Colloidal vs. Octopoidal Creatures

People have known about octopuses, squids, and other tentacled creatures since the beginning of time. We have, after all, lived by the ocean for countless millennia. People of ancient Greece decorated their pottery with pictures of octopuses. Some of those images are extraordinary. They capture the true nature of these amazing animals. In doing a cursory search through the ages, I find that images of octopuses are largely absent from art after that except for in much later scientific illustration. Many centuries seem to have passed before tentacled creatures once again entered the popular imagination. That seems to have come about in the nineteenth century, and it seems to have been a result first of scientific inquiry.

I can't think of any tentacled creatures that live on land. Terrestrial snails and star-nosed moles are supposed to have tentacles. I don't think anyone thinks of them in that way. A tentacle is a thing that grabs you. Tentacles belong to creatures that live in the ocean. Tentacled creatures are from environments foreign to us. You might call them alien. By stretching the meaning of the word, you might even call them extraterrestrial: tentacled creatures are from beyond land, from beyond earth.

Although there were diving bells, diving suits, and submarines or submersibles before then, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the first in which these inventions were widespread and in which they entered into the popular imagination. In our previous encounters with tentacled creatures, we found them on the beach, or on the surface or close under the surface of the ocean. Once there was sufficient technology for it, we could encounter them where they lived: we were able to witness alien forms of life and ways of life for the first time. You might say that seeing life in the oceans was our first extraterrestrial encounter. Scientists appear to have been the first to be interested in these forms of life. Then artists, particularly literary authors, got involved: Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1830; Herman Melville (briefly) in 1851; Victor Hugo in 1866; Jules Verne in 1869-1870. In the late nineteenth century, octopuses seem to have become symbolic of the reaching and grasping of the plutocrat or robber baron. I have written about these things before in my article on Frank Norris, from October 27, 2012.

Again, creatures with tentacles and with radial symmetry are strange to us. We have affinity for warmblooded creatures, creatures with bones and warm eyes, with fur or feathers, creatures with two sides, that is, those that are bilaterally symmetrical. There is far less affinity for these seeming aliens, with their soft, boneless bodies, their slick, cold, wet, and clammy skin, their monster eyes, and their radiating limbs. We shrink from things not like us. The less like us they are, the more we shrink. Compared to a cuttlefish, a lizard seems like close kin.

We also shrink from creatures that are amorphous or gelatinous. A slime mold is a bizarre creature. What do you mean there's a fungus that flows? Soft, liquid, rubbery things are strange, too. That strangeness is compounded when you throw in more than four limbs, especially when they're arranged not along the sides of an animal but around a hub. Some people believe that octopuses came from the stars. Maybe the shape of the octopus is representative of its astral origins.

There is overlap between tentacled creatures and what I will throw in together as slime-animals, blobs, jellies, and ooze-creatures. The overlap is not complete, though. Here is where science enters into things again, for slimes, blobs, jellies, and oozes would have become known to us once we went about trying to understand and describe the natural world in scientific terms. Tentacled creatures are easy to recognize as belonging to a certain group. Even a child can make a dichotomous key with this simple question: Does it have tentacles or not? Slimes, blobs, jellies, and oozes are far less easy to understand, describe, or categorize. Put an octopus on your magazine cover and it gives people the creeps. Slime-animals, blobs, jellies, and ooze-creatures might also, but we don't have very much knowledge of or history with them. Good luck in your search for such things in the history of art or literature. Like the nineteenth-century popular encounter with cephalopods, the same kind of encounter with what we might call colloidal creatures had to wait for science and technology to lead the way.

Colloids were first studied scientifically during the nineteenth century. Colloid and colloidal as words date from the mid-part of that century (in other words, at about the same time that weird was coming back into common usage). We now have a taxonomy of colloids, just as we do of living things. Put the two together and we have colloidal creatures, that is, animals that are gelatinous, amorphous, viscous, gluey, semiliquid, flowing, and so on. We recoil from colloidal creatures, but our view of them is not organized in the same way that our view of tentacled creatures is. They're creepy and alien because they're colloidal, but we don't call them that. As far as I know, no one had ever called them that before Jack Sharkey (1931-1992) used that very phrase--"colloidal creatures"--in his novelette "Arcturus Times Three," published in Galaxy Magazine in October 1961. In March 1923, though, with its first issue, Weird Tales turned a colloidal creature--an amoeba--into an octopoidal (if that's a word) creature, probably because doing so made the monster recognizable and categorizable at first glance. (It even has eyes.) After that, there were lots more colloidal creatures, and we have had lots of colloidal words to describe them. In fact, maybe we knew about colloids experientially before we knew about them scientifically, and we enshrined that prior knowledge in our language and in some very old words.

To be continued . . .

H.G. Wells, a trained biologist and zoologist, transported cephalopods or tentacled creatures into the realms of science fiction. I believe he recognized their alienness in the real world and by a leap of imagination moved them from Earth to the other planets, ultimately to the stars. Here's the cover of a Spanish-language version of The War of the Worlds, this from 1961. 

Science fiction author Jack Sharkey may have been the first to use the phrase "colloidal creatures," in his novelette "Arcturus Times Three." Here's an illustration from another of his stories, "The Creature Inside" (Worlds of Tomorrow, Dec. 1963), showing a tentacled, mantid-like alien. The cover artist was Bruno.

In looking for a culture or literature of octopuses, I found this gem of a poem, "The Mermaid and the Octopus" by Charles P. Russell, originally in Scribner's magazine for May 1878. That was a long time ago: Russell was on top of things when it came to octopuses. Notice that he pointed out his problem almost at the outset: Octopuses are "unrhymy." Thus the comic repetition.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley