•
Rating:
In 1926, Lovecraft returns to Providence from New York with a new awareness. He has come to understand that he is not made for the world he lives in, that the true winners are the half-breeds, immigrants, and foreigners who so horrify him. He has realized he has failed as a worker, a husband, and a writer. “I am only half-alive”, he would write to a friend about a year later. And indeed, with his return to New England, his life, in the most banal and prosaic sense of the term, is practically finished.
That is precisely when the abyss opens wide: this petty and infected world is reduced to a mere incident, to the negligible whim of entities and forces so deep and unknown as to escape any comprehension. The glory of man and his progress is pure illusion; metaphysics, sciences, and religions are tender tales that try to explain this useless aggregation of atoms that we call life.
The first great manifesto of this nihilism is “The Call Of Cthulhu”, 1926. In it, HPL's conception of the fantastic becomes entirely original, total, unsurpassed. We are told that unimaginable horror lurks in the depths of the oceans, that in a nightmare city lost in eternal night, unnameable beings await their rebirth. And that a degenerate, mysterious, and ancient cult, carried on by the negro and half-breed foreigners who so disgusted HPL, conspires for millennia to ensure that the return of the Great Old Ones may come to pass.
The Call Of Cthulhu follows the slow descent of Professor Thurston into the depths of this nightmare reality. It is a slow and gradual process, analytical as the minds of Lovecraftian heroes, worthy alter egos of HPL himself, invariably insignificant, sensitive, and impotent losers in the face of the enormities they encounter. Heroes who open windows on the abyss and are left annihilated.
Stylistically, the story is structured in a rigid and sometimes often laborious manner despite the richness of ideas and the numerous different settings; the fact that all this is narrated as part of a pseudo manuscript/testament is functional to the devastating descriptive flares typical of HPL's style, which undoubtedly make his visions so excessive and memorable. The story is, in fact, a delirium, but a cold, calculated, aseptic delirium, paradoxically focused entirely on imagination: Lovecraft's are “mind horrors and nothing else”, they are not theories nor metaphors. Lovecraft does not propose any philosophical solution, does not seek the truth, does not even dream of making proselytes. His literary ideal is the total negation of realism, the triumph of dream and imagination; in this, he is clear and evident, in his style as well as in the immense correspondence that represents virtually his entire life.
Certainly, it would not be difficult to find symbolism in the key elements of the story and use them to dissect Lovecraftian psychology: anyone with a minimum of psychoanalytic knowledge knows very well that the sea, the city, the creature that sleeps in the depths represent suggestions and have precise meanings in interpreting the psyche and dreams. But it would be an exercise somewhat fine in itself. Furthermore, the fantastic by definition requires abandonment, dream, asks us to give up for a moment our life, our feelings, explanations, and answers. The Call Of Cthulhu does it through the rigidity of the epistolary novel and the cold analysis of the autopsy findings; Lovecraft does not simply plunge us into the bubbling chaos of the unknown, but scientifically digs an artesian well to reach a level of unrestrained horror never surpassed.
The Call Of Cthulhu is undoubtedly a dated story, which does not “scare” in the most petty and banal sense of the word and whose slow climax certainly does not create the great suspense that a modern reader expects. The idea it conveys is one of inexorable advance, over which the characters have no control, a whirlpool that, among other things, leads to neither a real finale nor a conflagration. There is no end because there is no beginning; the Ancients have been, the Ancients are, the Ancients will be, man is only an incident, a ridiculous jester who deludes himself of having control over himself. This is ultimately the tragic grandeur of Lovecraft: rejected by the world of men, he avenges himself by reducing it to nothingness.
That he truly believed it is hard to say; today, a character like Lovecraft would be more than ever a failed misfit, a paranoid recluse. But even in life, the sense of dissatisfaction with everything around him, the perpetual disgust for the society that had generated him, were constant and painful feelings. He never fell into despair, never lost his affability, his correctness, his lucidity. He was loved and admired, and his legend was born without him realizing it, while his physical body was already plunging into oblivion. If his vision is something ultimately pathetic and detestable, there is something heroic in his sharp “NO” to life, in his channeling this contempt into visions so excessive, distant, and lacerating as to remain unsurpassed to this day. This is why Lovecraft is the Cthulhu dreaming and sleeping in the abyss of the fantastic, whose dreams influence men, whose crooked and alien architectures surface a little everywhere in the meanders of Western fantastic mentality.
But that's not all. Lovecraft was not a prophet; but in the face of the world he despised and that we know and nurture, facing the blooming of this almost century that separates us from him, an unsettling awareness peeks through, something barely hinted at that HPL had already glimpsed:
“loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men”.
Loading comments slowly
