Monkey Panic in the Deep Time Machine: Eugenics, Slavery, and European Fragility in Lovecraft

• Published in: Pulse (Budapest) Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 1 - 20
• Main Author: Woodard, Benjamin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Central European University 2020
• Subjects: American Literature; biology; slavery; eugenics; geology; H P Lovecraft
• ISSN: 2416-111X

This article treats H. P. Lovecraft’s deployment of deep time in “At the Mountains of Madness” as a historical artifact that bears the (at times conflicting) marks of evolutionary theory, social Darwinism, eugenics, and the various temporalities of biological life (recapitulation, degeneration). In particular, Lovecraft’s aesthetically charged ‘controlled evolution’ in his famous novella undermines the generative effects of deep time he sets out to emphasize. This undermining not only exposes Lovecraft’s well-documented nativism and racism, but provides an exaggerated yet instructive example of how the neo-Darwinism of the latter half of the 19th and early part of the 20th century deployed eugenics by means of a politico-aesthetic rearticulation of the ambiguities of evolutionary theory. This rearticulation was subsequently ramified by the trivialization of important complications to the Darwinian project prior to the so-called modern synthesis, namely, the downplaying of structuralist, mutationist, and epigenetic concerns. The article first unfolds a brief relevant history of biology and the concepts of deep time (fossil and trace) before examining how Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” plays on these themes to construct a fatalist eugenics carried out by a superhuman (yet still material) intelligence.