Journeys into Darkness (James Goho) by James Goho

Author:James Goho
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-29T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The Aboriginal in the Works of

H. P. Lovecraft

More than 400 years ago, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his band of conquistadores ravaged the Southwest in their quest for gold. The Superstition Mountain just east of Phoenix, Arizona, was one of their targets. The Apache believe the area of Superstition Mountain is the home of the Thunder God; it is a sacred place, treated with reverence and honor, akin to a cathedral and not a place to plunder. Jill Pascoe writes that over hundreds of years countless people have vanished and died in this mysterious area, which continues to be fabled for lost gold.[1] The Spaniards were unable to coerce the Apache to help them scour for gold on Superstition Mountain, where many found only terror and death. The Spaniards viewed the Apache, along with all Amerindians, with distain, as primitives, perhaps with a touch of fear, but with a rapacious loathing.

In 1552, Bartolomé de las Casas documented the savagery of the Spaniards as they subjugated the Americas, where they tortured and murdered millions.[2] The extent of the “genocide” is virtually unimaginable, according to Tzvetan Todorov.[3] Estimating the population of the overall Americas before colonization is challenging, and there are huge variations. Russell Thornton and others show the decline of the American Indian population was a holocaust—precipitous, devastating, and dreadful.[4]

This devastation was founded on the notion of the inferiority of the indigenous people. Celia Brickman notes that the colonizing Europeans saw the American Indian as “the quintessential emblem of the first, primitive stage of human development.”[5] Reneé L. Bergland suggests that the American “land is haunted because it is stolen.”[6] Bergland argues that the source of the American uncanny lies in the history of “murders, looted graves, illegal land transfer and disruptions of sovereignty”[7] of the Native peoples and the landscape is now one of ghosts.

D. H. Lawrence writes: “The Aztec is gone, and the Incas. The Red Indian, the Sequim, the Patagonian are reduced to negligible numbers. . . . Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.”[8] Of course, American Indians were never completely gone and continue yet to protect and nurture their unique cultures and have not been swallowed up by Lawrence’s “great white swamp.”[9] But Lawrence does hit on the hauntedness of America and the impact of the American Indian on American literature. To paraphrase a line from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), there is no forest, prairie, valley, mountain, or town in the country not packed with some dead American Indian’s grief,[10] and that is why the American landscape is haunted.

THE GHOSTS OF AMERICA

This haunting of the landscape, or geographic terror, is a key theme in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. That is because for Lovecraft the world in itself is sinister. Dread and horror are the nature of existence, and his textual topography makes this alive. In Lovecraft’s ontology the fundamental elements are indifferently malevolent. His haunted landscape was primarily in New England but also in other locales, such as the American Southwest.

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