The Unnamable in Lovecraft and the Limits of Rationality For the ...

Massimo Berruti 

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” 1 . 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” 2 . 

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 

1 

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

2 

Ibid. My Italic. 

The Unnamable in Lovecraft and the Limits of Rationality Page 1 of 20


definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology” 3 . According to Lovecraft, for the 

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

significance” 4 , 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” 5 . 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” 6 ). 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” 7 , 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 counterattacking 

his interlocutor, “actually clung to many old-wives’ superstitions… beliefs in the 

3 

Ibid. 

4 

Ibid. 

5 

Ibid. 

6 

Mosig 105. 

7 

“The Unnamable”, in Lovecraft 2004, 83. 



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’?” 8 . 

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” 9 . 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?” 10 . 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 

8 Ibid. 

9 Ibid., 86. 

10 Ibid, 86-87. 



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!” 11 . 

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?” 12 – 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”. 13 

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” 14 ). 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 

11 

Ibid., 89. 

12 

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

13 

Ibid., 79-80. 

14 

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



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 



angles, the supreme gaining substance of the possibility of all the most impossible laws 15 . 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 16 , 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” 17 

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” 18 , 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” 19 

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 20 . 

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” 21 

15 

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. 

16 

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. 

17 

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

18 

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). 

19 

COC, p.166. 

20 

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. 

21 

COC, p.166. My Italics. 



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 22 , 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” 23 

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 24 : 

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

perspective seemed upset” 25 

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 

22 

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. 

23 

COC, p.167. My Italic. 

24 

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. 

25 

COC, p.167. 



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 26 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” 27 

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 28 . 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 29 . 

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” 30 

26 

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. 

27 


28 

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. 

29 

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. 

30 




The name “Cthulhu” 31 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” 32 

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 33 . 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 34 . 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’” 35 

31 

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. 

32 

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

33 

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). 

34 

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. 

35 

COC, p.143. My Italics. 



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” 36 

Again in “The Call of Cthulhu”, the narrator Thurston writes about the “ominous syllables which 

can be rendered only as ‘Cthulhu’” 37 , 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” 38 

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” 39 , that “mad cacophony” 40 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 senseimpacts 

uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters 

‘Cthulhu’ and ‘R’lyeh’” 41 

36 DH, p.195. Lovecraft’s Italics. 

37 COC, p.147. 

38 COC, p.150. My Italics. 

39 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. 

40 COC, p.152. 

41 COC, p.143-4. My Italics. 



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 42 ? 

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, 43 tries to make the 

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

42 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. 

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



narrator realizes that “The odour of the fish was maddening” 44 : 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” 45 . 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” 46 . 

In the nightmare land he is visiting, nothing is truly as it appears 47 : 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. 48 

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 49 . 

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 wellshaped 

monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of 

living and thinking creatures” 50 . 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 

44 

Ibid., 16. My Italic. 

45 

Ibid. 

46 

Ibid. 

47 

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? 

48 

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). 

49 

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

50 D 17. 



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. 51 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” 52 . 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” 53 . 

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” 54 ). 

51 

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

52 

Ibid., 16. 

53 

Ibid., 18. 

54 

Ibid. 



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” 55 . 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” 56 . 

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” 57 : 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 threedimensional 

world, always takes the viewpoint from beyond the threshold, constantly maintaining a 

55 Ibid. 

56 Ibid., 19. 

57 Ibid. 



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” 58 . 

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, 

58 Ibid. 



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” 59 ). 

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” 60 . 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 

59 Ibid., 18. 

60 Ibid., 15. 



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” 61 ). 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” 62 . 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! 

61 Ibid., 16. 

62 Ibid., 14. 



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 nonhuman. 

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” 63 

63 

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



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” 64 

It is however beyond doubt that Lovecraft’s fondness for the invention of odd, exotic- or aliensounding 

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. 

64 Ibid., 388. 



Lovecraft, H.P., and Derleth, August. Il Guardiano della Soglia. Roma: Fanucci Editore, 1977. 

Lovecraft Studies. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, and New York: Hippocampus Press 

(issues 42-43). 

Mosig, Dirk Y. “H.P. Lovecraft: Myth-Maker” (1976). In S.T. Joshi (ed.), H.P. Lovecraft: Four 

Decades of Criticism. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 

Pagetti, Carlo. Cittadini di un Assurdo Universo. Milano: Editrice Nord, 1989. 

Abbreviations 

COC: H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. 

D: H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon and other Macabre Tales. 

DH: H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror and Other Tales. 

JHL: John Hay Library, Brown University (Providence, RI, USA). 

LS: Lovecraft Studies. 

MM: H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. 

Ms.: manuscript. 

SL: H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5 vols. In the body of the text the following system of 

quotation has been adopted: ‘SL, progressive number of the volume (from I to V), number of the 

page(s) in which the quoted passage is reported’.

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