Atlantis

Revisiting Atlantis

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Donning/Starblaze ed., 1983

Grove Koger

The literature about Atlantis is seemingly endless, a situation quite a bit like those turtles that go all the way down.  

Or almost. It all began, so far as we know, with Plato, who mentions Atlantis in two of dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. There seems to be nothing older than that unless it’s folkloric traditions (long since lost) of one kind of natural disaster or another. We might as well call the dialogues a work of fiction, since that’s pretty much what they are—an intriguing but relatively thin story laden with lessons about how a country ought (and ought not) to be governed.  

The later literature of Atlantis is, to me, quite a bit more interesting. The crew of Jules Verne’s submarine Nautilus paid Atlantis a short visit in his 1870-71 novel Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Arthur Conan Doyle’s late novella The Maracot Deep (1929) begins promisingly, but veers into spiritualism. In his 1919 novel L’Atlantide (translated as The Queen of Atlantis), Pierre Benoit moved Atlantis from the seabed to the Sahara Desert, a salutary move around which Benoit constructed quite a good story. I put it at the top of my very short “Novels about Atlantis” list.

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First ed., Andrew Dakers, 1946

But directly below Benoit’s novel I’d place the Breaking of the Seals by one Francis [Leslie] Ashton (1904-1994), which I originally learned about from a publication I once reviewed for, The Reprint Bulletin: Book Reviews. A small operation from Glanville Publishers, Inc., in Dobbs Ferry, New York, it’s long since ceased publication. Given my tastes in imaginative literature, I might have run across the novel later, but there’s no way to be sure. In any case, here’s what I had to say about the work:

“A welcome reprint of a nearly forgotten fiction classic. Framed by an English country house setting, the novel projects (via psychometry) its protagonist back 200,000 years to the fall of what we immediately recognize as Atlantis. The disaster is caused by the cataclysmic disintegration of one of a series of moons supposed by Austrian scientist Hans Hoerbiger (1860-1931) to have been captured by earth through the ages. This paper edition adds a brief and not particularly informative preface by Donning Editor-in-Chief Hank Stine [a churlish comment on my part], a longer introduction by fantasy writer Andre Norton, and a genially dotty foreword by Hoerbiger enthusiast Egerton Sykes, F.R.F.S., as well as a colorful cover and black and white interior illustrations by Ron Miller. Highly recommended for popular and research collections of imaginative literature, particularly since the original 1946 British edition is rare enough to be absent from the National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints.”

It was thanks to Ashton’s novel and its foreword that I learned about Hoerbiger (or Hörbiger) and Sykes, bold but seemingly genial advocates of what are now recognized as fringe theories. Hörbiger came to believe that, over the aeons, the earth has had a series of moons, with our current one being number seven. Sykes was an amateur archaeologist who, according the site Seachild: Egerton Sykes and His Science of Atlantology, amassed the “largest private collection on Atlantis in the world” and “prided himself on knowing every scientist around the world in the field of Atlantology from 1912 to 1950.” He also edited two journals, Atlantis: A Journal of Research, which ran to 1948 to 1976, and New World Antiquity, which ran from 1954 to 1979. Those were the days!

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Thinking about Atlantis

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Grove Koger

I don’t know of any myth in the Western World that has attracted so much ink as that of Atlantis, the great island that supposedly sank into the ocean sometime in the distant past.

However, the word myth can have several different meanings, and it’s important to understand what kind we’re talking about in discussing Atlantis. (That’s it at the top of today’s post in a map by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who’s oriented his map with north at the bottom).

Plato’s retelling of the story appears in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, the latter of which lacks a conclusion. Plato provides the story with a pedigree, claiming to base his information on the works of Athenian statesman Solon, who is said to have visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE. However, we have only Plato’s word for what his source might have learned.

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The truth is that Atlantis seems to have sprung full-blown from the head of Plato (seen above in a Roman copy of a bust by Silanion) in much the same manner that Athena was thought to have sprung from the head of her father, Zeus. Plato’s dialogues constitute the very first mentions of the island, which he described as lying “in front of … the Pillars of Hercules.” These pillars are usually understood to be promontories at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea, but—and this is only one of the many, many buts in the story of Atlantis—ancient authorities placed the pillars in any number of places, and even, on occasion, considered them to be metaphors. (For details, I encourage you to consult the entry in the invaluable online Atlantipedia.)

In any case, it’s important to keep in mind that the story of Atlantis has no precursors. It seems fairly obvious that Plato was teaching a lesson about the ideal state and about what happens when the citizens of that state turn away from the ideals that have sustained it. However, his story has been seized upon by subsequent philosophers, novelists, archaeologists (many of them amateurs), and crackpots, with the result that a small library could be filled to overflowing with their works.

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The most popular location for Atlantis has proven to be the eastern North Atlantic Ocean, largely due to the modern identification of the Pillars of Hercules with Gibraltar in the north and Monte Hacho (or possibly Jebel Musa) in the south. As a result, prime candidates for the remains of the lost island have included three of the archipelagoes of Macaronesia—the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. A. Samler Brown, for instance, dealt a little too carelessly with the subject in early editions of his guidebooks. More recently, some archaeologists have seized upon the catastrophic eruption of the volcano at the Greek island of Santorini, or Thera, which occurred some 3,600 years ago. However, they overlook the central point that Atlantis didn’t erupt, it sank.  

Among novelists, Jules Verne described how his travelers visited the ruins of Atlantis in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869-70), and Pierre Benoit placed his character Antinea, a descendant of the rulers of Atlantis, rather ingeniously in a cave in the Sahara Desert in his 1919 novel Atlantida. More recently, Lawrence Durrell suggested in his 1953 travel memoir Reflections on a Marine Venus that “islomanes”—those “who find islands somehow irresistible”—are “direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and it is towards the lost Atlantis that their subconscious yearns throughout their island life.” And on and on …

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Several years ago, realizing that few writers of any stripe have dealt Plato’s inner life, I wrote a modest story I called “An Incident from the Childhood of Plato.” But when I submitted it to a market I thought I had a good working relationship with, I received a remarkably obtuse response. The editor suggested that I was trivializing Plato’s use of the myth, and that the physical actions I describe were simply unrealistic. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was trivializing anything at all, since, quite the contrary, I had connected the myth with what I thought could have been a profoundly important childhood experience. In addition, the physical events I describe in the story were perfectly consistent with reality, as I proved to the editor when I provided him with links to several news reports of similar events. In any case, I went on to submit the story to the publication Altered Reality, whose perceptive editor accepted it within a couple of days. You can read it here.

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Pierre Benoit & the Mysteries of Atlantis

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Grove Koger

July 16 is the birthday of French novelist Pierre Benoit, who was born on this day in 1886.

In some circles, Benoit (ben wah) was once a literary figure to contend with, having won the Grand Prize of the Académie Française in 1919 for his second novel, L’Atlantide (or Atlantida in one of its English translations), and joining that august body in 1931.

If Benoit (seen below in a portrait by Henri Manuel) is remembered in the English-speaking world, however, it’s almost entirely for Atlantida, although the work’s fame in science fiction and adventure fiction circles inevitably involves questions over its resemblance to a far more famous English adventure novel, H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887). 

But first things first.

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Benoit’s father was a soldier who served in French-occupied Tunisia and Algeria, and it was in these territories that young Pierre lived from 1892 to 1907. Among many other memories, he recalled hearing the story of Lieutenant Clair Edouard Paul Arnold Quiquerez and Captain René de Segonzac, one of whom was accused of murdering the other while on an expedition in the French West African colony of Ivory Coast. In his novel, Benoit also introduces references to the disastrous Flatters Expedition of 1880-81 and mentions other North African explorers such as Heinrich Barth (1821-1865) and Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs (1831-1896). The result is a high degree of verisimilitude, a sine qua non in a genre in which we’re expected to believe what’s pretty much unbelievable.

Benoit embeds his narrative within the frame of another story in order to recount the experiences of two explorers—André de Saint-Avit (who has been accused of murdering a fellow explorer on an earlier expedition) and Jean Morhange—making their way deep into the Sahara. In time, after surviving a spectacularly described rain storm—the pair are kidnapped and imprisoned in the cave palace of Queen Antinea, a descendant of Neptune (!) and of the rulers of the fabled “lost continent” of Atlantis. We eventually learn the true story behind those accusations against Saint-Avit, but I’ll leave it to you to discover it for yourself. I’ll mention, however, that Antinea herself is a murderous figure, a very real femme fatale.

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Atlantida was filmed in 1921 by Belgian-born director Jacques Feyder, who arranged for some sequences to be shot in North Africa. Subsequently, Austrian director G.W. Pabst filmed three sound versions—in French, German, and English. And more adaptations, including theatrical, were to follow.

Accusations of plagiarism were leveled against Benoit soon after his novel’s publication due to its resemblance to H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 novel, and the two works are indeed similar in quite a few details. Benoit replied to his critics by pointing out that he didn’t read English and that She wasn’t translated into French until after the publication of L’Atlantide. He went on to cite his own sources in an essay, “Commenht j’ai écrit L’Atlantide,” in a 1920 issue of L’Écho de Paris. However, it seems that an abridgement of She entitled La Reine Ayesha had been serialized in the French periodical La Vie Moderne beginning in late 1898. Thus Benoit’s protestations that he could not have read She are suspect.

And it’s at this point that Carl Jung (1875-1961) enters the story. The renowned psychoanalyst suggested that cryptomnesia (that is, unconscious borrowing) and/or a manifestation of the collective unconscious might be involved in the similarities between the two novels. The situation raises questions that we’re never going to learn the answers to, but as I enjoy mysteries, I’m perfectly happy to leave it there.

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I’m indebted for some of the details in today’s post to Hugo Frey’s Afterword—“Pierre Benoit and the Lessons of L’Atlantide”— to the 2005 University of Nebraska / Bison Books edition of Benoit’s novel.

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News from Nowhere

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Grove Koger

Those of us fascinated by imaginary places are surely akin to “islomanes”—individuals who, in Lawrence Durrell’s classic formulation in Reflections on a Marine Venus, “find islands somehow irresistible.” They “are the direct descendants of the Atlanteans,” Durrell continues, “and it is towards the lost Atlantis that their subconscious yearns throughout their island life.” Which leads us quite naturally to …

Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Newly updated and expanded. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 2000.

On a small enough island, you can enjoy the fantasy that you might well be the master of all you survey. But in the case of an imaginary one, you are the master. You share your kingdom with a writer and a few of his or her characters, of course, but if they behave tediously, they run the risk of being put back on the bookshelf.

In honor of this fascinating phenomenon, Manguell and Guadalupi published the first edition of their Dictionary in 1980 and new edition in 2000. It’s more than 750 pages in length—a testament to the hold that the concept’s possibilities have exercised on the minds of writers for millennia.

The earliest place I find discussed in the book is—no surprise—Plato’s perennially intriguing invention, which the famous philosopher described in the 4th century BCE. We read that Atlantis was “a vast island-continent submerged under the waters of the Atlantic towards the year 9560 BC; parts of it are still inhabited and can be visited.” The entry runs to three pages, thanks in part to a diagram of the island continent’s obsessively circular capital, and mentions that one Professor Maracot discovered Atlantis’s remains underwater in 1926, and that, what’s more, a party of Frenchmen happened upon other remains of Atlantis in 1897 in—the Sahara! A bibliography at the end of the entry helpfully identifies the specific dialogues in which Plato described his legendary concept, as well as two other works: L’Atlantide by Pierre Benoit, and The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (I’ll be writing about both, along with Atlantis itself, down the line.)

Here also are Norman Douglas’s Nepenthe (from South Wind), Jan Morris’s Hav (from Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons), Anthony Hope’s Ruritania, etc., etc.

In describing their method, Manguel and Guadalupi write that “we would take for granted that fiction was fact, and treat the chosen texts as seriously as one treats the reports of an explorer or chronicler, using only the information provided in the original source, with no ‘inventions’ on our part.”

But why some entries and not others? “We can present no convincing excuse,” explain the two. “Ultimately we admit to having chosen certain places simply because they aroused in us that indescribable thrill that is the true achievement of fiction, places without which the world would be so much poorer.”

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According to information I find online, Alberto Manguel grew up in Buenos Aires, where he’s said to have met the great (but nearly blind) Jorge Luis Borges and become one of several people who read aloud to him regularly. Later in life, runs the account, he made the acquaintance of Gianni Guadalupi, who’s credited with books such as The Discovery of the Nile and Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator. So far as I can determine, neither man is imaginary.

News from Nowhere, by the way, is the title of a socialist fantasy by noted English designer and writer William Morris (1834-1896). A number of his inventions show up in the Dictionary, but not this one, as it’s set in the future—an admittedly imaginary realm that nevertheless lies far beyond our authors’ otherwise wide-ranging explorations.