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supergee

Jess Nevins asks: Does H. P. Lovecraft belong in the canon?

Crossposts: http://supergee.livejournal.com/3006879.html

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From:

laughingrat

Oh my god, is that a new icon?

EDIT: OK but more to the point, I'm glad someone's actually putting out a critical edition, because S.T. Joshi, while dedicated and brilliant and knowledgeable, was anything but objective in his approach. It's nice that someone's actually addressing the racism, for once.

Has anyone ever talked about the near-pathological sexism, either? It's not as bad as with some authors because it shows in a complete absence of female characters, but I think I've read all of Lovecraft's non-ghost-writing output by now and I don't remember a single female character that actually, you know, does anything. The one in "The Thing on the Doorstep" is revealed to not really be female after all, at least spiritually and mentally. That seems weird even by pulp standards.

Edited Date: 2013-05-09 12:17 pm (UTC)

From:

supergee

I think I did a GIP when I found the icon.

I'm just as happy I don't get to decide who's in the canon because I am so ambivalent about HPL (and others): the vision, but also the hates and the prose. I think the sexism was endemic to the time. There are fewer women in his work than in other pulp writers because nobody gets rescued.

From:

laughingrat

Haha, yeah. The invisibility, was it really that bad everywhere tho? But then, as you say, nobody gets rescued. It's not that kind of writing. And he was possibly weird about sex, personally anyway, so it's not like he'd necessarily want to write about anything to do with romance?

I don't mind the prose, even though it's hard to wade through. Like the critic, I feel like the stilted language actually makes the weird stuff weirder, like the words are trying to pretend that everything's normal and rational and okay, which highlights just how alarming the events are.

From:

supergee

Also, the racism has been dealt with before. 50 years ago we thought of him as like Pound: a mixture of great stuff and sick hates. The de Camp bio certainly covered his many ethnic hostilities.