I was just about to start a hijack in this thread about the so-called ghetto status of Science Fiction writing based on something very minor in Cal Meacham’s most recent post. (#41) Cal makes the claim that Lovecraft has recently had some of his work come out in a critical edition, and that he seems to be being elevated above his pulp roots.
My first thought was, “Wait? There’s a new critical edition of Lovecraft’s works?” I had picked up the Arkham House editions when they first came out, but that was in the eighties, and I have trouble of thinking of that as recent for publishing history.
More seriously, I was thinking about the question: Can one describe the works of H.P. Lovecraft as literature?
And even now, I still don’t know the answer to that.
Part of the problem, of course, is that there is no single, universally accepted definition of what literature might be. To pick on the defenseless, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is considered by everyone I’ve known to have read it as a bombastic work with little to recommend it, other than the fact that it helped to launch a war. Historically significant, and still utterly banal. It wasn’t even the first work to expose many of the abuses of slavery. Just the most popular. But in spite of being seen as a poor read, there are reasons why it’s still going to be considered an important work of literature.
Lovecraft’s works are often jingoistic, racist, maudlin, confusing and the man was obviously being paid by the word. (And I think he felt he got a bonus for antique words that hadn’t been used for generations.) Like Cal says of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, Lovecraft breaks all sorts of rules that one hears about what good literature should be. His sentences are full of independent clauses strung together with commas or weak linking structure, he even will often change subject mid-sentence. His characters are, more often than not, caricatures of the finest cardboard. And when talking about persons who are not WASP they’re often even worse than that.
But his stories stick in my memory. He mixed the prosaic and the uncanny in ways that I believe to have been introduced by him. Who else could run down a list of the subway stops in Boston and have that evoke a sense of dread, panic and horror? It is my contention that his imagery and situations are so compelling in spite of his techniques, and does more to bring the reader into contact with the alien than many other writers have achieved, before or since.
And whatever the merit of his stories, they are, whether modern horror readers know it or not, part of the bedrock that writers like King or Koontz use when they’re standing on the shoulders of giants, to make their own contributions.
In the end, I find myself drawing the conclusion that H.P. Lovecraft, a writer who never had anything published outside the pulpiest of the pulps, did produce literature*. It’s flawed, of course, as is much literature. But still literature, with much to reward the reader beyond sleepless nights, and shattering dreams.
Anyone else care to comment?
*The only work I can name that I’d even consider a possible contender for being flawless is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.