To write is to reach, through a pre-existing impersonality...that point at which language alone acts, "performs", and not oneself...
- Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"
In case you've not heard, HP Lovecraft is no longer the model of the trophy for the World Fantasy Awards, because he was manifestly a racist. Long-term readers of the blog will probably be able to guess at my views on this, and I don't particularly have any urge to sally forth into the lists of online debate over it, but I do think HP Lovecraft is a fascinating illustration of the way "the absence of the Author", as Barthes put it, "utterly transforms the modern text".
There are very few authors I can think of who, more than Lovecraft, embody the way in which a text can go through Barthes' process of "opening up". Anybody attempting to close his ouvre off, to put a "stop clause" on it, by interpreting it as the product of a racist has to ignore the way it has been plucked from his grasp and transmogrified into something utterly different from anything he may have intended. We readers have created an extensive mythos which he never envisaged and which still evolves and develops to this day. We have turned his ostensibly most terrifying creation into a child's stuffed toy or a joke for crude political satire. We have re-worked his stories into terrible films. Those of us who are Japanese, Mexican or African have recreated his work through our own cultural lens. We have flipped his male-centric universe. We have based board games and hard rock albums on his stories. We have joked about Necrotelecomnicon and created dishes like "Eggs Sothoth". We have mangled it and stomped all over it, smashed it up and put it back together, over and over and over again, and that process only seems to gather pace as Cthulhu in particular becomes a kind of internet totem or touchstone for nerd culture. Just as any Reader takes the text and interprets it in his or her own way, we as collective Readers have done precisely the same thing with HP Lovecraft's work as a text - writ large and to the extreme.
And players of Call of Cthulhu, perhaps more to the point, individually and collectively do the same thing in miniature for every session they play. They run games set in Norway, Australia, Egypt and Kenya and anywhere else in the world besides. They create new Old Gods, reinterpret existing ones, bastardise Lovecraft's stories and invent their own. They imagine themselves as black female Harvard professors, Chinese artists, Irish philosophers and English rugby players engaging in his world, and it doesn't matter in the slightest because the text is now theirs and not his. The man himself was a bigot and an appalling one. But his work as a text is constituted by us and not him, in a myriad of ways limited only by the number of individuals who read it and the number of interpretations they give it.
HP Lovecraft was a product of his time. Racism was science in Lovecraft's USA, to a point, where the US notions of eugenics of were implemented on a grand scale by the Nazis. Perhaps HP Lovecraft is no longer fit to grace the trophy of the World Fantasy Awards in the changing world, but his writing had obviously enough talent and merit to have him placed on that trophy in the first place. If the organizers of the World Fantasy Awards had any backbone, they would have done a presentation to honor Lovecraft's work during the awards ceremony, explain the developments, and then retire his trophy with honor, while awarding the new trophy to the recipients.
ReplyDeleteSaying that Lovecraft was a product of his time doesn't really wash any of the guilt off of him. What has he done to change the world for better in his time?
DeleteWhat guilt? He was an artist whose writings were influential and with a large enough audience. No one is under any obligation to change anything. Popular success of his work was the reason that his head was put on that trophy. Most strong people are a mixed bag of good and bad and if you really look at them, you can not really give a singular judgment that they were good in your sense of the word. Greater tolerance and acceptance of the ideas from people with questionable worth is the reason that US and West, in all their glorious decadence, have prevailed over Marxism, Islamism, and now over Putin's Russia.
DeleteLuka, how can there be a guilt when there's no crime?
DeleteHaving bad ideas is not a crime. Acting upon them is. And only in certain ways.
There's a dictionary definition that fits quite well the systematic chase and exile of "bad ideas". Bigotry.
You can try to rationalize it, but there's no weaseling out from it. This is a soft damnatio memoriae based on ideology.
"What has he done to change the world for better in his time?"
DeleteHis writing directly or (through its influence) indirectly made hundreds of millions of people's lives more enjoyable.
Anyone undesirable than nelson Mandela the terrorist? In the end they are all human. To embrace one and not the other is the real bigotry.
ReplyDeleteI totally get the World Fantasy Awards wanting to use a less divisive figure. I don't think that desire is automatically reflective of an attempt to sanitize history or imply that Lovecraft was not influential. Maybe it's time for the trophy to be modeled on a less controversial writer, at least for a time.
ReplyDeletePerhaps of note: I have seen several writers remark the Lovecraft recanted his racism. A quick search has not yielded a more substantial source, but if the man reversed his views later in life he could probably be more hopeful than anything else. What could be more symbolic of tolerance than an outspoken racist reversing his toxic world view? I'd certainly accept a trophy with an ex-racist's face on it.
*sigh* I'm sick and tired of this shit. The internet is, in an ironic twist, probably the largest detriment to free speech that has ever existed.
ReplyDeleteHow so? In this case internet promotes the free discussion.
ReplyDeleteWhat you have with this trophy, is a single person, who is circulating petition to replace HP Lovecraft with Octavia Butler. I have nothing against Octavia Butler, but I did some digging on the guy, and he is a fantasy author, who just got published in the mainstream in 2015. This dude just made the scene and he is already trying to change it!
What gives?
Get rid of HP Lovecraft, replace with Octavia Butler, this contributes to the cultural war which will ultimately change everything for the best. That's ultimately what it's all about - to some people this kind of thing has actual societal significance. It actually affects things. Blame Gramsci and the 1960s student Marxists.
DeleteMy point was that the internet has become the meeting place for people who use their free speech to try to deny free speech to others. The louder they are, the less dissenting opinions are tolerated. I'm not saying the internet doesn't allow opposing viewpoints, only that it empowers those who use it. The "ironic twist" is that some people use that power to silence others.
DeleteBut that has always been the case, going back to the Ancient Greeks. Democracy did NOT mean free speech. It meant majority rule. If the majority did not want to hear the minority view, it was not heard. There were laws on the books to collect fines, to flog, and to physically shut up those who insisted on speaking after the majority told them to shut up.
DeleteThe Roman Republic meant more of the free speech, but not the free speech. Only Roman citizens had the right to free speech, a shrinking minority as the time went on. The Roman State derived its power by guaranteeing the freedom of speech of the dissenting minority. When matters were decided by vote in a forum, EVERY one with a point of view had the RIGHT to speak as long as they wanted to, and no vote was cast until everyone said their piece. If anyone tried to shut them up by shouting or by throwing rotten tomatoes at them, they got the full wrath of the Praetorian Guard beating them down with the hilts of their swords. Literally. Roman Legions stayed in power by guaranteeing the rights of the political minorities and their unpopular point of view.
Based on history, Free Speech is an ideal, and it can be optimized only by regulating it, without which it falls under the dominance by majority rule, the loudest rule, the moneyed rule, etc.
I agree with you. This has always been the case. It's just on a larger scale because of the speed of communication these days, as a general thing.
DeleteIt remains to be seen as to whom they will put on the new trophy and how they will go about doing it. In another example, famously, AD&D Second Edition, got rid of the demons and devils, any references to historic occult, in order to placate a bunch of conservative parents.
ReplyDeleteIf we 'cleanse' literature of anyone who held views that wouldn't fit in a modern PC worldview, we'll have very little of our literary culture left.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to be one of those kooks who see Cultural Marxism behind every development, but I find it hard to find any other explanation...
Depending on how broadly you define cultural Marxism, they're basically right (eg the original c-Ms were less radical on race than the current version, and it's not a rigid top-down conspiracy, but Marcuse, Adorno & co influenced the 1960s New Left which then influenced the current zeitgeist).
DeleteIt all depends on how the World Fantasy Association carries itself. Their decision was lauded by the mainstream press in the Atlantic Monthly. The same article also mentioned that the WFA was founded in 1976 or so, by a bunch of hard-core HP Lovecraft aficionados, and that nothing has changed at WFA since then. The big question, which I hadn't bothered looking up, is what kind of a job the WFA did honoring Lovecraft previously versus what kind of job honoring Lovecraft they will be doing now.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it would be a mistake, conflating Multi-Culturalism in the US with Cultural Marxism. Don't forget, that the American pop culture tends to be more isolationist than the former Soviet Union. In 1960's and 1970's, USSR imported more films from the West and played it to a far wider mainstream audience than did US, in which there is tradition of Hollywood of re-making the American versions of European blockbusters under the pretense that the European cinema wouldn't sell well in the US, that American audiences wouldn't get it, unless Hollywood remade it, etc. So, given the previous history of cultural isolationism and racial segregation in the US, a little multi-culturalism might not be a bad thing, especially if the WFA does the right thing, respects the sensitivities of their multi-cultural audience, and keeps honoring Lovecraft, where honor and recognition is due. The two are not mutually exclusive.
They shanked HPL for cultural Marxist reasons. That this might have beneficial effects in exposing people to wider reading (I doubt it) is orthogonal to the first statement.
DeleteI sure hope we are as morally superior as we think we are, or that future generations will be far more forgiving and understanding toward us than we are of those who came before. But really, the funny thing about this is that it is driven by those who once would have laughed at the old religious types for wanting to ban D&D or shut down racy talk on television. Orwell, it seems, was onto something about pigs who eventually dine with humans no matter what they once may have promised.
ReplyDeleteWell the revolutionary pigs & human farmers are the cultural Marxists and the Capitalist plutocrats. The two groups always get along very well, as Orwell saw. Partly this is because the Capitalists are great at co-opting whatever comes along (and indeed the original cultural Marxists were heavily backed by the OSS then the CIA, who I suspect are capitalist-friendly). But c-M is comfy with or strongly pro a lot of things that directly benefit capitalist interests by increasing the labour supply - women working & not having children; immigration of cheaper labour; are two big ones.
Delete>>The man himself was a bigot and an appalling one.
ReplyDelete[i]Fuck you.[/i]
Monty python does blackface. Are they shitlisted too?
Judging historical people by the whims of the present is absurd.
Actually, Lovecraft's contemporaries thought he was a bigot.
DeleteThanks for your polite comment, Mr Anonymous. As Samantha rightly points out, Lovecraft was considered extreme even by the people he knew. His views about black people were not just uneducated and old-fashioned - they were genuinely pretty unhinged.
DeleteHistorical people should not be judged by the whims of the present, but that doesn't preclude judging them by their own context. The 1920s isn't that long ago, and it's fairly easy to see that Lovecraft's views about people of other races were weird and deranged for somebody living even in that era, let alone ours. It's also very unfair to other people living in that era who weren't like him (i.e. the vast majority probably) to suggest that everybody was like that in those days.
I'd just like to add that the whole point of this post is that Lovecraft was an appalling bigot but that it doesn't matter.
DeleteLovecraft is kind of weird, though. His oeuvre has indeed percolated into the collected cultural mind space and been reinterpreted countless times. But there is also a lot of effort made to ground the things he wrote in the context of his specific life and experiences. I own the Penguin Classic editions of his stuff, which is introduced and edited by ST Joshi, and the very first paragraph is Joshi saying that, despite the popularity of the "Death of the Author", it's not the best way to approach Lovecraft's work. And the annotations almost exclusively connect Lovecraft's fantastic with the quotidian New England.
DeleteSo you can look at Lovecraft today and focus on how noted critics are saying that his personal life is fundamental to what he did; and, therefore, he shouldn't be on the award. I don't know if that was the motivation for his removal; the actual motivation could be more censorship-based or whatever. But I think there is reasonable ground for that decision.
That kind of stuff is interesting and worth looking at, and I don't think Barthes would say otherwise - he was just trying to be provocative. The central point is that it doesn't matter to how you as the reader interpret the text. You can interpret it through the lens of his life and experiences, great, if that's what you want to do, but you're free to do whatever you like with it.
DeleteI have to say that reading HPL's stories I never really made the connection with racism against real people. It's not like reading eg Maddison Grant 'the Passing of the Great Race' (ie Nordic Anglos). If you're not looking for it or sensitive to it I think it's pretty easy to miss. When you're looking for it it is pretty obvious in places (just reread 'The Street').
DeleteHello Everybody,
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My favourite inversion is the frequency with which Nazis espousing Nordic racial purity notions very similar to Lovecraft's own are cast as the Cthulu-summoning cultists. You could take it a stage further and have the sinister Yankee devils using Cthuloid sorcery to seek control of a small South American country, say - perhaps defeated by the power of the Virgin Mary in the hands of good Catholic priests aid by Elder Sign-wielding Indio shamans...
ReplyDeleteI have to confess to doing this a bit in my own Wilderlands game, making Nerath (the fallen 'good white human' empire of 4e D&D) into villainous neo-Nazi Neo-Nerath, led by Necromancer occultists channeling Necrotic energies from the Domain of the Old Ones through the Gate of the Black Sun... opposed by Heavy Metal Barbarians, the red-skinned Altanians who are Iron Maiden meets Conan meets Native America, with a bit of John Carter's Red Martians.