My take on The Northern Caves
Hello all, it's been a while! For the past two months, I've been immersing myself in spooky media in celebration of the season, and I have many, many thoughts about it. Hopefully this burst of inspiration to write will stick around for a while and I can tell you all about it. This post is very long (At around 2,500 words, it may be the longest I've ever put on this blog), and it gets pretty personal, but I think it's necessary to explain why I liked this particular story so much.
Scene-setting
I've been sick with a cold for the past week, so I've spent most of my time listening to Davis Morgan on YouTube while crocheting. For those unfamiliar, Davis mainly does readings and analyses of internet horror stories, as well as analyses of horror literature in general. Yesterday, I finished listening to his reading and analysis of The Northern Caves by nostalgebraist, and this weird internet horror novel(?) is now one of my favorite things I've ever read, horror or otherwise. I wanted to put in my two cents on TNC, both to help me wrap my head around it and for fun.
Here's my spoiler-free summary of it:
It's the story, mainly told through a collection of forum threads and journal entries, of a small group of dedicated fans of a children's author named Leonard Salby. These fans attempt to make sense of his strange, final book called "The Northern Caves," which the majority of the fandom has resolved to ignore on account of its extreme length and nonsensical content. At an event called "Spelunk 04," these fans meet each other in person, and something sinister happens.
If you're interested in reading it, I think it's best for you to go in without knowing much. I know this sounds like a classic recipe for a cosmic horror story in which a piece of incomprehensible literature drives people mad, but I promise, TNC has a lot more to offer in terms of both style and content. I found the breaks and analyses between chapters in Davis' video to be very helpful for my own understanding, but you can also just read it on your own if you prefer.
Now that the spoiler-free part is out of the way, I want to discuss why this story affected me so intensely. Content Warning for discussions of mental illness, particularly OCD and anxiety.
Analysis
Something that struck me immediately was that TNC has several structural and thematic similarities to one of my favorite movies, Asteroid City. Both focus on the last work of a beloved creator, and both present a metanarrative around this creator's work that mirrors some of the themes in the work itself. Both are meditations on storytelling, interpretation, and the vast, nonsensical universe. I think TNC helped me think a little more deeply about why that movie spoke to me in the way it did. I may do an analysis of it later in light of the ideas TNC inspired.
Also like Asteroid City, TNC felt like it was made specifically for me. I know that isn't literally the case, don't worry. I just mean that it touched on things I have personally experienced in ways that I found to be very realistic, which made the horror of it all the more chilling.
Fandom
The most obvious thing nostalgebraist gets right is fandom discourse and the nature of fannish obsession. Seeing as TNC was published on Archive of Our Own, I think most people who encounter the story will recognize this immediately. For that reason, I don't have a ton to say about this aspect, other than the fact that I was very impressed by nostalgebraist's ability to write in a wide variety of believable and consistent voices.
Philosophy
This is where I get into what Davis didn't touch on in his video. Chapter 10 of TNC is the first time our main group of fans encounters Salby's ideas on "Mundum," a concept which dominates the rest of the story. The way I understand it, Mundum is an intense and never-ending sense of duty to make the world right, while knowing that the world cannot ever be righted. There exists objective, "definite wrongness" that must be remedied, and it will never be remedied. Salby's journal entry is difficult to understand, and whatever task he is talking about seems obviously futile. In spite of this, he clearly believes that the only correct way to live is by heeding Mundum.
The whole thing struck me as very familiar. Reading this journal entry is exactly how it feels reading a complicated piece of philosophy for the first time. We're presented with complete sentences and a sort of coherence, but there's also a sense that most of the words that are familiar to us mean something different in this context. We even have a new word derived from Latin roots, invented to describe one of the author's key concepts in a way that he feels his native language can't.
In general, an author choosing any single word or phrase and building up a new meaning for it over the course of one or several books (maybe even their lifetime) is the most Western Philosopher thing I can think of. When I took philosophy classes in college, we would spend our semesters trying to pin down the meanings of and connections among these words. Salby seems to think of himself as a kind of moral philosopher, too, as he puts himself in conversation with religious (especially Christian) morality and with Mill. In a universe in which Salby really existed, I could totally see theses devoted to Mundum once Salby's personal documents were published.
All of this actually made me inclined to want to hear Salby out and even try to decode what he meant myself. I thought, even if I disagree with this guy, he's clearly thought about this stuff and believes it wholeheartedly. I wanted to know why. Plenty of philosophy, if not most of it, sounds kind of insane to those who haven't been exposed to its context. Salby's journal entry is weird, yeah, but most of the grammatical strangeness can be chalked up to it being a personal journal, and the rest is relatively coherent. It's not that strange in comparison to a lot of things that have made their way into the Western philosophical canon, in my opinion. That's a big part of why the whole thing was so freaky to me: I could see myself being sucked into this and justifying it to myself.
I have had the experience of trying to explain some existential worries that class brought up to someone who looked at me like I was crazy when I was done. That probably just means I wasn't explaining it well, but still, it's not a pleasant experience. If I were in a worse mental state, like Paul or Aaron, I could see experiences like that driving me to isolate myself, and dig myself deeper into a hole.
Representations of OCD and anxiety
Speaking of terrible mental states, another reason this story affected me deeply is because I've had experience with OCD-like symptoms that revolve around morality, and I think TNC does a great job at communicating how that feels. The reason I describe it in such a convoluted way is that I was never diagnosed with OCD, so "OCD-like" feels like the most accurate way to describe what I experienced. These symptoms were most likely part of my general anxiety disorder, which I know for a fact that I have.
My "OCD-like" symptoms were at their worst when I was in high school--I hadn't been to therapy or gotten anti-anxiety meds yet--and they were triggered by stress. I had a very strong sense of morality, and I remember being too "logical" about it, to the point where I thought, with full sincerity, that if some actions have moral weight, then all actions must have moral weight, even if that morality doesn't make any obvious sense. I imagined morality as some kind of substance that was inherent in everything, or a quality of everything. If it wasn't clear, I don't think this is a logical or healthy line of thinking anymore.
Case in point: one of the most irrational things I remember doing because of these thoughts was making sure that the pens on my desk did not point towards anyone in the house before I fell asleep. I just had an extremely strong hunch that objects pointing towards people while they slept meant something bad, because I felt a sense of dread while looking at the pens in the "incorrect" state. And it's easy to move pens--I have the power to fix this--so what's the harm? It definitely took me longer than it should have, and I never even knew if I had arranged the pens "correctly" anyway, so it just delayed sleep more than anything. If you've read TNC, I think you'll see from this why Paul's thoughts felt so real to me.
The depiction of Mundum in TNC felt like an extreme and fantastical representation of compulsions like that. While these symptoms affected me, I had this paradoxical sense that I was small and powerless in comparison to the universe, and yet that my tiniest action or inaction would have disastrous consequences. When explaining what he calls "the separation" in Chapter 21, Paul describes feeling "abject, transcendental horror... regarding the possibility of 'displeasing the sky'." That sentence hit me hard.
I did often feel like I would be punished by some cosmic force for something I didn't even know was wrong. In retrospect, I think that's just how a severe anxiety disorder feels. Sometimes, it really does feel like you know something everyone else doesn't, and you feel that somehow you could prevent this oncoming doom, if only you knew what to do. I haven't encountered many descriptions of anxiety that feel more accurate than Salby's mantra, "the task is never done."
All this to say, I found that the most fascinating subversion in TNC was that the unknowable, old god in this cosmic horror story is simply our world as it is: "THE WHOLE BLEAK ENDLESS WORLD." At least, that's my interpretation of it. I think the way that Paul describes the world outside Marsh's house in Chapter 24 solidified that for me. A fly seems to follow "fell geometries" through the air, "mocking with its motions [Paul's] whole ambitious doomed project." An average row of suburban houses is described nightmarishly as a series of schematics full of moving "flesh capsules" in which Paul imagines "potential for improved arrangement."
The "madness" comes with the attempt to know the world objectively in order to gain a sense of control. The world, of course, is not knowable in that way, and rather than quelling one's anxieties, the belief in objective right and wrong taken to the extreme will just separate you further from reality. Even if you could know the literal location of everything down to the most minute detail, as Paul seems to in his moments of extreme spatial awareness, that is still just one perspective of many, and you do not have the full picture. You certainly do not have any more control over your surroundings than anyone else.
Conclusion
This shouldn't be taken as a definitive interpretation of TNC. I think that while there are a lot of things that can be said about it with confidence, like the fact that it says something about fandom, storytelling, and interpretation, I think that what exactly it says about those things is up for debate (as is the literal content of the story, thanks to its wonderfully unreliable narrator). At the moment, I find a lot of comfort in seeing it as an exploration of anxiety and control in the face of an unknowable world. But, like I said in my post on Asteroid City, I think that any interpretation will say a lot more about the interpreter than about the story being interpreted.
If you found any of the anxieties I talked about here relatable, know that those feelings aren't going to last forever, and the world really is a lot less dangerous and chaotic than you think, even though it doesn't seem that way right now.
And, if either nostalgebraist or Davis somehow reads this: thank you so much to nostalgebraist for writing this amazing story, and thank you to Davis for bringing it to my attention. This will be rattling around in my brain for a long time. What a fantastic experience!
Notes
There are a few ideas I had while listening to TNC that I had nowhere to put that made sense, so here they are.
- I think that the final chapter should be analyzed as part of the story. It recontextualized a lot of it for me, especially as the podcasters talk about the conservative the undertones of Chesscourt and the implications of turning the entire world into a win/lose game (a game which is literally black and white). It helped me come to the conclusion that Mundum was about the futility of understanding and controlling your surroundings/fate. It also gave us a look into how the whole situation was perceived from the outside. It's a story the readers have been very invested in, and then we see it covered almost dismissively ten years down the line. I think it's a neat ending.
- A lot less serious, but the idea of rearranging "sublunary materials" to enact some non-obvious, deeper change reminded me a lot of a magic system from one of my favorite actual play podcasts, Friends at the Table. The magic system is called semiotics (named after the study of signs). It's been a few years since I've listened, but from what I remember, it involved the precise placement of physical objects in order to cast spells. Very neat.
- A more lighthearted depiction of the moral anxieties I talk about here can be found in The Good Place. I related a lot to Chidi when that came out, and it meant a lot to me to see someone with severe anxiety depicted as an essentially good, or at least redeemable, guy.
If you've read this far, thank you! I have a gift for you! Here's the crochet project I finished this week. It's from a vintage pattern, and it's kinda wonky because I haven't gotten around to blocking it yet. I forgot which book it's from (possibly Priscilla's?), but it's from one of the old filet crochet books available on archive.org.
