The Serpent's Wisdom

So lately my interest has been piqued in the Cthulhu mythos. With its emphasis on bizarre geometry, nameless unspeakable horrors lurking just outside the edges of one's line of sight, and the concept of cosmic secrets known to ancient civilizations and since forgotten, it seems almost tailor-made for a nerd like me.

But as I re-read the seminal story "The Call of Cthulhu" over the past few days, I began to perceive a rather different set of unspeakable horrors lurking just outside of sight.

I've reached a point where everything I listen to, everything I read, everything I watch, gets filtered through a certain perceptual bias. It's impossible for me to not notice references to social power or imbalance. By the time I was done reading the story I was forced to conclude that it was about the "evil danger" of people of color.

"About" is a funny thing. I've written previously that I believe that the meaning of an utterance or artistic work is "primarily that reaction which is intended to be provoked by the work's creator". But I think that I have to include in that any agenda of which the author is only subconsciously aware. IOW, whether it was Lovecraft's intention or not to produce a work intended to provoke fear of people of color, this is what he produced, and it is not accidental, it is not something one "reads into the text now 91 years later."

As an aside to illustrate the point of "about", and just because it's on my mind today, and just to prove that I wasn't kidding when I said I am always viewing the world through this lens, consider the 1985 video to "Some Like it Hot" by the Power Station. The model featured prominently in the video is Caroline Cossey, also known as Tula; the video contains so many Terrible Tranny Tropes that it's practically "about" the fact that she is transsexual, though the 'obviousness' of this is only obvious to me in hindsight.

Anyway, back to Lovecraft and his story. It's not enough to say that the story draws a contrast between civilized, rational, yet unsuspecting white people, vs. violent and savage, yet knowing of the hideous horrors lying at the ocean floor, people of color. It's not enough that several times he refers to people of color as "mongrels," or suggests that the cultists are barely human, or avers at one point that to kill them would be an act of mercy. The story hangs its entire bid for effectiveness on the notion that voodoo and other "primitive" religions are evil and dark. Lovecraft presumes the reader is white and expects him or her to be complicit in his view that wherever we find people of color we might find the violent members of an ancient, savage, global cult. The cult and its secrets live "out of sight" in dark jungle type places until the beacon of white anthropology shines on it and reveals the terrible secret.

Furthermore, what of the "unspeakable horrors" this cult may usher in? What of the bizarre, otherworldly geometry in which they dwell? The popular interpretation is that Lovecraft was an anti-modernist concerned about what terrors might be ushered in by Twentieth Century science. In the post-atomic age this does not seem an unreasonable interpretation; indeed it almost seems to cast Lovecraft as a prophet. I'm inclined to suspect, though, that what Lovecraft feared was the thought of a populist uprising in the non-white or even the Eastern European nations. Perhaps the "otherworldly geometry" he feared was the upheaval of the Newtonian clockwork universe and the safe hegemony of the European colonial world order that proclaimed it.