Anxieties of the Anthropocene in R´lyeh and Palmyra atoll; the nautical weird fiction of Lovecraft and D.T. Neal

Abstract

IN D.T. Neal’s 2013 novel Relict, the protagonist, Paige, witnesses how her pleasure trip across the Pacific aboard a revolutionary luxury yacht, comes to an end when her three companions are murdered by a giant octopus that holds her prisoner on a solitary atoll. As she prepares her final confrontation to escape the creature, she thinks of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft’s octopus-faced creation. The reference to The Call of Cthulhu (1928) goes beyond this mere mention; in terms of the plot, both Lovecraft´s story and Neal’s coincide on the presence of three different evidences in each of the works, which make difficult to deny the existence of monstrous entities that give their respective titles to the narratives and whose irruption forces the protagonists to accept the existence of a broader reality where any humanity preponderance is completely overshadowed. Furthermore, the two stories take place in the vastness of the Pacific, which makes awareness of humanity's insignificant role on Earth even more evident. Also, the fact that creatures belong to lineages much older than that of primates. From the perspective of these beings, we humans are an irrelevant species, and our claim to supremacy on the planet is contested by their successful attacks, as they are better adapted to their environments and they are only monstrous from our perspective. The purpose of this chapter is to frame the definition of Nautical Weird / Literatura náutica de lo extraño emphasizing the role of the ocean’s immensity in the impression both protagonists experience in both texts when confronting creatures whose presence challenges human knowledge. Based on this, I will explore how Lovecraft and Neil make use of an encounter with oceanic monstrosities, whose perspectives ended up as opposite to anthropocentrism. Through these encounters, both authors express similar concerns regarding the Anthropocene, despite the almost century-long gap between their writings.