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Owen, Walter

Entry updated 31 July 2023. Tagged: Author.

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(1884-1953) Scottish translator, poet and author, who published his early poetry privately as by Gauthier de St Ouen, the only title surviving in general catalogues being The Sonnets of G S O: A Memorial (coll 1940); in 1902 he emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and apart from occasional excursions elsewhere remained there for the rest of his life; he was a Theosophist (see Theosophy). His translations from the Spanish, for which he is primarily known, are highly regarded. His World War One novella, The Cross of Carl: An Allegory [for full subtitle see Checklist] (written 1917; 1931), transgresses more than once against generic expectations with a ruthlessness of Equipoise (a term rarely used in this encyclopedia to describe early twentieth-century works) that makes it a central text in the history of Fantastika Between the Wars, and an example of the extremity of emotion containable (barely) within the frame of the Scientific Romance. The four sections of the tale represent in Parody form the stages of the Christian Passion. A brutally realistic Part One ("Gethsemane") describes a minor skirmish in the war, after which the protagonist, taken for dead, is transported in Part Two ("Golgotha") – bound immovably into a fasces made up of dead companions – to a factory at the end of a siding where the corpses are due to be rendered into pig slop; the tone of this narrative uncannily prefigures World War Two and some industrial aspects of the Final Solution (see Holocaust Fiction). Escaping from this hell, the protagonist buries himself in a shallow grave ("Sepulture"), being aroused in a terminal "Resurrection" by the German Kaiser and an Allied Marshal, who are travelling amiably together. Together they kill the protagonist: which is to say they finish their mutual job of slaughter.

Owen's second novel, "More Things in Heaven ..." (1947) is an extremely complicated occult tale involving a case of spontaneous human combustion (see Scientific Errors), a Zoroastrian curse laid against the descendants of Alexander the Great, an enigmatic savant known as Merlin (see Mysterious Stranger; Secret Masters), and a secret history of the world. [JC]

Walter Hubbard Owen

born Glasgow, Scotland: 14 July 1884

died Buenos Aires, Argentina: 24 September 1953

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