February 16, 2005
Psssssh.
Posted by nerdling | February 16, 2005 05:59 PM
To the detractors, from the defenders (regarding Salon's woefully awful piece on Lovecraft):
Laura Miller completely misses the point when it comes to Lovecraft. His critics revert to the same old Freudian bromides and armchair moralizing when addressing his work, but completely overlook what his fiction is about. Writing in a century where a world of perceived order and comforting old ways had given way to social chaos and mass destruction, and armed with the amateur astronomer's assurance that human life is essentially insignificant, Lovecraft created a much more honest art than many of the more celebrated writers of his time. Lovecraft wrote about monstrous, impersonal forces that were tearing apart the world he once took for granted. Watching his family fall apart because of disease and mental illness and seeing the genteel environment he knew was being bulldozed by modern, predatory capitalism, Lovecraft responded with what was for a man of his background primal screams. Don't forget that in socioeconomic terms, Lovecraft was nearly a Marxist. The fish-human hybrids in "Shadow Over Innsmouth" and the Chthulu cultists became monsters out of greed. Lovecraft did subscribe to some odious Eugenic ideas, but don't forget that he married a Jew, and was quite comfortable in the decidedly non-Anglo-Saxon pulp millieu of his time.
Better than any other writer of our own sorry-ass times, he also put the numinous, elemental power of nightmare on paper. To read his best stories is to enter his dreaming mind. Of course his stories are often disjointed and inconclusive -- so are dreams.
-- Chris Knowles
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