Reading "The Call of Cthulhu" again

[Extollager]

It'd been some years since I'd last read this HPL story. I'd forgotten the denouement in which sailor Johansen runs down Cthulhu with his boat and bursts the latter into a stinky mess of particles that recombine. It is a bit of an artistic risk to have your supreme horror pop when run down.

Brushing away the aura around the story, as one of the key "Cthulhu Mythos" texts and all, what an uneven performance it is. The idea of an extraterrestrial and perhaps extracosmic entity that fouls the dreams of the susceptible is a striking invention. Lovecraft obviously took many pains with the story, and his inclusion of various authentic details, whether about Inuit or Providence, is often pretty clever. I don't take away from his achievement here when I note that it's something M. R. James and Arthur Machen did before him.

(Nor do I mean to exalt myself all over the place when I mention what fun it has been for me, in a few stories, to work in some odd but authentic things I'd stumbled across. I was researching the Christian mystic William Law and got my hands on a Victorian-era publication of the diary of Law's disciple, John Byrom. Byrom wrote a hymn, "Christians, Awake, Salute the Happy Morn," that is still sung. He also invented a form of shorthand and wrote under the nice pen name "John Shadow." Anyway, in Byrom's diary he mentions, very much in passing, going to an Oxford museum [I think it was] to see a specimen of the devil's handwriting and to see the mandrakes. From these bits I worked up a Jamesian ghost story almost 20 years ago. In another story I worked in the real Lady Hester Stanhope, a reference to one of the ancient Church Councils, and coined "the acephaloi" or "headless ones" as demonic parodies of "the asomatai," that is, the fleshless ones, the holy angels.)

The emphasis in the early part of the story on the clippings collection is right out of Machen, too. Of course it's what HPL makes of it rather than priority per se that makes it count for the story.

I found myself wondering about an almost quasi-palindromic quality in the famous Cthulhu-gibberish passage. It would be interesting to see what a true linguist would say about it. I assume HPL basically just concocted it as a loathsome-sounding mass of vocables. I wonder what J. R. R. Tolkien would have thought of it, and what HPL would have thought of the Ring inscription in the Black Speech of Mordor. Tolkien was pretty hard to please in the matter of invented languages, but I suppose he'd give HPL pretty good marks for the aesthetics of his phrase.

I wonder if HPL doesn't end the story too soon. The narrator may be prematurely ready to throw in the towel as regards humanity's outlook. If he'd described something that could make the doom seem more inevitable...! I certainly do not mean the corny use of a concluding scribble such as that with which he ends one of his stories ("Dagon," I think) with the scaly hand on the windowsill, as he writes.

I've often been dissatisfied with the stories of HPL's imitators and other writers of horror who give us a welter of incidents and entities that involve decapitation, mutilation, etc. All very unpleasant, but exploding gas mains, home-made explosive devices in Iraq, and other things can inflict terrible injuries and painful death on people. Here HPL is on to something that goes beyond such gore-mongering, the suggestion of insidious "mental emanations" against which there may be no defense and which could steadily overcome anyone. The fact that he tends to associate receptivity to Cthulhu's "broadcasts" with, on the one hand, "sensitive artistic types" and, on the other, persons of what his narrator regards as racially inferior ancestry ("mongrels" etc.), perhaps militates against this a little....

Just some thoughts.

 

[Extollager]

... I'm struck by how this story positions poor humanity between two "mental" threats. There's the we'll-all-go-crazy danger if people simply put together various particles of information that are lying around right now. And then there's the danger that Cthulhu will radiate vile dreams that plunge humanity into the abhorrent stuff that the voodooists in the story are doing already.

 

[J-WO]

I've often wondered what it would be like to be a struggling artist in '28 and one morning arise to find all my fellow 'sensitive artisitic types' had had bad dreams/ visions, whilst I'd singularly had not. I mean, what a way to find out you are a poseur!

 

[j d worthington]

I've often wondered what it would be like to be a struggling artist in '28 and one morning arise to find all my fellow 'sensitive artisitic types' had had bad dreams/ visions, whilst I'd singularly had not. I mean, what a way to find out you are a poseur!

LOL! "But isn't it an artistic pose?"....

"The Call of Cthulhu" is one of those stories which seems to polarize people in different ways. Some simply think it is dull and boring, while others find it Lovecraft's best, utterly riveting. Some do find it clumsy and awkward, others feel the structure is darned near perfect. Neil Gaiman, for instance, says that is really isn't a good story... it's a good something, but not a good story. HPL himself came to feel that it was "cumbrous" (apparently speaking of the structure); yet I would disagree with this approach.

I think, while it has some drawbacks, it is actually quite elegant and an impressive performance. There are points in that story, for instance, where one is at something like seven removes from the source (HPL's "presenting" of the manuscript of the deceased Thurston; Thurson's actual manuscript; Angell's account; LeGrasse's account; Castro's account; "deathless Chinamen's" account; Necronomicon -- and one can stretch it even further in both directions: magazine version of HPL's presentation and Necronomicon's interpretation of the information concerning the Cthulhu, the Old Ones, and the dreams). Yet HPL manages to telescope this so that even the furthest removed still has immediacy for the reader... which is no mean feat when he also manages to fluidly move from one level to another so seamlessly (in most cases), very much like the dreams Cthulhu sends out to the cultists, and the artists, and even some scientists (and, of course, via Lovecraft's story, to the reader).

This sort of structure isn't new, of course -- it goes back at least to Dracula, with its varying levels and types of documentation (including dictographic recordings -- there has been a very interesting paper done on Dracula being a presentation of the war between the old world and the new, based on the differing philosophies and their technological expressions), and in essence even as far as the Arabian Nights or, in somewhat simpler form, to Apuleius and Petronius. But I think Lovecraft made it more elaborate and complex than any I've seen since Maturin's Melmoth... which may have influenced him in this indirectly (he didn't have access to the entire novel for nearly nine more years, but read excerpts from it and synopsis which emphasized its "Chinese box" structure). At any rate, it is an elaborate structure, to say the least, and I can see where some find it rather clumsy for that reason (though that does not seem to be what you were addressing).

As for Thurston presenting something which makes the outcome "inevitable"... I would argue that, while not done explicitly, it is most definitely done implicitly. Certainly, Cthulhu has survived intact for millions of years, and there is no reason to think a re-submergence is going to affect him in any way. It is only a matter of time before some convulsion of the earth sends him surfaceward again.... And, of course, the implication is also that Cthulhu would outlast humanity itself (and quite likely the very structures of R'lyeh), even were he not to reemerge until after our extinction. The damage done him, and the fact that he could recombine his very molecular (and possibly atomic) structure unscathed, indicates that no weaponry we could possibly evolve would have any impact worth noting. We are simply a convenient tool, but of no more importance than that. And Cthulhu isn't even necessarily one of the powerful entities the story hints at....

But, essentially, Lovecraft was striving to avoid such blunt statements, as he had come to feel that the more subtle and understated the final terror of such a story was, the larger its implications and impact.