Alexx's Journal

I've recently been re-reading a bunch of Lovecraft for an online course Kestrell and I are taking. "The Call of Cthulhu" still has one of the best first paragraphs I've ever read.

But the second paragraph, on this read, pulled me out of the story entirely. To paraphrase: "I hope no one else ever puts together these disparate facts. So here's a neatly organized document linking them together." And again, at the end, the final sentence (and here I quote): "Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye." Um, dude. Why don't you just burn it yourself? For that matter, why did you write it in the first place?

Recalling, however, my maxim that fixfics are more fun than nitpicks, I began to consider if there was a reason why the narrator doesn't destroy the manuscript. And I think my solution is pretty interesting.

"Call" makes it abundantly clear that sensitive minds can have their dreams affected by Cthulhu. What if their waking minds can also be affected to some degree? Possibly the various eldritch beings want to be documented, and influence people to do so.

We know that some of the strange things that HP writes about are not entirely physical. In "The Dunwich Horror", the titular being is described thus: "Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know." The naïve interpretation is that Lovecraft is talking about higher mathematical dimensions, or parallel universes in the now-standard SF sense. But what if these beings, either partially or fully, inhabit something akin to Alan Moore's notion of Ideaspace?

For those unfamiliar, here's Moore describing Ideaspace: "The idea of adapting a spatial metaphor for the properties of the mind and consciousness grew naturally out of the almost entirely spatial metaphors that we use already when referring to consciousness: we speak of things being on our minds, at the forefront or shoved to the back of our minds; we talk of being in or out of our right minds, even though our cranium is entirely filled with a kind of pinkish-grey electrified custard in which there is no physical space to be on, in, out of or at the front and back of. When we speak of higher consciousness, just how many feet above sea level is that? The idea of conscious awareness occupying some sort of space seems entirely natural to us, so I attempted to hypothesise about the possible nature of this hypothetical "space", which I labelled Ideaspace. One thing that struck me is that such a space might conceivably be a mutual space, even though we each apparently possess our own discrete consciousness. Maybe our individual and private consciousness is, in Ideaspace terms, the equivalent of owning an individual and private house, an address, in material space? The space inside our homes is entirely ours, and yet if we step out through the front door we find ourselves in a street, a world, that is mutually accessible and open to anyone. […] A further notion that came to me was that this hypothetical Ideaspace, where philosophies are land masses and religions are probably whole countries, might contain flora and fauna that are native to it, creatures of this conceptual world that are made from ideas in the same way that we creatures of the material world are made from matter. This could conceivably explain phantoms, angels, demons, gods, djinns, grey aliens, elves, pixies, smurfs and any of the other evidently non-material entities that people claim to have encountered over the centuries."

If beings like Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu, and the rest exist wholly or partially in this Ideaspace, then the act of writing about them is a method for them to reproduce. These beings could be seen as mimetic viruses, using hapless Lovecraft narrators as hosts. And on some level, these hosts appear to realize what is happening and fight against it, though ultimately unsuccessfully. (If there are successes, we wouldn't know of them, for obvious reasons.)

And as I continued to re-read HPL stories, I saw this pattern again and again. "At the Mountains of Madness" purports to want to discourage scientific expeditions to the Antarctic, while laying out details that could not fail to excite the interest of scientists worldwide. The narrator of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" writes: "I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing [...] I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours". In "The Whisperer in Darkness", Henry Akeley shares information with the narrator, but insists, in italics, "This is private." Akeley encourages the narrator to back away at several points in the story, but ineffectually. Later "Akeley" (actually an imposter) writes "The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, and to have a few of mankind’s philosophic and scientific leaders know more about them." (italics added). Throughout the HPL canon, The Necronomicon is described as "forbidden", yet there are copies in every collection of occult books, and most of the narrators have perused them.

I think this is a neat lens to read Lovecraft through. Though of course, you should by no means read any Lovecraft! Turn off your computer before it is too late!

I said some of this in conversation recently, and thought the analogy worth expanding upon.

He produced a great deal of work in genres and formats that were widely considered to be lowbrow, disposable entertainment for the lower classes. Most of his work wasn't

collected during his lifetime. Shortly *after* his death, some of his literary disciples started getting his work collected and reprinted, marking the start of the genre and form being seen as (at least *capable* of being) "literature".

Some of his political attitudes are not in fashion today, which some readers can't get past. And he had stylistic quirks (including a fondness for long words) that are easily parodied (and arguably became self-parody in his own lesser works).

Of his prodigious output, about the top 5% consists of enduring classics, works that influenced *everything* that came after them in their "home" genres, and had considerable influence even outside those genres. The next, say, 10% of his output was also very good, though not quite *as* enduring as the first-rank material. After that, the work ranges from "good" down to "wretched".

Although only the cream of his work is widely influential, devout fanboys of his work (starting with his first reprinters) have been completists, including everything they could get their hands on, indiscriminately. This has inadvertently led to a dilution of his mass appeal. People often hear great things about his work, but are then exposed to (sometimes quite large) pieces of his work that is not at all impressive. This is, IMO, why so many people are willing to say, "I'm not a fan of his stuff", even if they generally like the genre he helped make respectable. I believe they *would* be fans of his if they read his best works, and avoided the vast sea of mediocrity around it.

[Of course, countless arguments could be made about *which*, exactly, the best works are. But if you compiled a list of many people's opinions, I don't think many people would put works in the top tier that anyone else thought weren't at least second-tier.]

I once had a conversation in which I drew a few comparisons between Shakespeare and Neil Gaiman. While there's still some validity there, when I look at the *whole* of the description above, the name Jack Kirby leaps out at me as the Shakespeare of superhero comics.

That is, Old School as in the Great Old Ones. A happy cheery Christmas song. Well, not if you're human, I suppose.