Howard Philips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20,1890, in one of the oldest families of the town. He almost did not know his father, who suffered from a mental breakdown due to the syphillis when Lovecraft was three and was placed in a hospital where he died in 1898. So Lovecraft was brought up by his mother, his two aunts, and his grandfather, in the family home, at 454 Angell Street. He was a precocious child, who could read by the age of three and wrote his first story, The Little Glass Bottle, at the age of six, then several other tales from 1896 to 1902. Encouraged by his grandfather, he read passionately the ancient Roman and Greek mythologies, the Grimm’s fairy tales and the Arabian Nights ; in 1898 he discovered Edgar Allan Poe, and never ceased to admire his work afterwards. He also began to love the XVIIIth century for its ideas and its way of life.

Lovecraft’s school years were troubled by his frequent psychological illness, and he had to leave high school in 1908 because of a nervous breakdown before obtaining a diploma. However, he kept reading and studying on his own ; having discovered science, chemistry and astronomy, he edited journals, The Scientific Gazette (from 1899 to 1907), then The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy (from 1903 to 1907), he wrote and printed in order to sell them among his family, his friends and from door to door. He also wrote astronomical columns in several newspapers and journals of Providence (for instance in the Tribune from 1906 to 1908 then later in the Evening News in 1914 and 1915).

Lovecraft’s nervous breakdown in 1908 was also caused by the financial difficulties his family had to face after the death of his grandfather in 1904 : they had to leave the family home, which Lovecraft loved. From 1908 to 1913, Lovecraft lived a critical period of his life, failing to enter Brown University (he wanted to become a professional astronomer but had difficulties in higher mathematics), living with her depressed mother, writing a little. In 1914, after a controversy in the magazine Argosy about one Fred Jackson he attacked for his insipid love stories, he was observed by the president of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) who invited him to join the association. Until 1923 Lovecraft assiduously worked for the organization and regained taste for life. It was in the world of amateurdom that he published his first short stories, such as The Beast in the Cave in 1905 or The Alchemist in 1908, encuraged by W. Paul Cook, director of the magazine The Vagrant. He began to write more short stories than essays or poems, and became involved in a growing network of correspondence with friends. He also worked as a ghoswriter, “revisioning” or writing texts from vague ideas given the “authors”. But Lovecraft was poorly paid in these activities, and he never really tried to find a “normal” better-paid work. In 1921, after increasing mental and physical troubles and a nervous breakdown in 1919, Lovecraft’s mother died.

During this year Lovecraft met Sonia Greene at an amateur journalism convention ; she was a widowed Russian Jew and worked as an executive in a famous hat shop in Manhattan. He married Sonia in May 1924, and they moved to her apartment in Brooklyn. In 1923 had been founded the “pulp” magazine Weird Tales, where he began to publish stories (Dagon was the first), partly as a ghostwriter as he did for the magicien Houdini with Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (1924). He published The Rats in the Walls in 1924, The Festival in 1925, He in 1926. He never ceased to send stories to this magazine and to other pulps (such as Amazing Stories, Marvel Stories, The Tryout, The United Amateur, The Vagrant, but Weird Tales was the most famous of all and the quality of its texts was the best), where was published most part of his texts. He became one of the three famous authors published in Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard (known for the character of Conan the Barbarian) and Clark Ashton Smith, who was published in the magazine due to Lovecraft.

But Lovecraft was unable to get a secure work, while the hat shop Sonia has started on her own was a failure, causing her health problems. The couple had increasing financial difficulties, though Lovecraft published several stories in Weird Tales and other pulps. Lovecraft was growing depressive and his relationship with Sonia was deteriorating, all the more as Lovecraft didn’t like New York for the numerous “foreigners” who lived there, and as he was prejudiced against Jews and other minorities. However, he had many friends in the city, and they gathered in the Kalem Club, so named because the surnames of the members mostly began with K, L or M ; Frank Belknap Long was part of them. In 1926, Lovecraft returned to Providence, advised by his two aunts, without Sonia, though he seemed to still have an “appreciation” for her ; in 1929, she asked for the divorce. In August 1926 Lovecraft started his correspondence with August Derleth, who was to take a great part in the recognition and pursuing of his work after his death.

His last ten years were the period when Lovecraft wrote a great part of his work, still published in pulp magazines : The Call of Cthulhu was written in 1926 and issued in 1928, The Colour Out of Space in 1927, At the Mountains of Madness and The Whisperer in the Dark in 1931, The Shadow Out of Time in 1934-35. He continued to write a great number of letters to his friends, who were other authors first published in pulps, as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Donald Wandrei and August Derleth. He traveled several times, in the South in 1929, on the Eastern coast in 1931, in Philadelphia, New England, New Orleans, and in Canada, in Louisiana and in Newport in 1932-33. His ideas changed as he became less conservative in politics during the New Deal, and as he continued to read and learn by himself. But he had to keep searching for money, and that is why he constantly wrote “revisions” or as a ghostwriter for others ; he had difficulties in having his last texts accepted in pulps, since they were more complex and as long as short novels (one of his best-known works, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, was written in 1926-27, but not published before 1941, after his death). His last years were saddened by the death of one of his two aunts in 1932 ; he was shocked and confused by the suicide of Robert E. Howard in 1936. He was suffering from a cancer of the intestine ; in March 1937 he was admitted in Jane Brown Hospital, where he died five days later. His death, the death of Robert E. Howard and the departure of Clark Ashton Smith, caused the quality of the texts in Weird Tales to decrease : the great period of the magazine had ended.

After Lovecraft’s death, his work may have sunk into oblivion, apart from a few fans of Weird Tales : he had never published a real book in his life, except from a few hundred copies of The Shadow over Insmouth distributed in late 1936 ; his short stories, poems, essays and other writings had been published in many different amator magazines and papers or pulps. But Lovecraft had had an enormous correspondence, keeping writing many letters to a number of friends, having not even met some of them during his life, and his friends did want to publish his work in order to bring it to the attention of the public : August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House to publish collections of Lovecraft’s stories : The Outsider and Others in 1939 was the first, and the publication of his fiction, essays and poetry (Beyond the Wall of Sleep in 1943, Marginalia in 1944, Collected poems in 1962), then of a part of his correspondence in five volumes of Selected Letters collected by Donald Wandrei from 1965 to1976^¹ (partly translated and published in France by Christian Bourgois Editeur), last until August Derleth died in 1972.

The other writers who were published in Weird Tales or other pulps and were Lovecraft’s friends or acquaintances used to borrow characters, places or ancient books they had invented from one another ; it was a current thing at this time. That is how began a complex intertextuality between Lovecraft and a number of writers, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long and others, who refer to Lovecraft’s imaginary places such as Arkham or Dunwich, characters such as Randolph Carter, books such as the Necronomicon, or monstruous gods such as Cthulhu, and added other ones they invented and linked to the first ones, producing a vast and coherent corpus which constituted a fictional myth. After Lovecraft’s death, and in the 40s and 50s, they and other authors such as Brian Lumley or Ramsey Campbell, kept writing stories taking place in what was to be called the “Cthulhu Mythos”.

In early 1976, Paul Michaud, a young professor at the university of Harvard, founded Necronomicon Press^², a non-profit-making publishing house, to pursue the task. The director is now Marc Michaud, assisted by S. T. Joshi, a freelance writer and editor who published Lovecraft’s works in their best textual accuracy (in Arkham House and Necronomicon Press), wrote several studies and a biography of Lovecraft’s life. Necronomicon Press continues to edit studies, booklets, small volumes, and the review Lovecraft Studies.

However, Lovecraft’s work was first ignored in the United States, partly because he had been published in the same cheap pulp magazines which mostly published low quality texts, partly because he wrote “genre” fiction which had been banished from the main publishing houses. The interest for Lovecraft began in France, when he was discovered by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels in 1935. Jacques Bergier used his reputation as a means to draw the attention of French readers. He admired Lovecraft for his “réalisme fantastique” and presented him more as a science-fiction writer than as a horror or gothic writer (he evoked Lovecraft in his book Admirations published by Christian Bourgois at the same time when J.R.R. Tolkien was beginning to be known in France). Bergier and Pauwels founded the review Planète where they published stories by Lovecraft, convinced other reviews such as Fiction and the publishing house Denoël to do the same. In 1969 a Cahier de l’Herne was devoted to Lovecraft, under the direction of F. Truchaud. A second wave of French admirers gave way to the Etudes lovecraftiennes by J. Altairac and to the Cahiers d’études lovecraftiennes published by Encrages.

Then the movement came back to the United States and to other anglo-saxon countries, where Lovecraft is today recognized as the leading figure of the XXth century in supernatural fiction. Writers as known as Stephen King collected his texts in anthologies. Lovecraft inspired several films and comics, a few video games, and one of the first roleplaying games, The Call of Cthulhu, in 1983 (written by Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis, published by Chaosium Inc.).

Part Two – The Tale of Lovecraft’s Work : Classical fantastic, the Cthulhu Mythos, Dreamlands

Lovecraft was early influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, to whom he is often compared (one sometimes calls him “the Poe of the XXth century”) ; though Jorge Luis Borges even said, in The Book of Sand, that Lovecraft had kept writing involuntary pastiches of Poe, this influence did not last all his life long, but is quite visible in The Outsider (1926) and other earlier texts. Lovecraft was also influenced by other writers, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood (who is quoted in epigraph at the beginning of The Call of Cthulhu). It is useful not to forget, when reading his texts, the passion he had for ancient mythologies, astronomy, archeology and for the XVIIIth century. One may remember, too, that Lovecraft was not only a great reader and a great letter writer, but also thought about his time and led a continuous philosophical reflection as a materialist ; and his philosophy does not contradict his production as a writer.

Lovecraft’s fiction is often depicted as the coherent description of the “Cthulhu Mythos”, a corpus of stories all refering to the same fictional history of the Earth before mankind appeared, involving several extra-terrestrial civilizations and gods that have ruled the world and now seem to have disappeared, though they are just sleeping in hidden ancient places, waiting for the moment when the stars are right to awake and claim back their lost hegemony. To study The Call of Cthulhu is the best way to precise this general conception of Lovecraft’s work, since before 1926, the year when he wrote this short story, Lovecraft had no coherent project and his stories did not refer to each other. It is when he wrote The Call of Cthulhu that Lovecraft decided to describe, in his following texts, a coherent fictional cosmogony. However, and although he told his friends about his “Cthulhu and Yog-Soth-oth cycle” (Yog-Soth-oth being an other monstruous creature he had evoked), he never used the expression of “Cthulhu Mythos”, which was invented after his death by August Derleth and the other writers who pursued his work with increasing coherence.

Jacques Goimard^³ parts Lovecraft’s work into three periods, approximatively corresponding to but not caused by the three periods of his life. A first period, ending in 1919 when his mother enters a sanatorium, is his “literary youth” : he writes articles and poems, and a dozen of fantastic short stories ; the influence of Poe, Blackwood and Machen is quite visible. In 1919, Lovecraft reads Lord Dunsany for the first time, and is later influenced by his composition of a fictional cycle. It is the beginning of a second period, when he writes more letters and many short stories (about forty). He also writes Horror and supernatural in literature, an essay where he describes his conception of the fantastic. The third period begins after he has left Sonia ; he writes The Call of Cthulhu, which opens the way to his best works, around thirty texts : Lovecraft’s tales are fewer but longer and they are his masterpieces.

It is quite difficult to draw a “structural” typology of Lovecraft’s fiction, which is numerous and various in length and in style. But it is possible, not imposing any quick classification upon them, to propose three directions :

A first whole is composed by rather classical horror or fantastic texts, without clear specificity due to their being part of the Cthulhu cycle. They are his earlier texts influenced by Poe, certain stories he wrote as a ghostwriter, and also a self-parody, Herbert West, Reanimator, in 1922.

A second group consists of the short stories or short novels clearly refering to the Cthulhu Mythos : there are his latest and best-known works, and of course The Call of Cthulhu, but there are, too, a number of “revisions” written for other authors in order to earn money, but where he included quotations or allusions to his own Cthulhu cycle, such as in The Horror in the Museum attributed to Hazel Heald.

The Statement of Randolph Carter (published in 1920), the short novels The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath (begun in 1920, posthumously published), The Silver Key (written in 1926), Through the Gates of the Silver Key (written in collaboration with his friend E. Hoffmann Price), composing what may be called the cycle of Randolph Carter, and several short stories, mainly The Doom that came to Sarnath (1919), Celephais (published in 1920), Cats of Ulthar (1920), The Other Gods (1921), The Strange High House in the Mist (1926), may be gathered into a third set which takes place in a slightly different style and atmosphere than the other texts, and which has been called the Dreamlands : though there are references to the creatures and gods of the Cthulhu Mythos, the stories deal about the oneiric adventures of the dreamer Randolph Carter, or refer to the dreamlands he explores, not presenting him. The influence of Dunsany is rather important in these texts.

Part Three – The Madness from the Sea : The Call of Cthulhu or cosmic horror

I chose to study The Call of Cthulhu to complete this presentation of H.P. Lovecraft because this short story is well-known as one of his best, and because it is a typical tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. It is a detective story and a horrific adventure, but a controversy may be possible about his genre : is it a fantastic or a science-fiction story ? The issue is unsolvable, because Lovecraft draws literary horror from his philosophical reflection about the place of mankind in the universe, and draws this philosophical reflection just from his scientific knowledge in astronomy, mathematics and physics...

The Call of Cthulhu was written in August or September 1926, just after Lovecraft returned to Providence. He had achieved the idea of the general plot one year before, and the first idea finds its origin in a dream Lovecraft had made in 1920. Such a chronology may seem weird, but Lovecraft made all his life long numerous fantastic dreams which often inspired later-written short stories. The short story was first rejected by Weird Tales, but was resubmitted in July 1927 then published in February 1928.

The Call of Cthulhu is composed of three inner parts : I. The Horror in Clay, II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse, III. The Madness from the Sea, and it follows the progression of the investigations of the narrator, who tries to gather various elements he found in the papers of his recently dead grand-uncle, professor Angell. This leads him to reconstitute events which happened from 1907 to 1925. A series of terrible dreams made by many separate persons in the world during March and April 1925, and the madness of a young sculptor, Henry Wilcox, during the same period, after which he sculpts a weird idol in clay, confronted with the declarations of a member of a morbid cult broken up by the inspector Legrasse in 1907 in a swamp in Louisiana, where he found an ancient non terrestrial-made idol picturing the same hideous creature, appear to have been caused by an undersea earthquake which, during the same period of March-April 1925, had risen to the surface a small island where a seaman, Johansen, with his companions, discovered strange cyclopean buildings before most of them were killed or maddened by an enormous hideous creature, except from Johansen who was able to defend himself and get back to write what he had seen before his sudden death.

The creature, pictured by the two statues, is the ancient extra-terrestrial god Cthulhu, part of the Old Ones who came to Earth and ruled it billions of years before mankind appeared, bringing with them idols picturing themselves, and who are now sleeping in R’lyeh, the sunken city the earthquake had temporarily and partly risen, allowing them to communicate with mankind by manipulating dreams of sensitive persons ; they are waiting until the stars are right, the moment when the members of their ancient cult, which has been transmitted from generation to generation, liberate them so that they can claim back their ancient domination over the world. The narrator himself does not trust what he is finding out, until he makes sure that the death of his relative was not natural : he has been discreetly murdered by a member of the cult of the Old Ones, because he knew too much. In the end, the narrator becomes certain that such a truth, if it was spread, would plunge mankind into madness, and he hopes nobody will never gather the elements he used to achieve his investigation.

Several elements appearing in The Call of Cthulhu are representative of Lovecraft’s writing ; other ones create the specificity of this short story, which inaugurates Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu and Yog-Soth-oth cycle” as a means of cosmic horror. We will examine the first ones, then the second ones.

We can see in The Call of Cthulhu two elements which are characteristic of Lovecraft’s way of writing short stories, but are enhanced and appear as particularly efficient devices in this one. They are, the discrepancy between the narrated events and the way and order they are narrated, and autobiographical allusions he makes in his texts.

The Call of Cthulhu is the story of an investigation, and so the story of a recomposition of the true past. In Horror and the Supernatural in Literature, Lovecraft describes the way one can write a fantastic story, and he founds the main effect in the discrepancy between the order the events happen and the order they are narrated : one may first write a chronology of events, then write the story itself, and they have to be very different in the final result. That is why the narrator is lead to reconstitute, rewrite, three stories : the story of his great-uncle’s investigations about the Cthulhu cult, the story of a coincidence between events dating from March to April 1925 (the dreams of many people and the death of Johansen’s crew on an unknown island), and the history of the world before mankind. The narrator goes back far into the past in a movement which reaches its climax with the declaration of Old Castro describing the ancient coming of the Old Ones on Earth, in the middle of the second part of the story.

In The Call of Cthulhu, the device is enhanced by an other one : we may notice that this distance between the hic et nunc represented by the narrator, and the truth he is about to discover, is increased by an second distance : the distance between the reader and the source of the speech. Lovecraft uses the device of nested reporting, in which every piece of information the reader reads is passed on by at least three layers, following the pattern “A told B that C said he saw Z”. For instance, when the narrator produces the information “the Old Ones used to rule the world”, he found it in the notes of professor Angell, who heard it by inspector Legrasse, who had been told it by Old Catsro, who had heard about it in ancient legends : the narrator is but the last link of a long chain. That is reinforced through the agency of the narrator who keeps describing his inquiry, and of Lovecraft himself, who keeps writing the whole story.

The sources of information are themselves very distant : legends concerning the Old Ones and the cult of Cthulhu were transmitted from generation to generation before Castro heard about them ; and the dreams of young Wilcox are described by the sculptor himself as “older then brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon”, before they appear as results of the mental influence of Cthulhu, and sent by him. That is how the whole story is in fact a continuous movement that leads the narrator, and the reader, closer and closer to an unstandable truth. It is less the reliability of one single piece of information than the network they build up, once gathered, that creates the impression of horror : at one moment it is just a collection of uncertain rumors, legends or mere coincidences, and the moment after the narrator and the reader realize they are caught in a web of horribly clear tokens of evidence.

This information web aims at replacing the narrator’s and reader’s usual knowledge and science by another knowledge dominated by the reality of the existence of Cthulhu and the Old Ones, and a horrific reality replaces usual secure reality. The incipit of the story is the key to the mechanism of the progression of horror as the reader and the narrator approach this terrible reality : “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. [...] 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.”^⁴ The re-building of true reality over our reality leads both narrator and reader to an unbearable certainty, as announced in the very beginning.

The other characteristic in Lovecraft’s short stories is the recurrent presence of autobiographical allusions ; several are noticeable in The Call of Cthulhu. The name of professor Angell, the narrator’s great-uncle, is borrowed from the name of the street where Lovecraft’s family lived for a long time in Providence, and it was the name of one of the most distinguished families of the town. Wilcox is the name of Lovecraft’s ancestry. The name of Gammell is a variant from the name of one of Lovecraft’s two aunts, Annie G. P. Gamwell. The name of Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon^⁵, is a pseudonym Lovecraft used at the age of eight, just after reading the Arabian Nights. Lovecraft liked these literary games of hidden references, and also played them with other writers, as a means of intertextuality. We may notice too, which is perhaps more interesting, that Lovecraft uses precise details in real facts and places to anchor the story in our real world : the undersea earthquake near New Zealand really occurred ; and a house he evokes, the Fleur-de-Lys building where Wilcox lives at 7 Thomas Street, is a real structure, still standing. Lastly, it is probably not a mere coincidence if a story that had been inspired to Lovecraft by a dream gives such an importance to dreams as a way to discover the true hidden reality.

Lovecraft’s peculiar fantastic was called many times a “cosmic horror” and The Call of Cthulhu is probably the best-indicated story to explain this expression. As the “monsters” who cause horror come from outer space, and are nothing but extra-terrestrials or aliens, some critics considered Lovecraft as a science-fiction writer. However, the important thing may not be the genre, but the mechanism of lovecraftian horror : it is a “cosmic horror” because it is linked with Lovecraft’s philosophical reflexion, used as a component of his literary work.

I already quoted the incipit of the story ; it can not only be read as the key to a process of rebuilding of reality, but also as a philosophical conception. Lovecraft, as I said before, was a materialist : he didn’t trust the various and fanciful theories of some theosophists he read, neither did he think about a life after death, about a hidden signification of dreams, or about a real existence of the monstruous godities he had described. He thought that mankind was no more than a “transient incident” compared to time and space in the entire universe ; certain paragraphs he wrote in his correspondence look like what Pascal could have written about the infinity of universe. It allows a philosophical reading of his work, where the monsters and the strange events he depicts may be symbols or physical incarnations of man’s hidden fears due to his condition and place in Nature.

Lovecraft had read Freud and heard about emerging psychoanalysis : his evocations of dreams are not for the only purpose of picturesqueness, but correspond to a reflexion about the subconscious. Dreams are the best vehicle of fear because they evidence the reality and activity of a part of ourselves we are unable to master ; more, they mean an other logic we cannot easily understand, and awaken an other, symbolic way of thinking, which searches for sense everywhere by sudden associations of ideas. Lovecraft was inspired by his dreams, but he could also use them to explore the unconscious. Even if it is no proof, one should not forget the frequent nervous disorders or breakdowns he knew himself or in his family and the final madness of his mother just before she died.

The monsters Lovecraft describes, and the unknown ancient formulae he creates, correspond to a fundamental issue of the mind, often at work in fantastic literature : the relationship to Others, the fear of and fascination for what is completely different from you. The names of gods and creatures of the Cthulhu Mythos were written just for nobody to be able to utter them correctly, since they represented transcriptions of totally non human languages. Lovecraft said Cthulhu sounded like “Kthulhu” or “Khlulhu” with a u pronounced like in full, but it is nothing more than an equivalence ; other names of gods of the Mythos, such as Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep or the Shoggoths, not to quote Shub-Niggurath, Ghatanothoa or Tulzscha, are ulmost unpronouncable. And it is rather worse when Lovecraft writes down certain magic or ritual summonings as the well-known formula “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” ^⁶ The physical appearance of these gods and creatures is horrific because they seem at least monstruous or extra-terrestrial, as for Cthulhu who is represented by tentacle headed dragon idols, but sometimes totally protean, as Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, whose descriptions convey the primitive Chaos. The places where these creatures live are extremely distant stars, as Aldebaran, or unknown ones, asYuggoth. The architectura built by the Old Ones can’t be entirely perceived by human senses : Old Castro tells about their all wrong geometry, and the seamen who discover the emerged summit of R’lyeh and the palace of Cthulhu explore a moving environment, with angles looking like obtuse and feeling sharp and vice versa. Every little contact with these peoples and their cultures convey an impression of radical difference, which becomes hostility because it has no common measure with human usual time, space and way of perceiving and understanding the universe.

The similarity between a great number of these creatures and ancient gods or mythological figures must not hide the originality of Lovecraft’s creations : his work is not a mere copy or revival of ancient legends, it finds its foundations in the same place where they had found theirs : the deepest part of human mind, subconscious and fears, which Lovecraft links with man’s condition in universe. In his materialist conception of the world, where there is no life after death, no possible link with these “gods”, neither paradise to regain nor still preserved harmony, and where the magical power or mere knowledge you may gain by whorshipping the Old Ones or reading the books dealing about them, condemn you to madness, in such a reality, time, space and the whole universe appear as disproportionate compared with mankind, as the monstrous Cthulhu and his Mythos.

A last component of cosmic horror may preserve the reader from a confusion. In Lovecraft’s stories, it is not what is seen or really faced that causes horror, but what you know you will find if you dare go further. The title of the last part of the short story, “The Madness from the Sea”, well represents this suggestive horror. Cthulhu Itself does not kill everybody, and is desintegrated by a “mere” collision with Johansen’s boat when the seaman diriges it on him in a desperate attempt to escape, which is finally successful. Even if Johansen sees the huge creature “recomposing” itself while he flies, this scene is not the most horrific moment of the story. Cthulhu and its sectators do not seem dangerous. What the reader feels to be much more perillous is what is still hidden : the seamen have explored nothing but a very little top of the enormous sunken city of R’lyeh, veiled under the sea, which may appear as a symbol of the unconscious. And even R’lyeh is nothing compared to the infinite number of alien worlds and civilizations lurking in the outer space.

It is the sudden opening of infinite horizons, the close and intimate conviction of the existence of something which paradoxically seems too far or too secretly hidden to be ever reached, that provokes the feeling of a dislocation of the mind, caused by the unbearable tension or pressure between the usual reality we thought we knew, and this other reality, a so enormous, absurd, incomprehensible universe, that we are unable to think without destroying our own sanity. That is cosmic horror as we can see it at work in The Call of Cthulhu.

A short bibliography

- H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, Penguin Classics, 1999

- H.P. Lovecraft, Oeuvres complètes, French translation, Bouquins Robert Laffont, 3 vol.

- S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, (Arkham House ?)

- Timo Airaksinen, The Philosophy of HP Lovecraft – The Route to Horror, in New Studies in Aesthetics – 29, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999 (the 10^th chapter is devoted to The Call of Cthulhu)

- Jacques Goimard, Critique du fantastique et de l’insolite, Pocket Agora n°250, 2003 (two articles deal about Lovecraft and his work, but there are many analyses about fantastic literature)

Appendice : five excerpts from The Call of Cthulhu

The following five texts would have been read or distributed to the listeners in an oral presentation of H.P. Lovecraft and The Call of Cthulhu. I reproduce them below. The text I used is part of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, published by Penguin Classics in 1999, with an introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi.

Text 1

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 a 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.

Theosophists have guesses at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things – in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out ; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws, which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable ; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth – or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters long the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even the remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.

This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this – the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud :

Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this :

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dream to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars where ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen has told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

The Great Old One, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape – for did not his star-fashioned image prove it ? – but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through he sky; but when the stars were wrong, they could not live. But although They no longer lived, they would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to nom, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil^⁷, with laws and moral thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city r’lyeh, with his monoliths and sepulchers, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut-off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet :

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality^⁸, for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God ! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant ? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident.^⁹ After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Notes

1 Since Lovecraft’s correspondence consists of more than 100, 000 letters, it has not yet been entirely published. His published and non-published letters are conserved in the John Hay Library, in Providence.

2 (Necronomicon Press, 101 Lockwood Street, West Warrick, RI02893, USA)

3 « Itinéraire d’un fantastiqueur : Lovecraft entre l’en-deçà et l’au-delà », in Critique du fantastique et de l’insolite, Pocket Agora, 2003 ; initially published in Europe n°611, Les Fantastiques, March 1980. Jacques Goimard studied in the ENS and was a teacher in Henri IV, before he taught a seminary about marginal literatures in the colleges Paris III and Paris VII. He wrote in Le Monde and in Metal Hurlant.

6 See Text 3 for an English understandable translation.

7 Lovecraft knew of course the radical morality Nietzsche had described in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. He seems to have agreed a part of his philosophy, though he wrote in 1919-21 : “I do not swallow him whole. His ethical system is a joke – or a poet’s dream, which amounts to the same thing.” (Selected letters, vol. I, p. 134, quoted by S.T. Joshi in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories)

8 A noticeable reference to Poe, who writes, in The Fall of the House of Usher : “...the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe...”

9 As for the “accidental piecing together of separated things” in Text 1, the discovery of truth results from no planned investigations, but from a coincidence : chance (or fate ?) seems to be the incomprehensible law of universe, beyond human will or control of events.

H. P. Lovecraft and The Call of Cthulhu

Table of Contents

Part One – The Horror in Paper(s) : H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), a life and a recognition

Part Two – The Tale of Lovecraft’s Work : Classical fantastic, the Cthulhu Mythos, Dreamlands

Part Three – The Madness from the Sea : The Call of Cthulhu or cosmic horror

A short bibliography

Appendice : five excerpts from The Call of Cthulhu

Text 1

Notes