The Xothic Legend Cycle

HERE is another translation from the shocking Zanthu Tablets, one of Lin's own contributions to the Mythos. They seem intended as a Muvian counterpart co Lovecraft’s Lomarian Pnakotic Manuscripts and Richaid F. Searight’s Eltdown Shards. In the early notes tor these stories Lin had envisioned two tales, "The Tablets from the Tomb" and "The Thing in the Pit." The first would have read much like the present version of "The Thing in the Pit", save that it would have ended with Zanthu fleeing the destruction he had unwittingly unleashed, hoping to make it to Leng or Shamballah. The single premise of the story, the priestling’s attempt to vindicate his patron deity against the tyrannical cult of Ghatanothoa, is lifted bodily from Lovecraft’s "Out of the Aeons", specifically the subnarrative of the doomed attempt of T'yog to invade the sanctuary of Ghatanothoa.

In the original planned version of the second story, "The Thing tn the Pit" (just a note, not an extant draft), the action jumps ahead into the modern world. Here is the note: "Submarine volcanic activity temporarily heaves above the waves a portion of a drowned prehistoric continent off Ponape. Dr. Henry Stephenson Blaine, then at Ponape with the Sanbourne Institute Research Vessel Evans is the first to reach the island. Finds mighty chasm, etc. Sailors retreat, firing at monstrous paw which reaches up from the Chasm (it can only he the Abyss of G’than-yu, mentioned in the shuddersome documents of fabulous antiquity) "

This protostory is about three fourths "The Madness from the Sea" (third part of "The Call of Cthullui") and one fourth "Under the Pyramids" (published as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”). Carter finally decided to dump the "Call of Cthulhu" elements, but this left him little story. So he salvaged the bit about the paw and tacked it onto Zanthu’s own account.

One observation on a minor feature occurring in both "The Thing in the Pit" and "The Red Offering": Zanchu makes sure to introduce himself by name, "I, Zanthu." (Alhazred does likewise in Lin’s Episodes from the Necronomicon). Why should the author identify himself twice in the same work? A genuine ancient author would not, which is why so many ancient writings are anonymous, as well as why many more are instead pseudonymous. On the one hand, even it there were a reason for such "station identification" once, there wouldn’t be twice in the same work. The reason both "The Red Ottering" and "The Thing in the Pit" have Zanthu refer to himself in the first person is that they are, obviously, two separate stories pretending to be excerpts from a single work. Each must identify itself as the work of Zanthu. Actually, Lin could have been satisfied with tagging each tale as Zanthu’s in the fictive editor’s notes he supplied to each story. The interior self-reference becomes redundant. It is nonetheless revealing. The reason for such a reference, whether once or twice, is that the narrator (as distinct from the author) is by nature a part of the story, himself a character in it (or at lease on its margins, as a friend of a protagonist, for example), whereas the author exists outside the narrative universe of the story. Thus the author must use the very voice of the narrator in order to name the narrator for the reader's benefit. What this means is that an "I, Zanthu" or "I, Claudius" sort of reference is an immediate dead giveaway as to the fictive character of what you are reading.

So what? Is there anyone that imagines he is reading a factual narrative when he peruses "The Thing in the Pit?" (Lin did once tell me he received an earnest letter from a fan asking where the transporter beam to Callisto could be found in the Cambodian jungle. The poor fool was apparently planning to go there and give it a try.) The thing is, once you can establish the self-reference as a mark of fiction by studying its occurrence in a piece of admitted fiction, you are forewarned what to conclude when you start running across it in covert fictions, including ancient pseudepigraphs (epistles, narratives, revelations) using the name of a renowned authority of the past as a pseudonym so as to gain a hearing for one’s own work. Sometimes the use of the name was pure forgery, other times more of a dedication to the memory of the great man. When we read in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. "I, Thomas the Israelite, tell unto you, even all the brethren that are of the Gentiles, to make known unto you the works of the childhood of our Lord Jesus Christ and his mighty deeds," or in the Book of the Resurrection of Christ. “Believe me, my brethren the holy apostles, I, Bartholomew, beheld the Son of God on the chariot of the Cherubim," we are reading the words of someone "protesting too much", someone making a claim, an assertion of authorship, something an author writing under his own name feels no need to do. When we read a text in which the writer is implicitly defensive about his identity, we know we are reading a fictive claim. The author's is that guilty conscience that needs no accusation. He has anticipated it and thus given the game away. The Bible contains several such spurious claims to authorship: "When I, Daniel, had seen the vision" (Daniel 8:15); "I, John, your brother, who share with you the tribulation and the kingdom" (Revelation 1:9); "I, Jesus, have sent my angel to you with this testimony" (ibid, 22:16); "I, Paul, myself entreat you" (2 Corinthians 10:1).

This revealing little detail strikingly confirms a much-debated observation made by Käte Hamburger (yeah, that’s her name) in her marvelous book The logic of Literatury. She enumerates several defining marks of fictional narrative, separating it from autobiographical narrative on the one hand and historical reporting on the other. One is a certain distancing device called "the epic preterite", the use of the past tense for recounting up-to-the-minute action, with genuine past references recreating to the pluperfect tense: "Conan swung the broadsword he had taken from Zarono" really means “Conan now swings the broadsword he cook from Zarono." Another is the presence of verbs of situation, describing the specifics of a scene in a way the historian could never know (which is why Captain Picard scoffs at the phony time-traveling historian from the future, who remarks that the exact position of Picard's command chair would be a matter of scholarly debate).

In short, the story is told not from the perspective of the narrator but rather from that of the narrated character. When the narrator is not supposed to be that character, when the narrative is third person, the fictive nature of the whole is evident. But what about overtly fictive first-person narration? Hamburger claims that such narrative is in a sense not fiction at all, since it really employs the technique of autobiography. This is why occasionally we are not sure whether a first-person narrative is fictive, factual, or some mixture of both. "Marcel", the narrator of In Search of Lost Time (Rememberance of Things Past) sometimes seems to be the same as Marcel Proust the author, sometimes not. Is Robert E Howards Post Oaks and Sand Roughs an autobiographical novel, or a fictive novel using some autobiographical material here and there, in the manner of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward?

Hamburger has taken considerable heat for this claim, which seems prima facie absurd ("What do you mean it’s not fiction?!"), but she has merely expressed it in a peculiar way. It might be better to say that first-person fictive narration is the exception that proves the rule she has enunciated concerning the mode of fictive narration. Another way of saying it is to see fictive first-person narrative as a kind of pseudepigraphy, fiction posing as genuine first-person writing, or at least adopting the fiction of providing someone else’s first-person account. So we end where we began, since Lin Carter's uses of the false self-reference device occur precisely in "ancient” pseudepigrapha. stories purporting to be excerpts from an ancient text. The formal pretense is the same, though the intent is not: in the case of overt fictions we are able to tell there is no desire to deceive. Joseph Smith no doubt did mean his readers to understand the Book of Mormon to be a genuine ancient document. Ditto for Madame Blavatsky and the Stanzas of Dzyau. Obviously not with Lin Carter's Zanthu Tablets, a counterpart to Smith's golden tablets of Mormon and Moroni, or Lin’s Ponape Scripture, a clear analog to Blavatsky's own palm-papyrus codex.

"The Thing in the Pit" first appeared in Lin Carter’s collection Lost Worlds (DAW Books. 1980).