Hog’s Head PubCast #37: Learning Lovecraft

Oh wait – I do have a copy. Could you please email me? I don’t have your email address on my laptop. Thanks!

The line in Blazing Saddles where Cleavon Little holds a gun to his head and warns the lynch mob, “Nobody move or the black man gets it!”, is the perfect antidote to HPL’s oblivious racism.

Of course, that’s not what he actually said in the movie . . . .

Um, Matthew, while I don’t greatly mind being compared to Hermione – and would love to have her single minded dedication to whatever cause she embraces – I don’t think the analogy is apt on a number of levels, the most basic one of which is that African Americans have fought their own war of emancipation, are fighting it still, and don’t need any consciousness raising, thank you very much.

Having said which, I would be ashamed to use that racial slur, which is why I deliberately misquoted Cleavon Little. If a black person chooses to call himself or herself by that term, then that is an entirely different thing, the victim and the perpetrator are the one and the same and can work it out between themselves. I understand, however, that some members of the African American community are now offended by how often African Americans are using that word against themselves. I don’t know too much about the reasons for the objections, but I believe it has something to do with the implied lack of self-respect, and even the implied self-hate. The users of the word, on the other hand, argue that they are trying to empty it of its negative connotations by making it a commonplace. Which, if you think about it, is a tragic statement. How often does a culture have to go to war against a word in order to take away its derogatory power?

I’m not sure what you mean when you say you’re trying to see racism in its social and historical context. Does that mean you’re not offended when HPL – and he is by no means the only one, the culprits range from Shakespeare to Dickens to Mark Twain – depicts black people as less than fully human because that is how society at large saw them then? Should we not be offended because we can’t judge that culture by our own mores?

Well, it offends me. I accept that they didn’t know better because it was the cultural norm, but they did harm every time they used that word, it wasn’t just a word, it was a slap and a kick and fist in the face of every black man, woman and child who was called that.

Bill Walsh has an essay on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, discussing the criticism of book because of the over-200 instances of the use of that word which I will not write or say.

He writes about parents’ and students’ reactions to the use of that word, how his students just didn’t understand how people could be offended by the use of words they use themselves, and how parents felt that seeing that word used over 200 times would desensitize people to its use.

He doesn’t support one side or the other of the argument, but observes in his conclusion that:

‘Huck Finn was (and probably will remain) a lesson in the use of language, of epithets, of slurs and how they can change (or not) over time.

Hopefully, never again will my students repeat the schoolyard chant, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

We studied and got a brief glimpse of the power of words.’

For anyone interested, here is the URL:

http://interact.uoregon.edu/medialit/JCP/articles_mlr/walsh/Huck_Finn_Power_Words.html

Hey Matthew,

Your use of the word didn’t offend me; you were just quoting it. It’s HPL who offends me, by using it as a noun and an adejective in his writing, without the use of quotes.

The little I’ve read about HPL suggests that he is using skin colour, and especially mixed skin colour, as a symbol of corruption of humanity and the warping of the natural order. Which makes it worse, I think. The equation seems to be: White = pure = good and Black = impure = evil. And the sexual imagery is striking.

It makes me wonder about his own racial identity as well as his sexuality. Was he of mixed-race origin? Did his father have a black mistress? Did HPL have an unrequited passion for his black nanny? Why the association in his mind between the primordial monsters who still lurk in the shadows and black skin colour?

How do you think HPL would have reacted if it were pointed out to him that all humans, including the people of England, are descended from Africans?
Furthermore, the English are in many ways a mixed race. My hobby is genetic genealogy,and using the Y (male) DnA or mitochondrial (female) line we can trace back one’s ancestry. Now, I personally know of English men and women, with documented heritage in England past 1800, who have discovered, much to their surprise, that their Y line or their mitochondrial line is Asian, African or Native American. This is because the UK is an island nation, and there were many foreign visitors, sailors, merchants, etc., since the Bronze Age. Mathematically, if a person born in about 1949 is of complete English descent, he/she is descended from every person who lived in the UK prior to 1200 who left offspring who lived long enough to reproduce. That includes African slaves, Asian sailors, etc. So the odds are that the people who end up with African ancestry in the UK are descended from African slaves brought over by Roman garrisons, or by Roman soldiers who were themselves from Africa.
I discovered the truth of my own racism,how wrong I was to see myself as a white European when doing my own DNA research. My mitochondrial line is J1a, which is found in low levels-8% or so, in Europe, especially along the west coast of Europe. Obviously, it traveled with sailors. But it is at its highest frequency in the mideast. So I have more in common (on my mitochondrial line) with the “crazy” Arabs, than with the majority of Europeans, who are H mitochondrial. This was a real shock. But an even greater shock turned up later when, using autosomal genetic testing to determine the truth of the old family story that we were part Native American, to my shock, and I mean shock, I discovered that I had not only Native American, but African ancestry: from Guinea Bissau on my mother’s side, Mozambique on my father’s. Now, I have green eyes, reddish brown hair and fair skin. My father was blue-eyed and blond. My mother had greenish eyes, brown hair and was also fair skinned. And to be honest, I was shocked and at first, not all that happy to find out I had African ancestry within the last 300 years. It was a humbling and prayerful experience.
But really, we are all very closely related, much more than we realize, and it is a shame that most people do not know that we, in fact, are all brothers and sisters.

It has been interesting to read this topic this week. I wish I had some free time so that I could participate — or even do more than skim things. I haven’t quite been able to reach the end of The Call of Cthulhu yet; quite frankly, to date it has been better than I remembered it to be from my last reading.

On to comments and discussion.

I have long found the subject of taboo words quite interesting, and have enjoyed following the discussion here. I think that a major subtopic that Matthew introduces deals with a taboo word, “nigger”, rather than racism per se. The two topics have some overlap, but can also be distinguished.

Travis wrote

but the fact that ["Lovecraft's use of racist (sic) language" -- korg200000bc] happened “back then” doesn’t make it any less of an awful thing (which I know you understand). It’s still difficult for me to read because it never should have happened, and it’s a tremendous tragedy that it did, and that we’re still feeling the effects of it tremendously . . . .

I think there is a danger here in believing that words themselves always mean the same to others as they do to ourselves. Another danger is in mixing the denotation (what specific item or attribute a word refers to) and the denotation (what feelings, emotions, or moral state the word invokes or is intended to evoke).

Some of this is my linguistics training of old must be coming out. can not accurately discuss words in isolation from context. To use a very clear example (at least to those in the dog fancy), the term “bitch” is quite proper. I have rejoiced with friends when they got “winners bitch”, which is an adjective followed by a noun, not a noun followed by a verb. Or, to use a Harry Potter example, when Molly Weasley called Bellatrix Lestrange a “BITCH”, it was Molly who was acting like an actual bitch defending her pups; an irony that any member of the dog fancy would pick up immediately.

Within my own lifetime I have seen the word in the HPL and Blazing Saddles connection (“nigger”) change from being a mere denotation or description as used by many people (as offensive as “Swede” or “German” and, again for some, less pejorative than, e.g., “kraut”) to the current situation where it is almost universally a taboo word for an insult, at least amongst whites with proper upbringing. (Such a change in a word is not a rare thing in the history of languages: words change meaning.) I think we are seeing examples of the misunderstandings which result in some of the comments on this list.

Travis again:
(I agree with Critical Race Theorists who argue that racism is still the norm).

We’ve touched on this before, Travis, so my disagreement with CRT is no surprise. Leaving aside the crucial point that “racism” remains undefined, I think that, like many blanket statements, the CRT claim is a mixture of truth and falsehood, and can be very misleading. One critique out of many of CRT is that the term ‘racism’ itself becomes useful only as a pejorative — useful in gaining political or moral power — rather than a term with an actual or significant denotation. (The common example of politicians “playing the race card” in a quest for power serves as a quick example.) Another critique is that CRT is used to cover up the racism of its advocates. (E.g., arguably Bell and Crenshaw are more racist than many of their opponents: they seem to see almost everything in through race-categorizing glasses. To a small boy with a hammer, everything is a nail; to some CRT types, it appears that everything seems to concern “race”.)

Mary Jo Neyer’s experience suggests that a good starting point in a discussion of race would be to remember that we are all members of the human race. I believe that is a more basic collective than the racial collectives so popular right now. A viewpoint which sees individuals primarily (or predominately) as members of a given “race” does not respect the individual person; I would argue that such a viewpoint is inherently racist.

But when one begins with people’s basic humanity and individual nature, then one can have a meaningful discussion on racial distinctions, correlations, similarities, etc. I like Chief Justice Roberts’ comment recently: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Wow, quite a tangent from Lovecraft! I hope it is a useful contribution for thought on this topic, however.

Back to Lovecraft. Reyhan noted something in passing in his 9 October post which I think is worth pursuing, and which I’ll keep in mind as I continue reading Call. To paraphrase, his insight is that Lovecraft is using racial categories as symbolic of closeness “to the primeval monsters/Gods”. That this is a “racist” (or “racial”?) symbolism is without question, but I wonder how it ties in stylistically with the story.

Sorry I’m so far behind in my reading. Perhaps I’ll be able to catch up with you speedier people by this weekend.

Colorless, you speak of denotation connotation (I think) and context. You raise the caution that words mean different things to different people. You also mention the gradual transformation of the word “nigger” (see, I can type it out, now that I’ve chilled!) from “descriptive” to “taboo”.

To my mind, all this while true, ignores the central questions: is it racist, is it offensive? Well, I don’t have too much doubt about the answers to those questions and won’t debate them. But perhaps the more relevant question is: was the use of that word racist and offensive in the 20s and 30s when HPL wrote?

Was there a time that “nigger” was without pejorative connotation? I decided to try to answer this question and went to that handy (if not-quite-trustworthy) reference: Wikipedia:

‘In the United States, the word nigger was not always considered derogatory, but was instead used by some as merely denotative of black skin, as it was in other parts of the English-speaking world. In nineteenth-century literature, there are many uses of the word nigger with no intended negative connotation. Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad (who published The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ in 1897) used the word without racist intent. Mark Twain often put the word into the mouths of his Southern characters, white and black, but did not use the word when speaking in his own voice in his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi.

In the 1800s, as nigger began to acquire the pejorative connotation it holds today, the term “Colored” gained popularity as a kinder alternative to negro and associated terms. For example, abolitionists in Boston, Massachusetts posted warnings to “Colored People of Boston and vicinity.” The name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People reflects the preference for this term at the time of the NAACP’s founding in 1909.

In the United States, the word was freely used by some whites and blacks until the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. It seems that the word acquired a pejorative meaning in the Northern United States before acquiring the same connotation in the South.

Today, the implied racism of the term is so strong that the use of nigger in most situations is a social taboo. Many American magazines and newspapers will not even print the word in full, instead using n*gg*r, n**ger, n——, or simply “the N-word.”‘

So there was a transformation, as you say. It’s not cool in the 21st century, but it was cool in the early part of the 19th century.

Or was it?

I would argue (and I can anticipate the criticism coming my way because of this) that the transformation parallelled the emancipation and empowerment of black people. The more they gained the right to be regarded and treated as human beings, the less acceptable it was to refer to them with a word that was never complimentary, to say the least. My take on this is that it was never cool with black people but no one consulted with them; only when they had a voice in the matter did they announce that it was not cool.

Putting that aside, the poem I pasted above shows HPL’s value system clearly: there’s Man, there are the beasts, and in between is the “Nigger” (see, I’ve typed it again!) He does not use the word in a complimentary way. Quite the opposite, the connotation he puts upon it is highly negative (at least to the extent that being close to the beasts or worshipping the Elder Gods is seen as negative).

Would it have offended a black person of the 20s or 30s to read HPL and see himself or herself referenced as one of the ‘mongrels’ dancing around Cthulhu?

What do you think?

An aside to Matthew. You argue, plausibly I think, that people can acquire their prejudices legitmately, and that we don’t know enough about HPL to say how he acquired his prejudices. Granted. You accept that he was racist, but argue that racism is not what his stories are primarily about. I think I agree with you. His stories are about the monsters/Gods that lie beneath the surface of the earth and defy morality and reason. But from what I’ve seen so far, he depicts black and mixed-race people (‘mongrels’) as being more aware of and affiliated with these monsters/Gods, presumably because of their supposedly debased or beast-like natures. To me that says that he’s writing about man’s animal nature, what Freud, a few years earlier, referred to as the Id.

I could go further with this line of analogy, but at risk of further pathologizing HPL. So I’ll stop here.

Scott, all human beings may be created equal, but they don’t grow up with equal access to parental care, nutrition, medical care, education, recreational, cultural and sport opportunities, employment opportunities and positive and relevant role models.

Funny thing is, I think I’ve had this discussion before. We couldn’t agree then. What are the odds that we’ll agree now?

Matthew, I agree that HPL is trying to show his readers that their notions of reality is based on ignorance about what is really going on under the surface, i.e. Gods and monsters – as well as their worshippers. His attitude to what is going on under the surface, however, is really fascinating.

We’ve only discussed two of the stories, but I’ve skipped ahead and read the rest. The pattern I see is that a rational, materialistic, narrator of Nordic origin gets an inkling of the truth and seeks out the great hidden mysteries. What he learns is so disgustingly and indescribably horrible that it almost drives him insane. Sometimes he walks away shaken, a broken man who will always live in fear. Sometimes he calls in the authorities to wipe out the monster(s). But sometimes, and this is the fascinating part, he becomes part of the hidden horror, because it was always a part of him, and was only waiting to be released. And as we saw in Innsmouth, it’s not an unwilling transformation, it’s a natural, if hideous, progression.

This ambivalence towards the monstrous is clearly portrayed in Pickman’s Model (which we have yet to discuss, so I won’t say too much about it). I think Pickman has a great deal to say about HPL himself.

I also think that this ambivalence strongly hints that HPL’s monsters are a stand-in for some basic, primitive and uncontrollable human instincts which HPL had a hard time with, and alternately embraced and hid away from.

As a friend of mine once said, it’s always about sex.