Curriculars: The Relative Weird, Part Four—Genre as Metaphor
Lovecraft Country
To quickly recap: what started as a single long post exploring the second of my ad hoc categories of the Weird—the Relative Weird, sandwiched between the Banal and Utopian—turned into three posts when it was getting overly long, and now that the third itself got too long, into four. So … this is part four.
This is how my mind works, for good and for ill. I’m congenitally digressive, which has the frequently salutary effect of going down fascinating rabbit holes, and the just-as-frequent effect of getting lost in a labyrinth of my own making. Sometimes both at the same time. This is why, though I am writing all the time, I don’t often finish things. It is also why, in my attempts at writing fiction, short story ideas quickly become novellas, which then bloat into novel-length concepts. And why I rarely finish things on that front too.
But! Through the expedient of writing my larger ideas in manageable chunks and publishing those chunks as digestible posts rather than in long ponderous essays, I can at least maintain a respectable regularity in this space. I aim for one post a week. Well, I aim for averaging one post a week. Which I have almost managed since starting The Magical Humanist! If I can get up one more after this before the end of the month, I’ll be there. Fingers crossed.
ANYWAY. If you’re just joining me now, the first of this series was an ironic reflection on how the current anti-DEI policing of certain American universities would basically obliterate about 80% of my course content from this past term. I then started talking about my fourth-year seminar on The American Weird by way of explicating that assertion. Part two was a close look at Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom, which is a rewriting of H.P. Lovecraft’s egregiously racist story “The Horror at red Hook” from the perspective of a Black protagonist. And part three was a characteristic digression of the useful sort, in which I talk about the relationship of genre and mythology and then get into the culture wars that have raged over policing genres’ boundaries over the past ten-fifteen years.
And that brings us to this post, in which I discuss Lovecraft Country, both the novel and the HBO series.
In my American Weird class, after The Ballad of Black Tom, we did Lovecraft Country—the novel by Matt Ruff, as well as a handful of episodes from the HBO television series. Both the novel and the series employ genre as a metaphor: the main character1 Atticus is a young Black man living in Chicago in 1955, whose love of pulp fiction by the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lovecraft (among others) is an ambivalent one. It is a love shared by his uncle George and disparaged by his father.2 Atticus and George are drawn to the stories of pulp and genre authors for their fantastic visions and the promise of adventure and escape but are also often wounded by the stories’ elemental racism and their depictions of nonwhite characters. “They do disappoint me sometimes,” George says of the authors he loves. “Sometimes, they stab me in the heart” (14). Like Nnedi Okorafor, Atticus is forced to confront Lovecraft’s particularly pernicious racism when he reads the same odious poem she did—thrust upon him with no small amount of glee by his father.
Like the texts discussed in my first two instalments of this series, Lovecraft Country in both its literary and televisual versions depicts the relative nature of horror: as Atticus and his family and friends are drawn into a series of Lovecraftian adventures, it is always in question whether the various supernatural horrors they encounter are worse or more dangerous than what they experience being Black in mid-century United States. The novel and the series comprise interesting counterpoints, especially considering that Matt Ruff, as a White author, necessarily engages with the story as something of a thought experiment. This is not to disparage Ruff’s writing talent or his capacity to create sympathetic and compelling characters, but to observe that the novel sets itself obvious guardrails. One senses while reading where Ruff tactfully doesn’t press his luck. The series, by contrast, is run by Misha Green and executive produced by Jordan Peele; it has no such guardrails and leans in where Ruff chooses discretion.3
To go back to my earlier observation, what do I mean by thought experiment? I mean precisely the framework of genre as metaphor. Lovecraft Country isn’t strictly speaking a novel so much as a collection of interlinked stories, each of which pair a Lovecraftian or Weird convention with historical conditions of systemic racism. The first and longest story, “Lovecraft Country,” sets the table by introducing us to Atticus Turner and Montrose, his Uncle George and Aunt Hippolyta and their son Horace, Atticus’ childhood friend Letitia, and Letitia’s older sister Ruby. This first story also stages this extended family’s first encounter with the Braithwhites, a venerable old clan of White sorcerers who lead a secret magical society called the Order of the Ancient Dawn. The Order is determined to open a portal and assume a transcendent power that had annihilated the Order’s founder Titus Braithwhite over a century earlier because of an error made in the rite. Atticus, as it turns out, is related to the Braithwhites through his late mother, whose ancestor had been enslaved—and as it turns out, impregnated—by Titus. This blood relation makes Atticus magically valuable to the current Braithwhite brood and their mystical circle.
I won’t go more into the story’s details than that, as I don’t want to spoil anything for those who haven’t read the novel or seen the series.4 I’m also more interested with how the novel and series engages with key themes. Blood is a potent metaphor, and one often crucial to gothic horror—not just for the gore factor, but the ways in which it plays into occult ritual (the blood of a virgin being, for example, a cliché of the convention). Blood both literal and metaphorical was similarly central to pseudoscientific understandings of race that were pervasive through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The notorious “one drop rule” in antebellum America dictated that even a single drop of “African blood” in an individual designated them as Black and therefore excluded from the rights afforded Whites, and subject to enslavement in the southern states.5
Atticus’s blood relation to the Braithwhites thus collapses the historical into the conventions of genre. Though Lovecraft’s fiction frequently features racist caricatures of nonwhite people—again, almost always as metonymic vessels of the Weird—a critical mass of these characters are figured as foreign interlopers. He has little to say about Black Americans per se, and nothing (so far as I have seen) to say regarding the history Africans in America and their enslavement. Rather, his allusions to American history tend to fall into two categories: thematic and atmospheric evocations of New England’s Puritan era,6 and nostalgic figurations of the Colonial Era. An architecture enthusiast, Lovecraft frequently communicates this nostalgia through his descriptions of buildings dating to the eighteenth century. “The Horror at Red Hook” is characteristic of this tendency. Though he describes the present-day state of the Brooklyn neighbourhood as “a maze of hybrid squalor … with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves” and populated by “a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements,” a “tangle of material and spiritual putrescence,” from which “blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky,” one can discern traces of a happier, whiter past in the buildings set above the harbour:
Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there. (119)
Colonial era architecture comes to function as Lovecraft’s shorthand for a utopian past. Robert Suydam, the would-be White sorcerer at the center of the story, represents a link to the colonial origins of New York City. Indeed, the name “Suydam” is that of an actual historical Dutch family that settled Brooklyn in the 1600s.7 The now-dilapidated Suydam mansion is adjacent to the “steepled and ivy-clad” Flatbush Dutch Reform Church,8 “with its iron-railed yard of Netherlandish gravestones.” The history of Dutch colonialism cited here functions as a signifier of the Northern European whiteness with which New York was once identified, in contrast with its modern iteration as a city for which Lovecraft was unstinting in his loathing. Old New York, he is at pains to remind us, was once New Amsterdam (why they changed it? He can’t say).
All of which is by way of illustrating Lovecraft’s whitewashed historical sensibility, which precludes the kind of awkward paternities intertangled with actual American history—epitomized by the biracial scions of Thomas Jefferson and allegorized in Lovecraft Country by Atticus’s discomforting connection to the Braithwhites. Just as the fraught genealogies effected by the brutal and exploitative fact of slavery make race an inextricable element of the American story, so too Atticus and his extended family cannot easily extricate themselves from their Lovecraftian entanglement with the Braithwhites.
An irony that both the novel and series leave implicit is that when the escape Atticus seeks in his reading habits presents itself as a literal adventure, it is the last thing he or anybody else actually desires. Nor is either version of Lovecraft Country coy about acknowledging, through Atticus, the Lovecraftian elements: the very title derives from Atticus’s description of the part of Massachusetts they initially venture as “Lovecraft country,” i.e. the fictional constellation of towns in which Lovecraft sets many of his stories. The letter from Montrose that brought Atticus home and precipitates the action mentions the town of Ardham—which Atticus misreads as Arkham, the most significant of Lovecraft’s imagined places.
Aside from Atticus’s self-reflexive acknowledgements of specific Lovecraftian elements, both the novel and the series are organized into stories/episodes corresponding to, by turns, Lovecraftian, Weird, or gothic narrative conventions: haunted house, magical book, body horror/body shifting, astral and multidimensional travel, haunted/ possessed objects, archaeological adventure, and of course the overarching presence of an ancient occult society. This organizing principle offers a veritable showcase of genre, which has the simultaneous effect of highlighting the conventions and formulae of generic expectations, while also defamiliarizing them with the simple intervention of making the protagonists Black in traditionally White stories.9 In making genre such an obvious trope, the novel draws a close parallel between the ways in which genre narrowly circumscribes the narrative possibilities of its stories and the ways race circumscribes individuals’ agency in Jim Crow America.
At the end of the novel, Caleb, the lone remaining Braithwhite, finds that his plans have been thwarted by Atticus and his family and friends. Frustrated, powerless, and infuriated that these people he’d meant to exploit to his own ends have outsmarted him, he attempts to threaten Atticus: “No matter where you go, you’ll never be safe. You—” But he pauses, confused, as they all burst into laughter.
“Oh, Mr. Braithwhite,” Atticus said finally, wiping tears from his eyes. “What is it you’re trying to scare me with? You think I don’t know what country I live in? I know. We all do. We always have. You’re the one who doesn’t understand.” (375)
REFERENCES
Lovecraft, H.P. “The Horror at Red Hook.” The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S.T. Joshi. Penguin, 2004.
Ruff, Matt. Lovecraft Country. HarperCollins, 2016.
NOTES
Insofar as there is a main character, at any rate—Lovecraft Country is an ensemble piece, with the novel more of a collection of interconnected stories, each of which focus on different characters in a pair of families and their friend circle. Atticus functions as something of a focalizing character, at least thematically.
Atticus’ father Montrose—played in the series by the late and lamented Michael K. Williams, aka Omar from The Wire—with whom Atticus has a fraught relationship, disparages his reading choices for its authors’ racism, but also out of a certain literary snobbery. Montrose is himself a reader, but of the autodidact variety, preferring the Great Works out of a sense of self-improvement (we see him, for example, reading Tolstoy). I’ve always enjoyed this subtle ironic dig at Montrose’s sensibilities, in seeing the obvious racism at work in Lovecraft but missing the cultural imperialism represented by the Westen canon as the apotheosis of capital-C Culture.
Not always, it should be noted, to its benefit. The series is erratic and makes some big swings, which at worst are by turns baffling or cringeworthy, but at best make for some unequivocally brilliant television.
The first two episodes of the HBO series hew quite closely to the novel; after that, the departures become greater and more frequent. As I comment in the previous footnote, part of this is an effect of the show’s creators working without Ruff’s guardrails and taking bigger swings.
An exception to the one drop rule was Louisiana, which established instead a hierarchy of race based on how much Black “blood” one had. In descending order of status, one Black great-grandparent made you an octoroon; one Black grandparent a quadroon; and one black parent a mulatto. Though this system afforded people of mixed race relatively more agency, and saw itself as more enlightened, it functioned according to the same racist logic and ultimately served to reinscribe narratives of racial superiority and inferiority.
I hate to give it short shrift here because it’s one of the more interesting aspects of Lovecraft’s world-building, but to sum it up briefly: Lovecraft’s particular species of cosmic horror can be read as a modern revision of the Puritan understanding of God’s awesome and pitiless power, such as articulated in Jonathan Edwards’ notorious sermon “Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God.” The key difference between the Puritan God and Lovecraft’s chthonic pantheon is that the latter (1) are actively indifferent to humanity, and (2) offer no prospect of salvation.
S.T. Joshi notes that “Many Suydam graves are in the churchyard of the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church in southeast Brooklyn. There is a Suydam place and a Suydam Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, northeast of Red Hook” (Dreams of the Witch House 424-425n).
“[A] magnificent specimen of 18th-century architecture at the corner of Flatbush and Church Avenues in Brooklyn. [Lovecraft] first visited the site in September 1922” (Dreams 425n).
While also, it is important to note, not ever introducing sympathetic White characters, much less the tired cliché of the White Saviour.