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==Plot==
==Plot==
The story's narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of various notes left behind by his great uncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent Professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died during the winter of 1926 after being jostled by a sailor.
The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his uncle, George Gammell Angell, a of , Rhode Island the of .


More notes discuss a 1908 meeting of an archeological society in which [[New Orleans]] police official John Raymond Legrasse asks attendees to identify a statuette of unidentifiable greenish-black stone resembling Wilcox's sculpture. It is then revealed that the previous year, Legrasse and a party of policemen found several women and children being used in a ritual by an all-male [[cult]]. After killing five of the cultists and arresting 47 others, Legrasse learns that they worship the "Great Old Ones" and await the return of a monstrous being called Cthulhu.<ref name="Lovecraft p. 139">Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", p. 139.</ref> The prisoners identify the statuette as "great Cthulhu." One of the academics present at the meeting, [[Princeton University|Princeton]] professor William Channing Webb, describes a group of "[[Eskimo|Esquimaux]]" with similar beliefs and fetishes.
The first chapter, '''The Horror in Clay''', concerns a small bas-relief sculpture found among the notes, which the narrator describes: "My somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings". The sculpture is the work of Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, who based his creation on a delirious dream of "great Cyclopean cities of titanic blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror". References to Cthulhu and R'lyeh are included in letters written by Wilcox.


Thurston discovers a 1925 article from an Australian newspaper which reports the discovery of a derelict ship, the ''Alert'', of which second mate Gustaf Johansen is the sole survivor. Johansen reports that the ''Emma'' was attacked by a heavily armed yacht named the ''Alert''. The crewmen of the ''Emma'' killed those aboard the ''Alert'', but lost their own ship in the battle, commandeered the ''Alert'', and discovered an uncharted island in the vicinity of co-ordinates of {{Coord|47|9|S|126|43|W|type:isle_region:XP_scale:30000000|name=R'lyeh fictional location (Lovecraft)}}. With the exception of Johansen and another man, the remaining crew died on the island. Johansen does not reveal the manner of their death.
Angell also discovers reports of "outre mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania" around the world (in New York City, "hysterical Levantines" mob police; in California, a Theosophist colony dress in white robes while awaiting a "glorious fulfillment").


Upon traveling to Australia, Thurston views a statue retrieved from the ''Alert'' which is identical to the previous two. In Norway, he learns that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with "two [[Lascar]] sailors". Johansen's widow provides Thurston with her late husband's manuscript, wherein the uncharted island is described as being home to a "nightmare corpse-city" called R'lyeh. Johansen's crew struggled to comprehend the [[non-Euclidean geometry]] of the city and accidentally released Cthulhu, resulting in their deaths. Johansen and one crewmate fled aboard the ''Alert'' and were pursued by Cthulhu. Johansen rammed the yacht into the creature's head, only for its injury to regenerate. The ''Alert'' escaped, but Johansen's crewmate died. After finishing the manuscript, Thurston realizes he is now a target of Cthulhu's worshippers.
The second chapter, '''The Tale of Inspector Legrasse''', discusses the first time the Professor had heard the word "Cthulhu" and seen a similar image. At the 1908 meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri, a New Orleans police official named John Raymond Legrasse asked the assembled antiquarians to identify an idol carved from a mysterious greenish-black stone. Legrasse discovered the relic months before in the swamps south of New Orleans, during his raid on a supposed voodoo cult. The idol resembles Wilcox's sculpture, and represented a "...thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters".

On November 1, 1907, Legrasse led a party of fellow policemen in search of several women and children who disappeared from a squatter community. The police found the victims' "oddly marred" bodies being used in a ritual where 100 men—all of a "mentally aberrant type"—were "braying, bellowing, and writhing" and repeatedly chanting the phrase: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn". After killing five of the participants and arresting 47 others, Legrasse interrogated the men before learning "the central idea of their loathsome faith":

<blockquote>"They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men...and...formed a cult which had never died...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 were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."</blockquote>

The prisoners identify the confiscated idol as Cthulhu himself, and translate their mysterious phrase as "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming". One particularly talkative cultist, known as Old Castro, named the center of their cult as Irem, the City of Pillars in Arabia, and referred to a phrase in the Necronomicon: "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die".

One of the academics present at the meeting, William Channing Webb, a professor of anthropology at Princeton, states that during an 1860 expedition in the western coast of Greenland, he encountered "a singular tribe of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness". Webb claims the Greenland cult possessed both the same chant and a similar "hideous" fetish. Thurston, the narrator, reflects that "My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were".

In the third chapter, '''The Madness from the Sea''', Thurston reads an article dated April 18, 1925, from the ''Sydney Bulletin'', an Australian newspaper. The article reported the discovery of a derelict ship in the Pacific Ocean with only one survivor—Norwegian sailor named Gustaf Johansen, second mate onboard the ''Emma'', a schooner which originally sailed from Auckland, New Zealand. On March 22, the ''Emma'' encountered a heavily-armed yacht, the ''Alert'', crewed by "a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes" from Dunedin. After being attacked by the ''Alert'' without provocation, the crew of the ''Emma'' killed everyone aboard, but lost their own ship in the battle. Commandeering their opponent's vessel, the surviving crewmembers travel on and arrive at an uncharted island in the vicinity of 47°9′S 126°43′W. With the exception of Johansen and a fellow sailor, the remaining crewmembers perish on the island. Johansen never reveals the cause of their death.

Thurston travels to New Zealand and then Australia, where at the Australian Museum he views a statue retrieved from the ''Alert'' with a "cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal". While in Oslo, Thurston learns that Johansen died suddenly during an encounter with two Lascars off the coast of Norway. Johansen's widow provides Thurston with a manuscript written by her late husband, which reveals the fate of everyone aboard the ''Emma''. The uncharted island is described as "a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh". The crew struggle in comprehending the non-Euclidean geometry of their surroundings. When the sailors accidentally open a "monstrously carven portal", they release Cthulhu:

<blockquote>"It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway.... 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. After vigintillions of years, Great Cthulhu was loose again and ravening for delight."</blockquote>

Johansen described Cthulhu as "a mountain [who] walked or stumbled..." before fleeing with his crewmembers, almost all of whom are killed. Johansen and a sailor named Briden climb aboard the yacht before sailing away. However, Cthulhu dives into the ocean and pursues their vessel. Fortunately, Johansen turns his yacht around and rams it into the creature's head, which bursts with "a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish"- only to immediately begin regenerating. The ''Alert'' escapes from R'lyeh, with Briden having gone insane and dying soon afterwards. After finishing the manuscript, Thurston realizes he's now a possible target, thinking: "I know too much, and the cult still lives".


==Literary significance and criticism==
==Literary significance and criticism==

Revision as of 02:36, 5 June 2024

This article is about the short story. For other uses, see Call of Cthulhu (disambiguation).

"The Call of Cthulhu"
Short story by H. P. Lovecraft
Title page of "The Call of Cthulhu" as it appeared in Weird Tales, February 1928. Illustration by Hugh Doak Rankin.[1]
Text available at Wikisource
CountryUnited States of America
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Horror
Publication
Published inWeird Tales
Media typePrint
Publication dateFebruary 1928

"The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928.[2]

Inspiration

The first seed of the story's first chapter The Horror in Clay came from one of Lovecraft's own dreams he had in 1919,[3] which he described briefly in two different letters sent to his friend Rheinhart Kleiner on May 21 and December 14, 1920. In the dream, Lovecraft is visiting an antiquity museum in Providence, attempting to convince the aged curator there to buy an odd bas-relief Lovecraft himself had sculpted. The curator initially scoffs at him for trying to sell something recently made to a museum of antique objects. Lovecraft then remembers himself answering the curator:

Why do you say that this thing is new? The dreams of men are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon, and this was fashioned in my dreams.

This can be compared to what the character of Henry Anthony Wilcox tells the main character's uncle while showing him his sculpted bas-relief for help in reading hieroglyphs on it which came through Wilcox's own fantastical dreams:

It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.

Lovecraft then used this for a brief synopsis of a new story outlined in his own Commonplace Book at first in August 1925, which developed organically out of the idea of what the bas-relief in the dream actually might have depicted. In a footnote for his writing down of his own dream, Lovecraft then finished with the suggestion "Add good development & describe nature of bas-relief" to himself for future reference.[4]

Cthulhu Mythos scholar Robert M. Price claims the irregular sonnet "The Kraken",[5] published in 1830 by Alfred Tennyson, was a major inspiration, since both reference a huge aquatic creature sleeping for an eternity at the bottom of the ocean and destined to emerge from its slumber in an apocalyptic age.[6]

S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz cited other literary inspirations: Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" (1887), which Lovecraft described in Supernatural Horror in Literature as concerning "an invisible being who...sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extraterrestrial organisms arrived on Earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind"; and Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal" (1895), which uses the same method of piecing together of disassociated knowledge (including a random newspaper clipping) to reveal the survival of a horrific ancient being.[7]

It is also assumed he got inspiration from William Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904), which Lovecraft read in 1926 shortly before he started to work on the story.[8]

Price also notes that Lovecraft admired the work of Lord Dunsany, who wrote The Gods of Pegana (1905), which depicts a god constantly lulled to sleep to avoid the consequences of its reawakening. Another Dunsany work cited by Price is A Shop in Go-by Street (1919), which stated "the heaven of the gods who sleep", and "unhappy are they that hear some old god speak while he sleeps being still deep in slumber".[9][10]

The "slight earthquake" mentioned in the story is likely the 1925 Charlevoix–Kamouraska earthquake.[11]

S.T. Joshi has also cited A. Merritt's novella The Moon Pool (1918) which Lovecraft 'frequently rhapsodied about'. Joshi says that 'Merritt's mention of a "moon-door" that, when tilted, leads the characters into a lower region of wonder and horror seems similar to the huge door whose inadvertent opening by the sailors causes Cthulhu to emerge from R'lyeh'.[12]

Edward Guimont has argued that H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was an influence on "The Call of Cthulhu", citing the thematic similarities of ancient, powerful, but indifferent aliens associated with deities; physical similarities between Cthulhu and the Martians; and the plot detail of a ship ramming an alien in a temporarily successful but ultimately futile gesture.[13]

Plot

The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, Brown University linguistic professor George Gammell Angell, after his death in the winter of 1926–27. Among the notes is a small bas-relief sculpture of a scaly creature which yields "simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature." The sculptor, a Rhode Island art student named Henry Anthony Wilcox, based the work on delirious dreams of "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths." Frequent references to Cthulhu and R'lyeh are found in Wilcox's papers. Angell also discovers reports of mass hysteria around the world.

More notes discuss a 1908 meeting of an archeological society in which New Orleans police official John Raymond Legrasse asks attendees to identify a statuette of unidentifiable greenish-black stone resembling Wilcox's sculpture. It is then revealed that the previous year, Legrasse and a party of policemen found several women and children being used in a ritual by an all-male cult. After killing five of the cultists and arresting 47 others, Legrasse learns that they worship the "Great Old Ones" and await the return of a monstrous being called Cthulhu.[14] The prisoners identify the statuette as "great Cthulhu." One of the academics present at the meeting, Princeton professor William Channing Webb, describes a group of "Esquimaux" with similar beliefs and fetishes.

Thurston discovers a 1925 article from an Australian newspaper which reports the discovery of a derelict ship, the Alert, of which second mate Gustaf Johansen is the sole survivor. Johansen reports that the Emma was attacked by a heavily armed yacht named the Alert. The crewmen of the Emma killed those aboard the Alert, but lost their own ship in the battle, commandeered the Alert, and discovered an uncharted island in the vicinity of co-ordinates of 47°9′S 126°43′W / 47.150°S 126.717°W / -47.150; -126.717 (R'lyeh fictional location (Lovecraft)). With the exception of Johansen and another man, the remaining crew died on the island. Johansen does not reveal the manner of their death.

Upon traveling to Australia, Thurston views a statue retrieved from the Alert which is identical to the previous two. In Norway, he learns that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with "two Lascar sailors". Johansen's widow provides Thurston with her late husband's manuscript, wherein the uncharted island is described as being home to a "nightmare corpse-city" called R'lyeh. Johansen's crew struggled to comprehend the non-Euclidean geometry of the city and accidentally released Cthulhu, resulting in their deaths. Johansen and one crewmate fled aboard the Alert and were pursued by Cthulhu. Johansen rammed the yacht into the creature's head, only for its injury to regenerate. The Alert escaped, but Johansen's crewmate died. After finishing the manuscript, Thurston realizes he is now a target of Cthulhu's worshippers.

Literary significance and criticism

Lovecraft regarded the short story as "rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches". Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright first rejected the story, and only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, falsely claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.[15]

The published story was regarded by Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian) as "a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature.... Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken".[16] Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon regarded the story as "ambitious and complex...a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions", adding "one of [Lovecraft's] bleakest fictional expressions of man's insignificant place in the universe".[17]

French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in his book H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, described the story as the first of Lovecraft's "great texts".[18]

Canadian mathematician Benjamin K. Tippett noted that the phenomena described in Johansen's journal may be interpreted as "observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature", and proposed a suitable mathematical model.[19]

E. F. Bleiler has referred to "The Call of Cthulhu" as "a fragmented essay with narrative inclusions".[20]

The story, published more than a decade before World War II, is interesting for its use of the word "holocaust" as a metaphor for a global massacre.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Publication: Weird Tales, February 1928". isfdb.org. ISFDB. Retrieved January 15, 2020.
  2. ^ Straub, Peter (2005). Lovecraft: Tales. The Library of America. p. 823. ISBN 1-931082-72-3.
  3. ^ Bruce Sterling (July 4, 2011). "H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book". wired.com. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  4. ^ H. P. Lovecraft (July 1994). S. T. Joshi; Will Murray; David E. Schultz (eds.). The H. P. Lovecraft Dream Book. Necronomicon Press. pp. 14–16. ISBN 0940884658.
  5. ^ The Kraken, The Victorian Web
  6. ^ Robert M. Price, "The Other Name of Azathoth", introduction to The Cthulhu Cycle. Price credits Philip A. Shreffler with connecting the poem and the story.
  7. ^ S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Call of Cthulhu, The", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, pp. 28–29.
  8. ^ H.P. Lovecraft Archived January 12, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, Fortean Times magazine
  9. ^ "Lord Dunsany (1878–1957)". Works; Short bibliography. Dunsany. December 2003. Archived from the original on November 30, 2018. Retrieved January 26, 2012.
  10. ^ Price, "The Other Name of Azathoth". This passage is also believed to have inspired Lovecraft's entity Azathoth, hence the title of Price's essay.
  11. ^ Lackey, Chris; Fifer, Chad; Leman, Andrew (May 12, 2010). "Episode 42 – The Call of Cthulhu – Part 1". The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. hppodcraft.com. Archived from the original on August 3, 2021. Retrieved August 17, 2012.
  12. ^ Joshi, S.T. (2010) I am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press. 2 Vols. Vol II pg. 639
  13. ^ Guimont, Edward (August 2019), "At the Mountains of Mars: Viewing the Red Planet through a Lovecraftian Lens", Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 3: Papers from Necronomicon Providence 2017, New York: Hippocampus Press, pp. 61–63
  14. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", p. 139.
  15. ^ S.T. Joshi, More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 173.
  16. ^ Quoted in Peter Cannon, "Introduction", More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 7.
  17. ^ Cannon, pp. 6–7.
  18. ^ Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.
  19. ^ Tippett, Benjamin K. (2012). "Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific". arXiv:1210.8144 [physics.pop-ph].
  20. ^ E.F. Bleiler, Supernatural Fiction Writers Vol, NY: Scribners, 1985, p. 478

References

  • Lovecraft, Howard P. (1984) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.
  • Lovecraft, Howard P. (1999) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). More Annotated Lovecraft (1st ed.). New York: Dell. ISBN 0-440-50875-4. With explanatory footnotes.
  • Price, Robert M. (1996) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In Robert M. Price (ed.). The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror (1st ed.). Oakland, Calif.: Chaosium, Inc. ISBN 1-56882-038-0. A collection of works that inspired and were inspired by The Call of Cthulhu, with commentary.
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