THE DEEP ONES: "The Warder of Knowledge" by Richard F. Searight

"The Warder of Knowledge" by Richard F. Searight

Discussion begins March 10, 2020.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?59571

First published in Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (1992).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://maxima-library.org/mob/b/41503?format=read (scroll down)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?59571

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Yith Cycle

MISCELLANY

https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Eltdown_Shards
https://undertheirblackwings.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/those-dreadful-eltdown-sha...
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46616/46616-h/46616-h.htm (third reader comment down)
https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/142865/lovecraft/h-p-lovecraft-letters-to-r...
https://tinyurl.com/y8zz77ga

Ah, that Gahan Wilson illustration!

Online for me.

I mentioned in our discussion of "Polaris" the unlikelihood that an ethnonym would be recognizable after the passage of 26 000 years. Well, that pre-forms of Semitic should be recognizable in non-human writings from the Early Triassic - about 250 000 000 years ago - is not so much unlikely as preposterous.

I sort of liked the story, though. While the plot is stereotypical enough, Whitney's fate was considerably more interesting than exsanguination or dismemberment.

One does wonder, though, why the Warder gives its victims such visions before absorbing their minds?

>3 AndreasJ: not so much unlikely as preposterous

Yes! And yet, like you I enjoyed the story overall.

I chuckled as the story progressed, seeded with adjectives about Dr Whitney's painstaking approach to his translation, and his several emotional setbacks or decision-points, only to continue unto his demise. The endpoint was never in doubt, was it? But the process was so dramatic! -- I chuckled, because at various points Searight clarifies that this arduous journey took place over hours, not weeks or even days. I suspect Searight knew what he was doing, and chuckled along with me.

There is an editorial note in the online version I think worth sharing:

With Richard Searight’s “The Warder of Knowledge,” we have a special treat: a story that Lovecraft read in manuscript, but which was never published — until now. Searight, you will remember, had created the Eltdown Shards, cited in his story “The Sealed Casket,” and used to good effect subsequently by HPL in “The Challenge from Beyond” and other stories. Interestingly, Lovecraft and Searight were simultaneously developing the concept of the Shards in different directions, as can be seen from “The Warder of Knowledge.” Of it Lovecraft said in a November 4, 1935, letter to Searight, “I like the story exceedingly, & hope you will not let {Weird Tales editor Farnsworth} Wright’s rejection discourage you…. The references to the Eltdown Shards are fascinating — but woe is me! I’ve given a lot of dope in that composite story {the round-robin “The Challenge from Beyond”} which conflicts directly with the true facts as here revealed!.. I also fear that I described the shards in a conflicting way. Oh, well — in sober truth relatively few people will ever see the composite yarn anyhow.” Ah, the ironies of history.

I especially liked the tale's references to various manuscripts and the concise outline of Deep History. Never mind the hand-waving in the opening paragraphs, on where possibly the information for all this could have come so as to be relayed to us.

It's curious that the Mi-Go are identified here as the spawn of Cthulhu and builders of R'lyeh, a correlation I haven't seen elsewhere.

>6 paradoxosalpha:

I read "the flight from other worlds of the Mi-Go or Abominable Snow Men, the spawn of Cthulhu, and their building of the terrible stone city of R’lyeh" as listing two different things he saw, not as equating the Mi-Go with the spawn of Cthulhu. If this reading is intended there should strictly speaking be a semicolon rather than a comma after "Snow Men", but it makes for better agreement with the scenario from AtMoM.

>6 paradoxosalpha:
>7 AndreasJ:

I do not have a firm grasp of the various entities and their activities in the Mythos, so it's gratifying to see others tease out the implications. FWIW, my reading was similar to AndreasJ, but without any critical assessment of how it aligned with AtMoM. I was pleased that I recalled the Mi-Go specifically from that story, but failed to remember which story described R'lyeh or which beings might have been mentioned in connection with it.

Gramatically, I just don't see how Andreas' reading can hold. The semicolon wouldn't even cut it, although it would queer the appositive construction. The sentence really needs an added "and" to sustain that reading. And maybe that is what Searight intended.

I see this as a variant paleo-narrative for the mythos, sort of like the tweak that Ruthanna Emrys imposed in "The Litany of Earth," although to less consequence in the immediate story.

Parsing it that way, I can't argue. But to me it has the conversationally "obvious" meaning that AndreasJ noted, despite being grammatically hopeless. The thoughts relate, but they wander off on tangents, as conversational sentences often do.

I'm reminded of a claim by some linguist, cannot recall who, that if novelists transcribed speech the way people actually spoke it, readers would find it almost impenetrable. Having an "ear for dialogue" leaves fictional speech quite different from actual speech, praise for writers like Steven King notwithstanding.

>9 paradoxosalpha:

There is an "and" in the sentence:

He viewed the flight from other worlds of the Mi-Go or Abominable Snow Men, the spawn of Cthulhu, and their building of the terrible stone city of R’lyeh; and the terrific struggle waged between them and the Old Ones for supremacy.

I read it as:

He viewed (the flight from other worlds of the Mi-Go or Abominable Snow Men), (the spawn of Cthulhu, and their building of the terrible stone city of R’lyeh), and (the terrific struggle waged between them and the Old Ones for supremacy).

Not the only possible parsing, obviously, but it didn't occur to me it could be read otherwise until you brought it up. And yes, it's entirely likely that my reading was influenced by familiarity with the AtMoM scenario.

>11 AndreasJ:

According to both my copy (in Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos) and your own transcription in >7 AndreasJ:, you have just added both an "and" after "Cthulhu" and a semicolon after "R'lyeh." It's that first "and" that's significantly missing from the text, not the one you've bolded.

Another feature of this story that I found curious was the role of Professor Turkoff, whose "psychic impressions" seem like nothing more than a device to rationalize the narrator's knowledge of Whitney's motives and emotions. Of course, it's common for a short story to have a third-person omniscient narrative voice in which such details are offered, and as a reader, I followed along in just such a spirit. Being reminded of the psychic Turkoff justification at the end was more jarring than convincing.

>13 paradoxosalpha:

I wondered about Prof Turkoff's "psychic impressions" at the outset: did he have a seance? Take a psychic reading of the room after events transpired? Lay hands on the corpse of Dr Whitney? I anticipated a fuller description by the end of the tale, and was disappointed.

Better to have omitted entirely, and rely on the third-person omniscience so common to stories. It especially doesn't work after the reference to Dr Whitney's diary, which provides a rationale for the narrator knowing the bare outline but not all the emotional detail -- and certainly, not anything that occurred after the final diary entry!

It's the standard question of a story's provenance, and while I regularly wonder about it, I don't expect there to be a good answer in most cases. I find it more important in Weird tales than other fiction: somehow it's just not as relevant to me how e.g., Pynchon could know all the details of events and characters -- he's the author, this is the story, and that's that. But with Weird tales, the question seems entwined in the nature of the story itself.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

Er, what? There's patently an "and" after Cthulhu in >7 AndreasJ:.

But apparently there's slight differences between your copy of Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos and the online version I read.

(I haven't transcribed anything, strictly speaking, merely copied from the online version.)

>15 AndreasJ:

Eh, I seem to have gotten turned around. Still I'm where I was at in >9 paradoxosalpha:, and I think this item (not at all central to the story) has reached the point of diminishing returns.

>14 elenchus:

Ah, yes. I overlooked the sourcing problem "after the final diary entry." It was also a little odd that the diary was made so central to the story, but never presented in direct quotation. This story would have been better without the documentary conceit, which I think was something of a nostalgic affectation in the WT era. Although if Searight had inserted a seance or some other "psychic" spectacle for Turkoff, that could have been fun.

>16 paradoxosalpha:

Agreed that the documentary conceit could usefully have been left out here. As it is, it only calls attention to the implausibility of the story's existence.

I think the real sticking point for me, as far as suspension of disbelief is concerned, is the simple fact of existence of the shards. Clay tablets from the Triassic, and no real consternation over how they got there, or who or what made them and wrote on them. They're not, for example, hidden away by the Government for the greater good, in fact they seem more accessible than Miskatonic's copy of the Necronomicon.

The fact that the script can be deciphered because it is an distant (very distant) foreunner of known human languages, is ridiculous but goes some way to deliver the disorienting Deep Time vertiginousness of something like "The Shadow out of Time". And similarly, the business with the psychic (instead of simply going with an omniscient 3rd person narrator) is presumably an attempt to emulate HPL's method of assembling his stories from various pieces of evidence to give a greater sense of verisimilitude to them. I assume that he took this idea from Poe - from those stories that began as newspaper hoaxes.

I assume the WT readership loved these hints that what they were reading was "really real".

My reaction seems pretty much in common with everyone else's: I liked the emotional details but had trouble thinking of how the narrator would know them. I did like the mention of Turkoff and thought it was interesting to bring in a psychic investigator to add to the usual documents Lovecraftian stories often feature. It hadn't occurred to me that Searight meant for Turkoff to reconstruct Whitney's state of mind on the last night of his life..

Still, I liked for the story for showing the emotional state of Whitney during and after reading off the spell.

And, of course, we have another example in Lovecraftian fiction of academics suppressing knowledge, here the original discoverers of the Shards.