Dude. C’mon. It’s a 5 second google search. It’s not hidden. It’s obvious.
Thank you for the informative response. We shouldn’t run around championing his views. However, for a person who lived 1890 to 1937, I’d like to see how racist he was for his time. It’s like if a child were born in Nazi Germany and raised in youth groups, is his anti-semitism to be condemned as much as that of a modern middle-class educated American?
Show me some reading comprehension then, jackhole.
You do know that Lovecraft didn’t have email right?
Have you read his letters? The letters he exchanged with fellow writers? I have. There are discussions in which his contemporaries advised him to tone down the racism and bigotry. Stories like Call of Cthulhu with its scenes of degenerate swamp folk, Shadow Over Innsmouth with its warnings against race-mixing, or his correspondence and poetry describing the alien origins of niggers. He wasn’t just a product of the times, he was categorically more of an outspoken racist than the crowd he hung out with.
Oh wait, are you arguing for something without knowing it yourself, then deflecting by telling me that I should be the one who should know it by myself? I’ve read about 20 of his stories. Listening for racism. How about you?
Dude you are trolling. It’s an excerpt from the goddam definition of the phrase you talked about like you didn’t understand.
The problem is you then. Shadow Over Innsmouth. Ancient Alien Fish People breed with humans and an isolated village is full of them and they turn into fish monsters over time. If writing a story about how that is scary is racist, then you are a moron.
And what you are doing is EXACTLY called “Reading into it”.
Goddam, you know what, Star Wars is racist, the sand people are an allegory for blacks, don’t you get it? Durrrrrr
And finally, FFS, the innsmouth people never actually DID anything to the guy.
Mountains of Madness, they run into an ancient one, and it doesn’t even DO anything to them! In fact, they show COMPASSION for it after they’re done running for their lives.
No worries! I think the consensus is he was racist even for his time. But I wasn’t there so I dunno :)
In answer to your very good question I judge modern people more harshly. We all have access to the net of human progress since the 30’s. That said I do not excuse the views of your example person I have a universalist* view to morality I think.
I mean basic humanity I think should kick in at some point regardless of the era in which we live.
Which is nice but I have doubts…the problem with my universalist view of course is it leads me to conclude that Aristotle (or St.Augustin or Thomas Aquinas) is less of a philosopher or moral person because he justified slavery.
Which makes me feel, queasy somehow. So yeah its not an easy issue.
*a word I made up. Essentially the idea that there is a basic humanity which is kind and forgiving that can be seen by any human at any point in history. As I say I believe that, but I have doubts that it is true. So I guess I want to believe it? :)
This is not P&R. You might want to consider scaling back your attacks.
I agree with you about basic humanity. I’d like to believe that fear, ignorance, and suffering drive people to lose their basic humanity. The shoe fits Lovecraft very well, I think, because so much of his work that I have seen and read about played with fear of the unknown. I was surprised in the few cases where it seemed his stories undermined his own thesis in a way, because it was the fear itself that was the danger, not the thing the humans were afraid of. That’s only plain in a few cases I’ve seen though.
I’ve read a few. Not 20. The greatest hits. I recently took a collection on vacation with me and enjoyed a bunch of the stories. Many (most?) of them are innocuous. But, the guy was a fucking racist.
A poem by HP Lovecraft:
When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to 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 N****r.
The Horror at Red Hook is basically a diatribe against immigrants:
The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.
…
From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion.Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist’s shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning. . . . He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches’ Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.
I appreciate the backup, but my original response was a bit snarky, and I apologize for setting a negative tone to the discussion.
EDIT: Nevermind. I take this back. Flagged.
The dude is feigning reading issues and using deflection tactics. You wanna give him the benefit of the doubt?
And it went to P & R nuclear level in {looks at watch} 9 hours. I am actually impressed it lasted so long.
Yay, you found 3 paragraphs! Surely then, this is central to the story or the theme? Oh wait, it isn’t? Wowwwww you must be so proud!
It didn’t really go P&R, we just had one person like nose dive into the deep end with some really pent up rage.
Some topics…gonna go down like that…
Yeah, I’m out. I enjoyed the first few posts of this thread. Too bad.
If you had read convo for context then I take nothing back.
If you hadn’t read the convo for context, well I take nothing back.
Well sure but the guy is summoning Tom and going kind of crazy about the entire forum after engaging in like… 2 topics. It’s a little strange.