So, what can we say about a piece of writing
like “Dagon”? It’s a suicide note written by a morphine addict driven nuts
while lost at sea by the sight of a giant fish-man worshiping an obelisk. Wow.
The first questions that occur to me are “why
do people like this? Why do I like this?” Then I immediately reconsider
approaching the question that way. It isn't because we should avoid talking
about people, or why they are the way they are, but because focusing on
ourselves and our likes and dislikes is a tangly sort of maze from which we
might not escape. Better to look at what the good of the thing at hand is, or
what good there could be, and maybe gain some insight about ourselves along the
way.
So, “Dagon” has a few themes (all
interrelated, classic Lovecraft, and literarily Gothic): the unknown, the
alien, and the unnatural.
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| Most of you don't have to worry. Dagon would only hide under a waterbed. |
The Unknown
Everyone has experience of the unknown. I
mean both that they have been faced with darkness and mystery, and that they've come to know something that was unknown before.
The space under the bed, the woods at night,
the little window on the basement stairs that used to look out into the
backyard before grandpa built the addition but when you were a kid it just
opened on a barren cave-like expanse extending into utter blackness and you had
to hide your eyes and run up the stairs so you wouldn't look and see
you-don’t-know-what. Everyone has had these experiences because everyone starts
out knowing little or nothing. This is a fundamental human thing, this
“Unknown” with a capital ‘u’, and one of the things that naturally follows from
it is anxiety and caution, because the unknown is dangerous. That’s why we look
both ways before we cross the street; we turn the unknown into the known,
because whatever’s hiding out there behind the unknown might kill us.
The Alien
The Alien is very related to the Unknown, but
they deserve to be separate in our considerations because anything (familiar,
unusual, whatever) can be unknown – it’s our ignorance at the moment that makes
it so – but the alien somehow doesn't fit even when it is revealed. It
comes from somewhere else and whatever context it developed in, it isn't our
context. So, as concepts, the alien things tend to be unknown, and the little
bits we can see in the obscurity of the Unknown look alien, because we can’t
see how they fit in.
The Unnatural
The relationship of the unnatural to this
story is a little further outside the story itself. It is one of H.P.
Lovecraft’s constant underlying ideas in his fiction that the secrets of the
universe are fundamentally inhuman, that human beings live “…on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far.”[1] This means that, as
presented by the narrators of his tales, the alien things that come out of the
unknown reaches to haunt us are not unnatural even if they are
fundamentally divorced from us because, really, we’re the alien ones. It’s only
our tiny backwater of the universe that is comfortable and cuddly (to the
extent that it is).
H.P. Lovecraft seems to have written scary,
fireside stories for modern materialists. He takes the notion that mankind has
no privileged place in reality and says, “Ok then, if we’re not special, what
if the rest of everything is so outside our comprehension that it will drive us
insane?” This idea is frightening and makes for an effective tale around the
campfire. It might also vindicate what some unfortunate people think of their
own position.
But, however scary it might be, or however right
(in a perverse kind of way) it might seem to someone, this notion is not a very
reasonable theory. And, the images in this story (spongy rotting ground from
the bottom of the abyss, slimy bug-eyed fish-monsters, pale white obelisks,
etc.) were designed by a human being to appear wrong and perverse to other
human beings. They are contrary to our sense of right, health, and order.
Ok. Ruminate upon these concepts. Ask
yourself what benefit we (humans) could possibly derive from conjuring up such
things and reflecting on them. Next week, we can compare notes.
© 2014
John Hiner III
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