Vacation Necronomicon School – assignment one

Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 26th July 2010: “Dagon”.

“Your short assignment today is to ruminate on this ‘scientific’ aspect of his work — horrible things that remain generally unseen are unearthed.”

TASK ONE: 26th July 2010.

The short story “Dagon” was written in July 1917, partly inspired by one of Lovecraft’s dreams. There are four main elements in it that touch on science and technology: the German “sea-raider”; the unknown hieroglyphics; the volcanic or seismic activity that causes the sea-bed to rise to the surface; and the morphine. As I will show, all these in some way contain elements of ‘unearthing’ or ‘surfacing’.

Submarines: The First World War had recently engulfed America, and the story suggests Lovecraft had read many reports in the newspapers of submarine warfare. On 1st Feb 1917 Germany had declared unrestricted Atlantic submarine warfare, and America had consequently declared war on Germany on 6th April 1917.

There were navy patrols along the Atlantic-facing coastline of New England, necessary because in May 1917 German long-range minelayer submarines laid mines off the coast of New England. The summer of 1917 was the zenith of the U-boat submarines, a time when no mechanisms of ocean-going defence — such as acoustic detection and convoy formations — had yet been found against them. So here we have a loathsome skulking underwater menace, one that indestructibly lives in and rises from the deep — although this is of course a product of efficient German science, in contrast to Lovecraft’s creature, which is described as…

“Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome […] gigantic scaly arms […] hideous head”

Nevertheless, the sleek squid-like tube of the submarine, firing tor*profound*es that send out long tentacle-like strands, might seem to bear some visual resemblance to the Cephalopoda. Lovecraft returned to the theme of German U-boats, from a German perspective, in “The Temple” (1920) — a story in which all the crew die.

Hieroglyphs: Having become a keen young astronomer and then taken an interest in chemistry, Lovecraft may at some point have also considered becoming an archaeologist. It would have seemed an obvious career, if he had not been so rooted in Providence by sentiment and poverty.

“The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books, consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales and the like.” — “Dagon”.

This was the gung-ho era of archaeology, when amateur scholar-adventurers could hook up with rich explorers to make fabulous discoveries. Just five years after “Dagon” one Howard Carter — then a middle-aged gentleman living in genteel poverty as a tour guide and with a small sideline in antiquities dealing, and a familiar surname to Lovecraft fans — would become a media sensation after discovering the tomb of Tutankhamen. Yet North America — and New England in particular — seems at that time to have been a rather unpromising place for professional archaeologists seeking mysteries from before time. Several essays in Theosophist magazines of 1917 do however suggest opportunities and undecipherable hieroglyphs in Mexico and South America, such as this one…

This would be the career route later taken and pioneered by Lovecraft’s young acolyte and friend R.H. Barlow.

The seabed: In the history of oceanic and seabed exploration, the 1889-1922 period was a high-point of biological discovery, and the Atlantic had long been mapped by earlier seabed surveys — undertaken since about 1860 — for the purposes of laying the trans-Atlantic telegraph cables. Popular reports of the strange new deep-sea creatures, and magazine maps of the deep uncharted chasms, may have excited Lovecraft’s imagination.

Ancient seabeds would also have been in the news, since this was the highpoint of the amazingly rich fossil discoveries in the famous Burgess Shales (1910-1917). Found more than 2,000 metres above sea, the shales once lay more than 100 feet below the ancient ocean. The fossil creatures found there bear no resemblance to those currently living on earth.

Living where he did, Lovecraft would of course have been familiar with the ebb and flow of tidal estuaries, exposing strange landscapes and smells at low tide. As to “new land” being pushed up locally to Lovecraft, the book New England and the Sea (1972) states that…

“tidal action has also joined former islands like Marblehead, Nahant, and Hull to the mainland by long bars and has added many square miles of new land”.

Recent violent volcanic activity had occurred in the USA in the years before 1917, and must have been sensationally reported in the press. There were…

“a series of spectacular eruptions from Lassen Peak between 1914 and 1917” […] “The most destructive explosion occurred on May 21, when a pyroclastic flow devastated forests as far as 6.5 kilometers northeast of the summit and lahars swept down several valleys radiating from the volcano. An enormous ash plume rose more than 9 kilometers above the peak, and the prevailing winds scattered the ash across Nevada as far as 500 kilometers to the east. Lassen Peak continued to produce smaller eruptions until about the middle of 1917.”

The National Geographic magazine had published a long illustrated article on the “Hidden Perils of the Deep” (September 1909), which Lovecraft may have seen…

“Volcanic action in well authenticated cases has caused islands to rise or disappear. In the present location of Bogoslof Island, in Bering Sea, the early voyagers described a “sail rock.” In this position in 1796 there arose a high island. In 1883 another island appeared near it. In 1906 a high cone arose between the two, and a continuous island was formed about 2 miles long and 500 feet high. […] Earthquakes sometimes cause sudden displacements, horizontal or vertical, of sufficient amount to affect the information shown on the charts…”

Morphine: Dagon opens with the narrator destitute and addicted to morphine in a garret…

“Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone, makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate.”

Lovecraft must have been especially familiar with the nature of morphine due to his study of chemistry, and it was a common enough prescription drug in America in the early years of the century. I believe morphine or its derivatives were also commonly used in cough mixtures and the like during the 1910s and 1920s. He would also have been aware of the debt which dream-literature owes to the use of laudanum and opium by 19th century British poets.

There is, however, a contemporary news element that Lovecraft may have drawn on for Dagon. The book Dark Paradise: a history of opiate addiction in America (2001) reports several outbreaks of non-medical use of heroin in 1916, but it quickly fell into disuse…

“except in New York and surrounding cities”

… where a subculture was able to be established due to ease of access to supplies. Addicts of morphine and heroin were then overwhelmingly young men, according to Dark Paradise, and in cities such as New York there may have been links with gay prostitution. Underground criminal networks which could supply such drugs were at that time growing in the USA, and these would flourish in the corruption of the 1920s and 30s.

“Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths.” — Dagon.

“the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head” — Dagon. Illustration by Josef Kuwasseg, in “The Primitive World in Its Different Period of Formation” (1851).