During the summer of 1926 Lovecraft wrote a story that in traditional critical terms has often been considered, with much reason, to have turned out to be thematically central to his work: “The Call of Cthulhu” (DUN, 125-54). The story features a parenthetical colophon immediately following the title: “Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston.” The tale itself opens: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” The narrator editorializes upon the fear that “some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up . . . terrifying vistas of reality” (125). Indeed the narrator seems to have done such a piecing-together. Thurston has the task of going through the papers of his recently deceased grand-uncle, a Professor Angell of Brown University, who has been widely known as “an authority on ancient inscriptions” (126).
Among the deceased’s effects Thurston finds, in a box labeled CTHULHU CULT, a “queer clay bas-relief’ of a monster “which only a diseased fancy could conceive”—a squidlike creature with a “pulpy, tentacled head” surmounting “a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings,” against a “vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background” (127). Angell’s notes reveal that the figure is the work of a contemporary sculptor named Wilcox, who fashioned it from his dreams in a state of half-waking frenzy. The notes also tell of a police inspector named Legrasse, who some years earlier brought a similar statue to a meeting of the American Archaeological Society for possible identification. That object was taken from a murderous group of voodoo fetishists deep in the woods south of New Orleans.
Although no one at the meeting could ascribe a source to the figure, or could read the cryptic inscription upon it, a Professor Webb in attendance came forward and described having seen a similar statue worshiped by a “cult of degenerate Esquimaux” in Greenland (135). From them he had taken a phonetic copy of a chant: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” (136). He was told the chant meant “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” The phrase was also used by Legrasse’s fetishist prisoners, though they had supplied Legrasse with no translation.
Legrasse’s prisoners, severely questioned about the reasons behind their revolting human sacrifices, told of an ageless cult devoted to the Great Old Ones, primordial beings who had come from the stars bearing the statue-fetish with them. Cthulhu was their high priest, lying entombed undead in a watery crypt where the ocean had swallowed up the prehuman city of R’lyeh. While still above the water, Cthulhu had telepathically spoken to the sensitive among early humans, who started an undying cult devoted to the prospect that one day great Cthulhu would rise and regain dominion over the earth, “when the stars were ready” (139).
Understandably skeptical about all this, the narrator visits the sculptor Wilcox in Providence, Rhode Island, and hears fresh accounts of the sculptor’s feverish dreams, in which he has seen not only the lumbering Cthulhu but also a “damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry . . . was all wrong” (143). Later, visiting a museum curator friend, the narrator happens upon an Australian news item on a page of the Sydney Bulletin being used as shelf paper. The item relates the story of a Norwegian sea captain, one Johansen, who survived a sea experience in which he and his crew saw an island newly risen from the sea. Most of the crew died there, but Johansen remained reticent about how it happened.
Ultimately visiting Johansen’s home in Oslo, the narrator finds that although Johansen has since mysteriously died, he left behind a diary in English. Johansen’s widow allows the narrator to take the diary away, and it describes the crew’s experience on the risen island, which, the narrator comes to realize, can only be the fabled R’lyeh. It seems that Johansen and his men found on the island a stone city—again, “the geometry of the place was all wrong” (151), with one’s sense of perspective distorted. While they were exploring the place, the dreaded Cthulhu “lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity” out through the portal of a stone building (152). The creature killed most of the men outright, with only Johansen and one mate (who subsequently died) escaping. Later investigations showed no island at the spot described. This account leaves the narrator Thurston asking, “Who knows the end?” and reflecting, apocalyptically and with chiasmus, “What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise” (154). As one might expect, the story presents, even beyond its open and ominous ending, a good deal of interpretative potential. We need only linger at the textual door to see what peculiar things may “lumber forth.”
Perhaps the first thing that one notices about the text, after the title, is the colophon, telling us that the text was found among the notes of the (even more ominously) late Thurston. The colophon is of course a self-referential comment, as if the text has said, I am found among the notes of the late Thurston. The maker of this comment, this tag attached to the (rest of the) text, would seem to be a kind of exonarrator, a commentator upon the text, though when one sees the colophon as part of the text, the exo-narrator is the text itself, which promises to have things to say about its own narration. But further, one quickly notices that the mode of narration is, to say the least, that of a “frame story,” a story within a story. The framing, in fact, is many layers deep. Following one strand (among other strands) of narrative framing, we find a sequentially nested structure: we see the repellent Cthulhu through the prism of several layers of indirection. The text itself relates the narrator Thurston’s relating of Professor Angell’s relating (through his notes, and among other matters) of Inspector Legrasse’s relating of the New Orleans cultists’ relating of the traditional handing-down of the telepathic impact of Cthulhu. Following another strand, we find an even deeper well of structure: the text’s relating of Thurston’s discovery of Angell’s written account of Legrasse’s exposure to Professor Webb’s remembered account of the account of the “degenerate Esquimaux” of the handed-down tradition of the telepathic impact of Cthulhu. Interestingly, these two strands interweave, through the juxtaposition and cross-fertilization of the accounts of Legrasse and Webb as related in the notes of Professor Angell.
We begin to see, in the bizarre intertwining and nesting of these levels of framing, what the text may mean, self-referentially, by a description of a geometry that is “all wrong.” For wrong we can read “irreducible to simple, stable terms.”
As the narrator Thurston himself draws closer, inadvertently, to the matter that he is investigating, the structure of framing reduces to strands of fewer levels, though the telescoping of the frames obviously remains. In the matter of the sculptor Wilcox, we have the text’s account of the narrator’s experience with Angell’s notes about Wilcox’s experience with the telepathic impact of the risen Cthulhu. And when Thurston comes upon the matter of the sea captain Johansen, we have the text’s account of Thurston’s reading of Johansen’s account of his own expressly physical and direct contact with Cthulhu. If one counts Cthulhu and counts the self-commenting exo-narrator or the text itself, there are sometimes as many as nine layers, sometimes as few as four, with epistemological strands intertwining, as we have seen, and with Cthulhu seemingly the center. He is even described, with regard to Legrasse’s cultist prisoners, as “the central idea of their loathsome faith” (139).
As always, though, notions of centrality and presence are likely to be problematic. One notes, reading the text, that in the matters of the New Orleans fetishists and the Greenland cultists, Cthulhu himself is not present. Rather, the cult traditions guide the actions, traditions that were formed by primordial but never-forgotten telepathic contact. Strictly speaking, in the narrative strands or nestings of frames involving Legrasse’s and Webb’s accounts, we never quite get “down to” Cthulhu, but only to his long handed-down effects. The fetishists, both in New Orleans and in Greenland, do not have their unseen octopoid master at hand but carven images of him, together with ancestrally transmitted lore from early telepathic encounters. In Legrasse’s story of how the New Orleans police broke up the bloody sacrificial rites in the woods, one notes that the scene of the rites involves further nested structure. The statue of Cthulhu, upon its pedestal, rests inside a circular bonfire, outside of which a circle of celebrants dances, and farther out, beyond this revolving circle of dancers, stands a circle of ten gallows from which the mutilated human sacrifices hang. The effect again seems to make Cthulhu central to a telescoped sequence, but we note, as before, that it is not Cthulhu who rests as a presence within the concentric circles, but his image. And we read that Professor Webb’s remembered image in Greenland “was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing” to the statue that Legrasse brought to the meeting (135). It was a rough parallel but not an identical copy, so our sense of distance from the “real” Cthulhu is heightened. For Cthulhu, the narrator concludes from reading Johansen’s diary, “there is no language” (152), just as there is no exactitude or consistency of sculpture. We are structurally and linguistically separated from Cthulhu.
Even the Wilcox account, in which the narrator is in a sense closer to Cthulhu, stops short at the telepathic effects. Cthulhu is most significant, here as elsewhere, precisely for his effects in absence—his power from afar. Only in the Johansen story do we find an account of a direct encounter with Cthulhu. Yet even here, in terms of narrative distance, Cthulhu is absent. We must infer his having been present to Johansen from that man’s account as read and related by Thurston. To the extent that Cthulhu seems in any way central, he becomes an allegorization of the textually necessary absence of a center.
It is significant that Wilcox’s sculpture of Cthulhu is described as a bas-relief: an art form also known as low relief, in which the figure is projected very little from the background, in contrast with the forms known as half-relief, or mezzorelievo or demirelief, in which the figure projects more but not greatly, and high relief, with the figure prominently projected from the background. It seems that the text thus symbolizes its own workings, since the portrayal of Cthulhu in low relief suggests his disinclination to appear, to emerge from the background, to come forth. But from the standpoint of Johansen, the text does have him come forth, in what we can only call great high relief, in the episode of the encounter with the ship’s crew. Yet textually we may in turn question even this portrayal as high relief, since, as we have observed, the encounter is distanced from us by a number of layers of narrative indirection. For us, even here, Cthulhu is couched in a background from which we only imagine his emergence, as a matter of perspective.
Then, too, we note that in such a multilayered frame story as this, Cthulhu is himself framed, indeed is framed several times over: enclosed, bordered by various levels of narration. The notion of a frame or border raises serious problems. A frame both encloses (controls, seals off, exercises dominance over) what it encloses and, antithetically, highlights and draws liberating attention to the character of what it attempts to enclose. Thus frames of narration paradoxically enwrap Cthulhu and confine him to the background (or to low relief against the background) on the one hand and, on the other, pull him forth into high relief. In any case, it is well known that frames and borders were made to be overrun, and we can scarcely suppose that such frames may stand simply as rigid “structure” unambiguously present in the text.
We find some suggestiveness in the notion of “calling” in the title and in other such textual references. In the title “The Call of Cthulhu,” the preposition of is ambiguous. Primarily one takes it to suggest “from” or “originating with” or “characteristic of’ or “to be expected on the part of.” Cthulhu, when the stars are right, will call telepathically to his faithful among humans and will demand his liberation. Yet of may be read such that call suggests the gerund calling with its transitive force directed to Cthulhu: the calling of Cthulhu, the making of Cthulhu into that which is called forth—as his followers intend to do, in fact. This bidirectionality of the notion of calling—this capacity of the title to suggest that Cthulhu calls and is called, that he calls to be called—establishes a movement across boundaries and into and out of frames. To call is to call out, both in the sense of calling out to and calling forth. To have to call, and to be able to do so, is both to credit and to discredit the borders across which one calls. As usual, borders become self-deconstructing.
Among other senses of call—aside from “call” in the sense of putting a stop to, as in calling a ball game, with respect to which we observe that the text both puts a stop to Cthulhu and denies, in the apocalyptic ending, that it really has done so—we note that calling even suggests naming, and the call(ing) of Cthulhu is his naming. In this regard, one finds various matters of interest in the peculiar name itself. In terms of linguistic kinships, the nearest relatives, at least if we stay close to the cth- structure and refrain from introducing vowels, are the words chthonic and chthonian, “pertaining to the underworld,” from the Greek khthonios, “under the earth,” which in turn derives from the Indo-European root dhghem-, “earth.” The text waxes playful at the etymological level here, since of course Cthulhu, “in his house at R’lyeh,” is beneath not the earth but the ocean waves. It is interesting that the same Indo-European root is responsible, in Latin, not only for humus, “earth,” but also for homo, “man.” The call(ing) of Cthulhu, his name, becomes perversely linked with the humankind with whom the text at the simple narrative level takes pains to make sure that the teratological Cthulhu is opposed and contrasted.
Yet another intriguing kinship, requiring, in Greek, introduction of a vowel and exchange of the letter chi for kappa, is the form katholou—which is remarkable for its phonic closeness to some attempted pronunciations of the name Cthulhu, since there is a tendency to introduce a vowel where the -a- in katholou is anyway. Katholou (from kata-, “according to,” and holou, a form of holos, “whole”) means “in general” and of course is responsible for the word catholic in the sense of “universal.” (In the text, Inspector Legrasse’s prisoners, followers of a religious calling of a sort, describe Cthulhu as a “great priest.” Considering the katholou connection, there is more than a whiff of covert humor here.) Here again we arrive at the subversion of containment within borders or frames—that which is in any sense universal or far-flung is scarcely containable by boundaries. The text postures with itself. In presenting itself as a species of frame story, it pretends to draw distinctions between insides and outsides of frames yet at the same time moves against such distinctions, pulls the borders apart even as they are drawn, spills the contents of the innermost frames out. If Cthulhu partakes of universality, then he is not confinable, and one sees that the structural frames of the text end up being not so much boundaries as conduits: knowledge-conducting interfaces which transmit Cthulhu in and out and across. The levels of the frame structures—for example, the accounts of Webb and Legrasse as preserved by Angell’s notes—are, after all, informational.
Yet paradoxically they are also that which maintains narrative distance between the textual Cthulhu and the reader. They both connect and separate; they allegorize the impossibility of simple textual function. When Cthulhu calls telepathically across the void and when humans vow to call him forth in turn, the respective sides of the boundaries come to contain each other. Humankind is immersed in the telepathic presence-through-absence of Cthulhu, and Cthulhu retains the promise of liberation through human intervention. Without human devotees, Cthulhu cannot come forth, and without Cthulhu, human cultists cannot function as such. Each pole of the opposition is the enabling condition of the other. As far as textual frames go, inside becomes outside, and conversely. Further, if Cthulhu as katholou is redolent of generality or universality, then we have encountered another way in which the notion of centrality falls to subversion. A center is (or would be, if it existed) a local point around which generalities gather and cannot itself be “general.”
It is interesting that the name Cthulhu suggests other things as well, by way of French. The ending -lhu can scarcely but connect with lu, past participle of lire “to read.” In this regard, there are at least two phonically close transcriptions. In côté-lu (côté, “side”) we find the suggestion of sideways-reading, that which is read sidlingly, indirectly. Indeed we find that Cthulhu is “read” only through much sidling motion through multiple frames of narration. Yet we do “read” him, see him. But we see him from afar; he is beneath the waves while we are on the shore. Côte, “shore,” “coast,” gives us another transcription: côte-yeux lu, that which is read with shore-eyes. This underscores the distancing of the telescoped narrative frames, while, as we have seen, the borders of those frames nevertheless flicker in and out of existence, oscillating between the mutually antithetical functions of separating and bonding.
Altogether, “The Call of Cthulhu” stands as an allegorical exploration of the paradoxical nature of borders, of distances, of insides and outsides, of the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of centers, of the tendency of textuality to deal in absences that are more powerful than presences. If the great priest Cthulhu indeed calls to us from the deep, then it is from the unfathomable depths of language that he calls, and he speaks of the cryptic and eternal mysteries of texts.