"This is how you hustle the arcane": The Unspeakable Thing Unspoken in Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom

Abstract

"This is how you hustle the arcane":The Unspeakable Thing Unspoken in Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom Yumi Pak (bio) When I assign victor lavalle's novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), I ask my students to spend some time on the seemingly straightforward dedication: "For h. p. lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings."1 If a dedication is meant to be a declaration of gratitude or perhaps an invocation of intimacy, then why the conflict? Eventually a student who is familiar with lovecraft will offer the dilemma familiar to many of us who, much like lavalle, grew up appreciating the worlds lovecraft created. The question is this: how do people of color, BIPOC writers and students, contend with the immeasurable pleasure we once found in reading lovecraft and the unnerving realization that we are what he considered monstrous?2 Crucial conversations have been taken up around Lovecraft and his literary legacy, sometimes reductively in response to this quandary. At its most simplified, there is either a wholesale dismissal of the author for the unquestionably [End Page 353] racist contours of his worldview or a willful erasure of that critique for the sake of his undeniable influence on contemporary speculative fiction (an umbrella term that includes horror, science fiction, and fantasy), a binaristic parley that risks ignoring the vexed enjoyment of reading Lovecraft. Too, there are those who contend that speculative fiction is at heart apolitical and colorblind; for these readers, to read his work as demonstrating racist ideologies is to misread not only Lovecraft but the genre itself.3 Several writers familiar with Lovecraft's body of work have challenged such readings. China Miéville, for example, argues, "I don't think the racism can be divorced from the writing at all, nor should it be."4 What is powerful about Lovecraft is that one can never encounter his work without coming face to face with his abhorrent investments. In other words, any analysis of Lovecraft's writing must consider how it retains a cultural force because of his racism, not despite it. One should be compelled to "not just diagnose but excoriatingly attack that hatred, while acknowledging that it has some kind of diagnostic use-value and ecstatic power as a piece of cultural bumph."5 Curiously for Miéville, Lovecraft's "race hatred" is symptomatic of the epoch of modernity, but the language of his assessment is couched in the personal; Miéville's point of contention is that Lovecraft hates those who are racialized as nonwhite. For LaValle, the hatred is a symptom, but not expansive enough to adequately capture the issue at hand, which is that white supremacy and antiblackness are structures that brace society. To take Miéville's point, however, the deliberations around Lovecraft become much more nuanced when the focus shifts from is-he-or-isn't-he toward why, perhaps, his work and speculative fiction at large continue to be fertile grounds to diagnose how an othering of blackness remains persistent in our national imaginary. Speculative fiction is quite often imagined to be the apex of colorblind literary analysis. The arguments are manifold: there is no racism because the story takes place in a postracial future or fantastical past; there is no racism because half of the characters in the story are not human, to name but two.6 What I have found in teaching speculative fiction is that many white students and students of color who read the genre subscribe to this notion of escapism; those who dismiss it sometimes do so for the same reason. "Once upon a time, I believed that people of color were incidental to the English language fantasy tradition," writes Elizabeth Ebony Thomas, and that "the speculative genres did not deal directly with race, which was why I liked them."7 As with categorically non-speculative texts, however, it is imperative to draw students' attention to the [End Page 354] level of difficulty present in ignoring the entanglements of race, racialization, and racism within these works.8 Managing "not to see the meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy" allows for the mistaken belief that speculative fiction is somehow...