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Massimo Berruti

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The Unnamable in Lovecraft and the Limits of Rationality

For the American writer and poet Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) the issues posed by
philosophy and rationality, especially those on language and knowledge, reveal as very challenging
topics. In Lovecraft’s writings, both the fictional and the philosophical/autobiographical ones, the
notion of “rational language” is pre-eminent, and it is upon this specific question that I would like to
address most of my reflections, though it is of course impossible to neatly separate Lovecraft’s
views on language from those on rationality and reason tout court. Lovecraft’s personality is
particularly complex: though he repeatedly defines himself as a materialist, a positivist, a rational
“indifferentist”, and the bases of his philosophy undoubtedly move from a rationalistic, even
positivistic, background, nonetheless his literature stages a potent attack against the powers of
rationality, allegedly able to account for the universe and for humankind’s position therein. Besides
the thematic and representational aspects of these attacks to rationalism (as they may be retrieved in
the tales composed under the Dunsanian influence, as well as in the “dream cycle”), it is against the
pretence of rational language (and consequently knowledge) to explain and account for reality that
Lovecraft’s literature addresses its most crucial critical efforts. Significantly, terms like
“unnamable”, “nameless”, “unexplained”, “unutterable”, “unmentionable”, etc., abound in
Lovecraft’s prose and poetry. Why he is so concerned, in his fantastic and horror writings, with the
limits of rationality as displayed by language, is the question I am going to address in this paper.
Not merely Lovecraft makes ample use in his fiction of the terms reported above, but he even titles
two of his tales “The Nameless City” (1921) and “The Unnamable” (1923). Here I will focus my
reflections on the latter.

“The Unnamable” (1923)

The importance of this tale in Lovecraft’s oeuvre is testified also by the presence of the character
Randolph Carter, the author’s alter-ego that is protagonist of a group of five tales. In “The
Unnamable”, Lovecraft is able to connect his philosophical reflections on the limits of language
with those on the theory and practice of weird fiction. Already at the outset, Randolph Carter, the
narrator, poses the topic on which the tale is construed: “We were sitting on a dilapidated
seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in
Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable”

. The tale in fact features two characters, Randolph

Carter and his intellectual antagonist, Joel Manton, discussing at length the character of the
supernatural and the unexplainable, in the suitable surroundings of a burying-ground in Arkham,
while dusk and finally night are approaching. Right after the incipit, the narrator reinforces the
theme of the tale by claiming that he has made “a fantastic remark about the spectral and
unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charned
earth”. Lovecraft tries here, ironically, to assume the position of the detractors of weird fiction,
those individuals who claim his literature is not a worth effort: Carter’s interlocutor in fact claims
that “.. my constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things was a very puerile device”

Lovecraft’s goal is to demonstrate that this rationalist criticism totally fails to grasp the true nature
of weird literature, its potential momentous importance in dealing with epistemic questions, as well
as with the issues posed by rationality and human language. Joel Manton in fact states that “We
know things… only through our five senses or our religious intuitions”, adding that “it is quite
impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid

“The Unnamable”, in Lovecraft 2004, 83. My Italic.

Ibid. My Italic.

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definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology”

. According to Lovecraft, for the

rationalist/positivistic view of life “only our normal, objective experiences possess any aesthetic
significance”

, and “it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action,

ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed
transcripts of everyday affairs”

. But existence and experience are also made of the “mystical and

the unexplained”, which does not, in Lovecraft, entail a belief in the supernatural: reason is not
capable to account for so many phenomena, but from this does not necessarily ensue the necessity
of a belief in a superior or divine order – a position that would configure as no less dogmatic than
the one it opposes  - the blind faith in the unlimited powers of reason. Human reason is simply not
properly and sufficiently equipped in order to explain everything occurring in nature.
     What Lovecraft claims in “The Unnamable” and, more broadly, in his whole literature and
philosophy, is that there is a third way, between the “rational” and the “supernatural” explanation of
non-natural phenomena: the way of the “unnamable”, of the rationally “unexplainable”, which does
not entail any supernaturalism. The attitude of reason is that of considering all things and feelings as
fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects: the rationalist attitude can not, however, betray its
intellectual honesty, thus it recognizes that other sensations and feelings exist, that show a far less
geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature. But reason simply draws an arbitrary line and rules
out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average human being. Thus,
reason is sure that nothing can be really “unnamable” – the unnamable does not exist. Most, if not
all, of Lovecraft’s literature aims at demonstrating the opposite: the unnamable does exist, and the
correct thinker should humbly recognize it as it is, i.e. as the epitome of the limits of rationality.
This is why Lovecraft’s literature is replete of references to “unnamable” and “unmentionable”
events, experiences, locations, sensations: his effort is to metaphorically give voice to the
unpreparedness of our human epistemic equipment (and primarily of our language) to cope with all
is “unexplainable” in the universe (Lovecraft in fact does not hate either knowledge or reality. One
way of interpreting the themes in his stories is to believe that “Lovecraft is not deploring
knowledge, but rather, man’s inability to cope with it”

). Thus in “The Unnamable”, even from the

linguistic viewpoint it is clear how Lovecraft is interested in staging an attack against rationality:
the narrator Randolph Carter states that “I was soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy’s own
country”

, and thus he starts his “counter-attack” against Manton’s arguments (those of a

conventional rational mind). The whole tale functions as the denial of the tenets of reason: in order
to do so, the tale does not simply discusses reason and its limits (linguistic and philosophic levels),
but actually represents how rationality can be defeated by actual events (thematic level). Carter
criticizes Manton’s objection to supernaturalism in literature by revealing the incoherence of this
position: the blind faith in reason sometimes hides a belief in the supernatural much fuller than that
of those writers, like Lovecraft, who conceive supernatural stories, since their writing of a
supernatural story does not absolutely entail actual belief  in the reality of the events the story
portrays: weird literature is primarily fiction, is metaphorical, not a faithful description. And thus it
may happen that the same “rationalists” that despise the involvement of supernatural themes in
literature then believe and have faith in God, and of course anyone who believes in an omnipotent
God and in the divinity can scarcely object to the depiction of the supernatural in fiction. Thus in
this tale, in ways we are going to examine, Lovecraft expresses a very important philosophical and
aesthetical awareness on his part: that the aesthetic acceptance of the supernatural in fiction is much
more preferable to the intellectual acceptance of the supernatural in religion.
Carter  begins  his  denunciation  of  the  incoherence of Manton’s rationalist position by counter-
attacking his interlocutor, “actually clung to many old-wives’ superstitions… beliefs in the

Ibid.

Mosig 105.

“The Unnamable”, in Lovecraft 2004, 83.

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appearance of dying persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the
windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these whisperings…. argued a
capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his
visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be
absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem
with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the
manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter; why is it extravagant
to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes – or absence of shapes – which must for human
spectators be utterly and appallingly ‘unnamable’?”

After this and further theoretical discussion on what the “unnamable” might be, Carter moves to
illustrate the plot and the tenets of his own meta-fictional tale, “The Attic Window”, that aroused so
much disconcert and despise in his detractors. Carter claims he based the tale on a true story, that of
a strange creature, half human and half monster, living in the attic of a deserted house in Arkham, at
the time when the latter was a Puritan village. This monster was said to have killed many humans,
and its image reflected itself on the window of the attic where it was living. In his tale Carter
reported the story of a boy who in 1793 went to explore the monster’s attic, and was later found
shrieking maniacally, half insane, unable to retell what he actually saw in the attic. To reinforce his
argument, Carter reveals to Manton something that was not told in the tale: Carter himself went to
visit the cursed attic in Arkham (the same town where they live and are now discussing), and he
found some scattered bones and a skull belonged to a creature totally monstrous and non-human (he
then buried the bones in the cemetery nearby the monster’s dwelling). Not yet truly convinced by
Carter’s arguments, nor defeated by his “attacks”, Manton, the voice of reason, “granted for the
sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, but reminded me that even the
most morbid perversion of Nature need not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable”

. Though

admiring Manton’s clearness and persistence, Carter does not give up in his attempts and, while the
two are still sitting in the cemetery facing an old deserted house and darkness gradually falls, tells
Manton further revelations, collected among old people: legends of “monstrous apparitions more
frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and
sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the
crypt behind it, and the grave”. Lovecraft goes further the simple mention of these legends, and
poses a question at the core of his literature: is it truly possible to describe, through rational
language, these oddities of Nature, these unnamable horrors, and the incursions of
Outsideness/Alterity into our realm that they reveal? Is the human being linguistically and
epistemically equipped to face the unnamable? Carter adds: “So far as aesthetic theory was
involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent
representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a
malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature? .. would not such a vaporous
terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?”

. In front of

Carter’s pressing attacks, Manton’s rationalist attitude weavers: won by curiosity and shivers of
terror, he asks Carter the fatal question: “I’d like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? … I must
explore it a little”. Carter’s answer is quite theatrical but surely effective: “You did see it – until it
got dark”. The house of the monster had always been lying in front of them during their
conversation, and the tomb where Carter buried the bones of the monster is just the one on which
Manton is sitting.
From this moment onwards, the tale abandons its meta-fictional nature and becomes descriptive:
Manton starts shrieking loud, and he and Carter are actually attacked by an unrecognizable creature
– that is deceptively easy to identify with the creature of Carter’s tale. When the two characters

Ibid.

Ibid., 86.

Ibid, 86-87.

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wake up, they find themselves in a hospital and do not remember anything of what happened at the
cemetery after Manton’s cry: they are heavily wounded, Manton with cuts and Carter with
contusions left by a split hoof. Manton knows more than Carter, but he reveals to the physicians he
and Carter were attacked by a vicious bull – though the animal is a difficult thing to place and
account for. But after the doctors leave, Manton, the voice of reason now completely converted,
whispers the truth to Carter: answering Carter’s question “Good God, Manton, but what was it?
Those scars – was it like that?”, implying “Was it the monster of my tale?”, Manton states: “No – it
wasn’t that way at all. It was everywhere – a gelatin – a slime – yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes
of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes – and a blemish. It was the pit – the maelstrom – the
ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”

This tale aptly shifts its theoretical and philosophical discourse on rationality and its limits to the
actuality of the concrete events involving the characters. The theme is thus perfectly balanced, and
the limits of rationality are discussed under both the linguistic and the factual level. The situation is
anyway more complex than it seems, since Lovecraft the philosopher adopts a balanced position
towards rationality, striving to avoid any form of dogmatism: he does not believe that reason must
be totally discarded (he is not a spiritualist) – in fact, his mechanistic materialism relies upon the
texts of modern thinkers such as Thomas Henry Huxley, Ernst Haeckel (The Riddle of the
Universe), and Hugh Elliott (Modern Science and Materialism), and will later in his life embrace
the theories of Einstein and of advanced astrophysicists such as Planck, de Sitter, and Heisenberg.
Lovecraft’s peculiar use of reason is what I would like to call a relativistic or an “instrumental” one
– since rationality is perhaps better understood just in this way, as an instrument man has at his
disposal in order to live better and to achieve knowledge: for instance, Lovecraft employs
rationality in order to attack the “supernatural” idea of the existence of a spirit and a soul beyond
materiality, and of an afterlife. Anyway we have here to pay attention: Lovecraft’s reliance on
rationality is never the dogmatic one of an absolute faith (if it were so, he himself would fall in the
“supernaturalism” he strives to fight). S.T. Joshi, the foremost worldwide Lovecraftian scholar,
clarifies on this point: “How did Lovecraft ‘know’ that there is no life after death?”

– he simply

“shed belief in the absolute certainty of scientific discovery and based all his arguments – on the
existence of God or the soul, on survival after death, on the place of humanity in the universe – on
probability. This belief in probability – i.e., a belief as to the ‘is or isn’tness’ of things… as derived
from the most up-to-date findings of science would serve as the foundation for Lovecraft’s
metaphysics for the rest of his life”.

Of course the theoretical views expressed in “The Unnamable” bear some implications on both
Lovecraft’s literature and philosophy, which are strictly interconnected since one is the expression
and the outcome of the other (it is not by chance if S. T. Joshi regards Lovecraft’s works as
“expressions of a distinctive philosophy rather than as fiction intended merely to horrify”

). Thus

now I would like to focus especially on the effects the views illustrated above have on Lovecraft’s
literature, in both his themes and his treatment of rational language, since Lovecraft was primarily a
fiction writer and only in second instance a philosopher: he dealt more directly with words  than
with ideas.

As far as the thematic aspect is concerned, Lovecraft’s attack on rationality reaches his probably
most convincing peak when it stages (literarily, i.e. metaphorically) the defiance of scientific laws
as widely accepted as, for instance, those of Euclidean geometry. These passages are those which,
simultaneously, represent the irruption of the creatures and the dimensions of Outsideness, of a
realm of pure Alterity, into our own dimension or “reality” (Dasein). Lovecraft’s literature in fact

Ibid., 89.

“In Defence of Dagon and Lovecraft’s Philosophy”, in Joshi 2003, 79.

Ibid., 79-80.

“In Defence of Dagon and Lovecraft’s Philosophy”, in Joshi 2003, 75.

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critically discusses the notion of “reality”: in particular, both what we humans truly mean by this
term, and the ontologic status of the external referent to which this word normally refers. How can
the world we inhabit be “real”, if every now and then burst into it the realm of dream, the outposts
of Outsideness?

“The Call of Cthulhu” (1926)

“The  Call  of  Cthulhu”,  a  seminal  tale  in  Lovecraft’s “mythos” literature, serves very well the
purpose to illustrate Lovecraft’s attack on rationality, both from a thematic and a linguistic
standpoint.
     A short summary of the plot of the tale is necessary in order to develop further discussion. The
subtitle of the tale (“Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston”)
announces that the text is an account written by Thurston of the strange facts he assembled, both
from the papers of his recently deceased grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, and from personal
investigation. Angell, a professor at Brown University of Providence, USA, had collected several
peculiar pieces of data. First, he had taken extensive notes of the dreams and artwork of a young
sculptor, Henry Anthony Wilcox, who had come to him with a bas-relief he had fashioned in his
sleep on the night of March 1, 1925. The sculpture is of a hideous.looking alien entity, and Wilcox
had reported that in the dream that had inspired it he had repeatedly heard the words “Cthulhu
fhtagn”. This had piqued Angell’s interest, for he had encountered these words (or sounds) years
before, at a meeting of the American Archaeological Society, in which a New Orleans police
inspector named Legrasse had brought in a sculpture very much like Wilcox’s and claimed that it
had been worshipped by a degraded cult in the Louisiana bayou which had chanted the phrase
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”. One of the cult members had proffered a
translation of this utterance: “In his house at R’Lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”. Legrasse had
also interviewed one cultist, a mestizo named Castro, who had told them that Cthulhu was a vast
being that had come from the stars when the earth was young, along with another set of entities
named the Great Old Ones; he was buried in the sunken city of R’Lyeh and would emerge when the
“stars were ready” to reclaim control of the earth. The cult “would always be waiting to liberate
him”. Thurston scarcely knows what to make of this material, but then by accident he finds a
newspaper clipping telling of strange events aboard a ship in the Pacific Ocean; accompanying the
article is a picture of another bas-relief very similar to that fashioned by Wilcox and found by
Legrasse. Thurston goes to Oslo to talk with the Norwegian sailor, Gustaf Johansen, who had been
on board the ship, but finds that he is dead. Johansen has, however, left behind an account of his
experience, and his diary – reported by Thurston’s words – shows that he and his fellow sailors had
actually encountered the dreaded Cthulhu as the city of R’Lyeh emerged from the bottom of the
ocean as the result of an earthquake; but, presumably because the stars are not “ready”, the city
sinks again, returning Cthulhu to the bottom of the ocean. However, the mere existence of this
titanic entity is an unending source of unease to Thurston, because it shows how tenuous is
mankind’s vaunted supremacy upon earth. Thurston probably ends dying – we infer this from the
subtitle of the tale, and all evidence makes us believe that the cultists have killed both him and
Professor Angell, since their knowledge of the existence of Cthulhu’s sect represented of course a
danger for its survival.
     It is especially with Johansen’s description of the city resurfaced in the middle of the Pacific,
that the description of Outsideness reveals as a bold gesture of defiance against human rationality.
R’Lyeh is described as the prototype of the geometrical paradox, the triumph of the impossible

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angles, the supreme gaining substance of the possibility of all the most impossible laws

. Thurston,

commenting upon Johansen’s diary, states that

“Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for
instead of describing any definite structure or building

, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone

surfaces – surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and
hyerogliphics. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams.
He has said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of
spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible
reality”

Thus, in this ideal parallel between dream and reality, Lovecraft highlights how the “non-
Euclideity” of R’lyeh’s geometries gives rise to a sense of Outsideness, of “abnormality”

, which

reminds the reader of ultra-terrestrial spheres and dimensions.
In R’Lyeh anything may happen, not a single principle of Euclidean geometry is respected: other
laws are at stake, laws that the human mind is not able to grasp, not even to imagine. And therefore
it may happen that where a concavity appears, to a second glance a convexity shows itself:

“.. in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed
convexity”

This image originates a complex epistemological question: does the defect detected by the
human eye lie in the observed object, or rather in the observer’s eye? In other words, this change of
condition of the angle from concavity to convexity has an objective nature (R’Lyeh’s has then a
varying geometry), or is it a fault of the observing instrument, i.e. of the human eye which, means
used by a defeated reason, incapable to assimilate an alien geometry, can not grasp its essence, and
at each glance “sees” something different? The first hypothesis appears by far the most fascinating,
and maybe it would make even more disturbing, unconceivable the Outsideness of R’Lyeh’s
geometry. Yet I believe that the second is the most likely: it is the human eye that does not possess
the physical instruments capable to send to the brains any sensory impressions referable to a
rational scheme of interpretation of the observed object

In R’Lyeh the impressions of a “wrong” geometry, totally conflicting with Euclidean elementary
notions, like for instance those of horizontality and verticality, multiply:

“It was […] like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jumbs
around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As
Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground
were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable”

Impossible, it goes with the word, according to the human rational canons. But they are simply one of the possible

perspectives on reality: on a cosmic scale, everything, besides than relative, is possible.

I suspect that Johansen’s choice was unavoidable: it is not by means of the human language, i.e. the language of

reason, that it is possible to fully describe what rational is not. Man can only rely on “impressions”, or to establish terms
of comparison with what he already knows, like the futurists’ art here mentioned by Thurston.

“The Call of Cthulhu”, in COC, 165-6. Lovecraft’s Italics.

A recurring issue in Lovecraft. The non-Euclideity of the buildings of the dead city buried under the ice against which

explorers Dyer and Danforth run up in the novel At the Mountains of Madness (1931) is described like this: “There were
geometrical forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a name – cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation;
terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion; shafts with odd bulbous enlargements broken columns in curious
groups” (MM, p.51).

COC, p.166.

It is frankly quite hard to explain, with the words of the human-rational language, the Lovecraftian conception of

Outsideness. And this does nothing but confirm the author’s assumption that it is an ”alterity” irreducible to rational,
linguistic canons of interpretation.

COC, p.166. My Italics.

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The frequent hints to a “variability” of the relative position of each object in the city maybe
represents a clue in favour of the first hypothesis I discussed a few lines above: that the geometry of
the place is not settled, is in a sense changing, and the city is a sort of city in progress. It is hard
even to imagine how this could really “be”: but after all this is just the aim that Lovecraft proposes
to himself, this is the essence of the Lovecraftian Outsideness: to shock human episteme, depicting
something so deeply “other” that the human mind can not only describe it

, but not even imagine it.

And again, when one of the sailors falls from the obelisk that rises on Cthulhu’s tomb,

“Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was
acute, but behaved as it was obtuse”

The sheer mention of an angle, that our sight would define acute, that then behaves as obtuse is
something so unconceivable for the human mind that, if she tries to imagine it, fails, can only “see it
at work”: and at that point only a fate of madness opens up for her.
When the monstrous portal of Chtulhu’s crypt opens at the sailors’ sight, showing to the world the
Horror resurfacing from His sleep, once again its movements defeat the laws of perspective and
geometry

“In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and
perspective seemed upset”

I will now move to the linguistic aspect of Lovecraft’s attacks againt rationality, as they appear
in “The Call of Cthulhu”. Since the manifestations of Outsideness do not conform to rational laws –
as the Euclidean ones – this of course implies that also the language employed by Lovecraft must
adapt itself to the object it intends to portray. There are two ways in which language may perform
this task: one way is that adopted by the Modernisms of Lovecraft’s age, that of rarefaction and
aridity (Stein, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway), the other is the one Lovecraft chose.
     How does Lovecraft express the ”alterity” of language, how language is able, in Lovecraft’s
literature, to discuss its own limits, as in a metadiscourse? Above I highlighted how, if the object of
the observation is “other”, the human mind is not capable to conceive and rationalize it: therefore
her interpretative canons, first of all language, do not possess the instruments suitable to describe
the Outsideness, at which then one can only hint, allude. Already in the passages reported above it
is possible to see how the writer tries hard not to ever provide an image too sharp, clear of the
object that from time to time embodies the Outsideness: for instance Lovecraft often uses words or

See Stefan Dziemianowicz: “It is literally an unspeakable horror because the human vocabulary is inadequate for

describing it. Lovecraft holds up Cthulhu and R’lyeh as a mirror in which we view the reflection of our ignorance when
confronted with the Unknown. The unique effect he reaches for here is not so much fright, but a sort of intellectual
shock”: Stefan Dziemianowicz , “On ‘The Call of Cthulhu’”, LS n.33, Fall 1995, p.34-35.

COC, p.167. My Italic.

The manipulation that, in the descriptions of R’Lyeh, Lovecraft operates on the laws of geometry and architecture is

an effective instrument of artistic yield of the Outsideness. See Kirk Sigurdson: “In ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, architectural
detail perpetrates an actual manipulation of form on the reader. […] we […] witness one of Johansen’s crew pushing
the vast door above Cthulhu’s lair. We ask ourselves how a man was able to budge the immense stone. A fair question.
Lovecraft only alludes to the possibilities, allowing the narrator an insight into an account of the journal entry, which
infers, ‘the geometry of the place was all wrong’. The inference as to the strange nature of the architecture is vaguely
expanded by the after-thought, ‘One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative
position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable’. Since the inference is meant to allude to cosmic
consequences, more than subtle manipulations of Gothic architecture are needed. Even the simplest geometrical ‘given’
(of the sea’s natural horizontal plane) is upset by the variability of the cosmic architecture. Manipulation of form at this
decisive climax serves its purpose well. Burke’s notion of the Sublime is strategically evoked where most needed.
Disorientation, brought on by a skewed perception of the architectural elan at work, allows Lovecraft to successfully
execute his aesthetic of outsideness”: Kirk Sigurdson, “A Gothic Approach to Lovecraft’s Sense of Outsideness”, in LS
n.28, Spring 1993, p.31-32. My Italics.

COC, p.167.

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locutions as “it was like, they could not be sure, impressions, suggests, instead of describing…”,
which convey the sense of the impossibility of an objective/direct description, proceeding instead to
a continuous “speech through comparison”. It is as if Lovecraft admitted the incapability of the
human language to describe the Outsideness, and proceeded just to compare

its manifestations to

something known, reassuring for the human mind. The impossibility of a description is plainly
stated by the author at the moment of the cosmic climax par excellence: the re-emerging of Cthulhu
to sun light, prelude to His blasphemous, Second Advent:

“The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such
eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled”

The Abomination become actual can not be described. Once again, Lovecraft resorts to a
comparison – that has by now acquired celebrity among the scholars of his literature – to hint at the
Creature: a mountain that walks

. The metaphor appears almost clumsy, if not banal: but it is an

effective one, since it exactly depicts what happens to human language, to appear clumsy and banal,
when it tries to describe the unnamable, Outsideness, “what should not be”, that overwhelms it

There is moreover a whole series of linguistic signals adopted by the narrator in the effort to
express a sort of chaos of the language, that counterbalances the chaos of the knowledge. In front of
the unfolding of the Outsideness, not only reason surrenders, but also her main instrument of
expression: human language, in particular in its forms of verbal communication.
For instance, the name itself of the priest of the aliens, Cthulhu, since its first apparition in the tale
is presented as a notable “source” of Outsideness. In fact as heading of his papers, Professor Angell
spells it in very plain and distinct characters, in order to avert every incorrect interpretation of such
a queer name, which so evidently does not spring from the canons of any human language:

“What seemed to be the main document was headed ‘CTHULHU CULT’ in characters painstakingly printed to avoid
the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of”

Stefan Dziemianowicz remarks in effect that “… similes and double-negatives are employed throughout the story to

describe what things are ‘like’ or ‘unlike’, without actually saying what they ‘are’. By avoiding direct description,
Lovecraft leaves it up to the reader’s imagination to fill in the missing details. What appears to be evasiveness on his
part, however, actually is skillful preparation to establish the inadequacy of standard description to capture the
indescribable horrors to come”: Stefan Dziemianowicz , “On ‘The Call of Cthulhu’”, LS n.33, Fall 1995, p.32. My
Italic.

COC, p.167. My Italic.

Another, highly significant, example of “description” of Cthulhu’s Outsideness through comparison is noticeable

when Johansen-Thurston tell of how He, having realised that Johansen and another sailor escaped Him on board of the
Alert  (and yet after having killed other three sailors with some blows with the paws), “slavered and gibbered like
Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus” (COC, p.168): so Cthulhu’s behaviour, not only His physical aspect,
are not directly describable and necessitate a comparison, the “classicism” of which would seem to subside the Myth
Lovecraft is moulding in his tale in the reassuring channel of the imitation of a much more ancient and well-known
Myth. But the author, far from inserting himself in a consolidated trend like that of the Classic Myth, has no fear of
comparison and immediately, since this first occurrence in “The Call of Cthulhu”, attributes to his own Myth a mark of
potent originality: “Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops,  great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to
pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency”: Ibid., my Italic. Thus Cthulhu does not restrict Himself to
curse whom mocked Him with shrewdness and rapidity: He throws Himself in the water and pursues him, and will not
subside until His thirst for blood is quenched. The Myths have changed, and above all they seem to have grown up,
Lovecraft appears to mean.

As a testimony of the impossibility of a description, Lovecraft resorts to a highly evocative and at the same time

pompous, rhetoric and magniloquent language: symbol of a rationality that can not analyse the phenomenon with
analytical coldness, but is forced to use hyperboles, over-elaborate excesses which conflict with the straightforwardness
and the schematism of a scientific description (as, for instance, those of the Modernist writers of his time): “…It
lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into
the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness”: COC, p.167.

COC, p.141. My Italic.

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The name “Cthulhu”

clearly evokes a phonetics and a morphology alien if compared to those

of any human language: as regards the correct pronunciation of the word, Lovecraft jotted down
manifold notes in the course of his life, all containing slightly different information. The author’s
friends have always provided conflicting details and information too. It is likely that Lovecraft’s
definitive statements about the word, its meaning and pronunciation, are to be found in a letter
dating back to 1934:

“… the word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch the phonetics of an absolutely non-human
word. The name of the hellish entity was invented by beings whose vocal organs were not like man’s, hence it has no
relation to the human speech equipment. The syllables were determined by a physiological equipment wholly unlike
ours, hence could never be uttered perfectly by human throats… The actual sound – as nearly as human organs could
imitate it or human letters record it – may be taken as something like Khlul’-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced
gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, hence the h
represents the guttural thickness”

Therefore the sequence of letters “Cthulhu” is nothing but an approximation, not a faithful
reproduction, of what reproducible is not: an extraterrestrial, “other” sound, that human phonatory
organs, just like the phonetic transcription, can only try to imitate, to simulate exploiting the
(limited) means available

. Not only there exist entire universes besides ours, entire civilizations

and living species infinitely more evolved than ours: there exist also languages completely “other”
and unassimilable to human linguistic systems

. The Outsideness becomes more and more

disturbingly articulate, complex, unsettling for the human race, that Lovecraft would like to make
reflect about the absolutely relative position that she occupies in the cosmic scheme of things.
All the utterances in the alien language reported in the tale contribute to the achievement of this
Lovecraftian aim. For example, the huddle of sounds “Cthulhu fhtagn” is described in this way by
Wilcox, who hears it emerging from the depths of the submerged R’lyeh during his dream :

“Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was
not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy would transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the
almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, ‘Cthulhu fhtagn’”

About the choice of the name ‘Cthulhu’ Lovecraft does not provide detailed explanations. Yet it is not proved that

such a name is merely the result of chance or of the free exercise of the Lovecraftian imagination. As a curiosity, I
mention William Neff ‘s interpretative hypothesis: “The ‘Cthulhu’ term might be a relic of a childhood in a proper
home in Providence at the turn of the century. The word bears some similarity to a certain type of decorative art. In late
Victorian times various forms of glassware came into vogue as part of the Art Nouveau movement. They resemble the
movement of water – milky, cloudy, bubbly, swirls – long sweeping serpentine lines or octopoid shapes for decorative
vases. These were manufactured in Scotland and termed ‘Clutha’ or ‘Cluthua’ ware. These terms are from old Gaelic,
and are related to ‘cloud’ or ‘cloudy’, as in ‘cloudy waters’ or aqueous-appearing glassware. The name is thought to
derive ultimately from an old word for the river Clyde. The Whipple parlour was up on the artistic trends of the day […]
one wonders whether Whipple V. Phillips might have put in a few pieces of the latest glassware, with oceanic-looking
design”: “Correspondence”, in LS n.22-23, Fall 1990, p.67. Whipple V. Phillips was Lovecraft’s beloved maternal
grandfather, who for a young Howard took substantially the father’s place, until 1904, year of Whipple’s death.

Letter to Duane Rimel of 23/7/1934 [SL V, 10-11]. Lovecraft’s Italics.

An analogous reflection applies to the name of the sunken city, “R’Lyeh”. At first Lovecraft, when writing a draft of

the tale, had rendered the name of the city with the word “L’yeh” (Letter to his aunt Lillian D. Clark, 14-19/11/1925:
ms., JHL).

The attempt on the worshippers’ part to identify Cthulhu with “humanizing” appellations is part of this process of

anthropomorphization of the alterity: by “…their use of the pronouns ‘he, ‘him, and ‘his’ to describe a creature who
clearly fits no human measure of gender, the cultists’ conceptualization of Cthulhu and the Old Ones is crude
anthropomorphism, an attempt to reduce the unknowable to terms human beings can understand”: Stefan
Dziemianowicz , “On ‘The Call of Cthulhu’”, LS n.33, Fall 1995, p.34. My Italic.

COC, p.143. My Italics.

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Thus the alien language is not only unpronounceable for the human phonatory organs, but the
“voice” itself uttering the blasphemous sounds is not even definable a voice, but a “chaotic
sensation”: after all, the reader earlier in the tale is already told of how the aliens did not use voice,
but just telepathic transmission of information and thoughts. It is therefore interesting to read what
Lovecraft writes in a later tale, “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), when referring to the
incomprehensible cries of Wilbur Whateley’s monstrous twin brother – born by the carnal union of
a woman, Lavinia Whateley, and an alien entity, Yog-Sothoth:

“It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of
consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely
that of half-articulate words”

Again in “The Call of Cthulhu”, the narrator Thurston writes about the “ominous syllables which
can be rendered only as ‘Cthulhu’”

, but it is above all with the transcription of the chant that

Cthulhu’s adorers raise to the Great Old One that the inadequacy of human language to reproduce
the sounds and the morphology of the alien tongue plainly reveals itself:

“What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols
was something very like this – the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted
aloud:
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”

     Therefore human language can only try “to guess at”, to make hypotheses about what the alien
one is communicating, even only at the level of the mere linguistic signifier, basing on the sole
instrument of the rational language that, perhaps, can be applied to the cacophony from the outer
world: the pauses in the chanting of the singsong which, presumably (but the inference may be
totally arbitrary: another case of chaos/chance of the language), mark the subdivisions between
words.
     The term of our language that better expresses the linguistic chaos represented by the alien
words is perhaps “cacophony”

, that “mad cacophony”

symbol of the moral chaos which the

alien civilization stands for. And a further proof that this is a real linguistic chaos is provided by the
use, in a passage of the tale, Lovecraft makes of a word highly significant on this regard,
“gibberish”:

“… he [Wilcox] related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean
vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-
impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters
‘Cthulhu’ and ‘R’lyeh’”

DH, p.195. Lovecraft’s Italics.

COC, p.147.

COC, p.150. My Italics.

Carlo Pagetti remarks that in Lovecraft the language of the monsters is “made of bestial and incomprehensible

sounds, of cacophonic sequences of consonants”, in which “the cacophony, the indistinct cry is the most tangible
expression of that blind and bestial universe that always appears to be going to submerge man” (“L’Universo Impazzito
di H.P. Lovecraft”, in Pagetti 93-94. My translation from Italian). Expanding on this theme, Giuseppe Lippi remarks:
“This ‘deformation’ of language and of its rethorical figures is the fascinating means by which Lovecraft makes us slide
in a totally alien universe. In this way the syntax and the words ‘implode’ like every other diurnal value; the speech
becomes a chaotic anti-logos, expression of madness. A clear image of this is the language of the monstrous entities,
parody and extreme distortion of that of man […] The ‘negativity’ of this reversed language is of course the quality that
allows us to load it with a new and paradoxical meaning. Lovecraft’s mythical universe is a universe of language, and
through language it operates a last, definitive overturning of our supposed ‘rational’ universe”: “Il triplice fascino di
H.P. Lovecraft”, in H.P. Lovecraft and A. Derleth, 222-223. My translation from Italian.

COC, p.152.

COC, p.143-4. My Italics.

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Thus once more there is an absolute uncertainty, which does not allow to discriminate in the
linguistic chaos that takes place: is it a “voice” or an “intelligence” to utter the unpronounceable
sounds? What is the real linguistic signifier (to say nothing of the meaning, that places itself on a
superior level of comprehension, even more unattainable for the human mind) of such sounds, since
the words “Cthulhu” and “R’Lyeh” can do no more than approximating, simulating such sounds

These questions are and have to remain unanswerable, consistently with the aesthetic aim Lovecraft
pursues: to depict cosmic Outsideness, a “reality” unknown and unknowable to man, and therefore
undescribable under all its aspects, not merely with reference to its themes and “contents” but also
to its linguistic rendering.

“Dagon” (1917)

Countless are the possible examples of Lovecraft’s narratives staging – sometimes mercilessly –
the defeat of human rationality and rational language when forced to cope with irruptions from
Outsideness. Each of them adds some new insight to our discussion on the limits of rational
language. In the tale “Dagon” (1917), Lovecraft’s discourse on rationality is made even more
complex by the author’s attempt to demonstrate that the loss of reason, and the fall into madness,
lead to the discovery of truth. Here Lovecraft does not limit himself to attacking rationality: he
moves further, and claims that it is only through the utter negation of rationality, i.e. through
insanity, that man attains superior knowledge.
“Dagon” features an unnamed protagonist (the abundance of unnamed characters in Lovecraft’s
fiction can be now seen under new light after our reflections on Lovecraft’s lack of faith in rational
language and definitions), who suffers a shipwreck in an unknown island, that he later discovers is
populated by an obnoxious slimy creature. The protagonist undergoes a slow descent along a
promontory, a descent that gradually puts at risk his mental sanity, his rationality, and
metaphorically stands for a “descent” into madness, that reaches its climax through the physical
descent of the narrator into the chasm where the “stupendous” monster appears, in the sight of
which he now, during his recollection in pseudo-tranquillity, states he definitely went mad: he is in
fact approaching the edge of the threshold between the comforting “reality” and Outsideness, and
even only a furtive glance at the alterity beyond it condemns the viewer. The shipwreck experience,
as experience of the threshold, is therefore analyzable as an anatomy of going mad.
The path toward madness—conceived by Lovecraft not in the conventional sense, but as
revelatory experience—begins when the narrator, unaware of the cosmic significance of the
experience he is going to undergo, tries to rationalize it, i.e. starts to think,

tries to make the

interpretation of his experience tally with the clues of rationality. On the third day of drift, the

All in all, even the mere attempt, made by man, to imitate the sound of the alien language is a source of horror,

because it indicates the level of bestiality to which the human being may descend in the biological scale. In fact “There
are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the
source should yield the other” (COC, p.152. My Italic). S. T. Joshi remarks: “Aliens – extraterrestrials for the most part
– naturally inspire horror (at the outset, at any rate) largely for their mere physical difference from human beings -
tentacles, rugose cones, and the like. But Lovecraft reserves his greatest sense of loathing when he finds aliens doing
the sort of thing only human beings should do. One suggestive remarks is in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’: ‘There are vocal
qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should
yield the other’. Here the context is that these beings have renounced their humanity and descended to a bestial level”:
Joshi 1990, 200.

During the lonesome drift, “For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat” (“Dagon”, in D 15).

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narrator realizes that “The odour of the fish was maddening”

: here is the adumbration of a

nightmare land, even in the literal sense of “created by nightmare.”
The land where the narrator gets ashore is in fact a nowhere, a territory whose “objectivity”
cannot be corroborated by any rational grasp: it is not charted on maps, it is made of an eruption of
blackish and slimy volcanic earth, in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. Nobody knows of it, not even
the rescuers of the American ship who get him out of the scrape. It is a non-extant land, escaping
every attempt of interpretation/rationalization/significance. Further contributing to the building of a
“progression” of madness, Lovecraft reveals that in the landing-place the distances, the sizes of the
landscape elements, are not those a rational mind could expect. The narrator’s notion of space starts
to waver: “That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock,
though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it”

. When he finally

reaches the promontory, he realizes that it is much higher than it appeared at a distant view: “By the
fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had
appeared from a distance”

In the nightmare land he is visiting, nothing is truly as it appears

: it is a dream-land. Lovecraft

was often obsessed by the hypothetical notion of perspectives that do not match with man’s sensory
experience of reality, with his three-dimensional glimpse on the world, because these perspectives
make rationality waver and induce it to acknowledge its cosmic epistemological inadequacy: one
may recall, for instance, the Lovecraftian concern for the non-Euclidean geometry of “The Trap”
and of the immense monstrous dwellings of his aliens (as we saw not only in “The Call of Cthulhu,”
but for instance in At the Mountains of Madness too), or his concern with the image of oblique
perspectives.

The territory attracts the narrator toward madness, gaining life as a character, lit by the unreal
moonlight: this set of hallucinatory landscape elements induces the narrator to the descent into the
abyss (which is both geographic and existential). In fact the narrator feels he is “carried on” by a
superior, uncontrollable force

The discovery of the obelisk at the bottom of the chasm represents, in its unveiling an
hallucinating truth about the origin of mankind, a further, dramatic (even if not conclusive) attack
against the character’s rationality – here symbolically reflecting everyone’s rationality; but the
narrator’s rationality, though wavering, still tries hard to find a satisfactory explanation: “For
despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the
sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-
shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of
living and thinking creatures”

. The monolith becomes the symbol of the ancestral memory of

mankind (as the sea from which the monster emerges is the cradle of our species, symbol of the
womb where life originated, receptacle of the atavistic memory), a memory that one would like to

Ibid., 16. My Italic.

Ibid.

Again: “I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined” (D 16-17). Of

course the recurrence of the theme of appearance and perspective on reality again raises the complex issue of
Lovecraftian epistemology, and its most striking question: is it the human eye that is unable to grasp the true (and
potentially “graspable,” by more powerful senses) objectivity of reality, or is it reality that, intrinsically, escapes
explanation and holds a changing, mutable nature? Is the fault in the observer, who is unable to see, or in the object of
observation, which escapes Sight and form?

See Stephen King: “Lovecraft was struck by the horror of wrong geometry; he wrote frequently of non-Euclidean

angles that tortured the eye and hurt the mind, and suggested other dimensions where the sum of a triangle’s three
corners might equal more or less than 180°. Contemplating such things, he suggested, might be enough in itself to drive
a man crazy. Nor was he far wrong; we know from various psychological experiments that when you tamper with a
man or woman’s perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human
mind [. . .] this fascinating idea of perspective gone haywire”: King 1993, 324-25 (my Italics).

“Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse” (D 17)

D 17.

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remove as a testimony of our degrading and contemptible origins: the narrator takes a look on
mankind’s past, to withdraw immediately from his observation point, sickened but also amazed by
the revolutionary cognitive perspective that bursts upon his Sight.
The narrator would withdraw his glance because, as an oblique perspective, the one that opens at
the sight of the monolith, it fills him with new sensations, impossible to express with the words of
rational language.

Rationality, and the verbal language that is its primary means of expression,

declare themselves defeated in the face of this truth: they cannot seize it, because it overcomes any
attempt at rational interpretation, rides roughshod over it, and humiliates it. But despite this, the
spell prevails, in a sin of hybris that is the turning point that causes the subsequent doom of the
narrator: he throws a second glance toward Memory, as most Lovecraftian characters do, frightened
as they are by the abysses of truth looming in front of their quest, but nonetheless driven by the
irrepressible desire of the survey, by a scientific zeal that pushes them beyond the threshold, toward
damnation: “Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist’s or
archaeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely”

. It is the second glance on

Memory that dooms man, since it brings the comprehensive discovery of the “outer” reality,
metaphorically embodied by the inscriptions on the monolith: the awareness of the truth gradually
seeps into the narrator, in an irreversible path towards madness.
He ponders the hieroglyphics and bas-reliefs of the obelisk: his rationality is breaking down, he
cannot describe the forms of the figures carved on the bas-reliefs (they look like an oblique
perspective, not matching with the cognitive model adopted by the human mind to seize the
meaning of reality: reason would not bear recollection, sanctioning its epistemological defeat): “Of
their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint”

Human reason cannot know all the knowable, but only the reality that falls under restricted human
viewpoints: those of sensory experience, of tri-dimensionality, i.e. just a small component of the
vast “cosmos at large,” and of all the conceivable reality (and then, “potentially existing” reality,
since for Lovecraft the truth value of imagination is by no means inferior to that of the senses).
In “Dagon”, Lovecraft’s attack against rationality is even more disturbing than in “The Call of
Cthulhu”: he not merely stages the defeat of language as an instrument of reason, but also of a sense
– Sight, as another means reason employs to interpret reality and rationalize it. The final blow for
reason is in fact inflicted only by the vision of the abomination, which overshadows the glance,
makes it fade, and turns off every light, since it makes the Memory current. It is as if the object of
the observation defeated, through its violent impact on reason, the glance itself that is launched on
it: the observed does violence to the observer, and their roles are reversed. The observed, i.e.
Memory becoming actual, prevails by its violence, primarily visual, on every attempt of the
observer to incorporate it into his own conceptual system. The narrator looks into his DNA in
search for the genes he needs to bear the vision, and his defeat does not lie in his incapability to find
them, but just in his recognizing them. The vision of the hideous creature revitalizes the fund of
ancestral Memory that the narrator has always been carrying inside, without ever being aware of it:
it is just when Memory becomes actual and “visible” that doom is marked for mankind, because it is
the Memory of an unutterable past that the human species believed to have been wiped out from its
DNA, but the genes of which, resistant to every voluntary form of repression, the vision is able to
restore to light.
     The “actualized” image of Memory kills the glance, contextually condemns to madness: reason,
which uses not only language but also Sight to organize reality into rational interpretative rules,
now has lost its main instrument, the eye demolished by the vision. It is a blind(ed) reason,
incapable of incorporating reality into her conceptual system: only madness remains (the terribly
pithy “I think I went mad then”

“A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express” (D 16).

Ibid., 16.

Ibid., 18.

Ibid.

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Lovecraft nonetheless does not fail to examine further the delicate question of the “loss of the
eye”: during the hallucinatory chaos of the final vision, the author defines the apparently horrible
creature as “a stupendous monster of nightmares”

. By means of these peculiar lexical choices,

Lovecraft raises at least two basic questions:

By “of nightmares,” he compels the reader to wonder about the epistemic nature of the

whole story: reality or dream?;

By “stupendous”, Lovecraft anticipates a landmark of his most mature poetics, that of the

mythos tales. “Stupendous” bears also the meaning of “marvelous, extraordinary,” referring to the
idea of the fascination exerted by the unknown and by the quest of a hideous truth: most of
Lovecraft’s characters are terrified by the object of their quest and by the truths that step by step are
unveiled, but they cannot stop the quest, since at the same time they undergo their irresistible,
hypnotic charm.

     In “Dagon”, the attack against rationality involves not only Sight and, as we will see, language,
but also a third instrument of reason: Memory. From the moment of the vision, only a destiny of
madness is left for the narrator: he starts laughing, singing at the top of his voice, and, above all, not
remembering anything: the vision of ancestral Memory in shreds makes a clean sweep of his own
rational memory, the ultimate effect of annihilation. Two levels of memory exist: once drawn from
that of the ancestral Memory, it does not exist any more as memory, vision, reason. It is only
Nothingness, coinciding with the loss of spatial-temporal coordinates: the narrator cannot remember
where, when, and how he got out of the chasm, how he regained the boat, how and by whom he was
rescued. He undergoes a complete deconstruction of the Self, a loss of Self-meaning and of his
human dimension, physical as well as existential. Only the experience of ancestral Memory is left,
not as an instrument for knowledge (we will see that knowledge deriving from this Memory has no
coherent relevance among the human beings who believe they have removed the ancestral genes
from their DNA), but only as instrument for damnation.
     At this point a new descent takes place: if, before, the physical descent into the chasm coincided
with the existential one into the Mäelstrom of madness, there now exists only the metaphorical
descent toward the inevitable conclusion, suicide. By now there is only room for “delirium”:
nobody believes the narrator because he is testimony of the removed Memory, which no human
being would be disposed, and not even capable if not through the Vision beyond the threshold (and
so, in his turn, through insanity), to recognize as his own. The narrator, in the world of “light” and
conventional reason is now just a madman, whom nobody believes; but he still naively tries to get
in touch with an anthropologist. His New Reason, Madness, i.e. awareness of Truth, makes a last
attempt, because in him conventional reason is by now extinct; but once the threshold has been
crossed, nobody can believe him in the world where the other reason, the conventional one, rules.
He receives only derision and sneers: “Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him
with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon
perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries”

The conventional world of three dimensions, of Euclidean geometry, and of the five senses, can
receive the narrator’s account with nothing but “contemptuous amusement”

: this is the fate of one

who has crossed the threshold searching for knowledge and obtained damnation. But for Lovecraft
Madness is Truth, which can be secured through shipwreck: here a physical one, as well as
existential, with a scheme that will recur in his mature works—always through drift in deserts,
ancient ruins, ice, the abysses under the ocean, man gets in touch with the Truth beyond the
threshold. This is not madness conventionally conceived: Lovecraft, though living in the three-
dimensional world, always takes the viewpoint from beyond the threshold, constantly maintaining a

Ibid.

Ibid., 19.

Ibid.

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veiled scorning smile toward reason and its conventional perspectives (how can we not notice it,
here in “Dagon,” in that ”hopelessly conventional” attitude of the amused ethnologist?).
Before the inevitable ending, the last threshold this time toward salvation and oblivion, the
narrator still dreams flashes of Memory, of unmentionable truths: he keeps having visions of
“Beyondness,” of Truths whose awareness is incompatible with survival because conventional
reason is unable to “metabolize” them: “I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the
nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed [. . .]. I
dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the
remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when a land shall sink, and the dark ocean
floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium”

The Language of the Limit

Shipwreck is the experience of the rarefying of language and of its capacity to convey meaning.
Word, as Sight, fades away as instrument of the conventional reason, it cannot be interpreter of
reality anymore, at a twofold level:

language can no more “translate” the external reality, or represent the “objective”

world;

language can no more express the depth of feelings and sensitiveness.

Concerning this second feature, perhaps the most appalling, it may be useful to quote a passage
from Stephen King’s Different Seasons, the incipit of the tale entitled “The Body.” These words
celebrate the defeat of language in its attempt to convey feelings, its progressive drying up in the
face of the mystery of instincts:

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of,
because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in
your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?
The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to
a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you
dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all,
or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s
the worst thing, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want
of an understanding ear (King 1982, 293)

     This is probably what happens to the narrator in “Dagon”: no ear is able to listen to his telling,
no mind is disposed to receive his truth, save with derision. What King describes as “the worst
thing,” the want for a ear to listen, leads the narrator even to suicide: the shipwreck experience
assumes the form of a tragedy of solitude, a solitude lived not only during his drift, but also, and
perhaps especially, after, when coming back in the cosy, rational world where it is not possible
anymore either to reconstruct the human relationships existing before the shipwreck or maintain
“normal” relationships with his fellows.
How does the rarefying of language due to the shipwreck experience find expression?
     It is necessary to conceive the shipwreck as the experience of the limit: on the edge, along the
razor blade, one hovers between life and death, between sanity and madness. The narrator’s
experience is the practice of an equilibrist, in a dimension where the opposites live together: death
is life and vice versa (in fact the narrator in “Dagon” has to die a fictitious death to have life,

Ibid.

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The Unnamable in Lovecraft and the Limits of Rationality Page 16 of 20

because his life in the conventional world for him is the real death), sanity is madness (appearing as
a madman to the conventional world, he has reached the true sanity, the true knowledge: and here is
the paradox, in the waking world the only sane ones are the insane).
Then, shipwreck as experience of the opposites and one that displays its doubleness, only
apparently contradictory, also from a linguistic viewpoint, by means of:

the rarefying of language, coming to border on aphasia;
the redundancy of language, apparently exploding into magniloquence.

They are opposite procedures, but certainly not contradictory because oriented to the same goal, i.e.
to express the want of Self and Sense and the language’s loss of competency in producing meaning.
Lovecraft chooses the second procedure, staging the theatrical performance with baroque prose:
language does not seem to vanish or rarefy; on the contrary, it flourishes in mannerist baroques. His
is a rich and complex style, basically hypotactic, redundant in adjectives, often resorting to a
lexicon magniloquent and tinged with archaisms (consistent with his fondness for the British poets
and essayists of the eighteenth century). Lovecraftian prose has been often criticized as affected by
a peculiar disease, adjectivitis, i.e. the persistent recourse to qualifying adjectives, interpreted as a
flaw of Lovecraft as a writer. But the resort to this harvest of qualifying adjectives was neither
fortuitous nor a symptom of a supposed stylistic ineptitude; it corresponded to precise and
conscious goals: in truth, they are qualifying adjectives that actually do not qualify at all, nor add
meaning to the speech, nor build new senses, they are just a sterile accumulation. They are above all
synonyms, the juxtaposition of which is a sign of the flaring up of language, which acknowledges
its inability to bear new issues of knowledge and a reliable viewpoint on reality. This proliferation
of adjectives has the same aesthetic goals as aphasia: between the absence of words and their
excessive accumulation, there is no pragmatic difference, the purpose is the same. Language gets
nowhere, as an engine that goes out of phase, keeps on turning but does not set the car in motion,
i.e., out of metaphor, does not imprint meaning to the speech. Also the frequent resort to lexical and
syntactical archaisms is a stylistic expedient consistent with the purpose: the use of archaisms, the
wreck of a past epoch of Memory and Language, sanctions the epistemological inadequacy of
modern language to express “reality.”
The challenge Lovecraft launches is again very provocative: to write a literature that builds a
non-rational language, in order to give voice to the truth that insanity unveils. On this regard
Lovecraft’s literature operates a Copernican revolution: that of considering language not as an
instrument of reason anymore, but as an instrument of insanity. Thus Lovecraft creates the language
of the insane, an accumulation of words and subordinate clauses that always say the same thing:
that there is nothing to say, because it is not by the rational-conventional language that truth can be
signified. Its proliferation of words is used to hide the absence of words, to stem the silence, to
express the incapacity for facing the abyss. Lovecraft’s is a screaming silence: his language seems
to shout, consolidating the victory of rational thinking over the territories of “reality,” even its
capacity to signify the truth, but it is no more than a house of words built on silence—it is silence. It
is the shout of the insane, of one who has crossed the threshold and lost sanity (“I think I went mad
then”

Examples of this rhetorical technique of ”adjectival accumulation” can be found almost
everywhere in “Dagon”: “The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other
less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I
should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute
silence and barren immensity”

. I would emphasize the word “unutterable” as an example of how

in Lovecraft language itself becomes, meta-linguistically, a means to express its own inadequacy to

Ibid., 18.

Ibid., 15.

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The Unnamable in Lovecraft and the Limits of Rationality Page 17 of 20

attain from the unattainable, to describe the object beyond the threshold. It is Lovecraft himself
acknowledging that his lavishness in baroque and complex descriptions and his efforts to “utter the
unutterable” are vain: the only possible result for language is to deflagrate, to go crazy in its turn,
because it is applied to an object that cannot be told nor described: in “Dagon” there are plenty of
words that refer to this ineffability of experience (“unknown goal . . . immeasurable pit or canyon . .
. fathomless chaos . . . unfashioned realms”

). This is the ineffability of which Lovecraft had

warned the reader already at the beginning, cautioning him that he would not be able to completely
understand the meaning of the story, not because of an intrinsic fault on the reader’s part, but
because of an inadequacy of the language used by the narrator in describing it: “When you have
read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must
have forgetfulness or death”

. Here language is used as a lie: it feeds on harvests of words without

meaning, deflagrates going out of phase, and tells a story that actually (the language itself states it)
is ineffable and cannot be told. So each story that claims to tell the “truth” is false (it is not through
the human-rational language that truth could be told), even more so that of “Dagon,” which is
portrayed as the outcome of a hallucinatory experience lived by a narrating “I” addicted to drugs,
ambiguous and unreliable. The voice of the protagonist starts up a faint, insufficient effort of
approximation to reality: as King maintains, language diminishes emotions, shrinks to no more than
living size what seemed limitless in the narrator’s soul, and this is the true reason why readers, since
they have at their disposal only the “linguistic” expression of the experience of the narrator (and
basically do not grasp much of the real nature of the hallucinations, emotions, and tortures that the
character lives in his inwardness), are not able to comprehend thoroughly the reasons for the final
choice to end his endurance of the hopelessly conventional world.

“Recognition”

Finally, I would like to add a further element of complexity to Lovecraft’s discussion on the
limits of rational language, namely that concerning the ways in which language may “say” the
deity. This new example, excerpted from Lovecraft’s poetic production, further testifies that the
interest his literature shows towards linguistic issues is not a perfunctory one: in fact it involves not
only prose, but also poetry. I refer in particular to the fourth sonnet of Lovecraft’s poetic cycle
Fungi from Yuggoth (1929-30), a poem called “Recognition”:

The day had come again, when as a child
I saw - just once - that hollow of old oaks,
Grey with a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes
The slinking shapes which madness has defiled.
It was the same - an herbage rank and wild
Clings round an altar whose carved sign invokes
That Nameless One to whom a thousand smokes
Rose, aeons gone, from unclean towers up-piled.

I saw the body spread on that dank stone,
And knew those things which feasted were not men;
I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,
But Yuggoth, past the starry voids - and then
The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,
And all too late I knew that it was I!

Ibid., 16.

Ibid., 14.

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This poem claims that “The day had come again, when as a child” (1-2) the narrator saw an altar
in the woods, and that “It was the same” (5). The octet and the quatrain of the sestet describe a
“natural temple” or “grove” sememe, converted by negativizing words into a threatening world of
horror. The mention of “a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes” (3), of the “slinking shapes which
madness has defiled” (4), of “herbage rank and wild” (5), of “unclean towers up-piled” (8) and of
the altar as a “dark stone” (9) all involve conventional natural temple elements transformed by
negative qualities. In this descriptive system the altar serves as threshold – as the locus of the
transfer from the worshippers to the god. The sonnet defines the god the “Nameless One” (7), an
expression, as we saw, very significant in Lovecraft’s literature and philosophy, and that here gains
a peculiar complexity, since it can be loaded with several different meanings. It may refer to:

1) the religious taboo against saying the name of the deity;
2) the inadequacy of language to describe the deity from Outsideness;
3) the sheer inability to recognize the deity’s identity, thus valorizing its quality of

unknownness.

All these connotations emphasize the sheer Outsideness, or otherness, of the deity. The “unclean
towers piled-up” (8) from which “a thousand smokes / Rose” (7-8) appear here as a duplication of
the altar’s threshold-function.
But as well as opening into an otherworld through the altar, the natural temple’s world itself
becomes an otherworld in this sonnet. Like it was for “Cthulhu”, here the name “Yuggoth” clearly
exemplifies this world as otherworld. The name has in fact an odd sound-shape and graphemic
shape: not many polysyllabic words in English end with the /-ath/, /-oth/, and /-ith/ characteristic of
Lovecraft’s coined names, and the consonant /y/ begins a relatively small number of words. The
former graphemic coin should conjure up associations with the Hebrew-derived terms of occultism,
valorizing the word as an otherness-word, while the second coin merely adds to the strangeness
connotation through its rarity.
As a matter of fact, Lovecraft often claims to have invented such names in order to convey the
“flavour” of foreign and remote sources, especially Arabic, Hebraic, Oriental, Celtics, or even non-
human. Lovecraft’s words below can be useful not only to explain the origin of the word
“Yuggoth”, but also of all the otherworldly names of his literature, including Cthulhu:

“As to those artificial names of unearthly places and gods and persons and entities – there are different ways of coining
them. To a large extent they are designed to suggest – either closely or remotely – certain names in actual history or
folklore which have weird or sinister associations with them. Thus ‘Yuggoth’ has a sort of Arabic or Hebraic cast, to
suggest certain words passed down from antiquity in the magical formulae contained in Moorish and Jewish
manuscripts. Other synthetic names like ‘Nug’ and ‘Yeb' suggest the dark and mysterious tone of Tartar or Thibetan
folklore. Dunsany is the greatest of all name-coiners, and he seems to have three distinct models – the Oriental (either
Assyrian or Babylonian, or Hebrew from the Bible), the classical (from Homer mostly), and the Celtic (from the
Arthurian cycle, etc.) […] I myself sometimes follow Dunsany’s plan, but I also have a way strictly my own – which I
use for devising non-human names, as of the localities and inhabitants of other planets […] The sounds ought not to
follow any human language-pattern, and ought not to be derived from – or adapted to – the human speech-equipment at
all. In other words, the whole design ought to be alien to both the ideas and the tongue of mankind – a series of sounds
of different origins and associations, and capable only in part of reproduction by the human throat and palate and
mouth. Just how far, and in what direction, such a sound-system ought to differ from human speech, must of course
depend on how far and in what direction the imaginary users are represented as differing […] Usually my stories
assume that the non-human sounds were known to certain human scholars in elder days, and recorded in secret
manuscripts like the Necronomicon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, etc.. In that case I likewise assume that […] ancient
authors of these manuscripts gave the non-human names an unconscious twist in the direction of their own respective
languages – as always occurs when scholars and writers encounter an utterly alien nomenclature and try to represent it
to their own people”

Letter to Duane W. Rimel, 14/2/1934 [SL IV, 386-387]. My Italics.

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In the same epistle, Lovecraft underscores that, in spite of what “realistic” writers claim, it is
certainly profitable to introduce in a fictional work an invented word, coined carefully associating
the proper sources:

“Many realists violently object to the practice of using these coined names, averring that it gives a childish effect to the
stories concerned. I can see their point, but do not think their objection can be applied indiscriminately. Carelessly,
injudiciously coined, or excessively used artificial names do rather cheapen a tale; but it is certainly advantageous now
and then to introduce a coined word which has been shaped with great care from just the right associational sources”

It is however beyond doubt that Lovecraft’s fondness for the invention of odd, exotic- or alien-
sounding proper names is pursued coherently with his aesthetic of vagueness  and, above all, of
“distanciation”: when a fictional realm displays names as Yuggoth, Thog, Nyarlathotep and
Azathoth, as those labelling its geography and inhabitants, the main aesthetic impression aroused in
the interpreter is that of a profound “distanciation” and “otherwordliness”.

References

King, Stephen. Different Seasons. 1982. Rpt. New York: Signet, 1983.

-----------------. Danse Macabre. London: Warner Books, 1993.

Joshi, S. T. The Weird Tale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990.

--------------.  A Subtler Magick: the Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. Gillette, NJ:
Wildside Press, 1999.

--------------. Primal Sources. Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003.

Leiber, Fritz. “A Literary Copernicus” (1949). In Peter Cannon (ed.), Lovecraft Remembered. Sauk
City, WI: Arkham House, 1998.

Lippi, Giuseppe. “Il Triplice Fascino di H.P. Lovecraft”. In Lovecraft and Derleth.

Lovecraft, H.P. Selected Letters. A. Derleth and D. Wandrei eds. 5 vols. Sauk City, WI: Arkham
House Publishers, Inc., 1965-1976.

------------------. The Dunwich Horror and Other Tales. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1984.

------------------.  At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House,
1985.

------------------. Dagon and other Macabre Tales. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1986.

------------------.  The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. New York, NY: Penguin Books,
1999.

------------------. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. S.T. Joshi ed. London:
Penguin Classics, 2004.

Ibid., 388.