The Eye of Argon is a legendarily awful piece of fantasy fanfic written in 1970 by a teenager called Jim Theis. For years a typewritten copy circulated around sci-fi conventions, inspiring a game where people would try to read it aloud without collapsing into laughter. Rumour has it that no one ever made it past page two. In isolated, humour-free conditions, however, it was possible to make it further, but never to the actual ending -- because there wasn't one. For 35 years, the last page was missing, and the story ended as it began, in media res. Legions of fans never knew how Grignr the barbarian escaped from the hideous red blob that ensnared him.
Which is why there was much rejoicing when the lost ending was discovered last year. I couldn't join in the fun, though, because to me the lost ending is an obvious fake. It apes a few superficial elements from the story -- the awkward phrasings, the typos, the thesaurus -- but misses its essence.
To begin with, the content is all wrong. The lost ending takes an immediate jump into metaphysics:
With a sloshing plop the thing fell to the ground, evaporating in a thick scarlet cloud until it reatained its original size. It remained thus for a moment as the puckered maw took the shape of a protruding red eyeball, the pupil of which seemed to unravel before it the tale of creation. How a shapeless mass slithered from the quagmires of the stygmatic pool of time, only to degenerate into a leprosy of avaricious lust. In that fleeting moment the grim mystery of life was revealed before Grignr's ensnared gaze.The eyeballs glare turned to a sudden plea of mercy, a plea for the whole of humanity.
Musing about the "mystery of life", hinting at some greater meaning, aiming for profundity and falling flat -- this is more like bad Bulwer-Lytton writing than the real thing. It's deliberate nonsense, unlike Theis's quite accidental nonsense. There's nothing like it in the original. The Eye of Argon is a tale concerned with living, not with reflections upon living. It never ponders the wider significance of any of its events -- it just doesn't have that kind of self-awareness. About the closest it comes to an abstract meditation on life is Grignr's brooding over a life of captivity:
To be forever refused further glimpses of the snow capped summits of the land of his birth, never again to witness the thrill of plundering unexplored lands beyond the crest of a bleeding horizon, and perhaps worst of all the denial to ever again encompass the lustful excitement of caressing the naked curves of the body of a trim yound wench.
But note here that the emphasis is on the actions that Grignr will be denied, and that no universal parallels are explicitly drawn, there are no wider appeals to the human condition.
The only other example I can find is this passage:
In the face of the amorphos, broad breated female, stretched out aluringly before his gaping eyes; the universal whim of nature filing a plea of despair inside of his white hot soul; Grignr acted in the only manner he could perceive. Giving vent to a hoarse, throat rending battle cry, [...].
But the "universal whim of nature" here doesn't draw attention to itself, or present itself as a discovery. In fact, it's a stock phrase, a cliché, dressed up by a thesaurus. And fundamentally, it's less ridiculous than the "grim mystery of life" being revealed in the eyeball of a red blob. Theis's work has a certain incongruous dignity about it.
The Eye of Argon either doesn't have the maturity to plumb the depths of human experience, or consciously avoids it. I do get the impression that Theis was something of an innocent as teenagers go -- horny enough to dwell over the "huge outcropping breasts" of his heroine, but without the experience to tell whether such things were really as much fun as plundering the lands of your enemies. So maybe The Eye of Argon really was the product of that last ebb of childhood before existentialism sets in. But I don't think so. Like a lot of fantasy fanfic, it seems deliberately childish and unreflective. It avoids confrontation with disturbing questions; it's opposed to looking below the surface. Like a lot of fantasy fanfic, it depicts a world which, for all its posturing and violence, is a safe and comfortable retreat. It's a world where nothing is ambiguous: good is good, evil is evil, everything is clearly labelled. Why reveal the "grim mystery of life" when nothing was a mystery to begin with?
The lost ending continues as follows:
Then the blob began to quiver with violent convulsions; the eyeball shattered into a thousand tiny fragments and evaporated in a curling wisp of scarlet mist. The very ground below the thing began to vibrate and swallow it up with a belch.The thing was gone forever. All that remained was a dark red blotch upon the face of the earth, blotching things up.
No way. There's a consistently turgid rhythm to Theis's prose, and "blotching things up" just doesn't fit it. Perhaps the most striking thing about Argon is its misguided perfectionism; it's an obvious labour of love, with every sentence heavily worked and crafted to highfalutin' excess, every effort spent to make it look like a bloated jewelled corpse. Theis may have been deaf to the ridiculousness of his prose, but he wouldn't have been deaf to the sudden plebianism of "blotching things up".
On top of that, this passage is vague, lacking in detail. Was there an earthquake? Did the blob fall into a crack in the ground, or was there just some general seepage? Actually, what in the hell happened? It's a charge you can rarely make against the original: if there's one thing Argon doesn't lack, it's detail. Unlike a lot of fanfic authors, Theis's imagination has a thoroughness about it. Underneath the bombast, once the malapropisms have been resolved, it's usually clear what is going on. Let's look at some genuine Theis prose again:
Confronting the group was a short stocky man seated upona golden throne. Tapestries of richly draped regal blue silk covered all walls of the chamber, while the steps leading to the throne were plated with sparkling white ivory. The man upon the throne had a naked wench seated at each of his arms, and a trusted advisor seated in back of him. At each cornwr of the chamber a guard stood at attention, with upraised pikes supported in their hands, golden chainmail adorning their torso's and barred helmets emitting scarlet plumes enshrouding their heads. The man rose from his throne to the dias surrounding it. His plush turquois robe dangled loosely from his chuncky frame.
The scene has clearly been imagined in detail. Which is not to say that it's imaginitive: in fact, it's desperately unimaginitive, full of clichés and stock fantasy elements. It's full of poor word choices, errors of spelling, and errors of logic -- but also full of detail. There is enough here to give the reader a good picture of the room, the people in it, and their relative positions. Which is more than a lot of writers -- including those of the lost ending -- can convey.
We've come to the last paragraph of the lost ending:
Shaking his head, his shaggy mane to clear the jumbled fragments of his mind, Grignr tossed the limp female over his shoulder. Mounting one of the disgruntled mares, and leading the other; the weary, scarred barbarian trooted slowly off into the horizon to become a tiny pinpoint in a filtered filed of swirling blue mists, leaving the Nobles, soldiers and peasants to replace the missing monarch. Long leave the king!!!
I like the "disgruntled mares", but the last sentence is too ridiculous to be genuine Theis. "Long leave the king!!!" is too obvious and unlikely a spelling error: not a finger typo, and unlikely to be a brain typo. It's even less likely to be a deliberate pun: why would Theis end his labour of love on a weak joke? The last sentence just gives the game away.
Altogether, the lost ending is simply too bad to be the real thing. For, as has been pointed out before, The Eye of Argon is actually not all that bad. Granted, its prose is howlingly awful -- thesaurus-heavy, stilted, clichéd -- but writing isn't just about prose. Writing is about composition, and Argon is reasonably well-composed -- it's got structure, it's got pace, it's got direction. This is enough to elevate it above at least 95% of fanfic. Read any random story on fanfiction.net, and the chances are it won't be as spectacularly bad as Argon. Instead, it'll be something far worse -- quietly bad, mediocre, dull, incoherent, unreadable, simply incompetent. The same goes for most IF games.
In fact, the paradoxical joy of Argon is that it's well-written enough to make you appreciate how wonderfully awful it is. If Theis were merely a producer of terrible prose, Argon would have been impenetrable; but instead it's surprisingly penetrable, surprisingly easy to read. The well-paced story delivers one hilariously bad chunk of prose after another with remarkable efficiency. This is what has endeared it to so many people, why it continues to make people laugh 36 years after it was written, why it will be remembered when other fanfic is forgotten. And crucially, it's what the authors of the lost ending missed.