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Tuesday, April 23, 2019

THE READING RHEUM: THE RATS IN THE WALLS (1924)


                         
SPOILERS (story’s ending discussed herein.)

As I’ve stated elsewhere, there’s no doubt that H.P. Lovecraft was what I term a “passive racist," though the meaning I give the phrase probably differs strongly from the way more ideological types use it. HPL indubitably took pleasure in believing his Anglo-Saxon heritage to be superior to most if not all other ethnicities, even those that shared roughly the same skin coloration. I call his racism “passive,” however, because I’m aware of no evidence of his taking either private or political action to marginalize other ethnicities, and by this standard his racism largely seems to come down to a lot of  “big talk” between Lovecraft and his intimates.

His stories and poems, however, stand as the great exception. It would be foolish to see HPL’s stories of horror and fantasy to be about primarily about racial matters, even with a story like the one considered here. For modern audiences “The Rats in the Walls” has the reputation of being one of the author's most offensive stories, since its protagonist Delapore constantly flings about a forbidden epithet in the form of his black cat’s name, “Nigger-Man.” Given the fact Delapore owns more than one cat but only mentions the name of the black one in the course of the story, it’s not unreasonable to imagine HPL taking a childish joy in maligning persons of the Negro race. At the same time, though, Delapore—one of the few HPL narrators with a detailed background— may be displaying a particular animus toward black people in keeping with said background. Though the bulk of the story takes place in the 1920s, Delapore as a child witnesses the burning of his family’s Virginia plantation during the American Civil War. Aside from the name Delapore gives his cat, though, black people play no role in “Rats,” except for a brief mention that one of Delapore’s distant relatives left the family, allied himself with Negroes and became a “voodoo priest.”



Though HPL was not above writing stories suggestive of racial miscegenation, “Rats” is not one of them. Delapore, though born in America, is aware that his English forbears have a vaguely sinister reputation, dating back to the Roman era. In his middle years, Delapore,  having lost his wife to childbirth and his only child to World War I, travels to England to reconstruct Exham Priory, the ancient dwelling place of his family, originally known as "the De La Poers." During this project Delapore hears many horror stories about his ancestors, who are deemed as the scions of evil by local villagers. His own research suggests that the de la Poers were the result of religious rather than racial crossbreeding, combining the traditions of Druidic sacrifice with the Roman cult of Cybele. (For some reason, in HPL’s world Cybele’s forbidden rites have nothing to do with castration and everything to do with cannibalism, but then, cannibalism was one of HPL’s preferred sources of horror.)  One legend from antique times claims that the locals suffered a plague of rats proceeding from Exham Priory, and once Delapore moves into his new digs, imagine what he starts to hear scuttling around in the walls…

Delapore eventually learns the dread secret of the de la Poers, which involves the use of rats to devour dead bodies, and even some suggestions that the family was acquainted with at least one Lovecraftian demigod, Nyarlathotep. This being, to whom HPL gave the epithet of “the crawling chaos,” was a particularly appropriate choice. There’s no doubt that at the time of the story’s writing, HPL would have considered his branch of the Caucasian race to be at the top of the heap, so he isn’t undermining his belief-system by showing the degradation of the de la Poers. But it’s significant that, in contrast to ideologically racist writers of the same period, such as Thomas Dixon, in HPL’s world being white is not any sort of protection from degeneration. Chaos is everywhere in HPL’s world, and neither the right skin-color nor the right religion is any protection.

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