The Longing (Studio Seufz, 2020) - 5/? (Literary Interlude #1)

EDIT: After some thought, it struck me that the 'Let's Play' format really wasn't something that I was finding to be terribly interesting to follow through with, and what little readership I have wasn't particularly interested, either.  I'm leaving this post up because it's at least on literary topics, but I won't be keeping that format any longer.  When I'm done with The Longing, I'll do a wrap-up post instead.

 A brief aside from the writing about what's happening in my silly little game, since I'm not yet at the point of being able to really dig in deep as far as what's going on there and what the message is besides 'be patient'.

As I mentioned in my first piece on the subject of The Longing, there are a number of literary works that can be collected throughout the game, which include their full texts for A Shade to read while relaxing at home, and the player can read right along, as a result.  As I've now read three of these works in their entirety, along with the portion of a fourth that is part of the game itself (though I modded in the full work because dang it, I want to read the Roman poetry), I thought I'd do a little analysis of what I'm seeing so far, just to get my thoughts in order.

The portion of the Metamorphoses that is included in the game in its unmodified form is the first of the fifteen books written by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (more commonly referred to as simply Ovid), somewhere around 1 C.E. by all indications we currently have.  These fifteen books, taken as a whole, cover a vast portion of the Greco-Roman mythology, with a seeming focus on... well, transformations as a theme.  We've been provided with a translation from 1717, so it's got some questionable spelling and such, but it's readable enough if you just assume that an oddly-spelled word is supposed to be the word it sounds like if you say what you see.

Metamorphoses opens with the creation of the world (though in a rather pared-down form, omitting the stories of Uranus and Saturn and the Titans and instead jumping straight to Jupiter/Jove and the Olympian gods), giving an account of how the early ages of mankind were peaceful and creative but gradually became warmongers with no sense of justice, and how there was a race of giants who populated the first world alongside humans.  The giants decided it was a good idea to rise up against the gods (in part, by building a Babel-esque tower by literally stacking mountains), and the result was, well...  Jupiter smites the giants and, due to the fall of mankind having happened as well, the gods as a whole follow it up with a Great Flood to just wipe everything out and start over, leaving but one man and one woman to serve as the archetypes for a properly-worshipful new human race.  It's... kind of like the reason and results of the Great Flood depicted in the Book of Genesis, really, except that instead of a boat, we've got the peak of Mount Parnassus for our surviving humans to cling to, and we get some amazing poetic verse describing just how much water is here:

And where of late the Kids had cropt the Grass,
The Monsters of the deep now take their place.
Insulting Nereids on the Cities ride,
And wond'ring Dolphins o'er the Palace glide.
On leaves, and masts of mighty Oaks they brouze;
And their broad Finns entangle in the Boughs,
The frighted Wolf now swims amongst the Sheep;
The yellow Lion wanders in the deep:
His rapid force no longer helps the Boar:
The Stag swims faster, than he ran before.
The Fowls, long beating on their Wings in vain,
Despair of Land, and drop into the Main.
Now Hills, and Vales no more distinction know;
And levell'd Nature lies oppress'd below.

 --Ovid's Metamorphoses (tr. Garth, Dryden, et al.), Book I, lines 409-422

Wow.  Not great rhyming in that first couplet, but... that's some very fast water if a deer "swims" faster than it runs.  And dolphins getting tangled in oak trees?  Ovid knew what he was doing, to say the least.

The creation story goes on to have the Olympian gods rebuild humanity out of stones, rebuild all the animals that were lost, and generally bring back, well... everything that is the world that once was, but without the lawlessness and the giants getting full of themselves, then moves on to stories of lustful gods trying to get it on with mortals.  The first of these is the story of Apollo pursuing Daphne, who wants nothing to do with him, and would literally rather have herself turned into a laurel tree than be wooed by a god.  The second is Io's ill-fated dalliance with Jupiter, where he tried to cover up his infidelity when Juno discovered him by transforming the nymph into a heifer.  She, of course, sees right through this, even when the Thunderer thinks it's a good idea to then give the cow to his wife as a gift because she's just such a pretty cow.

Yeah, that's a thing that happened in mythology.

Anyways, the story then goes on to tell how Juno put Io in a field and had her guarded by the hundred-eyed Argus, and Jupiter sends Mercury in to break the poor cow out so she can go back home, where the only way she can communicate to her family that she's Io is by literally writing her name in a river bank with her hooves because all she can say is, well, 'Moo', and eventually Jupiter pleads for forgiveness and Juno deigns to let Io have her human form back.

Now, my initial thought was that the Metamorphoses being truncated in this way, with the first book present but none of the others, was that the developers had just made a mistake.  After all, one doesn't read Metamorphoses for just the creation myth and a dude with eyes on all sides of his head guarding a cow because Juno is jealous.  After looking at the other three short pieces I've unlocked, though, I'm not so sure.  In fact, I think the key parts of Metamorphoses for the purposes of this game might just be those two stories.  Specifically, I think the themes of 'retribution' and 'one's true identity silenced' might be the focuses here.

Illustration from Poe's Tales of Mystery
 and Imagination, Arthur Rackham, 1935

Retribution might be the most obvious theme at work in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," where the key isn't just retribution, but retribution without discovery.  Montresor, the narrator of the piece, has been careful to plan out his Carnival-timed vengeance against Fortunato in a way that will prevent his act of homicide being discovered.  The titular cask never appears, however much the hapless Fortunato might want it to, as set on tasting the expensive wine as he is; instead, we have a man being bricked into a wall within a set of catacombs, the bones replaced on the wall as they were before the hole in the wall was made, and apparently never being discovered, given that the narrator is making what honestly has always appeared, at least to me, to be a deathbed confession to his priest for final absolution.  He's not just gotten away with it in life, he's getting away with it in the afterlife.

Equally, though, there's an important question that is never answered in this story, a truth left silent: what did Fortunato do to deserve this fate?  Montresor doesn't tell us, he simply says that he'd born a thousand injuries from Fortunato, but that adding "insult" to the injuries was a step too far.  Fortunato genuinely seems confused by what's going on, allowing himself to be chained to the wall and not even starting to meaningfully struggle until it's far too late.  Even in the very end, he tries to talk some sense into Montresor, or even to get an idea of why, but it's to no avail, with Montresor simply parroting back Fortunato's panicked pleas for sanity.  It's a chilling story, made all the more so by this lack of important context for the narrator's actions.

Context for the main characters' silence is much more meaningfully given in the two Brothers Grimm fairy tales on offer, "The Goose Girl" and "The Six Swans".  These are both tales of princesses forced to remain silent about who they are and what they are doing, though for very different reasons.

In "The Goose Girl," the title character is a princess who was betrothed to be married to a young king in the next kingdom over, sight unseen.  She is sent with a conniving handmaiden who, during the journey, manipulates the princess, eventually including a threat against her life, to cause the two to switch places, with a promise that if the princess ever reveals what has happened to another living soul, she will die.  As a result, the princess winds up as little more than a servant, while the handmaiden is living the high life as a young queen.  It's only when a combination of her truly royal nature showing through her appearance and another servant's irritation at her constant attempts to remain as noble in action as she can combine to alert the king emeritus to the fact that something is wrong that anything about this changes, with the old king's cunning serving to get the girl to confess her story to a stove, with him listening to the stovepipe in the other room (yes, seriously).

"The Six Swans", meanwhile, features a princess who, in order to break an evil stepmother's enchantment of her six brothers (turning them into swans), must remain completely silent, not speaking a word for a period of six years while weaving six shirts out of aster flowers to break the spell.  She hides out in the forest to do this, so as to avoid any temptation to talk to anyone.  Of course, she winds up captured by royal woodsmen, brought to a neighboring kingdom, married to its king, and has three children, all without ever saying a word.  Because it's a fairy tale, there's an evil mother-in-law on hand to mess things up, repeatedly hiding the newborns and wiping blood on the young queen's mouth to make a claim that she's a baby-eater (yes, seriously).  While the king doesn't believe it, the third time it happens is just too much and he has to give his silent wife over to "justice," where she is unable to argue in her own defense and winds up sentenced to be burned as a witch.  The six years expire literally while she is bound to the stake and the fire is on the verge of being lit, and of course she has the shirts with her to fix her brothers when they fly in (though the youngest winds up with a swan wing left because she couldn't quite finish that last sleeve, what with being accused of witchcraft and tied to a stake).

So, that's four stories with some serious lack-of-voice issues at work.  I don't know where this will play into The Longing yet, but I'm also less than ten days into the 400-day timer on it.  But what about the other theme I mentioned, the retribution?  Well, let nobody ever say that 'Grimm' wasn't a suitable name.

"The Goose Girl" ends with the old king directly confronting the disguised handmaiden, describing precisely what she did to the princess and asking the false queen what punishment someone who does that deserves; for someone who worked to manipulate herself into such a position, the handmaiden is incredibly dense in this moment and nonchalantly explains that someone who did all that deserves to be shoved naked into a barrel with iron spikes driven into all the sides of it, the barrel hooked to two white horses, and the horses sent running through town until the villain is dead.  At which point the old king directly tells her that she is that villain, and puts her to death in that very gruesome manner.  Retribution, deferred but not escaped.  And of course the true princess marries the young king and they lived happily ever after.

"The Six Swans" ends with rather more agency on the part of the lead princess; instead of the king or even her brothers revealing what's going on, she speaks very firmly on her own behalf, explaining everything about the enchantment, her silence, and especially the evil mother-in-law's connivings... at which point the king has his own mother tied to the stake in place of the queen, and... well, burned alive.

So, with these four stories, we've got these two themes in common: Truths untold, and perhaps-excessive retribution.  This makes me worry a little about just what's going to happen to A Shade as The Longing progresses; I'm kind of fond of the little creature, already.