According to the Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Gustav Jung, “Water in all its forms—whether sea, lake, river, spring, etc.—is one of the most recurrent representations of the unconscious, just as it is also the lunar femininity that is the aspect most intimately connected with water”. The symbolism of the sea has not failed to influence the best literature: from Melville to Conrad to Stevenson, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe with his famous Gordon Pym, there are numerous examples in this sense. But perhaps the one who managed to evoke more effectively the sense of solitude, mystery, and looming threat of the infinite marine expanses was the great William Hope Hodgson.
If the sea-themed novels of William Hope Hodgson have had various editions—starting with the very well-done and curated edition of Naufragio nell’ignoto by Fanucci curated by De Turris and Fusco—the same cannot be said for the stories before the commendable work of Edizioni Hypnos. In fact, there was only a short collection by Newton Compton curated by Gianni Pilo titled L'orrore del mare (1993), which was not impeccable in terms of translation. The Hypnos publisher, after the first, also publishes the second volume of All the Sea Stories, namely Deep Waters, a volume curated, with great passion and competence, by Pietro Guarriello. The new translation is by the talented Elena Furlan. Each story is introduced and framed by Guarriello with great precision and wealth of bibliographical references, while his long afterword Lost in the Enchanted Seas: William Hope Hodgson and the Mystery of the Sargasso is a truly important contribution to understanding the genesis of what can rightfully be defined as the The Sargasso Sea Cycle.
This cycle was inaugurated by the story From The Tideless Sea published in 1906. Hodgson, somewhat like Lovecraft with The Cthulhu Mythos, created a series of stories set in this mysterious place long considered “a ship graveyard”. Numerous are the anecdotes of disappearing ships or their discovery without crew, which are meticulously recalled here. Even in this second volume, we find several stories where the Sargasso Sea is explicitly named, as in Nei profondi abissi (An Adventure Of The Deep Waters) and The Finding Of The Graiken, or it is evoked through the description of a motionless sea or the presence of “putrid algae and strange marine fauna” as in the splendid The Stone Ship that closes the volume: it is a remarkable and genuinely weird story where the crew of the ship Alfred Jessop discovers a mysterious stone wreck that seems to come from another cosmic dimension. The ending, which describes the emergence of a bizarre mountain range from the ocean depths, is something truly unforgettable. The story might remind one of “the emergence of R’lyeh”, but at the time of The Call Of Cthulhu (1926), as Guarriello rightly points out, Lovecraft still did not know Hodgson, of whom he would only later speak while integrating his famous essay Supernatural Horror In Literature. However, Jean Ray definitely knew him, and probably discovered Lovecraft much later thanks to the Denoel Editions in the Présence du futur collection. To delve into the influence Hodgson had on Lovecraft and Jean Ray the essay by Jacques Van Herp, found in the fundamental L'Herne Lovecraft of 1969, titled Lovecraft, Jean Ray, Hodgson, is very interesting. According to Van Herp, it is precisely the mutual knowledge of Hodgson that is the reason for certain similarities between the two writers. In any case, the masterpiece story by Jean Ray Il Salterio di Mayence, where a vessel is projected into unknown dimensions, surely owes something to Hodgson.
Among the other stories present in this anthology, I would surely recall The Derelict where his imagination is at its best: the disturbing atmosphere and extreme solitude generated by finding a ghost ship is something truly unforgettable. The story also feels the influence of some philosophical theories of the period by Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch. The Sea Horses is instead a non-horror story and, in some ways, unpublished in the “Hodgsonian” canon: however, we are faced with a fairy tale-like piece that manages to evoke the world of childhood—with all its turmoils and innocence—in a very effective and dreamlike manner.
In conclusion, we are dealing with another important piece to understand the production of a fundamental figure in the realm of supernatural literature.
Loading comments slowly