Over the course of a long reading life, I’ve found a small handful of novels that I regard as — to put it mildly — exceptionally challenging. Usually this is because they are metaphysical in nature and strive to convey some sort of complex, even ineffable vision. They frequently echo their great poetical-theological forebear, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” in that the principal character journeys through a highly symbolic landscape, meeting strange semi-allegorical personages before finally attaining a moment of epiphany, self-understanding or revelation.
What books do I mean? To stick with works in English, I’d point particularly to George MacDonald’s “Phantastes” and his even more demanding “Lilith.” These novels — by a Victorian writer best known for fairy tales such as “The Golden Key” and “The Light Princess” — are essentially portal fantasies, in which a human protagonist passes into a bizarre and confusing Other World and there undergoes esoteric trials and ordeals. Algernon Blackwood, author of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite supernatural short story, “The Willows,” also produced several head-spinning visionary novels around his belief in cosmic pantheism and the supra-human, most notably “The Centaur” and “Julius LeVallon.”
Of course, fantasy and science fiction have long welcomed and celebrated books that require serious effort from a reader. Samuel R. Delany’s “Dhalgren” is perhaps the most famous recent example, but the locus classicus remains David Lindsay’s “A Voyage to Arcturus.” Its pages are crowded with strangely named beings, most of them bizarre and off-putting; each stage of the hero’s Extra-Terrestrial “Pilgrim’s Progress” generally ends with a murder or two; and the reader closes the book puzzled about what it has all meant.
And yet “A Voyage to Arcturus” is deservedly regarded as titanic, the depiction of a spiritual rite of passage that interlaces death and renewal with a quest for transcendence. Significantly, among the book’s most prominent admirers are two of the leading, and otherwise quite antithetical scholar-critics of the past century: C.S. Lewis, who drew on “A Voyage to Arcturus” in writing “Out of the Silent Planet” (which he wanted to call “A Voyage to Venus”), and Harold Bloom, who used Lindsay’s book as the template for his own youthful Gnostic fantasy, “A Flight to Lucifer.” Because of its gothic grotesquerie and excess, the novel even recalls Cormac MacCarthy’s monstrous, horror-show vision of the Old West, “Blood Meridian,” albeit without the beautiful prose and widescreen, cinematic massacres.
“A Voyage to Arcturus” opens as if it were going to be a social satire. A séance, overseen by the medium Backhouse, “a fast-rising star in the psychic world,” is interrupted by the arrival of three strangers: the bearded giant Maskull, the hairless, spiritually intense and socially indifferent Nightspore and, finally Krag, a short, repulsive figure whose first action is to twist the head off the materialized shape of a young man newly summoned from the ether. Afterward, Krag invites Maskull and Nightspore to the Starkness observatory, from which the three employ “back rays” to power a rocket that transports them to Arcturus.
When Maskull awakes after the space journey, he finds himself naked and alone. What’s more, he now possesses a fleshy protuberance on his forehead and a tentacle as long as his arm dangling from his chest. In short order, he meets Joiwind and Panawe, a kindly, gentle couple — with appendages like his own — who shrink from violence and subsist entirely on water. Being understandably eager to explore this new world, Maskull soon begins to journey northward, encountering numerous other humanoid creatures along the way, each of whom will either lead him into sexual temptation, elicit his sympathy or provoke him to murderous rage.
He also learns more about the planet’s two rival deities, the widely beloved Crystalman, associated with beauty and pleasure, and the reputedly devilish Surtur, the bringer of pain and suffering. Yet Maskull soon begins to question these received dogmas: What if the world he travels through is really a baneful, sensual illusion, a pretty toy created by Crystalman to beguile us, while Surtur’s mystical realm — called Muspel — is our soul’s true home?
Surprising in a novel first published in 1920, several characters in “A Voyage to Arcturus” are androgynous or hermaphrodite. One couple reverses the traditional gender roles — the wife being aggressive and masculine, the husband languorous and feminine. Another is wholly bisexual, so much so that Lindsay coins the pronoun “ae” and employs it instead of “he” or “she” when referring to this so-called “phaen.” Similar close attention to linguistic detail shows in Lindsay’s naming of people and places: Maskull, for instance, can be parsed as “my skull,” “masculine,” “mask all” and “mass kill.” Tormance, as its natives call their planet, mixes “torment” and “romance,” both of which Maskull experiences.
And that’s not all he experiences. He encounters thought control, vampiric personality absorption, music that kills, colors beyond the usual spectrum, various new sense organs, the truth about Nightspore and Krag and, above all, the meaning and necessity of pain. As I want to stress, the novel’s bleak, sometimes Buddhist-like understanding of life, sex and the nature of things doesn’t offer what you’d call a fun time, only an unforgettable one.
Lindsay, who was born in 1876, published “A Voyage to Arcturus” when he was in his early 40s, having quit his job in an insurance office to become a writer. Its first edition sold only 596 copies. Undaunted, he carried on and produced a half-dozen other works, the best known being “The Haunted Woman.” Nearly all of them suggest that what we call reality is actually a shadow-world. Lindsay died in 1945.
And that might have been that — except that “A Voyage to Arcturus” keeps being rediscovered and reprinted. “Only a very few people will ever read ‘Arcturus,’ ” Lindsay once said, “but as long as even two or three people will listen to Beethoven, two or three people will read it.” If you’re adventurous enough, you might want to be one of them.
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source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-voyage-to-arcturus-may-have-sold-596-copies-in-its-first-edition-but-it-deserves-a-wider-audience/2021/11/16/14c24b48-462f-11ec-b8d9-232f4afe4d9b_story.html
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