close to fin-de-siècle aesthetics, if alongside these contradictions we did not find another Clark Ashton Smith. But we do find another. And this second side can be
seen most clearly in his use of the extravagant and archaic worlds of heroic fantasy; moreover, his pessimistic future-oriented cosmology underscores Smith’s creative originality.
His fantastic poems paved the way for his lyrical tales, which we may regard as authentic prose poems. The end of “The Memnons of the Night” (1915) can be
read as a genuine poem:
Only at eve, when the west is like a brazen furnace, and the faroff mountains
smoulder like ruddy gold in the depth of the heated heavens—only at eve, when
the east grows infinite and vague, and the shadows of the waste are one with the increasing shadow of the night—then, and then only, from the sullen throats of
stone, a music rings to the bronze horizon, a strong, sombre music, strange and sonorous, like the singing of black stars, or a litany of gods that invoke oblivion; a music that thrills the desert to its heart of stone, and trembles in the granite of forgotten tombs, till the last echoes of its jubilation, terrible as the trumpets of doom, are one with the black silence of infinity. ( NU 8–9)
These prose poems, in which we see the influence of Baudelaire, Gautier, and
other French Symbolists, draw to a close, more often than not, upon themes of
irreversible decline and tragic oblivion (“the black silence of infinity”) and with the recurrent images of the sands of time and the twilight sun (cf. “From the Crypts of Memory” and “The Shadows”).
The spectacular and visual side of Smith’s art2 also surfaced in two other
forms of expression, namely sculpture and painting. In Smith’s mind, the three art forms were complementary and responded synesthetically to one another; a sonnet was able to inspire a sculpture, a painting could act as the source of a story. Insofar as it was poetic and wild, extravagant and refined, Smith’s art reflected the contradictions which lay inside him.
206 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Smith’s Tales
In their own way, Lovecraft and Smith conform to the principles of “aesthetic fiction” set out by Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying,”3 while at the same time
adding a note of cosmic horror to such principles. For Smith, literature had to strive toward transcendence and the sublime.
During an eight-year period (1929–37), Smith wrote more than a hundred of
the one hundred and forty tales he eventually produced. The majority were pub-
lished in Weird Tales. They were probably published on Lovecraft’s recommenda-tion, to whom Smith felt so close that he christened certain of his tales with titles that are resolutely Lovecraftian: “The Hunters from Beyond,” “The Treader of the Dust,” “The Light from Beyond,” “From the Crypts of Memory,” and “The
Dweller in the Gulf.”
“Evaluating” both the short stories and the author is a challenge (Bleiler, Science Fiction Writers 1.458). Certain tales are set in the past, others in the future, certain take place on earth, others are set on a variety of planets. Throughout his tales, the author favors exoticism and esoteric milieux and situations, and a quest for forgotten worlds. Above all, he strove to be original:
Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have
ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently. . . .
Tell me many tales, but let them be of things that are past the lore of legend and of which there are no myths in our world or any adjoining. . . . Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless
star, or unto which its rays have never reached. (“To the Daemon,” NU 17–18) This desire to cut himself free from external supports says a great deal about the author’s fundamental creativity, and it also reveals Smith’s profound knowledge of mythology and of literature in general.
The decadent aspects of Smith’s universe, found especially in the universe of
“Zothique,” the importance of the femme fatale, of mythology, of lost civilizations, as well as an unflagging interest in the archaic in all its forms can be connected with a fin-de-siècle aesthetic vision. Moreover, as a reflection of his “onomastic curiosity” (the “science” of proper nouns, especially the names of people, an obsession worthy of Lord Dunsany and Flaubert), Smith also possessed his gueuloir—his collection of rare names of incantatory and exotic charm—Xeethra, Morthylla, Maâl
Dweb, Naat, Ylourgne, etc.
Smith’s tales provide in themselves an anthology of decadent themes: black
magic (“The Last Incantation,” “A Rendezvous in Averoigne”), the theme of body
doubles (“The Double Shadow”), fascination with ruins (“The Primal City”),
Faustian pacts (“Xeethra”), cursed love potions (“A Vintage from Atlantis”), a
taste for jewels (“The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan”), the theme of despoilment
(“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”), metamorphosis (“The Maze of the Enchanter”),
threatening vegetation (“A Voyage to Sfanomoë”), the cult of antiquity (“The Sa-
Fantasy and Decadence in the Work of Clark Ashton Smith
207
tyr,” “The Gorgon”), femmes fatales (“The Ghoul,” “Morthylla,” “Sadastor”), vampires (“The Flower-Women”), and the omnipresence of snakes: snake-men in
“The Double Shadow” or in “The Seven Geases,” and snake-women in “The End
of the Story” or “The Gorgon,” and giant worms found in “A Tale of Sir John
Maundeville” and in “The Coming of the White Worm.”
The macabre, the first stage of all decadent literature, dominates Smith’s literary production. At the heart of this output shines the obscure star of death which is associated with the obsessive metaphor of physical decomposition. Decay in
general is linked to the past, which recalls Henry James’s famous phrase, “the
monstrous heritage of antiquity” (James 115). Paradoxically, Smith’s obsession
with death was expressed, as in Poe, through ideas of a physical afterlife (the Poe-like theme of premature burial: “The Second Interment”), and through the idea of fatal return (“The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake”), themes that opened the door to the fantastic genre. Black magic enabled Smith’s characters to struggle against death and presented the reader with a profusion of “live contamination,” examples of supernatural milieux as well.
As with a number of other decadent authors, Smith’s fantasy production,
which allied life and death, depicted the existence of an autonomous life-form in the midst of decomposition. Mummies shake off their lethargy in “The Double
Shadow” or in “Necromancy in Naat,” gods or witches from the past are brought
back to life in “The Charnel God” or in “The Witchcraft of Ulua,” and corpses
refuse to die or to decompose in “The Testament of Athammaus” or in “The Su-
pernumerary Corpse.”
Occasionally, the art of illusion enables the author to play with death. In “The Death of Malygris” (1934), two magicians come across the corpse of Malygris. Just when they decide to steal his magic ring, they are attacked by a viper, which is suddenly transformed into a gigantic python; from beyond the grave, Malygris continues to exercise his magic. When his rival creates an exact replica of the archmagus in order to be able to decompose a kind of protoplasmic golem, the two thieves
are eaten alive.
In the tradition of Stevenson, Poe, and Wilde, the concept of body doubles is
resolutely attached to the themes of dissolution and decomposition. In “The Double Shadow” (c. 1933), for example, some necromancers send the shadow of a
corpse back into the past in order to unravel the enigma of a “primitive continent”
; populated by snake-men. The consequences of their acts, however, are tragic. One of the magi suddenly finds himself wearing a second shadow that eventually contaminates him. There then follows an elaboration of putrescence and decay that
rivals Poe. As in the previous story, the complete identification of the shadow with the magician’s flesh causes the dissolution of the magician’s body. The terrified narrator entrusts the last anguished message of a doomed continent to drift away on a wave. This example is typical of the contagion which links the dissolution of the individual with the contagion of a city or continent.
208 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Smith’s Hyperborean world became the favored site to the threat of perpetual falling and being swallowed. Such a threat was expressed in various isomorphic
forms. In “The Seven Geases” (1934), Lord Ralibar, who is the victim of a curse, has to sacrifice himself to the terrible god Tsathoggua. He has to venture into the center of the earth in order to go through seven stages which correspond to seven curses. A classic regressus ad uterum leads him to relive the world’s past inside an extinct volcano which is home to the “Cave of Archetypes.”
Smith’s imagination creates an underground universe of infernal creatures
straight out of Bosch’s paintings, such as “monstrous one-legged toads,” “huge
worms with multiple segments,” and “deformed lizards.” Hell is depicted in its
medieval form, in the manner adopted by Gustave Doré in his illustrations for
Dante’s Inferno: “a sort of pool with a margin of mud that was marled with obscene offal,” “the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination” ( RA 147) . The final phase of the quest—the seventh stage—proves to be fatal for Ralibar Vooz,
who succumbs to the Queen spider’s web and falls into a bottomless void.
The same tragic end awaits Avoosl, “the richest and most avaricious money-
lender in all Commoriom,” in “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” (1932). In a
grotto which has a “muddy and foul-smelling floor,” the usurer discovers a deep well full of jewels to which he is irresistibly drawn. He is terrified as he realizes that he is sinking into his treasure, as if he were in “treacherous sinking sands.” At the same time, from the depths of the well a toad-like monster surges up and swallows him ( RA 130). The usurer’s punishment takes on an ironic and unusual dimension as the author uses a grotesque monster, evocative of the most repulsive pagan divinity, to convey a moralistic, almost Christian, message.
The most horrible of punishments cannot be avoided, yet death can some-
times play tricks on us. In “The Testament of Athammaus” (1932), the narrator
recounts the successive transformations of someone sentenced to death, who nev-
ertheless survives all of the execution attempts inflicted upon him, and who
changes his appearance and embarks on a series of monstrous adventures. After
various decapitations, the man’s body becomes snakelike and swells disproportionately. The mass starts “frothing as with the venomous foam of a million serpents,”
becomes a “round, blackish ball” and eventually changes into a “python-shaped
mass of frothing and hissing matter” ( OST 275–76)—a gigantic creature reminiscent of the shoggoths found in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
In “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (1929), two thieves penetrate the temple
that houses the tomb of the Cthulhian god Tsathoggua. Suddenly, a “viscous and
semi-liquescent substance” gushes out from the base of the statue giving off putrid flames which form a misshapen creature with an “immense mouth” and a sort of
“tapering tail.” The thing devours one of the thieves and severs the other’s hand with one of its tentacles ( RA 163).
Smith was obsessed with the image of “devouring evil” which is linked to the
theme of darkness. Following G. Durand’s analysis, it would be easy to highlight a
Fantasy and Decadence in the Work of Clark Ashton Smith
209
“mutilation complex” in Smith’s work which is linked to symbols of the abyss and the mouth, which, in turn, reveals “terror before the change and before the devouring death.”4 The grotesque figure of the batrachian god Tsathoggua, a lunar animal par excellence, and the various spiderlike and octopuslike creatures, refer to the image of the “Terrible Mother, an ogre that sexual taboos have strengthened.”5
The frequent images of swallowing and of biting reinforce the cannibalistic terror linked to femininity. Hyperborea is likened to a kind of feminoid mouth, a vagina dentata which threatens to swallow everything, even to gobble herself up. The femme fatale could thus be associated with the image of the “fatal continent”: the “White Sybil” predicts the unavoidable advent of the “white death” that devours the
mythic lands in an ultimate mutilation.
Alongside this morbid chain of events could be added the sadistic theme of
torture. Indeed, in “The Isle of the Torturers” or in “The Chain of Aforgomon,”
we are given a detailed catalogue of various types of tortures, which equal those created by Poe or Kafka: red-hot chains, bodies flayed alive, brainwashing, as-phyxia, acid burns, snake bites, eyelids torn away. In “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), one of the most original forms of torture consists in coupling with a corpse. Eros gets married with Thanatos in an atmosphere of clinical and grotesque horror, as in “The Ninth Skeleton,” where we witness the birth of a
“baby skeleton.” Indeed, to attempt to resuscitate one’s beloved or to bring back from the grave an exquisite divinity is a fatal transgression. In “The Last Incantation,” the necromancer, Malygris, wishes to recover his beloved from the dead in order to contemplate her original beauty. When the ghost appears, the magician
fails to recognize the young girl who has haunted his memories. His “evanescent hopes” are dashed. All that remains is “shadow, dullness and dust” and the burden of a sense of “torment that nothing would ever cure.” Malygris thus utters his “last incantation,” which serves to send the spectre back into the void from whence it came. He becomes aware of the limits of his own magical powers: he is incapable of recovering his lost youth or the distant yearnings of his heart.
Smith, ever faithful to the first principles of decadence, sometimes created a
mixture of drugs, sex, and oriental mysticism that produced an orgiastic atmos-
phere. His vampiric tales were said to be “the most erotic of fantastic literature”
( Cahier Zothique, 7). Smith salted some of his tales with scenes of necrophilia (“The Death of Ilalotha,” “The Epiphany of Death”), and he delighted in evoking the
portrait of femmes fatales (“The Disinterment of Venus”), and of fascinating pagan goddesses who are ghouls, lamias, or gorgons (“The End of the Story,” “Sadastor,” “Morthylla”), ready to swallow their prey; the “Muse of Hyperborea” was a kind of mermaid who drew the narrator irresistibly to his death in a last fatal union with her.
This fatal intertwining reflects images of vegetal growth, whose characteristic snakelike movements convey the threat of a lethal embrace. The themes of vegetal invasion, of the decay and proliferation of the “green darkness” lay at the center of
210 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Ella d’Arcy’s short story “The Villa Lucienne”: “The ground was covered with lichens, deathstool, and a spongy moss exuding water beneath the foot, and one had the consciousness that the whole place, floor, wall and roof, must creep with the repulsive, slimy, running life which pullulates in dark and solitary places” (d’Arcy 265). We might also refer to “The Moonslave” (1901) by Oscar Wilde, where
sprawling vegetation was synonymous with latent horror, or to Lord Dunsany’s
tales, “The Dream of King Karna-Vootra” (1915) and The Blessing of Pan (1927), which evoked
the silent threat represented by proliferating plants that were transformed into snake-shaped arabesques. These references, which stem from the
decadent movement, highlighted a source of inspiration which Smith preserved.
In “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” (1931), two brothers from Atlantis are impotent
witnesses to the geological process which pulls Atlantis down to the depths of the ocean. After having flown forward several decades, they discover on Sfanomoë
(Venus) an extraterrestrial floral world composed of “virgin primeval landscapes.”
However, this paradise quickly becomes hellish when the two brothers are ab-
sorbed by Sfanomoë’s luxuriant flora. Thus, the last two inhabitants of Atlantis meet their end, and are “the first (and last) humans to have set foot on Sfanomoë’s soil” ( RA 119). Likewise, the “Venus of Azombeii” (c. 1931) turns out to be fatal for its discoverer and gives the impression that the Venusian star shines with malefic properties. The apparent intoxication and voluptuousness, which were deceptive signs of a “springtime feast for the intoxication of the senses,” give way to the
“lady of destinies” and to the “queen of spells,” who are figures which evoke cannibalistic femininity.
Extraterrestrial feminoid vegetation was continuously associated with death in
Smith’s work, whether in “The Flower-Women” (1935), or in “The Demon of the
Flower” (1933), in which Smith transformed the image of a delicious garden into a demon’s lair.
All these fin-de-siècle themes are energized by an author whose ambition transcended time and space. Smith was a poet of the past and the future, he trans-
formed the genre of heroic fantasy by situating the romantic tradition in science fiction, and, in the process, produced a variation that provoked a sense of sublime disorientation and a feeling that humanity had been surpassed. Admittedly, the
omnipresence of the macabre makes the tagging of the label of “decadent fantasy”
seem more appropriate when applied to Smith’s work, whereas the expression “he-
roic fantasy” finds its full embodiment in, for example, the work of Howard.
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