THE CAVE OF FREEDOM AND RESTRAINT

 

In my essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALLSET YOU FREE, I noted one of the vital distinctions between philosophy and literature: that philosophy attempts to suss out truth from falsehood, while literature’s primary function is to promote fictions that have an ambiguous relationship to “truth,” whatever a given artist’s personal convictions may be. For instance, Dave Sim may believe explicitly in the revelations of the “Peoples of the Book,” but he’s still encoding those beliefs within the context of the fiction called CEREBUS.

Numerous philosophers have come up with metaphors for the search for truth, but in my personal opinion no one has ever topped Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave," summarized thusly:

Plato tells of men who have remained closed since they were children in a subterranean cave, chained so that they can only see the bottom of the cave.

Behind them stands a high and remote light, and between the light and the prisoners there is a wall that runs alongside a path. On the path walk some people carrying different objects, some argue, others do not.

Whoever is in the caves, having never observed the true object, thinks that the shadow cast at the bottom of the cave must be the real object, and that the echoes are the true voices of those people.

A prisoner frees himself and goes up the cave.

For him it is long and painful, because his eyes, which are not accustomed to light, hurt so much more that he approaches the opening of the cave.

Once accustomed, however, the prisoner can see that the shadows were only the projection of the objects brought by the servants behind the wall and now he thinks these are the real objects.

It tells of men who have remained closed since they were children in a subterranean cave, chained so that they can only see the bottom of the cave.

Behind them stands a high and remote light, and between the light and the prisoners there is a wall that runs alongside a path. On the path walk some people carrying different objects, some argue, others do not.

Whoever is in the caves, having never observed the true object, thinks that the shadow cast at the bottom of the cave must be the real object, and that the echoes are the true voices of those people.

A prisoner frees himself and goes up the cave.

For him it is long and painful, because his eyes, which are not accustomed to light, hurt so much more that he approaches the opening of the cave.

Once accustomed, however, the prisoner can see that the shadows were only the projection of the objects brought by the servants behind the wall and now he thinks these are the real objects.

The dominant interpretation of the allegory is that the chained people in the cave, able to perceive only shadows of the reality beyond the cave, symbolize human confinement to the input of their physical senses. According to the idealism of Plato (sometimes given the chimerical name of “Realism”), the World of Forms is the actual Truth Beyond the Cave, and presumably the individual who escapes the cave, and tries to convey that insight to his chained fellows, symbolizes the dilemma of the Platonic philosopher.

In addition of my deeming this the best of the “truth-seeking” metaphors, I would hazard that this may be the best known metaphor in philosophy as a whole, given that it furnishes the reader with all the basic challenges of epistemology. Further, the Cave-Allegory may be seen as consequential for the two major branches of metaphenomenal fiction: what we call “fantasy” and “science fiction.”

There have been dozens of involved histories of both “super-genres,” but I’m most concerned with the ways in which both categories developed in the late 1800s. Despite many significant precursors, the two super-genres receive their greatest codification in this period, when Jules Verne and H.G. Wells defined science fiction and William Morris defined the alternate-world fantasy. (To be sure, horror fiction undergoes a similar codification in this period, but many works in this genre make so much use of either “fantasy motifs” or “science fiction motifs” that I can’t think of horror as being entirely separable from the other two.)

Plato’s allegory in itself evokes both images of freedom and restraint; of human beings bound by their physical circumstances but nonetheless capable of obtaining some degree of freedom. Readers of this blog will be familiar with my assertion that human existence is characterized by both “affective freedom” and “cognitive restraint.” We can imagine nearly anything, despite being restrained by all the demands of physicality, winsomely styled as the “Four F’s:” food (edible matter), flax (clothing), flags (shelter) and frig (continuance of the species). As I wrote previously, the imagination may or may not lead to useful inventions that enhance the physical quality of life, but it should always be seen as instrumental to all mental formulations.

Now, fantasy and science fiction pursue distinct epistemological patterns, each in tune with the dominant matrix in which they exist. In science fictional worlds, all wonders are predicated on extensions of scientific principles, while in fantasy, they arise from the concept of magic, which may range from traditional “faerie” spellcraft to organized notions of thaumaturgy. Within all of these worlds, the main characters are generally in the position of the man freed from the chains of his fellows and propelled into a greater cosmos.

In fantasy, a common trope is to show a youth who lives in a bucolic existence, and who finds himself drawn into events of cosmic importance, often involving the combat of good and bad wizards and/or deities. Morris uses a rough variation of this trope in his four fantasy-novels, particularly in THE SUNDERINGFLOOD, though he isn’t as successful in giving his protagonist a grounding in the magical principles governing the world. Morris’s spiritual disciple Tolkien is of course famous for having hurled protagonists Bilbo and Frodo into the greater world of sorcery, walking trees and enchanted rings. The bucolic world of the Shire, from which both hobbits hail, does not as a whole wish to be tainted with all of these momentous and enigmatic presences, but its inhabitants are not really able to reject the magical cosmos in a manner comparable to the chained people in the Cave. The very idea of magic, as a force that transcends the limits of time and space, stands aligned with the concept of affective freedom.

In contrast, the epistemology of the Cave has a more ambivalent function in science fiction. For all the differences between Verne and Wells, they have in common the fact that many of their scientific seekers—the ones who part company with the world of ordinary reality—meet catastrophic fates, explicit with respect to Captain Nemo, implicit with respect to the Time Traveler. Thus, science fiction can be somewhat aligned with the concept of cognitive restraint, and not only because the forces of science—even those of made-up, “impossible” science—are supposed to cohere with the limits of time and space.

At the same time, science fiction shows a greater emphasis upon following the destiny of the society than that of the individual. Wells’ Eloi and Morlocks are bound by the chains of a chimerical evolution much as are Plato’s cavepeople, and they are doomed never to escape, existing to illustrate to the protagonist the futility of life. Yet many of Wells’ disciples altered the Platonic paradigm in order to promote a triumphalism of science. It would probably be difficult to find a science fiction author who advocated “truth” in a Platonic World of Forms, but there are hundreds who see capital-S “Science” as such a truth. Science fiction is riddled with protagonists who live in some constricted society, whose people know nothing of scientific principles, but who break free and bring the Good News of Science to convert disbelievers. Such cosmic conversions underlie the enduring appeal of a series like Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION trilogy, where the advocates of a logical means of “reading history” are proven to have superior insight over all competitors.

Not a few advocates of science fiction have shown themselves to be hostile to the representations of fantasy, confounding the fictional premises of fantasy-stories with resentment of real-world religion and/or superstition. In so doing, they validate only those products of the imagination which seem to champion real-world science—even though, in point of fact, constructs like Niven’s “Ringworld” and Blish’s “Cities in Space” are not likelier to come into being than elves and orcs. It’s a shame that science fiction enthusiasts have made this conflation, for the activity of trying to fit the human imagination into a box is not only fatuous, but futile beyond anyone’s attempt to—imagine.

THE READING RHEUM: THE NIGHT LAND (1912)

Over the years, as I’ve researched the evolution of fantasy-concepts in prose fiction—with special attention to their significance for either the superhero idiom or the combative mode—I’ve meant to force myself to re-read the 20,000 word monster known as William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND. It’s probably been thirty years since I first read it, and even then, such critics as C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft warned me in advance that many of the novel’s virtues were impaired by assorted vices. I remember agreeing with those critics in large part. On my second (and probably last) reading, I’m less impressed with the specific virtues of NIGHT LAND than with its place in fantasy-lit history.

The year of the book’s publication, 1912, boasts at least four major conceptual achievements. In America Edgar Rice Burroughs authored two of the four, debuting both Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. In the same year two English authors, Sax Rohmer and Arthur Conan Doyle, conceived respectively the first great Asian supervillain, Fu Manchu, and the first perfectly preserved prehistoric domain, the Lost World. Four years previous, William Hope Hodgson had published his best-conceived novel, THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, and in 1912 he sought to up the ante with an even more ambitious fantasy-scape, THE NIGHT LAND.

Though there had various “fantastic voyage” tales before THE NIGHT LAND, I don’t know how many succeeded in picturing a futuristic version of Earth in apocalyptic terms. Readers of the late 20^th century grew up on numerous post-apocalyptic tales where Earth was ravaged by disaster, often nuclear holocaust, and reshaped into a bizarre new environment, but such stories were relatively rare in the early 2oth. NIGHT LAND doesn’t even sport a disaster as such. Following a lame framing-device, in which a man of relatively modern times suffers bereavement, he imagines a far-future world dominated by darkness and strange lurking monsters. Most of humankind has been eradicated, and the survivors endure in a few super-scientific cities known as “Redoubts.” In contrast to later post-apocalyptic worlds, the nameless hero’s purpose is not to redeem the fallen world, but to rescue a single woman, implicitly the reincarnation of the woman who dies during the framing-device. The modern man and the future-man are inexplicably the same person, and both of them talk in a fustian manner that reminds me of the labored language of medieval epics. It’s this literary style—coupled with a first-person narration that eschews any dialogue—that makes the monstrous NIGHT LAND so hard to enjoy.

I’ll call the unnamed narrator “X,” since Hodgson once published a cut-down version of the novel entitled THE DREAM OF X. X lives in the largest of the human enclaves, a vast pyramid known as the Last Redoubt. Implicitly futuristic technology keeps these scions of humanity alive against the external threats, though for Hodgson future-science is just a source of visual wonders and nothing more. In the course of the novel X sometimes makes veiled references to evolution, though not using that specific name, but similarly, his creator has no interest in showing how the Night Land evolved from the old world. This provides yet more common ground with the world of the medieval romance, wherein noble knights forged through assorted strange domains like nothing on Earth, scaring up witches and dragons and knights of evil intent.

X, though for the most part an ordinary man, possesses a form of telepathy, and this allows him to apprehend that another human enclave, the Lesser Redoubt, has been attacked by the Night Land’s monsters. However, at least one woman has survived: Naani, who is the reincarnation of the woman lost by the original narrator. “Five hundred youths” of the Last Redoubt storm forth to fight the monsters, and they’re all killed. So X decides to mount a lone rescue-mission, moving on foot and armed only with a weapon called a “Discos,” which can cut through monster-flesh like a buzzsaw.

Lewis and Lovecraft opined that the first half of the novel, with the warrior making his way through the Night Land, was better than the second half, in which X locates Naani and starts the arduous process of taking her back to the Last Redoubt. Granting that in both sections Hodgson’s style is archaic, prolix, and monotonous, I became a little more interested once X reached the halfway mark, and was forced thereafter to guard over a mostly helpless maiden during his exploits. (Naani does stab one of the various monsters that attack the couple on their way back, but a valkyrie she ain’t.) One point of interest is that though X does get Naani back to their refuge, the occasion is almost marked by tragedy, but Hodgson allows for a happy ending after all.

In addition to castigating the horribly affected style Hodgson attempts in the novel, Lovecraft and Lewis blast the romantic arc, with the former attacking the “sticky romantic sensibility” and the latter assailing the “irrelevant erotic interest.” Indeed, in editor Lin Carter’s introduction to Ballantine’s 1972 paperback edition of NIGHT LAND, he remarks that Ballantine’s editors cut down a lot of the billing and cooing. Even what remains in the Ballantine edition is horrendously repetitive, and Naani is no more interesting as a character than is X: both are just stereotypes of heroine and hero. The romantic arc is never compelling, but at times there’s a mild perverse interest in seeing how Hodgson depicts feminine impracticality during the long pilgrimage. The two protagonists naturally never have sex, since they’re not married, but Hodgson devotes so much space to telling us how often they kiss that a modern reader has to wonder.

Editor Lin Carter compares the Night Land to the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, but that’s an overly ambitious claim. Hodgson conjures up a lot of weird horrors, including gigantic slugs and monstrous hounds, but the ones the reader sees clearly are fairly dull, and the creatures that are not seen clearly are a little too hazy and ill-defined. Hodgson isn’t interested in carefully building a picture of his apocalyptic world, he wants to evoke “the horrors of the half-seen.” But I think he was less interested in building his world than his hero: all the monsters exist only for X to slay them with his mighty Discos. In fact, the fight-scenes are the novel’s strength, particularly one in which X contends with a four-armed humanoid and literally “disarms” the monster by cutting off its upper set of arms with his weapon.

Thus THE NIGHT LAND qualifies as a combative work. However, the world itself is too vague to deserve the status of a literary myth. It strikes me as an uneasy blend of two such myths promulgated during the late 19^th century: the bizarre future-scape that appears in H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE, and the endless geographical vistas found in the faux-medieval fantasies of William Morris. I cannot say with any certainty if Hodgson had read either author; it’s possible the Night Land was inspired by other, comparable sources. But the combination of concepts seems fortuitous. Wells supplied the eerie image of a world mutated by the ravages of time, but the main action of the story was confined to a limited “stage,” a small part of England, in order to illustrate the cultural downfall of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Morris’s fantasies were the first purely literary works to take an Earth-like landscape and populate it with magical locales and inhabitants thereof. Hodgson, by cross-breeding the ideas of the apocalyptic world and the endless fantasy-landscape, didn’t so much create a new lit-myth as to pave the way for greater works to follow.