The Dream Journal of a Would-Be Insomniac

My Horror flash story "The Dream Journal of a Would-Be Insomniac" is now up and delectable on the Horror D'oeuvres site. It requires a subscription, but the fee gets you access to quite a bit of other quality shorts in addition to mine. Check it out!

Disillusionment in A Game of Thrones

[Note: I have felt for a while that I should probably put those of my academic essays that fit this blog's purview up here. As it would be hard to find a book more fitting to what I do on The Hat Rack than A Game of Thrones, I figured that this is where I would start. This paper was originally written for the class "Fantasy Literature and the Historical Imagination" and was intended to explore Martin's usage of both in-world history and world-building. 

Alas, I do have the habit of copious footnoting in my academic writing, and I don't know a graceful way of integrating that with a blog's formatting. I'd recommend having a second tab open at the bottom of the page to read them as you go.]

A Game of Thrones is the first book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. In it, Martin sets out to shatter his characters’ illusions. After building up a great store of cultural knowledge and ideals, he sets about destroying it. He shows his characters that war and politics are nothing like that they expect. But he doesn’t sotp there. By the time he is done, he has shown them that their very world is not as they thought it was.

The people of Westeros^[1] have a great deal of lore. Knowledge and ideas are preserved and spread in a large body of songs and stories that are often alluded to. ^[2] The oldest woman in service to the Starks is Old Nan, whose purpose seems to be telling bedtime stories to each generation of new lords. Not all of what the Westerosi know comes from general knowledge and oral traditions. Chroniclers record the details of major events (Martin 102), and lords’ castles hold large libraries. Books are so prized that they can be considered sufficient wedding gifts for a princess: Daenerys receives – and cherishes – volumes of songs and histories of the Seven Kingdoms (Martin 86). The past isn’t just something for the political elite to toy with. The maesters are a Westerosi institution that can be cheesily summed up as the “knights of the mind” (Martin 484). Groan-worthy propaganda aside, maesters study for years in Oldtown before dispersing through the realm as learned advisors. They are educated in  histories, herbs, ravens, architecture, and far more (Martin 485), and their chambers are overflowing with books (Martin 615).

This knowledge – particularly the stories and songs – serve as a guide to the world for Martin’s many child characters. Bran, for instance, thinks he knows what to expect in the capital from the stories that he has heard (Martin 64). Sansa goes farther, building her life around songs, desiring nothing more and nothing less than “for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs” (Martin 119-20 This isn’t just idle dreaming about how things should be. Betrothed to Prince Joffrey, Sansa believes that her life will be just like the Age of Heroes, only with more lemon cakes.

Alas, treating life as a story ends disastrously. As Littlefinger says, “life is not a song” (Martin 395). The children learn this to their great sorrow. Bran dreamed of being a knight. Instead, he watches the knights ride to war while he sits by, crippled. Jon discovers that the legendary defenders of the realm, the Night’s Watch, are not heroes driven solely by honor. As one character Jon complains to eloquently puts it, reality likes to “piss on the stories” (Martin 153). But it’s Sansa that gets the most brutal blow. Long after the others have given up their idealized dreams Sansa becomes capable of “seeing [Joffrey] for the first time” (Martin 622). That moment of revelation comes when her gallant prince decides to display her father’s severed head for all to see.

Adults, too, suffer from their ideals. Ser Hugh came to participant in the Hand’s Tournament, the tournament that, to Sansa, proves “better than the songs” (Martin 246). Hugh came because he was “desperately” seeking glory to justify his recent knighting (Martin 256). In the jousting, he gets a lance through the throat. If the killer’s brother can be believed, that deadly deviation from the songs was no accident (Martin 253). Indeed, knighthood falls far short of its romanticism throughout the text. One telling difference between storied battle and actual combat is how “in songs, the knights never screamed nor begged for mercy” (Martin 453). Of course, there are things to believe in besides stories. Not all of the novel’s^[3] characters go on believing their adolescent fantasies to and through their knighting. Martin delights, therefore, in showing that these mature ideals are just as impractical and illusory Eddard believes in honor. When he gains documented proof that King Robert supports him, he thinks the battle won. Cersei tears the document to pieces. “Is this meant to be your shield, my lord?” she asks him. “A piece of paper?” (Martin 441) His honor, and even the king’s legal will, are as much paper shields against reality as a cherished book of childhood stories. No storied knowledge or grand virtues, it seems, matter in the face of the real (Westerosi) world and the men in it with swords.

The final source of disillusionment is the greatest, and it is also where the disillusionment moves from the histories created by the people of the world to the very history of the world and the world itself. The world of Westeros is not what the Westerosi believe it is. The children delight in Old Nan’s stories of Others and other fantastic creatures. But the rational adults know that these stories are just stories, irrelevant to today’s modern (medieval) world even if they might once have had some grain of truth. As Ned says, “The Others are as dead as the children of the forest, gone eight thousand years. Maester Luwin will tell you they never lived at all” (Martin 20). The Maesters confidently state that “magic ha[s] died” (Martin 197), their only qualifier being that it may never have existed. In legends, the Night’s Watch raised the Wall to combat the Others, but everyone knows the Night’s Watch really just keeps the nasty northern barbarians out. As Tyrion mocks, the Night’s Watch is “watching for grumkins and snarks and all the other monsters your wet nurse warned you about” (Martin 104). The Others have been left with no more dignity than the monsters in a children’s movie.

But the Others are not extinct. The prologue shows three men of the Night’s Watch venturing beyond the wall. Ser Royce, a knight new to the Watch, leads them, and, before long, they are slaughtered by the Others. On the surface, this seems the typical story of an inexperienced and overconfident commander leading his men to ruin. That is true, but it is also insufficient, because the good Ser Royce is not really a buffoon. He is intelligent enough to realize that the temperature was too warm for the men they were pursuing to have simply frozen (Martin 4), and he is courageous. He alone stands and “bravely” face the Others (Martin 7). He was out of his depth, but any commander would have been. Only silly stories passed down through the ages shed any light on the Others, and the three are forced to rely on tales from their “mother[s]” and “wet nurse[s]” as soon as they pass the Wall (Martin 3). ^[4]

The supernatural was likely dismissed from official records and general belief for political reasons. Dragons, unlike Others, are not from the Dawn Age or the Age of Legends but from the Targaryen Conquest a mere three hundred years ago. Nonetheless, characters confidently assert that “dragons are gone,” and “it is known” that they are not coming back (Martin 197). Part of their reasoning is that the last known dragons are dead. Similarly, when proving that Others do not exist and maybe never did, Eddard says “no living men has ever seen one” (Martin 20). But the dismissal of dragons is also political. When the Targaryens ruled, they kept the memory of dragons alive, for the symbol of the dragon was tied to their power and reign. When King Robert dethroned the Targaryens, he took down the dragon skulls that adorned the throne room (Martin 102). It was in his interest to forget the old, to have the people dismiss dragons as a relic of the past that could never recur, and to embrace his new reign. The same reason could explain why Others are so categorically dismissed despite ancient evidence. When the Targaryens took over three hundred years ago, it was in their interest to have the people forget their prior rulers and the legendary foes those rulers strove against. Unfortunately, neither Others nor dragons care much for Westerosi politics. The Targaryens may have reduced the Others to a laughingstock, and Robert may have stuffed all the dragon relics out of sight, but both beasts are returning in defiance of all the rational learning of the maesters.

Admittedly, these supernatural beasts are not yet in Westeros, and the maesters are correct for the moment that magic is dead in the world. After all, they define the world as Westeros. The Wall marks the “end of the world” (Martin 173), no matter that there is plainly territory beyond it. But while the Others and other magic are still outside the world, they are coming. A Song of Ice and Fire could be called the story of magic gradually but inexorably returning. In A Game of Thrones, we have direwolves returning to the realm for the first time in two hundred years (Martin 15). Outside Westeros, we see Others, dragons, and Wights, the last of which end up attacking the Wall itself. By the second volume, A Clash of Kings, one of the faction’s competing for the throne has a sorceress of sorts. In the third, A Storm of Swords, we have the Night’s Watch battling Others. The progression continues from there.

A Song of Ice and Fire, therefore, becomes something like a secondary world intrusion fantasy. This can be seen in contrast with The Worm Ouroboros. E. R. Eddison’s sub-creation is wholly consistent and integrated. Its denizens know the rules of the world and what is possible. They might express amazement at the exploits of the wondrously named Brandoch Daha or at the spells of one of the many Gorices, but their awe would be like our awe at someone who climbed Mount Everest. These are incredible feats, but they are not impossible feats. It would not be like our reaction to someone who claimed they could fly. No fundamental (or seemingly fundamental) rules of the world are violated by their exploits. It is not so in Martin’s work. The seemingly impossible does happen. The maesters are convinced that magic is gone, but what could be accurately described as a frozen zombie attacks the Night’s Watch. Now, this does not actually violate the rules of the world. By starting with his prologue and the Others, Martin makes sure to let the reader know the real rules of the game. But the characters do not have that luxury. Their worldview is incomplete, and it is violated by what is (to them) the supernatural. From the Westerosi viewpoint, the Others marching south of the Wall is the quite literal intrusion of the fantastic into the world. Martin’s characters are subjected to something akin to Cthulhu rising from the Pacific.

This does not, of course, mean that A Game of Thrones or A Song of Ice and Fire is not an immersion fantasy. It is set in a detailed secondary world and, save the paratexts^[5], contains no hint of Earth. Its story is certainly one about the world of Westeros. In fact, the idea of ancient evils returning – essentially, intrusion fantasies – is not a rare one in immersion fantasies. Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time – another recent, sprawling, and best-selling fantasy series – uses the same concept. Even The Lord of the Rings plays on similar ground. Suaron, after all, is a foe from past ages, though characters like Galadriel that can speak about that ancient history with perfect accuracy complicate the effect in Tolkien. The techniques of an intrusion fantasy are compatible with the world of an immersive fantasy and allow an author to create a different effect than can be had from simply establishing one set of rules and never toying with them.

For Martin, this technique is the final hammer he can use to hit his characters’ illusions. A Game of Thrones and the books that follow it set out to prove to their cast that nothing is what they thought it was. The characters’ songs, stories, and ideals of honor and knightly valor hide the truth of death screams and begging for mercy. Even their world, Martin reveals, is vastly more complex than they imagined.^[6]

Works Cited

Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam Books. 1996. Print.

---

^[1] Westeros is the continent on which the vast majority of the series’ action is set. It is also (somewhat confusingly) the name of the world.

^[2] In later volumes, Martin does include the words to some of these songs, such as the Rains of Castamere, but none are present in A Game of Thrones.

^[3] Though A Game of Thrones has many aspects of a romance, Martin’s too concerned with “character development” and the psychology of his narrators to not be considered a novelist. Indeed, it is precisely that character development that he so often uses to poke holes in romance and romantic ideals. [Note: a central issue in our class was whether works of Fantasy qualified as true Novels as opposed to as Romances.]

^[4] It’s too simple, therefore, to say that Martin thinks all knowledge – songs, stories, books – is misleading. In the first place, he seems to divide between cultural lore or stories and what is critical, studied. The former is a very poor guide to the day-to-day world, while the maesters really are valuable advisors. But the maesters are worthless against supernatural menaces that defy all reason.

^[5] Though it’s never stated in the text itself, an argument could be made that the genealogies in the back are in-world texts. They never explicitly address an out of world reader, and, as we see Ned reading The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses, we know that there are genealogies created by and for Westerosi.

^[6] Finally, I should note that A Game of Thrones did, thankfully, hold up to my memories of it. I can no longer quite call it the greatest book of all time, but my fears of finding out that everything I’d loved about it were just cool due to having read less at the time proved unfounded.

Finals

This week is the delightful time of finals, which means that the time I would usually have to write and edit a review is being taken up by writing and studying antiquity, The Jungle, and the poetry of John Donne. Your regular (hopefully) in-depth and (possibly) insightful content will return next week.

Innsmouth Free Press Issue 12 Interviews

I've posted about Innsmouth Free Press' twelfth and newest issue before. Suffice to say, it's damn good Weird Fiction, and you should read it. Since, I've been doing a series of interviews with the contributors to the issue. As interviews with Weird Fiction authors clearly fall under this blog's purview, I figured I'd link those of you here to them:

Allen Griffin
KL Pereira
Steve Toase
E. Catherine Tobler

Of course, that's not the full roster of contributors yet. The rest should be up in the next few weeks, and I'll post again once they are.

In other IFP news, it's worth pointing out that the Swords and Mythos table of contents is out now and that there is a forthcoming collection of Mythos fiction from Nick Mamatas. The biggest change, though, is that the IFP magazine will no longer be free to read. That's sad news. The silver lining, though, is that, in addition to paid ebooks, print editions will be available. Being as big a fan of print fiction as I am, I can't regard this as all bad news.

Joan Sclonczewski - A Door into Ocean

Last semester, I took Professor Slonczewski’s “Biology in Science Fiction” class at Kenyon College. It’s a course she’s well qualified to teach. When not a professor and microbiologist, Slonczewski pens novels, and I’m sure a fair few here have encountered her name numerous times before and without the “professor” bit before it. Her second novel, A Door into Ocean, not only introduced her Elysium setting but also won her the John. W. Campbell award for best novel. With a scientist’s rigor and a writer’s imaginative flair, Slonczewski brings us to the ocean world of Shora. Other humans aren’t far behind us. Shora’s inhabitants, the Sharers, are about to be challenged by the military might of the Valans.

The contrast between Valans and Sharers, however, is more than environmental, and theirs is not simply a power struggle – it is, rather, a question of the very uses and expressions of power, of the structure of society, and of what is necessary for civilization to function. Of, even, what it is to be human. This is Science Fiction, after all, and the human race has long since learned how to destroy.

Mankind lives a life of strict control. The wonders that the Valans and their offworld overlords command are bare shadows of what they once were. Once, the human race was nearly wiped out, and now they live lives shaped so as to forget such a catastrophe’s recurrence. Theirs is a world carefully structured to exclude forbidden sciences (p. 33) and all learning that is not permissible (ibid). Their structure is strictly hierarchical, and it is a well armed hierarchy. Each level does all in its power to keep the entire structure intact by keeping the level below too weak to destroy it, a mechanism well illustrated when a city is annihilated for its flirtation with illicit nuclear power. Towards the novel’s end, a ruler of many worlds, a man well used to ordering genocides, gives his justifications: “How little keeps our world intact, safe from the law of the jungle. Always, in every age, a few strong men bear the burden of civilization.” (p. 393)

The Sharers, on the other hand, live a life of limitless technological and political potential. Their society is egalitarian and leaderless. Their decisions are made in gatherings. Where the Valans restrict every citizen to the point where he cannot harm himself or others, the Sharers give each and every one of themselves, each self-namer, limitless power. As Spinel characterizes it: Without any nobles and commoners, everyone got to be a High Protector (p. 61). This is joined by the Sharers’ immense technological strength. It is the Valans who come with guns, but we soon realize that each and every Valan can only live on Shora at the sufferance of the Sharers. The Sharers’ mastery of biotechnology is such that they, with ease, defeat any measure of the Valans that they find too intrusive, such that they could, with no trouble at all, devise a virus to end the threat.

This strength of the Sharers is kept cloistered by their personal restraint and strength of character, by what might even be called their wisdom. Despite their strength, violence is anathema to them. What it means to be a self-namer is to recognize oneself in the mirror of the water and in others, to understand the humanity that exists outside yourself, and to grasp a picture of life far vaster than your own concerns. That grasp, the ability to become a self-namer, is the defining feature of sentience to the Sharers, the defining feature of even humanity. As is said: There is more to a human than physiology (p. 77). It is not, either, a grasp that you can reach and then disregard. For, to truly understand life and humanity as it exists outside of yourself, is to step forever outside your own boundaries and to never again end your considerations with your own flesh and physical needs: Conscious beings were meant to control pain, to say yes or no to their physical selves, else how could their souls be freed? (p. 289). (It may be interesting to note, while we are on the subject, that the idea of humanity defined by transcending pain is one of many places ((another of which is the environment of her novel)) in which Slonzcewski is responding to Frank Herbert’s Dune.)

Of course, if we are defining humanity more by philosophy and behavior than by physiology, it’s suddenly rather questionable if the Valans fit the Sharer definition. And that’s a question that’s rather more than academic. If the Valans aren’t humans but just some particularly ferocious breed of beasts, than the Sharer viruses can be unloosed upon them without a backwards thought.

A Door into Ocean is a book about conflict, but that conflict is primarily philosophical. The Sharers have the ability to wipe out the Valans; if they choose not to exercise it, the Valans can more than certainly gun down their unresisting gatherings. As neither a one-stroke victory nor a protracted slaughter have all that much in the way of dramatic tension about them, our plot is less concerned with mechanics than it is with persuasion. Well the factions exercise the powers that they have? That question gives us the novel’s two arcs. The Sharer judgment on humanity is not only contingent upon their watching of the Valan hordes. Spinel, a Valan youth, was brought to the Sharer world just before the conflict’s height for just such a judgment, and we see his attempts to integrate into their (alien, entirely female, and landless) society. On the other side, we have the Valan resolve tested by Sharer pacifism and nonviolent resistance.

Both arcs are interesting ideas well conceived and explored that are dampened but not destroyed by their transformative moments being overstated and often rather cheesy. Slonczewski, I think it is safe to hazard, is rather more comfortable writing ecosystems and societies than single people or close friendships. This isn’t to say that she is a bad writer of character, necessarily. Her skill at conceiving and, then, depicting the interactions between people and the environment and society lead to moments of insight into people as well as into fish. Spinel’s youthful perspective and voice comes across authentically and leads to moments of juvenile but insightful commentary like that about high protectors quoted some paragraphs above.

In moments where the character has to come to the fore, however, moments of high and uncontrollable emotion, Slonczewski often falters, and characters begin to act out in the most dramatic and abrupt manners, leaving the reader’s emotions a good distance behind them in the dust. One characters sudden decision to enjoy some nice terrorism would likely be the prime contender for this, but she isn’t alone. For Spinel, crises are chiefly met with temper tantrums. This could be, to some extent, a function of his age, but it is no less exasperating for it, and, when hundreds of pages and huge personal growth later, Spinel reacts to an event with yet another fit of toddler-appropriate wrath, the reader can’t help but stare uncomfortably at how little he's come.

The dramatic power of nonresistance, meanwhile, is weakened by the inevitability of its victory. This is most obvious when Spinel brings its lessons to his hometown, where the police grumble for about five minutes before going home and giving way, but it sadly doesn’t vanish when the Sharers face the full might of the Valan military. The philosophical conflict at the novel’s heart is one with a very clearly favored side.

The Valans are a bunch of sadistic murderers. The second in command has a plan: “Line up those little ones and snuff them out before their mothers’ eyes. That would get results.” (p. 292) The overseer does too: “You shall activate the satellites to burn out the entire native population of the Ocean Moon. To the last mother and child – do I make myself clear?” (p. 391The main guy himself is no better. He is, after all, convinced that: In warfare there were no innocents (p. 206), and, knowing that, it was galling to have to protect natives along with his troops, and he hoped it would not be interpreted as a weakness (p. 284).

Is this a crowd that has gained your sympathies yet? No? Thought not. When one side is cackling while it devours babies, the reader knows who’s going to win long before the decision’s made, and so the Sharer’s victory becomes a matter not of if but of how, a persuasion that is essentially fated to occur. Besides which, the dissonance of having Valans intellectually capable of grasping the Sharer argument and yet subscribing so long to their kill and burn nonsense is rather hard to reconcile when the moment of epiphany comes knocking.

One last note on the Valan military: its leader, Raelgar, is the fiancé of one of the humans living with the Sharers. She soon realizes how much of a bastard he is, but that betrayal is not so stunning for the reader. It’s a situation nearly identical to that shown in Vernor Vinge’s disappointing The Children of the Sky. In both, a protagonist’s fiancé turns out to be the embodiment of darkness, and we are expected to feel the betrayal of it. But neither shows us the loving relationship that must precede such a betrayal, an omission that just leaves us wondering how the sane one could ever love the beast. Why do Science Fiction authors seem to think that our sympathies are immediately secured by the mere mention of an engagement?

Such issues, though, are not wholly damning. A Door into Ocean is a novel that is absolutely fantastic in its ideas and good even if not great in its execution. It brings a strange world to light, plays out a grand and excellently conceived conflict in its pages, and raises innumerable interesting questions (its treatment of gender, for instance, is an absolutely fascinating issue that I must admit I find myself unqualified to dig deeply into).

H.P. Lovecraft - "The Nameless City"

That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die (p. 30).

For the Lovecraft enthusiast, the most obvious lures of “The Nameless City” are bibliographic, the way that it introduces Abdul Alhazred and his couplet (quoted above) and prefigures At the Mountains of Madness with the idea of artwork giving a window into a lost civilization’s history. But it is also a powerful tale in its own right. As the narrator descends beneath the sands of Araby, Lovecraft displays his gifts at toying with history and building atmosphere, but he also works with wonder in a way which I had not often considered in my prior readings of his work.

[Be warned before continuing that I am assuming some familiarity with Lovecraft as a whole and so will not be going into great detail on the more obvious topics, such as the specifics of his dark revelations (in a word, scale; in a few, the realization that the universe is infinitely vaster than we are and that we do not matter) or how many adjectives he can cram into a single sentence. There will, also, be some spoilers for the story discussed. Finally, note that all page numbers come from the Penguin Classics edition of The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, edited by S.T. Joshi.]

In popular culture and brief references, Lovecraft is often reduced to one emotion: fear. Occasionally, at moments of great specificity, that might be clarified to fear of the unknown. I don’t mean this in a purely derogatory way. Fear of the unknown is a huge part of Lovecraft’s work, and he evokes it masterfully. But “The Nameless City” exhibits the other driving force behind much of Lovecraft’s work: wonder, and our need for it.

The narrator here is not forced into his predicament. He came to the Nameless City of his own volition, well aware of its reputation. He endured many hardships to see it, even excepting those he encountered after his arrival that he could never have expected. Early on, he talks of “curiosity stronger than fear” (p. 32). Shortly afterwards, he writes of “that instinct for the strange and unknown which has made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places” (p. 34). Curiosity, the drive to seek the wondrous, then, is a matter integral to the narrator’s character. And it is admirable. We are not dealing with a dallier, here, but rather with a man that has managed to trace forgotten legends to their source, one whose search for knowledge has left him fluent in Lord Dunsany’s short stories, Thomas Moore’s poetry, and Greek mythology.

This need for wonder is not a fleeting thing. It might be the driving force for the erudition just discussed, but it goes farther than that. Just before descending into the Nameless City, the narrator says that he was “more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder” (p. 33). Fear, then, goes beyond what can be put into words, past what is rational. But so does wonder, for the narrator’s wonder trumps his fear. Remember, after all, that he has not yet entered the city when he feels that way. He could have simply turned around and seen no more. Right up until the final revelation, the narrator insists that “wonder drove out fear” (p. 39).

Let us step back for a moment and remember that this is the Lovecraft that, in a 1930 letter to August Derleth, wrote that: Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat – especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. An escape from strict, material reality like the kind that Lovecraft there described certainly sounds like a matter for wonder to me.

In fact, it leaves me wondering if wonder might not be the other pole of the cosmic dread that makes up so much of Lovecraft’s worldview, if his protagonists, aware of the unsatisfactory nature of the mundane, find that their only chance at joy is to strive for something greater than what is commonly perceived. That question is starting to go beyond “The Nameless City,” admittedly. While the narrator certainly does show a drive for wonder, we do not get to see any of his ordinary life, nor his state before the expedition. But the distinction between wonder and terror is one I certainly do plan to keep in mind when I next return to Lovecraft’s work.

What “The Nameless City” does provide in ample detail is how a search for wonder, for something greater than the limited perception that we all have ends if it ever really succeeds. Needless to say, it ends poorly. By the time he has escaped the Nameless City, the narrator can bleakly boast that “no other man shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows” (p. 30). The knowledge he has gained burns away any shred of joyous wonder.

In his imparting of that overawing knowledge, Lovecraft operates by taking successive steps away from the narrator’s comfort zone, enlarging the frame each time but doing so by subtle enough degrees that we follow him until the final shocks. From Araby* to the uncharted desert to the ruins to the strange temple and on, each step seems tied to the last. Many of the piece’s more evocative details serve to bridge and strengthen the gaps between conceptual shifts. The seemingly source-less wind that leads the narrator to the passageway down, for instance, is an admirably physical hook that keeps things from feeling too easy or too bodilessly concerned with alien art.

(* In any other author, the fact that “Araby” seems utterly unpopulated save for the narrator and a few briefly mentioned sheiks would seem like whitewashing. In Lovecraft’s work, it just left me glad that we were spared any execrable descriptions of cultic natives dancing about a fire.)

The most interesting thing about the different stages might be how easy it is to cross from one to the next. It does not, of course, look that way at first. “There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive” (p. 30) Lovecraft tells us of the Nameless City before, after a semicolon, continuing with: “but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandmas in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why” (ibid).

Of course, if there are no legends about it and no one has ever heard of it, it is difficult to see how so many people are whispering about it. One could be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that Lovecraft let his grandiosity get away with him. But I think the seeming contradiction shows something deeper. There are barriers to seeing the cosmic truths behind the mundane, but those barriers are perspectival and not material. It is not that all knowledge of this past is truly gone. Rather, we fervently wish that all knowledge of it was, and so we loudly declare that even as we whisper the truth to those closest to us.

Then there is the crucial fact that Lovecraft does not reach the end of these stages. He never says that he is done, that all truth has been revealed, and that the reader can rest contented. Rather, at the end, he gives us a glimpse of more vistas yet to come, even if we could never manage to tread upon them. The artwork grants the narrator great knowledge, but it is incomplete. It does not take him to the present day. Instead, he is left knowing that: “Of what could have happened in the deological aeons since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say” (p. 39). The final revelation, then, is that, even with the veil torn back, there is still an incomprehensible vastness beyond it, still infinitely more to be known that can never be known, other and innumerable gaps of cosmic time that even this monolithic revelation cannot come close to filling.

I would like to end, though, on a slightly smaller scale: with an allusion to mythology. As the narrator journeys to the Nameless City, he sees the sun, and we hear that he “fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile” (p. 31). To those that either know the myth or alternatively turned to S.T. Joshi’s handy footnote (I will admit that I fell into the later category), the description of the natural world seems poetic, tinged with greater stories and imaginings. Lovecraft brings the allusion back at the tale’s end, and those same words are then utterly overshadowed by the vaster horrors below. Similarly, wonder functions in the story throughout, growing putrid and awful as it is attained but no less present for it.