Friday, December 11, 2020

If You Meet Cthulhu, Kill Him

Miserable grump that I am, I've been opposed to the domestification of the creations of H.P. Lovecraft for a long time. I loathe plush Cthulhu toys and the other vapid wares of the Geek Industrial Complex, almost all of which undermine the very things for which they purport to have affection. But the truth is, if we're being honest, the process that led to the proliferation of such liveliest awfulness began long, long ago, with August Derleth and the invention of "the Cthulhu Mythos" itself. 

Within the actual writings of Lovecraft, there is no such thing as the Cthulhu Mythos. Whatever one thinks of HPL's skill as a writer – I personally hold him in high regard – he never mistook the content of his stories of cosmic horror for their subject. Doing just that, as nerds are prone to do, is the first step on a path that ends with Pokéthulhu and even more abominable products of diseased fancies. David E. Schultz, as quoted in S.T. Joshi's magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, notes that
… the pseudomythological elements to which Lovecraft referred were only part of the fictional background of his stories. They were never the subject of his stories, but rather part of the background against which the main action occurred. That is to say, Lovecraft did not write about Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, the Necronomicon, or any of the other places or creatures or books found in his stories. The subject of his stories were typically the small place that man occupies in an uncaring cosmos, and his fictional creatures were only part of the means by which he sought to demonstrate that.

Joshi himself elaborates.

I myself have come to believe that the pseudomythological elements are plot devices designed to convey the various philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, and even political themes that Lovecraft was seeking to convey in his tales. In this sense it might not be quite accurate to say that Lovecraft never wrote "about" Cthulhu and the rest; "The Call of Cthulhu" really is largely "about" Cthulhu, at least on the surface level: we are given much information (possibly unreliable) about the nature and origin of this entity, and toward the end we see a glimpse of him through the eyes of the hapless Norwegian who encountered him. It might be better to say that "The Call of Cthulhu" is not only about Cthulhu; Cthulhu serves as a symbol for the vast, unknowable cosmos in which all human history and aspirations are as nothing. (emphasis mine)

Somewhere along the line, Lovecraft fans lost the plot, assuming they ever understood it in the first place. Instead of exploring Lovecraft's ideas – which, I think, are the reason why his stories are, if anything, even more relevant today than they were almost a century ago – his admirers have decided instead to catalog and obsess over his creations. In this respect, I am sorry to say that my beloved Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game has undoubtedly played an insidious part, with its relentless codification of Lovecraftian monsters, spells, and artifacts, not to mention its essentially Derlethian ethos and style. Call of Cthulhu deserves much praise for its having introduced untold numbers of people to H.P. Lovecraft and his writings, but that introduction was, from the beginning, adulterated and misleading – little wonder then that we now live in a world of pervasive Cthulhu merchandising.

I get it: Lovecraft's vision is bleak. If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that many people, when confronted with even mildly unpleasant realities, would rather look away than confront them head-on. Lovecraft's stories advance a very unpleasant thesis and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to grapple with the possibility that it is correct. But stripped of their philosophical themes, HPL's stories are just pulp yarns with a highfalutin vocabulary, little different than those of, say, Seabury Quinn (though certainly more imaginative). By focusing on the content of Lovecraft's works rather than their subject matter, the door is opened to all sorts of hackwork – or, worse, plushies.

It's probably inevitable that any creative endeavor, if it acquires a large enough audience, eventually becomes an Ouroboros-like parody of itself rather than something vital and dynamic. Over the course of my life, I've seen this happen innumerable times and, while I've been known to rail against this state of affairs on occasion, I have, for the most part, accepted it is simply evidence of the decay that eventually touches all sublunary things. Somehow, though, I had foolishly believed that Lovecraft might be immune to this inexorable process. At the very least, I had hoped that he might simply be cast aside and forgotten rather than subjected to that worst of all fates: commodification. But as, HPL taught us, with strange aeons, not even death is safe and these are strange aeons indeed.

30 comments:

  1. I didn’t mind Cthulhu plushies and such. Until a lady who played in a bunch of my Cthulhu Games years ago started posting pictures of Cthulhu related toys on my Facebook page on a weekly basis. Every plushy or Christmas decoration that has to do with Cthulhu and stuff posted to my Facebook. I’m getting pretty annoyed by it haha.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Where do I sign up for Grumpnardia?

    I'm no proponent for badwrongfun in our hobby or it's related subjects.

    But I would love to see "Geek Culture" die in a fiery blaze.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You and me both. I expect there will be more posts of this nature in the future, though I don't intend it to be a major focus.

      Delete
    2. Looking forward to the "GET OFF MY LAWN" segment of the Blog.

      Delete
    3. Maybe I'll make a new tag for such posts.

      Delete
  3. Geek culture is essentially the embrace of icons and ideas that have been traditionally popular among geeks and nerds, and then displayed as a token of enthusiasm - essentially, the same kind of tribalism displayed by sports fans who wear hockey ball caps but don't play hockey at all, and watch it casually. It's a way to say "this is a thing I like".

    With Lovecraft, I would actually say that his work has grown beyond his intent, and upon entering the mass market the original idea (the hopeless cosmos) has truly been lost, or more accurately, discarded.

    Cthulhu actually has the same appeal as Godzilla/Gojira in this context.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cthulhu certainly has become just A giant monster. But I always thought of him as that. And that in itself was scary pre Kaiju.

      The true horror of Lovecraftian things lay in the basements and wilderness caves. Sure a giant can stomp you, but an alien lobster stealing your brain, putting it in a jar, and flying you to some stark cosmic location will always hold more horror.

      As an aside, Lovecraft in current pop culture will be taking worse hits. Thanks to HBO things of the mythos is will now be firmly tied to racial injustice.

      Delete
  4. I am on board with the grump, James, though I find it more mildly amusing than annoying. In general, I refuse to open my wallet to support the geek chic commodity culture.

    IN GENERAL. I *did* however purchase a copy of Ken Hite's "Antarctic Express" a few years back, which I consider to be very much in line with Lovecraft's literary "ideas," simply told through a lovely children's storybook. With wonderful illustrations. Great bedtime read for the kids.
    ; )

    ReplyDelete
  5. As a huge H.P. Lovecraft fan, I am both less and more disturbed by the existence of these things. Whether he intended it or not, Lovecraft's corpus is a critique of the materialist world view. Cthulhu is a stand-in the meaningless nothing that humanity is in the uncaring universe that materialism posits. Our denial of Cthulhu is a denial of death itself. Staring into the abyss, Lovecraft's stories are an honest assessment of the meaning of life when we expunge God from the equation. Western Culture (especially in its American form) dances by the graveyard because it refuses to do what Lovecraft did: look death in the face. Therefore, a plushy Cthulhu toy is just another attempt at painting over the dark abyss of despair that Lovecraft points out in his stories. So, in the same way that the greatest success of the devil was to make people not believe he exists, plushy Cthulhu toys play the horrifying role of glossing over the horrors of a world without God.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was working on a response along these same lines, but you have said it more elegantly and concisely than I could. Kudos.

      Delete
    2. You’re conflating two different meanings of the word “materialism”. “Materialism” can mean the philosophical view that the universe is just matter. It can also be used as a synonym for “consumerism”, people caring to much about owning objects. These don’t really have much to do with each other. One can be the former without being the latter and vice versa.

      Delete
  6. I heard a guy in a comic shop once opine "Nerds like to smoke everything down to the filter". He meant, I presume, that they "Love" characters and concepts until they smother them. Just yesterday The House of The Rat announced ten new Star Wars shows. TEN. Pretty much guaranteeing that in a few years even the most hardcore fans will be sick of Star Wars. Strip mining.

    Anyway, a good post full of very valid points.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm not sure I'd blame Derleth for the plush Cthulhus as much as much as the fact we live under an economic system that turns anything and everything into a commodity. If genuine rage against the establishment can be packaged and sold by the very thing it opposes, what hope would the works of a pulp author have?

    I'm also not the fan of thinking other people enjoy something the wrong way... Sure, some people have a shallow understanding of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, on the other hand, I think the overly academic readings that you see from people like S.T. Toshi also fail to really understand it.

    Lovecraft was a *horror* author. Horror is academic. It's emotional. It's primal. Two people can read the same story or watch the same movie and take very different things from it.

    For me, I discovered Lovecraft at a very dark time in my life. I related to the nihilism of his work and I related to his protagonists; supposed men of logic, who find out they actually live in cold and uncaring universe. But upon rereading the same stories time and time again, I started to realize I had more in common with his cultists than the leads of his stories... So like Milton's Lucifer before him, who was intended to be a tragic villain but grew into romantic hero, the entities of the mythos shifted from cold, uncaring personifications of the universe to avatars of alienation and rejection of a world that the outsider as dangerous and mad...

    ReplyDelete
  8. I, and most other Lovecraft fans I've met, started reading his works in our early to mid teens. They were fascinating, morbid and interesting in a way other contemporary fiction just wasn't. But I don't ever recall a real sense of cosmic horror.

    David Chapman makes my point better than I could in the post linked at the bottom, but the crux of it seems to me is that the horror Lovecraft worked to inflict no longer exists. The cutting edge of cosmic horror requires an assumption in the reader that the universe is ordered according to some plan and that we are somehow important. That assumption was shared in his time, and Lovecraft's defiance of that assumption made him obscure in his own time and relevant later.

    But that assumption is no longer shared. Some degree of nihilism, up to cosmic irrelevance, is the mainstream cultural zeitgeist. The reason we can show Lovecraft's stories to children, buy Cthulhu plushies, and play RPGs where the player characters go insane as a result of comprehending the vast indifference of the universe... is that it no longer bites. Oh no, Cosmic Meaninglessness, the horror. It feels silly that people were ever scared by it. When you've grown up in a nihilistic worldview, nihilistic horror is funny for how much it chews the scenery.

    https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/lovecraft-harman-nihilism

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I disagree that most people - at least in the USA, where I live - subscribe to the belief that existence is meaningless, or that murdering a human being has no more moral weight than swatting an insect, or that nothing is true (and consequently everything is permitted). And even those that claim that they do believe don't usually act like they do. Thankfully.

      Delete
    2. Maybe that's where you live, but I see a whole lotta people who are neck deep in delusions about themselves, the universe and their place in it. If they're losing one religion they're joining another. Consumerism promises a sort of immortality through your purchases if you just. keep. buying.
      I don't think 'cosmic meaninglessness' has gained anywhere near the acceptance you think it has.

      Delete
    3. Many people say they believe in cosmic irrelevance but don't act like it. Religion is still very popular. Even among atheists, who ought to be nihilists almost by definition, it's rare to meet someone who embraces it. Most might cynically quip about life being meaningless, but are not otherwise showing any real anomie, and when pressed on what personal philosophy they've developed on the foundation of this existential emptiness that causes them to act the way they do, they can rarely elucidate one. Or if they do, it's usually something about the future of humanity, which is just pushing the question a step further back.

      What they are doing is looking the other way. Nobody likes to gaze into the abyss; we glance at it, giggle nervously, and then turn our backs on it. 'Oh, how naive our ancestors were not to understand that we are all doomed to an oblivion so complete as to be indistinguishable from never having existed at all! Now that we are wiser, we don't need to think about such things. Let us turn our attention to something else...' If the stories pop less now, it's because the concepts are no longer fresh and so are easy to ignore, not because they're any less horrifying or true. We read the stories for entertainment but we don't want to actually DWELL on nihilism, that would be depressing. The mind rejects it, except among the clinically depressed, as unhealthy to our mental wellbeing.

      Delete
    4. I've expanded on the original comment and on some responses here: https://espharel.blogspot.com/2020/12/contra-grognardia-on-lovecraft-nihilism.html

      Corathon and knobgobbler: I would draw a distinction between two statements; one, that there is no ultimate meaning, and second that life is meaningless (or existence is meaningless etc). The former I accept, but not the latter.

      John: Very insightful comment, addressing a lot of what I wrote in the post above. I'll get back to you properly once I've had time to think it over.

      Delete
  9. There's a really interesting post over on cavegirlgames from a while back about how "cosmic horror" is an idea that has to shift and change with the times.
    The fundamental thesis of Lovecraft's horror was that science holds things that man was not meant to know, that to search out truth and meaning may inevitably doom us all, and that we are in a universe that is utterly uncaring to our needs.

    But science has been developing along with a good clip, and right now it looks like it's risks aren't in unearthing 'forbidden knowledge,' but simply in creating systems of technology that let humans be nastier to each other then ever before. We know about things that are arguably scarier then all of Lovecraft's elder gods: the existence of black holes alone are probably more existentially terrifying then all of Azathoth's mad pipings!

    Finally, people generally seem to KNOW that we are in a universe that is uncaring. We know that space is big and scary and huge and doesn't care about us.

    In other words, many of the things that Lovecraft draws horror from are just basic facts of our modern life- no wonder many people don't find him scary anymore!

    ReplyDelete
  10. >Some degree of nihilism, up to cosmic irrelevance, is the mainstream cultural zeitgeist.

    This. It's incredibly difficult to find Lovecraft scary in a world with both a post-Darwin understanding of biology and a post-Hubble understanding of cosmology.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Well, sure! That's what nerds do, and what fandom does. Cataloguing and defining what HPL deployed as creepy vaguenesses that were never supposed to be defined ruins the whole thing, but it allows fans to obsess for longer and to treat the fictional world as though it exists beyond from the stories. Same with Star Trek fandom with its Klingon dictionaries, plans to the Enterprise, and general peevish insistence on internal consistency of minutia, as though the most important thing about fiction is that it might be real. (There's an episode in Don Quixote that satirizes that approach, ~350 years before there was anything recognizable as a nerd.) To be honest, the worst villain may well be Gary Gygax himself, who did more than any other person to catalogue and quantify the contents of fantasy literature.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Why, was the universe of ST ever supposed to be terrifying or unfathomable? On the contrary, it's the glorification of the explorer spirit, reason and good little boy and girl scouts posing as engineer nerds triumphant with their pseudoscientific technobabble explaining the unknown in a blink of an eye. To have cyclopedias thick as a phone book (when whas the last time you saw an actual phone book btw) for stuff like that is only fitting.

      Delete
  12. I appreciate the original creations of things by their creators. I loathe, however, what nerds and geeks have done to them. I blame Happy Meals.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Let me say that I actually find the existence of all that Pokethulhu and Nyaruko and so on, even the parts that hold zero appeal for me personally, to be deeply comforting.

    I think that a lot of people do "get," on some level at least, the cold indifference that underpins Lovecraft's cosmic horror. (We'll set aside the racism that underpins his "miscegenation horror.") But if we really took it to heart, what would there even be to do?

    The human project, writ large, is to spit in the face of Death. And while sometimes this takes the form of Very Serious Allegories about literally facing off against a humanoid specter, and sometimes it takes the form of gallows humor, I suspect that taking an idea that scares us and asserting our power over it by making it small, or cute, or wacky, etc. is also part of what makes us human and keeps our minds from getting stuck ruminating on despair.

    ReplyDelete
  14. I think you've hit the nail on the head! That is, too many obsess over HPL's creations instead of the significance and circumstances of his protagonist's brushes with such creations.

    The first season of True Detective is in the same vein of many of HPL's stories. At the end, we don't see the Yellow King and there is no confirmation that any of the supernatural elements truly exist, but the peace that Cole finds in accepting his place in the world serves as the closest "happy ending" one might see in a Cthulhu-esque story (though I doubt HPL would let Cole survive sanely if he had truly written it).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Watching True Detective I was never under the impression that there was anything supernatural going on. But Coles general view of the cosmos for sure is Lovecraftian.

      Delete
  15. Personally, I haven't found HPL frightening a bit, not even in my teens. Rather, what I brought away was a sense of wonder and belonging. I'd rather live in a world where you can dig up eldritch secrets or go mad from terrible revelations from forbidden books, not where the greatest sensation existence has in store for you is a tedious decline in your daily drudge followed by a (more than likely) painful and demeaning death.

    And HPL used his devices to portray cosmic bleakness? Whoa, that's new. But he used them in a rather pulpy way, his gimmicks included corpse-devouring ghouls, gigantic demons and pointy-toothed savages (as you should, if you want any plot in your more-or-less traditional adventure or horror stories). In this sense, seeing these gimmicks haunt merch shops and thousands of games and movies a hundred years later is justified. If you want to bemoan man's insignificance as an author, you have a definitely harder time if you intend to do it without all these Coney Island contrivances. You may set up a hazy no man's land governed by cruel and unknowable laws like Kafka, shock the bourgeoisie with protagonists killing just to see how it affects them like Camus, or numb the reader's senses with endless monologues by insane narrators like Thomas Bernhard or Laszlo Krasznahorkai. All these show man's true condition in our real world, what is a lot more scary than any monster under the bed or sleeping deep in the Pacific - we are just evolutionary accidents, cursed with a consciousness impelling us to forever seek meaning in an universe without any, the only creatures in creation aware of our impending doom and our utter inability to do anything against it. Now _that's_ frightening.

    ReplyDelete
  16. I hate to say it but I suspect the original Deities & Demigods is partially responsible for the eventual plush-toys and other nonsense. Knowledge of HPL's writings exploded but not everyone actually read the books and got the context, they were just interesting beasts with boatloads of HP.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Agreed. Part of growing old is seeing what we loved and elevated become something better left behind. Don’t try to return to Camelot. It is gone.

    ReplyDelete