Speaking of whitewashing Lovecraft

[james_davis_nicoll]

We'll talk about his racism this *one time* and then never speak of it again.

Comments

[mishalak]

"On one end of the spectrum, some would like HPL’s racism never brought up again, or at least, rarely."

I think this line from the article somewhat challenges your view of it. Though it is far from the most graceful dealing with a racist past in works you love. I think that still goes to Warner Brothers for the warning they put in front of some of their cartoons now.

"The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudice in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

[tandw.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between discussing and including. What I want to see in online references to Lovecraft, Bradley, Breen, Heinlein, Campbell, and a host of others, is that their issues are included/acknowledged in a way that makes it easy for casual researchers to find out about them. If that makes their fans upset, tough. Just because the fans have come to terms with (or ignored) the problematic features of their idols is no reason to hide them from everyone else.

[theidolhands.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Depends on the context. A discussion of Lovecraft's life and work in general needs to address the racism issue, as does a review of a story like "The Horror at Redhook" or "The Shadow over Innsmouth." But if someone writes about a Lovecraft story that doesn't exhibit his racism, like "Celephais," there's no obligation to bring it up.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

To my mind, there's a qualitative difference between a general reference (e.g., Wikipedia, ISFDB, and the like) and discussion of a specific work. It seems to me that in a discussion *of the author* it's always necessary to bring up or point to their problematic aspect(s), but you're right that it may not always be germane in a discussion *of a single story*. That said, no online discussion of a story by a particular author would be complete without a link to more about that author.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

That said, no online discussion of a story by a particular author would be complete without a link to more about that author.

Happens all the time. Unless the author is prominent, most readers don't know anything about the person who wrote the book they're reading, and even then they probably only know the author's other works and maybe the things mentioned in the bio at the end of the book.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

If we want an inclusive, egalitarian, constructed-on-consent world, we're going to need a new literary canon (because right now it's still impossible to study English literature without starting with the King James Bible and its highly problematic archaic world view) and while we're getting there we'd need to acknowledge that the canon is unstable. _Really_ unstable.

Which in turn means acknowledging that "good" is a response to, rather than a property of, the work. Which is most of the way to pitching the default authoritarian organizing principle right there.

Anybody really invested in the excellence of any extant body of work is going to have issues with that, and very plausibly dismissive issues.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

it's still impossible to study English literature without starting with the King James Bible

Not so.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Will you go for "including"? It's a long shadow on anything anybody with native-speaker fluency could just pick up and read.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Usually a survey of English literature begins in the 7th century, denominated Anglo-Saxon, a/k/a Old English literature, to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066. "Cædmon's Hymn", composed between 658 and 680, is considered the first work, at least according to the Venerable Bede, 672 - 735. In the timeline even Beowulf is late, composed between the 8th and early 11th centuries. The King James Bible, 1604 - 1611, is still some centuries down the line.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

And right at the start of Modern English.

Uton we hycgan hwær we ham agen,
ond þonne geþencan hu we þider cumen;

Is a different language than the one we're communicating in now.

Of fustian he wered a gypon
Al bismotered with his habergeoun,
For he was late ycome from his viage,
And wente for to doon his pilgrymage.

Isn't the language we're speaking now, either, even if it's closer. If the vowel shift going on now and some of the syntactical shifts keep going we're going to lose the Early Modern, too, as things that can be absorbed by diligence in reading.

So, sure, the fusion of germanic heroic ideals and christianity is important background, but I think that's kinda my point; the expectations we've got about shapes of stories don't escape King James. (Or Piers Plowman, or Paradise Lost.) Knowing how those got there doesn't really help you get out at this end, into some other world where the stories don't presume fundamental ordering principles or inherent legitimacy of authority or prescriptive normalcy.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

I don't see how you could redefine the literary canon to not include the King James Bible. No matter how ponderous and boring it is, you can't get around the fact that it was a central text for English culture for centuries and has a profound impact on literature even today. That'd be like trying to understand the history of science without ever bringing up Newton.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

History of english letters, sure; it's got to go in there.

Current "these are the stories we declare important"? Doesn't have to be in there. It'd be a major great wodge of work to have the stories exist outside it's shadow, but perhaps possible and (I think) entirely worthwhile to try.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Whether a particular book is "important" or not isn't something for you or I to decide. It's a product of our culture as a whole. All we can do is look at what books have emerged as important and try to identify both the inherent qualities and societal forces that made it that way, and maybe try to predict which modern books will become important in the future (though that's a good way to look silly in ten years time when the book's out of print and nobody remembers it).

And however you cut it, the King James Bible is important.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I grew up with the King James. Much of it is anything but boring, particularly the more history one knows.

As well, its influence on English language writing, rhetoric and oratory is so extensive in both Britain and the U.S, and presumably Canada too, one needs to know it for the reference, to fully appreciate what's been written and speechified.

Even now, with all the extreme rapturists and born agains, they are still taking imagery for the making of war and end of the world, us and them, from it, even though they have their own versions of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, now.

[realinterrobang.livejournal.com]

Yes, this. I also don't see what's so difficult about looking at a particular work as a product of its time, while acknowledging that modern people think, act, and behave differently. It seems to me that Greydon is advocating bit of a New Critical approach, and I'm more of a historicist, to be honest. I also don't see why an entire canon needs to be built on works that conform to modern political and aesthetic sensibilities, either; that kind of smacks of Zhdanovism.

I can read The Merchant of Venice and still hate antisemitism.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

The New Criticism was very popular among the Agrarians, and southern scholars and writers generally. See: John Crowe Ransom.

It worked very well with the revisionist histories of slavery, secession and the Civil War.

Love, C.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

"Never speak of it again"?

Yeah, right. And for their next miracle...?

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

The next miracle will be the discovery of a simple process that everyone agrees on to categorize any given story as SF, fantasy, horror, or other.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

"Hey, Mr. Knight, could you come over here and point at some things for me ?"

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Not only was Thomas Jefferson a racist, "but he owned slaves." So let's just mention that once and once only, and then move on to the important parts, which are his fittingly adulated places in the history of the United States.

Because, in no way should his place in and effect on the history of the United States be considered in the light that he formulated his very own self, and put into writing, the principles of white supremacy and racism in order to justify the institution of slavery in the United States. Seen in the very best light possible he created the points of the argument that while slavery isn't a good thing for white people there simply is no way to end it, short of ethnic cleansing -- which is what "colonization" was the buzz word for. See -- Notes on Virginia (which, btw, he never intended to have seen outside of a very people in France). But oops, one of those people he gifted it to, basically culled it from his shelves, the book got translated and published in Britain and then got to the U.S. too.

Love, C.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Agreed. The argument tends to go kind of like this:

"But Jefferson was a very complex person!"

"Yes. And you are refusing to address his complexity."

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

O you! You're forgetting that the only role for women in the middle ages was to be raped and / or be prostitutes. History tells us so.

O, and there were no people of color in Europe until, o 1950 or something.

Love, C.

[brooksmoses]

Vaguely apropos of which, hrj has been doing a rather informative series of writing up notes from various academic works that "would be useful in grounding a fictional lesbian character in the context of historic human experience," as she puts it. Not necessarily only things about historic lesbian women per se, but things about the spaces in which they would have lived. The introductory post is here.

I'm finding it well worth reading.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Neat! Thanks.