A Literary Quiz

[dreamshark]

No multiple choice here - you people are too smart for that. Can you identify the author of this passage? The narrator is staring at a disturbing old painting hanging over a bar in a spooky seaside town.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. -- It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. -- It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. -- It's a blasted heath. -- It's a Hyperborean winter scene. -- It's the breaking- up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great Leviathan himself?

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Hah, I even read Moby Dick in the last few years, and I didn't recognize it. I was thinking Lovecraft, actually. Although I suppose the Leviathan ref at the end should have given it away.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

It certainly sounded Lovecraftian to me, right down to the term "blasted heath." I wouldn't be surprised if Lovecraft were a big Melville fan.

[thorintatge.livejournal.com]

I guessed correctly, but only because I saw your copy sitting around.