“The Call of Cthulhu”
“The Call of Cthulhu” is one of the most prominent and crucial works of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos series, featuring the first “appearance” (or “anti-appearance”) of Cthulhu, one of the Great Old Ones. Some key philosophical notions, which Lovecraft brings upon, have extended and developed through his following years of writing. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the skills and techniques12, as well as the complexity and depth Lovecraft shows in terms of creating, piling up the feeling of horror. The detailed discussion in the following passage will also serve as a contrast for the case studies of the modern time in Chapter 3.
Divided in three parts, the storyline offers the reader a track to follows the narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, going into the dark center of horror, which traces back far beyond men’s history. Through the manuscripts left by his grand-uncle George Gammell Angell who died an obscure and bizarre death during 1926-27, three sub-plotlines intertwining and resonating each other construct a worldview of horror and hopelessness. As a linguistic professor of Brown University, Professor Angell recorded on his manuscripts an evil of the evilest cult, the “Cthulhu cult,” with information from numerus sources, each more uncanny in detail and more horrendous in depiction than the other. The narrator then uncovered the mysteries surrounding a bas-relief sculpture with a scaly creature “of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature” (“The Call of Cthulhu” 141). The bas-relief, however, was a modern piece by a young sculptor Henry Anthony Wilcox, based on his dreams of delirium. In his dreams, he visited "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths" (143).
The recurrent appearances of “R’lyeh” and the chant of “Cthulhu fhtagn” connect the first part with the following plots; further, Wilcox was not the only person who had such
12 Many of the skills and techniques reflect the notions and concepts Lovecraft himself has elaborated in the essay
“Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in which his presents the good horror of his own selection in a literary- historical sequence as well as geographical specificity.
syndromes of dreams. Professor Angell discovered a phenomenon of mass hysteria
worldwide. In a 1908 academic meeting of an archeology society, detective John Raymond Legrasse asked the scholars if they could identify a bas-relief, which resembled Wilcox’s dream. In the previous year, Legrasse had led a party of police on a mission targeted on a ritual, which murdered women and children. After subduing the cultists with killing several of them, the detective learned that this cult worshipped the “Great Old Ones” and awaited Cthulhu, the great priest’s return. In the same occasion, Professor William Channing Webb from Princeton University also provided his personal experiences forty years ago during an expedition in search of lost Runic inscriptions to Greenland and Iceland, where he
encountered a group of “blood-thirsty,” “degenerated Esquimaux” with similar beliefs and fetishes. The climax comes in the third part of the story, when Thurston discovered a 1925 reports from an Australian newspaper. Upon the discovery of the ship Emma, which seemed to encounter miserable events, there were only two members of the crew onboard: one was found dead, while the other, the sole survivor, second mate Gustaf Johansen, was found grasping a statuette which he described vaguely about its source. The investigators learned from Johansen that Emma was attacked by the heavily armed yacht Alert earlier during their voyage. The crew of Emma shewed fight and won the battle, killing the sailors on Alert, but lost their own ship. The remaining crew then boarded on Alert, and after continuous sailing reached an island located approximately around 47°9′S 126°43′W. Most of the crew members died there, without particular descriptions from the survivor. This did not put an end to the whole tragedy, among Thurston’s visit to Sydney and seeing Alert in person, he realized, the statuette Johansen held in his hand was identical with the two of the previous cases. Craving for the truth, Thurston then traveled to Norway for the testimony of Johansen. However, Johansen had died suddenly after encountering two Lascar sailors. Provided with his manuscripts by his widow, who clearly pointed that Johansen would not expect people to believe his words, Thurston learned what happened on that island of the incomprehensible
“abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent” (166) city of R’lyeh: Cthulhu Himself was made present out of the crew’s accidental behaviors. Johansen and his crew mate flee aboard the Alert, while the monster pursue. Out of unexpected bravery, Johansen rammed their yacht at Cthulhu’s head. The great ancient god exploded into green mists but then recombined, re-organized, regenerated from His injury...The Alert escaped, but the only crew mate of Johansen went insane and died shortly thereafter. Having connected Johansen’s fate with his uncle’s unnatural death, which also had to do with some “nautical-looking negroes”
(140), Thurston then understood that he would be hunted by the worshippers of Cthulhu.
In the story of “The Call of Cthulhu,” the narrator openly expressed the key idea of the whole fiction by the opening paragraph as follows:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The
sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age” (139).
Noted that the hinted ideas in the paragraph include: (1) Human minds are unable to grasp the full vista of the universe; we are simply living in tiny parts and the finite aspects of it. (2) Although human beings are of wisdom and ways to possess knowledge, we actually accumulate very little, therefore we can be totally omitted, ignored in the scale of the whole universe; once when the totalitarian knowledge of the universe is presented in front of human beings, no individual would be able to bear and would only result in insanity. (3) In this case, human beings may as well re-sink into the dark ages, like primitive, prehistoric or
pre-civilization eras, so we would not risk madness or even a deadlock of the whole race, a
full devastation, maybe worse than extinction. This threatening fact comes in the aspect of psychology. This is an overthrow of the “human’s will transcend nature” and the degradation of human rationality. For human beings are lesser than crickets, ants, even germs, compared with the vastness and infinity of the universe.
Through these three hinted ideas the readers may come to the conclusion that human beings are comparatively vulnerable and trivial compared to the universe and what it could bear. There is a suggested conclusion of nihilism that all the human struggles and pursuits are in vain: No matter how hard the human race try, the result will always be of little significance;
therefore we may as well stop all our intentions to do something, to change something, to improve and to evolve, and accept the truth, residing back to the darkness (a word in contrary to enlightenment).
Through the spreading out of the plot scroll, Lovecraft is not only telling a threefold, or three-layered story, but also constantly reinforcing the ideas of the opening paragraph. This part will be dealing with the techniques Lovecraft adopts in order to make his points, as well as how Lovecraft arranges the first appearance of Cthulhu, the great priest among Great Old Ones, throughout his literary career.
The first thing a reader may notice is that the story is filled with scholarly nouns like theosophists, mineralogists (experts), geometry, math (scholarly subjects), futurism, cubism (schools), and terminology like non-Euclidean and hieroglyph. Some may be shunned by such pedant-hood, but be aware that Lovecraft has a very sharp division of literate/ illiterate, civilized/ uncivilized or of intelligence / of vulgarity in his characters in “The Call of
Cthulhu,” few of these characters lie in between the spectrum of such sharp binary
oppositions. Conspicuously Lovecraft himself borrows the persuasiveness from authorities of numerous fields. His narrator, no matter how unreliable he may seem, is also well-educated person at least of middle class, which the reader may distinguish from his ancestry (Professor Angell) and the circles he befriends. One will first incline to think of the somberness and
sanity of the narrator and of the ones he consults, and will be prepared to accept the following plots which seem insane and unbelievable enough. The diction applied by the narrator also hinted that he is erudite and learned. Throughout the story the reader embarks on a detective and academic journey with the narrator. Such unfatigued and preserving hunting, which is similar to Largesse, for the truth also implies the intrepid character lies within the narrator.
The reader will easily identify with the narrator (as well as Johansen, who shows an unusual bravery), admiring his dauntlessness and sympathize him when he is faced with such horror.
Although people usually tend to think of Lovecraft’s narrators as unreliable, for many of them have the inclination of madness and delirium, the building of such characters may be the only place Lovecraft accidently shows some merit of human conscience.
The circumstances the narrator and his intellectual friends are facing are beyond their utmost rim of knowledge. “They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism” (“The Call of Cthulhu” 139). The bas-relief,
which connects the thread of the story, is actually a “monstrous puzzle” that even the experts
“vowed that the world held no rock like it” (163). The unveiling of such truth is a
layer-upon-layer accumulation of horror, especially when the reader holds the awareness that human accomplishment is drained to its extreme boundary; even so, the horror still cannot be made into full presence, but only through the narrator’s retelling of some second-hand
materials like reports and manuscripts.
Lovecraft explicitly wants to include as many fields of knowledge in human history as possible to indicate the greatness of the horror itself. For example, when Professor Angell
first inquired Wilcox, the young man said what appeared in his dream landscape was “new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than
brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon” (143). Considering
the profession of Angell, ancient inscriptions, one may assume that Wilcox was speaking so to intrigue the old professor, though later the reader may also learn that Wilcox’s words wereno exaggeration, but terrified of its being just one of the merest descriptions. Compared with the ancient civilization, which might be the lifelong quest of the old professor, and many other devoted and learned ones, what comes with the dreamscape is something that surpasses.
Later the story reaches the conclusion that “[m]ankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few” (154).
These few keen ones among human beings which were dubbed as “psychically
hypersensitive,” normally young ones, had dreamed about a similar landscape and settings, where “come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, ‘Cthulhu fhtagn’” (143). Their syndromes, including “alternations of unconsciousness and delirium” and a manifestation of suggestive fever with a temperature not above normal, all happened during a peculiar time span always between March 23rd and April 2nd , beginning with an earthquake and ending with a storm. Strange events also happen, contingently from London, California, Africa, to the Philippines…insane asylums, suggesting a global phenomenon very much like an epidemic. Professor Angell started to collect the records on the dreams of the “psychically hypersensitive” ones, among which artists and poets, connecting to the later narration in Part II of Largesse’s investigation that “[o]nly poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard” (142), echoing to Shakespeare’s lines of “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact”13
. The horrification is that this is no imagination, but a dream scape of a “cyclopean city whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong” (158). Dreamers of far distance and wild range have dreamed
about something peculiarly common, giving the dream scape a credibility. The similar dreamscape is not the only thing that connects the three parts of the story, the other two things are the bas-relief and the cult surrounding it, and the chant of “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu
R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” (“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”).
13 William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1.