Is saying “Author X held some hateful ideas, and here’s how they influenced his work; but he also had good dialogue, or characterization, or world-building [or whatever X did well], so his works are worth reading” giving a pass to the hateful ideas?
(I’m not thinking about Lovecraft so much as G.K. Chesterton, in this instance. )
Are you angry about Shakespeare getting a pass for Shylock?
Or Dostoevsky getting a pass for the racism in The Brothers Karamazov? (cite)
In short, how old, or how exalted, does an author have to be before we decide they’re immune from being dismissed for having odious views?
Of course, the Bible is more racist than anything else put together, but the authors get a pass because nobody today knows or cares what the fuck a “Midianite” was other than “Dem bad people what Moses SLEW RIGHT GOOD” and never admit it’s a glorification of genocide right in their designated source of all morality.
Or Robert E. Howard, for another example of a writer who was immensely influential in certain types of fiction, but whose writing is definitely something of a reflection of his particular time and place in rural Texas in the 1930s.
I don’t give a pass to Lovecraft.
He has had, and continues to have, a HUGE impact on pop culture. My high-school-age kids know about Cthulhu, and Lovecraft shows up all over the internet, and his influences run deep in all genres of popular fiction and gaming… so they wanted to know about him. And one of the first things we talked about was that even for his time, his views on race were absolutely abhorrent. My exact words were “While the dude has had a huge impact, and I absolutely love reading his works, the only way I can describe him to you is that he is a racist piece of shit.”
So you and I agree on that!
I don’t think we are talking about the same scenario. Odesio was complaining about Lovecraft’s racism being brought up frequently when people talk about his work. He quite specifically states:
It’s fine with me if someone brings up Lovecraft’s racism to examine how that influenced some of his work. But very often it’s, “OMG! H.P. Lovecraft is so racist! How can you read that?”
People ignoring Lovecraft’s abhorrent beliefs so they can enjoy his fiction guilt free is my definition of giving him a pass.
I’m no expert but wasn’t Shylock written to be both villain and victim? I don’t see why Shakespeare would need a pass for creating a complex character and allowing the audience to judge them according to their own set of morals. Now if Will kept slaves or slaughtered people on the weekends and folks constantly chose to overlook that, then yes, I would be angry that he gets a pass. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Dostoevsky and the bible* are so far outside of my wheelhouse I don’t think I can speak to those examples. Hopefully someone better versed in these areas can come along and offer an opinion.
*I do think Christianity has been frequently used to help perpetuate racism but I can’t speak to the example you provided.
I don’t think there should ever be a statute of limitations on judging those of the past on their abhorrent shit. I don’t think anyone should get a pass nor do I think their works should be dismissed. If a person’s creations are useful, entertaining or desired then I think we should enjoy those things while still being very cognizant of all the bad things that are associated with the person who created it.
IMHO to completely ignore the bad shit just so we can have a guilt free experience just smacks of willful ignorance and allows people like Cosby and Trump to operate freely with little to no recourse for those who wind up holding the shit end of the stick.
Shylock is a moneylending Jew (itself a trope so old it’s Medieval, and often used to justify further antisemitism) who signs a contract where the person he loans money to has to give him a pound of his flesh if he can’t pay. The play’s happy ending is when the heroes, Christians all, get away without paying the Jew anything and, as a bonus, the Jew is forced to convert to Christianity as well.
Dostoevsky portrayed the Turks in his novel as taking pleasure from torturing children.
The Midianites were destroyed because the Israelites had been having sex with Moabite women. Moses’ army first killed off the Midianite kings and grown men, sending Moses into a righteous rage that the boys and mothers were still alive. Therefore the Israelite army killed the mothers and boys, and kept the virgin women for themselves, and GOD was well pleased, and the next section is about dividing up shares of the goods stolen from the victims of the genocide, because NEVER AGAIN means DON’T BOGART THOSE BEEVES. (Numbers 31, for those following along in the Tent of Meeting with Phineas.)
Do you think people necessarily feel guilt when reading fiction by people who had odious views?
Do you think they should?
This is exactly how I approach things like this. Except the good but always remember the bad.
And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy all of the new Cthulhu memes kicking around out there…Why Choose the Lesser Evil?
I suspect I’ve been giving a pass to nearly every pre-WWII author, artist, or composer I’ve ever enjoyed.
They’re tiresome people to begin with, though. As long as they’re getting the words, meter, and inflection right I can usually deal with it. But I start stabbing people when the consistently get the lines wrong. Probably why I don’t hang out with those types anymore.
I’d be curious to hear from our UK people: what about fans of the very old punk rock bands like The Damned or The Stranglers? Not just ‘concert goers’ but people who’ve seen them play, like, a couple hundred times. Do they carry an unusual air of oddness about them?
Lovecraft was born in 1890 and you might be astonished to learn how many people back then were racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and sexist by our standards. I don’t say that to excuse his beliefs but to place them in the context of the era he was inculcated into. Like it or not, plenty of people throughout history who accomplished some very good things held some beliefs we would find abhorrent today.
What do you think you’re accomplishing by wrinkling your nose and declaring Lovecraft a racist? Am I honestly supposed to be surprised or outraged because a white New Englander who died in 1937 was racist? It doesn’t seem likely that your target audience will be overwhelmed by you revealing secrets of the universe and mercifully pass out before the true nature of our racist past will overwhelm them. So why are you doing it? If you wanted to talk about how his beliefs influenced his work, great. Are you just trolling?
As far as Lovecraft getting a pass, the dude’s been dead for more than 80 years now so there’s not a whole lot any of us can do to him. And he’s already had a profound influence on many people including Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro so anyone who is into horror is going to stumble across him at some point. Should we just ignore Lovecraft? Strike him from the records or something?
It doesn’t address the LEAST pathetic fanbase, but someone should reference the Geek Hierarchy, which denotes which fandoms look down on which other fandoms as more geeky than themselves.
The bottom, of course, is “People Who Write Erotic Versions of Star Trek Where All the Characters Are Furries, Like Kirk is an Ocelot or Something, and Then Put a Furry Version of Themselves as the Star of the Story”
At least one thing you can say about Lovecraft is that at the end he realized he had been a total racist, and repented.
That chart (buy the Brunching Shuttlecocks, BTW), is over 20 years old now… and still pretty accurate.
Did he? Some of his views may have softened a bit but I don’t know if he actually repented. But if it makes people feel better, it’s not like Lovecraft was ever able to make a living as a writer of fiction. He didn’t really become famous or appreciated under after he was dead.
It’s debatable just how enlightened and penitent he was, but by 1937 he was writing stuff like
Were you just trolling with your original question? Maybe I just prioritize differently than you do…
Yikes! I obviously didn’t pay enough attention to the end of Merchant. Yeah, no pass for Will on that one.
What is it you’re prioritizing? I don’t really care whether or not you like Lovecraft. It’s certainly okay if you don’t want to read his work because he was a racist, because you find his prose terribly written, or you just find him boring. But if two people start talking about Lovecraft and you bring up his racism what is it you’re trying to accomplish?