Into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable. Nyarlathotep or the trajectory of the Lovecraftian signifier

Abstract

Fantastic, speculative, and fantasy fiction share an appropriately uncanny relationship with psychoanalysis. Lovecraft and his semantic tentacles immediately come to mind. Indescribable, ineffable, unimaginable, Lovecraftian monsters appear, on the surface, as a perfect placeholder for the Lacanian Real. Following this model (shallow/depth), exemplified by Lacan’s seminar on «The Purloined Letter», «The Call of Cthulhu» has been often used as a parable for the Real. This text argues that Cthulhu cannot represent the real, at least, not anymore. It has become exhausted as a signifier, overrepresented in contemporary pop culture. In its stead, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, like the Real, cannot be pinned down due to its very nature. The Crawling Chaos or the God of a Thousand Faces travels in the same way as the signifier does: on one side its shape is permanently changing (Y-axis) but, at the same time, it crawls along the x-axis.

Keywords

• Lovecraft
• Posmodernism
• psychoanalysis
• speculative fiction
• weird fiction