THE READING RHEUM: "THE CALL OF CTHULHU" (1926/1928)

 

In my review of the short HPL story "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," I wrote:

Many commentators have talked about HPL's abhorrence for non-white races, and sometimes even for white ethnicities that the author considered decadent. I don't deny that he sported these racist views to make himself feel superior. Yet it's interesting that the first example of a wretched ethnicity in HPL's fiction-cosmos is lowborn "white trash," and the author treats Slater just as condescendingly as he would ever treat any other ethnic figure... In my opinion HPL was always separated from most of humanity thanks to his superb intellectual attainments, meaning that he related no better to most whites than he did to non-whites. Yet because HPL knew that he was of the same common clay as the most ignoble human being, and thus his fiction is filled with examples of his fear of degenerating into something inferior. (In Jungian terms Slater would be "the shadow" who incarnated that dominating fear of bodily devolution.)

I confess that I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of HPL, even regarding the specific topic of his theories on race. CALL OF CTHULHU, though, far more than the above short story, brings to mind the old quarrel between two theories about the concept of racial evolution (putting aside the question as to how applicable the term "race" is to the human species):

Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that the human races are of different origins (polygenesis). This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.

Was HPL a foursquare advocate of one position or the other? Since polygenism was on its last legs in the early 20th century, it seems unlikely that he could have placed total faith in that theory, even if (as one online authority argued) he'd been strongly influenced by the work of Ernst Haeckel. But what I find fascinating about CTHULHU is that it promotes a sort of "psychic monogenism."

CTHULHU proceeds like a detective story, as viewpoint character Thurston labors to collate the voluminous notes left behind by his late uncle Professor Angell, who perished under dubious circumstances. What Thurston eventually learns is that there exists a widespread cult devoted to a collection of archaic cosmic entities, one of whom, Cthulhu, is said to lie buried far beneath the ocean waves. Angell's notes reveal the widespread activities of cultists, many of whom are described as "mongrel" or "degenerate." Yet at the same time Thurston remarks that the mythos worshiped by the cultists "disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it."

Structurally, this justification is identical to the one HPL uses in "Wall:" that, because cosmic visions appear in the dreams of an uneducated specimen of "white trash," said visions must have some reality outside the brain of the individual experiencing the visions. In the case of the CTHULHU narrative, the visions commonly shared by Eskimo "diabolists" and Louisiana voodoo-worshipers stem from "thought transference," which is the method by which Cthulhu and his fellow Old Ones communicate with one another and with their human servants. But CTHULHU goes a good deal farther, for Angell also discovers a particular sculptor affected by Cthulhu's call-- an educated white fellow, one presumes, since HPL does not say otherwise. This artist, ignorant of the cult or its object of worship, was spontaneously inspired to carve the same image of Cthulhu venerated by the "half-castes and pariahs." Further, during the same period that this one sculptor created his Cthulhu-image, Angell's surveys prove that numerous "artists and poets," as well as individuals who may just be psychically sensitive, experienced their own visions, which either result in strange artworks on in suicide. 

So what do the two groups have in common? All HPL says is that other (presumably white) New Englanders surveyed by Angell-- "average people in society and business"-- had no strong responses during the period when the hypothetical "call of Cthulhu" goes forth. HPL's chauvinism meant that he probably would have not credited "degenerate" peoples as possessing similar social hierarchies between workaday types and visionaries. So my best guess is that he thought that the "mongrels" and the Caucasian visionaries all shared a common psychic receptivity, which I choose to term "psychic monogeny," since no other species save humans are affected by Cthulhu's Call. I qualify this view by stating that at no time in CTHULHU does HPL promote a widespread theory of human psychic abilities, such as we get from a later "demi-follower" of the author, like Colin Wilson.

Though HPL sneered at the "puerile symbolism" of Sigmund Freud in "Wall," the aim of the cultists seems roughly parallel to Freud's idea of the unrestricted "Id." One cultist in Angell's records claims that when the Old Ones rule Earth again, they will "teach [their followers] to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the Earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." The corresponding theory would be that Caucasians functioned as the "Ego," the "reality principle" that keeps the Id's impulses in check. But since there are no records of what Freud texts HPL read, this is just an interesting side-note.

CTHULHU shows HPL expending far more effort in chronicling all the details of the Call's influence upon humanity before he gets to the Big Apocalyptic Moment. As in the short story DAGON, the monster and his forbidding island only remain on the surface long enough to suggest the terrors that will come when Cthulhu and his kindred enjoy full reign; then they disappear, leaving narrator Thurston to realize that "we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity." Why does Cthulhu Island re-appear so briefly, which would imply that the stellar configurations are not quite right for the Old Ones' rebirth? And if it's not time, why does Cthulhu send forth his call? HPL does not say, so one can only guess.

It's implicit that in most if not all stories, HPL wanted to believe his own kindred were at the top of the cultural and racial matrix-- also eclipsing, I should emphasize, all those Caucasians with whom the author didn't identify. Yet had HPL been a true follower of racial polygeny-- a specter that sometimes appears in certain works of his contemporary R.E. Howard-- then it would be easy to dissociate the activities of "people of color" as being foreign to the nature of "the white race." The horror is made far greater by the intimation that all the grotesque people who embrace chaos share the same base nature as the most sophisticated spawn of humankind.