Following "The Call of Cthulhu:" Becoming-Monster
Laura Nikolich
Following “The Call of Cthulhu:” Becoming-Monster
Lovecraft’s ending to “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936) has crept into a tiny crack in the back of my skull and lived there ever since I came across it in a seminar on cosmic horror a couple of years ago. It goes like this:
“On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity. He refuses to tell anyone (even Dyer) what he saw, though it is implied that it has something to do with what lies beyond the larger mountain range that even the Elder Things feared” (432).
At that time, I put the blame on ‘the sublime’ as a concept and aesthetic experience and with that on your go-to idealists and romantics, such as Kant or Burke. To Kant, experiences like these teach us, that we are superior to the nature within us–we can rise above our impulses, so to speak, and ultimately reach moral clarity (cf. Kant, 103). While I think that this provides an interesting angle to Lovecraft’s writing and gave me some pointers as to why his work had such strange and haunting effects, I could not attest to any moral betterment per se when reading Lovecraft. What stuck instead was an intense affect of unsettlement. What if it was less about reaching something and more about transforming into something, becoming something? This led me to Deleuze and his idea of becoming (a concept aiming to replace more static ideas of ‘being’ ) and the question of what would happen if one were to apply a Deleuzian reading on one of his stories instead. Where would it lead us, for example, if we tried to understand ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) as a call for becoming? And what would the implications be for aspects such as Lovecraft’s racism?
The first thing I can say is that you run into a bunch of conceptual challenges; First off, we need to get rid of the strict divide between literature and real life (not that that’s something I personally struggle with) and second of all, the divide between what is inside your head and what isn’t (something that for Kant was quite the important differentiator). Within Deleuzian thought, the world as a whole can be looked at in terms of intensities and therefore intensities within a text or provoked by a text are in some ways happening on the same plane as ‘real life intensities’. These intensities then form all kinds of alliances on the plane of consistency. Some turn into strata (which can maybe be thought of as trajectories of some sort), some form assemblages (somewhat short term cooperations between ideas) and some form plateaus (huge conglomerates of ideas, mechanisms and intensities). Now, the Deleuzian application I found when researching this approach looked at Cthulhu as an assemblage and because assemblages have deconstructing–or here rather de-stratisfying–qualities, as a potential for the de-radialization of Lovecraft’s text. Here, we run into the first logical challenge that comes off as rather harmless at first; Oftentimes, Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown, which gives way to his signature cosmic horror, is seen as a symptom of his fear of foreign cultures and territories:
“The very conception of weird fiction and cosmic horror helped Lovecraft to construct villains based on his fear of the unknown. In many of his stories, evil is recognised in the peculiar, alien force of the other, which can be explained as a general concept of discrimination against other races – human or not” (Casthilo et al., 43).
Makes sense, right? At the same time probably just as much has been written about his texts’ inherent transformative potential, the immanent potential of change, if you will, which (we’re all hoping) allows us to read Lovecraft beyond his and its racism. Be it in the form of aesthetic experiences like the sublime as mentioned above or general metaphysical mediations. So far, so good.
In “Radicalizing Assemblage,” the essay I mentioned, Lucas Kwong suggests that by understanding Cthulhu as an assemblage and focussing on the affects the story has on the reader both, the imagined reader, as well as the actual one, we are able to deterritorialize the text and its white supremacist borrowings. Now, if common decodings are correct and Cthulhu signifies the other, and thereby the non-white body, reading him as an assemblage becomes a murky business. We could simply say for now equating Cthulhu with any form of racist symbolism is wrong. I am just putting it out there as the itch in my brain that it poses and will come back to it at the end.
Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is told through a series of documents and narratives pieced together by the protagonist, Francis Wayland Thurston, after his great-uncle, Professor George Gammell Angell, dies under mysterious circumstances. Angell had been researching Cthulhu, a monstrous, ancient god-like being who lies dormant beneath the sea in the submerged city of R’lyeh. Thurston himself is plagued by a sense of doom, after having learned more about Cthulhu and its surrounding cult. All of this is scary for many reasons, one of them being that, it is reflective of our contemporary world. This is not least since the story itself is entrenched with the elements of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “uncanniness of modernity”: secret, speed and affect (cf. 415). Markers which point to political manifestations we’re all painfully familiar with today
Moreover, the dialectics between cognizance, i.e. the (fragmentary) gathering of information and the secrets/unknowing assemble and become themselves a stratum of death and destruction; on both, metaphysical (the ‘call’ and its induced mass-psychosis) and physical/material levels: “the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones” (10). That is, if we take the sublation of difference between text and ‘real life’ seriously enough. Again, in its movement not something that should be unfamiliar to the contemporary reader in the age of mass information and social media and their potential, lingering connection to (real life) destruction and death.
To Kwong, reading Cthulhu as an assemblage allows us to place agency on us, as the readers and have our affective reading ultimately destratisfy Lovecraft’s racism. This act, to him, is more effective than Haraway’s assumption “that simply moving the letter ‘h’ can distinguish her progressive ‘Chthulucene’ from the assemblage summed up in Cthulhu’s monstrous figure” (385). Her différance-iation poses a “dismissal of the ‘misogynist racial-nightmare monster’ Cthulhu [and] underestimates the ontological claims of a text in which assemblage overturns interlocking definitions of matter and whiteness” (Ibid.)
In contrast, Kwang’s (Deleuzian) reading asks for “radical readers [who] might reappropriate select stories, thereby exploiting fiction’s ability to take on a life of its own—particularly, in this case, fiction that testifies to assemblage’s own self-animating, author-defying power” (404). So, he proposes to let yourself be affected by the text’s intensity, here: more concretely the accumulation of it in the form of Cthulhu and in doing so, wrest the text away from Lovecraft’s bony, white hands. I do find that convincing to an extent, but I still want to propose a slightly more radical reading. Going back to the idea that the differentiation between inside and outside (text and life, mind and nature) is somewhat rendered moot by Deleuze, my point would be, the reading of Lovecraft as a racist writer (and consequently his text as a racist text) and the attempt to rectify/deterritorialize/deconstruct both or either, opens up a binary, which might not be necessary in the first place .
To take Cthulhu seriously then would mean to unleash it from its constraints of modernity and materialism and to subject oneself to the idea of becoming, here: becoming-Cthulhu, i.e. becoming-monster. Put differently: reading Lovecraft through Cthulhu, i.e. answering to his call. Consequently, you cannot ask whether it is ‘real’ or bind it to its text(ual structure) but accept it as an assemblage in the world and by coming into contact with it, risking to become it.
Here is what that could look like. Deleuze and Guattari offer an example of reading text through an animal (for lack of an example of a monster), when they tell the story of the rat named Ben. The reader emphathizes with Ben, the rat, in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, when his rat-girlfriend gets killed because Willard, a human, is turning his back on becoming-rat, and thereby risks her life by bringing the two rats to work: “Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a long, hard glare. Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his becoming-rat. He tries with all his might to remain among humans” (272). Willard dies at the hands claws and fangs of a pack of rats, which he would not have, had he followed his call to become rat. We essentially follow Ben’s reasoning and agree with his choice of revenge. If we opened ourselves up to a possible alliance with Cthulhu, trying to understand his agenda, we essentially become the thing, we are supposed to fear. Here, we could use Lovecraft as a starting point to go further than affect and deconstruction: namely to emphasize, to imitate and ultimately, to become.
If you wanted to go back to ideas of the sublime, instead of looking at the riptide from your little lookout, or witnessing the ship burn, you would jump, you would give yourself to the flames. I am not making a particularly pedagogical or moral point here, I am simply saying that I believe this would be the outcome, if one applied Deleuze to Lovecraft’s short story in question.
I also have a fun, pop-cultural reference, that is less grim than drowning yourself of falling at the feet of an ancient monster. In Miller’s Girl, Jade Bartlett’s 2024 film, for example, eighteen-year-old Cairo walks through a forest every morning on her way to school. When her teacher asks if she is not scared to do so, she responds, “I’m the scariest thing in there” (00:45:30). Cairo essentially becomes-monster, instead of coming up with strategies, to defend herself towards punitive threats or realizing that in the face of danger, she can reach moral epiphany and transcendence. Here is where I think lies the fun application of Deleuze on Lovecraft: To read the text as a meditation to become one with the thing we fear and overcome the stratification, that is our matrix and instead to follow Cthulhu’s call.
I still have not solved the problem of equating Cthulhu’s otherness to non-whiteness, which allows all sorts of racist multiplicities back into the motion and I will leave it for now at saying not all otherness is created equal and I do believe while cosmic entities instill a similar fear in our frail hearts as non-white people might do in racists, I don’t believe they should be equated. And I know it’s tempting from the sea and its Moby Dicks to space as the last frontier. To me, this is a tired gesture, trying to apply constraints to limitlessness. The point is precisely that it is beyond our comprehension, barely latching onto the plane of consistency, where our binary ideologies live and fester.
While I find Kwong’s reading of Cthulhu as assemblage helpful in placing it within a logic of intensities, as I hope to have shown, a more radical Deleuzian reading would focus on the moment of becoming rather than emancipating the text from its author or its content from its colonialism, as those categories are inherently bound to the logic of modernity itself. Or, to put it differently: there is no deconstructing Lovecraft, or his text, there is just you, the reader, and the monster and whatever happens, when you two become one.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett Publishing, 1987.
Kwong, Lucas. “H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu as Radicalizing Assemblage: An Anglo Materialist Nightmare.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 49, no. 3, Fall 2019, pp. 382–410. Eastern Michigan University, Dept. of English. In special issue: “Bodies/Objects/Agents”.
Lovecraft, H.P. At the Mountains of Madness. Arkham House, 1964.
Lovecraft, H. P. “The Call of Cthulhu.” Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 10 June 2022, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68283. Updated 18 Oct. 2024. Accessed [18 Jan. 2025].
Miller’s Girl. Directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, performances by Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega, Lionsgate, 2024.
Silva de Castilho, Ana Clara, and Sarah Beatriz de Andrade Bezerra. “The Beliefs of H.P. Lovecraft: An Analysis of Racial Prejudice in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and the Lovecraftian Lore.” Ao Pé da Letra, vol. 24, no. 1, 2022, pp. 39-48.