Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Ambiguity & Simultaneity

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.