not a dragon with an octopus head

An acquaintance of mine once said, against Lovecraft: “A dragon with an octopus head is not scary.”

Assuming that he meant it’s not scary as literature (it would obviously be terrifying in the flesh), he’s right. That would be merely pulp, if that’s all there were to it.

But Lovecraft does not say that Cthulhu is a dragon with an octopus head. Here’s what he actually says:

“If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing… but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful…”

Note that he suspends the literal description “octopus-headed dragon” in at least three different ways:

1. By calling the description the product of his “somewhat extravagant imagination.”

2. By saying hesitantly that the description is “not unfaithful to the spirit of the thing,” rather than dead-on correct.

3. By saying that it was the “general outline of the whole” that caused such terror, not the mere admixture of human, octopus, and dragon.

The fact that the t-shirts and album covers of the world depict Cthulhu as an octopus-headed dragon is not the doing of Lovecraft himself. In fact, I hold that it would be impossible to depict any of the monsters accurately in visual terms, given how much trouble Lovecraft takes to cancel his own literal descriptions. And as those who read his works often enough will surely know, this is not an isolated instance: Lovecraft’s basic trait as a writer is the way he makes it impossible to achieve any literal grasp of his monsters, cities, or alternate laws of nature.

And this is why he *is* scary, in my opinion. And also why he is of the greatest philosophical interest at this particular juncture (assuming you agree with me that reality is partially –and in some sense fully— impenetrable by all description).