Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Any other comments on "Lovecraft's Comfortable
> World"?
OK, here's a simple one that we agree on, and I'd like to extend it orthogonally to follow a very minor, but to me, interesting thing HPL does. There are two (at least) ways to look at it and I'd like to engage your opinion (and others!) as to one which seems most likely.
This response is to your specific observation on "The Call of Cthulu", where you note:
Quote:DN
Lovecraft builds up the suspense in “The Call of Cthulhu,†only to dissipate it rather catastrophically by having the second mate Johansen run down the malevolent entity with his boat. We are told that Cthulhu pops like a seaweed bladder – a simile that is liable to remind those readers whose childhoods included seaside rambles, of long-ago vacations.
Such unintentionally funny bits would bother me as major defects if they were inserted into a tale by Blackwood, Machen, or M. R. James, but I relish them in Lovecraft.
This particular incident is one of the very weakest plot manipulations I've seen in HPL because what happens is so contrary to everything anyone who has read the Mythos has come to expect from Cthulu, a very potent interdimensional entity whose interests seem inimical to those of humanity.
I mean, I had always viewed him more along the lines of the creatures in the Cloverfield film trilogy, not like something you might encounter in a funhouse in a cheap carnival.
By simply turning the boat around in desperation and bull-rushing the Scourge of the Cosmos, he very quickly resolves the biggest conflict in the plot.
It's also sort of a funny image of Cthulu as he swims in pursuit, just before he loses the head-butting session to the Alert, Johannesen's boat...
Quote:HPL
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.
I sorta get the picture of Johnny Weismueller in a sort of rubber monster suit in a 1950s Japanese movie.
And...
Quote:Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals
...I was damned close to copying Briden's behavior, up to that point.
It's hard not to burst out laughing aloud. At the very least, it was the definition of "anticlimactic".
OK, Here's the divergence...
It's where Cthulu first emerges from the aperture...
Quote:HPL
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. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned.
Right away the use of "flabby claws" caught my attention, and if HPL purposely used it in the way I suspect, which is to throw together two words that are never seen to exist in common usage, with "flabby" modifying "claws"--which in the normal world is patently inappropriate if not impossible, it emphasizes and heightens the sheer alien-ness of the very material of Cthulu's corporeal existence.
I think he did this purposefully and effectively.
But it also occurs to me that one might use the term "claws" generically, metaphorically, to mean those appendages that might be used in lieu of claws (as we know them), for catching and grasping, and so were never really intended to be taken literally as earthly "claws". In this case "claws" is a stand-in for "tentacles" or something along those lines.
He certainly could have done either, by I'd much prefer to think that he chose the former, because it's a subtle and near unique touch.
But I'd like to hear the views of others on this minor point.
--Sawfish
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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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