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H. P. Lovecraft

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Author Topic: H. P. Lovecraft  (Read 678 times)
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« on: August 20, 2007, 03:04:30 am »

Themes
Several themes recur in Lovecraft's stories:


Forbidden knowledge


In "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), Lovecraft wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." Lovecraft's protagonists are nevertheless always driven to this "piecing together," which makes up most Lovecraft stories.

When such vistas are opened, the mind of the protagonist-investigator is often destroyed. Those who actually encounter "living" manifestations of the incomprehensible are particularly likely to go mad.

Those characters who attempt to make use of such knowledge are almost invariably doomed. Sometimes their work attracts the attention of malevolent beings; sometimes, in the spirit of Frankenstein, they are destroyed by monsters of their own creation.


Nonhuman influences on humanity

The beings of Lovecraft's mythos often have human (or mostly human) servants; Cthulhu, for instance, is worshipped under various names by cults amongst both the Eskimos of Greenland and voodoo circles of Louisiana, and in many other parts of the world.

These worshippers served a useful narrative purpose for Lovecraft. Many beings of the Mythos were too powerful to be defeated by human opponents, and so horrific that direct knowledge of them meant insanity for the victim. When dealing with such beings, Lovecraft needed a way to provide exposition and build tension without bringing the story to a premature end. Human followers gave him a way to reveal information about their "gods" in a diluted form, and also made it possible for his protagonists to win temporary victories. Lovecraft, like his contemporaries, envisioned "savages" as closer to the Earth, only in Lovecraft's case, this meant, so to speak, closer to Cthulhu.


Atavistic guilt

Another recurring theme in Lovecraft's stories is the idea that descendants in a bloodline can never escape the stain of crimes committed by their forebears, at least if the crimes are atrocious enough. Descendants may be very far removed, both in place and in time (and, indeed, in culpability), from the act itself, and yet blood will tell ("The Rats in the Walls," "The Lurking Fear," "Arthur Jermyn," "The Alchemist," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). An example of a crime that Lovecraft apparently considered heinous enough for this consequence is cannibalism ("The Picture in the House," and, again "The Rats in the Walls").


Inability to escape fate

Often in Lovecraft's works the protagonist is not in control of his own actions, or finds it impossible to change course. Many of his characters would be free from danger if they simply managed to run away; however, this possibility either never arises or is somehow curtailed by some outside force, as in The Colour Out of Space. Often his characters are subject to a compulsive influence from powerful malevolent or indifferent beings. As with the inevitability of one's ancestry, eventually even running away, or death itself, provides no safety (The Thing on the Doorstep, The Outsider, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, etc.). In some cases, this doom is manifest in the entirety of humanity, and no escape is possible (The Shadow out of Time).


Civilization under threat

Lovecraft frequently dealt with the idea of civilization struggling against more barbaric, primitive elements. In some stories this struggle is at an individual level; many of his protagonists are cultured, highly-educated men who are gradually corrupted by some evil influence.

In such stories, the "curse" is often a hereditary one, either because of interbreeding with non-humans (e.g. "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1920), "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931)) or through direct magical influence (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). Physical and mental degradation often come together; this theme of 'tainted blood' may represent concerns relating to Lovecraft's own family history, particularly the death of his father due to what Lovecraft must have suspected to be a syphilitic disorder.

In other tales, an entire society is threatened by barbarism. Sometimes the barbarism comes as an external threat, with a civilized race destroyed in war (e.g. "Polaris"). Sometimes, an isolated pocket of humanity falls into decadence and atavism of its own accord (e.g. "The Lurking Fear"). But most often, such stories involve a civilized culture being gradually undermined by a malevolent underclass influenced by inhuman forces.


Racism

A common dramatic device in Lovecraft's work is to associate virtue, intellect, elevated class position, civilization, and rationality with white Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, which he often posed in contrast to the corrupt, intellectually inferior, uncivilized and irrational, which he associated with people he characterized as being of lower class, impure racial "stock" and/or non European ethnicity and dark skin complexion who were often the villains in his writings.

Some of his most hostile racist views can be found in his poetry, particularly in "On the Creation of Niggers," and "New England Fallen" (both 1912). In "On the Creation of Niggers" in particular, Lovecraft takes this to an extreme, explicitly characterizing black people as sub-human:

“ When, long ago, the gods created Earth;

In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were designed;
Yet were too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest of Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a ****.
 ”

In "The Call of Cthulhu" he writes of a captured group of "mongrel" worshipers of Cthulhu:

“ the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattos, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with suprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith. ”

He also expressed racist and ethnocentric beliefs in his personal correspondence. In a letter of January 23, 1920, Lovecraft wrote:

“ For evolved man -- the apex of organic progress on the Earth -- what branch of reflection is more fitting than that which occupies only his higher and exclusively human faculties? The primal savage or ape merely looks about his native forest to find a mate; the exalted Aryan should lift his eyes to the worlds of space and consider his relation to infinity!!!! ”

In "Herbert West - Reanimator," Lovecraft gives an account of a just-deceased African-American male. He asserts:

“ He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms that I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life - but the world holds many ugly things.”

In "The Horror at Red Hook," one character is described as "an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth". In "Medusa's Coil," ghostwritten by Lovecraft for Zealia Bishop, the story's final surprise--after the revelation that the story's villain is a vampiric medusa--is that she

“ was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers.... [T]hough in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress." ”

In "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," there is a somewhat more patronizing description of an African - New English couple: "The present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shewn about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah." In contrast to their apparently alien landlord: "a small rodent-featured person with a guttural accent"

The narrators in "The Street," "Herbert West: Reanimator," "He," "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Horror at Red Hook," and many other tales express sentiments which could be considered hostile towards Jews. He married a woman of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry, Sonia Greene, who later said she had to repeatedly remind Lovecraft of her background when he made anti-Semitic remarks. "Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York," Greene wrote after her divorce from Lovecraft, "Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind."[11]

To some extent, Lovecraft's ideas regarding race reflect attitudes common in his era and particularly in the; racial segregation laws were enforced throughout much of the United States and many states had enacted eugenics laws and prohibitions against "miscegenation" which were also common in non-Roman Catholic areas of Europe. A popular movement during the 1920s succeeded in drastically restricting immigration to the United States, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, which featured expert testimony to the United States Congress on the threat to American society from the assimilation of more "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe.

Lovecraft was an avowed Anglophile, and held English culture to be the comparative pinnacle of civilization, with the descendants of the English in America as something of a second-class offshoot, and everyone else below them (see, for example, his poem "An American to Mother England"). His love for English history and culture is often repeated in his work (such as King Kuranes' nostalgia for England in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath").

Lovecraft's ideas about eugenics often extended to his white characters. He showed greater sympathy for Caucasian and culturally European groups. The narrator of "Cool Air" speaks disparagingly of the poor Hispanics of his neighborhood, but respects the wealthy and aristocratic Spaniard Dr. Muñoz, for his Celtiberian origins, and because he is "a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination." The degenerate descendants of Dutch immigrants in the Catskill Mountains, "who correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South" ("Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919), are common targets. In "The Temple," Lovecraft's narrator is a highly unsympathetic figure: a World War I U-boat captain whose faith in his "iron German will" and the superiority of the Fatherland lead him to machine-gun survivors in lifeboats and, later, kill his own crew, while blinding him to the curse he has brought upon himself. However, according to Lovecraft: A Biography, by L. Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft was horrified by reports of anti-Semitic violence in Germany (prior to World War II, which Lovecraft did not live to see), suggesting that Lovecraft was opposed to violent extermination of those he regarded as "inferiors".

Lovecraft's racism has been a continued focus of scholarly and interpretive interest. S.T. Joshi, one of the foremost Lovecraft scholars, notes that "There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft's racism, nor can it merely be passed off as "typical of his time," for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction."[3] In his book "H.P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life," Michel Houellebecq argues that "racial hatred" provided the emotional force and inspiration for much of Lovecraft's greatest works.

Lovecraft racist antagonism is a corollary of his nihilistic notion of biological determinism: At the Mountains of Madness, in which explorers discover evidence of a completely alien race (the Elder Things) who created human beings through bioengineering but who were eventually destroyed by their brutish shoggoth slaves. Even after several members of the party are killed by revived Elder Things, Lovecraft's narrator expresses sympathy for them: "They were the men of another age and another order of being... what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible... Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!"

These lines of thought in Lovecraft's worldview -- racism and romantic reactionary defense of cultural order in the face of the degenerative modern world -- have led some scholars to see a special affinity to the aristocratic, anti-modernism of Traditionalist Julius Evola:

“ Certainly "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" with its grandiose portrayal of the onyx city respires the cool and elegant spirit of Tradition, arraigned against which in several stories is the sink of decadence, Innsmouth, an inbred population made up of the offspring of lustful mariners and sea monsters, the negative force of counter-Tradition. The eternal struggle between the Uranian power of light and the telluric forces of chaos is reflected in Lovecraft's work" ”

and his racism.

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