Last month’s post here on cultural senility and its antidotes discussed the way that modern education
erases the past in order to defend today’s ideologies against the lessons of
history. While that post focused on the leftward end of the political
spectrum—the end that currently dominates what we still jokingly call “higher
education” in today’s America—the erasure of the past is just as common on the
other end of things. Between the political correctness of the left and the
patriotic correctness of the right, it’s hardly surprising that so many
Americans stumble blindly toward the future in a fog of manufactured ignorance,
sedulously shielded from the historical insights that could give them a clue
about the troubled landscape about them or the looming disasters ahead.
This week I’d like to discuss another aspect of that erasure
of the past. I’ll be concentrating again on the way it’s done on the leftward
end of things, because that’s the side that’s doing the most to deform American
education just at the moment, but I’d encourage my readers to keep in mind that
the issue I have in mind is a blade that has two edges and cuts both ways. That
issue? The censoring of literature from the past in order to make it conform to
the moral notions of the present.
It so happens, for example, that quite a few works of
American literature talk about people of color in terms that many people today find
extremely offensive. Now of course just as many works of American literature
discuss women, sexual minorities, and just about any other group of people you
care to name, other than well-to-do, college-educated, white male heterosexual
Anglo-Saxon Protestants, in highly insulting terms, but let’s focus on racism
for the moment. In American universities these days, it’s fashionable to insist
that such works should either be tossed into the dumpster, on the one hand, or
reissued in new editions from which all the offensive material has been
expurgated.
The justifications for these projects are appropriately
diverse. On the one hand, there’s the claim that members of groups that have
been subject to racial oppression should not be required to read books containing
language or ideas that justify the oppression they’ve experienced. On the other
hand, there’s the claim that people who don’t belong to those groups should not
be allowed to read such books, so that they don’t adopt the language or ideas
in question. Off in the distance lies the utopian vision of a society free of
racism, and eliminating the language and ideas that were once used to justify
racism is proclaimed as a step toward that goal.
Fair enough. What does history have to say about projects of
this sort?
As it happens, it has quite a bit to say about the results
of censoring the literature of the past to support the moral crusades of the
present, and in that connection I’d like to introduce you to a gentleman who
was once quite famous in his way, though nothing more than his last name
survives in our collective imagination these days. His name was Dr. Thomas
Bowdler; he was an English physician who lived from 1754 to 1825, and in his
retirement he put together a new edition of Shakespeare’s plays, “in which
nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions were
omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Yes, he’s the
guy who inspired the verb “to bowdlerize.”
He was on the cutting edge of one of the great cultural
projects of the 19th-century English-speaking world, the quest to eliminate
every reference to sex from public discourse. The era that would take its
enduring name from Britain’s Queen Victoria reacted against the relatively
freewheeling sexuality of the preceding Regency era by embracing a more than
Puritan horror of sex. This wasn’t
simply a pose; people in Victorian society were profoundly sickened and
offended by human sexuality and anything even distantly related to it. The
result was an era in which the legs—excuse me, “limbs”—of pianos in respectable
English homes had little starched cotton skirts put on them to cover their
overly erotic curves; in which the British ambassador bullied the Florentine
authorities into putting pantaloons on Michelangelo’s David, so that
lady tourists from the British Isles would not be scandalized by his state of
undress; and in which we all started referring to the male of the domestic fowl
by the newly minted term “rooster,” because what had previously been its normal
English name, “cock,” had the same genital connotations then that it does now.
The Victorian rejection of sexuality achieved the level of
cultural unanimity that today’s advocates of political correctness hope to
achieve for their rejection of racism. All through the public sphere, rigid
censorship of sexual content and strenuous denunciation of improprieties were
universal; reputations were ruined and careers ended by incautious utterances
or, in many cases, so much as a rumor of the same; across the English-speaking
world, public figures spoke approvingly of the triumph of modern morality over
the disgusting habits of the past, in much the same tones of self-satisfaction
you’ll hear these days at the American university of your choice.
There’s our comparable historical example. How well did it
work?
That’s where things get interesting. Human cultures are
governed by something not too different from Isaac Newton’s famous third law of
motion: “every action produces an equal
and opposite reaction.” The Victorian moral crusade against sexuality thus
generated its inevitable countermovement, and for most of a century—from the
1890s until the late 20th century—just about every avant-garde literary,
artistic, and cultural movement in the English-speaking world went out of its
way to reject Victorian sexual morality and glorify casual sex. In the mid-20th
century, that same reaction burst into popular literature; some of my readers
may remember the torrent of science fiction novels from the 1960s—Robert
Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is probably the most famous of
them—that proclaimed uninhibited orgiastic abandon as the next glorious step in
human evolution.
The difficulty that Thomas Bowdler and his many equivalents
had not foreseen was that erasing sex from literature and popular culture
doesn’t make people innocent and pure, it just makes them clueless. Growing up in respectable Victorian society,
young people were kept ignorant of every attitude toward sexuality except the
one hammered into them day after day by all the officially approved voices of
their society, and the result was that they had never learned to think
critically about the ethics of sex. If you raise lab rats in an environment
completely free of pathogens, and then turn them loose, quite often they’ll
drop dead from common diseases that a normally raised rat will shrug off with
ease, because they’ve never acquired resistance. Keep young people ignorant of sexuality, and
the resulting lack of resistance may not be as lethal but it’s every bit as
dramatic.
If the partisans of political correctness in today’s world
achieve their goals, in other words, one very likely outcome is a period up to
a century in length, starting some decades after political correctness becomes
the conventional wisdom of society, in which every avant-garde literary,
artistic, and cultural movement in Europe and North America will go out of its
way to reject political correctness and glorify racial prejudice. I doubt that
the professors who are advocating the political bowdlerization of literature
realize that this is where their efforts are leading, but then history has a
nasty sense of humor, and seems to delight in playing such tricks on those who
don’t pay attention to the lessons she has to offer.
Let’s go deeper, though. The strategy of bowdlerization
assumes that the best way, or even the only way, to discourage undesirable
expressions and ideas is to keep people ignorant of them. The history of
previous attempts at moral censorship shows that exactly the opposite is the
case: since it’s never yet been possible to get rid of every expression of an
undesirable idea, making people ignorant of that idea simply means that they’ll
react to it uncritically when they do finally encounter it—and while some of
those reactions will amount to uncritical rejection, there will also be cases
of uncritical acceptance.
What’s the alternative? The capacity for critical thinking
about whatever issue is in question—and that’s a capacity that can’t be produced
without exposing people to the whole spectrum of ideas that relate to the
issue, even those that happen to be offensive to modern sensibilities. For
reasons we’ll be exploring further on, and in future posts as well, literature
is particularly well suited to this kind of examination, and it’s precisely the
literature that modern politically (or patriotically) correct thinkers find
reprehensible that’s most valuable in this context.
A specific example will be more useful here than any number
of generalities, so let’s take a look at a writer who’s come in for quite a bit
of condemnation along the lines just sketched out: the American horror-fantasy
writer H.P. Lovecraft. Was Lovecraft a
racist? You bet; he proudly described himself using exactly that term in at
least one of his letters. (You could get away with saying that in America
between the wars. A significant fraction
of Americans described themselves as racists in that era, before Auschwitz et
al. made it too uncomfortably clear what kind of results then-popular notions
about racial superiority could have when put into practice. I mentioned
history’s nasty sense of humor earlier; one solid example is the fact that the
single most enduring impact the career of Adolf Hitler had on Western culture was
to make overt racism and antisemitism unfashionable in many circles.)
Lovecraft’s racism wasn’t simply a privately held opinion,
either. He put racist tropes into many of his stories. With very few
exceptions, the people of color who appear in his fiction fall into a handful
of classic stereotypes—the deferential drudges who “know their place,” the
mindless masses who can do nothing right, the sinister and swarthy figures who
deliberately serve the Wrong Side—if you know the pop culture of the time, you’ve
met them all. Multiracial people tend to get even worse press at Lovecraft’s
hands, with all the usual tropes present and accounted for; in particular, when
you find out that a group of people in a Lovecraft story are multiracial, you
can pretty much take it for granted that they’re in league with the tentacled
horrors who are out to devour mankind.
Now it’s entirely possible to make a case that Lovecraft
deserves to be read despite these unpleasant habits. That case has been made by
a range of gifted writers, who point out that Lovecraft is among the greatest
figures in 20th century horror fiction, and that the imaginative depth and the
extraordinary richness of the philosophical issues with which he deals justify
keeping him out of the dumpster to which politically correct opinion would
consign him. I think there’s a lot to be said for that case, but it’s not the
case I propose to make here. Rather, I’d like to suggest that if you want to
get a clear sense of the underlying psychology of American racism—an
understanding of the sort that will make it impossible for you to take racist
notions seriously ever again—a close reading of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft
is a very good place to start.
Let’s start by noting something that hasn’t always been
given its due in studies of Lovecraft: people of color weren’t the only people
who came in for abuse at his hands. His attitudes toward poor rural white
people, as set out in such stories as “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and “The
Lurking Fear,” were just as bigoted. In Lovecraft, with few exceptions, if
you’re not a well-to-do, college-educated white male heterosexual Anglo-Saxon
Protestant, you’re probably being demeaned.
For that matter, what gave the nonhuman critters at the
heart of his most famous stories their frisson of horror in his eyes wasn’t so
much that they’re hostile, as that they have the effrontery to exist at all.
Consider “Dagon,” usually considered the first of Lovecraft’s mature stories,
in which the narrator witnesses a huge, vaguely humanoid, vaguely froggy-fishy
creature worshipping at a monolith that’s been thrust up out of the ocean by an
earthquake. This sight drives the narrator to drug himself with morphine, and
when his cash runs out, to fling himself out the window to a certain death.
Why? The froggy-fishy thing isn’t overtly hostile; it
doesn’t even appear to notice the narrator, much less resent the intrusion on
its religious practices; but the mere fact that there’s another intelligent
species on the planet, one with its own religious and artistic traditions, is
apparently enough to unhinge the narrator’s mind so deeply that suicide is the
only way out. “I cannot think of the deep sea,” Lovecraft has his narrator say,
“without shuddering at the nameless things that may be at this very moment be
crawling and floundering in its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone
idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of
water-soaked granite.” Would he have
felt better if the nameless things were worshipping our idols and
carving our detestable likenesses?
With one extremely important exception, in fact, Lovecraft’s
whole approach to horror centers on trying to make questions of the sort I’ve
just posed impossible to ask. The unhuman creatures at the heart of his most
famous stories are dim incomprehensible shapes seen only at a distance,
revealed to the narrator of a story by a babbling, frantic description uttered
by some half-reliable figure unsure of what he’s seeing. Thus the closest the
reader gets to the mighty devil-god Cthulhu in Lovecraft’s most famous story,
“The Call of Cthulhu,” is a narrative written by one man and summarized briefly
in a narrative written by another—and that’s why the story works. Get any
closer to Cthulhu and you start to wonder what things look like from his
perspective, and then the whole thing falls to bits.
Lovecraft’s tentacled monsters and sinister cultists have
been accused of being two-dimensional, but that misses the point entirely. They
work as figures of horror precisely and only because they’re two-dimensional.
Give them a third dimension, an inner life, a name and a perspective of their
own, and they lose much of their capacity to terrify. If you’re going to
project your own fears onto something, one might say, the recipient of the
projection needs to be treated as a flat screen—a point that has more than a
little relevance to the prejudices that Lovecraft himself embraced.
The one time in his fiction that Lovecraft deliberately
broke with the approach just described is the exception that proves the rule. At
the Mountains of Madness, one of his three novels, features a team of
Antarctic explorers who discover archaic life forms, apparently long dead, in a
cavern beneath the ice. Shortly thereafter, radio contact is lost, and when
other members of the expedition go looking they find that the team and their
sled dogs have been torn to bits; the camp has been destroyed, and the critters
are gone. It’s classic horror—except that as the story progresses and two
members of the expedition follow the trail of the critters, it slowly sinks in
to the reader that the critters’ actions are precisely what a group of human
explorers, suddenly awakened in the far future and assaulted by bizarre alien
creatures, would have done.
It’s a stunning reversal of perspective that adds tremendous
force to the story, but Lovecraft can only maintain the horror by bringing in
another, even more ghastly monster, whose perspective is excluded from the
story by the usual means. It was also, if I may insert a personal note, one
inspiration behind my new novel The
Weird of Hali: Innsmouth, which stands Lovecraft on his head by
placing the tentacled Great Old Ones and their multiracial worshippers at
center stage, and letting them speak for themselves.
There is, though, another way in which the monster’s-eye
view enters Lovecraft’s fiction, and it’s deeply revealing. Over and over again
in his fiction—in “The Outsider,” “Arthur Jermyn,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” to name only the best examples—the revelation that
brings the story to a close is the discovery that the main character belongs to
the monsters’ side of the equation after all. The connection’s nearly always
via an ancestress who wasn’t what she appeared to be—this theme recurs so
obsessively in Lovecraft’s fiction that I frankly wonder if Lovecraft himself
knew or suspected that someone on the distaff side of his ancestry was merely
passing as white.
That sort of skeleton in the mental closet is far from
uncommon among racists, by the way. I’m thinking here, among many other things,
of a book I read years ago about the neo-Nazi scene in the United States. The
author commented in his introduction that practically every one of the neo-Nazi
leaders he interviewed claimed that some other neo-Nazi leader was really gay,
Jewish, or not entirely white. The author went on to note that in a good many
cases, those allegations turned out to be true. I hope I don’t have to remind
my readers, along similar lines, of the number of gay-bashing preachers who
turned out to have boyfriends on the side. Jung’s cogent discussions of the
habit of projecting the shadow are relevant here: we hate most what we can’t
tolerate seeing in ourselves, and our most savage denunciations are always
directed, in one sense or another, at a mirror.
You can hear that said in so many words, and it might or
might not sink in. Watch H.P. Lovecraft doing it, and if you read him closely
and pay attention to what he’s doing, it’s impossible to miss. He took his own
frantic terror of other races, blended it with the ethnic, cultural, and
economic divisions of a troubled time, and turned that bubbling mix of status
panic into some of the twentieth century’s most iconic horror fiction. In the
process, like all great writers—and I would argue that despite his problems,
Lovecraft was a great writer—he took his own idiosyncratic experience of the
world and universalized it, creating literature’s most unsparing portrayal of
the hatred and terror of the Other that every human being feels at one time or
another: a hatred and terror that is always directed at some part of ourselves.
Grasp that—and a close reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction,
again, is a good place to start grasping it—and you’ll never be able to listen
to racist cant again without instantly recognizing that the racists are
projecting onto the blank screen of another human life something they find
intolerable in themselves. For that matter, plenty of other modes of
denunciatory cant stop being plausible once you grasp the lesson Lovecraft
unintentionally teaches—and a good many of those modes of cant, dear reader,
are to be found on the leftward rather than the rightward end of the spectrum.
That’s what literature can do, when it’s not gutted of its power by
bowdlerization. That, in turn, is why
reading literature that upsets you, written from points of view with which you
disagree, is a crucial element in the kind of education that might just get
some of us through the profoundly troubled times to come.
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Homework Assignment #2