"What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response." Classic Lovecraft -- yet only building up to "the raucous squawking of a penguin" Admittedly, a six foot albino penguin, but a penguin nevertheless. It's at moments like these when the story flirts (ferociously?) with the absurd, if not the outright comic.
Yet the middle segments of the story also include a complex history -- something surpassing, perhaps, even Tolkien's indulgence in (if not his capacity for) including ancient frameworks for the events of his stories. The history is more unbelievable than any giant penguin, for the narrator and his compatriot decipher endless details from artwork of (we are frequently reminded) an extremely alien sensibility and consciousness. The history is certainly an interesting one -- Old Ones fighting Mi-Go and Cthulhu spawn in epic wars? Amazing!
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The curious thing is that history is subtle and maybe even sophisticated. This is no list of kings and emperors, no chronicle of the high and mighty of the sort to which so many students have been subjected, no Greek or Biblical lineage of patriarchy. Partly due to the scale of time in question, and partly due to the nature of the alien civilization involved, it is a kind of environmental history. It is a history in which slavery and rebellion play a central role, unable to be suppressed beneath veneers of religion or rationality. It is almost a postmodern history, in which the centrality of the subject is disrupted, avoided, even impossible. After all, some of the major players are the genetically-engineered monstrosities called shoggoths, whose limited intelligence generally only mimics the Old Ones, but which somehow waged a war for their own liberation! Consider the passage: "To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant shoggoths to land life; a thing the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins."
Penguins again! Anyway... this all goes back to the question of absurd and improbable deduction. The narrator eventually admits, "All this, of course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes [Mi-Go, etc.] are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats..." It's an important reminder of how much speculation is involved in this history. And what sort of scientist would take such leaps? What motivates these explorers? The reader has precious little to work with regarding such psychological questions, other than the periodic assurances that these are men of science, affiliated with Lovecraft's famous, fictional Miskatonic University.
Yet there is one interesting passage in that regard: "Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists.... Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity -- or anxiety -- or auto-hypnotism -- or vague thoughts of responsibility toward [the missing] Gedney -- or what not -- drive us on." Surely these are wildly different things? Aren't they? Perhaps not. Is human anxiety the cause of curiosity? Or is the reverse more true? Auto-hypnotism?! Just madness, surely, as the title of the story demonstrates. Yet if the Old Ones did create all other forms of life on earth, as the narrator suggests, then perhaps these men are not independent agents after all, but driven by ancestral, genetic pseudo-memories as much as the narrator in another famous tale, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Are the scientists inevitably drawn to the antarctic, to the Old Ones, to the danger and the madness? Is the object of their curiosity also the source of it?
Image from Child Harolde's Pilgrimage, available on the British Library's Flickr page.
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