The Shadow over 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' Part II: Hints Of A False Start

...but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

Picking up roughly where we left off, note the previous section is roughly being dropped. The story's beginning is even explicitly in the text being dismissed as irrelevant, and the narrative shifts to the present tense now. I don't want to remake the same points as before, but merely if something can so off-handedly be dismissed, maybe pare it down. But don't call attention to how it's totally not relevant. It's an easy point to belabor, because it is so frustrating.

This part, though, adds up to a whole lotta nothin', too, since it is mostly a framing device to transition into the beginning of the main flashback in the story. Too much can't be revealed without ruining even more of the story, so it ends up merely spinning wheels for all of a paragraph before dropping backing into the past, though a seperate one than before.

In some ways, the structure of the first three chapters is like this, roughly jumping from one set of flashbacks to another, and flashbacks within flashbacks, all so Fishizen Kane, though without the pteradactyls. It is tricky to pull off, but HPL does an admirable job by not having the narration itself jump around in time after these first two false starts, and using dialects to keep the story-with-a-story clear. This creates some other problems later on, but we'll get that old man drunk when we come to him.

I do, however, like how there is the elements here that hint of some of what is coming in Chapter V, however, these still, I think, would be better elsewhere. Personally, I find a particularly lovely turn phrase in "odd cravings to whisper" which evokes more than vague talk of an ominous growing plan, and self-doubts of sanity. A terrible way to start a story not about an unreliable narrator is to make him look like one and then just drop that.

Two other quibbles:

Why, after having gone through this, would our unnamed narrator worry he was the first to go mad? Sometimes the sloppy writing points at a more interesting tale; the total lack of follow up is what makes it sloppy. The only way for him to be first is if none of the events in Innsmouth happened as the narrator believes, which explains the nonsensical nature of the second hand tales of submarines attacking reefs and such. Yet this isn't The Yellow Wallpaper of Innsmouth; although HPL sets all the pieces up on the board for the 'succumbing to a contagious nightmare hallucination' interpretation, it is my sense that you are to take it all in the end as more or less a just-so story, and things happen as they seem.

Yet there is the lingering lines that point to a more ambitious story somewhere beyond the simple just-so or 'it was all a crazy dream,' one where the narrator is slowly growing more alien, not mad, as the call of sea is growing, growing, and, in Chapter IV, the Deep Ones are merely trying to lead a lost brother home to Y'ha-nthlei, instead of doing whatever they're up to... It is these hints that draw me in Innsmouth, and, ultimately, why I am so frustrated with it.

Finally, there is "evilly-shadowed seaport of death;" a perfectly hackneyed, silly phrase, but, oh, dear God, when Innsmouth is over, I am so sick of the word 'shadow.' The name of these series of posts is my attempt to cope with the constant variants of 'shadow' all over and over and over again in Innsmouth. I used to think maybe it was a failed attempt at something, some sort of repetition like crashing waves. Now, I suspect HPL was merely sloppy, yet they still crash on me like waves. I have these nightmares that I will do a count of the number of times that damned word is used in the story, but there are, after all, things a man is not meant to know. Yet Mother Hydra calls those odd cravings in whispers to another part of me...