"The Temple" -- story

[Extollager]

Just reread this one, many years after my last reading I suppose.

I'd forgotten the "young, very dark, and very handsome" seaman whose body is found after the U-boat has sunk a British freighter (during World War I) and the ivory carving of a laurel-crowned youth that is taken from the body. The carving belongs to the same civilization whose ruins are found beneath the sea by the German narrator.

I assumed that we were to take it that the young "seaman" was from the destroyed British ship. As nothing is said to indicate that his clothing is unusual, presumably he was dressed as a modern sailor. How, then, did he come by the ivory?

On the other hand, when he is found he is gripping the U-boat's railing, in which posture we think, at first, that he died; but one of the German sailors claims to see him swim away after his body is returned to the sea. If the mysterious young man is a member of an amphibious race, we may wonder how it came about that he appeared just at the time of the freighter's sinking.

Lovecraft also has his narrator refer often to "dolphins" that accompany the submarine, even at great depth, although they disappear before the end of the story. Their relationship to the temple isn't made clear. Are we to infer that the original inhabitants mutated into something like dolphins?

So it is a more puzzling story than I expected it to be on a rereading. Of course, the puzzles may reflect simple logical gaps in Lovecraft's plotting, but perhaps someone has other views to share.

I believe this was one of the first HPL stories that I ever read, in this cheesily-covered 1969 book. Notice the Frankenstein's-monster scar at the base of the thumb. Why the creature has been holding the candle thus for so long as to make such a pool of wax must remain a matter of speculation. It's a silly as well as ugly image, but apparently it caught my eye when I was 14 or so...

 

[j d worthington]

Briefly: I tend to agree with those who feel that Lovecraft didn't quite think this one out as well as he generally did, hence the ambiguous linkages (and, as Joshi has pointed out, the overabundance of supernatural phenomena) are never made into a coherent whole, though one gets the distinct impression that HPL himself had such in mind, and was striving to create a cloudily allusive atmosphere rather than being overexplicative... and, as is the case with some of his other early tales, went a bit too far in the former direction.

At any rate... I have always gathered the impression that the young sailor was of Greek background, a member of a still-existing, hidden cult which still worships prehistoric deities; hence this can be seen as Lovecraft's common trope of an image which has come down through secret channels known only to the initiate... generally those born into such a subculture, and almost always of some ethnicity other than Anglo-Saxon. However, given HPL's often admiring views of classical Greek culture (he once referred to the ancient Greeks by saying that "but perhaps one shouldn't be surprised at anything they did; they were a super-race"... though this may be slightly paraphrased, as I don't have the reference right to hand), it is highly unlikely there is any negative connotation intended.

As for the body's swimming away... that one is left ambiguous. Was it merely the modern seaman's superstitious fancy, or did it really happen; and, if the latter, why?

The dolphins... given some of the Greek myths depicting the roles of such creatures (saving poets cast overboard by greedy sailors and the like), it is likely, I think, that HPL was making that connection between them and the god of the sunken temple, much as the owl was a favored messenger (and symbol) of Athena. Their disappearance, I gather, was because they had fulfilled their purpose in escorting the submarine to its destination; after which they returned to their "normal" lives and activities. (Though this, too, would seem to indicate that there are mysteries beyond mysteries concerning the Delphinus delphis which themselves reach back far, far into antiquity, and have to do with even greater relationships between these creatures and the old gods.)

It is a flawed story, but in various ways an intriguing one. It has never been among my favorites, but of late years I am coming to regard it as more interesting than I have most of my life, largely due to having gone over it rather carefully and puzzling over some of these portentous but elusive hints. The writing itself is a bit overdone, but actually more carefully crafted in some ways than is generally credited, quite carefully using the language of the narrator's account to demonstrate his shifting from a cold (and rather spiteful) caricature who nonetheless prides himself on his rationality and logical mind, to someone who is disintegrating and becoming prone to even the tiniest of atmospheric influences, yet one we (perhaps grudgingly) come to respect much more and whose courage in the face of such events we may even find ourselves admiring. That final statement, for example, is one of the noblest utterances of the intrepid human spirit one could wish for, and it gives the character of the Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein something of the air of a tragic figure in the end.

 

[Extollager]

One might work up a discussion whereby the theme of the story is the narrator's intellectual and emotional confrontation with the superiority of an ancient civilization that relativizes his original assumption of German supremacy and/or durability. At the end, his passivity could be due not only to courage in the face of inevitable death, but to the termination within him of his earlier assumption of the supremacy of German civilization, to which he has been dedicated. Or it could be that he is trying to assert German pride in the only way left to him, by embracing his own death.

His application of "German discipline" leads, ironically, to the murder (mostly at his own hands) of everyone else on the ship.

The civilization that he glimpses in the ruins was a magnificent one. Its architecture is both beautiful and strong -- although the buildings have been at the bottom of the sea for such a long time, they are not shapeless mounds covered by mud and weeds, but ones whose carvings are still immediately discernible. The submarine has (one could argue) been a mini-Germany, and its fate is disintegration and death. Lovecraft implies that Germany is built on cruelty, racial smugness, etc. The ancient civilization seems to have been more oriented towards aesthetic accomplishment -- although there is the likelihood that the rites of the temple are barbaric. I suppose we could, from that, make a connection with the German civilization as also founded on barbarism and, likewise, doomed.

At any rate it seems that, if the story is to be read as anything more than a nightmarish weird tale, we must assess the two civilizations and work out how they relate to one another thematically. There is a pronounced moral dimension to the story that is different from some of HPL's other stories. Offhand it is his only story, so far as I recall, dealing (critically) with a specific non-American nation.

 

[Extollager]

The story exhibits problems as regards plotting, plausibility, etc. However, it is rich with suggestion.

The submarine suggests the idea that modern people live within a confined world of man-made notions. (Dr. Bruce Charlton has a book called Thought Prison.) One of these that is indicated by the story is having a sense of identity based on one's nationality. By contrast you have the suggestion of that other race that has lived both in air and under water -- perhaps even "navigating" both life and death, given the ambiguity of the Greek-looking seaman. He could represent a wider consciousness.

Light is important in the story. As the submarine withdraws from the surface, it loses natural light and becomes dependent on artificial light. That narrow and restricted beam could suggest the limitations of human awareness, especially modern human awareness. It is going out. But then we have the light that issues from the archaic subaqueous temple. Does this suggest a capacity for knowledge that is still deep in the human psyche but denied by modernity?

I could imagine some New Age-type folks liking a reading of this sort....

 

[j d worthington]

Just a quick note at the moment (hope I will have a chance to get more in later): On the subject of the light emanating from the interior of the temple... George T. Wetzel, in his landmark essay "The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study", drew connections between this and other examples of such a mysterious subterranean illumination such as that in "The Nameless City", as well as other examples, relating it to the growing concept of what he called "The Hell of the Mythos", noting the linkages between the "straight" Mythos tales and the "dream fantasies" such as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Though he has more to say, here is the relevant passage:

In the dream-novel there were several places where the waking world was touched upon by some of the sinisterra of the Mythos' Hell, places where these embodied nightmares could enter the waking world, giving rise to tales among men of daemons, and possibly explaining also why gargoyles atop cathedrals bore resemblance to the ghouls of this place. Where these entrances touched the waking world from the wood of the zoogs, there shone the phosphorescence of fungi; there was a phosphorescent shining abyss in the story "The Nameless City" (1921) and in the drowned temple in the story, "The Temple" (1920).

There were some fearsome gates to this Hell -- through the burrow of the ghouls beneath graveyards, as finally revealed in the dream-novel; when Carter visits the ghouls he notes that he is very near the waking world which the appearance of grave-stones and funeral urns strewn about indicates all too clearly. The line, "Through the ghouls-guarded gateways of slumber," from the early poem "Nemesis" (1918), which prefigured some of this, tales on a disturbing meaning.

I would also argue that this motif, especially in "The Nameless City", where he typically labels his influence, as well as here, where it is less obvious, owes something to Thomas Moore's Alciphron which, though not supernatural in itself, has some very fine moments of suggesting weird terrors in a quite effective way....