THE DEEP ONES: "The Gorgon" by Tanith Lee

"The Gorgon" by Tanith Lee

Discussion begins August 25, 2021.

First published in Shadows 5 (1982).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?50998

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales
Mythic Beasts
Forests of the Night

ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-gorgon/

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://pseudopod.org/2018/07/26/pseudopod-604-the-gorgon/

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanith_Lee
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/tanith-lee
http://www.daughterofthenight.com/
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i11&am...
https://www.tabula-rasa.info/Horror/TanithLee.html
https://tinyurl.com/4jb8vfm5

Online (print) for me, but I've gotta admire that podcast title: pseudopod. Beautiful.

This is at least the second Lee story (after "The Hill") we read where nothing nominally supernatural happens, yet the natural explanation is decidedly strange.

(Speaking of strange, "Daphaeu" seems an unlikely name for a Greek island.)

I found the narrator rather unlikeable, and was surprised when he was so affected by Medusa's predicament - he seemed too self-absorbed to be profoundly affected by another's plight like that.

I note on Lee's WP page that this story won a World Fantasy Award for best short story in 1983.

There are several passages which conceivably include meta signifiers: "the work I needed to be doing", the contempt shown the narrator first by Pitos and later by the woman on the island, "a young man in the Bronze Age ...", "I had no knowledge of the rules, or pretended I had not". I was not surprised to find the author picture (at the end of the Nightmare Magazine page) broadly matched the description of the gorgon. At the same time, I know of no particular reason for the story to be autobiographical apart perhaps from Lee's dyslexia.

The ending, drawing an explicit connection between the story and the Medusa myth, is brilliant in its simplicity and fit. It also reinforces my obscure sense there was something meta going on, without making that part explicit.

While there are no supernatural events in the story, I found reading it affected me in much the same way as reading supernatural stories (at least, those I like). The tone, the tension, the types of thoughts I have while reading. And so I must admit, for me it's of no consequence that there is nothing supernatural in the story, given that my experience is the same as if there were.

I don't quite know why, but that realisation struck me as quite Weird in itself, and brings back the meta nature of the piece.

Taking a myth, rationalizing it, and yet still letting it have its symbolic power -- added power even given the aside on the motives of a gorgon slayer -- is unusual, and I appreciated it as well as the tone of the story, including that marble blazing at sunset.

>5 elenchus:
You've articulated something that was in my head when it was suggested a while ago that we could look at poetry on here. There are poems that have a sense of the strangeness or alien-ness of the universe that almost tips over into religious awe (that's one aspect of the Weird - think of Machen, or Blackwood) without having any obvious markers of the Weird or the Cosmic. They could be about someone looking out of the window of a commuter train.

Reading the interview with Tanith Lee in the miscellany, it's just struck me that the narrator is autobiographical, or at least his fate is: she would surely see "losing it" as an artist or creator, no longer being able to make up stories, as a terrible fate (writing is like breathing to her, and becoming a professional writer enabled her to give up stupid and soul-killing jobs).