#the tentacular Lovecraftian creature

[ennaih]

Every Film I Watch In 2023:

122. Older Gods (2023)

[fatehbaz]

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. [...] Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, [...] were [written] in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. [...] [T]hese tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and [...] they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. [...]

---

The Atlantic Ocean has long been central to Caribbean literature and art. Fundamental to the emergence of the capitalist world-ecology through the slave trade, its violent history has haunted Caribbean imaginaries [...]. The [...] Weird emerged [...] at the turn of the twentieth century [...]. [T]wo tropes [...] flourished in an era when European and American powers competed [or collaborated] for dominance in the Caribbean: monstrous octopi, which would metamorphose into the Lovecraftian anthropoid tentacular figure, and the Caribbean-centred myth of the Sargasso Sea as a “Weed World” [...]. In legends of the weed-clogged Sargasso Sea, “ships became becalmed and trapped by the weed” in an area of the North Atlantic that would later be nicknamed the Bermuda triangle [...]. Several late nineteenth-century American and British writers “used the Sargasso as a setting for societies of people trapped there for generations” [...]. [O]ne of the most influential [...], English author William Hope Hodgson, describes it as [...] an “interminable waste of weed - a treacherous, silent vastitude of slime and hideousness” [...]. Hodgson’s “From the Tideless Sea” (1906) depicts monsters of the deep [...]: “some dread Thing hidden within the weed” devours almost all of the crew [...].” In his subsequently published Sargasso-themed horror novel, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), the tentacled creature is joined “by giant crabs, octopodes, and tentacled devil-fish, [..] giant fungi [..] trees that howl [and] […] weed men” [...]. As [...] Alder observes, these “[a]nimal monsters” are so unsettling because [...] "[t]hey violate," she continues, "existing norms and knowledge systems [...]"; they [...] disturb “a colonialist centrism structuring relationships between humans and the more-than-human world” [...].

---

The Old [...] Weird imagines the Sargasso as a depository of a secreted, miserable history which invokes the temporality of the longue durée - whether deep time provoking terror because it is seemingly beyond human conceptualization, or the catastrophic history of the four hundred preceding years of capitalist modernity. UK naval officer Frank H. Shaw’s “Held by the Sargasso Sea” (1908), which offers a paradigmatic condensation of imperialist tropes associated with the sea, mobilises both temporalities [...]. Shaw’s invocation of Columbus situates the Weird within a colonialist tradition that imagines the Caribbean both as site of triumphal European conquest and of fearfully insurgent natural alterity that might thwart or exceed European power and epistemes. [...] The rampant seaweed reconfigures the [...] [older well-established US and European colonial] trope of monstrous tropical fecundity to imagine the loathsome vegetation as clogging and obstructing the technics and vehicles of maritime capitalism, thus resisting the rigid abstraction of nature.

---

It is within Lovecraft’s sea horror that tentacular monsters and abyssal terrors achieve their most potent distillation, [...] and [in] its related tales of ancient underwater beings [...], the true "horror [...]" is "the horror of 'inferior' races, miscegenation, and cultural decline [...]" [...]. [A]s the new global hegemon in the world-ecology [...] [i]n the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the US aggressively expanded into the Caribbean and Latin America, establishing the ecological regime of the “American Sugar Kingdom,” increasing its control over commercial sea lanes, and justifying “dollar diplomacy” through patriarchal-racist ideology.

Despite his narrative insistence on the primitive, his Weird monsters could [also] be read as figuring not so much the repression or recurrence of an ancient past, as the emergence of a new present "impregnat[ed] [...] with a bleak, unthinkable novum" [...]. As [Stephen Shapiro] postulates [...]: [Quote] the weird registers initial perceptions of what ought not be present - i.e., capitalism in crisis - in times otherwise dominated by wealth creation and expansion, [...] moments when rising inequality begins to be sensed [by residents of the imperial metropole] even though these social divisions have been dogmatically claimed to have been overcome. Narratives that foreground the seepage of the other, seemingly inexplicable lifeworlds and temporalities into the everyday, register the onset of larger temblors of transformation within the capitalist world-system. [End quote] [...]

"At the Mountain [sic] of Madness" (1931) is replete with "fossil-terror" [...] [w]hile Lovecraft's other tales [...] [also] thrive on "problematic uncontainability of deep underground powers" [...]. Within [newer fiction from Caribbean authors in the early twenty-first century] [...], ecological crisis is often explicitly thematised, [...] mediating the [...] transition to [...] [and] the epochal exhaustion of the [more contemporary] neoliberal ecological regime. [...] The climate change crisis, in short, is portrayed as emerging from the wider crisis of global capitalism [...]. The impossibility of disentangling "social", "political" and "environmental" histories are emphasized [by Black and Caribbean writers] [...]. [T]he utopian trace [...] [in this writing] lies in its intimation that prospects for [...] transformation lie in finding alternative, non-capitalist, ways of viewing the marine world [...].

---

All text above by: Sharae Deckard and Kerstin Oloff. “”The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunle (2015)”. Humanities [MDPI] 2020, Volume 9, Issue 3, page 86. Published 19 August 2020. At: doi dot org slash 10.3390/h9030086. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. The text in the first paragraph segment comes from the article's abstract. Within this excerpt/post, all text within brackets was added by me for clarity and context. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[weirdletter]

The Squid Cinema From Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia, by William Brown, David H. Fleming, Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Info: edinburghuniversitypress.com.

Here be Kraken! The Squid Cinema From Hell draws upon writers like Vilém Flusser, Donna J. Haraway, Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker to offer up a critical analysis of cephalopods and other tentacular creatures in contemporary media, while also speculating that digital media might themselves constitute a weird, intelligent alien. If this were not enough to shiver ye timbers, the book engages with contemporary discourses of posthumanism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and animal studies to suggest that humans are the products of media rather than media being the products of humans. Including case studies of films by Denis Villeneuve, Park Chan-wook and Céline Sciamma, The Squid Cinema From Hell also provides a daring engagement with various media beyond cinema, including literature, music videos, 4DX, advertising, websites, YouTube, Artificial Intelligence and more. Zounds! This unique and Lovecraftian book will change the way you think about, and with, our contemporary, media-saturated world. For as we contemplate the abyss, the abyss looks back at us – and chthulumedia, or media at the end of human times, begin to emerge.

Contents: Acknowledgments Beaky prepostface 1. Introducing the End 2. Pulp Fiction and the Media Archaeology of Space 3. Encounters with a 4DX Kino-Kraken 4. Actorly Squid/Sets and Cephalopod Realism 5. The Erotic Ecstasy of Cthulhu 6. Cosmic Light, Cosmic Darkness 7. The Backwash of Becoming Cthulhu, Or, L∞py, Tentacular Time 8. From the Modern Prometheus to the Modern Medusa

[mosqa]

So this is the intro page wip from the Subventure book I’m currently writing / designing / illustrating. @fishhook-s asked me for the basic lore, and its true after a bunch of illustrated teases, its time to reveal a bit.

I’ve designed Subventure as a hommage to pulps, comics, noir genre, lovecraft and urban imagination. But I was tired of this universe taking place in America, while loving its gigantic properties, and I was also tired of the recurring nazi tropes. So it takes place in Europe, in Circande, a fictional city which associates classic european architectures with american gigantism. It is also an uchrony, due to the united states invading Europe in 1928 instead of their intervention in 1917, world war 2 never happened. It’s a mixture of Mignola’s BPRD, Tardi’s Adèle Blanc-Sec and lovecraftian ambiance. But instead of just a victim of entities, you can also play one of its cultists. Or maybe that’s being a victim… Here is a translation of the text on the right page. Since english isn’t my mother tongue, although I speak it quite well, please pardon this attempt of translation, I did my best:

“Subventure is set on our planet, in our uchronic time period, in a megalopole named Circande, nation-city which siege at the heart of a Europe under american control since 1928. Circande is a geopolitic, intellectual and technologic capital. For exempal, in its streets were designed the first steps of medicinal cybernetic in the 40’s. But more important, “she“ is mainly, unknown to most of its inhabitants and the world, the capital of the occult.

In Circande, the untold and the supernatural have found their entry gate. Under the streets, in the long forgotten subway tunnels, in the depths of the central Belamante Park, in darks alleys or just behind your neighbor’s door; a parallel life subsist and grows. This hidden other society is named Outreville (“Beyondtown“), a secret which is the origin of Circande’s influence over the world, not an actual place but  an intricated community where urban legends have reasons to exist.

From the Beggars Guild to the inverted city of the Troglodytes, from mutated beasts from below to cyborgs, the kings and queens of Outreville are the seven extradimensionnal entity who extend their dominion from the tunnels to the surface. Their cultists wear with pride and secret the marvelous mutations caused by the adoration of those they consider gods, but they are not the only aware of the supernatural nature of the city. Detective of the occult trying to protect their clients from secrets that could destroy them, journalist a little bit too curious for their own good, scientists craving to understand this new world’s mysteries, mad ingeneers, mediums victims of their gifts, thugs and politic figures in search of power or even just “simple citizen“ of the secret side of the town; Outreville hosts a myriad of profiles. And its dangers are as many. Mutated creatures, quantum anomalies, religious wars, conflicts and tentacular plots are the burden of those who know too much.

Who and what are this entities, where do they come from and what do they want ? Why is Circande the center and origin of this events? Why the supernatural seems to exist since barely a century only? What is this gigantic Abyss of whirling waters at the very bottom of the caves below the city? Who are the Troglodytes, this humans adapted to depths with their strange advanced technology? What are the Anurs, this amphibian humanoids, and what is the secret of the Fongoïds, this people resurrected from a fungus-like organism? Why does some entities want the secret to survive instead of invading the world ? Those are only a sample of the enigmas waiting to be solved.

Welcome to Circande, where horror meets pulp fictions, and may your journey as a Subventurer avoid the dangerous paths…”

[fatehbaz]

The sea, as “a space unexplored […] offers a fleeting experience of an absolutely unknowable realm” [...]. It is, therefore, unsurprising that an important subcategory of the Weird focuses on oceans. [...] The Oceanic Old Weird is suffused with fear and loathing of the unknowable sea, which is imagined as a force of malevolent antagonism directed at ships and sailors, or as embodying the natural immanence of death and entropy. While Jolene Mathieson has previously discussed “hypermateriality” and “wet ontology” in the Oceanic Weird through a new materialist lens, alleging that the genre troubles the limits of “earlier modes of oceanic thought within the natural and social sciences,” we [...] instead [...] analyse the ways in which the genre’s aesthetics and themes mediate the violence, epistemes, and socio-ecological relations corresponding to the eco-racial regimes of capitalism and colonialism [...].

The Oceanic Weird emerged within a larger tradition of ecophobic tales at the turn of the twentieth century in a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by emergent US imperialism. [...]

[W]e elaborate on two tropes that flourished in an era when European and American powers competed for dominance in the Caribbean: monstrous octopi, which would metamorphose into the Lovecraftian anthropoid tentacular figure, and the Caribbean-centred myth of the Sargasso Sea as a “Weed World” [...].

-------

In legends of the weed-clogged Sargasso Sea, “ships became becalmed and trapped by the weed” in an area of the North Atlantic that would later be nicknamed the Bermuda triangle [...]. Several late nineteenth-century American and British writers “used the Sargasso as a setting for societies of people trapped there for generations” [...]. At the dawn of the twentieth century, one of the most influential authors of Sargasso tales, English author William Hope Hodgson, describes it as a place of absolute loneliness, an “interminable waste of weed -- a treacherous, silent vastitude of slime and hideousness” (p. 4) that eclipses humanity and enlightened rationality. Hodgson’s “From the Tideless Sea” (1906) depicts monsters of the deep lurking beneath this stagnant surface: “some dread Thing hidden within the weed” devours almost all of the crew [...].” In his subsequently published Sargasso-themed horror novel, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), the tentacled creature is joined “by giant crabs, octopodes, and tentacled devil-fish, [..] giant fungi [..] trees that howl [and] […] weed men” [...].

As Emily Alder observes, these “[a]nimal monsters” are so unsettling because they “reveal the limits to scientific mastery over the natural world” (Alder 2017, p. 1084). “They violate,” she continues, “existing norms and knowledge systems; they flourish in environments in which humans are unfit and cannot dominate” and disturb “a colonialist centrism structuring relationships between humans and the more-than-human world” (ibid.). The Atlantic Ocean and its Weird creatures mark the limits of capitalism’s attempts to control the submarine world.

The Old Oceanic Weird imagines the Sargasso as a depository of a secreted, miserable history which invokes the temporality of the longue durée -- whether deep time provoking terror because it is seemingly beyond human conceptualization, or the catastrophic history of the four hundred preceding years of capitalist modernity. UK naval officer Frank H. Shaw’s “Held by the Sargasso Sea” (1908), which offers a paradigmatic condensation of imperialist tropes associated with the sea. mobilises both temporalities [...].

Shaw’s invocation of C*lumbus situates the Weird within a colonialist tradition that imagines the Caribbean both as site of triumphal European conquest and of fearfully insurgent natural alterity that might thwart or exceed European power and epistemes. At the same time, the passage offers a prescient, if unwitting, registration of capitalism’s transformation of the ocean into trash-heap and dumping-ground, full of derelict ships, but also the detritus of the Atlantic mercantile economy, trapped within a vortex that anticipates today’s garbage patch within the North Atlantic Gyre. The rampant seaweed reconfigures the ecophobic trope of monstrous tropical fecundity to imagine the loathsome vegetation as clogging and obstructing the technics and vehicles of maritime capitalism, thus resisting the rigid abstraction of nature.

-------

It is within Lovecraft’s sea horror that tentacular monsters and abyssal terrors achieve their most potent distillation, developed and refined throughout the Cthulhu mythos and its related tales of ancient underwater beings [...]. Critics have often noted that the horrors of the two world wars are central to the Old Weird, particularly in stories such as “Dagon” and “The Temple.” However, they have been less attentive to the geopolitical environmental unconscious of Lovecraftian eco-racial-phobia, which registers, even if often in displaced form, the emergence of the US as the new global hegemon in the world-ecology. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the US aggressively expanded into the Caribbean and Latin America, establishing the ecological regime of the “American Sugar Kingdom,” increasing its control over commercial sea lanes, and justifying “dollar diplomacy” through patriarchal-racist ideology. [...]

Furthermore, during the early twentieth century, tentacled figures were explicitly used to refer to Standard Oil. [...] More broadly, tentacled creatures were employed to critique new forms of imperialism. [...]

Within the more radical politics of the New Oceanic Weird, ecological crisis is often explicitly thematised, no longer mediating the imminent transition to a new oil-fuelled regime but rather the epochal exhaustion of the neoliberal ecological regime. As a mode that estranges “our sense of reality” (Noys and Murphy 2016, p. 117), the New Weird is particularly suited to addressing the changing realities of a warming planet. The uncanny totality of climate change is aptly captured in Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman’s concept of “global weirding,” understood as “a cognitive frame” aimed at refocussing “our attention on the localities within the totality of the global.” As they write, it “was intended to show us is that we are now living in postnormal times: we can no longer depend on the climatological patterns that up till now have more or less reliably structured our behaviors” [...].

Given the crucial role of the oceans in regulating the climate, it is no surprise that the Oceanic Weird should experience a revival in this context. [...]

-------

[T]he utopian trace in Indiana’s novel lies in its intimation that prospects for radical transformation lie in finding alternative, non-capitalist, ways of viewing the marine world, in restoring the numinosity of the oceans and revaluing all forms of life.

-------

Sharae Deckard and Kerstin Oloff. ‘“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunle (2015).’ MDPI Humanities. August 2020.