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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8526845"><p>But the intention and the person do illuminate the work. I am fine separating artist from art in the sense that, a terrible person might make beautiful art (and I can divide those two things in my mind, even appreciate that perhaps there is a connection between how chaotic this person's soul was and how that enabled them to achieve something compelling artistically). Just think of someone like Beethoven. When you realize the state of his hearing when he wrote his 9th Symphony, that adds a whole other layer to it for me. And I think the same is true for intentions. Ideally the text itself gives us enough information to thoroughly assess and figure out what a person was trying to say without misunderstanding them. But I think when we stop at our own immediate reaction to a work of art, that is very simplistic. It feels like an act of bad faith to just stop there without trying to gauge what the actual purpose of it was. And part of gauging that can be learning more about a person and what they thought. Just contrast how people have discussed Tolkien and Lovecraft. Much of that is about what those men wrote in letters, journals and what we knew about their lives. Knowing that Tolkien was a veteran of WWI for example, makes Lord of the Rings read a bit differently. Knowing what he had to say about Jewish people, that he was concerned about how Orcs were portrayed, reveals something about his intentions in the work. And the same is true of Lovecraft. I love Lovecraft's stories and I think they are much bigger than the man's flaws (you can't escape his influence and there is a reason for that). But his views on race were always pretty clear to me being from New England, and when I see things he wrote in letters and when I read about his life, it very much makes sense (the kind racism Lovecraft had I think is of a much different character than say the kind of racism we associate with the segregated south: it is more about a bloodlines, distrust of any ethnic group outside of Yankees (in New England terms, those who can trace their ancestry to early English settlers)---his attitude towards Italians for example didn't exactly sit well with me (and it is an attitude that used to be around in New England even when I was kid...though it was fading quite a bit by that point). But like a lot of people have also pointed out, Lovecraft was a very unsuccessful person in many respects, a fairly powerless person in his actual life, his views also did change over time (though not to the degree of Howards), and he died of a horribly painful illness quite young, so it can be useful to examine his personal life and intentions and try to put them into the context of their time. I think we get a more accurate and nuanced understanding of these things when we examine the author's more thoroughly. You still might come away feeling the same, but I think it pays to give a work and to give a writer their day in court and a fair hearing.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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