Dagon

The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

—> You can read or listen to Dagon for free here.

Dagon

Lovecraft’s fourth short story marks the start of the famous Cthulhu Mythos, in which ancient creatures rise from the depths of the world to drive men mad, reminding them of their cosmic insignificance. The name Dagon usually refers to the god of prosperity worshiped by the Mesopotamians and, in the Bible, by the antagonistic Philistines. He’s often depicted as a merman, but here Dagon is a fearsome, unfathomable monster.

The story begins with the narrator in a state of emotional distress: he’s about to commit suicide, throwing himself out of a window, so the text functions as a sort of suicide note as he tries to justify his behavior. He immediately confesses to being penniless and addicted to morphine, and suggests that the story he’s about to tell will allow us to have a brief glimpse of what’s behind his dire state: “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.”

He goes on to tell about the time he was made prisoner by the Germans during the war but managed to escape in a small vessel, drifting alone in the ocean for countless days. He only knows he’s alone somewhere in the Pacific and south of the equator and has little hope of surviving, but one day he wakes up to find that the sea is gone and, in its place, there’s a “slimy expanse of hellish black mire.”

The protagonist gets to this mysterious land while he’s lost and asleep, which means that the place has this fever-dream-like aura, where things don’t seem tangible and real. The narrative leaves a clear opening for us to believe the narrator is only describing a hallucination. After all, he tells us that he “for uncounted days drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun,” and marks that the change in scenery happened while he was unconscious, asleep.

His description of the fantastical marsh that surrounds him is very effective in establishing the tone of the narrative and easily justifies its first mention as being a “hellish” place. The man claims he was horrified at the sight of it, as the very air and soil seemed to possess a vague sinister quality that chilled him to his bones. The mire is tinged with death, being littered with the putrid “carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things.” The failure of language, marked by the inability of the characters to describe the things they witness, ever-present in Lovecraftian prose, comes in full force here when the narrator ponders, “Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.” When the horror comes from the unspeakable, it leaves the job of picturing these hellish creatures entirely up to us, the readers, who have to work with just some vague terms and the paralyzing effect they cause on the characters.

Nonetheless, despite the hideousness of the place, the protagonist still tries to explore it, going for a nearby hummock to try to climb it and see what lies beyond. He only manages that at night, of course, and only after waking from a restless sleep full of strange visions. A “fantastically gibbous moon had risen above far above the eastern plain” and it functions as his single source of light. The moon, however, is initially incapable of illuminating the other side of the mound. When the narrator reaches the top and gazes at what lies beyond it, he’s struck with sheer terror: “I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.”

This description is vital to the story, establishing its main themes. The place the narrator finds himself in is “the edge of the world”, which means he’s looking precisely at what lies beyond our world, to hidden, forbidden, alien things. The moonlight can hardly reach it, so it’s a place of darkness, which can hide any number of dangers. No wonder, then, that it’s a place of “fathomless chaos”, lying beyond human understanding and control. And, finally, it’s also a place where evil “satanic” things can rise from. A hellish place indeed, as even Satan is imagined to dwell there, trying to climb out of it.

The moonlight, however, eventually manages to shine over this “Stygian pit” and the protagonist can make out what appears to be a huge manmade object: a monolith, traced by “both inscriptions and crude sculptures.” The whole thing, obviously, feels alien to the narrator, who can’t read the inscriptions and understand the hieroglyphs. He can only make out the drawing of various aquatic beings, such as “fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like.”  The “foreignness” of the whole thing is what makes it so pictorial, fascinating, and terrifying to him.

The narrator, then, starts to describe the carvings on the monolith and this is what he says about the human-like figures depicted, “Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint.” However, contradicting himself, he immediately proceeds to describe them nonetheless, revealing the ambivalent effect they have on him: he dares not speak about them, but he must speak. “Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall,” he writes.  Because of their disproportionate size, the narrator wonders if they’re the carving of the gods of a long-lost seafaring tribe.

And then it happens. There’s just one paragraph marking the appearance of Dagon, but it’s enough: “Vast Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted, like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.” The creature is compared to the one-eyed giant son of Poseidon, which helps give it an ancient, mythological aura while reinforcing its enormous size, its deformed appearance, and the danger it poses – as Polyphemus is depicted as a man-eating giant in the Oddysey. It’s nightmarish and hideous, with “scaly arms” to reinforce its affinity with the sea. After hearing it speak in a foreign language – if “speak” is the right word for “give vent to certain measured sounds” – the narrator goes mad.

He writes how he began to sing and laugh without reason while making his way back to his boat, alone in that dark mire, and how, after being eventually saved by an American boat, he is still able to see that dreadful thing at night. He imagines things deep in the sea, carving monoliths and worshiping idols, which makes him shudder. But there’s a sudden, important change in him. When he speaks about the next coming of Dagon – a name he directly takes from a Philistine legend – there’s a kind of longing for it, as if the end of the world is something the “puny, war-exhausted mankind” deserves. He writes: “I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons of the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind – of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.” Dagon ends up with the narrator thinking there’s a creature at his doorstep and, remembering the monster’s scaly hand, his final thoughts move to the window he’s urging himself to jump from.

This first short story of what August Derleth would later call the Cthulhu Mythos already shows many of the elements that will characterize this famous group of Lovecraft’s stories: the sense that beyond what we can see and understand await terrible, ancient things – that usually come from the sea. Things that one day will rise again and bring rightful ruin to us all. A most terrible future, indeed, but one that humanity either deserves or has brought onto itself.

December 12, 2024.