandinavian fringes thriving not far away. It is a babel of noises and dirt, and cries of all kinds are a counterpoint to the waves lapping on the filthy wharves and the monstrous organ concert of the sirens of the port.

"Horror em Red Hook", by crisouls, [via DeviantArt]

It's still [8]:

From that tangle of material and moral decay the blasphemies pronounced in a thousand dialects attack the sky. […] The police have no hope of enforcing order or of obtaining better living conditions, and their effort consists in erecting a sort of barrier that protects the outside world from contagion. [...] More people enter Red Hook than they leave (or at least, than they leave by land) [...] In this state of affairs Malone perceived the disgusting scent of practices older than those that honest citizens, priests and philanthropists commonly consider "sinful". He knew, as only those who possess a lively imagination combined with scientific knowledge can know that those who live outside the law tend to repeat, in an arcane way, the darkest instinctive behaviors of the barbaric and primitive life, and this both in everyday life and in the actual rituals of which he is the bearer.

It is not, as we have said, a hymn to integration and multiculturalism; yet many critics fail to notice how The horror a Red hook the Afro-Americans are mentioned only in passing, contrary to what Okorafor, relying on the ignorance of its supporters in this absurd battle, suggests with extreme superficiality. The followers of the mysterious sect rather present themselves as "a colony of unclassifiable individuals, with almond eyes and using the Arabic alphabet," whose abominable ritual [9]

[…] It must have been a survival of Nestorian Christianity mixed with a tip of a Tibetan shaman. Most of the faithful, according to his hypothesis, were of Mongoloid stock and came from Kurdistan or a neighboring region; and Malone couldn't help but remember that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, the last descendants of the Persian devil worshipers.Β 

- Yazidi - it is good to remember - I am an Iranian ethnic group, and therefore of Indo-European stock: much closer genetically and biologically to the very white WASP and at most to Native Americans than to African Americans, as the distorted reading of the accusation advanced by the Okorafor would suggest. Not only that: Lovecraft explicitly links the secret cult that develops like a cancer in the basement of Red Hook to the practices of the medieval witchcraft and to ancient pre-Christian cults of the Euro-Asian religious ecumene, both of Caucasian stock and - as Malone speculates - of Mongolian stock, but in any case non African. In fact it is said explicitly [10]:

Those foreigners […] must have been the heirs of a terrifying primordial tradition; those who allowed the survival of degenerate but very ancient cults, older than humanity itself, and of which some fragments were still handed down. […] Malone had not read in vain Margaret Murray's Witches in Western Europe and he knew that until recent years a frightening system of orgiastic and clandestine assemblies had survived among the peasants and among the separated communities which were the manifestation of obscure religions, older than the European world, and which popular tradition defined black masses or witches' sabbath. That the diabolical vestiges of the Asian wizarding world and fertility cults had not completely disappeared, Malone had no doubts: sometimes he wondered how much older and how darker than the worst tales they really could be.

Stephen Fabian, illustration for "The Horror at Red Hook"

The sources of inspiration are therefore the studies of the Anglo-Indian anthropologist Margaret Murray on European witchcraft and β€œblack” tales by Arthur Machen, mostly The Great God Pan (1894) and Novel of the Black Seal (1895), which we know Lovecraft read and appreciated immensely. In Horror at Red Hook, Machen is in fact explicitly quoted in exergue [11].Β 

READ MOREΒ  Arthur Machen: Witchcraft & Holiness

One cannot fail to notice how the conception of Evil and Sin that emerges from reading the story, far from being founded on a "racialist" evolutionism [12] who, to be fair, was not absent from the author's ideological background at a young age, nonetheless almost exclusively metaphysics, and consequently not at all attributable to the ideological category of "biological racism". At the most, it could be said that Lovecraft saw sin as fatally inherent in an undifferentiated and crazed humanity that had more or less metaphorically handed his fate into the hands of the "Demons" of "underground" NYC, but not in any particular race, warned biologically e morally as "inferior", as certain "partisan" interpretations would suggest. Instead, it seems clear to us that more than the theories of Count De Gobineau The horror in Red Hook is affected by the influence of panic metamorphosis e protoplasmic by Arthur Machen, as the wonderful ending seems to demonstrate [13]:

The supposed anti-African racism which according to Okorafor would allow the pages of The Horror at Red Hook is simply an invention based on nothing: the ecumene cultu (r) ale of the notorious sect operating in the dystopian NYC of Lovecraft's tale has nothing to do with the ritualistic of Black Africa, and on the contrary is closely related to the European and Middle Eastern tradition from which Christianity itself arose: the writings in red letters found on the walls of the neighborhood "ranged from Arabic to Greek, from Hebrew to Latin, and were composed in their respective alphabets": and formulas are also mentioned kabbalistics also known by the European hermeticists of the Middle Ages e archaic invocations in Greek to the dark moon goddesses Gorgo and Mormo. All the most abominable descriptions of the sect's work and beliefs are not May referred or referable to presumed African ethnic groups, but on the contrary they are by explicit mention of Lovecraft to be reconnected to the Middle Eastern tradition and to the classical Greco-Roman tradition, which he himself was passionate about since he was a child [14]:Β 

There the cosmic evil had infiltrated and there, fueled by forbidden rites, the triumphal march had begun that would have transformed us men into horrendous anomalies and fruits of corruption, in something too horrifying for even the tomb to want to welcome us. Satan held his pagan court there and Lilith's contaminated limbs were washed with the blood of children. Nightmares and succubus shouted the praises of Hecate, monsters born without head invoked the Magna Mater. Goats danced to the sound of flutes and satyrs chased misshapen fauns on boulders that were shaped like huge toads. Moloch and Astaroth were not absent, because in the quintessence of damnation the bonds of conscience were loosened and visions of every kingdom of horror or forbidden dimension that evil could forge opened to man's imagination. The world of nature was helpless in the face of the attack from the gaping wells of the night, and there was no sign or prayer that could put that Walpurgis night tumult in check; an evil key, used by a demon summoner, had thrown open the gates of the abyss.

Finally, it remains to underline that, if it is legitimate to see in the Commissioner Malone an alter-ego of Lovecraft himself - an observation that, in the opinion of detractors trained to see ghosts everywhere, would ideally make him a sort of "cop oppressing minorities" - just as legitimate it would be to see a second perhaps even more evident in his "satanic" opponent , the villain of the story, namely the accident Robert Suydam, described verbatim as a "solitary man of letters from an ancient Dutch family" passionate, as the author, of folklore and ancient medieval and even more archaic esoteric traditions, who finally turns out to be the main culprit in the whole affair: the real catalyst of Evil in the underground meanders of the sprawling NYC is therefore, in the "very racist" Horror at Red Hook, a full blown WASP.

Robert Suydam of β€œThe Horror in Red Hook” portrayed by Jon Arfstrom (Weird Tales)

A racist manifesto?

Nevertheless, there is still someone who interprets the tale in question and more generally the "Cycle of the Great Ancients" as a sort of "manifesto" of xenophobia rather than ofcosmic horror, through which Lovecraft would have expressed more or less consciously a personal vision focused on the "demonization" of minorities colored. How is this possible, in the light of what we have said? What the modern proponents of what we could call one have done witch hunt 2.0 was to extrapolate a few lines from an entire story, to invent a direct accusation against the author, for example by sticking to certain descriptions of Lovecraft on the "Dark skin" or "brown" of some members of the cult, a definition which however - as the exegete of the Lovecraftian work well knows - is also extended in his literary production to Italians and Spaniards, Greeks and Middle Easterners (practically all non-WASP humanity) , therefore it cannot be considered as proof of the author's specific hatred towards African-Americans, as the controversy raised by Okorafor has hinted.

READ MOREΒ  The Deer Man of the Castelnuovo Carnival and the regeneration of spring

It would even be ridiculous to consider The horror in Red Hook a manifesto to racism for the simple fact that it connects to some, however very ambiguous, ethnic groups rites aimed at evoking Evil. In the Lovecraftian mythopoeic vision there is no room for any apology of racism or suprematism, and even the hints to the various ethnic groups from time to time involved in the nefarious rites performed in honor of the "Great Ancients" are so varied as not to reveal any specific hatred. of the author towards African-Americans, as Okorafor suggests. Even in one of the rare tales set in Black Africa, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1921), Evil bursts into our world not because of the sinfulness of the local tribes, but of a only partially human being described with the "snow white" skin, who turns out to be the demonic ancestor of the protagonist Arthur Jermyn, who carries his cursed blood in his veins.

This evidently clashes with what the critics of the last hour claim, according to which in the tales of Lovecraft Evil is intimately linked to the ethnicity of various racial groups that would evoke it from the absolute Elsewhere to bring chaos to our world, and these adepts they would be punctually colored, according to the old adage (so dear, for example, to Walt Disney) that he wants the "good" white and the "bad" dark. To disprove this absurd paranoia it would be enough to read the stories themselves. One would find, for example, that in The Festival (1923) the abject ceremony is celebrated by the ghosts of the ancient northern European settlers and is a sinister reversal of the Nordic Yule; that, similarly, the adepts of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931) are the descendants of the ancient European settlers who settled on the territory in previous centuries; than the demon summoners of Dunwich Horror (1928) and Haunter of the Dark (1935), the witches of Dreams in the Witch House (1932), the vampires of Shunned House (1924) and the cannibals of Rats in the Walls (1923) are all WASP certified!

Illustration for "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family"

The list could go on for many pages. The only story in which the ethnic origins of the "damned" character are partly attributable to Black Africa is Medusa's Coil, which Lovecraft wrote with Zealia Brown Bishop in 1930. As proof of how often the "ideological" accusations against Lovecraft are based more on prejudice than on an actual reality of the same, this story has been criticized for being set in a Missouri plantation, in which the work is carried out following the dictates of racial separation. This would make HPL, in the opinion of detractors, a nostalgic forapartheid: absurd slanders, incorrect above all from a merely point of view historical, since the laws were still in place in the United States in the early 30s Jim Crow and therefore the authors, far from being "nostalgic" for a distant past, limited themselves to describing a reality that still existed in those years. But you know: anyone who wants to see evil everywhere, wherever he will find it.

It still remains to be noted that, even admitting that The horror in Red Hook was written primarily for exorcise the impatience felt by the author during the New York years, this hypothesis can only be followed by the recognition of having managed to sublimate these "low" sensations within a far more complex and absolutely non-racist mythopoeic vision stricto sensu, In which the horror presents itself as a spy for the infiltration of entities other in the human dimensional plane, cosmic demons for whom the different human races all have the same, not significant value. From this, if anything, it would be legitimate to brand Lovecraft as a misanthrope, but not as a racist. On the other hand, as Houellebecq points out, more than by the supremacist obsession Lovecraft was ultimately more terrified by the possibility of a mixture of the whole of humanity in an amorphous and standardized crucible, which could serve as slaughterhouse meat to the sinister ultra-capitalist world of machines that was already taking shape in those years [15]. We will have the opportunity to talk about this in the second part of this article.

The horror that emerges from antiquity is a thousand-headed hydra and the cults of darkness have their roots in arcana deeper than the well of Democritus. The soul of the beast is triumphant, omnipresent, and the throngs of youngsters of Red Hook [...] continue to sing, scream and hurl their curses as they drift from abyss to abyss, not knowing where or why, but pushed by the blind laws of biology they will never understand.

[end of part 1 -continue to part 2]


Note:

[1] Cit. in HP Lovecraft biographer rages against ditching of author as fantasy prize emblem, in Β«The GuardianΒ», 11 November 2015

[2] Β A. Scarabelli, Interview with ST Joshi: "The Master of Cosmicism", in Β«AntarΓ©sΒ», HP Lovecraft # 2 - The cosmic horror of the Master of Providence n. 8/2014

[3] HP Lovecraft, The horror of reality, edited by G. De Turris and S. Fusco, Mediterranee, Rome 2007, p. 159

[4] M. Houellebecq, HP Lovecraft. Against the world, against life, p. 123-139

[5] Ibid, p. 153

[6] TS Joshi, commentary to He, in HP Lovecraft, All the stories 1923 - 1926, Mondadori, Milan

[7] HP Lovecraft, The horror in Red Hook (The Horror at Red Hook, 1925)

[8] Ivi

[9] Ivi

[10] Ivi

[11] Β«There are sacraments of evil as well as good, and I believe that we move in an unknown world where there are shadows, mysterious ravines and beings who live in the twilight. It is possible that one day man will retrace the path of evolution backwards and it is my belief that there are scary secrets that have not yet been forgotten.Β».

[12] To be clear, we are referring to the concepts of the "Darwinian" WASP supremacists, very popular at the end of the XNUMXth century, who considered thehomo britannicus as the only "definitive" and "perfect" product of the evolutionary chain; a view which, among other things, served the British Crown as a "scientific" justification for its colonial dominions around the world.

[13] Lovecraft, Red hook, cit.

[14] Ivi

[15] Houellebecq, op. cit., p. 142

4 comments on β€œHP Lovecraft, the New Babel and the witch hunt 2.0"

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *