Dagon (Gothic literature) 1 of 2

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.

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 Implications of Science-Fiction

The technology in science-fiction is capable of having the same kind of metaphorical implications as the magic in fantasy. As I mentioned last week, the two kinds of literary device are the same in many ways. But, what makes these pairs different from each other (fantasy and magic on the one hand, science-fiction and technology on the other) bears some further investigation.

The primary difference I mentioned before was that the technology in science-fiction is meant to be within man’s grasp, although it is beyond our current capacity, whereas magic and the other things that appear in fantastical literature posit a radical difference between the real world

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

So, I enjoyed Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In fact, I think it is probably my favorite installment of the Marvel-Avenger-movie-cross-over-thingy that is ongoing. But, just as the previous sentence’s hyphenated monstrosity indicates a certain inability to classify this series of movies, I wonder how to classify this movie itself. Not in the sense that I don’t know which heading to put it under at the movie store; I’d put it under “Action,” unless they've just thrown up their hands and made a “Marvel-Avenger-movie-cross-over-thingy” section.

The difficulty is in determining whether the movie is allegorical, metaphorical, fantastical, or realistic (though I flatter myself that I can identify a few elements that don’t fit that last description). And we want to do such a thing because we want to figure out what good this story does.

It is possible for a story to throw new light on something because, given a skilled and

Black Widow teaches us that one KGB
agent can keep up with chemically enhanced
super-soldiers and the Norse god of thunder.

Magic... is Wonderful

If someone was talking to you casually and they said that some character in a relatively recent book, comic, game, or movie used “magic”, what would you think you know about that character, without any further information? I don’t think you’d know any more than this: said character uses means apparently unrelated to his ends to achieve them. In addition,

Magic...

those ends may be impossible under conventional circumstances. Really, that’s it; after the countless fictional worlds containing countless variations on the theme, that is the dry and general, basic understanding of magic we are left with. Does the character make grim bargains with other-worldly spirits? Does the character tap into an invisible force and bend it to his will? Is there no explanation whatsoever? To know that, knowing it was “magic” isn't enough.