Isegoria

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the Voynich manuscript of American literature:

As the only novel written by Edgar Allan Poe, its historical importance is unquestionable; as a literary work, it is mystifying. Its catalog of atrocities and incidents, which includes cannibalism, drownings, ax murders, shootings (with muskets and pistols), a ghost ship crammed with rotting corpses, a shark feeding frenzy, a landslide, and a mass-casualty explosion, combined with a nightmare symbolism have inspired both interpretation and incredulity.

Long forgotten after Poe had been buried both literally (in 1849) and critically, Pym moldered in ragged omnibus editions for nearly 100 years before W. H. Auden and the New Critics resurrected it for the Age of Academia. Since then, every subsequent critical school has interpreted Pym through its own narrow aesthetic, or increasingly political, perspective. It is a metaphor for the creative imagination; a meditation on God and Providence; a pre-Freudian return-to-the-womb allegory; a rite-of-passage myth; a parable about race. The most recent critical trends generally focus on Pym’s self-reflexive qualities. It’s a book whose metatextual enigmas attracted credulous postmodernists in hordes from Yale to the University of California, Irvine.

But the real mystery surrounding Pym, aside from its shocking and indeterminate ending, is whether it is a flawed work produced by an author under duress or a conscious literary hoax. This is, after all, a novel that begins with a preface from the narrator, “Arthur Gordon Pym,” that stresses the implausibility of the events he is about to recount and ends with a postscript from Edgar Allan Poe, the “editor,” who refuses to complete the story because of his “disbelief in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narrative.”

Not long after the boom in Pym studies began, a few sharp-eyed critics realized that Poe, with his long history of hoaxes and pranks (to go along with perpetual hardship) had produced something dubious.

[...]

Understanding Pym is impossible without delineating the personal challenges Poe faced when he composed it. Starving, with a teenage wife to support, and unemployed during one of the worst depressions America had yet seen, Poe needed to deliver a manuscript as soon as possible, in hopes of a quick payout. That meant repurposing material from the Southern Literary Messenger, plagiarizing from several nonfiction books, and possibly, fusing two different narratives and passing them off as one.

(Hat tip to Castalia House.)

The history of horror is a history of what we aren’t all that frightened of anymore:

Horror, began appropriately enough during the Reign of Terror. Religion was officially outlawed in France. The Catholic Church had been forced out of the country and if you were going to worship anything at all, it had to be the Goddess of Reason. Graveyards were filled with dead people who were, according to the First Republic, gone forever. They were in an eternal sleep from which there would be no waking.

Into this government-mandated spiritual vacuum stepped Étienne-Gaspard Robert, the creator of the very first horror show: The Phantasmagoria.

The Phantasmagoria was a “Magic Lantern” show that combined sound effects and an eerie music score provided by Ben Franklin’s glass harmonica.

Robert, unlike his various conmen spiritualist predecessors, had to keep an eye out for militantly atheist authorities, so he was very clear about the fact that what his audience was watching was fiction. Ghosts and ghouls weren’t real and it was purely for entertainment.

And by all accounts, audiences found the Phantasmagoria utterly terrifying. Admittedly, Robert was careful to serve them punch laced with laudanum before the show started but that only goes so far. The fear was quite real. But now you can look at what was the most frightening thing in the world in its day and you just sort of shrug.

(Hat tip to Castalia House.)

Will Oliver’s list of Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery stories starts with Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” — the origin of both the sword and sorcery genre and the reptilian conspiracy theory — and continues with stories exclusively from Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith for the first 25 entries, before getting to “The Sapphire Goddess” by Nictzin Dyalhis:

Nictzin Wilstone Dyalhis (June 4, 1873–May 8, 1942) was an American chemist and short story writer who specialized in the genres of science fiction and fantasy.

[…]

Firm facts about Dyalhis’s life are few, as he coupled his limited output of fiction with a penchant for personal privacy, an avoidance of publicity, and intentional deception. Even his name is uncertain. His World War I draft registration card establishes his full name as Nictzin Wilstone Dyalhis, but it marks the earliest known appearance of this name. His first wife’s death certificate gives his first name as “Fred,” and he has been thought to have possibly altered his surname to Dyalhis from a more prosaic “Dallas” — in his stories, Dyalhis played with common spellings, so that “Earth” becomes Aerth and “Venus,” Venhez. According to L. Sprague de Camp, however, Dyalhis was his actual surname, inherited from his Welsh father, and his given name Nictzin was also authentic, bestowed on him due to his father’s fascination with the Aztecs.

His World War I draft registration card and 1920 Census record establish his birthdate as June 4, 1873, and his state of birth as Massachusetts. According to the 1920 census, his father was also born in Massachusetts, and his mother in Guatemala. But in the 1930 census he was reported to have been born about 1880 in Arizona to parents also born in that state. In bibliographic sources, his year of birth was usually cited (with a question mark) as 1879; Dziemianowicz gives it as 1880; and he was speculated to have been born in England — or Pima, Arizona.

Among the imaginative readers of his stories, Dyalhis acquired a reputation for possessing unusual abilities and an exotic history as an adventurer and world traveler. The known facts of his life are more prosaic, mostly centering around Pennsylvania and Maryland. At some time during his youth he lost one eye, as noted on his draft card. He worked as a box nailer in 1918, a chemist in 1920, a machinist in 1930, and a writer for magazines in 1940.

I’ve written about Halloween and horror quite a bit over the years:

• Halloween used to be kid stuff
• The flowers acquired associations of decay and disease
• I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death
• The most triumphant example of a trope is the Trope Codifier
• Its power is not confined to its grasp
• Halloween came early
• Her creepy imaginary friend is called Captain Howdy
• Setback in The Sassoon Files
• The vampire is consumption in human form
• Almost a vampire story, but with dogs
• The one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature
• Sacrifices must be made!
• Not every lesson can be taught explicitly
• The asuang ruse is part of the legend of Edward Lansdale
• Not everybody knows your rules
• I attributed his craziness to the Zeitgeist
• Expanded Anglo-Saxonism
• H.P. Lovecraft’s Advice to Aspiring Writers
• Inference With The Vampire
• Prepared for Dracula’s Minions
• Blood, Dice, and Darkness
• S.T. Joshi Returns His Two World Fantasy Awards
• Lovecraft on Cats and Dogs
• A Cultural History of Capes
• Some Words with a Mummy (revisited)
• Alan Moore on Lovecraft and the 20th Century
• The Secret to Composing Halloween
• Night On Bald Mountain
• Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre”
• Did the writer of “True Detective” plagiarize Thomas Ligotti and others?
• The Arkham Digest Interviews Nic Pizzolatto
• The King in Yellow
• Benefits from Trade Day
• Christopher Lee: Metal Rocker and Total Badass
• It’s pronounced “Eye-gor” now
• Foseti’s Vibrant Halloween
• The Phantasmagorical Four
• The Plague Behind Zombies and Vampires
• A Rendezvous in Averoigne
• Collected Ghost Stories
• It’s the Great Cthulhu, Charles Dexter
• The Castle of Otranto
• Lovecraft’s influence has been wide, but superficial — because his works were reactionary.
• What if Dr. Seuss wrote The Call of Cthulhu?
• 121 Years of Sanity-Blasting
• The Long Tentacle of H.P. Lovecraft in Manga
• No child has ever been killed by poisoned candy
• Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Candy Witch?
• Pigeons From Hell
• The New Ones
• Where the Deep Ones Are
• Some Words with a Mummy
• Frankenstein
• The Circus of Dr. Lao
• The Birds
• Calvin’s Snowman House of Horror
• The Rare Carpathian Armadillo
• Cthulhu License Plate
• Dracula’s castle returned to Van Hapsburg
• 50 Greatest Horror Movies
• Weird Tales Gallery
• HP Lovecraft by Michel Houellebecq
• NPR on Arkham House
• Gremlins on a B-17 Bomber
• Danvers Asylum for the Criminally Insane

Will Oliver ran across a list of early Cthulhu Mythos stories and took up the challenge of tracking down and reading all of the stories in order, which got him wondering what a list of Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery stories would look like:

Finding none online, I decided to create one.

Starting with the well accepted premise that the genre, or sub-genre, known as Sword-and-Sorcery started with Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom,” I knew I had a starting point, August 1929. As a generation is approximately 20 years, that would take the end point of the list to August of 1949, or simply the end of 1949. This makes sense in that the date falls right before Gnome Press began reprinting the Conan stories in hardcover and well before the 1960s resurgence.

I was a bit embarrassed that I couldn’t have rattled off “The Shadow Kingdom” as the name of the first sword & sorcery story:

Robert E. Howard’s short story “The Shadow Kingdom” from Weird Tales magazine is the origin of both the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy fiction and the conspiracy theory concerning a hidden species of advanced reptilian beings disguised among us while covertly controlling the levers of power, which has been a recurring theme in fiction and conspiracy since the story’s publication.

Apparently the idea of reptilians was popularised by David Icke, a conspiracy theorist, in 1999:

Michael Barkun, professor of political science at Syracuse University, posits that the idea of a reptilian conspiracy originated in the fiction of Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, in his story “The Shadow Kingdom”, published in Weird Tales in August 1929. This story drew on theosophical ideas of the “lost worlds” of Atlantis and Lemuria, particularly Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine written in 1888, with its reference to “‘dragon-men’ who once had a mighty civilization on a Lemurian continent”.

Howard’s “serpent men” were described as humanoids (with human bodies and snake heads) who were able to imitate humans at will, and who lived in underground passages and used their shapechanging and mind-control abilities to infiltrate humanity. Clark Ashton Smith used Howard’s “serpent men” in his stories, as well as themes from H. P. Lovecraft, and he, Howard and Lovecraft together laid the basis for the Cthulhu Mythos.

In the 1940s, Maurice Doreal (also known as Claude Doggins) wrote a pamphlet entitled “Mysteries of the Gobi” that described a “serpent race” with “bodies like man but…heads…like a great snake” and an ability to take human form. These creatures also appeared in Doreal’s poem “The Emerald Tablets”, in which he referred to Emerald Tablets written by “Thoth, an Atlantean Priest king”. Barkun asserts that “in all likelihood”, Doreal’s ideas came from “The Shadow Kingdom”, and that in turn, “The Emerald Tablets” formed the basis for David Icke’s book, Children of the Matrix.

Historian Edward Guimont has argued that the reptilian conspiracy theory, particularly as expounded by Icke, drew from earlier pseudohistorical legends developed during the colonisation of Africa, particularly surrounding Great Zimbabwe and the mokele-mbembe.

Fans of old-school swords & sorcery fiction can’t help but notice Theosophy’s many mentions of Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis, and reincarnated men evolving through various races from age to age.

(Hat tip to Ben Espen.)

A recent HuffPost Entertainment piece opens with the assertion that the cast of House of the Dragon is visibly less white than its predecessor, Game of Thrones, which is interesting, because the original features large numbers of quasi-Mongols, quasi-Middle Easterners, etc.

Anyway, one of the co-creators recently claimed the “increased” diversity wasn’t intended to appeal to left-wing ideals:

“I think it was not that simple,” Ryan Condal said. “I think the reason that it’s been a successful choice … is because it was thought out. It wasn’t just done perfunctorily or wasn’t just done to tick a box or … to be seen as progressive.”

Condal, who is also a showrunner for the HBO series, then followed up this statement with one that seemed to somewhat contradict his previous remarks.

“It’s 2022,” he said. “It’s a different era than these shows used to be made in. We have an incredibly diverse audience that’s not only across America, but in multiple countries that speak all sorts of different languages, that represent … all the colors under the sun. And it was really important to see some of that reflected up on screen.

“This is a fantasy world. I think if this was a historical fiction piece, it would be a more nuanced discussion. But I think simply because this is a fantasy world, if we believe in dragons, and shape-shifters and [the fictional canines] direwolves, we can believe everybody in the story is not white.”

He’s content to engage with the straw-man argument that detractors are complaining that “everybody in the story is not white,” when the real complaint is that the characters’ ”pure blood” is a key element of the story:

The character Corlys Velaryon (also known as the Sea Snake) in “House of the Dragon” is portrayed by Steve Toussaint, a British actor of Barbadian descent.

Due to this, House Velaryon — a prominent family in the series whose members are pivotal players in the story — is characterized by darker skin and silvery-white, or sometimes dreadlocked, hair. (Not every character with the last name Velaryon fits that description, though.)

This departs from the show’s source material. In George R.R. Martin’s book “Fire & Blood,” the Velaryons are described as having white skin, ghostly pale hair and purple eyes.

This has put Toussaint on the receiving end of racist criticism online from Westeros purists.

Condal said on “TheGrill” that the decision to make House Velaryon Black was inspired by the family’s unique place in the franchise and something that Martin had said years ago.

“Why we went to the Velaryons in particular was because that felt like the most fantastical race in the show, and it felt like … these were people from a lost continent that we don’t really know that much about,” Condal said.

“We know they all have silver hair, we know they have an affinity for dragons, some of them. And we know they are seen, as quoted in the books and in the show, closer to gods than to men. So what does that all look like?

“And it always stuck with me, this article … where George had talked about, at first when he set out to write these books, considering making all of the Velaryons Black. … Black people with silver hair — and that always really stuck with me as an image.”

Condal also noted that the time period in which “House of the Dragon” takes place is not that far off from the fall of Valyria in the franchise’s lore.

“I said: ‘Well, Valyria was this enormous continent, a very diverse and well-populated nation that fell into the sea. Why couldn’t there have been a line of Black Velaryons in that story?’” he remarked.

“I think if you’re willing to take that first leap of suspension of disbelief, you really come to [the idea that] it feels integrated and intrinsic to the show in a organic way.”

The showrunner also said that having a Black family on the show helps differentiate “people on screen and remembering who’s from what house.” He added that this aids in highlighting the “questionable parentage” of Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen’s very white-looking children, who have the last name Velaryon.

“I think there’s a lot of visual benefits that come along with it,” Condal said. “And because Corlys has such a rich and diverse family line himself, just simply making that one turn on him to cast Steve Toussaint, his entire family becomes then a diverse cast. And it’s a really interesting way to populate the show with a bunch of different faces that you may not have seen in another high fantasy show or in the original series.”

When I saw the TV show M*A*S*H as a kid, I don’t think it even occurred to me that it might be about Korea; it was obviously about Vietnam. Apparently the original movie had the same issue:

Because of the context of the film being made — during the height of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War — 20th Century Fox was concerned that audiences would not understand that it was ostensibly taking place during the Korean War. At the request of the studio, a caption that mentions the Korean setting was added to the beginning of the film, and PA announcements throughout the film served the same purpose. Only a few loudspeaker announcements were used in the original cut. […] The Korean War is explicitly referenced in announcements on the camp public address system and during a radio announcement that plays while Hawkeye and Trapper are putting in Col. Merrill’s office, which also cites the film as taking place in 1951.

I didn’t really watch the show, but when I finally watched the movie, I realized the theme music had been burned into my memory — or, rather, its melody had. The TV show doesn’t include the lyrics to “Suicide Is Painless“:

Director Robert Altman had two stipulations about the song for composer Johnny Mandel: it had to be called “Suicide Is Painless” and it had to be the “stupidest song ever written”. Altman attempted to write the lyric himself, but, upon finding it too difficult for his “45-year-old brain” to write something “stupid” enough, he gave the task to his 15-year-old-son Michael, who reportedly wrote the lyrics in five minutes.

Altman later decided that the song worked so well he would use it as the film’s main theme. This more choral version was sung by uncredited session singers John Bahler, Tom Bahler, Ron Hicklin, and Ian Freebairn-Smith, and was released as a single attributed to “The Mash”. Altman said that, while he only made $70,000 for directing the movie, his son had earned more than $1 million for co-writing the song.

Several instrumental versions of the song were used as the theme for the TV series, but the lyrics were never used in the show. It became a number-one hit in the UK Singles Chart in May 1980. The song was ranked No. 66 on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs.

Its opening lyrics:

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see

That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it
If I please

The movie struck a nerve:

The film won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, later named the Palme d’Or, at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. The film went on to receive five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 1996, M*A*S*H was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and recommended for preservation.[3] The Academy Film Archive preserved M*A*S*H in 2000. The film inspired the television series M*A*S*H, which ran from 1972 to 1983. Gary Burghoff, who played Radar O’Reilly, was the only actor playing a major character who was retained for the series.

From my perspective, it wasn’t a black comedy so much as a depressing, meandering drama full of unsympathetic characters — with the exception of Radar O’Reilly, I suppose — combined with a low-brow sports comedy. The “ringer” they bring in to beat the other units football team is a black NFL player known as “Spearchucker” Jones. Yeah.

Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film four (out of four) stars, in a review I can respect and understand, even if I don’t share his assessment:

There is something about war that inspires practical jokes and the heroes…are inspired and utterly heartless…. We laugh, not because “M*A*S*H” is Sgt. Bilko for adults, but because it is so true to the unadmitted sadist in all of us. There is perhaps nothing so exquisite as achieving…sweet mental revenge against someone we hate with particular dedication. And it is the flat-out, poker-faced hatred in “M*A*S*H” that makes it work. Most comedies want us to laugh at things that aren’t really funny; in this one we laugh precisely because they’re not funny. We laugh, that we may not cry…. We can take the unusually high gore-level in “M*A*S*H” because it is originally part of the movie’s logic. If the surgeons didn’t have to face the daily list of maimed and mutilated bodies, none of the rest of their lives would make any sense…. But none of this philosophy comes close to the insane logic of “M*A*S*H,” which is achieved through a peculiar marriage of cinematography, acting, directing, and writing. The movie depends upon timing and tone to be funny…. One of the reasons “M*A*S*H” is so funny is that it’s so desperate.

In a retrospective review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum characterized the film as “a somewhat adolescent if stylish antiauthoritarian romp…. But the misogyny and cruelty behind many of the gags are as striking as the black comedy and the original use of overlapping dialogue. This is still watchable for the verve of the ensemble acting and dovetailing direction, but some of the crassness leaves a sour aftertaste.”

Overlapping dialog wasn’t its only innovation:

In his director’s commentary, Altman says that M*A*S*H was the first major studio film to use the word “fuck” in its dialogue. The word is spoken during the football game near the end of the film by Walt “Painless Pole” Waldowski when he says to an opposing football player, “All right, Bud, your fucking head is coming right off!” The actor, John Schuck, said in an interview that Andy Sidaris, who was handling the football sequences, encouraged Schuck to “say something that’ll annoy him.” Schuck did so, and that particular statement made it into the film without a second thought. Previously confined to cult and “underground” films, its use in a film as conventionally screened and professionally distributed as M*A*S*H marked the dawn of a new era of social acceptability for profanity on the big screen, which had until a short time before this film’s release been forbidden outright for any major studio picture in the United States under the Hays Code.

I was recently shocked to realize that I didn’t own a single copy of Beowulf, except for a recent graphic novel adaptation and the short summary provided in Bulfinch’s Mythology. Bulfinch’s introduction is from another era (1867):

Notable among the names of heroes of the British race is that of Beowulf, which appeals to all English-speaking people in a very special way, since he is the one hero in whose story we may see the ideals of our English forefathers before they left their Continental home to cross to the islands of Britain.

It was perfectly natural for an American who lived through the Civil War to refer to the British race.