Deus Ex Machina

A few weeks ago I began reading a book of collected stories by H.P. "Sauce" Lovecraft. I have a slight inclination toward fantasy and horror literature, and I wanted to know what the big fuss was about. Certainly, Lovecraft's writing, while at times maddeningly verbose, is up to par. His prose is at times sublime, as evidenced by this brief quote from The Call of Cthulhu:

There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.

That's neat. The guy could write, for sure. So also could he pen a weird story. The first half of the book of collected stories interested me greatly. I noticed not a few elements of modern horror fiction in his works. However, by the time I reached the book's halfway point, one thing gnawed at me and vexed me immeasurably: Lovecraft's blatantly racist views.

Now, I know that, if one were to contextualize most canonical literature written prior to, say, the late 20th century, almost every white writer could be called a racist. But Lovecraft's racism, I'm afraid, is starkly extreme even in comparison to the writers of his time.

Here is an exerpt from an interview with Lovecraftian scholar -- and the man who edited the book I was reading -- S.T. Joshi:

There's a lot of argument that Lovecraft was a xenophobe and a racist. (Certainly his description of the black zombie in "Herbert West, Re-Animator" seems unduly disparaging.) Is this simply a situation where you have to judge an author according to the mores of his own time? How do you bypass this on personal level?

As an Indian, I am perennially entertained by Lovecraft’s comment, in the 1930s, that “The more one thinks about India, the more one wants to vomit!” (Actually, he was referring to the political turmoil initiated by Gandhi’s quest for independence from Great Britain.) There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft’s racism, nor can it merely be passed off as “typical of his time,” for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction at key points (although I might suggest that there is a considerable element of humour and parody in that passage you cite in “Herbert West”). I find Lovecraft’s racism disappointing not merely because he expressed it so frequently in fiction and letters, but because this was one area where he refused to modify his thinking in light of new evidence. In every other aspect of his thought--metaphysics, politics, economics, aesthetics--he was constantly amending his views as new information came to him; but with his racism, he stuck pretty much to the prejudices he had absorbed in the reactionary New England of the 1890s.

Becoming more and more frustrated with Lovecraft's ubiquitous passages of racist, white supremecist writings, I was in a quandry: namely, should I put the book down and leave it alone, or keep reading until the bitter end (for the stories, while at times a mixed bag, are largely imaginative and provocative)?

I no longer have to choose. An hour-and-a-half earlier, my daughter sat upon my lap as I was nearing the end of the second chapter of The Call of Cthulhu. After sitting placidly on my knee for perhaps two or three minutes, she unexpectedly lurched forward and vomited all over the book, my hands, and my pants.

And I like to think that some unknown force was telling me to cease reading the book. The alternative is that said higher force was telling me to stop using my hands for fell purposes. Or possibly urging me to stop wearing those pants.