Vote for Cthulhu: Lovecraft an adrift spirit

PRIOTESE SEBASTIAN
tefan cel Mare University, Suceava

H.P. Lovecraft is one of the most prolific horror fiction and science fiction writers of all times
and one of the strangest men encountered in literature; reportedly, he would go out only after
nightfall because he would have been ashamed of his looks and of the paleness of his skin.
Although he will briefly perpetuate the direction of his biggest influence, Edgar Allan Poe, he
would carve his own style by accumulating different themes, amongst which that of paramount
importance will be the outer cosmos and the horrors it shelters, later on giving birth to a niche
that today bears the name of Lovecraftian fiction, a term which describes the type of fiction in
which the recurrent theme is the fear of the unknown.
There are myriad horror fiction writers, but none of them has yet reached Lovecrafts
ghastly deliriums, his schizophrenic ability of displacing his soul, uprooting it from the
immediate reality and transporting it into some very singular lands.
His first encounter with the madness that would become fundamental in his writing was
at the ripe age of three, when he beheld his father's fits of dementia. He became obsessed with
the ideas of death and failure, he slowly became a convinced misanthropist, often emphasizing
upon the insignificance of humankind as a race (see all the abhuman forms of life in his stories)
and, all in all, he hated everything that had roots in the immediate reality and society:

I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of
murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external
universes. (online reference)

The loneliness he drowned in beginning with childhood had only greatly increased his
afterwards slumps of odious imagination. Although there are various types of monsters in his
stories, each more bloody and slimy than the other, the most horrific monster he had ever created
was himself a wanderer of so many worlds but his. The dread and horror his characters suffer
in the so-vivid scenarios he creates are, in fact, his dread and horror the horror of living.
Lovecraft was the prototype of a person which could not find any relief in the hurtful
process of being alive in a world it feels it does not belong to, thus it dreams of other places that
would best suit its inner state of being. One of the most eloquent examples in this regard is the
beginning of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where from the very beginning, dreaming is
fundamental:

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while
still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples,
colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and
perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in
gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little
lanes of grassy cobbles. (Lovecraft, online reference)

Dreams and dreaming, respectively, are to Lovecraft the easiest ways to shed his skin and leave
the world behind. Dreams and dreaming are everywhere in his oeuvre. Despite the fact that they
work well for him as a writer, providing him a short relief, these oneiric excursions rarely end up
well for his characters. His protagonists often visit these dream-cities in order to be granted
unknown knowledge, but in the end, precisely this knowledge they are looking to find and
ultimately fathom is nascent of lunacy: the peculiar feature of the places Lovecraft creates is that
they are often prone to drive the protagonist insane, to stir unspeakable ancient horrors and to
lure unimaginable beings that people are not even aware they exist, that they do not even
perceive (see, for instance, his opus magnum, The Call of Cthulhu). Lovecraft seems to gradually
dissolve even those imaginary places, just like he does with reality. He crucifies both the worlds
he creates and reality to him they are both meant for destruction and alienation.
Another odd thing that is to be found in his stories is that he has no mercy for his
characters. For what is worth, when they could run away from the peril, they keep on going
further with their investigations. They are not far from being downright fools, because they do
not possess the wit to run away when they should and this may be one of the reasons for which
Lovecraft destroys them so ruthlessly.
 In Lovecrafts work there is a recurring realm known as the Dreamlands, a vast
territory that can be entered into enter Captain Obvious - just via dreams. Within this arabesque
clime there can be found cities with strange names, as the likes of Ulthar, Sarnath, Oriab and
Celephas, inhabited by unimaginable creatures with names as Yog-Sothoth, Nath-Horthath, Yad-
Thaddag, Ulthar, etc., known as The Elders/ The Great Ones, creatures that, purportedly, fell
from the sky when the stars were right, led by the slimy, titanic Cthulhu who slumbers in the
forgotten carcass-city of Rlyeh. We are also more or less directly told that they are waiting for
another set of right stars to rise from the burrows in which they live, far beyond the mantle of
reality, a possibility that becomes nauseating to the reader because Lovecraft tells everything
straight - almost vitriolic - from the first line -, this directness only contributing to the belching of
the storys stern events. In this way, he witnesses the nightmares with a very singular
detachment, as if nothing would matter but his story. However, the violence with which he
sometimes mends together the narrative is paradoxical when put in contrast with the beauty that
frequently stems from his adjective-driven depictions of his fanciful architectures.
In his essay on Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, against Life, Michel
Houellebecq affirms that

To transform the ordinary perceptions of life into an unlimited source of nightmares, thats the audacious
wager of every writer of the fantastic. Lovecraft succeeds magnificently, by giving his descriptions a touch of
loquacious degeneracy that is his alone. (Houellebecq, online reference)

Houellebecq is right when he asserts that Lovecraft thrives in transforming the perceptions of
everyday life into a perpetual source of horror, because some of the most common actions of
humankind are a source of terror and frightful in Lovecraft's stories; for example: playing music
brings chaos and alienation to the individual but keeps general pandemonium at bay (The
Strange music of Eric Zann), travelling is nascent of horror (At the Mountains of Madness) and
going out into the world - which is almost an autobiographical theme, most obviously underlined
in The Outsider. The story is about a man that escapes the labyrinthine catacombs of his castle
in order to reach the outside world, and when he eventually does, people are fleeing in terror at
his sight; in the end of the story, we are being told that the years of seclusion within the
catacombs turned him into a ghoul. Evidently, the protagonist of this story is an embodiment of
Lovecraft himself, in relation with the society he lived in:
 For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and
among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within
that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
(Lovecraft, online reference)

All the above-mentioned facts make the escapism process very easy to understand in the case of
H.P. Lovecraft, because evading into other worlds is one of the commonest reactions when it
comes to depressed/ anxious people. The Cthulhu mythos, with all its ghastly mini-narratives,
can be seen as an excoriating reaction to the hostile outside environment. The author himself
expresses the idea of detachment from reality in Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain
degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the
spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of
common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority;
rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. (Lovecraft,
Online reference)

Thus, those who cling to reality are unable to create other worlds, simply because they do not
respond to outside "tappings"; i.e., in order to forge good science-fiction stories, you have to cut
yourself off from quotidian life. Not only did the proverbial Lovecraft revamp the transmutation
of the perceptions of life, but he became, through his stories about far-flung nightmare-ridden
worlds, a magnet for those who are possessed of apathy for life. Lovecrafts style is very lush
and his excessively adjectival descriptions are meant to drag the reader into the story and convey
his visions as much of an authenticity as possible; that is what enforces the grotesque of his
stories and ultimately makes them so appealing.
In respect with his eerie, harsh-named geography, his seclusion and loneliness combined
with his fervent fantasy have turned him into a psychogeographer, one who chaffed against the
crassness and alienage of the modern commercial city, and sought to combat it in visionary
words. (Haden 14). From this point henceforth, Lovecrafts rampant-sounding cities make
sense, because they are, after all, real places infected by that loquacious degeneracy which
Michel Houellebecq was talking about and, moreover, by the imp of the arabesque. Of course, as
the author himself asserts, Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. (Lovecraft, online
reference). Lovecrafts imagination has voyaged, indeed, far and strange places, and it especially
delved deep into the geography and architecture of his own nightmares, which seem to have been
a paramount inspiration source for the author. From a subjective point of view, Lovecraft shared
the fate of every visionary, namely, he had a life of misery and seclusion, (see E.A. Poe, for
instance, or our Morningstar); thus, his oeuvre is conversant of the perils of venturing too far and
wide in the lands of imagination.
Notably enough, despite his anti-humanity views and his despondency, his behavior was
not less than that of a gentleman, an aspect to which the huge amount of letters stands as a proof.
Not without reason is Lovecraft considered one of the greatest letter writers of the 20 th century,
for he purportedly wrote somewhere around 100.000 letters. Despite his behavioral and
ideological issues, he established close and long friendships during his lifetime, friendships that
would prove to be nepenthe for the author, given the length and obvious pleasure with which the
letters were written.
The affirmation that Lovecraft is, in fact, E.A. Poe and Lord Dunsany reunited in a single
being would not roam unfertile ground. Their own psychologies and styles have haunted and left
a lasting impression upon Lovecraft; to Dunsany he owes his baroque, abundant writing style,
with complex sentences, overworked upon, and to Poe, of course, many of his themes and his
overall gloomy mood. His writing became in no time a cure for a hideous reality. Of course, his
psyche is far more crooked that a first glance would permit an inquirer to behold, and without a
doubt, every single aspect of his life has left an imprint in the psychological evolution of the
personage in discussion, especially his mothers cold treatment, his grandfathers ghost stories
and his fathers death, due to syphilis.
Undoubtedly, what fascinates the Lovecraft reader is the writers betting on the
insignificance of man in contrast with the boundlessness of the outer space. As Guillermo del
Toro affirmed in the Lovecraft documentary, Fear of the Unknown, Lovecraft is talking about the
scale of the man in the universe: from the authors point of view, man has never been but a speck
of dust, at the power of much larger powers that witness him with contempt and could obliterate
him with an almost pathetic easiness. From here, there was only one tiny step to the invention of
his Carrion-Pantheon of amorphous deities of times forgotten, that designed the world and roam
dimensions that are hidden from the view of mortal man.
 It is interesting to observe that Lovecrafts mythos, although it did not have too much of a
following during his life, was borrowed by other writers, thus adapted and continued. Writers
like August Derleth, Robert Bloch and Ramsey Campbell have perpetrated the Cthulhu mythos,
in particular, carrying the torch for their crest-fallen, deceased friend and model. Why wasnt
Lovecrafts work recognized? Because he wrote in a vein for which there has never been too
large an audience []. (Derleth i)
By designing such grizzly, weird worlds, H. P. Lovecraft has become a literary
destination for those who do not have a taste for life or simply people that seek exiting be it
only briefly the real world. Undoubtedly, the reading market has changed a lot since the
authors death, but the young generations still find Lovecraft pleasing.
Forsooth, many of them can look at a plush Cthulhu in the store without being aware that,
in fact, the monster has been created by Lovecraft and that in the story it is far from being a
pleasant creature which you hug, but supposedly being the meanest thing in the universe. If H. P.
Lovecraft did not have too much fans while alive and was not so popular, nowadays, his legacy
is immense, and it lengthens from video-games, card games, toy industry, writing, 3D Modeling
and music, to the slogan that appears everywhere whenever theres elections: Vote for Cthulhu;
why choose the lesser evil?, a sentence which pays tribute to one of the most brilliant literary
minds.

Works cited
Derleth, August. Arkham House: The First 20 Years: 1939-1959. Arkham House: Publishers,
Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1959. Web. 17.08.2014
Haden, David. Walking With Cthulhu: H.P.Lovecraft as a psychogeographer. New York City,
2011. Web. 14.08.2014
Houellebecq, Michel. H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. 1991. Web. 12.08.2014
Lovecraft, H. P. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Brighthouse, 2007. Web. 16.08.2014
Lovecraft, H P. The Outsider. Brighthouse, 2012. Web. 16.08.2014
Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Brighthouse, Web. 16.08.2014