THE READING RHEUM: THE TIME MACHINE (1895)

In my 2017 essay TREES, MEET FOREST (GOD), I wrote about the problems of focal presence in H.G. Well's TIME MACHINE:

I don't consider "the Time Traveler" to be the star of Wells' TIME MACHINE, and from one standpoint I might teem "time itself" to be the star. However, the bulk of the narrative does center itself upon the Eloi/Morlocks period of future-history, and so it's possible to see that one period as the focal presence of the Wells narrative.

Primarily I did a quick re-read of the Wells novel to compare story-points to those of the 1960 film adaptation. I won't attempt a full review as such, but it's interesting that Wells' hero shows no interest in traveling to the past, like his rough progenitor in Twain's CONNECTICUT YANKEE, but only to two future periods: that of the Eloi and Morlocks, and that of the Earth's final death-spasms. Both visits are designed to undermine the narrator's naive belief in progress and human perfectibility, but the doleful end of the world functions almost as a coda to Wells' message of utter degeneration, rather than as a source of conflict in itself. The novel's main conflict revolves entirely around the seeming inversion of Marx's "rise of the proletariat," wherein the old ruling class simply degenerates into bland imbecility and the working-class becomes content to rule from the underworld, turning their fellow humans into breeding-stock. In contrast to the protagonist of the 1960 film, once the Traveler comes to a full realization of humankind's ultimate fate, he takes no action to change the dominant power-structure despite his aversion to the Morlocks. Perhaps Wells felt that the Eloi deserved their fate due to their ancestors' abuse of power. Certainly the narrator shares Wells' general disinterest in violent conflict, which would crop as a outright philosophical stance in 1933's THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME:

What has happened during the past three and a half centuries to the human consciousness has been a sublimation of individuality. That phase is the quintessence of modern history. A large part of the commonplace life of man, the food-hunt, the shelter-hunt, the safety-hunt, has been lifted out of the individual sphere and socialized for ever. To that the human egotism has given its assent perforce. It has abandoned gambling and profit-seeking and all the wilder claims of property. It has ceased altogether to snatch, scramble and oust for material ends. And the common man has also been deprived of any weapons for his ready combativeness and of any liberty in its release. Nowadays even children do not fight each other. Gentleness in difference has become our second nature.

It would seem that by 1933 Wells actually came to feel that there was something to be said for all of humanity evolving into Eloi, as long as there were no recrudescent savages.

I should also note in passing that I recently discovered a passage in a 1935 H.P. Lovecraft essay, "Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction," which supports all of my previous attempts to suss out "focal presences" in fiction that are not human beings per se:

Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story elements, and cannot be made convincing by any mere process of casual narration. They have the handicap of incredibility to overcome; and this can be accomplished only through a careful realism in every other phase of the story, plus a gradual atmospheric or emotional build-up of the utmost subtlety. The emphasis, too, must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being. Therefore in a story dealing with such a thing we cannot expect to create any sense of life or illusion of reality if we treat the wonder casually and have the characters moving about under ordinary motivations. The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true "hero" of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena.

ABUNDANCE AND EXPRESSIVITY

I thought about relating this essay to the CRAFTING WALL STONES series, but it's not actually related to what MW herself wrote. Rather, in passing she made a partial quote of a famous passage from Matthew 12:34 (King James version):

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

In this case I chose not to check the original context of the passage, for I'm not interested in the moral stance taken by the speaker. I like the idea of "the abundance of the heart," though, for it takes me back to a subject I've not addressed much in recent years: the idea that all of the arts begin as expressive forms and only gradually are mitigated by considerations of reason, morality, et al. Ernst Cassirer was often my guide in this respect:

"Whatever we call existence or reality, is given to us at the outset in forms of pure expression. Thus even here we are beyond the abstraction of sheer sensation, which dogmatic sensationalism takes as its starting point. For the content which the subject experiences as confronting him is no merely outward one, resembling Spinoza's 'mute picture on a slate.' It has a kind of transparency; an inner life shines through its very existence and facticity. The formation effected in language, art and myth starts from this original phenomenon of expression; indeed, both art and myth remain so close to it that one might be tempted to restrict them wholly to this sphere."-- Cassirer, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, p. 449.

The Biblical speaker is only interested in the moral statement that bad people must and will reveal their badness through their words. I'm more interested in the fact that art, whether good or bad, proceeds from a given person's desire to express him/herself. That desire may be inextricably linked to the desire to make one's daily bread, or to any number of other personal factors, but the desire to make art is in itself sui generis. 

Now it should be obvious that what creates "abundance" in one heart may not do so in another. However, it seems indisputable that the best-regarded creators are those that are in touch with what moves them personally, rather than simply pleasing their readers. To reference briefly one aspect of CRAFTING WALL STONES PT. 2, I don't think that comics-artist Marie Severin would have necessarily created work on the same level as Wood and Kurtzman had her femaleness simply been overlooked. It's quite possible that she would have given more work if the industry had not been ruled by "the old boy's network." However, it doesn't follow that she would have created works of genius had she enjoyed constant employment, since there were innumerable toilers in the vineyards whose works only occasionally rose to levels of excellence. 

Where creativity is concerned, there's something to be said for unleashing one's demons. Since Heidi McDonald mentioned Wally Wood, I'll cite the example of his PIPSQUEAK PAPERS.

Even though I extolled PAPERS as one of my chosen mythcomics, it should go without saying that this is not an example of a work with widespread appeal. The story of "baby man" Pip and his discontents with femininity, while extremely expressive, does not measure up in other respects to Wood's best EC work, or even his superhero tales. I would imagine that many would judge the PAPERS to be a misogynist work, and it's axiomatic that Wood is not particularly fair to the fairer sex herein. But then, bitching about women was something that gave "abundance" to Wally Wood's heart, and so informs his art as much as a similar negativity toward femaleness informs the art of William Faulkner.

Rumiko Takahashi, whom I used as a counter-example against Marie Severin's staid formulaic qualities, is another artist whose creativity is, in my opinion, fueled by the abundance of the heart, even when it contains extreme negativity against the male of the species. Certainly even her endless assaults upon her character of Ataru Moroboshi argue that she was in part using him as a punching-bag in retaliation for male offensiveness of one kind or another. 

Sheer expressivity, of course, is worthless by itself; it has to mediated by excellence in what I've termed the four potentialities in order to communicate anything. But contrary to the Matthew citation, both good and evil things can be spoken by real human beings, who in every culture are ruled by disparate notions of good and evil-- and this is why art is often better when it too reflects an inextricable mixture of good and evil.

CRAFTING WALL STONES PT. 2

Assuming that one validates my equation between artistic creativity and Mary Wollstonecraft's concept of "virtue" as it is determined by the sexual division of labor-- what then?

Well, if everyone viewed such discrepancies in virtue as the result of a long-standing biological process, we wouldn't get things like THE OBITUARY MARIE SEVERIN SHOULD HAVE RECEIVED, in which we learn, according to author Alex Dueben, that it represents "the career she could have had, had she been born a man."

Not since the days of "Spiderbuttgate" have I seen such a display of blithering ressentiment, in which the shortcomings of any person who fits an intersectional profile can be excused by references to "endemic sexism."

Now, I wrote my own obit for Marie Severin, combined with one for Gary Friedrich, who coincidentally passed on the same day. Mine was not a general assessment of either comics pro, aside from crediting them both with "better-than-average formula entertainment," which assessment I would apply to both pros separately.

What we have here is sheer revisionism, an attempt to build Marie Severin up to a major figure in comic books. In the comments-section, Heidi McDonald avers:

Looking at the work here, Severin should always be mentioned in the same breath as Wood and Kurtzman.

To say the least, I do not agree. Severin simply was not that imaginative. Forget comparisons to Wood and Kurtzman; Severin was not even as accomplished as a contemporaneous "Marvel Bullpen" artist like Bill Everett. Everett is of course most famed as the creator of the Sub-Mariner, but even if one compared Everett's accomplishments in the Silver and Bronze Ages to those of Severin in the same period, there's nothing on Severin's resume that even rates with Everett's co-creation of Daredevil. Indeed, Everett even created one of Marvel's most prominent sixties villainesses, Umar the Unrelenting--

--whom Severin also drew a few issues later.

Now, if one agrees with my proposition that, based only on their Silver-and-Bronze Age contributions Everett was superior to Severin, is there a biological explanation for this opinion? Certainly I would not advocate Camille Paglia's explanation, as discussed in Part 1, to the effect that Everett's abilities in male projection-- and being able to write his own name in the snow-- had anything to do with it.

But Everett may have been a better creator simply because, being a man, he was more invested in excelling in a largely male arena, while Severin was not so invested.

Granted, one can certainly find male practitioners who weren't even as good at formulaic entertainment as was Severin. But on the whole, there were simply more good male creators than there were female ones, and no revisionism can change that.

I assert, further, that there are a fair number of female comics-pros who not only show exceptional creativity, but who arguably can excel their male contemporaries. An example would be Rumiko Takahashi, one of the foremost manga-artists, who IMO easily outpaced her former manga-teacher, the recently departed Kazuo Koike. I admire Koike's writing on such properties as LONE WOLF AND CUB and LADY SNOWBLOOD. But even allowing for the manga-works I have not read, I would say that Takahashi displays a far greater profusion of disparate characters and concepts. And she did so, even though it seems likely that Japan had its own tradition of "endemic sexism."

CRAFTING WALL STONES PT. 1

The title of this  essay is an extremely forced pun on the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose 1792 VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN I've recently started reading. I knew when I began that VINDICATION is a precursor to "first-wave feminism." However, even though I have always approved of the practical goals of the first wave, I never thought Wollstonecraft would prove so useful to me in combating "third wave feminism," that bloated monster of Nietzschan ressentiment. Further, the author-- whose name I'll abbreviate to MW just because I feel like it-- proves insightful in buttressing some of my own theories on what I'll call the "sexual division of creativity."

In one respect I might have anticipated such an application, once I knew that one of the bastions of male privilege whom MW assaults is the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Camille Paglia, whose views on gender-creativity I'll soon reference, asserted that Rousseau was the font of Western liberalism. Paglia does not comment on Rousseau's sexism, but claims that he is one of the main sources of the liberal idea that social engineering can "fix" any apparent problem-- an outlook shared by most if not all third-wave feminist authors.

For example, most third-wave feminists would agree that if there is an apparent discrepancy in the creative accomplishments of the two primary genders-- the dominant one being that there are no female playwrights equal to Shakespeare, no female comics-artists equal to Kirby or Tezuka-- then that discrepancy must spring from social inequity, and social inequity alone. It's all about the old boys' club, silencing women's voices, and other forms of ressentiment. The sexual division of labor can have no relevance when one is seeking to prosecute a supposed enemy.

In the first chapter of SEXUAL PERSONAE, Paglia asserts that there is a real gap in the accomplishments of feminine creators in comparison to those of masculine ones. Her explanation for this discrepancy is rooted in a complicated synthesis of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, though Paglia freely calls upon various Nietzschean terms, such as the "Apollonian-Dionysian" duality, Freud will be seen to be the dominant influence:

Art makes things. There are, I said, no objects in nature, only the gru¬ 
elling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, 
reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new 
forms bob, gasping for life. Dionysus was identified with liquids— 
blood, sap, milk, wine. The Dionysian is nature’s chthonian fluidity. 
Apollo, on the other hand, gives form and shape, marking off one being 
from another. All artifacts are Apollonian. Melting and union are Dio¬ 
nysian; separation and individuation, Apollonian. Every boy who leaves 
his mother to become a man is turning the Apollonian against the Dio¬ 
nysian. Every artist who is compelled toward art, who needs to make 
words or pictures as others need to breathe, is using the Apollonian to 
defeat chthonian nature. In sex, men must mediate between Apollo and 
Dionysus. Sexually, woman can remain oblique, opaque, taking plea¬ 
sure without tumult or conflict. Woman is a temenos of her own dark 
mysteries. Genitally, man has a little thing that he must keep dipping 
in Dionysian dissolution—a risky business! Thing-making, thing- 
preserving is central to male experience. Man is a fetishist. Without his 
fetish, woman will just gobble him up again. 

Hence the male domination of art and science. Man’s focus, directed- 
ness, concentration, and projection, which I identified with urination 
and ejaculation, are his tools of sexual survival...

Thus Paglia is firmly in the Freudian camp that claims "biology is destiny." There's even a passage a few pages later in which Paglia seems to be advocating Freud's tendency to view male sexuality as primary and female sexuality as epiphenomenal, as when she claims that "art is [man's] Apollonian response toward and away from woman."

As stimulating as I find Paglia, I can't subscribe to her system, since I regard biology as being at best "partial destiny."

So, even before reading MW, I began to think in terms of sociological explanations that would be rooted not in Rousseauist wishful thinking, but in the sexual division of labor as we understand it today. The statement that "men hunt and women nest" may not be entirely fair to either gender. However, it certainly has broader applicability than the old "damn that boy's club" rant.

As it happens, MW seems to have touched on this problem in her time. VINDICATION continually argues in favor of women receiving a broader education than European culture tended to allow in that time. However, despite taking males to task for the faulty reasoning, MW seems to be a stranger to the circular argument of endless ressentiment seen in third-wave feminism. Rather than simply prating about boys' clubs, MW says:

Let it not be concluded, that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must, therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain, that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God.

To be sure, lest this be misinterpreted, Carol Poston, editor of Norton's second edition of VINDICATION, adds this footnote:

Being physically inferior can lead to women's being morally inferior: not just physical size but [man's] worldly pursuits allow men a greater opportunity to make moral choices and thus attain virtue.

MW, in addition to cautioning her readers that she does not "wish to invert the order of things," asserts that men may at a particular time attain greater virtue than women because their "worldly pursuits" give them the chance to make moral choices. This in no way contradicts her advocacy of woman's right to full education, but rather, sees the division of labor as bringing about womankind's inability to attain virtue through informed choice.

MW is not addressing artistic creativity at all, but her concept of "virtue" applies to my concept of creativity as it exists in the temporal world-- as I'll argue further in Part Two.

HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE PT. 2

One of the biggest problems for my theory of centricity pertains to the concept of the "rotating team" franchise.

I consider myself fully cognizant of the most important crossover-permutations of crossovers in popular fiction. The earliest examples seem to be short-term, usually dealing only with two established characters or concepts encountering one another, like the 1920 SHE AND ALLEN. John Kendrick Bangs' four "Associated Shades" stories, which I have not read, may be the first time someone invented the idea of a "team" whose members were fairly fluid, though most of Bangs' characters were historical rather than fictional figures.

As far as I can tell, the first true "rotating team" concept appeared in 1963. Since 1955 DC Comics had been trying to score a hit in its anthology series THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. Though DC was sometimes able to use the title as a showcase for serials that graduated to their own series, such as the Justice League, nothing caught fire within the magazine, until issue #50 teamed up two of the company's lesser lights, Green Arrow and the Martian Manhunter. Batman began enjoying team-ups irregularly in issue #50, but not until issue #74, in 1967, did he become the exclusive co-star in the series, using his TV-amplified clout to help DC try to hype its vast array of non-bat characters.

In many respects, this innovation resembled the core idea for the Golden Age Justice Society, whose principal raison d'etre was to use the more popular DC heroes to spark readers' interest in lesser lights. I tend to doubt that any of the 1960s lesser lights burned any brighter thanks to hobnobbing with Batman, any more than 1940s flops like Starman and Hourman had benefited from their temporary association with the Flash and Green Lantern. But once BRAVE AND BOLD became dominated by the Caped Crusader, the series provided its writers with a dubious challenge: that of finding rationales for teaming up the urban hero with characters rooted in wild concepts of SF and fantasy, like the Metal Men and Green Lantern, or even in different time-frames, like Scalphunter and Sergeant Rock.

Now, had any of these short-term team-ups appeared in one of Batman's own books, then the team-up characters would be mere "guest stars," and the charismatic action would be non-distributive, descending only to the Big Bat. But in theory, even though Batman is a constant presence after 1967, the concept of the franchise should mean that Batman shares charisma with any of his co-stars--

-- with just a few exceptions. Most of the time, the co-stars either had their own franchises, or had enjoyed such regular berths at some point in DC's history. However, on a few occasions the Bat teamed up with one of his famed enemies, and I would consider all of these to be subordinate rather than coordinate figures, because the villains had not previously enjoyed their own franchises.

Here's the crusader being forced to team up (sort of) with the Riddler--

And here he is with Ra's Al Ghul.

And then there was Bats and the Joker:

Admittedly, by the time that the Brave and Bold Bat had to make a temporary alliance with the Joker, the Crown Prince of Crime had enjoyed a short-lived nine-issue solo series. But since he wasn't really known as a starring character despite that series, I would say that he too became as much a subordinate figure as Riddler and Ra's, due to the dominant approach of the BRAVE AND BOLD series.

A similar aesthetic came to pass when Marvel attempted to sell Doctor Doom as a regular co-star in the title SUPER VILLAIN TEAM UP.  Though the Sub-Mariner was also a regular for the first nine issues, issues 10-12 11 focus upon Doom's (non-team) encounter with a genuine Marvel fiend, the Red Skull. Admittedly #10, seen before, still shows the "team" of Doom and Namor above the series-title, the next two spotlight Doom and the Skull.

Namor gets the above-title billing in #13 again, but then it's Doom and Magneto in issue #14.

Following a reprint of an earlier Doom-Skull tale, the series then finishes up with a two-parter with neither Doom nor Namor, but presenting the Red Skull working alongside a far less popular Marvel menace, the Hate-Monger.

Since at the time Red Skull, Magneto and Hate Monger had not enjoyed serials of their own, all of them would be subordinate figures, even as the Joker, Riddler and Ra's are within the context of BRAVE AND BOLD, and so Doctor Doom alone is the sole coordinate in the stories without the Sub-Mariner. HOWEVER-- in the final two issues, it can be fairly judged that both the Red Skull and the Hate-Monger share the centric position. In the absence of a figure who dominates the narrative, the way Batman dominates most texts in which he appears alongside one of his vilains, the two villains here are coordinated as the unchallenged stars of the story.

MYTHCOMICS: RAT GOD (2015)

Richard Corben’s meditation on both the era and the art of H.P. Lovecraft is a rara avis indeed: a critique of turn-of-the-century American racism that eschews ego-boosting righteousness in favor of a plain-spoken realism about the ways human beings treat one another. And despite being a dramatic work at its core, RAT GOD is also brilliantly funny in many places.

The main setting is New England in the 1920s (taking place partly in Lovecraft’s fictional city Arkham), and the main character is a physical doppelganger for HPL, here given the staidly respectable Anglo-Saxon name of “Clark Elwood.” Though none of the Lovecraftian gods appear in the story, Corben has Clark swear by Cthuilhu and Yog-Sothoth, and use fancy words like “gibbous”  and “eldritch.” However, before the reader encounters Clark, RAT GOD’s first eleven pages deal with two Native Americans, a brother and sister, fleeing from tribal enemies in the wilderness, apparently back in the days before the advent of Columbus. A totem with the image of a “rat god” appears once, but Corben does not explicitly align either tribe with this repulsive deity.

Though the title of Corben’s work begs associations with HPL’s  “The Rats in the Walls,” the greatest similarity is that of protagonists are, at the outset, initially sure of being at the top of the ethnicity-totem pole. After page 11,  the physical struggles of the aboriginals give way, via a time-shift, to the struggles of Chuk and Kito, a brother and sister who are implicitly descendants of the first siblings—though by the 20^th century, their struggles  have more to do with defining themselves in a world now owned by white people.

In point of fact, Kito, sister to Chuk, does not appear on page 12, but she’s the subject of a conversation between Chuk and Clark. Chuk informs Clark that though they’ve never met, Chuk is aware that Clark is dating his sister. Clark, having been unaware that Kito is at least partly Indian, is not pleased with Chuk’s revelation. Clark picks a fight with Chuk and gets quickly beat down. (Clark is far more pugnacious than any HPL protagonist: he’s something like a Robert E. Howard character who can’t really fight but sometimes wins by sheer doggedness.) As Clark licks his wounds he remembers his encounters with Kito in Arkham, with whom he falls in love even though “she’s kind of funny looking.” In the course of their dates, Kito reluctantly relates her escape from a “rat hole” called Lame Dog. 

This town was originally an ancient settlement of the Cthanhluk tribe, but it was taken over in the 1800s by white gold-hunters. The gold-seekers soon left, leaving Lame Dog to be dominated by what Kito herself calls a “mongrel hybrid” made up of white and red people. However, even with most of the white settlers gone, there’s still one rich white guy in charge of things, Zachariah Peck, whose ancestor studied the pagan practices of the Cthanhluks. Kito relates how she and Chuk escaped Lame Dog without Clark ever tipping to the idea that she too may be of mixed race. The two lovers quarrel when Clark finds out how she makes her living, and though Clark intends to forgive her her trespasses, he learns that she’s fled back to Lame Dog. Despite all of his Anglo-Saxon misgivings, Clark pursues the object of his desire.

The town of Lame Dog might be termed an “Innsmouth for rats.” The residents, all of whom encourage Clark to get lost, often have a rodent-like look about them, regardless of their race or social station. One such is Gharlena, a grotesque but earthy young white woman who tries to seduce Clark. Far less earthy is Damon Peck, son of the patriarch Zachariah, who initially tries to get rid of Clark as well, only to change his mind when he gets the idea that Clark may serve as a catspaw with which to slay Zachariah. The patriarch follows in the footsteps of HPL’s evil de la Poer family, having built up a religion based on human sacrifice. However, instead of using regular-sized rodents, Zachariah’s religion worships a giant flesh-and-blood rat-creature. Damon asserts that the giant animal is some sort of mutant. However, given that Corben has suggested the existence of an aboriginal rat-god, Damon may not be privy to all the mysteries of his father’s cult.

Without giving away all aspects of the story’s ending, suffice to say that Clark’s quest for Kito has a more satisfying conclusion than the story-arcs of most HPL characters.  To be sure, Corben doesn’t let Clark keep his delusion of racial superiority. By the end of RAT GOD, he’s a long way from the man who starts out the story claiming that “my family has been the racial backbone of New England for generations.” Rather, he becomes thoroughly implicated in the mixed-race world of Lame Dog. Thankfully, though, Corben resists any impulse to cast even margjnalized races as suffering, sinned-against innocents. Whereas Lovecraft took the position that all humans were doomed to descend into a hell of degeneracy, Corben plays with the images of miscegenation and perhaps some sort of spiritual bestiality in order to emphasize the common visceral heritage shared by every ethnicity. And, for what it’s worth, it’s also a world where women are free to be every bit as visceral and degenerate as any man.

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.