In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of “The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced from authorial intent and life influences — meaning is in flux, changing with each reader.[1] “We shall never know” motivations or “the writer’s interiority,” Barthes insists, it is only “language which speaks,” meaning “every text is eternally written here and now,” interpreted by today’s reader, full of empty enunciations without her.[2] Interestingly, this post-structuralist position has helped some individuals of the modern age reconcile their enjoyment of a work of art with their disdain for the artist, e.g. J.K. Rowling or R. Kelly. If it is the consumer who matters, it is easier to ignore vile things artists say or do, whether within texts or outside them. Readers of early twentieth-century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft may face similar struggles, as Lovecraft’s perceived anti-immigrant and racist narratives and language intrude upon, or are foundational to, highly engaging mysteries and terrors. (Here “perceived” is used not to question this interpretation, but to highlight the fact that a post-structuralist analysis would acknowledge “the destruction of every voice,” including Lovecraft’s, and the futility of seeking “ultimate meaning” and intent.[3] Future statements concerning Lovecraft’s racism have this caveat — the racism is found in the language through this reader’s interpretation. See footnote 31 for all concerns about contradiction.) Recent works — Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) — have something to say about this tension. These creations reconcile Lovecraft’s racism with his popularity by adopting, through delightful metatextuality, a post-structuralist literary perspective, a recognition that meaning is constructed by others and that Lovecraft’s intentions are hardly the end of the story. These works are representative of Barthes’ thesis — at least, that is the meaning this reader observes, which of course will not be contradicted by creator intentions.[4] How can one appreciate Lovecraft’s tales despite their exercise of power against people of color? Remember, our recent texts seem to say, the author is dead. In other words, Lovecraft’s works are incomplete until we experience them, until we actively give them meaning.[5] Let us therefore complete them.
LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is a retelling of Lovecraft’s 1927 “The Horror at Red Hook,” which closely associated immigrants and people of color with evil, crime, and decay.[6] “Persian devil-worshippers” and “squinting Orientals…swarmed” New York’s (nonfictional) Red Hook neighborhood, “a babel of sound and filth.”[7] There is “an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth,” “mongrels” and “evil-looking strangers” who kidnap white children for human sacrifice, “vicious criminals” among the “slums and dark foreign faces.”[8] (For those who know Lovecraft but not this side of him: how ironic it is to find the truth, gain hidden knowledge, about Lovecraft and find a monster!) Robert Suydam, a white man, taps into their occult element to remain young and be resurrected upon his death. The Ballad of Black Tom subverts Lovecraft’s monstrification of “The Other,” making a monster out of Jazz Age racism. Tommy Tester, a black street musician and hustler, endures everything from suspicious white glances to the police murder of his father, prompting him to join and then replace Suydam in a mission to conjure the elder god Cthulhu to destroy and remake the world.[9] Importantly, this work features and gives voice to characters of color, humanizing the residents of Red Hook, Harlem, and elsewhere (without denying the presence of crime[10]). Suydam alone appears responsible for the sinister esotericism. Stories of white kidnapped children were racist rumors.[11]
The Ballad of Black Tom is a rather close reflection of Barthes’ theory, as it takes one of Lovecraft’s stories and reveals a hidden story beneath it (this is also a delicious twist on the hidden worlds and unrevealed truths found in many of Lovecraft’s tales). LaValle does not attempt to make the stories fit perfectly together — for instance, in “Red Hook”Detective Malone witnesses many things in the tenement basement, from “headless moon-calves” to the reanimation of Suydam’s corpse, that are absent from the tenement basement scene in Black Tom.[12] But Lovecraft’s story was abstract and light on narrative, leaving plenty of room to flesh out the story with new characters, perspectives, motivations, and events while preserving its overall structure. LaValle’s approach to “Red Hook” is to suggest that the horrors were misunderstood, a white and prejudiced perspective altering who was responsible for the occult, whether kidnappings occurred, what people of color were like, and so on. This is stated fairly directly when Tommy discovers he has misjudged a Caribbean immigrant establishment called the Victoria Society, finding not a “den of crime and sin” where the “worst criminals were too afraid to go” but rather a peaceful spot for cards, music, and dinner.[13] “Had Tommy simply assumed terrible things about this wave of West Indian immigrants?”[14] Seeing the truth was “like learning another world existed within — or alongside — the world he’d always known”; he had been “too ignorant to realize it.”[15] Black Tom likewise reveals the secret world behind “Red Hook.” On the one hand, here Lovecraft the Author is called out for his personal bigotry, for not discovering his own hidden worlds in early twentieth-century America. On the other hand, “Red Hook” is treated as if it exists on its own, outside the author, a post-structuralist framing — the story is incorrect, despite what its creator might say. (And despite what certain characters might say, those who LaValle notes misremember the tale.[16]) Lovecraft’s dreadful intentions, his story elements even, can be disregarded at will. LaValle read “Red Hook” and found new meaning, knowing silenced perspectives and hidden worlds were somewhere beneath the surface. He gave it new meaning, made it more complete with his own interpretation, perhaps helping to reconcile his “conflicted feelings” about Lovecraft, to quote his telling dedication.
The metatextuality is in some ways different in Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, which contains creatures, objects, and so on from Lovecraft’s stories but is not a direct retelling à la LaValle. (Either way, one cannot help but think of Barthes’ depiction of a text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”[17]) In the world of Atticus Turner, a black veteran uncovering the mysteries of magic and confronting the monster[18] of 1950s American racism, Lovecraft existed and can be discussed directly. Atticus reads “The Call of Cthulhu” on the same night his father Montrose tells him he “did a little research on your friend Mr. Lovecraft.”[19] Atticus braces himself, knowing “something he enjoyed was about to be irrevocably spoiled,” and is handed a copy of Lovecraft’s 1912 poem “On the Creation of Niggers.”[20] Montrose does not believe his son should be reading Lovecraft, nor other problematic white authors.[21] Atticus resonates more with his uncle George. “I do love them,” George says of pulp stories of this nature, but one must “cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws… They do disappoint me sometimes… Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.”[22]“Overlook” is interesting word choice, especially in a book interested in confronting the bigotry of popular horror writers and the larger society. In any event, Atticus does not reject Lovecraft (his books appear among Atticus’ favorites and to-reads in the Braithwhite manor[23]), and continues to represent those who, despite conflicted feelings, enjoy his stories. Reconciliation, the text seems to suggest, is possible, acceptable.
While other observers have rightly noted that the frights and themes in Ruff’s text are not always particularly Lovecraftian, it is interesting to consider a world in which Lovecraft existed but so do the beasts and spells from his writings. Black Tom and Atticus (and companions) both use magic to confront racism, but the latter would be in a position to suspect that Lovecraft himself misunderstood the realities of “unheard-of powers.”[24] The Braithwhites and other white men of the Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn are responsible for the sorcery, and Atticus’ power is derived directly from his white ancestor.[25] This is as far from Persian devil-worshippers, and the framing of people of color as Other, as one could get. Characters of color of course use incantations and powerful objects not for evil but for survival in Jim Crow America, such as when Atticus avoids death at the hands of the Order or when Ruby experiences freedom and opportunity after transforming into a white woman.[26] Lovecraft Country also has moments where Lovecraft’s monsters feel less like mindless forces of apocalyptic destruction and more like partisans. A shoggoth devours Sheriff Hunt and other racist policemen but seems to leave Atticus, George, and Letitia alone.[27] It seems a happy coincidence that a box with a tentacled creature meant to kill Hippolyta is opened by a white farmer who is harassing her; the farmer’s head is consumed.[28] And while Winthrop’s ghost at first tries to kill Letitia, it eventually plays board games with her and seemingly agrees to help protect her home from white vandals, dragging them “screaming into the darkness.”[29] Magic — who is responsible for it, how people of color use it, whether its creatures have sympathies or can be tamed — is clarified. Again, Lovecraft’s fictional stories can be judged to contain truths and untruths. The world they attempt to describe is bigger than them, exists outside of them — Atticus can come to understand it better than Lovecraft, as can Ruff, as can we. The Author is not God, the sole arbiter of truth over his own work.[30] Ruff reinterprets Lovecraft’s monsters and sorcerers, while at the same time suggesting we need not feel that we must throw out artists who stab us in the heart. These activities are connected, the former aiding the latter.
This paper argued, while working to avoid contradiction,[31] that The Ballad of Black Tom and Lovecraft Country address the tension between Lovecraft’s racism and enjoyment of his work by utilizing post-structuralist ideas, imparting new meaning to Lovecraft’s lore. The awfulness can be undermined by completing and clarifying the stories, rejecting authorial intent. Ruff and LaValle have unleashed Cthulhu to murder the Author. Lovecraft’s works need not be rejected, as they are fictions rife with errors — the reader can dig beneath the surface to find more accurate fictions. Hidden worlds abound, and not just for lay readers. In the future, scholars might explore strange intersections, or at least tantalizingly close parallels, between the ideas of Barthes and Lovecraft himself. At first one jests that Barthes’ text as a “tissue of signs,” an amalgamation of prior ideas, writings, and language, sounds monstrous, while the reader bringing “focus,” “unity,” and “meaning” to the “multiplicity” of signs sounds magical.[32] But then things grow a bit more serious, with Barthes declaring we should avoid seeking “secret” or “ultimate meaning” in a text and Lovecraft having his characters who discover hidden truths go raving mad.[33] A colleague of mine sees suspicion of intellectuals and academics in Lovecraft’s works, part of this warning against pursuing certain knowledge; Barthes, though an intellectual himself, seems unimpressed with the “Critic,” who supposes he has all the answers because he has discovered the Author.[34] And can we, somehow, compare the post-structuralist’s “anti-theological activity” — to “refuse to fix meaning” is to “refuse God” — with the nihilism and sense of cosmic indifference in the horror writer’s texts?[35] The works inspired by Lovecraft may not be the only ones worthy of a post-structuralist reading.
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[1] John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 5th ed. (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2009), 126.
[2] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Music, Image, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 142-148. Retrieved from https://sites.tufts.edu/english292b/files/2012/01/Barthes-The-Death-of-the-Author.pdf.
[3] Ibid., 142, 147.
[4] It is not claimed that a Barthesian framing is intentional. See footnote 31.
[5] Storey, Cultural Theory, 126.
[6] H.P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook,” Weird Tales vol. 9, no. 1 (January 1927): 59–73. Retrieved from https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hrh.aspx.
[7] Ibid., parts 2, 3, 4.
[8] Ibid., parts 3, 5, 6, 7.
[9] Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2016), 12-13, 60-66, 121-134.
[10] Ibid., 73-74.
[11] Ibid., 136.
[12] Lovecraft, “Red Hook,” part 6. And LaValle, Black Tom, 119-134.
[13] LaValle, Black Tom, 15, 28-29.
[14] Ibid., 29.
[15] Ibid., 30.
[16] In Black Tom, Detective Malone begins to misremember the climactic events; his memory begins to align with Lovecraft’s story. See pages 138-140: “Malone began to doubt his own memory of the villain known as Black Tom. Hadn’t it really been Robert Suydam all along who’d guided those awful forces?” Lovecraft’s story is wrong; it is the product of forgotten truths. The newspapers likewise err in their reports, delivering a “Red Hook” version of the tale.
[17] Barthes, “Death,” 146.
[18] Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country (New York: Harper Perennial, 2016), 47-52 for example. On page 21, it is made clear a white sheriff is a “real monster.”
[19] Ibid., 14.
[20] Ibid., 14-15.
[21] Ibid., 12.
[22] Ibid., 13.
[23] Ibid., 65.
[24] Lovecraft, “Red Hook,” part 4.
[25] Ruff, Lovecraft Country, 75, 79, 86-87.
[26] Ibid., 102-103, 213-270, 369-370.
[27] Ibid., 52-56.
[28] Ibid., 208-209.
[29] Ibid., 129-130, 135, 137-141.
[30] Barthes, “Death,” 146-147.
[31] This paper may feel contradictory, but that is, hopefully, illusory. These points may offer some clarity.
1) This paper assigns meaning to texts and declares that meaning to be “You can assign meaning to texts.” This is consistent. (This paper has a post-structuralist flair and claims these novels do as well.)
2) To see a post-structuralist framing (or any framing) is not necessarily to claim this was the author’s intent. Perhaps it was, perhaps it was not. But here it is only observed meaning. It would indeed be quite a headache to argue intended meaning here (as the intended meaning would be that intended meaning is unimportant, cannot be known, and so on).
3) “How can one say these works are countering Lovecraft’s racism with post-structuralist ideas if post-structuralism questions whether Lovecraft’s racism (authorial intent and character) can be found in the text in any absolute way?” This is not a contradiction. According to Barthes, the reader is the interpreter, the one who gives meaning. If the reader sees racism, racism is present. (Recall the caveat in the opening paragraph.) If she then sees an anti-racist response with a Barthesian bent in another text, that exists as well. Within the mind of the individual, this is consistent. The reader, as Barthes observed, brings unity (see page 148).
[32] Barthes, “Death,” 147-148.
[33] Barthes, “Death,” 147. And Lovecraft, “Red Hook,” part 1. See also H.P. Lovecraft, “Dagon,” The Vagrant no. 11 (November 1919): 23–29. Retrieved from https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/d.aspx.
[34] See the school of economics, social clubs, and cafes where intellectuals and other “sinister men” might hang out in H.P. Lovecraft, “The Street,” The Wolverine no. 8 (December 1920): 2–12. Retrieved fromhttps://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/s.aspx. Robert Suydam in “Red Hook” is a man of letters and a man of study, an “authority on mediaeval superstition.” See also Barthes, “Death,” 147.
[35] Barthes, “Death,” 147. LaValle comments on Lovecraftian indifference on pages 49, 66, and 148 to frame racism as worse than Cthulhu.
