THE DEEP ONES: "Scarlet Dream" by C.L. Moore

"Scarlet Dream" by C.L. Moore

Discussion begins on February 24.

First published in the May 1934 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://tinyurl.com/hxt3euo

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?56927

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams
Virtuous Vampires
Northwest Smith

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Smith
https://www.sfsite.com/04a/ne293.htm
http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/blog/c-l-moore-pioneer-of-weird-fiction/
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/many-names-catherine-lucille-moore/
http://tinyurl.com/zrzj4uy

@artturnerjr posted the following link using the Google Books search, I hope to use it:

"Scarlet Dream":
http://tinyurl.com/hxt3euo

Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith for me.

>2 elenchus:

Thanks! I went back and looked but somehow missed Art's link. Whew! Now I can read it. :)

I'll place it up above.

"These tales have a peculiar quality of cosmic weirdness, hard to define but easy to recognize, which marks them out as really unique... In these tales there is an indefinable atmosphere of vague outsideness and cosmic dread which marks weird work of the best sort. The distinctive thing about Miss Moore is her ability to devise conditions and sights and phenomena of utter strangeness and originality, and to describe them in a language conveying something of their outre, phantasmagoric, and dread-filled quality."

H. P. Lovecraft on C. L. Moore

The unmentionable menace that eventually will kill each of the people who become trapped in its little world--don't even think about it--put me in mind of the Doctor Who episode "The God Complex," where the environment turned out to be a simulation on an interstellar prison ship.

Moore often devised this sort of "pocket world," in both Jirel and Northwest stories. Are they actually on other planets? Outside of our universe altogether? Completely staged in the mind of the protagonist by a powerful outside intelligence? There doesn't seem to be any way to know. I guess that's true of the "real" narratives of our lives also. Protests to the contrary, there's really no escaping the shadow of Descartes' Evil Demon (or the BIV), and it doesn't take 21st-century virtual reality gadgets to know it. Everybody has at least experienced dream naivete ("non-lucidity") in sleep, even if they haven't been treated to the more exotic realities offered by longstanding mystical and psychopharmaceutical techniques. I wonder if Moore, like HPL, drew significant inspiration from her own sleeping dreams.

The namelessness of the heroine was bothering me even before I reached the end. I guess the intoxication of the "place" was such that proper names didn't really operate there. None are used at all, for the geography, the monster, the temple, the Name, etc. It made it all seem more dream-like, and also possibly allegorical. The fear that kept the people passive and unorganized, their nourishment on blood, it all seemed like apt material for an allegory about a totalitarian society.

Northwest would have put the kibosh on that textile, but--ah, well. Whatcha gonna do?

I did very much like the writing of this piece, though a few times the appeal to "nameless colours" and such were almost as grating to me as the girl's constant evasions were to N.W. Generally, though, I thought Moore did very well describing the indescribable. The bit about how the patches of blue and green in the water didn't diffuse and move as they would on Earth, when reflection and water movement would cause colours to shift and scintillate, was quite good, and there were several examples of that.

I'm not familiar with Doctor Who, except as a cultural reference, but I thought this pocket world (great term) would have worked quite well in the original Star Trek television series. It almost was described like a set, everything so plain and inchoate, just don't look too closely.

Finally, I thought the arrangements were apt for an industrialised farm, with humans the sheep or cattle. That idea suggests the spigots might very well reconstitute human blood for their nourishment, just as some modern farms include rendered cattle from the slaughterhouses for the cow's own feed. Vampiric, indeed.

I thought a little more on the Doctor Who reference, and realized that there was more to it. In "The God Complex," the monster turns out to be a Nimon: an alien race that had featured in a long-ago Doctor Who story as the "shaggy god" version of the Minotaur. The girl who partners with Northwest is strangely ambivalent, and I called her a "heroine" with some hesitation in my previous post. But she ends up serving as Ariadne to Northwest's Theseus.

The analogy isn't perfect. Northwest doesn't kill the monster or rescue the other prisoners. But the girl does supply the golden thread for Northwest's escape, to her own cost.

>6 paradoxosalpha: (Yeah, talking to myself here.) I guess the intoxication of the "place" was such that proper names didn't really operate there. None are used at all, for the geography, the monster, the temple, ...

Smith doesn't give the girl his name either.

The only name in the world of the scarlet dream is the Name, which is never spoken because that world is such that it must be broken by a Name. This puts me in mind of the Homo Sacer of Giorgio Agamben, where he identifies the proper noun with the untranslatable individuality, and resistance in the face of totalization. (This gloss is as I recall it from a read nearly a year ago; I can't check the Agamben online, and now I'm tempted to return to my shelf for it.)

ETA: Indeed, I misremembered. See below >12 paradoxosalpha:.

The Agamben has been on my tablet since reading your review, but I've not started it. I know Homo Sacer will require some focused reading, which isn't likely now.

Your description of the untranslatable individuality of the proper noun (you mean all proper nouns? not a specific if unspecified one?) reminds me of Walker Percy's concept of the centrality of the denotative function of language, that naming something is crucial to human consciousness of that thing. Percy's argument is significantly influenced by his reading of Peircean metaphysics, which I've also long had on my TBR pile. In any case, all the more fodder for an allegorical reading of Moore.

You go on talking to yourself, paradoxosalpha. I'm along for the ride.

>10 elenchus: you mean all proper nouns? not a specific if unspecified one?

The proper noun as a linguistic function, any proper noun, but especially as exemplified in the personal name. Again, I'm not sure if I remember this correctly or if I'm representing it accurately. I'll check back on it over the next day or two.

So, that'll teach me to post in the heat of connecting notions, without checking my sources. It wasn't Agamben at all. (And on reflection, I can hardly believe I thought so, since Agamben is not notable for theorizing resistance.) It was Derrida in A Taste for the Secret:

Taking the proper name seriously means taking seriously the oldest locus of resistance to the authority of translation; at the beginning of this conversation we spoke about opening to the other, about the fact that the other was there, and that there has to be a 'has to' by which I am disarmed before the other: this is what the proper name means. There was Socrates, there was Plato, absolutely singular moments that came before me, and that are the law; I have to try to respect the very thing that is untranslatable in the event that carries the name of Socrates. Weakness before the 'there has to be the other' passes in philosophy through the existence of proper names. (p. 67)

>6 paradoxosalpha: Moore often devised this sort of "pocket world," in both Jirel and Northwest stories. Are they actually on other planets? Outside of our universe altogether? Completely staged in the mind of the protagonist by a powerful outside intelligence?

The title of the story would seem to support the last possibility, as does the presence of Smith's unconscious body back in the 'real' world.

Okay, finally got to this one tonight. Primarily wanted to note how I was reminded of how much I love Moore's prose style. There is a sensuality there that is just intoxicating, and it suits this story particularly well.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

But she ends up serving as Ariadne to Northwest's Theseus.

Speaking of Greek mythology, it seemed to me that the ur-antecedent of this tale is the story of the land of the lotus-eaters as famously depicted in The Odyssey (and named directly in the story):

I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.

(from the Samuel Barber translation of the poem)

Finally, I couldn't help but be a little amused that the mechanism for Northwest's transport to the dreamland is a shawl. Kind of a feminine item of apparel for a macho guy like NW, isn't it?

I finally got to read this one a couple of days ago.

>6 paradoxosalpha:

It was the original Star Trek that came to mind for me. Not only because the series quite often set up marooned or otherwise isolated lone-man-and-woman-in-peril scenarios (right from the start, thinking about it, Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike in the pilot episode), but also because the realisation that Star Trek is really in the tradition of Weird Tales is still a fairly recent and startling one for me.

Not only are many of the stories actually Gothic/Horrific in theme (the salt vampire in the very first episode (as originally transmitted); one of Robert Bloch's spins on the Jack the Ripper theme; a teleport malfunction making a Jekyll and Hyde out of Kirk, etc), but even the more straight SF stories are in the vein of pulp SF of the 30s and 40s - just pushed out from our Solar System to the wider canvas of the whole galaxy. And of course Weird Tales did publish its fair share of science fiction.

The philosophical discussions about the relevance of names above sailed over my head, I'm afraid (yes there's quite a bit of philosophy in my library, mostly still unread..) but I'm inclined to take it as a kind of shorthand for the lack of individuality and agency of everyone trapped in the pocket universe/dreamworld. I can imagine Moore toying with the idea of having everyone there lose their memories and then rejecting it for plot reasons (or rejecting it because it was already, by 1934, old hat).

>14 artturnerjr:

I don't necessarily see the shawl an odd thing for Northwest Smith to buy, given that he's in essence an old-style adventure hero, a gunslinger or buccaneer, and his few possessions have to be portable and practical (I'm reminded of the importance of a towel to the seasoned space traveller in Douglas Adams' The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). However, there is a strain of submissiveness or at least surrendering to sensuality which is - as far as I know - not common to run-of-the-mill pulp heroes. From what I've read (only this story and "Shambleau" although Smith is stated to be a weatherbeaten tough nut, his actions reveal something quite different.

I remembered I'd read an article about C. L. Moore a few years ago. I found it in Wormwood No 8 and it's by E. F. Bleiler. On the Northwest Smith stories, After focusing on Shambleau and Black Thirst, Bleiler notes "three other stories centered on Northwest Smith display the same linkages of strange vampirisms, blood, absorptions, strong eroticism, mythic elements, and equations of death and sexuality." As a footnote, he also provides this anecdote: "there was speculation in the late 1930s and early 1940s as to why Moore wrote no more private wonderland stories. A. Merritt"..."expressed a wish to collaborate with Moore before she lost her virginity, the implication being that frustrated sexuality lay behind (or beneath) the early stories". In fairness, and for what it's worth, Bleiler notes a gloss on this comment by Gary K. Wolfe:" Merritt's opinion was not so much personal as a period psychological interpretation".

>15 housefulofpaper:

the realisation that Star Trek is really in the tradition of Weird Tales

See my post here:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/181901#4890811

It's also worth noting, I think, that like Bloch, WT contributors like Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, and Richard Matheson also wrote for Star Trek: The Original Series.

I don't necessarily see the shawl an odd thing for Northwest Smith to buy, given that he's in essence an old-style adventure hero, a gunslinger or buccaneer... From what I've read (only this story and "Shambleau" although Smith is stated to be a weatherbeaten tough nut, his actions reveal something quite different.

Northwest very much conforms to the "lovable rogue" archetype/trope so often seen in genre fiction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovable_rogue
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LovableRogue?from=Main.LoveableRogue