Summary
After a quotation from British writer Algernon Blackwood, the title of the story indicates that what is to follow has been, “found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston.” The speaker of the story, Francis Wayland Thurston himself, contemplates the vast and incomprehensible nature of the things in the universe still unknown to mankind, in spite of our many scientific and technological advancements. He describes happening upon a “dread glimpse” of such cosmological truth after having pieced together various accounts secondhand, drawn from reading an old newspaper and consulting the notes of a deceased professor to whom he is related.
In the winter of 1926, Thurston writes, his grand-uncle George Gammel Angell, a retired professor of Semitic languages at Brown University, passed away at the age of 92. The circumstances of Angell’s death had caused a local controversy-- although authorities claimed that his heart gave out after being jostled by a passer-by, Thurston has lately doubted this testimony. Thurston explains that as Angell’s heir and executor, he had been tasked with dealing with his grand-uncle's estate. In the course of going through Angell’s papers, Thurston recollects finding a locked box containing a "five by six inch" clay bas-relief, featuring hieroglyphics and the outline of a creature described as a combination of an octopus, a dragon, and a human.
In a cache of papers next to the curio, Thurston also finds a manuscript entitled "CTHULHU CULT" split into two sections. Other papers in the manuscript include written memories of dreams, and clippings from fantasy and occult magazines. He also finds writings on "secret societies and hidden cults," and references to an outbreak of group mania in 1925. Thurston then launches into a detailed account of the first section of the "CTHULHU CULT" document, entitled, "1925—Dreams and Dream Work of H.A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I."
Thurston calls the tale, told from Professor Angell's perspective, "peculiar." In the document, Angell remembers how on March 1st, a "thin, dark young man," studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, originally brought him the clay bas-relief. Angell describes the boy, named Henry Anthony Wilcox, as a "precocious youth of known genius," who had fallen out of social favor as a result of his queer and erratic behavior. When asked to describe the relief, Wilcox replies with cryptic references to Babylon, Tyre, and the Sphinx that strike Angell (and also Thurston) as fantastic and bizarre.
Angell then recalls listening to a "rambling tale" that Wilcox told in his office, which began in New England on the night of a minor earthquake. Wilcox reports being "keenly affected" by the tremor, and dreaming that night of "great Cyclopean cities" and "sky-flung monoliths." Wilcox remembers hearing a voice in the dream that he attempts to transcribe with the letters "Cthulhu fhtagn." After inquiring about Wilcox's affiliations with any cult or religious body, Angell then proceeded to record details about the content and imagery of Wilcox's dreams, noting that the two most common words he reported hearing were "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."
On March 23rd, Angell remembers, Wilcox became feverish and delirious. Angell's uncle called Wilcox's family doctor, Dr. Tobey, and received reports that Wilcox was muttering strangely about a gigantic monster, "miles high." Angell deduces that this creature must be the same one inscribed on the clay bas-relief. Wilcox's mild fever, and absence of any other signs of mental disorder, cause the men to conclude that the sculpture was merely a fancy of his fevered mind. On April 2nd, Angell reports that Wilcox returned to full health, having no knowledge of any events that had transpired since the night of March 22nd.
Thurston also finds some addenda to the first part of Angell's manuscript, which reveal nightly dream reports of other participants Angell recruited in his studies. Judging from the extensive notes, Thurston surmises that poets and artists were most sensitive to the kinds of dream imagery Angell was interested in pursuing. Among this group of "aesthetes," Angell's notes describe several as experiencing strange dreams and bouts of insanity between February 28th and April 2nd, including a well-known architect who never recovered. Further news clippings in the manuscript report similar bouts of mania in Europe, South America, Africa, and India, especially on the night of March 22-23.
Analysis
H.P. Lovecraft wrote the short story "The Call of Cthulhu" during the summer of 1926, but had sketched out its plot a year prior in his notebooks. With "The Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft essentially aimed to build a complex, recursive, and epistolary plot structure—a cursed letter of memories, composed of the cursed letters and memories of many others, nearly all of whom are dead by the time the document reaches the reader's eyes. The story's subtitle, "Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston," was initially printed as a footnote, and its vital revelation—that the speaker of the story has died—casts an ironic and foreboding shadow over the narrative to come.
The story's epigraph, which cites from Chapter 10 of The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood, establishes the cosmic, mythical depths that Lovecraft sought to plumb with his tale of ancient monsters and Cyclopean cities. Blackwood's voice was a major influence on Lovecraft, who regarded his story "The Willows" as the finest horror tale ever written. Blackwood's language about "great powers or beings" and "shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity" anticipates the grandiose cosmology of the "Great Old Ones" that Lovecraft's story's speakers will articulate in various fragments and glimpses over the course of its multi-generational and geographically widespread plot.
At the center is Francis Wayland Thurston, a fictional descendant of the real historical figures Francis Wayland (the fourth president of Brown University), and Robert Lawton Thurston, a wealthy steam engine manufacturer in Providence. Thurston's name and academic affiliation suggest an educated, affluent lifestyle, which explains how he has the means to travel to Louisiana, New Zealand, England, and Norway over the course of the story. Instead of following the Christian faith of his Baptist ancestors, however, Thurston holds unwaveringly and pessimistically that mankind will never transcend the "placid island of ignorance," or comb the "black seas of infinity" that envelop human affairs. The ominous opening lines of "The Call of Cthulhu," wherein Thurston asserts the insignificance of humanity, became arguably the most famous words Lovecraft ever wrote.
The web of tales that Thurston delivers to the reader is the story's most direct discursive level, a frame narrative grounded in the first person. Like other Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, however, Lovecraft uses free indirect discourse liberally to commingle narrative voices in the tale—for example, Thurston's voice as he reports Angell's recollections to the reader, or Angell's voice as he remembers Wilcox's dreamscapes. The transmission of knowledge from a speaker/visionary to a listener/transcriber about the Cthulhu cult rituals and legends is an encounter that recurs over the course of the story in many swirling and increasingly detailed reiterations—for instance, in Wilcox's preliminary visit to Angell, in Inspector Legrasse's testimony before the American Archaeological Society, in Gustav Johansen's diary read posthumously by Thurston, and finally in Thurston's own document, which he hopes has no reader.
Lovecraft allegedly drew Wilcox's poetical phrasings about his dreamscapes from a dream of his own, in which he remembered uttering the phrase "the dreams of man are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx or a garden-girdled Babylon." Lovecraft also integrated a real earthquake that struck New York City on the night of February 28th, 1925, into the plot of the story, an event which signals in Lovecraft's tale the onslaught of otherworldly demons from the depths of the sea. Wilcox's tale, and the fact that the minds of poets, artists, and aesthetes are most likely to channel the cosmological horrors of the universe, raise philosophical implications about the underlying psychological factors driving all aesthetic labor and production—especially the decadent, futurist, and fantastic schools of sculpture and literary thought to which Lovecraft constantly alludes. References to Wilcox's "queer" and "hyper-sensitive" nature are at once sexually suggestive and pathologizing, in keeping with the early twentieth-century medical consensus of sexual "inversion" as a mental disorder.
