Trapped in Madness
I can’t tell you what attracted me to Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall. Rather, I don’t want to admit it. This novel really doesn’t have much to do with anything I’m working on. It was a cheap book that I accidentally tossed into my tote as I cleaned out the sci-fi section of a used bookstore. But I’m going to reluctantly admit that the synopsis reminded me of Pitch Black, a sci-fi/horror film starring Vin Diesel that premiered in 2000. There, I said it. Let’s all move on and not hunt for photos of me on the internet in a possibly related Halloween costume.
Nightfall was originally a short story premiering in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1941. It was eventually expanded into a novel, published in 1990, with the help of Robert Silverberg. I’ll be reviewing the novelized version since there’s a little more meat to chew on.
Nightfall is set on the alien world of Kalgash. One of six suns always hovers above the horizon, creating a planet that never knows darkness. But this eternal day is interrupted once every 2,000 years when a moon, usually invisible in the ceaseless daylight, eclipses the one and only sun in the sky. Previous instances have resulted in civilization-ending panic. This time, a team of scientists and academics tries to warn the world. But various governments drag their feet, the media chastises the alarmists, and the people ignore the dire warnings.
Nightfall is split into three sections: Twilight, Nightfall, and Daybreak (I’m not sure if we should be giving Stephenie Meyer the side eye here). In Asimov’s Twilight, we meet the main characters as they grapple with the impending cataclysm. There’s Beenay 25 and Athor 77, a pair of physicists/astronomers who work out the presence of the eclipsing moon through minute gravitational wobbles in Kagalash’s orbit. Siferra 89 is an archaeologist that stumbles across definitive evidence of a series of catastrophes that strike the planet with unerring regularity.
A psychologist, Sheerin 501, studies the effects of darkness on the mind. We meet him as he’s inspecting a carnival ride that flings participants through a long, dark tunnel. Several people have died from even this short exposure. He provides educated guesses on the outcome of a planet-wide blackout.
Joining our team of academics is Theremon 762, a journalist. Though he’s initially supportive of the cause, Theremon 762 eventually rejects the team’s warnings as fake news. Other media outlets follow suit and he eventually turns the scientists into laughing stocks. Lastly, there’s Folimun 66, a member of the Apostles of the Flame, a religious cult whose teachings foretell the end of the world.
There’s a lot of fun to be had in the first part of the Nightfall as all these characters slowly, independently reach the same conclusion about the coming apocalypse. As one would expect from Asimov, the academics utilize the scientific method, methodical tests and verifiable results, adding pieces to a puzzle until its image becomes frighteningly clear. Watching these people from different disciplines reach the same doomed conclusion is a lot more fun than it sounds. It’s a scientific murder mystery. And I won’t go into too much detail about the outcome. Instead, I want to explore the topic of madness in literature.
Nightfall has an interesting origin story. Supposedly John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, recommended the premise to Asimov. They discussed a quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”
Asimov was sure that instead of finding proof of god, a thousand million stars appearing at once would drive the world mad. And he wrote Nightfall to make his point.
I think at first glance, it feels unusual that things so mundane--darkness, stars--would cause so much madness in the world. The characters in Nightfall even comment on this. The physicists theorize about a planet with just one sun, and how that planet would be half in light and half in shadow every moment, and how the creatures on that planet would be perfectly suited to that cycle. They’re talking about Earth, about us. But they, the denizens of Kagalash, lack appropriate mental defenses against darkness.
They’ve evolved to live in the light almost like humans need heat or shelter. All of the characters, indeed everyone in society, sleeps with a Godlight (i.e. nightlight) so that they’re never in a dark room. One wonders what it’s like for these creatures to blink for too long, but that is, lamentably, never addressed.
But while darkness is terrifying, it is the stars--a billion twinkling pinpricks of light--that really drive everyone barking mad. Here’s a direct quote from Nightfall, the moment when Theremon 762 breaks:
“There were thousands of them, blazing with incredible power, one next to another next to another next to another, an endless wall of them, forming a dazzling shield of terrifying light that filled the entire heavens. Thousands of mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world . . . he could not tear his eyes away from the hellish sight of them. He looked up through the opening in the dome, every muscle rigid, frozen, and stared in helpless wonder and horror at that shield of fury that filled the sky. He felt his mind shrinking down to a tiny cold point under that unceasing onslaught. His brain was no bigger than a marble, rattling around in the hollow gourd that was his skull. His lungs would not work. His blood ran backward in his veins.” (p. 200-201)
For starters, I think Asimov deserves credit here for describing madness with words. That’s not an easy task. There’s a clear pattern when studying his use of imagery: “frozen”, “frighteningly cold”, “tiny cold point”, “marble”. The shape of the character’s madness is determined by the shape of the object causing the madness: it is a fixation, the mind is no longer under the owner’s control. The term “interpellation” comes to mind.
But there’s more. Twice, Theremon 762 mentions the word “shield”, and once mentions “wall”. Shields, walls, these are things that protect us, defend us from threats. But the psychologist doesn’t feel safer; he’s not expressing a sense of security. Indeed, it’s the opposite. He is surrounded, he is trapped by the stars; he’s ringed by a Spartan phalanx. These shields offer only destruction; the walls separate him from his sanity.
And like with the written description of the stars, there’s a link between a physical sensation and a mental state: he’s trapped inside his madness. His mind is crushed down into a marble where it, too, is confined, “in the hollow gourd that was his skull.”
It’s worth comparing the madness in Nightfall with that of another work. The first thing that jumped to mind was the John Carpenter film In the Mouth of Madness, mostly because it pleasantly scarred me as a child. But in literature, you can’t escape the classical eldritch text: H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
Lovecraft wrote this novella in the early 1930s and eventually published a serialized form in, surprisingly, Astounding Stories, the predecessor of Astounding Science Fiction where Nightfall first appeared in print. I won’t provide an exhaustive synopsis. Short version: a team of scientists embarks on an expedition to uncharted sections of Antarctica. An advance party stumbles on the fossilized remains of an unusually ancient species, but that ill-fated group is slaughtered, and our narrator, Dyer, and a graduate assistant, Danforth, set out to figure out what happened.
They search the area and stumble upon the ruins of an ancient city built by an advanced civilization. Interpreting prolific bas-reliefs and carvings, the narrator determines that the ancient culture, known as the Old Ones, ruled the planet for millions of years ago. Earth’s first rulers created shoggoths, shambling monstrosities built solely as beasts of burden.
The Old Ones’ artwork hints at great wars with other alien species common to Lovecraftian lore like Cthulhu and the Mi-go. But when an encroaching ice age weakened the Old Ones, the shoggoths finally overthrew their masters and forced the last of the Old Ones to flee beneath the waves.
The advance team inadvertently roused some slumbering Old Ones, and was slaughtered for this transgression. Dragging bodies and samples with them, these ancient creatures from a long dead civilization tried to return home, but found a shoggoth waiting for them. It (probably) killed them and then chased the narrator and his graduate student out of the city and into their airplane. With the narrator at the controls, Danforth takes one final look back at the mountains and witnesses something that breaks his mind.
At the Mountains of Madness is written in epistolary form. After returning home, Dr. Dyer has since learned that another expedition to Antarctica is being mounted. He publishes a warning and begs them not to wake the monsters that almost claimed his life and stole his student’s sanity.
Published about five years apart, it’s understandable why these two works share so much. They are both about scientists--supposedly rational individuals--confronting a phenomenon that breaks their minds. But it’s also curious how dissimilar they are when stacked against each other.
In Lovecraft’s story, our characters are slowly steeped in dread: the desolate Antarctic tundra, the deaths of their comrades, the exploration of an empty alien city, and their final confrontation with the living embodiment of an alien evil. It is an escalating fear with every new discovery adding to their terror. In Nightfall, the calamity is foreseen but its ensuing madness is swift and sudden, taking only as long for the moon to fully occlude the sun.
And there is the madness itself. Here is Lovecraft’s description of the moment when the grad student loses his mind:
“But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strewn foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward, my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely--yet I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.” (p. 585)
First, regarding the writing, Lovecraft uses a similar technique as Asimov. The creatures they’ve recently tangled with are said to be many-tentacled and many-eyed. Tentacles “wriggle”. Tentacles “seethe.” And certainly a “cave-riddled” mountainside might evoke a revulsion akin to the many-eyed creatures they met in the depths of the ruins. This speaks to a common phobia: trypophobia, the fear of holes.
It’s also important to note that we experience the madness in Nightfall from a character’s perspective, while Dyer merely recounts Danforth’s symptoms, his physical response to crumbling sanity, in At the Mountains of Madness.
What I think is the most interesting when comparing these two passages is that in Nightfall, our team of physicists, astronomers, archaeologists, and psychologists know exactly what is going to happen. They’ve done the math. They’ve published the research. They’re expecting the end and predict its final form, even running tests on what staring at a star-filled sky might feel like. They had years to process what was coming. Science has led them to a horrifying conclusion, and science provides no shield for the insanity that consumes them.
Yet in At the Mountains of Madness, our researchers stumble upon things that science simply cannot explain. The foundation of human thought is turned upside down by their discoveries. The creatures they find are both animal and vegetable. Or neither. The shoggoths are implied to be the source of all human life on earth. Giant, ancient horrors soar through space and start wars that devour worlds. It’s all so overwhelming. This is, in some ways, a very understandable madness, certainly more so than a starry afternoon.
But there’s a line in Lovecraft that I think really gets at how the madness mechanism works (in literature). Dyer and Danforth have just crossed the mountain chain hiding the alien city. “I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay beyond” (p. 522).
The horror--the true, mind-shattering cosmic horror--cannot be awe alone. We can look at a mountain or the ocean and feel awe, dwarfed as we are by their tremendous size. And it cannot be terror alone either. Some people look at puppies and feel terror. Silly as that sounds, it’s at least understandable if in their mind, deep down, puppy = hungry wolf. But awe and terror aren’t enough. Not alone.
It is disbelief that is the crux of madness here. We simple primates have only our limited physical senses with which to explore the world. And if we come upon something so huge, so terrible, so awful, so wondrous, that our mind refuses to believe our senses, that is the necessary break. That is the shallow gulf between sanity and insanity (as often portrayed in literature). It is the tension of a liminal stage, oscillating between two poles.
Our conscious mind reels as its foundational paradigms are upended. Our subconscious--perhaps, more accurately, our instincts--are likewise torn asunder. We are both attracted and repelled. We, like Theremon in Nightfall, are trapped and cannot look away. We’re stuck in an electric socket, buzzing with energy, cooking our insides to mush until something breaks the hold on us.
True cosmic horror is a blend of awe, terror, and disbelief. It’s pulling back the curtain on reality and finding something that no words can explain. Or can ever explain. We humans don’t like to think this way, but there are things, many things, completely beyond our comprehension. We just don’t normally run into those things in our day-to-day, city-dwelling, earthbound lives.
In both works, the impetus and cure for madness is a simple human drive: curiosity. Scientists, certainly as written in the Golden Age of science fiction, were curious to a fault. And maybe we can’t blame them for that. It is, perhaps, curiosity that makes scientists what they are. It is curiosity that lures them toward danger. And it’s curiosity that (sometimes) breaks the spell of madness. They (as characters) and we (as readers) want to know, need to know. Curiosity is one of my favorite human traits.
Admittedly, it’s also one of our most hazardous traits. Lovecraft’s narrator, Dyer, writes his letters as a plea to prevent another team from traveling to Antarctica. His dire warnings were meant to keep others from facing the death and madness that eradicated his team. I wonder if this other team listened. Curiosity, this near primal need to know a thing, likely pushed them to go regardless of another’s exhortation. How often are we warned of danger only to ignore these reasonable appeals? It is the height of folly, but I can’t deny that fools have done incredible things by ignoring good advice. What a boring world it would be if we all listened to our cautious elders and peers! Perhaps we need our brave fools. And perhaps these brave fools will one day be our downfall, awakening an eldritch god-beast that will devour and doom the whole species. It may be dumb, but it certainly won’t make for boring reading.
