another reader

Joseph:

“By the by, I completely agree about the *resistance* of Cthulhu to visual representation—even HPL’s own drawing looks, I’m sorry, ridiculous. It’s the same thing that destroyed the latter half of At the Mountains of Madness: HPL works best when there is a weird quantum of undecidability, if you want, about his creatures and landscapes. It isn’t that it isn’t there, it isn’t spiritual, but it’s like a subatomic reality in superatomic experience. Elusiveness is the stuff of his horror, and when you take that away, like with a drawing of Cthulhu, it becomes, I think, silly.”

Agreed.

If you look at a critique of Lovecraft such as that by Edmund Wilson (and I like Wilson nearly as much as I like Lovecraft), he misses the point precisely by reducing Lovecraft through literalization.

Wilson ends up saying things roughly along the following lines: “Basically, Lovecraft gives us scary monsters who attack humans with suckers and tentacles and mighty winds. This is pulp hackwork, not adult literature.” And sure, Lovecraft sounds ridiculous when Wilson summarizes him in that way. But Dante and Melville can also be made to sound ridiculous if literalized in the way I attempted in this space a few days ago.