Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  Eliot also based his theory of language upon sense perception. His early criticism extolled the “superiority of the precise, clear, and definite” over the “vague, general, and indefinite.” Eliot attended Bertrand Russell’s course on symbolic logic while a graduate student at Harvard and was tremendously impressed by Russell’s theories of language. These were referential theories “where words get their meaning from the objects they refer to and where the primary objects were sensations or ‘sense-data’”

  (Shusterman 36–37). Therefore, language was ultimately related to experience. But, the English language had become “abstract and anemic”:

  In really “English” writing, however, language “concretely enacted” such felt experience. . . . This whole notion of language rested upon a naive mimeticism: the theory was that words are somehow healthiest when they approach the condition

  of things, and thus cease to be words at all. Language is alienated or degenerate unless it is crammed with the physical textures of actual experience, plumped with the rank juices of real life. Armed with this trust in essential Englishness, latinate or verbally disembodied writers (Milton, Shelley) could be shown the door, and

  pride of place assigned to the “dramatically concrete” . . . (Eagleton 32)

  It was for this reason that Harriet Monroe wrote of Sterling’s “shameless

  rhetoric. . . . Already the young poet’s brilliant but too facile craftsmanship was tempted by the worse excesses of the Tennysonian tradition: he never thinks—he deems; he does not ask, but crave; he is fain for this and that; he deals in emperies and auguries and antiphons, in causal throes and lethal voids . . . ” (309). This is also the reason why Marjorie Farber said of Smith’s prose style (in a review of Lost Worlds): “Another feature of this style is its use of two words in place of one: ‘consider or conjecture,’ ‘speed and celerity of motion.’ Why Mr. Smith failed to say a ‘mouth of amazing and astounding capacity’ I don’t know; perhaps he was in a hurry” (26).

  Smith’s response to this was as follows:

  I too was rather amused by the N. Y. Times review; especially by the complacency with which the lady displays her ignorance of the finer shades of meaning in English

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  words. One might well ‘consider’ without conjecturing at all; and vice versa. Even her attempt at sarcasm falls down, since ‘amazing’ is far from synonymous with ‘astounding,’ the first meaning to perplex or confuse with fear, terror, wonder, etc., and the latter to overwhelm or stun with awe, etc. But of course such nuances are lost on the average reader . . . (CAS to August Derleth, 13 December 1944)

  It was in statements such as this that Smith’s debt to Ambrose Bierce is most

  evident. Cathy N. Davidson points out parallels between Bierce’s theories and

  those of another Harvard philosopher, C. S. Peirce, the founder of semiotics. Consider this assessment by Bierce of William Dean Howells:

  The other day in fulfillment of a promise, I took a random page of [Howells’s]

  work and in twenty minutes had marked forty solecisms—instances of the use of

  words without a sense of their importance or a knowledge of their meaning—the

  substitution of a word that he did not want for a word that he did not think of.

  (quoted in Davidson 7–8)

  Peirce took an organicist approach to language, as opposed to the referential

  approach Eliot derived from Russell: he “located meaning in the perceiver and insisted that signs could be understood only with reference to other signs (interpre-tants) previously held by the perceiver. A whole web of prior signs gives meaning to the new sign and, in addition, becomes the self which interprets new signs”

  (Davidson 9). Smith told Donald Wandrei about his first reading of Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry”: “I first read it when it appeared in the old ‘Cosmopolitan,’

  about 1907, with an accompanying eulogy by Ambrose Bierce, who ranked it

  among the greatest imaginative poems in literature” ( SL 97). Shortly thereafter Bierce published a rebuttal to criticism of Sterling’s poem and his own praises of it,

  “An Insurrection of the Peasantry.” One of the criticisms directed against Sterling was his use of “strange, unfamiliar words.” Bierce ridiculed these “critics” for their ignorance, because “there are not a half-dozen words in the poem that are not in common use by good authors, and none that any should man should not blush to

  say that he does not understand” (201). He particularly signaled out for attack those who objected to the lines

  Infernal rubrics, sung to Satan’s might,

  Or chanted to the Dragon in his gyre.

  After pointing out that it is not the poet’s fault if the reader has never heard of a “gyre,” Bierce points out that “Gyre means, not a gyration, but the path of a gyration, an orbit. And has the poor man no knowledge of a dragon in the heav-

  ens?—the constellation Draco, to which, as to other stars, the magicians of old chanted incantations?” (203). It is not surprising that when Smith quit school his self-education consisted in large part of reading through Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary and making a study of the meaning of each word and their etymologies.

  188 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  Smith had an understanding of language which paralleled certain theories held

  by the Poststructuralists: “Language is far more unstable and mysterious, far more given to radical undecidability, far more elusive than has previously been thought”

  (Burleson 3). Smith wrote to the poetry journal Epos concerning his work that “My prime requisites in poetry are music and magic” (27). As to how he achieved this, he wrote Lovecraft “my own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation”

  ( SL 126). A deconstructionist could make much of the fact that an incantation implies both magic and music, ultimately deriving from the Latin cantare, to sing. It is precisely for this reason that Smith embraced the use of a Romantic language:

  As to my own employment of an ornate style, using many words of classic origin

  and exotic color, I can only say that [it] is designed to produce effects of language and rhythm which could not possible be achieved by a vocabulary restricted to

  what is known as “basic English.” As Strachey points out, a style composed largely of words of Anglo-Saxon origin tends to a spondaic rhythm, “which by some mysterious law, reproduces the atmosphere of ordinary life.” An atmosphere of re-

  moteness, vastness, mystery and exoticism is more naturally evoked by a style with an admixture of Latinity, lending itself to more varied and sonorous rhythms, as well as to subtler shades, tints and nuances of meaning—all of which, of course, are wasted or worse on the average reader, even if presumably literate. ( SL 365) Smith’s use of language, in direct opposition to Pound’s Imagist aesthetics, is related by Brian Stableford to the French Symbolists, harkening back to Rimbaud:

  [Smith] was a great exponent of the alchemy of words. He used his vocabulary to transform descriptions into incantations directly evoking a sense of the strange, a distortion of attitude and feeling. Smith’s prose [and his poetry] is geared to apply to the reader, an experiential wrench or jolt, to permit the relief of ‘seeing’ words of the imagination—which might have gone stale along with the hopeless world of mundanity—through a new linguistic lens. (239)

  In other words, Smith bypassed totally a language grounded in the experience of the senses in favor of one grounded in the imagination.

  Eliot’s stance on Romanticism was similar to that of his mentor, Irving Bab-

  bitt, who came to lead a critical movement called the New Humanists. This

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sp; movement took Matthew Arnold as its model and attempted to uphold human

  dignity and moral rectitude, and stressed the human elements of experience over supernatural. The New Humanists attacked Romanticism for its embrace of individualism and emotionalism, and stressed reason and respect for authority. They regarded man as a moral creature, and emphasized the importance of ethics in literature. Babbitt called for writers to “combine ethical insight” with “excellence of

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  form, or . . . high seriousness of substance,” and stressed what he called the “ethical imagination—the imagination that has accepted the veto power” as opposed to the limitless imagination of a Shelley or a Sterling (274). To Babbitt literature was most “vital” that was subordinate to the affirmation of “a general nature, a core of normal experience” that was open to most normal people (27)

  As can be imagined, Clark Ashton Smith was not at all in agreement with any of

  the tenets of the New Humanism. He wrote in The Black Book, following Bierce, that

  “Poetry, though its proper concerns are not primarily intellectual, is none the worse for having behind it a keen and firm intelligence. But intelligence alone does not make poetry, as glaringly exemplified by the latter works of T. S. Eliot, which while no doubt profound from a philosophical standpoint, has little or nothing of the bardic magic and mystery; all such elements have been ruthlessly sacrificed, leaving an obscurity which, unlike that of Gérard de Nerval, is devoid of color, glamor, and the allurement of new imaginative meanings and analogies which would justify obscurity” ( BB item 164, emphasis added). We find this reflected in two of his finest stories. “The Double Shadow,” the title story of his first short story collection, deals with what Peter Goodrich called “the mutual logocentrism of sorcery and literary art” (220). The sorcerer Avyctes, once the pupil of the Atlantean archmage Malygris, has eschewed the temporal path of his master in favor of a sterile scholasticism.

  When confronted by an ancient tablet washed ashore after a great storm, they were unable to divine its meaning through their scholarship, resorting to the spirit of a dead shaman to provide “the key to the meaning of the letters” ( OST 133), although

  “the symbols and ideas [were] alien” to men (134). The ritual apparently fails, although later they discover a grotesque shadow trailing each of them in turn that remains speechless until it merges with their own shadow, at which time they are in turn absorbed into something rather unpleasant. The story ends with the narrator observing that the shadow is separated from his own by a space “no wider than the thickness of a wizard’s pen.” The sorcerers failed because ironically they failed to respect the magic inherent in the language: they understood the words, but not the symbols or thoughts behind the words. Even experience fails to provide meaning to the doomed wizards, for after they and the shadow merge the newly formed hybrid remains just as speechless as before. Likewise, in “The City of the Singing Flame,”

  Giles Angarth writes of his experiences in the new dimension he has discovered that

  “Words are futile to express what I have beheld and experienced” ( RA 194), except through the intervention of the reader’s own imagination, as both Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison have testified. In her review of The Star-Treader Harriet Monroe said of Smith that “he shows an unusual imaginative power of visualizing these remote

  splendours until they have the concrete definiteness of a personal experience [emphasis added]” (31–32). From a Modernist perspective there was no greater praise.

  Surprisingly, George Sterling appeared somewhat receptive to portions of the

  New Humanist program toward the end of his life, telling Smith “As one grows

  older, one takes pleasure in writing things that have a vital value, a human relation-

  190 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  ship, as apart from ‘the literature of escape’” (Sterling to CAS, 16 October 1925; SU 260). Smith rankled at the charge that imaginative poetry was somehow inferior, replying “I think the current definition or delimitation of what constitutes life is worse than ridiculous. Anything that the human imagination can conceive of becomes thereby a part of life, and poetry such as mine, properly considered, is not an ‘escape’ but an extension” ( SL 94). He confessed to Wandrei on 11 November 1926 his frustration with these developments, but clung to the belief that “Romanticism is revolt, the Promethean spirit ever seeking to overthrow the gods of the commonplace—and the marketplace. The latest ruse of the forces of Law and Order is to throw the Romantic-fantastic type of imagery out of court as being ‘non-vital.’ Even G. S. seems to be ‘falling’ for this.”

  After Sterling’s death, Smith began to write the great body of his short sto-

  ries, and found himself under attack in the letter columns of Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories by readers who objected to the ultra-human nature of his fiction.

  Smith responded in a series of letters which were really self-contained essays, in which he defended his belief “that there is absolutely no justification for literature unless it serves to release the imagination from the bounds of every-day life”

  ( SL 123). When a reader stated that the proper intent of a science fiction story was “to show a cross-section of a man’s life, at a point where he is faced with some problem” and to portray “the breakdown or building up of his character,

  or the way he reacts to the test” (notes to PD 81), Smith replied that this definition of literature was “rather narrow and limited,” and offered the opposing

  opinion that “imaginative stories offer a welcome and salutary release from the somewhat oppressive tyranny of the homocentric, and help to correct the deeply

  introverted, ingrowing values that are fostered by present-day ‘humanism’ and

  realistic literature with its unhealthy materialism and earth-bound trend” ( PD 14).

  Smith argued that because of the limitations of our sensory apparatus “fantasy of one kind or another is about all that is possible for us” ( PD 21), and that even so-called “realistic” writers were in fact writing a type of fantasy, since “it is axiomatic that in thought or art we deal not with things themselves, but with

  concepts of things. . . . The animals alone, being without imagination, have no escape from reality” ( PD 38–39). By discounting the powers of the imagination, modern writers were in danger of perpetuating a “meaningless Dreiserism, an

  inartistic heaping of superficial facts or alleged facts, which, after all, through our perceptual limitations, may be erroneous, or, at least, too incomplete to permit the safe drawing of dogmatic inference” ( PD 21) by “abnegating the one gift that raises man above the other animals” ( PD 23). Smith saw the role of fantastic literature as leading “the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one’s own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as ‘incest’” ( PD 12). The danger existed that such exaggerated introversion and introspection could lead to a type of hu-

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  bris or cosmic ethnocentrism, since “it [is] only the damnable, preposterous and pernicious egomania of the race, which refuses to admit anything but man’s own

  feelings, desires, aims and actions as worthy of consideration” ( PD 16). Because of the anthropocentrism of modern literature, Smith felt that it was desirable

  “for one genre, at least, to maintain what one might call a centrifugal impetus, to make ‘a gesture toward the infinite’ rather than toward the human intestines”

  ( PD 19). Far from offering an escape from reality, Smith saw ultra-imaginative works of art resulting from “an impulse to penetrate the verities which lie beneath the surface of things; to grapple with, and to dominate, the awful mysteries of mortal existence” ( PD 33).

 
Smith was not alone in scorning the lack of cosmic perspective in Modernism.

  Conrad Aiken took Harriet Monroe and Poetry to task for being a traditionalist

  “ethically and emotionally,” and in fact for not being avant garde at all: The only answer is that Miss Monroe, if she is really a radical at all, is chiefly so as regards form; as regards the material of poetry (and to any genuine well-wisher of poetry this is the important thing), she suffers from many of the curious inhibi-tions, for the most part moral, which played havoc with the Victorians. The truth must not be told when it is disagreeable or subversive. One’s outlook on life must accord with the proprieties. Above all, one should be a somewhat sentimental idealist—anthropocentric, deist, panpsychist, or what not, but never, by any chance, a detached or fearless observer. (390)

  When Smith condemned Babbittism and “the ‘vital’ theory” for being “the old

  didacticism in a new disguise” (CAS to Wandrei, 13 November 1926), he found

  himself unknowingly echoing no less a philosopher than George Santayana. In

  “The Genteel Tradition at Bay,” Santayana argued that the program of the New

  Humanists was nothing more than the old genteel tradition in new dress. In dis-

  cussing the “appeal to the supernatural” which he saw as forming the ultimate basis for their ethical position, Santayana used language remarkably similar to that used by Smith: “I am far from wishing to deny that the infra-natural exists; that below the superficial order which our senses and science find in the world, or impose upon it, there may not be an intractable region of incalculable accident,

  chance novelties, or inexplicable collapses.” He even recognized that an interest in the “infra-natural . . . positively fascinates some ultra-romantic minds, that detest to be caged even in an indefinite world, if there is any order in it” (171). Ultimately Santayana concluded that Babbitt and the entire New Humanist movement were,