World Fantasy Award winner Nnedi Okorafor writes about contemporary authors having to wrestle with the fact “that many of The Elders we honor and need to learn from hate or hated us.” Winner Sofia Samatar, who wanted the statuette changed, exclaimed, “I am not telling anybody not to read Lovecraft. All of that said, however, it’s impossible to deny Lovecraft’s influence on horror and fantasy, and almost no one has done so, even among those writers who most vehemently lobbied to retire his image or who found his presence deeply troubling. And Fitzgerald had the critical distance to satirize fanatical bigotry like Lovecraft’s in The Great Gatsby‘s Tom Buchanan. Scott Fitzgerald lived during Lovecraft’s time. It goes far beyond casual “man of his time” attitudes (and increasingly, of our time). Lovecraft’s xenophobic loathing begins to seem like an almost pathological hatred and fear of anyone different, and of any kind of change in the nation’s makeup. As Houellebecq said, it is racism itself that raises in Lovecraft a ‘poetic trance.’” China Miéville, for example, writes “I follow in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred. Were these simply private political opinions and nothing more, there might not be sufficient reason to read them into his work, but as several people have argued convincingly, Lovecraft’s opinions form the basis of so much of his work.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |