Breaking Politeness and Finding Adventure -- The Hobbit, Chapter I

I've explored The Hobbit before, over at my "Nightly Noises" blog, but I'm going to give it a fresh look here at Dark Lanterns.

The adventure begins with the deconstruction of politeness -- and the simple phrase "good morning."  Bilbo Baggins is so enamored by the beautiful day that he blithely wishes the wizard "Good morning!"  Gandalf cracks apart the pleasantry, asking whether "you wish me a good morning, or mean it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"  His questions are pedantic but precise.  Bilbo isn't bothered and replies "All of them at once," thus embracing a cloud of meanings, as vague and shifting as the smoke-rings from his pipe.  Gandalf, by contrast, demands a sword-shaped consciousness -- a sharp and ready focus.

He makes his inevitable offer of adventure, but Bilbo isn't interested.  The hobbit makes a few more statements (including good morning, again!), and "By this he meant that the conversation was at an end."  Yet Gandalf had yet to reveal his identity and does so now, reminding Bilbo "And you do know my name, though you don't remember that I belong to it.  I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me!"  The language is terse and haughty, but effective.  And as is so often the case with Tolkien, there is a dynamic and mysterious tension between the name and the thing -- between the rune and the magic, as it were, between the letters and the language and the tale that they tell.  In any case, the wizard well knows that the residual memory of excitement and adventure has not quite departed from the boring, respectable, bourgeois hobbit.

Bilbo recites the mythology of Gandalf, such as he knows it, referencing a history of heroic tales and magical fireworks and invoking the lure of "the Blue" and "mad adventures."  The madness to which he refers may seem rather humble and innocuous, activities like climbing trees and sailing in ships.  Yet, to the eyes of children and the unjaded imaginations of sensitive souls, such things will always constitute a vital part of life's magic and adventures.

Towards the end of the conversation, Gandalf tentatively reestablishes the presence of politeness and formality, playfully granting Bilbo his "pardon."  Perhaps it's just a trap, since Bilbo panics and invites Gandalf to tea, doubtlessly the default activity of any respectable hobbit.  Gandalf finds the thought of Bilbo going on an adventure "amusing" -- and it should serve as a reminder that, though often linked to the epic grandeur of The Lord of the Rings, this book, The Hobbit, is a rather curious and often quite a comic tale.

With one more desperate "good morning!" from Bilbo, the stage is set for the meetings and quests to come.

Scooby-Doo Review: Frozen Fright

“A Frozen Fright is No Delight”

In the world of Scooby-Doo, every night is a groovy beach party… except when monsters intervene.  When a caveman frozen in the block of ice appears at the aforementioned groove fest, however, Fred dazzles the gang with some heavy alliteration: “I wonder where this frozen fright floated in from.”  Obviously there’s a poetic soul lurking behind that buff preppy sweater.

When the pesky kids take their discovery to Ocean Land, the scientists there want to bring Frosty the Caveman back to life.  Of course.  Sensible Velma likes him the way he is, rejecting the hubris of the patriarchal male scientists.  Yet, inevitably, the caveman is released from the ice – and he’s a pretty big guy.  It would be interesting to consider where this particular creep fits into the tapestry of human anthropology.  He’s identified as two million years old, so perhaps he’s a Homo habilis. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis)  In any case, the creature has a club at the ready and comes out of the ice in a belligerent mood.  Is that meant as a statement on the inevitable violence of humanity, as writ in our genetics?  The caveman has no obvious supernatural connection – except in so far as alternate variations of humanity are inherently disconcerting and alien.

The plot thickens when the gang sees a professor communicating with dolphins through some kind of improbably effective telepathic radio.  Shaggy – as comic terror personified – finds even this image disturbing.  “This scene is getting creepier by the minute,” he declares.  This develops the theme of the implicit horror of the trans-human – even when manifest in the cute form of a mustached man talking to a babbling dolphin with a species-transcending radioscope (or whatever).  This anthropological angst is somewhat tamed by a scene where Scooby and Shaggy dress up as maritime creatures, displacing their horror of an alien proto-self onto a comic motif.  Thus, Shaggy’s peculiar declaration: “What safer way to sneak up on an old gruesome than disguised a as a couple of fish?”  Huh?

The most terrifying moment of the episode is, presumably, unintentional.  After the criminal is de-suited, Scooby dances with the caveman costume back at the malt shop.  The costume wriggles around like a floppy corpse while the others laugh and make jokes.  Oh, the horror.

The Maddening Need

H.P. Lovecraft -- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

When Randolph Carter sees a fabulous city in his dreams... it is empty.  There are descriptions of gardens and gables, of roofs and temples, but there is no mention of habitation.  Carter might consider himself the master of this metropolis, but it is a solitary sort of possession.  That which should be most solid in a city -- its physical architecture -- is here rendered as ephemeral, and that which should be fleeting and intangible (its rhythms of life and activity) is entirely absent.  Nevertheless, the vision has a powerful effect: "there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place."

Thus an exceedingly strange story begins with a description of beauty, loneliness, and the power of memory.  And it begins, too, with a challenge to the gods, though in some ways a subtle one.  Carter plans to go to Kadath -- the home of the gods -- and ask for more visions of his beautiful city, but he is warned by the priests "that not only had no man ever been to unknown Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands around our world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhuat or Aldebaran."  And in attempting that journey he will risk encountering "that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach... the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth... who gnaws hungrily in conceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time..."

It is curious how Lovecraft gives Azathoth a title and implicit supernatural-political authority as "daemon sultan" yet simultaneously implies that he is an unstructured, insane, and almost random presence -- "that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity."  Perhaps this constitutes Lovecraft's attempt to negotiate the ultimate implications of an amoral universe.  If randomness is fundamental to the structure of the universe (and quantum physics provides all sorts of intriguing possibilities here) then is the universe, in a sense, insane?  Or does it merely obey laws that are unfathomable to the human mind, allowing daemon kings to rule over randomness in an ultimate paradox made to torment people like Randolph Carter?

But it's not all doom and gloom in this story... the zoogs are waiting in the enchanted wood!

"I am a brain, Watson"

In the Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, Sherlock Holmes declares "I am a brain, Watson.  The rest of me is mere appendix."  This is, evidently, the great detective's resolution of his own mind-body problem.  Yet the body of Sherlock Holmes proves significant in a great many stories.  As we are moving through the historical "reality" of Victorian literature and not in some realm of steampunk fantasy, he must of course be "embodied" -- but he uses that body in fascinating ways.

In The Adventure of the Dying Detective, Holmes deceives even Watson, faking his own illness in order to lay a trap for a criminal.  In the process we hear his delightful attempt to feign delirium.  Without any reason for doing so, he announces, "Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem!"  In The Reigate Puzzle, we learn Holmes is susceptible to ailments, as "Even his iron constitution... had broken down under the strain of an investigation which had extended over two months during which period he... had more than once... kept to his task for five days at a stretch."  Yet there, too, Holmes tricks people into thinking he is ill, in order to divert attention during a vital conversation.

I suppose that most people keep mind and body in an existential alliance, rarely allowing too much separation tween their consciousness and the physical vessel that fuels and mediates it.  Holmes, though, seems to use his body as a tool of his will, casually pushing it to its uttermost limits and frequently ignoring its demands.  Thus (somewhere or other!) he tells Watson that he cannot spare time for digestion because he is devoted to contemplating a problem.  Yet Holmes, when he wishes to be, is as acutely aware of his own body as of all those he observes with such calculating fervor -- thus his success not only in creating ordinary disguises, but in creating and manipulating false ailments.

Holmes is famous for his logic -- for his mind.  It would be interesting to speculate on whether that mind felt "at home" within his body, or whether, perhaps like T.E. Lawrence, he struggled in frustration against the weakness, strangeness, and imperfections of his actual substance -- tugging with impatience at his only anchor in the material world.  Yet, in the middle of an engaging mystery, perhaps it hardly mattered.

The Human Shoggoth

H.P. Lovecraft -- At the Mountains of Madness (Part 4: Conclusion)

The shoggoth is one of the most memorable features of the story: "the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence... a shapeless congeries of proto-plasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light..."  Since the Old Ones used shoggoths as a slave labor force, it is reasonable to presume that they constitute Lovecraft's anxieties about the working class.  I think there is more to the shoggoth, however.  They are, in some ways, an embodiment of collectivity -- thus, ultimately, of society, cities, and civilization.  After all, they are represented in the story as "a vast onrushing subway train," evoking an image of modernity, and a location ripe for overpopulated claustrophobia.

Shoggoths are raw, savage genetics -- demonstrating the undignified origin point of humanity, in both an evolutionary and a reproductive sense.  The narrator speaks of "the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their foetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles..."  This is the oozing stuff of life, manifested as a living monstrosity.  The horror of the shoggoth is the horror of life -- the shifting, bubbling, heaving, messy reality of human substance that can find no meaning or purpose or justification.

 By the end of the story, the menacing reality of the shoggoth is replaced by babbling and inarticulate references to "the black pit" and "the nameless cylinder" and "the primal white jelly."

I'm not sure that this story is necessarily Lovecraft's best work.  Yet I wonder whether he ever managed to produce something so acutely revealing of his own most fundamental anxieties.


Image from Unser Wissen von der Erde, available on the British Library's Flickr page.

Blasphemous Penguins and Lovecraft's History

H.P. Lovecraft -- The Mountains of Madness (Part 3)

"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!

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.

The Alien Earth

H.P. Lovecraft -- The Mountains of Madness (Part 2)

I can't help but think that Mountains might be a better story if it were a shorter one.  I mean, it might be more dramatic and accessible, though its exaggerated grandiosity and ponderous movements suit the material.  Nonetheless, there are certainly gems of prose scattered throughout.  Time and geology are, at this point, the real antagonists in the tale: "we... thanked heaven that we were clear of the haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust."  Lovecraft goes out of his way to dislodge the world from its familiar role in human consciousness, creating an "utterly alien earth."

The narrator struggles to understand a time "before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom" and is forced to confront a "palaeogean megalopolis" constructed by the Great Old Ones.  As the exploration of the city commences, we hear the startling claim that these Old Ones were living at a time before "the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells" -- and that the aliens were "the makers and enslavers of that life."  From that point in the story we begin to learn the history of earth's first empire -- an ancient power that came from the stars.

Image from The Student's Lyell, available on the British Library's Flickr page.