Post 9rTYaiQ2FWgodPEJSi by melissasage@radical.town
(DIR) More posts by melissasage@radical.town
(DIR) Post #9rTYXZDtyy7PFJ3Mye by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T01:06:43Z
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Lovecraft is white culture and I can prove it
(DIR) Post #9rTYXZUuxhjI650xV2 by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T01:11:38Z
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I made a post yesterday about how Lovecraft is more-or-less equivalent to a modern-day internet troll. I'm not going to be breaking any critical new ground here but I think that this will be fun and shed some light both on whiteness and on Lovecraft, so here we go.
(DIR) Post #9rTYXZunPUQhOL7cps by HarneyBA@pleroma.site
2020-01-28T23:47:30.627622Z
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@melissasage >Lovecraft is more-or-less equivalent to a modern-day internet troll.wtf i love lovecraft nowThat aside, your thread does seem to be valid. The idea of the outside forces, out to destabilize the Rational™ and Just™ current system feels like somewhat familiar. Thanks for posting.
(DIR) Post #9rTYY8bWR8oCyhNE9Y by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T01:18:02Z
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Let's start by discussing what it is that makes horror work. All good horror takes a common fear and exaggerates it, turns it into a monster that's both grounded in mundane anxieties and blown up into the realm of the supernatural.Let's parallel that with what whiteness is: it's a project of domination of white people (an invented ethnic category) over the rest of the people of the earth. It also usually comes with Enlightenment ideals involved: rationalism, a deterministic and knowable universe, positivism.
(DIR) Post #9rTYY8stOYhfqZV6EC by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T01:22:09Z
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Lovecraft's most famous contribution is his mythos: a series of unknowable monsters, all of whom are beyond human ken or description. Setting aside the textual racism- and boy, there's a lot of it, let's just take a second to appreciate how much of his work we just set aside- it's actually impossible to distinguish this mythos from whiteness, and Lovecraft's despair at the idea of the project of whiteness failing.
(DIR) Post #9rTYaZ1x9h4vW6tSAy by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T01:30:10Z
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At the time Lovecraft was writing, Marx, Darwin, and Freud had all come along and started to undermine the ideals of the white Enlightenment society that Lovecraft idolized so. Conservatives even today hate all three for the same reasons: Marx attacks the idea that modern society is built in the ideal manner, Darwin that humanity was divinely inspired and not merely a natural phenomenon, and Freud that human beings are rational actors.All of these fears are present in Lovecraft: and, moreover, they're central. You can't really understand what Lovecraft is grappling with unless you understand him as reacting with horror and despair at the destruction of these tenets. It's why the idea of separating the art from the artist is silly in Lovecraft: the fears he writes about are centrally those of the project of whiteness in the 20th century.
(DIR) Post #9rTYafrvjMDij3G31c by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T01:48:07Z
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Let's take Cthulhu, his most famous monster, to show what I mean. I won't do a close reading of its eponymous story, but I do want to note some general features of interest- the story opens with finding information about Cthulhu in ancient Semitic writings. This is notable because it's basically the only role people of color have in his works: either in league with, or possessing privileged knowledge of, the monsters. To Lovecraft, there's definitely already horror to the idea that ancient, nonwhite people could know anything that modern, white, rational Europeans do not.- Often, unlike in many heroic stories, the individual is powerless before Lovecraftian monsters. Cthulhu is certainly one of these: the universe is powerless and uncaring. It's this rejection of individualism where we can see a twisted reflection of Marx: the individual is helpless before Capitalism, just as it is before Cthulhu.
(DIR) Post #9rTYah0pTkvuGwQfXE by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T01:49:03Z
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- R'lyeh is a city with geometry the human mind cannot comprehend, and many of Lovecraft's monsters cause insanity to gaze upon them. This is his distortion of Darwin: if human beings are just natural creatures, not created by a loving God, then by what right do we expect natural law to be real? Humanity has no business expecting nature to make sense to them.- There's plenty of irrationality in Lovecraft for the Freudians to sink their teeth into, but I want to point out the oceanic metaphor in Cthulhu. In psychology 101 it's common to use the analogy of the iceberg to represent the Freudian model of the mind, with the superego at the very top, and the unconscious id being the vast majority of the iceberg you can't see. I have always pictured Cthulhu as the id of humanity, come up to destroy the superego of western civilization, with its pretense of control. In Lovecraft, civilization is just the very tippy-top of an uncaring natural order.
(DIR) Post #9rTYaiQ2FWgodPEJSi by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T02:00:43Z
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This is why Lovecraft is white culture. It's fundamentally reactionary. Corey Robin's ever-useful description of conservatism is "the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back". If we just tweak it a bit, we can arrive at a succinct definition of Lovecraftian horror: "the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and knowing that there is nothing you can do about it."This is why Lovecraft is white culture. It's the fear at the heart of whiteness, and of other reactionary projects as well, that it's not sustainable. That one day an elder god will rise from the ocean, or your slaves will revolt, or an alien meteor will crash in your yard, or the natives will rebel and kick you out of the colonies. It's all the same, to him: it's the threat against white hegemony, and the toppling of the existing order, and the threat of a new one lurking on the horizon.
(DIR) Post #9rTYanGeDr9RfjsO1Y by alexis@tilde.zone
2020-01-28T02:09:15Z
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@melissasage a close reading is not necessary. he says it outright, himself, partway through:“The time [when the stars came right again] would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”
(DIR) Post #9rTYaosGFUpgegTwI4 by alexis@tilde.zone
2020-01-28T02:10:44Z
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@melissasage the conflation of concepts like freedom and liberation, and concepts like holocaust and slaughter, we think is particularly telling
(DIR) Post #9rTYapTU16bgW7tfJA by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T02:11:49Z
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@alexis true! there's a lot of that in Lovecraft: he identified rigidity and order with happiness, which is to be expected from an arch-conservative white supremacist like he is.
(DIR) Post #9rTYat0CttZ7SUELEO by alexis@tilde.zone
2020-01-28T02:15:37Z
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@melissasage given what we know of the man's life and attitudes, we doubt he was capable of identifying *anything* with happinesswe think it is more accurate to say that he identified rigidly enforced order, specifically that of the hegemonic whiteness he so cherished, with safety, both individual and civilizational. happiness would be irrelevant and potentially dangerous, we think, because its pursuit might direct the desires of individuals to diverge from those most consonant with the maintenance of safe normality, the dominance of the beige
(DIR) Post #9rTYaur40rRLChy4G0 by alexis@tilde.zone
2020-01-28T02:29:51Z
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@melissasage which is why PoC and queer and trans reclamation of lovecraft's themes and tropes and, in many cases, his actual creations, to tell stories of worlds in which we can hope to be free, strikes us as such an important trend in culture.such use is directly and deliberately opposed to the very same rigid order and normality and beigeness that the original works enshrined, and we're amazed and delighted every time we see something new like "the shape of water" or "carnival row" bring it more into the cultural mainstreamthat's a project we've been observing, and in very tiny ways participating in, for a quarter of a century now - call it the queering of the cthulhu mythos, if you like. it's something that began well before we were born, and we confide it will continue long after we're gone.and it's why critiques like these can't help but make us a little nervous, because while a bold blanket statement like "Lovecraft is white culture" is certainly pithy and is not fundamentally inaccurate, we worry that it might lend itself to a perspective in which not only the bad of the original oevure, but the liberatory good for which it's provided so much raw material, is regarded as A Problemnot that we think that's where your critique is heading! but we've been sitting with this thought since you began, and we're not comfortable with it being absent from the conversation. so we're calling it out explicitly here to make sure there's no risk of that happening
(DIR) Post #9rTYb65IGIMI21i5Sq by wgahnagl@www.librepunk.club
2020-01-28T02:34:09Z
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@alexis tbh short of the killing and holocaust this sounds lit as shit Lovecraft was so white and so racist that he couldn't even realize what a fucking incredible goddamn scene he was thinking up
(DIR) Post #9rTYb6XIaAlBQsoS7E by alexis@tilde.zone
2020-01-28T02:36:01Z
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@wgahnagl tbh from the perspective of also a writer (who steals his shit to make gay as hell monster stories, besides) we feel like it's at least 40% he threw that stuff in because he himself realized it would actually sound super good if he didn't
(DIR) Post #9rTYbDF7e9NcEXMXFw by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T02:10:43Z
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I think that, by and large, you understand Lovecraft better if you think of him less as a science fiction author and more as a latter-day Edmund Burke who happened to write weird fiction.
(DIR) Post #9rTYbsp13bS9BjTHOa by wraidd@sunbeam.city
2020-01-28T05:41:29Z
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@melissasage I enjoyed this analysis, thank you.Is there a way to deploy cosmic horror in modern fiction without having it linked to whiteness? Or does that association just poison the whole concept?
(DIR) Post #9rTYbtInGtGwg5P3oG by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T12:48:13Z
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@wraidd I think it's entirely about the context it's done in in the modern era. there's nothing inherently reactionary about cosmic horror; this thread is definitely about the man himself, not anyone working in the genre
(DIR) Post #9rTYc3EuKC6bUvf68m by mwlucas@bsd.network
2020-01-28T14:45:01Z
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@melissasage I have a deep fondness for cosmic horror. The idea that we are tiny and lost in an indifferent universe that will crush us without noticing us resonates in my psyche.Everything you said is true.
(DIR) Post #9rTYc3cIvCowfUbmbo by melissasage@radical.town
2020-01-28T14:48:31Z
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@mwlucas yeah, like I've said elsewhere in the thread, it's all about context. for Lovecraft eldritch horror is definitely tied to anxiety about losing white power; but it doesn't have to be in other media, the same way that elves don't have to be aristocratic forebears just because that's who they are for Tolkein