Cameron Kunzelman via Twitter recently reminded us all of a thing:
a reminder that @ZoeQuinnzel made “Hitler or Lovecraft” a long time ago and it is still great http://t.co/RlXkpzMZbj
— CMRN KNZLMN (@ckunzelman) January 25, 2014
Zoe Quinn’s Twine game is very good, and does precisely what I think she intends it to do — to demystify the strange fandom cult that Lovecraft accrues through a rigorous application of Godwin’s Law. What I think is great about the game is how well it forces one to evaluate their principles with regard to Lovecraft by demonstrating that he was not just “some racist” in the way that nearly anybody 100 years ago (or today, as a matter of fact) would be susceptible to systemically and structurally inculcated racism.
HPL was the sort of racist who went out of his way to be racist, to think up ways to be even more actively racist than any white person living in the 1920s was on a day to day basis. Obviously Lovecraft’s racism is something I’ve known about for a long time, due to my familiarity with his work. It’s something I’ve developed thoughts on, but weirdly enough it wasn’t until replaying Quinn’s game last night that they all came bubbling out in a multi-tweet series.
fyi i am really good at the “Hitler or Lovecraft” game and I am not sure what that says about me — Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
tweeted the dude whose personal website and twitter handle are both lovecraft references — Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
This was probably what did it, really. My realization was that I know Lovecraft so well that I can actually sense the man in his racist statements devoid of context — both through his prose, and through the logic of his racism, the assumptions that underpin his scientific materialist worldview.
I got a perfect score on the game.
as a kid spending early online years on Lovecraft message boards, it always bugged me that people would rush to defend Lovecraft’s racism
— Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
“Well he hated EVERYONE so it balances out” or variations thereof. bothered me. how is hating all people better than hating some people?
— Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
wasn’t until i was older that i had the vocabulary to describe this: there’s a certain type of privileged cynicism/nihilism/depair in horror
— Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
you can see this in Lovecraft but also eg Ligotti. very educated white men throwing up their hands and saying there’s nothing to fight for
— Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
this is why i’m always a little suspicious of the way Lovecraft crops up in certain contemporary speculative realist/neo-nihilist accounts
— Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
obv. SR/neo-nihilism are different beasts from HPL/L’s nihilism but we should still be aware of these foundations
— Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
though Houellebecq is his own special kind of terrible he’s also right in that Lovecraft’s horror is predicated on his astounding racism
— Michael L (@WarrenIsDead) January 25, 2014
But I suppose this is as good a point as any as to make clear my stance, however half-formed.
Horror is about being afraid — and I believe this is valuable. It was valuable to me when I fell in love with the genre, because I was a very anxious child in a very unhappy environment and stories about monsters told me that it was okay to be afraid, because there are indeed things to be afraid of.
The cosmic despair of someone like Lovecraft is a luxury. It is a result of his race and his socioeconomic class that he could survey all of creation, pronounce it barren and hostile, and then amuse himself by populating it with phantasmagoric projections of anyone who was different from and thus upsetting to him. For Lovecraft the decline of humanity was synonymous with the decline of a certain type of rarefied whiteness, inevitably a result of miscegenation and the embrace of the unknown.
If horror has an ethical dimension, then it is this: to remind us that there are things to fear. To remind us that we don’t always win. That many humans on this planet did not win: they were mowed down by regimes of exploitation, oppression, and hate far greater than they could comprehend.
@WarrenIsDead @heySMM It's telling that all these stories of scared white men are all about their worldview being disrupted.
— Andrea Harris (@SpinsterAndCat) January 25, 2014
@WarrenIsDead @heySMM So you aren't in charge/the world isn't what you thought it was/it's full of things that don't care about you.
— Andrea Harris (@SpinsterAndCat) January 25, 2014
@WarrenIsDead @heySMM Welcome to life for everyone not a white male.
— Andrea Harris (@SpinsterAndCat) January 25, 2014
“The problems of rich people” is the biggest genre of literature there is