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The House on the Borderland Q3 - Symbolism
This book is rife with symbolism, from the pig men to the dark sun and anthropomorphic statues of ancient gods, to the green sun and the Sea of Sleep. There's also the Pit, the fungus, the dog(s), and She.
What could it all mean? Did anything jump out at you as pointing significantly one way or another? Hodgson himself doesn't provide much in the way of answers in his text.
Comments
It occurred to me several times while reading that Hodgson was writing this at around the time that psychoanalysis and its related therapies were starting to emerge, along with a growing understanding of the unconscious. In the book, the connection between Sea and Sleep is perhaps the most overt reference. But I'm not sure that such direct connections can be made for most of the items (the pigs? the dogs?) so I guess much of it is just trying to tap into a kind of primordial sense of imagery?
I'd have liked more indications of where Hodgson thought he was going with the tale - a lot of it seemed to me (perhaps through ignorance of his context and background) to be just zany description for its own sake. I never got the feeling that the book as a whole had much by way of overall direction. This in contrast to The Mind Parasites (which we read together back in March 2022) where there was a clear sense of what Colin Wilson thought was wrong with the world and how it might be fixed.
As Richard says, there are lots of symbols but I've no idea what any of them is supposed to mean. Perhaps the pig-men are the assault of base urges on the fortress of the intellect, the id trying to overpower the ego?
And to back up Richard, I felt like this book was a rather empty experience, especially the second half. Things happened, things were seen, but there was no introspection on what anything meant. I'm not sure if Hodgson had an idea about what readers were supposed to get from the book, but I got nothing concrete.
That said, some of the passages were entertaining enough to read.
I guess I was hoping you all would recognize the symbols that I didn't!
Maybe this would be a nice Rorschach test for someone to sift through the book and pull out what they think things mean. I have no idea if he wanted things to mean more than just the up front weirdness, or if he was digging for something deeper.