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S. T. Joshi Blasts Critics Over Lovecraft and Race (Again)

2/8/2015

46 Comments

 
Many of you will likely remember that late last year Charles Baxter wrote an evaluation of H. P. Lovecraft for the New York Review of Books that I characterized as elitist and, largely, wrong. Baxter expressed his distaste for what he perceived as Lovecraft’s antisocial, adolescent fans, and he applied a Freudian reading to Lovecraft’s fiction that reduced the Cthulhu Mythos to, essentially, abject terror of vaginas. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi was incensed at Baxter for a different reason, and he wrote a letter to the editor of the Review blasting Baxter for factual errors in his piece as well as what Joshi claimed was an overblown emphasis on racism.
Well, the Review recently published Joshi’s letter alongside a rebuttal from Baxter and another perspective from Mark Halpern (if it is the famous one, I do not know). Baxter summarized Joshi’s letter thusly: “One would think, reading S. T. Joshi’s response to my book review, that I had attacked the object of a cult.” Joshi had another fit of apoplectic rage and delivered one of his increasingly common blog posts denouncing those who disagree with him. In the first half of his January 29 blog post, Joshi analyzes Baxter’s rebuttal sentence by sentence, oblivious to the irony that his actions only confirm Baxter’s impression of Joshi’s cultish devotion to Lovecraft.

It’s hard to root for either Baxter or Joshi here. Baxter’s original analysis was wrongheaded (“grotesque slander,” Joshi calls it), but Joshi’s reaction is more that of the offended true believer than the scholar attempting to correct the record.

But this sniping doesn’t interest me as much as a point Joshi started to make in response to Baxter but develops more fully in response to Halpern. He disputes both men’s readings of the monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos as expression of Lovecraft’s racism and his fear and dread of ethnic minorities. “Well, lordy me!” Joshi writes. “I confess to be guilty as charged—because there is little or no connection between Lovecraft’s racism and his creation of the ‘gods and monsters’ in his fiction.”

I’m not sure if Joshi is purposely being obtuse or if he is really so blind to the concept of symbolic expression that he cannot see behind the literal shape of Mythos beings to the forces that animate them. For example, Joshi claims that Cthulhu himself can have no literary relationship to the debased minorities who worship him because he is, pointedly, not African or Latino and therefore isn’t a minority: “Uh-oh—Cthulhu is green! Maybe this means that he is a stand-in for ‘people of colour’! If you believe that, there’s a bridge nearby that I’d like to sell you.” He similarly explains that Shub-Niggurath is not “a stand-in for HPL’s disdain for black women who breed a lot.” Nyarlathotep, he said, isn’t even “Negroid” despite having black skin in his human(ish) form.

Has Joshi never met a symbol? Symbols, by definition, are not the thing they symbolize.

Lovecraft makes very plain that the Old Ones are closely associated with the primal, the primeval, and the primitive. They are the wild, unhinged, and uncontrollable forces that (white) civilization seeks to suppress and deny. Throughout Lovecraft’s fiction, he makes excessively plain that ethnic and racial minorities, as well as white people who have abandoned the façade of Western civilization to embrace the primitive, have special access to the Old Ones because they are wholly degenerate and given over to the wild and the irrational that is the opposite of civilization. Joshi sees no special reason that the cultists in “The Call of Cthulhu” are “men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type,” but Lovecraft made the cultists into a group of blacks and Latinos because he wanted to link the Old Ones with his conception of the primitive, as expressed through scientific racism. This doctrine, which Lovecraft embraced, held that people of color were more primitive than Anglo-Saxons and thus closer to the apes—that they were less human and less civilized. Thus, we find that the people who have regular contact with the Old Ones, special knowledge of them (positive or negative), or actually worship them are blacks, Latinos, Chinese, and Eskimos (in “Cthulhu”), Pacific Islanders (in “Shadow Over Innsmouth”), Italians (“Haunter of the Dark”), and Middle Easterners (in “Horror at Red Hook” and any mention of the “mad” Alhazred). In Lovecraft’s revision work the connections are often even clearer, with Native Americans (“The Mound”) and sub-Saharan Africans (“Winged Death”) specially connected to the wild, primitive, and uncontrolled Old Ones.

Joshi’s counterexamples prove my point. He cites the white people with such knowledge in “The Lurking Fear,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Rats in the Walls” to show that Lovecraft did not single out minorities. But here in all three cases it is the white people’s degeneracy—their abdication and rejection of the conventional norms of Anglo-American civilization through their embrace of “primitive” sexual or culinary mores—that connects them with the Old Ones. That, for Lovecraft, is the greatest fear: That the civilization he associates with white Anglo-Saxon culture is fragile, decomposing, and threatened at every side by uncivilized minorities and their strange rites and unrestrained sexuality.

Granted, there is generally a divide between Lovecraft’s earlier stories and his more cosmic later stories (though not a complete one), and the Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness have virtually nothing to do with minorities, instead serving themselves as symbols of white Anglo-American civilization under assault from minorities (Cthulhu spawn) and their own hybrid offspring (the shoggoths), who undermine their culture from within and without. Surely even Joshi can see that Lovecraft meant for the Old Ones’ decline and fall to symbolize the crumbling of Depression-era Western civilization. The Old Ones even had New Deal-style socialism!

Joshi instead maintains that the original flavor Old Ones—the gods, not the Antarctic monsters—represent “immensity,” as though they can have only one meaning. Like most symbols, they derive their power from being multivalent, from having multiple meanings depending on the angle from which they are viewed. Not for Joshi, though:
Those hostile critics seeking to maintain some intimate connection between Lovecraft’s racism and the creation of these alien entities will have to put forth more than mere assertions to make their case. In my mind, the evidence is overwhelmingly against them.
I get the feeling that Joshi could watch the classic Outer Limits episode “The Children of Spider County” and miss the fact that it’s a story about the social pressures faced by interracial romance because the two actors playing the alien and human lovers are both white.
46 Comments
Mike
2/8/2015 04:24:53 am

Yea.. I like Lovecraft's stories, and believe that you can enjoy art while attempting to remove it from the artist to some degree, but pretending that there was not significant (even for his time) racism to the man, and that these views permiate his writing is just not a tenable opinion to hold.

Great article by the way, lots of interesting interpretations that I had not previously made but in retrospect seem very obvious.

Reply
Jim
2/8/2015 05:48:33 am

Personally, I don't care about the racial views of long dead writers. Hpl wanted to be an Englishman and had the attitudes I would expect from a member of the elite during the British empire.

Frankly you can throw on Fox news or read the Daily Mail and find views far more offensive to my mind than Hpl held in his lifetime.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
2/8/2015 07:01:22 am

"He similarly explains that Shub-Niggurath is not “a stand-in for HPL’s disdain for black women who breed a lot.”"

You wanna say "Shub-Niggurath" out loud a few times and tell me again how Lovecraft wasn't racist, Mr. Joshi? =P

Reply
Only Me
2/8/2015 08:35:39 am

Damn! Great point, Shane. I freely admit I'm not well-read when it comes to HPL, but, I should have seen that one for myself.

Reply
EP
2/10/2015 01:20:59 pm

Counterpoint: Cthulhu is green. Your arguments are invalid :P

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 07:17:39 am

It's a Lovecraft post, so I feel like I should say something. But honestly, there's not much left to say.

Reply
spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 07:29:40 am

I would clarify. I mean there isn't much more to say about Joshi's blogging style, or Baxter's review.

Reply
EP
2/8/2015 07:32:09 am

spookyparadigm, on a completely unrelated matter, have you read much Lafcadio Hearn?

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 07:48:39 am

No, but I was very vaguely aware of his writing about Japanese folklore. As in, I couldn't remember his name, but when I wiki-ed it three minutes ago, I reacted "Oh yeah, that guy"

The history of western engagement with Japan is an important topic, and I know almost nothing about it.

EP
2/8/2015 08:55:10 am

Lafcadio Hearn is awesome!

Aside from his Japanese writings (and his really undervalued literary criticism), he is arguably the key person in shaping the modern mythos of New Orleans, and of voodoo in particular.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/hearn/nos.htm

"It is believed that by secret spells a "Voudoo" can cause some monstrous kind of bird or nondescript animal to shape itself into being out of the pillow feathers--like the tupilek of the Esquimau iliseenek"

It's hard to read this and many other passages and not think of Lovecraft.

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 09:13:20 am

That is very interesting. The swamp cult was initially in Alabama in Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, but it was always going to be a voodoo cult. One wonders if when he switched the location, Lovecraft reached for that volume for research.

But an even more likely possibility is that in 1924 he was working Eddy on the Houdini superstition book. This is exactly the sort of thing he would have used as a source.

I don't have my copy of Joshi's index of Lovecraft's Library at my office (ironic given the post topic), so I can't check on whether he is known to have had it. I don't recall him ever mentioning it in a letter, but that means little.

EP
2/8/2015 09:28:25 am

Lovecraft mentions Hearn in two places, as far as I know. First, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature", where he speaks highly of several of Hearn's original works and translations. Second, in "Medusa's Coil": "Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of Lafcadio Hearn and Gauguin and Van Gogh - regular epitome of the yellow ’nineties."

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 09:33:53 am

The conflation of tupilaks and voodoo seems beyond coincidence, then.

EP
2/8/2015 09:58:30 am

But their respective attitudes to archaic and exotic cultures are diametrically opposite. Whereas Hearn was all about preserving them, or even restoring them to their former glory, Lovecraft was... well... you know.

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 10:02:04 am

In Joshi's various works, he notes that HPL owned a copy of Gautier translated by Hearn, likely source for imagery in Under the Pyramids.

More interestingly, he does mention Hearn in a letter to Long, saying Hearn had gone over to the Japanese because he's a cultural tourist.

https://books.google.com/books?id=hdplAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=Lafcadio+Hearn+lovecraft&source=bl&ots=oy28eLB8Br&sig=3Q9M9BuTOOs_LM6CuvG-NKECh_k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=i-nXVPmICYX0yASe4oKIBw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=Lafcadio%20Hearn%20lovecraft&f=false

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 10:06:15 am

Hearn vs. Lovecraft: Sure, Lovecraft had no real interest in such things unless they were _his_ such things (Englishness, Romans, everything else was primitive or accursed).

But in terms of mining such material for the details he'd paste over his witch-cult or legends? That's exactly the sort of thing he did. He's treating Heran the same way he's treating the Theosophists: more material he can mine for things to be afraid of.

EP
2/8/2015 10:17:09 am

What's interesting is that he clearly appreciated Hearn for all the right reasons:

"Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic... with the supreme artistry of a sensitive poet weaves phantasies impossible to an author of the solid roast-beef type... some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all literature... crystallises with matchless skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends... Hearn’s weird wizardry of language... a classic of fevered and riotous imagery clad in the magic of singing words."

But his emotional reaction to the things that he found in Hearn is the diametrical opposite of Hearn's own. It's quite startling once you start thinking about it, actually...

EP
2/8/2015 10:18:30 am

(Btw, Hearn married a Japanese woman and had a bunch of awesome mixed-race children.)

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 10:44:20 am

In a letter to Morton in 1933

HPL letter to James F. Morton, June 12, 1933. Published in Lovecraft 1976a:205–208, Letter 626

he goes on about how it is equally bad to have Aryan taint in Japanese society as it is to have Japanese taint in Aryan society. He still hated Australians and Africans (I don't know if he ever shifted in his less-commonly shared fear of the Inuit), but by that time he seems to have honestly believed in Separate but Equal in a non-cynical fashion for everyone else.

He goes on about his fears and dislike of Japan, but this is largely geopolitical, and repeatedly wrote about the final global showdown between Anglo/Aryan etc. and Japan leading Asia, and that the West would lose (as he used in his future history in Shadow Out of Time). And unlike his antisemitism which diminished over time, that particular aspect seems to have been growing. Unsurprising given Japan's imperial expansion, and as I've written elsewhere on this site, I'm sure Lovecraft would have been fired up with hatred for Japan for the rest of his life after Pearl Harbor. Here's two of the letters that speak to his geopolitical views

HPL letter to Mrs. Natalie H. Wooley, November 22, 1934, Published in Lovecraft 1976b:75–80, Letter 741
HPL letter to Robert E. Howard, May 7, 1936, Published in Lovecraft 1976b:249–250, Letter 844

On the cultural front, I have in my notes (these are my quotes summarizing him, not quoted from the letter) that

"Admires Japanese art for its attention to detail, simplicity, harmony, and civilized repose. Especially loves the wave motif and sea foam."

as discussed in HPL letter to Miss Elizabeth Toldridge, March 25, 1933, Published in Lovecraft 1976a:164–165 Letter 610

In a 1934 letter

HPL letter to F. Lee Baldwin, August 21, 1934, Published in Lovecraft 1976b:21, Letter 719

he describes owning a "Japanese idol" and a Kim Ling vase

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 10:47:01 am

What the hell would a "Japanese idol" be? A Buddhist sculpture? While I love the idea of him owning one of those Japanese cat with a paw in the air sculptures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneki-neko

I suspect he wouldn't have called that an idol.

EP
2/8/2015 10:58:58 am

Hearn, to be fair, definitely erred on the side of Japanophilia, even when it came to Japanese imperialism. But he was incredibly sensitive to cultural differences and thought really hard about how to converse and coexist across them.

Lovecraft, on the other hand, was driven to despair by the impossibility of some Latino-Saxono-Aryan Pax sweeping the globe. His racism was tempered, I'm inclined to think, only in the sense that he grew more willing to accept ghettoes (of all sorts) as anything other than cancerous blight.

"he describes owning a "Japanese idol" and a Kim Ling vase"

Yet more proof of how totally fuckin' not racist Lovecraft was! :)

EP
2/8/2015 11:04:39 am

"I suspect he wouldn't have called that an idol."

I suspect he would. I also suspect he'd write a story about it infesting a New England virgin with a demonic force that turns her into a breeder of filthy and deformed chimeras :)

(Hearn, on the other hand, wrote a beautiful sketch about a cat his Japanese friends gifted him, forgetting in her sleep that her last litter was stillborn.)

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 11:27:31 am

His entire life, if you were classified as black (African or Australian), HPL would have considered you subhuman. He also never gave a fig if you were Native American, you basically didn't exist in his mind and your ancestors had accomplished nothing of interest (he openly says this at one point in one letter), though to be fair this was an extremely common view held by white Americans until recently, and an attitude of obvious importance to the most common material Jason writes about.

Prior to 1930, he considered everyone who wasn't English or Roman to be on the same sliding scale between subhuman and Awesome Imperial Masters, with particular scorn for "Asiatics" by which he meant anyone Semitic.

But reading his letters, I detect substantial mellowing after 1930. This is also the time when he woke up and realized he had been a massive pompous jackass his whole life, acting like a self-righteous know-it-all. The tone between his letters in the early 1920s and the 1930s is extremely different.

It has been said by many observers, including myself, that HPL started trending towards New Deal socialism as his economic prospects got worse in the Depression.

But you know, thinking about this issue, I wonder if it was almost the opposite. Maybe I'm being too charitable (though wait, there is a racial angle), but looking at the various ways his personality changed, and he finally grew up, I wonder if he finally got over himself and his narrative of loss.

HPL had his breakdown as a teenager, dropping of high school. He comes out of that a super pretentious jerk in letters, though apparently a very affable guy to his white friends (say what you will, but it was the Lovecraft circle over time, and he very much impacted his friends usually for the positive until they read some of his other letters or were told of them as Sonia discusses in her biographical essay). He discussed at some length thinking about killing himself in high school or later, and apparently told people he carried a bottle of poison to kill himself if need be (which sounds like BS, but still). He obsessed until the 1930s about being a gentleman, and once Whipple died, he clearly began the slow and permanent slide into poverty from affluence.

I wonder if the Depression finally broke his pity party, his narrative of personal loss and decay. In the 1920s, seeing immigrants and non-WASPs (and decayed rural white folk who he saw as cursed leftovers of the puritans) in mass poverty would have just confirmed their subhuman nature, that they were to blame for their state. The Lovecraft family should be wealthy, but because of disease, it wasn't (father dies of "madness", mother dies of madness, grandfather dies when HPL is young, mother tells HPL that he's hideous, he has a breakdown and becomes a shut-in for 10 years). Lovecraft's letters don't read like one of the "grievance collectors" that people invoke when talking about mass shooters, but his extreme xenophobia, lean towards paranoia, and fixation on personal and social decay (often at the hands of aliens terrestrial and otherwise) matches that personal narrative. He also inherited the obsession with loss of landscape from the Victorian British and adapted it to his xenophobia about immigrants rather than the growth of factories and cities.

And then 1929 comes around, and millions of "civilized" white people are thrown out of work, out of homes, and into bread lines. He could have gone full conspiracy theorist and blame immigrants and sinister yellow perils for it all (mainlining "The Call of Cthulhu" in between video from Alex Jones or the last year Glenn Beck had his show on Fox News would probably be terrible for one's sanity). Instead, he went the other way, at least a bit, and framed the Depression as an inevitable consequence of Machine Society (which he lamented for the loss of tradition, but saw as inevitable).

Maybe he got shamed into admitting he wasn't a lone victim of the universe's persecution. Maybe he felt a kinship to others who also were sliding into poverty. I don't know.

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 11:29:13 am

Asian cat idol as unclean thing?

No, he'd just have it jump to the moon with the other cats.

EP
2/8/2015 11:49:28 am

Glenn Beck has gotten much, much worse now that he's free from the shackles of television. Howadays he talks about taking his children to see Europe before it is destroyed and literally weeps in righteous self-pity at the prospect of the government taking Christians and Jews away to concentration camps (which is sure to happen any day now!).

Anyway, I don't know about Lovecraft. There are terribly racist things in his late works (including racism against Native Americans). And Yithians are basically awesome because they are fascist.

It is important to remember that New Deal was not the only game in town. All kinds of wacko quasi- and pseudo-socialist remedies for poverty and inequality were being proposed (many of which, with nearly clockwork-like inevitability, ended up absorbing the anti-Usura strain of anti-Semitism).

Uncle Ron
2/8/2015 12:07:29 pm

EP-

LOTS of Hearn titles at Amazon. Any suggestion(s) for a good starter anthology of his fiction?

EP
2/8/2015 12:18:45 pm

Depending on how broadly we construe fiction, I recommend "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature", "Fantastics", "Kwaidan", "Kotto", and "Karma".

(Btw, if you're interested, all of his works are in public domain. You can get them on archive.org among other places.)

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 12:25:25 pm

Oh, I know Beck has gotten worse. But now he's just the largest of any number of internet/radio conspiracy preachers obsessed with race/religion panic. He's got a bit more clout than the others, but that's not the same as giving him hours every day on a major news channel (such as all the news channel numbers are today, they still shape media and popular opinion). Walt always used to hit us with "it's just a tv show." I hold the opposite opinion. Websites, youtube videos for the most part don't bother me as much as a television broadcast. While maybe for those under 30 there is no difference, for the majority of Americans, the tv is still a powerful broadcast device, while a website is something you have to go visit. Add into that the communal vs. group aspect of TV (aka, the Fox News is always on at the McDonald's, CNN at the airport) and let's just say I'm glad that even Fox News balked at Beck preaching Moundbuilder theology (he covered the Newark Octagon not long before they pulled him off the air).

EP
2/8/2015 12:39:53 pm

I think Beck being pulled had more to do with his anti-bank lunacy and flirtation with Holocaust denialism, but hey... At least now we get Beck's thoughts on Tesla and free energy, the Legend of Super-Santa and visits from the Beck-of-Christmas-Future. Which I wish would make up for his pernicious impact on the world so I could enjoy his slide into insanity with clear conscience.

"Fox News is always on at the McDonald's"

Really? Interesting. I had no idea that was a thing...

spookyparadigm
2/8/2015 01:05:38 pm

There was a scare story going around liberal online circles a few years ago about how Fox News is always on at McDonald's, which eventually got the parent corporation to release a statement saying (as I had assumed) that such decisions were in the hands of franchise owners.

In my experience, I can't think of a time in the handful of times I've been to a McD's in the Obama years when Fox News wasn't the channel playing on the monitors. But I only go to such places when either my parents visit, or I visit them, and in both cases these are in relatively rural or small city areas in the rust belt, and the clientele is largely older and white. I think it is just franchise owners knowing their clientele.

It is always CNN in major airports (probably a significant part of their share), though the local airport I fly into at times is now Fox. I'm amazed every time that this is still the default, since the cable news channels are either showing loud personalities, or repeat clips warfare, crime, or accidents. I didn't fly last week when that "dramatic" plane crash (vs. what, the boring kind?) footage was on constant tv loop, but I can only hope airport staff were smart enough to change the channel to Judge Judy. When I traveled in December (I think), it was constant loop of a door gunner laying down suppressive fire during the evacuation of some Yezidis in Kurdistan. Seriously?

I did see some tv when I visited the bank this weekend. It was on CBS This Morning, and it was a news piece on 3D scanning at the Smithsonian, which was great as I work with a number of archaeology students using this technology and was able to send it to them. Better than constant "back and to the left" footage of plane crashes and gunfire.

EP
2/8/2015 01:14:26 pm

I don't watch TV at airports. I either read or check out hot people :)

Uncle Ron
2/9/2015 02:12:54 am

Thanks, EP.

spookyparadigm
2/9/2015 03:10:05 am

I write, but the screens are omnipresent once you're near the gates.

EP
2/9/2015 03:50:56 am

So are hot people :D

EP
2/8/2015 07:30:49 am

Lovecraft makes no secret whatsoever of his racialist and segregationist views. Plus, he uses some of the most offensive racial slurs you're likely to find in a mainstream 20th-century writer.

But hey, Cthulhu is green, so Lovecraft couldn't possibly be racist!

Joshi's case would be sad were he not so obnoxiously self-righteous and presumtuously authoritarian.

Reply
Residents Fan
2/9/2015 06:30:52 am

"(Btw, Hearn married a Japanese woman and had a bunch of awesome mixed-race children.)"

Hearn was also married to an Alethea Foley,
a woman who was half African-American, earlier in
his life. (They divorced a few years later).

As for Joshi...perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but
I've noticed Joshi very rarely, if ever, writes about the
work of non-white writers in his work. There are quite a few horror writers of colour working in the US that I can think of :

* S. P. Somtow (Asian-American),

* Jewelle Gomez (half Native American and half-African American),

* Tananarive Due (African-American),

* William F. Wu (Asian-American)

* Maurice Broaddus (African-British, living in US)

* Charles R. Saunders (African-American).

Yet Joshi has never, to the best of my knowledge, written
about any of their horror work.

On its own, this would merely be odd, but then you have
the fact Joshi bellicosely defends a White writer against
criticism in a manner more suitable to an angry undergraduate
than a serious scholar, and things get odder....

Reply
EP
2/9/2015 06:44:49 am

I believe that such complaints are usually unfair. Especially when it comes to the study of the past (which is what Joshi is mostly interested in). It is like complaining that a scholar of Elizabethan drama or the Bloomsbury Group never writes about minorities.

(Not that it should be some kind of prerequisite or merit badge, but Joshi has edited a volume of M. P. Shiel's works, who is half-Carribean.)

Reply
Residents Fan
2/9/2015 07:28:28 am

But Joshi often writes about modern horror fiction as well. ("The
Modern Weird Tale" and "Classics and Contemporaries" contain
large sections devoted to post-1970s horror fiction). So maybe
he (and other horror scholars) should give horror writers of
colour some more attention.

I'm aware of the Joshi Shiel book...and boy, while I like
Shiel's work, he makes HPL look like a saint. For
all his flaws, at least HPL never forced himself
on a twelve year old girl. :(

EP
2/9/2015 08:08:50 am

Why can't a scholar give attention to whichever figures he likes? I mean, being a "writer of color" doesn't automatically make one interesting... If there is a "writer of color" who gets a lot of attention for reasons independent of their race from many critics and scholars, but is conspicuously ignored by some scholar who you'd expect to be interested in their work, then, especially if there is a pattern, such questions may be legitimate. Otherwise, it smacks of paranoia or politicking on the part of the accuser.

Frank
2/9/2015 11:19:58 am

The reason that Joshi ignores the writers listed by Residents Fan is probably not due to the race or ethnicity of the authors. But instead most likely because their works are not sufficiently Lovecraftian or do not embody the philosophy of cosmicism, which are for Joshi the prerequisites of worthwhile horror fiction and exclude most of the much of the fiction in the horror genera.

The only true bigotry I've noticed in Joshi's writings are a dislike of authors with religious beliefs that are apparent in their works like those of conservative philosopher and ghost story author Russell Kirk.

Joshi's atheism is rather strident.

Reply
EP
2/9/2015 12:03:05 pm

Russell Kirk wrote ghost stories?! Holy shit, is there anything that man didn't write?!

Reply
Residents Fan
2/10/2015 06:10:57 am

"...works are not sufficiently Lovecraftian or do not embody the philosophy of cosmicism, which are for Joshi the prerequisites of worthwhile horror fiction and exclude most of the much of the fiction in the horror genera."

I think it was the late Joel Lane who noted "Joshi has
a weakness for philosophical tracts dressed up as fiction". Hence
his emphasis on horror as a "philosophical form" of writing and
his initial lack of enthusiasm for M. R. James, because Monty
didn't have a "worldview" that you could easily understand
from his fiction.

"Russell Kirk wrote ghost stories?! Holy shit, is there anything that man didn't write?!"

Yes, and quite good ones they are too (I'd recommend
"Behind the Stumps" and "There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding").

Bret Kramer link
2/9/2015 04:59:54 pm

Actually I think the Italians in "The Haunter in the Dark" weren't worshiping the Haunter so much as they were attempting to keep it imprisoned, understood through the lens of their religion. The same goes for the various Poles in "The Dreams in the Witch House" attempting to help Walter Gilman against Keziah Mason.
Lovecraft certainly linked foreigners with the corruption of the Mythos in some stories ("The Horror at Red Hook" is one obvious example) but I don't think there is always a one to one correspondence.

Reply
Bob Jase
2/10/2015 08:36:02 am

For those not fortunate enough to have been at Necronomi-Con 2 back in '93, there was a session titled "Alhazrad the Magnificent" which was a parody of Johnny Carson's Carnak. The part the audience that got the biggest laugh from was when the mysterious Alhazrad held the sealed envelope up to his forehead and said, "The answer is Psychopompous." then tore the envelope open and read the 'question', "What do you call a panel discussion hosted by Anthony Perkins and S. T. Joshi?"

That said it all.

Reply
docfuturity link
2/15/2015 07:08:50 am

One thing which does confuse me about arguing for hidden racism in Lovecraft's symbolism is that Lovecraft's known racism was present because he didn't exactly need to disguise it, nor was it something he had internalized and wrestled with so far as I am aware (I've read his fiction but not much on his life). The sentiment in his work is there, and its not hidden in symbolism, it was an artifact of his age. It seems to me that if you're burying fears in symbolism, then part of the point of the construct is for those hidden expression of fears being realized to manifest which are not normally so visible or self-evident to the writer. In that sense, arguing that there's an element of "fear of women" in such symbolism might make more sense (assuming this was something Lovecraft might have suffered with), or even a broader fear of helplessness brought on by his health issues and his family's, manifesting in this projection of a universe which is irrelevant to one's own needs or desires. I think the racism was not something he needed to hide....a notion that may be hard to realize in today's society where racists do need to disguise their beliefs through symbols and double-speak.

It's hard not to question Baxter's interpretations on this level when people find that they become interested in or connect to Lovecraft's works for other reasons....and I know of no racists that I am aware of who are particularly enmeshed in Lovecraft's writings in any way; they don't need literary symbolism in this fashion to doll up their hate. Fear of the unknown is sometimes sufficient enough--and broad enough--that people can fill that space with a lot of personal fears. I personally would suggest that a lot of people might find a strong anti-theistic message buried thinly in Lovecraft's writings, as well as a "period apropriate" fear/concern about the scientific developments of the time.

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    • James Dean's Cursed Porsche
  • The Library
    • Ancient Mysteries >
      • Ancient Texts >
        • Mesopotamian Texts >
          • Eridu Genesis
          • Atrahasis Epic
          • Epic of Gilgamesh
          • Kutha Creation Legend
          • Babylonian Creation Myth
          • Descent of Ishtar
          • Resurrection of Marduk
          • Berossus
          • Comparison of Antediluvian Histories
        • Egyptian Texts >
          • The Shipwrecked Sailor
          • Dream Stela of Thutmose IV
          • The Papyrus of Ani
          • Classical Accounts of the Pyramids
          • Inventory Stela
          • Manetho
          • Eratosthenes' King List
          • The Story of Setna
          • Leon of Pella
          • Diodorus on Egyptian History
          • On Isis and Osiris
          • Famine Stela
          • Old Egyptian Chronicle
          • The Book of Sothis
          • Horapollo
          • Al-Maqrizi's King List
        • Teshub and the Dragon
        • Hermetica >
          • The Three Hermeses
          • Kore Kosmou
          • Corpus Hermeticum
          • The Asclepius
          • The Emerald Tablet
          • Hermetic Fragments
          • Prologue to the Kyranides
          • The Secret of Creation
          • Ancient Alphabets Explained
          • Prologue to Ibn Umayl's Silvery Water
          • Book of the 24 Philosophers
          • Aurora of the Philosophers
        • Hesiod's Theogony
        • Periplus of Hanno
        • Ctesias' Indica
        • Sanchuniathon
        • Sima Qian
        • Syncellus's Enoch Fragments
        • The Book of Enoch
        • Slavonic Enoch
        • Sepher Yetzirah
        • Tacitus' Germania
        • De Dea Syria
        • Aelian's Various Histories
        • Julius Africanus' Chronography
        • Eusebius' Chronicle
        • Chinese Accounts of Rome
        • Ancient Chinese Automaton
        • The Orphic Argonautica
        • Fragments of Panodorus
        • Annianus on the Watchers
        • The Watchers and Antediluvian Wisdom
      • Medieval Texts >
        • Medieval Legends of Ancient Egypt >
          • Medieval Pyramid Lore
          • John Malalas on Ancient Egypt
          • Fragments of Abenephius
          • Akhbar al-zaman
          • Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah
          • Murtada ibn al-‘Afif
          • Al-Maqrizi on the Pyramids
          • Al-Suyuti on the Pyramids
        • The Hunt for Noah's Ark
        • Byzantine World Chronicle
        • Isidore of Seville
        • Book of Liang: Fusang
        • Agobard on Magonia
        • Book of Thousands
        • Voyage of Saint Brendan
        • Power of Art and of Nature
        • Travels of Sir John Mandeville
        • Yazidi Revelation and Black Book
        • Al-Biruni on the Great Flood
        • Voyage of the Zeno Brothers
        • The Kensington Runestone (Hoax)
        • Islamic Discovery of America
        • The Aztec Creation Myth
      • Lost Civilizations >
        • Atlantis >
          • Plato's Atlantis Dialogues >
            • Timaeus
            • Critias
          • Fragments on Atlantis
          • Panchaea: The Other Atlantis
          • Eumalos on Atlantis (Hoax)
          • Gómara on Atlantis
          • Atlantis as Biblical History
          • Sardinia and Atlantis
          • Atlantis and Nimrod
          • Santorini and Atlantis
          • The Mound Builders and Atlantis
          • Donnelly's Atlantis
          • Atlantis in Morocco
          • Atlantis and Hanno's Periplus
          • Atlantis and the Sea Peoples
          • W. Scott-Elliot >
            • The Story of Atlantis
            • The Lost Lemuria
          • The Lost Atlantis
          • Atlantis in Africa
          • How I Found Atlantis (Hoax)
          • Termier on Atlantis
          • The Critias and Minoan Crete
          • Rebuttal to Termier
          • Further Responses to Termier
          • Flinders Petrie on Atlantis
          • Amazing New Light (Hoax)
        • Lost Cities >
          • Miscellaneous Lost Cities
          • The Seven Cities
          • The Lost City of Paititi
          • Manuscript 512
          • The Idolatrous City of Iximaya (Hoax)
          • The 1885 Moberly Lost City Hoax
          • The Elephants of Paredon (Hoax)
        • OOPARTs
        • Oronteus Finaeus Antarctica Map
        • Caucasians in Panama
        • Jefferson's Excavation
        • Fictitious Discoveries in America
        • Against Diffusionism
        • Tunnels Under Peru
        • The Parahyba Inscription (Hoax)
        • Mound Builders
        • Gunung Padang
        • Tales of Enchanted Islands
        • The 1907 Ancient World Map Hoax
        • The 1909 Grand Canyon Hoax
        • The Interglacial Period
        • Solving Oak Island
      • Religious Conspiracies >
        • Pantera, Father of Jesus?
        • Toledot Yeshu
        • Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay on Cathars
        • Testimony of Jean de Châlons
        • Rosslyn Chapel and the 'Prentice's Pillar
        • The Many Wives of Jesus
        • Templar Infiltration of Labor
        • Louis Martin & the Holy Bloodline
        • The Life of St. Issa (Hoax)
        • On the Person of Jesus Christ
      • Giants in the Earth >
        • Fossil Origins of Myths >
          • Fossil Teeth and Bones of Elephants
          • Fossil Elephants
          • Fossil Bones of Teutobochus
          • Fossil Mammoths and Giants
          • Giants' Bones Dug Out of the Earth
          • Fossils and the Supernatural
          • Fossils, Myth, and Pseudo-History
          • Man During the Stone Age
          • Fossil Bones and Giants
          • Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man
          • American Elephant Myths
          • The Mammoth and the Flood
          • Fossils and Myth
          • Fossil Origin of the Cyclops
          • History of Paleontology
        • Fragments on Giants
        • Manichaean Book of Giants
        • Geoffrey on British Giants
        • Alfonso X's Hermetic History of Giants
        • Boccaccio and the Fossil 'Giant'
        • Book of Howth
        • Purchas His Pilgrimage
        • Edmond Temple's 1827 Giant Investigation
        • The Giants of Sardinia
        • Giants and the Sons of God
        • The Magnetism of Evil
        • Tertiary Giants
        • Smithsonian Giant Reports
        • Early American Giants
        • The Giant of Coahuila
        • Jewish Encyclopedia on Giants
        • Index of Giants
        • Newspaper Accounts of Giants
        • Lanier's A Book of Giants
      • Science and History >
        • Halley on Noah's Comet
        • The Newport Tower
        • Iron: The Stone from Heaven
        • Ararat and the Ark
        • Pyramid Facts and Fancies
        • Argonauts before Homer
        • The Deluge
        • Crown Prince Rudolf on the Pyramids
        • Old Mythology in New Apparel
        • Blavatsky on Dinosaurs
        • Teddy Roosevelt on Bigfoot
        • Devil Worship in France
        • Maspero's Review of Akhbar al-zaman
        • The Holy Grail as Lucifer's Crown Jewel
        • The Mutinous Sea
        • The Rock Wall of Rockwall
        • Fabulous Zoology
        • The Origins of Talos
        • Mexican Mythology
        • Chinese Pyramids
        • Maqrizi's Names of the Pharaohs
      • Extreme History >
        • Roman Empire Hoax
        • America Known to the Ancients
        • American Antiquities
        • American Cataclysms
        • England, the Remnant of Judah
        • Historical Chronology of the Mexicans
        • Maspero on the Predynastic Sphinx
        • Vestiges of the Mayas
        • Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
        • Origins of the Egyptian People
        • The Secret Doctrine >
          • Volume 1: Cosmogenesis
          • Volume 2: Anthropogenesis
        • Phoenicians in America
        • The Electric Ark
        • Traces of European Influence
        • Prince Henry Sinclair
        • Pyramid Prophecies
        • Templars of Ancient Mexico
        • Chronology and the "Riddle of the Sphinx"
        • The Faith of Ancient Egypt
        • Remarkable Discoveries Within the Sphinx (Hoax)
        • Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology
        • Book of the Damned
        • Great Pyramid As Noah's Ark
        • The Shaver Mystery >
          • Lovecraft and the Deros
          • Richard Shaver's Proofs
    • Alien Encounters >
      • US Government Ancient Astronaut Files >
        • Fortean Society and Columbus
        • Inquiry into Shaver and Palmer
        • The Skyfort Document
        • Whirling Wheels
        • Denver Ancient Astronaut Lecture
        • Soviet Search for Lemuria
        • Visitors from Outer Space
        • Unidentified Flying Objects (Abstract)
        • "Flying Saucers"? They're a Myth
        • UFO Hypothesis Survival Questions
        • Air Force Academy UFO Textbook
        • The Condon Report on Ancient Astronauts
        • Atlantis Discovery Telegrams
        • Ancient Astronaut Society Telegram
        • Noah's Ark Cables
        • The Von Daniken Letter
        • CIA Psychic Probe of Ancient Mars
        • CIA Search for the Ark of the Covenant
        • Scott Wolter Lawsuit
        • UFOs in Ancient China
        • CIA Report on Noah's Ark
        • CIA Noah's Ark Memos
        • Congressional Ancient Aliens Testimony
        • Ancient Astronaut and Nibiru Email
        • Congressional Ancient Mars Hearing
        • House UFO Hearing
      • Ancient Extraterrestrials >
        • Premodern UFO Sightings
        • The Moon Hoax
        • Inhabitants of Other Planets
        • The Fall of the Sky
        • Blavatsky on Ancient Astronauts
        • The Stanzas of Dzyan (Hoax)
        • Aerolites and Religion
        • What Is Theosophy?
        • Plane of Ether
        • The Adepts from Venus
      • A Message from Mars
      • Saucer Mystery Solved?
      • Orville Wright on UFOs
      • Interdimensional Flying Saucers
      • Poltergeist UFOs
      • Flying Saucers Are Real
      • Report on UFOs
    • The Supernatural >
      • The Devils of Loudun
      • Sublime and Beautiful
      • Voltaire on Vampires
      • Demonology and Witchcraft
      • Thaumaturgia
      • Bulgarian Vampires
      • Religion and Evolution
      • Transylvanian Superstitions
      • Defining a Zombie
      • Dread of the Supernatural
      • Vampires
      • Werewolves and Vampires and Ghouls
      • Science and Fairy Stories
      • The Cursed Car
    • Classic Fiction >
      • Lucian's True History
      • Some Words with a Mummy
      • The Coming Race
      • King Solomon's Mines
      • An Inhabitant of Carcosa
      • The Xipéhuz
      • Lot No. 249
      • The Novel of the Black Seal
      • The Island of Doctor Moreau
      • Pharaoh's Curse
      • Edison's Conquest of Mars
      • The Lost Continent
      • Count Magnus
      • The Mysterious Stranger
      • The Wendigo
      • Sredni Vashtar
      • The Lost World
      • The Red One
      • H. P. Lovecraft >
        • Dagon
        • The Call of Cthulhu
        • History of the Necronomicon
        • At the Mountains of Madness
        • Lovecraft's Library in 1932
      • The Skeptical Poltergeist
      • The Corpse on the Grating
      • The Second Satellite
      • Queen of the Black Coast
      • A Martian Odyssey
    • Classic Genre Movies
    • Miscellaneous Documents >
      • The Balloon-Hoax
      • A Problem in Greek Ethics
      • The Migration of Symbols
      • The Gospel of Intensity
      • De Profundis
      • The Life and Death of Crown Prince Rudolf
      • The Bathtub Hoax
      • Crown Prince Rudolf's Letters
      • Position of Viking Women
      • Employment of Homosexuals
    • Free Classic Pseudohistory eBooks
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