Imagine
a novel that tells two concurrent subplots. Plot A is about a
character called Steven, going about his daily life, while Plot B
follows the character Mr. Blande, whose adventures as a bounty hunter
lead him to visit many of the same places that Steven frequents, but
the two characters never meet. Then, years after the author of the
novel has died, an academic puts forward that Steven and Mr. Blande
are actually the same character. The author, being dead, can neither
confirm nor deny the interpretation, but because the novel is
ambiguous
– it does not commit to any detailed physical description of the
two characters – the interpretation can stand up. As a result, the
novel becomes two books simultaneously:
one where Steven and Mr. Blande are two separate characters, and
another where Steven Blande juggles his mundane day-to-day life with
his freelance bounty-hunting. Neither one is the 'correct'
interpretation and both are equally 'true'. For those of us who
indulge in fiction for the sake of diegetic immersion, of getting
lost in the story, this would be a nuisance. Such people would want
clarification on either one or the other as being the 'reality' of
the story. But for me, it is this very simultaneity that makes the
text
(an object that exists in our world) far more fascinating than the
story (a
window into a fictional world).
This
post is going to look at the idea of ambiguity and simultaneity in a
particular literary phenomenon, namely, the Cthulhu Mythos and the
author H. P. Lovecraft. For those who don't know, the Cthulhu Mythos
is a vast body of stories and gaming material that takes place in a
shared fictional universe where all of reality was once ruled by the
malevolent Great Old Ones, a pantheon of near-omnipotent alien beings
who exist outside of the traditional three dimensions. Another race
of godlike beings eventually appear and lock the Great Old Ones up in
different prisons (sealed away in other dimensions, in forced slumber
beneath the ocean, and so on). In the present day, humanity is more
or less totally ignorant of the horrors that lurk in our ancient past
and only a few terrifying tomes, such as the Necronomicon, describe
the truth in any detail. The Great Old Ones have various insane cults
and non-human minions working tirelessly to try and free them 'when
the stars are right' and bring their horrific rule back over the
world. The Mythos has a special place in modern culture, it gets
ripped off or parodied everywhere, and it owes its origins to
horror/sci-fi author H. P. Lovecraft.
Except...
not really.
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| H. P. Lovecraft |
Although
pop culture still describes Lovecraft's writing and the Cthulhu
Mythos as more or less interchangeable terms, the reality is that
Lovecraft's rather slim body of work is far more nuanced and
nihilistic than the 'good gods vs. bad gods' set-up that the Mythos
presents. Lovecraft wrote genre-bending 'weird fiction', essentially
sci-fi stories that masqueraded as horror stories, where the clichés
of the latter genre – demons, witches, magic, monsters – were
explained in scientific, though no less horrific, terms: our
human-centric perception of the universe is a complete fallacy, we
are not special, we are just one in a continuous parade of life-forms
that briefly hold dominion over a fairly unimportant speck in a vast
and indifferent emptiness. What we think of as demons and gods are
just other beings, perfectly natural in a cosmic scale, that are
genuinely beyond our limited comprehension. They are not evil,
because evil is a human invention – they just don't care about us
any more than you care about a dust mote that floats past your face
as you read this.
Not to say that there
isn't evil in his stories. There is, but it nearly always has human
origins. People can be degenerate and reprehensible in Lovecraft's
tales, tainted by the influence of the ancient beings that lurk
beneath the surface of reality, but they are not 'following the
orders of the gods' in any direct sense. Lovecraft liked to give
these entities barely-pronounceable names, (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth,
Azathoth, Nyarlathotep) and kept their descriptions ambiguous and
uncertain. The first-person narrators that occasionally catch a
glimpse of these beings lack the linguistic skills to express what
they see – or more accurately, our language itself is unable to
express what they see.
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| Cthulhu |
So, how did we get from
Lovecraft's anti-humanitarian view of an empty and uncaring universe,
to a riproaring adventure world where humans fight against evil gods
and monsters? And what has this got to do with the opening spiel
about ambiguity and simultaneity? The man generally understood to be
the real creator of the Cthulhu Mythos is August Derleth, a writer
friend of Lovecraft's, one of the many writers for the magazine Weird
Tales with whom Lovecraft kept a longstanding correspondence.
Derleth never subscribed to Lovecraft's world-view, in fact he didn't
really seem to understand it, and he often misinterpreted the more
experienced writer's subtleties and intentions. During his lifetime,
Lovecraft politely corrected Derleth's misunderstandings, but when he
died of cancer at age 46, with no estate to take over his body of
work, Derleth stepped in and arranged the stories in such a way that
suited his more Christian good-vs.-evil ideas. Vague references
became solid links between stories, explanations that were provided
by ill-informed support characters became facts, and the degenerate
nastiness that Lovecraft occasionally imbued his human characters
with was projected out into the gods that they worshipped.
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| August Derleth |
Because Lovecraft kept
his references to Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and friends intentionally
vague, this gave Derleth plenty of room to manoeuvre and indulge in
some 'wilful misinterpretation'. My favourite example of this is
Hastur. In a Lovecraft story, The Whisperer In Darkness, a
character reels off a list of the races, places and entities of myth
that he has discovered are in fact true. A list of cities bleeds into
a list of gods, with Hastur being the last city mentioned. Derleth
read this passage and chose to interpret Hastur as first name
in the list of gods, essentially creating a whole new entity that he
could flesh out and use and – most importantly – always claim
that it originated in Lovecraft. Hastur became Cthulhu's half-brother
and nemesis, adding a bit of very human soap-opera style dissension
to ranks of evil. Although we know that it was not Lovecraft's
intention, we can read this passage and see Hastur as a city and a
god simultaneously. The individual reader can choose the
interpretation that they prefer.
The Cthulhu Mythos has
continued to grow in this manner, with authors choosing to follow and
accentuate links between stories by 'Lovecraft Circle'/Cthulhu Mythos
authors while ignoring other connections. Some Mythos stories feature
Hastur prominently, others refuse to acknowledge him it all. Although
fans will try to comprehend the Mythos as a hugely complex but
nevertheless unified system, for me the Mythos is interesting
precisely because it can be a million different bodies of work at the
same time. To demonstrate on a smaller scale, I will try a bit of
'wilful misinterpretation' on the Lovecraft story The Thing On The
Doorstep.
The Thing On The
Doorstep is narrated by Daniel Upton, who has just walked into a
sanatorium and killed his friend Edward Pickman Derby, though he
maintains that it was not murder. He proceeds to explain how Edward
had married an intense young woman from the nearby port-town of
Innsmouth by the name of Asenath Waite who soon begins to exert her
will on the young man. But this is more than simple hen-pecking;
Asenath is literally trying to transfer her mind into Edward's body
and leave his in her body. As it turns out, Asenath had a very
strong-willed father who died in a mad fit – and now Edward
confesses his fears to Daniel that Asenath has in fact possessed the
father's mind from the start of their relationship. I won't give away
the end, as what is important to our (mis)interpretation here is the
background details. The fact that Aesnath and her father hail from
Innsmouth is important. As is the fact that Edward catches glimpses
of what Asenath gets up to whilst in his body, which includes unholy
rites and a pit filled with Shoggoths.
In the Cthulhu Mythos,
the people of Innsmouth are worshippers of Cthulhu and many of them
are actually interbred with bizarre fishmen known as Deep Ones, while
Shoggoths are vast protoplasmic horrors that can warp and consume
anything. They are both 'villains' in this context, dedicated to
resurrecting Cthulhu and his ilk and opposing the 'Elder Ones' that
supposedly imprisoned them. We can read the story as set very clearly
within the good vs. evil backdrop of the Mythos; Asenath is an evil
wizard who needs a fresh body to continue his/her nefarious ways. But
if we focus entirely on Lovecraft's body of work, the references here
are to two earlier stories, At The Mountains Of Madness and
The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In these stories we learn that,
indeed, the Deep Ones and their human companions do worship Cthulhu
and are allied with the Shoggoths. But the reference to the 'Elder
Ones' has a very different meaning here. In At The Mountains Of
Madness, an expedition to Antarctica makes the horrendous
discovery that life on Earth was created by a race of alien beings,
referred to as the Old Ones, who created mankind as a side-effect.
The Old Ones were also responsible for waging war on Cthulhu when he
turned up on Earth a few millennia later, and were the creators of
the Shoggoths, which eventually gained sentience and rebelled against
their masters. Taken as a cycle on their own, these three stories
(and another, The Dreams In The Witch-House) simply tell a
rather straightforward science fiction history of the world,
involving the power struggles of ancient alien races that still have
ramifications for human beings today. The 'Elder Ones' are not gods
that banished Cthulhu but simply an alien race that the Deep Ones and
Shoggoths have decided to team up against. The personal story of
Edward Pickman Derby and his wife is just a drop in the ocean of this
bigger story.
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| A Shoggoth from At The Mountains Of Madness |
But let's take this a
step further in our 'wilful misinterpretation'. Let's ignore At
The Mountains Of Madness and Shadow Over Innsmouth and
instead link The Thing On The Doorstep to two or three stories
by other 'Lovecraft Circle' writers. In Donald Wandrei's The
Tree-Men Of M'Bwa, an evil wizard-dwarf, at the bidding of a
vague demonic force, uses black magic to turn men into trees. On the
face of it, the link seems rather tenuous. Both stories feature
humans using apparent magic and serving unseen non-human entities and
that's about all. But the missing link comes with Robert Bloch's
Notebook Found In A Deserted House. In this story, a young boy
moves in with relatives on the edge of an eerily empty forest. After
several strange experiences – hearing odd sounds, people uttering
bizarre words, inexplicable slime and markings on the ground – the
boy and another man are attacked by a tree-like creature, identified
in the story as a Shoggoth (Ramsey Campbell would later expand on
this version of a Shoggoth by describing it as a tree spirit covered
in hundreds of mouths). Taking this cycle of stories together, we can
construct a world where cults of dark magicians dotted throughout the
world indulge in wicked rites, including the transformation of human
victims into tree-like Shoggoths. Now, the moment where Edward
glimpses the Shoggoth pit in The Thing In The Doorstep can be
interpreted very differently. When he says that he “saw a Shoggoth
– it changed shape!”, instead of the protoplasmic creature from
At The Mountains Of Madness, we can now argue that what Edward
saw was a human being transformed into a tree-like creature.
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| A Shoggoth of the Bloch/Campbell variety? |
We know that this is not
what Lovecraft intended when he wrote this moment, but because of the
ambiguity of the writing (he never describes a Shoggoth in this
particular story), we can happily read this very different meaning as
'true'. This process can be repeated indefinitely with stories by
Lovecraft and others. One can group any random collection of stories
together and link them in ways that are unrelated to the authors'
intentions, or those of the wider Cthulhu Mythos context. The Cthulhu
Mythos, rather than a unified world, can be an infinitely shifting
'super-text' that alters in content and meaning for each reader.
- P.S.
