LOVECRAFT’S RACISM IS THE REASON HE’S ESSENTIAL TO HORROR LITERATURE

H.P. Lovecraft is the grandfather of modern horror. He was also, incidentally, a blatant racist, both privately and in his work, animated by a fierce hate for immigrants and by a not-so-subtle admiration for Adolf Hitler.
To some, Lovecraft’s racism is reason enough to discard both him and his work. Others argue we should separate the artist from his art. Here I argue in favor of a third position, one that considers Lovecraft’s body of work fundamental because of his racism.
It may sound provocative, but I do believe that without his complete bond to a failed, dying vision of the world, Lovecraft would have never been able to craft a new kind of horror literature.
It’s worth remembering that for a long time racism was considered a scientific truth. A truth that stem out of a philosophical position. Being a racist was perfectly in line with the paradigm that the image above represents, a paradigm that saw (and in a certain measure still sees) humans as the pinnacle of creation.
We used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, life was the reason for the Earth to exist, and humans were the definitive expression of life. Evolution was considered a distilling process that from the most inarticulate and simple organism proceeded to the perfection of the human being, him alone shaped in the image of God.
It’s an egocentric position common to pretty much every society humans created. Tasked with the need to understand the universe they were a part of, time and time again humans assumed their particular brand of humanity had a peculiar and unique bond to the Creator. After all, the first need of a cosmogony is to make sense of the society that nurtures the cosmogony, so it can’t be a surprise that said society ends up being considered the center of everything. It happened to Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Aztecs, and Mayas. And it happened to Western Civilizations.
When Galileo stated that it was the Earth to orbit the Sun and not the other way around, the Catholic Church didn’t threaten to burn him alive out of some astronomical concern. It accused him of heresy. It accused him of questioning the unique bond between God and man.
But if we accept the paradigm that man is the result of the long process of purification exemplified by the image above, then creating a hierarchy of races (and incidentally genders) is just one more logical step. After all Caucasian, African, Asian, etc. differ from one another in both their physical and cultural traits. If everything else is organized along the line of a progression from the primitive to the divine, why shouldn’t the same principles apply to humanity’s different forms?
If perfection exists, evolution is a process of rapprochement to said perfection, races exist and they differ from one another, it seems only obvious that one race is going to be closer to God than any other.
By the time H. P. Lovecraft came into the frame, Western Civilization had long started to question its founding paradigm. Since Galileo had publicly rejected his own beliefs, a massive process of marginalization of the human experience had taken place. We now knew that the Earth is not the center of the universe. We knew that we exist on a rock orbiting one of trillions of stars, in just one of countless galaxies. We knew that evolutions is not a linear process of distillation from the simple to the complex.
Lovecraft lived in rowdy times, destined to deliver the final blow to the idea of man as God’s favorite son. He witnessed the birth of Albert Einstein’s Special Relativity, that questioned the very idea of space and time, and of Quantum Mechanics and all of its strange trickeries (that became the standard formulation for atomic physics during the 20s). Finally, he was still around when Goedel’s assaulted our most powerful tool in formal systems.
All of a sudden, the ground under everybody’s feet didn’t feel as stable anymore. As a matter of fact, it seemed like there could be no ground at all. God’s once favorite sons were now asked to accept the truth that they were utterly insignificant in the eyes of God, or at least in the eyes of the universe and its laws. It was such a catastrophic shift that Einstein himself famously struggled to accept it entirely (“God does not play dices with the universe”).
Racism could not survive unscathed the crumbling of the very philosophical view it was a part of. It was now becoming increasingly clear how evolution’s purpose is not to distill one perfect creature, for the simple reason that evolution has no purpose at all, and that the concept of perfection in the natural realm is indefensible. Evolution is a dance of countless interactions that, often through coincidental occurrences, generates momentarily stable equilibriums. The creatures that are part of one of these ecosystems are in no way better or worse in absolute than the creatures that participate in some other system, or than the creatures the process discarded along the way. In this sense, the image above is more than just a gross misrepresentation, it’s a lie.
But if life is not organized alongside the lines of a clear and obvious hierarchy, how can human “races” be? What does it mean that one race is “superior” to another one? In which sense? Judging from which metric? The very concept of race was yet to be called into question, but the foundations of its complete revision had already been put in place.
Enter H. P. Lovecraft:
“Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. One must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, [have] any existence at all.”
The horror in Lovecraft always arose from discovery. The obnoxious monster is actually the hero’s maker, the demented hybrid his ancestor, and at the center of the universe is a mad, screaming God whose very anatomy makes no sense to the human eye.
Unlike in classic horror stories, in Lovecraft’s tales the quest to destroy the monster is utterly pointless. It’s not the monster that pushes Lovecraft’s characters over the edge of sanity. It’s what the existence of the monster implies.
As Wes House rightfully notices: “Traditionally, horror stories concern a monstrous perversion of the status quo, with characters seeking its resolution or restoration by extraordinary, and sometimes desperate, means.”
This is a simple mechanism. The unknown breaks into the ordinary, and the story that follows is the story of how our hero restores the natural order. The extraordinary and the supernatural are aberrations that must be expelled. The goal is to expel them.
Norm.
Transgression.
Restoration.
This is, at its core, a fundamentally reactionary structure, because it implies that a natural order exists and it’s always possible to return to it.
Lovecraft uses a different mechanism, “accomplishing what Mark Fisher, in The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater), calls ‘catastrophic integration,’ where the outside breaks into an interior that is retrospectively revealed to be a delusive envelope, a sham.”
In Lovecraft’s stories, the encounter with the extraordinary forever changes our idea of the universe (and of our role in it). The monster is no longer a transgression that can be eliminated. The monster is the revelation that drives us insane. Lovecraft doesn’t go as far as Philip K Dick would (stating there’s no objective reality to be found at all): in his stories a natural order still exists, but it’s not the order we know, nor an order we can comfortably adopt. It’s a natural order in which we are nothing but toys, pets, or simple byproducts. The universe doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to something else.
It’s relatively easy to see how Lovecraft was dramatizing his own discomfort about what science was discovering, and the paradigm’s shift appearing over the horizon. The horror he constantly writes about is the horror that arises from the progressive marginalization of the human experience in the context of the universe. It’s the cry of a man with his feet firmly planted in an outdated paradigm discovering the universe is nothing as he wanted it to be. I suspect such a cry would not be so desperate and visceral if it wasn’t, incidentally, also the cry of a racist starting to suspect that between him and the so hated “Syrians, Spanish, Italian and Negros” of his story “The Horror of Red Hook” there may be not much of a difference.
Lovecraft’s racism made the change he was witnessing personal. And so it allowed him to distill the zeitgeist he was a part of in stories of horror and alienation. Ironically enough, his racism helped horror literature to overcome its own reactionary roots, to embrace a much more radical and stimulating approach.
