Why A Voyage to Arcturus deserves a place on our bookshelves.By Ted Hamilton
Summer 2008
How do books become what we call “classics”? Is there some element internal to the works themselves that determines their status? Is it the cultural moment of their creation that’s important? Is there something we can point to and say, "This is what makes a book great”?
These questions appear almost superfluous when it comes to the likes of, say, Don Quixote, Jane Eyre, or The Sound and the Fury—their universal acceptance leaves little for the asking, and you’ll have no trouble finding a thousand devotees of each, or a thousand articles explaining why. These books have masterfully constructed characters, evocative descriptions, and an ability to capture the spirit of the age that rightly wins certain works literary accolades. But there’s another class of books, too—a class whose members seem, to their devotees, to have what it takes for greatness and yet who never win inclusion in its ranks. Their power and their vision appear to qualify them for membership in the canon, but, for one reason or another, they have remained marginalia in the literary universe.
 (art by Erin Nuzzo)
One such book is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus. No monuments to its author exist, and his presence is overshadowed in scholarly databases by a 17th-century Scottish aristocrat of the same name. A short, disturbing work of pseudo-science fiction, it failed to sell 600 copies on its first printing in 1920, and it took over a quarter-century for a second edition to be printed.
And yet this novel, read by so few, has inspired some to paeans of admiration: Harold Bloom, one of the world’s foremost literary critics, admits that “I have read several copies of it to shreds,” and his colleague Colin Wilson calls it “the most extraordinary feat of imagination in English fiction.” C.S. Lewis, creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, credited the work as an important influence. To what, then, does this enigmatic little book owe its enduring power? Why is it so little known? And what can it tell us about the capricious nature of the literary canon and its inductees?
Any investigation into the influence of A Voyage to Arcturus will be of a distinctly intellectual character. An obscure work, the novel rears its head only in the back-alleys of library catalogs and the pages of little-read scholarly journals. Despite the praise given to it by prominent figures like Bloom, Lewis, and fantasy author Philip Pullman, Arcturus is for the most part a creature living in the shadows; unsurprisingly, so was its author.
David Lindsay was born outside London on March 3, 1876. His family, while not poor, commanded no great means, and his father left for Canada when David was still young. Finances kept the young man out of university, and he eventually settled into an undistinguished clerking job at the Lloyd’s underwriting firm. After serving during World War I away from the front, Lindsay seems to have decided upon a literary career, and, abandoning his substantial prospects at Lloyd’s, entered into a kind of self-exile in southwestern England’s North Cornwall with his wife and family to begin work on his first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus.
Lindsay was deeply interested in philosophical notions of the sublime and the transcendent—essentially, that which goes on beyond the visible world and its petty concerns. He was a devotee of the German philosopher Schopenhauer and paraphrased the thinker’s ideas in describing his own worldview: “To understand the true nature of the World, it is necessary to realise that it is a direct creation of the Will, and that everything in it (including love, self-sacrifice, etc.) is either the assertion or the denial of the Will.” Lindsay was austere; he viewed the “Will,” the non-rational desires and passions directing men’s actions, as supremely important. His life was an earnest, serious enterprise, and his artistic priority was always truth over success.
This is perhaps a good thing, given Lindsay’s lack of the latter. After nearly a year of writing, A Voyage to Arcturus was published in 1920 and sold only 596 copies. Lindsay, surprised by the lack of enthusiasm in literary circles but undeterred by the icy reception, continued writing for the rest of his life. His work, however, never reached the same level; Colin Wilson, a prominent science fiction critic, suggests that the “complete artistic success of Arcturus” posed a problem for Lindsay’s future endeavors, and it seems that the author’s lack of recognition caused an ever-increasing withdrawal from society that robbed his work of vividness and depth. Consider a passage from his diary: “The beautiful may be enjoyed in Society, but the Sublime demands solitude; the reason being that it is an emancipation from individuality, and other persons serve to remind one of this individuality.” Lindsay was little concerned with perception and would be suspicious of any pose, artistic or otherwise; nonetheless, the figure of the tragic, underappreciated artist seems to suit him perfectly: one pictures him writing away furiously after the truth of the world, alone and ignored in his sad corner of the realm.
A Voyage to Arcturus was not republished until 1946. In the interim, a few prominent literary voices, including Lewis, acknowledged the work, but it remained undeniably obscure. The first American edition was printed in 1964, and the 60s and early 70s saw a bit of an Arcturus revival, led in large part by the efforts of Wilson and other critics. A paperback edition was issued; a low-budget film adaptation was made in 1970. Since then, the novel has remained in continuous publication, gaining a somewhat higher level of visibility. However, it remains nearly unknown in popular circles, and its obscurity is perhaps due to its undeniable strangeness.
The novel opens with a rather uninspiring scene involving a séance, and the reader is abruptly thrust into the bizarre adventure of the protagonist, Maskull—a character with no past and few traits other than a large body and a penchant for exploration and danger. With little explanation, Maskull, along with his mysterious friend Nightspore, is hustled off by a man named Krag on a cross-space voyage to the star Arcturus and its planet, Tormance.
So far, the plot smacks of uninspired, standard-fare science fiction. But the tone quickly changes; Maskull awakes to a magical, powerful world, and his blood, tainted with the indignity and guilt of Earth, is too heavy for the gravity of Tormance. Joiwind, a selfless, beautiful woman, guides him to safety. At first, it appears as if this planet is idyllic, full of love, caring, and thoughtless beauty.
Things change. Through a series of encounters with characters good and evil, Maskull begins confronting profound metaphysical issues and is forced to challenge his own notions of reality and self-importance. In the land of Ifdawn, for example, where the will rules all, Maskull is forced to commit murder; in Sant, he follows a messianic figure preaching the denial of pleasure and the self; in the Wombflash Forest, he follows the mysterious drumming of the creator, Surtur. As the story progresses in this strange, spiritual vein, the tone gets darker and the encounters more sinister and unsettling. Maskull crosses lands where life is still young and fickle, plants changing forms in seconds and new creatures appearing out of the blue; elsewhere, a fatally beautiful music kills all who try to approach its source. Lindsay presents a world where ideas are of utmost importance and where competing visions of reality play out side by side.
Maskull clearly has some special power in this odd world; at first, suggestions are made that he is some sort of savior, analogized to Prometheus striving after some truth or fire to bring back to humanity. But death stains his hands as he enters into a philosophical quest for the true nature of the world and its creator. The episodes are short and follow each other rapidly, and the reader is given no chance to catch her breath. At the end of the novel, Maskull dies and is replaced by his spiritual counterpart, Nightspore, who learns the shattering truth from Krag: that the world, with its notions of individuality and beauty, is an illusion, and the real world—in a word, pain—has been blocked out by a selfish God, intent on guarding his creation from the truth.
This is all very heavy and hard to swallow, and Lindsay makes no allowances to style or pacing in trying to lighten the load on the reader. But even as the novel overloads the mind with its quick succession of profound ideas and shocks the soul with its haunting scenes of violence and despair, it manages to impart a sense of haunting gravity and beauty. Reading A Voyage to Arcturus is not an amusing or an uplifting experience, but neither is it one that the reader will soon forget.
Unfortunately, part of the memorable nature of the novel may indeed be its hopelessly stilted style. In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway writes, “I’ve been wondering about Dostoyevsky…How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?” Much the same could be said about Lindsay: his prose is amateurish in tone and structure, and, though it manages to impart the author’s impressive ideas, leaves much to be asked for. Consider a passage shortly following Maskull’s landing on Tormance:
One part of the sky began to get lighter than the rest. Maskull cried out to his companions, but received no response. This frightened him. He went on shouting out, at irregular intervals—equally alarmed at the silence and at the sound of his own voice. Finally, as no answering hail came, he thought it wiser not to make too much noise, and after that he lay quiet, waiting in cold blood for what might happen. Lindsay seems simply to have been born without the gift of succinct writing; his ideas, characters, and plot are striking, his style is not. Perhaps this accounts, at least in small measure, for Lindsay’s obscurity: a novel already so difficult to swallow will win few readers with writing so poor. Bloom notes in an email exchange that his friend John Crowley, an eminent literary science fiction writer, cannot read Arcturus because of its terrible composition. Even less hope remains, then, for the layman.
And yet Lindsay’s work has managed to affect some in remarkable ways. Following its mini-revival in the late 60s, Arcturus gained some significant critical attention. The science fiction critic Colin Wilson, along with Lindsay’s friend EH Visiak and JB Pick, released a collection of essays on Lindsay’s novels in 1970 that explored themes such as the author’s personality, influences, and use of symbols. Eleven years later, the Frenchman Bernard Sellin published a book that detailed the author’s life and work in a more biographical fashion. In 1982, another full-length treatment was published by Gary K. Wolfe, and in the same year Bloom wrote at length on A Voyage to Arcturus as an example of the Sublime in fiction in his essay collection, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism. The earlier critics are concerned largely with explicating Lindsay’s account of reality and with linking it to the work of Scottish fantasist George MacDonald and the philosophy of Schopenhauer; Bloom, on the other hand, takes Arcturus as an emblematic work of post-Romantic fantasy linked to the millennia-old skeptical Gnostic tradition. Whatever their take, the diverse interpretations of these critics highlight the fertile ground for reflection that Lindsay had created.
But what accounts for this sudden upsurge in interest? Perhaps the novel simply needed some time to sink in; perhaps heightened focus on the works of CS Lewis and his contemporary JRR Tolkien led critics to focus on one of the fathers of the fantasy genre. One also suspects, though, that the trippy, unorthodox nature of Maskull’s journey could have had a special appeal for writers coming out of the 60s; the student film adaptation of Arcturus suggests such a development. The film, made in 1970 by Bill Holloway, is infused with cultural motifs of the late-60s, and some plot points of the novel are altered accordingly; for example, Maskull does not leave for Tormance in a space shuttle; instead, he is instructed to put a tablet in his mouth and told that “the voyage will begin once it dissolves.” The viewer is left to make appropriate connections.
But this film is not the strangest permutation of Arcturus; that honor belongs to The Flight to Lucifer, a pseudo-sequel to the novel published in 1980 and written, strangely, by Harold Bloom. The critic’s only foray into fiction, it represents an over-earnest attempt to capture the novel’s spiritual elements in an overt fashion. Bloom, concerned as he is with the “sublime splendor of Lindsay’s book” and its relation to Gnostic religious ideas, tries in The Flight to Lucifer to explicitly describe the spiritual revelation he sees in Maskull’s journey; namely, the illusory nature of reality and the hegemony of pain. The result, as Bloom admits, is “an inadequate fantasy.” But the mere existence of a novel such as The Flight to Lucifer—certainly one of the more unconventional entries in the catalog of a great critic’s works—points to Lindsay’s strange and powerful influence.
Perhaps the most ironic instance of this influence is the importance that Arcturus has had for science fiction. The most prominent literary inheritor of Lindsay is likely CS Lewis. His Space Trilogy, released during World War II, was one of the first works of serious science fiction. In an email exchange, the critic Gary K. Wolfe—whose 1982 book was part of the minor Lindsay revival—notes that Lewis credited Lindsay with being the first writer to discover that other planets were fruitful settings for reflection on philosophical and spiritual matters. This discovery by Lindsay has helped steer the course of the genre; Wolfe writes that “he helped establish a tradition of fantastic writing that was beyond formulaic adventures.” Interestingly, however, Lindsay was almost surely unaware of this important facet of his novel. At the time of Arcturus’ publication, science fiction was unknown, and literature incorporating fantastic elements was not marginalized as “genre” work. Subsequent writers, however, picked up on the novel’s schema and exploited it to great effect. Lindsay thus became the accidental father of one of 20th-century literature’s most important innovations.
What sparse popularity Arcturus enjoys is largely a consequence of this unintended development, as most readers today encounter the work through references by other science fiction authors. One such reader is the jazz musician Ron Thomas, who discovered Lindsay through his influence on the Space Trilogy. Thomas’ 2001 album, “Scenes From A Voyage to Arcturus,” is probably the most recent mainstream instance of a Lindsay-inspired work. A thematic adaptation of the novel, the album features piano and electronic instrumentation in a mixture of serene and disturbing tones. Thomas says in an interview that his goal was to create an overall impression of “strangeness”—to imagine “what music might be like on other planets.” The adaptation is especially apt—Lindsay himself was an avid music fan (albeit of the classical sort) and notes that “the greatest compliment [A Voyage to Arcturus] has ever received was from the mouth of an artist and musician, who found its whole construction and composition essentially ‘musical.’” Thomas demonstrates that, even as music, Arcturus is an unsettling creation.
There may be some answer as to why A Voyage to Arcturus remains nearly anonymous. Perhaps it’s the novel’s frustrating prose; perhaps it’s the odd setting and plot. More likely, one might think, is that the work is simply an accident of history—a piece of visionary art that somehow fell through the cracks while others got the praise it deserved.
There’s no ready answer. Arcturus appears on precious few reading lists and rarely crops up in literary conversation. Still, one must take notice when the work is included in a major assessment of the western canon (as it was in Bloom’s version), or when it is cited as inspiration by authors such as Lewis. And maybe this is the novel’s fate: perhaps it will only exist only as a shadow at the back of others’ work, as an important stepping-stone to other things.
Still, though, for many readers, Arcturus remains a shocking assault upon ideas of reality and truth and an undeniable example of the force that literature can exert. Wolfe notes that the book “appeals to a postmodern sense of indeterminacy”—the notion that nothing is certain and that distinctions between types are inadequate—in its questioning and denial of all our ways of looking at the world. Lindsay expresses this idea powerfully in a diary entry: “One must regard the world not merely as the home of illusions, but as being rotten with illusion from top to bottom…The most sacred and holy things ought not to be taken for granted, for if examined attentively, they will be found as hollow and empty as the rest.”
A Voyage to Arcturus is not a novel that consoles or reaffirms; it is an unflinching attack upon our easy answers to the hardest questions. The book never earned the fame that its author, and many subsequent others, thought it deserved, and Lindsay withdrew from the world as he grew older, eventually dying of complications resulting from lack of dental care. With its austere vision and its lack of acceptance, one might view A Voyage to Arcturus as the emblematic work of “art for art’s sake”, and Lindsay as the quintessential artist. But the author himself, concerned as he was with his single-minded quest, would likely have rejected such facile categorizations; he, like Maskull, was interested only in the pursuit of truth. All else, including fame, would be an illusion. |
