Episodes 84-88 - The Shadow Over Innsmouth

[Bob Lovecraft]

Uncanny, but not true. Well, not "literally" true.

You bastard, you totally got me with that post. I would have spent time looking for that episode on Netflix. Curses to you, OldBook. Curses...

Bob

[old book]

It was July 5th, anyway, and probably 1989. You're a fun one to tease, Bob. Sorry.

[Bob Lovecraft]

It was July 5th, anyway, and probably 1989. You're a fun one to tease, Bob. Sorry.

Yeah, that's what the Mrs. says too...

Bob

[ahtzib]

Yeah, and it probably was if you go back and watch the show enough to find it.

Bob

Try watching the episode "Our Town" after consuming this story

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Town_%28The_X-Files%29

[ahtzib]

Are Zadok's "Kanakys" the same as the "Kanakas" on the Alert in Call of Cthulhu?

Wikipedia says: "Kanaka, a word, meaning 'people' or 'person', used by various Polynesian people to refer to themselves."

How generic or specific did Lovecraft intend it to be?

If they were blood relatives or descendants, it might explain their apparent propensity to worship sea monsters.


-MJ

Kanakas is kind of a slur, a catch-all for Pacific natives but deriving from forced labor (the wiki talks about this). I suspect he meant it in a broad sense, and in a way that while not meant as super offensive, probably knowingly had a touch of the offensive to it.

[old book]

On the Pacific Coast of North America in the 1800s "Kanaka" did not carry any negative connotations beyond innate racist notions held by some users of the word. It just meant Hawai'ian. There was a village at Ft. Vancouver called Kanaka Village named after Hawai'ian canoers brought in from the British Sandwich Islands by Hudson Bay Company to navigate rivers in the Columbia region. "Kanaka" also meant various things in NW Coast laguages, or carried certain associations, in Tlingit, I believe, for example (edit: the Tsimshians had a clan modeled on the Tlingit clan Gaanaxteidi called Kanakana). Kanaka Village wasn't really Hawai'ian, a lot interior Athapascans working for the Bay and local natives from the Columbia River Basin, the Dulles, the Williamette and the Puget Sound Salish groups as well as French voyageurs who had taken native wives lived there, and a generation grew up speaking what had been until then the regional trading language/pidgin, the Chinook Jargon. News of "Kanakas" would have reached the eastern seaboard and Lovecraft from the Pacific coast, mainly.

I suspect the author of the wikipedia entry for Kanakas is at pains to explain how it became derogitory in Australia, doesn't really know, and is writing around the subject. It is a racial slur in German as well. It is difficult to take it seriously as a slur, because it is Hawai'ian/Polynesian for "people," which is the usual way ethnonyms are formed, whereas slurs, such as "Lapplanders" which I understand means "stupid people," rely on the language of the slurrers to supply their ingredients. To put it more simply, I was once asked whether it was an insult to use the word "Jew" in English by a foreign person who had been told it was by an American. This was long before South Park or Borat or any of that. Is "Jew" a slur? Of course not. Not unless all users and hearers of the word happen to be anti-Semites, in which case it probably is, for them.

As far as I can tell Kanaka was not derogatory historically, but became so in certain settings because of racist attitudes and class inequalities between Kanaka workers and their taskmasters. By the time Lovecraft wrote Shadow it would've been archaic to use "Kanaka" instead of Sandwich Islander or Fijian or Tongan, but not like Lovecraft's use of "nigger," which was derogatory and intended to be so. At least that's how it seems to me.

Incidentally, there is a strong parallel between the story of Kanaka Village at Ft. Vancouver on the Columbia and Shadow Over Innsmouth. At Kanaka Village a generation arose of very mixed race (miscegenation), of European, Native and Polynesian descent, speaking a language that had formerly served as a pidgin facilitating inter-tribal and mercantile communication called the Chinook Jargon. The Jargon probably began before Russian, Spanish, British and American ships began plying the west coast, probably as a lingua franca a little bit further north, perhaps near Nootka Sound in British Columbia. It was simple enough that white traders began using it and it filled up with words from French and English and various local languages. So far we've got miscegenation plus a new language, which isn't a big feature of Innsmouth but was the plan of Joseph Smith in setting up his Mormon Republic. (His Mormon Republic more or less in the same general region where Aaron Burr hoped to set up his own distinct republic, for which he attempted to seize New Orleans and the entire Louisiana Purchase to add to Mexican territories he hoped to seize with his army, more or less in line with Jefferson's earlier vision of a family of fraternal but separate republics west of the United States in territories that were claimed by France, Spain and Britain. Astor had a different plan for assimilating these areas to the United States, symbolized by his trading post at the mouth of the Columbia just downstream from Ft. Vancouver, called to this day Astoria). Now we come to the religious aspect. Apparently these wild Chinook kids weren't so keen on Christianity, Western civilization, etc etc and pretty much carried on as they liked. The Jargon was also a force to be reckoned with, it spread like wildfire all up and down the coast and even reached up into the Yukon. So you have this dynamic of a growing population of mixed race people who probably didn't give a damn about race forming a new society in contradiction to British and even American values of civilization, and the Bay was more or less to blame for bringing this about, a phenomenon possibly like the autonomous native/European pirate utopias postulated in William S Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night.

They called in the Anglican priests, sent all the rebels off to religious boarding school (=kidnapped) and closed the village down. And yet it changed little, the Jargon kept spreading, the British soon lost their claim to the lower (southern) Columbia region, American attempts at "civilizing" the natives brought mixed results. So the paralell at this point with Innsmouth is the federalis were called in for mopping up operations after blasting Devil Reef, but the insidious contagion didn't end there. Oh, and the early descriptions of Puget Sound natives by Europeans call them bandy-legged, toadlike, and probably the ugliest people on earth, although I see little resemblance to Rosie O'Donnell. There are probably more parallels with different episodes of attacks on long houses and degenerate generations of wizard indians housed therein near Port Ludlow, if one looks hard enough, but perhaps Lovecraft really was making some points about Native and European American relations, history, patterns, alienation, encounters, etc. Which means that we Europeans (or non-Natives anyway) are the Innsmouthians in the story, which is what the protagonist also discovers, which leads to this double whammy at the end if it is read this way. Is this what Robert Price calls hermeneutics?

[Bob Lovecraft]

Yeah, and it probably was if you go back and watch the show enough to find it.

Bob

Try watching the episode "Our Town" after consuming this story

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Town_%28The_X-Files%29

You know, I've actually seen that episode before. Personally I think that is more "Rats in the Walls" then it is "Shadow Over Innsmouth", but still in all, a decent episode.

Bob

[Genus Unknown]

After listening to the Innsmouth wrap-up episode, I caved in and ordered The Innsmouth Cycle and Tales Out of Innsmouth from Chaosium. I'm reading Tales right now, and rather enjoying it. Between this and Lumley's Haggopian and Other Stories, I think I just might be coming around to this whole "Cthulhu Mythos" (or "Lovecraft fanfic," to call a spade a shovel) thing.

Special mention has to go to "The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth" (in Tales) by John S. Glasby, who took fragments of an earlier draft of "The Shadow" and rewrote it. The result is a kind of alternate-universe version of the original story, with some elements seriously downplayed (including, of all things, the Deep Ones themselves!) and others pursued in a different direction. It's really interesting and entertaining.

Another great story from the same collection is "The Old Ones' Signs" by Pierre Comtois, the story of a pious Christian sailor serving on Obed Marsh's Sumatra Queen.

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Finally listened to the wrap-up. Looking forward to the geography book.

[Genus Unknown]

I'm reading The Innsmouth Cycle now, and Robert M. Price's preface to the story has an interesting thought (bold emphasis mine):

Lovecraft made no attempt to harmonize the details between his various stories and their depictions of his myth cycle. Or, better, he attempted not to harmonize them. He realized that actual ancient myth cycles abound in contradictions and variants. To lend his own artificial mythology the semblance of reality, he allowed contradictions to stand...

Ironically, this pair of stories ["Whisperer" and AtMoM] marks the beginning of a belated attempt by Lovecraft to knit his stories into a more coherent whole. The links become stronger with each new tale. The space devils from Yuggoth, as we have just seen, make an encore cameo appearance in At the Mountains of Madness. Then the starfish-headed Old Ones are glimpsed by Walter Gilman in one of his bad trips in "The Dreams in the Witch-House" (1932). They are also mentioned as the enemies of the Great Race of Yith in "The Shadow Out of Time" (1934-35). It must be the crinoids again to whom Zadok Allen alludes as "the lost Old Ones" in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," as we also hear of shoggoths as allies of the deep ones who worship Cthulhu. Finally, the bulge-eyed Innsmouth folk appear again in "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933), though as bit players.

Putting these fragments together, we would have to guess that the deep ones somehow correspond to the "Cthulhu spawn" of At the Mountains of Madness, even though there they were called "cosmic octopi." They had been enemies of the Old Ones of Antarctica, as were the shoggoths later on, who turned on the Old Ones and destroyed them. Thus it makes some sense that the shoggoths would now be allied with the deep ones of Cthulhu, even though their common enemy has vanished...

What say you, forum-goers? Is he on to something?

[bkd69]

I'm reading The Innsmouth Cycle now, and Robert M. Price's preface to the story has an interesting thought (bold emphasis mine):

Lovecraft made no attempt to harmonize the details between his various stories and their depictions of his myth cycle. Or, better, he attempted not to harmonize them. He realized that actual ancient myth cycles abound in contradictions and variants. To lend his own artificial mythology the semblance of reality, he allowed contradictions to stand...

Ironically, this pair of stories ["Whisperer" and AtMoM] marks the beginning of a belated attempt by Lovecraft to knit his stories into a more coherent whole. The links become stronger with each new tale. The space devils from Yuggoth, as we have just seen, make an encore cameo appearance in At the Mountains of Madness. Then the starfish-headed Old Ones are glimpsed by Walter Gilman in one of his bad trips in "The Dreams in the Witch-House" (1932). They are also mentioned as the enemies of the Great Race of Yith in "The Shadow Out of Time" (1934-35). It must be the crinoids again to whom Zadok Allen alludes as "the lost Old Ones" in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," as we also hear of shoggoths as allies of the deep ones who worship Cthulhu. Finally, the bulge-eyed Innsmouth folk appear again in "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933), though as bit players.

Putting these fragments together, we would have to guess that the deep ones somehow correspond to the "Cthulhu spawn" of At the Mountains of Madness, even though there they were called "cosmic octopi." They had been enemies of the Old Ones of Antarctica, as were the shoggoths later on, who turned on the Old Ones and destroyed them. Thus it makes some sense that the shoggoths would now be allied with the deep ones of Cthulhu, even though their common enemy has vanished...

What say you, forum-goers? Is he on to something?

Given that HPL was never shy about providing liner notes for his work, I rather suspect we've got all the actual answers we'll ever have.

That being said, personally I'm partial to the notion of all these various entities being entirely separate and independent entities and groups, unless specifically indicated otherwise. In other words, Cthulhu stands alone.

On the other hand, is there any evidence that Cthulhu is not, in fact, Dagon?

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

\That being said, personally I'm partial to the notion of all these various entities being entirely separate and independent entities and groups, unless specifically indicated otherwise. In other words, Cthulhu stands alone.

On the other hand, is there any evidence that Cthulhu is not, in fact, Dagon?

Their cultists seem to think otherwise. Also Dagon seems to have a consort and to be awake. Still an interesting idea...

[Genus Unknown]

I've thought of something that throws a wrench in the "deep ones are Cthulhu-spawn" theory: they can interbreed with humans. Granted, that's damned hard to account for no matter what mythological context you put it in, but it does seem to rule the idea that they originate somewhere else in the cosmos right out.

[Mike J.]

But what about Wilbur Whately & his brother? They're hybrids.

[old book]

He's onto something. Probably shoggoths grabbed a human the way sharks do a seal pup, some of the undifferentiated shoggoth cells stuck, and presto-magic the poor fellow grew gills. The change wasn't cosmetic, the shoggoth slime-mold DNA insinuated itself and he bred true, so to speak.

Does Dagon equal Cthulhu? I always thought so. Except Dagon is the localized Caananite/Phoenician representation, dimly remembered, while Cthulhu is the ultimate Deep One from outer space, the real deal behind the legend. In the collective unconscious Cthulhu and the archangel Michael are undifferentiated.