By Fiona Glen.
It glares, venom-eyed, from a yellowed page. Like a Rorschach test inkblot, it ripples trickily, gathering associations and uncertainties. This is a very good sketch of a very resentful octopus, glowering from seemingly lowered brows. The artist has allowed it to flow with its medium; the animal melts into patches of different opacities: watery shade and thick ink-cloud shadow (1). He has captured the way its twisting limbs almost find right angles in their unpredictable directionality, and into their roving tips he has spun the letter V above the letter H, like an initialled bullet, or a death sentence left dripping on the wall. Did Victor Hugo intend to show himself hit-listed by the animal of his nightmares?
After all, this is the ‘beast of ash’ from his 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea, the transient yet terrible creature armed with blood-drinking suckers and a combined mouth and anus. With those chilling anatomical inversions — drawn from a wicked imagination rather than biological reality — Hugo’s giant octopus ‘draws you towards itself and into itself, and bound, stuck, powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied out within that horrendous sack, that monster.’ Here, a holey terror is taken to both of its extremes: condensed into a singular orifice, and peppered across a body of suction. In his creation, a creature more absence than substance, Hugo seems to crystallize a comprehensive castration anxiety; an entire man can disappear into that ‘footed void’ — flexing, moist; its reaches unseen.
Amid his battle with the giant octopus, Gilliat, the protagonist of Toilers of the Sea, discovers the skeleton of the last man it has literally sucked dry, draining vital fluids rather than the resources that dependents such as women or children are usually accused of siphoning off. A black hole, an inverter, this fictitious octopus disempowers by puncturing, undoing the unity of its victims with suckers pursed and thirsty like little mouths.
But, in their battle, it is Gilliat who slays the ‘monster’. His classically heroic story captured imaginations; in 1879 the rising sculptor Joseph Carlier won second prize at the Paris Salon for his Gilliat Struggling with the Octopus. With every marble muscle tensed, his ribs arched and his stance athletic, this Gilliat stands glossy and white as a good tooth upon his pedestal. Scantily-clad as any neoclassical male warrior of sorts, his skin is bare to the desires of his pursuer: the octopus wrapped around the rock he stands upon. One slim cephalopod arm is mid-slink up the back of a thigh, a second arm encircling the other. So slender it seems gentle, attentively tracing the grooves in human muscle, the contact could appear sensual, an exploratory touch, But the Gilliat of stone reaches back with a look of anguish that could be read as irritation, peeling a third creeping arm from the back of his calf. Haunting Carlier with the idea of its slow, cold touch, Victor Hugo’s monster had begun to populate a visual, and perhaps visceral, imagination.
Hugo himself declares the shapeless yet forceful octopus so ‘unnatural’ that no mortal could invent it: ‘The Unknown disposes of marvels, and it makes use of them to compose monsters […] Homer and Hesiod only managed to make the Chimera; God made the Octopus.’ That uncanny liveness, for Hugo, must be explained by some kind of dark yet divine meddling, muddling. A sick experiment in suckers.
Sixty years before Toilers of the Sea was published, another Frenchman, Pierre Dénys de Montfort, had adamantly testified to the existence of ‘kraken’ octopuses which could explain the Nordic legend of a vast and elusive sea monster. De Montfort’s theories were ridiculed and disregarded by the vast majority of his peers, yet his pen-and-wash drawings of these massive creatures, with their decisive form and stippled shading, are still popular — available, in fact, on a range of retro homeware and clothing. In ‘Le Poulpe Colossal’ (1801), the animal’s enormous, amber and lidless eyes face us brazenly as its arms spiral up the full length of a naval vessel’s three masts. De Montfort slowly slipped out of his scientific career into destitution and died of starvation on the streets of Paris in 1820. But his drawings continued to propagate imaginaries of living krakens — they perhaps laid the egg of Hugo’s gobbling octopus, which in return set the standard for the notorious giant squid battle in Julius Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). In this adventure classic, Captain Nemo’s submarine crew valiantly fend off a fleet of giant squid; in an unlikely outcome befitting a tall tale of the high seas, all but one of the men survive the ferocious battle.
Both novels stoked the ‘cephalomania’ of the early 1870s, a fashionable fascination with cephalopods, setting bourgeois northern European circles thrumming with discussion over their seemingly malevolent molluscs. This fervour drew record crowds in 1871 to the Crystal Palace — London’s Victorian exhibition centre made of glass — to view the ‘wonderful Octopus, or Devil Fish’ on display (2).
Monstrosity is a culturally-agreed category. Alone, an individual’s fear of a creature is simply a phobia. But when uneasiness is shared, it conspires to form a demon that grows as it roams through our minds and words and artworks, now crossing the threshold of the collective imagination. And here, it becomes harder to remember that this was once just a fellow being, regarding us with equal uncertainty, equal curiosity.
Another strange knot in history: one century after the ‘devil fish’ came to the Crystal Palace in 1871, an octopus graced the 1971 Crystal Palace Garden Party, a rock music festival in the South London park which had been renamed after the glass building that burned to the ground there in 1936. As Pink Floyd took to the stage, a gargantuan octopus lurked in the pond that was supposed to separate the musicians from the audience. Its would-be-inflatable limbs, intended to fill with air from sulphur flares, were torn by festivalgoers wading with abandon in the shallow water. Floating on the surface, floppy yet bulging unevenly, the giant animal still filled the water where dead fish began to rise as well. In the few photographs of the event that I can trace, the octopus’s seeming awkwardness — flaccid limbs folded in the insufficient water — hold a dark comedy. The deflating octopus still appears charismatic in its excess and absurdity, as enormous as the mythical kraken.
This beast’s existence had been ‘proven’ in the late nineteenth century, as maritime developments sent sailors into deep waters for longer. Here, the recovered carcasses of giant squid confirmed centuries-old sightings, and commentators were quick to link this species to the medieval legend of the kraken.
But the kraken was a creature who once had nostrils and jaws. Bones and horns. Named the hafgufa, or ‘sea-mist’, in thirteenth-century Nordic myth, its great body rolled up from the deep (one-and-a- half miles across!) with a mouth as broad as a sound (3). A fellow of the lyngbakr, the ‘heather-backed’ sea-monster who imitated islands, the hafgufa was a great belcher, prone to regurgitating its latest meal as bait for a hungry shoal. Its worst threat was to sink a ship in its downward turbulence. Hafgufa could pull the plug on even the greatest ‘men-of-war’, whether ships or individual Viking heroes. Yet its excrement was said to ‘nurture an army of lesser fish’, and so, in that steamy wake, above its maybe-gaping maw, sailors would still dare to fish, gathering their food like scavengers (4). Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina of 1539 shows smirking fish-monsters battling enormous crustaceans across the northern oceans. Nothing so soft-bodied as a cephalopod — and none of those dinner-plate eyes.
Danish-Norwegian bishop-scholar Erik Pontoppidan wrote the Kraken as a giant starfish in 1752; he had never sighted the legend himself, yet his theory would explain how its horns were sometimes arms. That was over a century before the Kraken was ‘found’ to be a squid. But how much are novel monsters grafted onto the ancient ones, emerging anxieties validated by an established myth? An enthusiasm for answers (for lineage and links) matches the Kraken to legends across the world. Surely, eighteenth-century Japanese prints of female pearl-divers (ama, the water women) pursued by octopuses now represent a Kraken? (5) And why not say that Cetus, the beast sent by a jealous Poseidon to devour too-beautiful Andromeda, was the Kraken, now that it has been proven real? (6)
Colossal squid, giant squid. Both these species take their names from classical Roman and Greek culture: the former from man-made statues so enormous that they created their own category, the latter from those too-large beings, the Gigantes. Earth-sprung challengers of Olympia, born of Gaia inseminated by the blood of the castrated sky-god Uranus, the giants were sometimes conceived of with snakes for legs.
Animal names, with the vivid potentiality of bodies nudging at the edges of their annunciation, seem to conjure up apparitions. Octopus. Ancient and borrowed, the word rings in English with a kind of phonetic self-importance, a mythic grandeur. Speak it aloud — its three syllables, like three hearts, are chambers.
The circle of oc- is a droplet echoing, the cut-clicked -ct- biting between cupped vowels. After the release of a sucker-pop aspirant -pu- comes the fading slither of -s. The animal escapes your mouth. You are left with lips pursed and your tongue tickling your palate. Assigned sounds fill with shadows that we animate, imaginatively.
In 1735, Linnaeus, ‘father of taxonomy’, listed the Kraken as microcosmus marinus in his Systema Naturae. Marine microcosm: a charmingly awe-struck title. But then, this is the man who named an entire class Mammalia to encourage women to breastfeed their babies more. His systemic logic was filled with mystery, faith, intentionality. Science was never empty of these.
In a time of great passion for classification and control, inseparable from the ethnological and the colonial, eighteenth-century biologists urgently generated titles for the living and the mineral. Georges Cuvier, a student and reformer of Linnaeus’ taxonomy, had named the common octopus octopus vulgaris by 1797. Apparently, Cuvier was repulsed by a being so slippery, bulging, gripping, wet.
I imagine men with starched collars, horrified by an animal with no hard edges to grab onto, no solidity to venerate. Something low, lateral, creeping. Perhaps a creature that Georges Bataille would have been proud of, as he called in 1929 for the celebration of the formless — artworks and other things that rejected formalism’s high-minded humanist values, revelling in the messy materiality that had for so long been looked down upon ‘like a spider or a blob of spit’ (7). Or like a mucous-sheathed spider of the sea, an octopus.
Davy Jones wriggles his slug-like lips thoughtfully. His little siphon pouts and gulps. The demon captain whips round with a wet flick of the forty-six octopodal arms that hang, profuse and jowly, around his semi-human face, eyes narrowed in malicious determination, while a real whip viciously bites the barnacled backs of his undead crew aboard the Flying Dutchman. They push, grunting and screaming, against a great wooden wheel, as Davy barks: Let no joyful voice be heard. Let no man look up at the sky with hope, and let this day be cursed by we who ready to wake… The Kraken!
A bellowed NO! A boom below the Dutchman’s hull, triggered by that wheel’s excruciating turn. Orlando Bloom athletically scales the rigging of the good guys approaching ship. I’ve doomed us all, he mutters in smouldering despair. Then, seething water and a gut-wrenching thump. An enormous cephalopod arm shoots from the sea to pluck a fellow sailor almost unnoticed from the deck into the deep. But one pirate points a quavering finger, speechless, before his comrade is whipped victoriously above the surface, wrapped helplessly in the tentacle. That soaring, panning screech, a sick trick of cinematic sound design, signals the cry of KRAKEN! and the ringing of an emergency bell, apparently installed exclusively for this purpose. And here come dozens more burrowing arms, grabbing feebly flailing sailors like canapés from a passing tray, as deaths multiply rapidly and beyond reason in a Hollywood extravaganza of CGI, second-hand adrenaline, and a hungry, driving orchestral soundtrack. Orlando never dies, though.
The makers of the commercial Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and this particular scene from Dead Man’s Chest (2006), entrepreneurially incorporated any element of myth, literature, or cultural resonance that could enhance their highly saleable storyline. Their spectacular manifestation of the Kraken arguably reinvigorated a generation’s perception of the legend.
For the scene’s other monster, however, they allegedly looked elsewhere. Davy Jones’s skin was grafted from a thoroughly coffee-stained Styrofoam cup — fished from a studio bin, flatbed scanned, and digitally manipulated into his pore-spotted complexion (8). Perhaps we can extrapolate the makers’ tribute to the cup into a comment on the nightmarish ocean plastic rafts now evolving their own ecologies, toxic bodies: motley crews of polystyrene cups refusing to be throwaway carcasses, returning again like the repressed, like Jungian monsters.
In any case, Davy Jones’ designers apparently patched the rest of his chimerical body together directly from a cluster of marine and maritime creatures: crab arm, octopus head, salty sea-dog body (9). No mention of H.P. Lovecraft’s extra-terrestrial pantheon member, Cthulu, another cephalocephalic villain. But there is some family resemblance, even if subconsciously transferred.
Cthulu exceeds. That is his purpose — to signal an overwhelming cosmic dread before our lack of control of the universe (a dread that is often presumed universal). First incarnated in Lovecraft’s 1928 short story, ‘Call of Cthulu’, the Great/Dead/Dread Cthulu lurks in ‘slimy vaults’ beneath the Antarctic sea, summoning sensitive humans to his dark side in their dreams. His face is a ‘mass of feelers’, uncanny and haptic. Instantly maddening anyone who sights him, he can only be represented by idols. But I find something mildly pathetic in Lovecraft’s description of his Great Old One as a ‘rubbery-looking’ anthropoid thing ‘of a somewhat bloated corpulence’. Or maybe more so in his evident manifestation of paranoia. They’re in your dreams. They’re waiting under the sea. They’re interbreeding. They have always been here. And who was more paranoid than Lovecraft, a racist, misogynist xenophobe? Living by a New York port, he had both a close knowledge of seafood (which he despised), and an anxious vantage on the new Americans he saw arriving from across the world; Lovecraft’s cephalopods were chosen because, ‘like the immigrant’, they were ‘unfathomable, different and thus evil’ (10).
The demonising darkness of Lovecraft’s Old Weird has thankfully nurtured a New Weird, a contemporary literary movement which embraces otherness; a genre which Damien Walter argues could itself be represented by a tentacle — ‘the monstrous appendage that emerges from the rift to disturb the mundane order of things’ (11).
One of Lovecraft’s rare sketches, addressed to R. H. Barlow in 1934, is of a Cthulu statue. Unlike Hugo and de Montfort with their boldly sprawling octopuses, Lovecraft was apparently not a confident draughtsman. Rendered in uncertain, repeated lines, his god- monster is perched on a block inscribed with mythic script, his tentacular chin inclined downward. This Cthulu looks awkward, shy — would it be fair to say afraid? Tucked inside himself, a mutant thing hiding. Knees high and back arched, I see him like a bullied schoolchild perched on a wall, away from the jeers. Cultivating the blows, perhaps transforming them into blame — perhaps ready to send it back outwards, violently against some other.
Tracing inky forms across blank pages, fear, pain, obsession, conviction, desire come spilling out. Undercurrents, when given a body, gain enough animacy to clamber further. The image scuttles sideways, clambers out of reach, out of proportion. Unseen things, things below the surface, soft and shifting.
Side by side, what is happening in these three drawings by three (white, Western, educated) men, spread out over one-hundred-and-thirty years? The strong composition and bold lines of de Montfort’s ‘Le Poulpe Colossal’. The vampiric, ink-spread indistinction of Hugo’s octopus. The scribbled jitters of Lovecraft’s Cthulu in profile. Each speaks to different ambitions and audiences. One was presented as a public thesis of a ravaging, real-world animal. One came spilling out, privately indulged. The last was enclosed in a letter to a confidante — here is my monster. But perhaps each artist, in their own way, whispered in their pen-strokes: Other, o Other, show us who we are!
(1) Pieuvre, Victor Hugo, 1866, see Allen S. Weiss, ‘Ingestion: The Epic of the Cephalopod’, Cabinet, 2001.
(2) Clare Finney, ‘Eating the Alien: Untangling a knotty relationship’, At the Table, date unknown.
(3) Speculum Regalae – Konungs skuggsjá (c.1250), (c.1250), ed. and trans. Keyser, Rudolf et al. (Christiania: Carl C. Werner & Co., 1848) p.32.
(4) Jacob Wallenberg’s My Son on the Galley (1781) qtd. in Mike Bara, The Triangle, (Kempten IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2019).
(5) See Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s Tamatoshi Attacked by an Octopus, or Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s Octopus Attacking a Pearl Diver, both mid-nineteenth century Japanese Ukiye-o prints.
(6) In Hollywood blockbuster Clash of the Titans (1981), the ancient Greek sea monster Cetus is portrayed as a cephalopod.
(7) Georges Bataille, ‘l’Informe’, Documents 1, 1929, p.382.
(8) ‘Meet Davey Jones’, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, 2006, DVD Extras.
(9) Masters of Design: Crash McCreery’, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, 2007, DVD extras.
(10) Clare Finney, ‘Eating the Alien: Untangling a knotty relationship’, At the Table, date unknown.
(11) Damien Walter, ‘The weird deserves recognition as a major literary movement’, The Guardian, 20 September 2012.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fiona Glen is an emerging artist and writer from Edinburgh, based in London. Bridging essay, poetry, script, and fiction, her writing explores messy embodiment, unruly ecologies, and how human beings understand themselves through other species. Glen graduated in 2020 from the MA Writing at the Royal College of Art, with the manuscript for a book that follows the slippery figure of the octopus through contemporary culture. Her writing has been published in periodicals and anthologies, from MAP Magazine and Aesthetica to Dark Mountain and DreamsTimeFree. Glen has read her work at the London Science Museum and has previously been commissioned by BBC x ICA New Creatives.
