The Ecstasy of Saint Paul, by Nicolas Poussin
This is so ironic. When I first conceived
of this entire series of postings, drawing parallels between The
Skylark Trilogy and Homer, what I am now about to discuss was the
primary motivation for doing so. But now that it comes to it, I find myself in
no way up to the task. I am humbled by the audacity of the conception, and fear
that I will fail utterly to convey the unalloyed awe that overcomes me when I
catch even a glimpse of what moved Homer, Virgil, Dante, St. Paul, the unknown
author of Gilgamesh, and (yes) E.E. “Doc” Smith to plunge their hero into
the depths of the Underworld at the supreme moment of crisis in their lives.
Apollo and the Muses, by John Singer Sergeant
Perhaps it is time for me to imitate my
tutors here, and invoke the Muses for aid in completing my task.
Oh, Holy Nine.
Descend, I beseech you,
from Mount Parnassus most blessed,
And fill my feeble spirit
and quaking heart with your genius.
Despise not my
unworthiness, and call upon your divine father Apollo.
Beg for just one drop of
his skill in all the Arts,
And lend, each of you,
the peculiar talent for which you are held in so high esteem
To my pitiful efforts.
I pledge to lay whatever
stray leaves of laurel that may chance my way upon your altar
And give all credit where
it is due.
For I know all too well
that it is beyond my power to express the Truths
Revealed to me in these
writings, penned by the Great Doctor,
As he himself was
blissfully unaware of your guidance, as he sang the tale of
Richard Seaton
And The Skylark of Space!
Gilgamesh journeys to the realm of Utnapishtim
I’d wager that there isn’t anybody who has
formally studied literature who is unaware of the universal, repeating themes
that we find in every time and all countries, such as the quest, the homecoming,
and the coming of age, to name just a few. But the motif I’m interested in right
now is the journey to the Underworld. In the world’s oldest known story, The
Epic of Gilgamesh, our hero is brought to the brink of supreme crisis
with the death of his best friend Enkidu. To retain his sanity, Gilgamesh must
undertake a journey of surpassing difficulty beyond the circles of this world
to the realm of Utnapishtim, who along with his wife is the only human being
immune to death. In The Odyssey, the witch Circe tells Odysseus that he has no
hope of ever returning home unless he first voyages beyond the encircling Ocean
to the land of the dead, there to learn from the prophet Tiresias how to find
his way back to Ithaca. When Aeneas lands on the Italian peninsula, he is
compelled to make his way to Hades, there to see the unborn shades of his
descendants who are fated to found Rome and lead her to greatness. In The New
Testament, Saint Paul is carried up to the Third Heaven (quite possibly the
Sphere of Venus) as a necessary step in the preparation for his missionary
journeys. In the opening lines of The Divine Comedy, Dante finds
himself stymied at the foot of the Mountain of Bliss, unable to get past three
guardian beasts that prevent his ascent. Dante is then met by the shade of the
poet Virgil, who informs him that unless he first descend to the bottom of Hell
and climb the Mountain of Purgatory, it will not be possible for him to ascend
to Paradise. In The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn learns by gazing into the
Palantir that his only hope of saving Minas Tirith in an imminent decisive
battle is to take a roundabout route via The Paths of the Dead, and fall upon
the enemy from the rear.
Dante and Virgil at the entrance to Hell
The common thread to all these stories is
that, at a moment of ultimate tension, our hero is stopped dead in his tracks
with no hope of obtaining his goal, and discovers that the one and only way
forward is to seemingly go in the opposite direction, through the underworld,
into the realm of the dead.
Aeneas and the Cumaen Sybil, by Turner
I’m not at all sure why this must be so.
Charles Williams would no doubt tell us that all these tales are pale
mythological reflections of the true story of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell in the
time between His Crucifixion and Resurrection – the archetype of all such
journeys. But for whatever reason such forays into the Kingdom of the Dead are
baked into our collective subconscious, we can (as I stated way back on August
8th) expect great artists to deal with these matters. It is, after all, part of
their job to know about such things. But what is this? Here in Chapter 6 of Skylark
of Valeron we see Doc Smith (most definitely not a great writer!) doing something that looks suspiciously
like the same thing, apparently in blissful ignorance of what he has done.
Christ's Descent into Hell
Skylark Three ends with the
annihilation of the last of the Fenachrone, but with Seaton and company still
hurtling away from the Milky Way at an unthinkable speed. It will take many
months for them to slow down, reverse course, and return home. And it is there
in the next volume (Skylark of Valeron) in the unimaginable vastness that separates
the galaxies, where our heroes encounter for the second time the creatures of
pure intellect who very nearly did them in, way back in the first volume of the
trilogy (see the posting “Monsters” from August 24th). Smith of course takes
the reader through every detail of that meeting, which all too quickly turns threatening,
then hostile, and finally settling into open warfare.
Spaceship Skylark Three battles the Intellectuals
(Pyramid Books paperback cover illustration)
But as exciting and definitive as that
first-hand account is, Smith outdoes himself in the retelling from distant
Norlamin’s point of view, where the super scientists of that world strained to
follow the events taking place at the extreme limit of their instruments:
At the tantalizing limit of visibility, something
began to happen … The immense bulk of the Skylark disappeared behind zone after
impenetrable zone of force, and it became increasingly evident that from behind
those supposedly impervious and impregnable shields Seaton was waging a terrific
battle against some unknown opponent, some foe invisible even to fifth-order
vision.
For nothing was visible - nothing, that is,
save the released energies which, leaping through level after level, reached at
last even to the visible spectrum. Yet forces of such unthinkable magnitude
were warring there that space itself was being deformed visibly, moment by
moment. For a long time the space strains grew more and more intense, then they
disappeared instantly. Simultaneously the Skylark's screens of force went down
and she was for an instant starkly visible before she exploded into a vast ball
of appallingly radiant, flaming vapor.
In that instant of clear visibility,
however, Rovol's stupendous mind had photographed every salient visible feature
of the great cruiser of the void. Being almost at the limit of range of the
projector, details were of course none too plain; but certain things were
evident. The human beings were no longer aboard; the little lifeboat that was
Skylark Two was no longer in her spherical berth; and there were unmistakable
signs of a purposeful and deliberate departure.
"And," Rovol spoke aloud …
"although we searched minutely and most carefully all the surrounding
space we could find nothing tangible. From these observations it is all too
plain that Seaton was attacked by some intelligence wielding dirigible forces
of the sixth order; that he was able to set up a defensive pattern; that his
supply of power uranium was insufficient to cope with the attacking forces; and
that he took the last desperate means of escaping from his foes by rotating
Skylark Two into the unknown region of the fourth dimension."
So far, Seaton had proven himself more
than a match for any purely physical opponent, be it a dead sun, non-sentient
beasts, the ultra-extreme conditions at the heart of a white dwarf star, or
combat against enemy weaponry. But when confronted with an actively malevolent
will, he is compelled – just like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, St. Paul, and Dante
– to take a seemingly roundabout path. In this case, into the Fourth Dimension,
a world of utter bizarreness raised to the Nth Power, a universe of
surpassingly strange inhabitants to whom our supposedly solid bodies are
thinner than any imaginable tissue paper, an environment that strains our 3-dimensional
intellects to the breaking point.
Now I am in no way proposing that Smith’s
Fourth Dimension is some sort of Kingdom of the Dead. This is, after all, a
Super Science Epic, a “Space Opera” if you will, and we have to tease our
profundities out of a more prosaic raw material. And as I must insist over and
over again, it is my contention that Smith had no inkling of the significance
of what he has written here. And it is that very unawareness that makes what
Smith is doing here so fascinating. For he did not set out to create myth, or
to shed light on our deepest yearnings as human beings, but was simply telling
a cracking good yard, using what was then cutting edge science as his
framework. But like it or not, even if he were totally indifferent to such
things, Smith was inexorably pulled into our collective mythos like iron
filings aligning themselves with the poles of a magnet. The fact that it was done
(to all appearances) unconsciously only proves that such ideas are deeply imbedded
in our psyche. To repeat what I wrote three months ago:
“Homer was right
because E.E. Smith said the same things by accident.”
Dante at the Gates of Dis
But what exactly do all these adventures in the Underworld mean? Why do
they so often crop up in our collective mythos, and always at the same time? I
believe they occur when we realize that our main battle is not with some
external enemy, but within ourselves. In the first 8 cantos of The Divine
Comedy, Dante had encountered the sins of the appetite (lust, gluttony,
avarice, anger). Here in these upper circles of Hell, the intellect is not so
much engaged as it is suppressed. (Dante illustrates this by having his pilgrim
swoon in very nearly every circle.) But traveling deeper, he comes to the iron Walls
of Dis, the infernal city. Within these walls lie the sins where the intellect
is actively engaged (heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery). Hitherto the passages
between Hell's concentric circles had been guarded by brainless monsters -
Minos, Cerberus, Pluto. But now the ramparts are manned by the demons
themselves, pure intellect totally depraved. Dante can progress no further, and
even his guide Virgil is no help. Virgil is the allegorical representation of
art, culture, and civilization itself. But unaided, these prove helpless in the
face of Pure Evil. Virgil must call upon divine assistance to proceed, which
arrives in the form of a heavenly angel who rebukes the demons and scatters them
before our pilgrim.
The literary device of a voyage to the Underworld serves the purpose of
indicating that the story's protagonist has come to the realization that
victory or defeat is a matter of internal struggle.
“The battleline between good and evil runs through
the heart of every man.” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
“For we are not contending against flesh and blood,
but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of
this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the
heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12)
