OK, this post will be long. It is, possibly, the longest post I ever wrote for a forum. It answers a post by BoxCrayonTales. If you will jump it or got bored half-way... you are right! Be warned that a key example involves a long detour about David Lynch. I felt the need to include it because it is the best
practical example I can give about "analysing a creative work" - something I feel being very important here.
No one with a normal mind denies that Lovecraft is racist (or, better yet, Xenophobic): you only have to read his tales. I openly recognised this
in the first post of this very thread. BTW, I'm Italian and thus among the targeted groups.
I'm not mindlessly "anti-woke" when debating their ideas. If anything, politically I'm center-left. I'm for sure against "wokeness" as a dangerous religion - the one that admits only "sin" and no redemption, then looking obsessively for "sin" everywhere. As an Italian, I can track Lovecraft's realisation, later in his life, that maybe some of his ideas about race and ethnicity were wrong. When I hit the "woke wall"
"NO! You can't say that Lovecraft was a product of his time! You can't say that he was slowly redeeming himself late in his life! (before being killed while still young and productive by a terrible form of cancer) I just refuse it and I genuinely think that it is a very dangerous mindset. "Sin can't have any redemption!" is as inhuman as the Deep Ones.
I can't judge Leila Hahn's efforts because I never followed her. I'll check her works and I genuinely hope that you are right. Meanwhile I can only judge what is presented to me, like this analysis of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and it is a terrible analysis. For all her efforts, she fails from the start to follow the first rule of textual analysis: "First start with the text, and the text only. Your first pass must be as pure as possible." Hahn, instead, just can't help to start with:
Xenophobia isn't just present in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Every sentence drips with it. Every word and syllable is marinated in it. Lovecraft was always a very xenophobic author, of course, but this tale takes it to an incredible extreme even by his own standards. And, like the Red Hook stories (sic), I don't think Lovecraft himself was unconscious or even uncritical of this....Which is already her take on the text. As an "analysis" it gets an "F" right there. "Lovecraft was xenophobic!" Sure enough. But one of the very first questions one should consider, "was he xenophobic
in this story?" (because one thing doesn't lead to the other) remains a critical point of failure.
Once you approach the problem correctly, you easily find that, no, Lovecraft, wasn't "always a very xenophobic author". There is no xenophobia in many of his poems. There is no xenophobia in classics like "The Music of Erich Zann". And there is no Xenophobia in "The Haunter of the Dark" - a tale where, if anything, is the "cultured New Englander" full of hubris that gets nuked, and it is the community of "poor Italians and their Catholic priest" who was right from the beginning and now has to pick up the pieces.
This is why in her "analysis" of "Innsmouth", Leila Hahn fails from the very first paragraph. This has nothing to with "anti-wokeness" or anything else, only with "Text Comprehension 101".
"The swastika-holding Pacific Islanders slaughtered a local hybrid population, with seemingly even less justification".
Sure, because
only the Nazis committed genocide in known human history - that the story was written and published years before Hitler came to power be damned!
"Reductio ad Hitlerum" at his worst. If it is true that Hahn is such a good critic, why she torpedoes herself this way over and over?
And why nowhere in this "in-depth analysis" she considers what an important "NPC" clearly states about Innsmouth?
"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I don’t say I’m blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself"This
is part of the text. And you have a recognition by Lovecraft that racism is real right there! And, more specifically, that some racism springs from hate! And she just flies over it instead of, for example, starting a debate about if hate justifies racism (no, IMHO it doesn't, BTW), or if Lovecraft is actually condemning the fact (the main character has a neutral approach about it).
(Ironically, later we discover that the source of all the racism and the hate were the Deep Ones that in 1846, first tried to rape and then killed
half of the population after the humans rebelled - then occupying and governing the town; so much for "trying to talk with the - oh!, so nice! fish people"
).
To further clarify this important point in criticism, first approaching the text and the text only, this is the example I always use with my students: we watch together David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive". In the movie we see both the real world and the dreams caused by some events the characters go through. I then ask them to connect the real events with the dreams, and what these connections tell us
using only the contents of the movie. David Lynch was amazingly rigorous about this in his movie which is the reason why I use it.
So, the students munch about the movie and then try to cheat by reading (or watching) "interpretations" on the internet. And I
always get the guy or the gal who pipes up "The dreams follow Freud's idea of dreams as compensation!" Cool! Congratulations for your Google-fu! Problem is
"Nothing in the movie refers to Freud." As an
interpretation can be acceptable, but it contaminates the analysis of the sheer contents by bringing in an outside element - Freud.
Sometimes, but it is rare, a student says
"She dreams about the two judges in the competition that allowed her to have a shot in Hollywood as queer figures that, by the end, become malevolent, laughing ghosts. This because those judges once symbolised her hopes to become a star in Hollywood only to symbolise, now, how she was "cheated", and how that victory assigned by those judges actually led her to ruin."Which, wow!, is a totally fine analysis. Agree or disagree with it, but
it never strays from the contents of the movie.
I hope that this example is clear enough. Clear enough to show where Leila Hahn and many others fail - no matter how "good" their intent is.
Hahn even fails in her research. She doesn't consider at all the
immense number of sources that Lovecraft mentioned when talking about "Innsmouth", and that had nothing to do with xenophobia or other ugly things: from a dream he had, to the fact that both his parents died in a mental hospital (and thus his fear of having inherited a propensity for physical and mental degeneration), to a visit to Newburyport, to Robert W. Chambers' "The Harbor-Master" and Irvin S. Cobb's "Fishhead" (the latter vividly acclaimed in "Supernatural Horror in Literature") to, of all people, H.G. Wells and his short story "In the Abyss" - from where Lovecraft does seem to have taken his description of the "fish people" (that's the same H.G.W. who wrote "The War of the Worlds" as a criticism of British Colonialism, BTW).
Again,
nowhere these sources are mentioned in Hahn analysys. Why?
And then Hahn devolves into the straight stunning:
"The message of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is that we all deserve to die. All of us. Everyone. Every single last human."Nnnnnnnnnnn...oh?
The very quote by Lovecraft she puts above this doesn't say that. The quote essentially says that "knowing the reality of the universe leads to the understanding that human existence is meaningless, to the point that non-existing is the better choice (and thus suicide)." But both here and in his possibly most famous quote
"...That we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." he offers a peaceful alternative: ignorance.
Even worse, Hahn fails to place the quote. It is from an political essay that Lovecraft wrote in 1921, ten years before "Innsmouth", and titled "Nietzscheism and Realism". In it, rather stunningly, Lovecraft perceives
"...The impracticability of Nietzscheism and the essential instability of even the strongest governments." It is a nihilist essay, about why and how
any form of government is destined to collapse (totalitarianism included - so much for those "swastika-holding Pacific Islanders"). Lovecraft thinks that the human condition is one of suffering, hopelessness, lost in the vast abysses of infinite space and time. No form of government (and nothing else, actually) can save humanity from this: the best attempts only delude for a while. From here, better not to live at all.
These are the words of someone either suffering or who has suffered from deep depression or disillusion. 1921 was the year when Lovecraft lost his mother to insanity. But Hahn withdraws this information, takes the sentence without giving context, sends it to "Innsmouth" via extraordinary rendition, and uses it as the lead in to that incredibly misguided final commentary. And people applaud her for her efforts!
I have read S.T. Joshi biography of Lovecraft - all the 1100+ pages of it. True: amazingly enough, he recognises that Lovecraft was a xenophobe - as anyone who read his tales can tell you. It is good to know that Joshi read Lovecraft before writing his biography.
Talking about "Innsmouth", Josh first points out how it was written by Lovecraft in late 1931, during a new spell of disillusionment and lack of faith in his own writing craft. It was a very difficult story for Lovecraft to write, with not less than four versions discarded before the final one. Joshi for sure recognises at once racism as "a" interpretation (not "the"), with, possibly, the involvement of...
"...Such things as Lovecraft’s general coolness toward sex, the frequency with which members of his own ancestry married their cousins, perhaps even his possible awareness of the cause of his father’s death [madness]."Notice the careful use of the word "interpretation".
But Joshi, later in his examination, also pushes the racist idea by pointing out how it appears over and over "in text":
"By means of his protagonist, Lovecraft occasionally betrays his own paranoia: during his escape from Innsmouth, Olmstead hears "horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English," as if a foreign language were in itself a sign of aberration."How far we are from Hahn maybe well intended but incredibly amateurish ramblings...
You mention Tolkien. Tolkien?? The guy who, until his last breath, declared how he hated "allegories" and "interpretations", and how "A tale should be read only as the narration of some events, maybe happening somewhere else in a different time, and nothing else." Sorry to break you the news, but if there is someone who "flattens" Lovecraft (and himself) before anyone else, he is Tolkien.
True, both Lovecraft and Tolkien "would write layers of symbolism and references into his stories that only the erudite would understand." But this doesn't mean that
they do bring the contents and meanings of these references into their tales. Once again one thing doesn't lead to the other. Tolkien's Ring is Tolkien's Ring, not Siegfried's. The "wise man with a staff" is a recurring image in fables and fantastic art, but Gandalf is Gandalf, not Moses. Gandalf is not even Saruman and for sure he is not Elminster.
Which is, ironically, what each one of us does everyday when preparing a original adventure for their players. As I often mentioned, my 13 years long D&D campaign was based on the Iran-Contra scandal. Was it anti-American? Not at all: it was anti-some "Good" Gods in the Forgotten Realms. The Devils were the Iranians? No, they were Devils born and raised by a stunt by Tyr and company done "for the greater good". Were the elves "a clear proof that the Contra rebels were represented in the campaign"? Not at all: some Good Gods dangle in front of them the opportunity to recapture Myth Drannor and it ended... not well.
Should have I written and published book instead of creating a D&D campaign I'm pretty sure that someone would have pointed at the plot and said "This is a clear denouncing of American politics in the '80s! This guy is anti-American!" And the inspirations would have been there! - except that not even once you would have found a NPC named "North". But you would have found a hidden eighth level of Carceri named Pyranesia - because the visuals were not "inspired" but directly taken from what
Piranesi showed us in his "Carceri" art, and thus I made a
direct reference to the source.
Lovecraft
can be interpreted and "psychoanalysed". Alan Moore does just that in "Providence". As the main character he creates Robert Black, an "American gay Jew" living in 1919, because (Moore's words...)
"I chose some parts of Robert's character specifically because they resonated interestingly with some of Lovecraft's prejudices. I thought this would be a good way to actually make some of Lovecraft's views emotionally explicit by showing them from the point of view of someone who could not help but be hurt by them.But Moore is too intelligent to stop there. Across the series, it becomes increasingly clear how Blake's experiences are
both about his struggle with his repressed homosexuality and his general being in the 1920s,
and at the same time show that the Mythos are quite real. Moore is not interested in choosing a single interpretation of Lovecraft's work. To him, Blake's feverish, fearful hallucinations when accidentally poisoned by a gas leak are born by his repressed homosexuality (earlier stimulated by the clear interest shown for him by a certain Detective Tom Malone...)
and there was no gas leak and Blake had a scrape with the Mythos (issue #2).
But Moore (who had read "anything Lovecraft" before he started writing "Providence") also said of the man:
"...If you actually look at his attitudes, they are actually precisely those of the white, middle class Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexual men of his period. All of his fears were almost exactly the median of social fears at the time. He was frightened of Bolsheviks. He was frightened of foreigners. He was frightened of women. He was frightened of gay people."What basically Moore says across the series is "Listen, we all know the nature of Lovecraft the man and we can we can find it in his works. But this doesn't imply that these works
must be interpreted as misogynist, racist, serial killerist or whatever else. They can stand by themselves,
at the same time, as very creative, very inspiring, very horrific works."
Which indirectly answers
the absolute cringeworthy statement that the very interviewer makes while introducing his interview with Moore:
"Lovecraft was vocally homophobic and anti-Semitic in his personal life and, to some extent in his writings. In fact, that's one of the things I've seen crop up in conversations about this comic Providence already, in the form of speculation. Some fans have essentially asked why people who create Lovecraft-based stories shy away from addressing these hard truths about Lovecraft's prejudices."Really? Because, maybe, once again
the inspiration is not the content and thus being inspired by Lovecraft doesn't mean to translate
the man in your tale or be obliged to address "hard truths" that simply are not there to address once you consider the tale alone? Most importantly (and sadly)
you just had an interview with Alan Moore where he addressed this point, and about a creative work where he addressed the same point across twelve issues, and you learned nothing?! What a waste of that time of your life (not ours thankfully).
I know how a young Lovecraft named his cat. I read about it everywhere. What I never found was someone pointing out how
cats were the creatures most beloved to Lovecraft. The Lovecraft gave that name to a creature he deeply loved could be the spark for an interesting debate about the complexities of his personality - and not necessarily a debate that ends well for Lovecraft. But, since, I guess, this is a remote possibility, it will never be held. "Pure sin" doesn't admit complexity.
Some final side notes:
Re: "Blade Runner". I mentioned the movie as part of the "fear of the other" examples. This doesn't imply that the other is evil in this case (or in Dick's original novel), but there is no doubt how, in both movies, humans fear replicants who develop emotions, free will and become indistinguishable from human beings.
Re: Leila Hanh. While writing this I put my nose into some other writings by her. I'm reading her analysis of Cthulhu and surrounding - and, up to the point I reached (one third in) she remains faithful to the texts. If she manages to pull through I'll recognise her effort.
Re: Jesus. He multiplied fishes. There is a dark clue in there.