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stuffed eels and jellied salamanders’ eggs (Wolfe 9; Smith’s italics). Thus his purpose is often cautionary, and the voyage motif is elaborated in the remaining five stories by additional devices of distancing and estrangement, such as settings remote in time and space from the present, or the summoning of cosmic forces that overwhelm the temporal, spatial, and sense-related limitations of the present.
Although the ending of the first and longest story in the pamphlet suffers
from anticlimax after all the marvels the tale has traversed, the next story picks up these motifs in another quest. “The Maze of the Enchanter” commences with a
barbarian hunter, Tiglari, tigerishly invading the mountain-top domain of the sorcerer Maâl Dweb to rescue his beloved, Athlé, from being “eternalized.” However, the protagonist roles are again reversed as the enchanter is here an absolute monarch like Euvoran, and Tiglari a supple challenger like the necromantic trickster.
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The results are also reversed: Tiglari proves no match for Maâl Dweb’s superhu-
man foresightedness and power. However, the hunter is a far more sympathetic
figure than the sorcerer, who not only exercises seignioral rights over the loveliest maidens of the planet Xiccarph but also apparently makes no better use of their beauty than freezing them into art-objects by exposure to his “mirror of Eternity.”
Maâl Dweb’s aesthetic yet flatly sexist stereotyping of the female form extends also to their disenfranchised lovers, like Tiglari and his rival Mocair. Despite their stalking skills and animal cunning, they are transformed into shambling hairy apes from the neck down by the flowers of “primordial life” in his arboreal maze. But the wizard, although remaining absolute master of his planet, suffers at the end of the story from a fate similar to Euvoran’s: repetition compulsion and ennui. We are left with the conviction that he has so isolated himself from humans and human
emotions that despite his lip-service to diversity in his future enchantments, hollowly repeated by his inhuman iron servitor Mong Lut, he has become too much
like his sword-handed automatons and statuesque women—deadly and petrified.
In this way, the estrangement motif associated with the hero’s quest is ex-
tended to the sorcerer and author-creator. As the French anthropologist Marcel
Mauss observed, “Isolation and secrecy are two almost perfect signs of the intimate character of a magical rite” (23). However, imaginations that become intimate with infinitude—like those of Smith’s tricksters and enchanters—can also become bored and misogynistic when language is used for necromantic purposes that deny life and suppress dissent. The resulting rite dooms its practitioner as well as any against whom the rite may be directed; its isolation and intimacy becomes self-reflexive and immobilizing. In Smith’s aesthetic the exotic atmosphere evoked by luxuriant images predominates, and the tale often admonishes as much as celebrates both the creators and the consumers of art. Deconstructing the Double Shadow pamphlet’s tales suggests that the sensuous aesthetic appreciation championed by Smith becomes arrested development rather than revitalizing epiphany. In short, it constitutes an implicit and perhaps unintentionally reflexive critique of Smith’s own rhetorical art.
The pamphlet’s key third story confirms and extends this self-replicating and
self-canceling turn of art-as-sorcery. “The Double Shadow,” one of Smith’s most famous and effective tales, reveals the wizards as the victims of their own enchantment. The narrator is Pharpetron, the pupil of Avyctes (who is himself the pupil of Malygris in a link to other stories of Smith’s Atlantean cycle). Pharpetron discovers a glittering triangular tablet cast upon the shore after a storm. The tablet is inscribed with strange characters that neither Avyctes nor his acolyte can read. A sorcerer in the proper sense of summoning spirits to enact his magic, Avyctes finally sends the ghost of a prehistoric wizard into the abyss of an even more distant past to learn that the tablet contains a conjuration of long-vanished serpent-men.
Possessed of the key, the two decipher the tablet and Avyctes insists upon enacting the ritual, even though its result is not named by the tablet. The sorcerers station
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themselves at the corners of a triangular design simulating the tablet, employing a magically animated mummy named Oigos at the third corner, and recite the spell.
But nothing appears to happen. The wizards think they have failed until much
later, when Pharpetron sees an indescribably noisome shadow trailing behind
Avyctes, “a distorted loathly blot, having a pestilent unnamable hue,” and “a
streaming ooze of charnel pollution, a foulness beyond the black leprosies of hell”
(20). Despite their efforts to conjure this repulsive undulating shadow into speech, it remains unresponsive and slowly nears Avyctes, until it and the hapless sorcerer coalesce into a single ghastly being, all the more terrifying for its continued speechlessness. The sorcerer’s castle also takes on the fluid characteristics of the monster, like a bad dream, so that the terrified Pharpetron is unable “to reach the topmost outer stair; for at every step the marble flowed beneath me, fleeing like a pale horizon before the seeker” (21). The stalking shadow makes no distinction between the living and the dead: Oigos is stalked and engulfed next. Despairing, the trapped Pharpetron throws the alien tablet back into the sea and seals his tale in a bottle before the double shadow takes him. The ages-old message-in-a-bottle motif that frames the narrative artfully doubles the finding of the tablet, just as the act of reading Pharpetron’s story cautions us against the unknown and indecipherable.
The cylinder’s enclosure echoes the captivity of the helpless wizards within the un-foreseen consequences of their own spell. And the final lines of the message, “the space is no wider than the thickness of a wizard’s pen” (22), also inscribe the mutual logocentrism of sorcery and literary art, and their nearness to the absent and unspeakable Other that is their object.
It is a logocentrism, however, with literally nothing at its core. In the weird tale, nothingness is the ultimate horror. It is horrible precisely because it is palpable yet anonymous, incommunicable, and therefore uncontrollable. Similarly, it may be that we are so enclosed by and dependent upon the language of signs that we cannot ever master or get “outside” it. The summoners’ power is negated and con-
sumed by the power summoned. The serpentlike horror doubles and personifies
the sorcerers’ own consuming ignorance, a silent and inexpressible other, “the sign of an entity” (21) that implacably represents the very absence of the signified.
In this way, Smith implicitly questions the sorcerer’s fundamental mode of op-
eration: the replacement of reality by images. As Mauss writes, “A magician does nothing, or almost nothing, but makes everyone believe that he is doing everything, and all the more so because he puts to work collective forces and ideas to help the individual imagination in its beliefs” (141–42). However, it is not the magical power of language that Smith is interrogating, but the appropriateness of its uses. At first Avyctes and Pharpetron think they have done nothing, that their conjuration, rather than defining an absence to be made present, is defined only by the absence of results. After all, the “collective forces and ideas” they have put to work are not their own or even comprehended by them. When they realize their
error, it is too late to save themselves from absorption by the alien belief system
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for which they have no language, so horribly manifested in its otherness that Pharpetron can only describe it in terms of his own hysterical revulsion. And the sorcerer’s duel implicit in the tale is not only metalinguistic, but made concrete. As Daniel O’Keefe describes it, dueling and paranoia are at the heart of sorcery, which
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“fears reflect the hostile action of rivals . . . Sorcery itself is already magic— your rival’s magic” (420; his emphasis).
If magic is so double-edged in this story, it remains nearly as much so in “A
Night in Malnéant.” After the terrifying indeterminacy of the spell that swallows Avyctes and Pharpetron, the lack of a name for the following story’s narrator appears all the more self-absorbed (as it is in Poe’s “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” narratives with a similar theme). The narrator’s apparently random and indefinite journeying to “old-world city to city” (22) and “old-world
realms of fog and mist” (24) suggest Smith’s mythical realm of Averoigne, yet that realm is never mentioned and the narrator never tells us how he has heard of Malnéant itself. He is literally in a fog, and the city becomes for him a labyrinth of self-pity and guilt in which everyone is preparing for the funeral of Mariel, whom he claims poisoned herself because “my changeable temper, my fits of cruel indifference or ferocious irritability, had broken her gentle heart” (22). As lugubrious as the previous story was brilliant, the narrative suits the narrator. Yet no one there recognizes him, suggesting his own lack of self-knowledge. Malnéant itself translates as “evil nothingness or unknowing,” and it is a mortuary limbo. It may also serve as an architectural metaphor for magic. Again according to Mauss, “Magic is a living mass, formless and inorganic, and its vital parts have neither a fixed position nor a fixed function” (88). If this is so, then Malnéant with its clammy fog and tolling bells not only externalizes the narrator’s descent into the solipsistic maelstrom of his “belated remorse,” but symbolizes the disappearing distinction between rite and representation that constitutes magic. Like the doom that consumes the Atlantean sorcerers, the narrator’s obsessive confrontation with the object of his grief does not absolve him. Instead, it brings only the conviction that “this one event, the death of the lady Mariel, had drawn apart from all other happenings, had broken away from the sequence of time and found for itself a setting of appropriate gloom and solemnity; or perhaps had even built around itself the whole enormous maze of that spectral city” (24).
Smith’s fixation on compulsive repetition, possession and dispossession, and the ways in which the magician loses control of his rite—becoming trapped within his own representations—therefore corresponds to the theme of the implied author-creator or reader losing control of the work as it absorbs them and grows into text.
Smith states in The Black Book:
Whether the poet deals with nearby and familiar things, or with the remote and
fabulous is, in the last analysis, immaterial; since, in either case, he is dealing with concepts and mental figments rather than ultimate reality. The world itself is quite possibly a mere superstition of the senses—and no less so because the superstition
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is universally shared by beings with the same sense-equipment. (56)
The implied equivalence of rite and representation also breaks down the distinction between primary and secondary worlds.
In the next tale, the dark nothingness of the self is materially transformed into the cosmic nothingness of absolute evil—a nothingness in which there may or may not be a center. “The Devotee of Evil” brings Smith’s time-space spiral right into his fictionalized hometown of Auburn, California, where the haunted Larcom
house is purchased by a New Orleans creole named Jean Averaud. Smith himself
takes on the fictional mask of Philip Hastane, novelist (although Smith never wrote one). Averaud is attended by a single servant, a striking, mute mulatto named
Fifine who is also reputed to be his mistress. Links with the preceding story are created by carrying over the enclosing architectural metaphor from city to house, by the trait of obsessiveness that Averaud shares with the unnamed visitor to Malnéant, and by the simile with which Hastane likens the devotee to a “medieval al-chemist, who believed himself to be on the point of obtaining his objective after years of unrelenting research” (24).
The alchemical search for the means to transmute base matter into gold and
mortal into eternal life is once again signified by writing. Like any magician’s library, Averaud’s is remarkable. It contains “an ungodly jumble of tomes that dealt with anthropology, ancient religions, demonology, modern science, history, psy-choanalysis, and ethics. Interspersed with these, were a few romances and volumes of poetry. Beausobre’s monograph on Manichaeism was flanked with Byron and
Poe; and ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ jostled a late treatise on chemistry” (25)—all collected for the study of evil. The library’s apparent incoherence is another analogue to the formless mass of magic with which the sorcerer models reality, and whose evil
source he desires to summon. Averaud’s model-building is not expressed through
linguistic analysis, evocation, or incantation, however, but in a curious machine designed to “receive” a “monistic evil, which is the source of all death, deterioration, imperfection, pain, sorrow, madness, and disease” (25). The mechanism itself repeats a triangular geometry of evil that we have already seen in the serpent-men’s tablet and conjuration; it is a tripod structure of gongs and hammers placed in a triangular room. After an inconclusive but frightening demonstration while the
machine is still incomplete, Hastane stays away in a neurotic funk, only to return at the moment when Averaud completes and activates it. Before Fifine rushes in to
switch it off, Hastane is incurably scarred by madness and Averaud, stepping into the “double column of triangular shadow” (28), is permanently petrified into an icy black image of the evil he has summoned.
The mechanistic analogy to Pharpetron’s fate signifies the inorganic concep-
tual nature of what Averaud worships. Thus, despite the tale’s Lovecraftian intimation of absolute, even sentient evil, we are left to wonder if he has summoned the independent cosmic force that he had postulated, or merely focused some
formless mass of black magic created by his own obsessive imagining. Averaud’s
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machine replaces a linguistic system of signs as the mystical invocation of infinitude, suggesting that technology is merely modern magic that begins as a tool
and ends by consuming its creator. Typically for Smith, its effects upon the characters are described especially through the rhetoric of oxymoron (“the agonizing rapture of his perverse adoration” [28]) and synaesthesia (“chill awe,” “sable
fire,” “black cold” [28]); devices he inherited from Symbolist poetry to connote quasi-religious ecstasy, the confusion of categories and manifestation of transcendence.
Still, whether mechanistic or animistic, human imagination and writerly de-
vices cannot long sustain the effect. And if we may choose any imaginary world to be our home, why should it not be a more pleasant one than our primary one or a Dantean Malebolge? Sorcery is not only coercive and combative, but medical in its application, potentially healing the split between matter and spirit. So Smith ends his pamphlet of alternate realities with a parable in which the protagonist achieves, finally, a blissful heart’s desire instead of an eternal dark night of the soul. “The Willow Landscape” redeems the theme of loss and estrangement through its protagonist’s passage into the idyllic alternative world of an ancient landscape painting.
The tale does not start hopefully, however. Shih Liang, “a scholar, a poet, and a lover of both art and nature” (28), is progressively stripped of his health, his position as court secretary, and his ancestor’s art treasures which he must sell to support himself and finance his younger brother’s education. This decline in wealth, power, and available actions parallels Euvoran’s experience in the first story, although Shih Liang’s admirable character is more akin to Haldane than Euvoran.
The pattern of reversal culminates in the sale o
f Liang’s last treasure, the willow landscape, to an avid collector. Before surrendering it, Liang requests one more day to contemplate it.
At this point, however, the sorcery that in other stories resided within the
characters and was externalized through their summonings finds a different locus: the realm of art itself. “Somehow the picture was more than a painting, was more than a veritable scene: it possessed the enchantment of far-off things for which the heart has longed in vain, of years and of places that are lost beyond recall. Surely the artist had mingled with its hues the diviner iris of dream or of retrospect, and wine-sweet tears of a nostalgia long denied” (28). As Liang watches, the landscape grows, deepens, and assumes “the illusion of an actual place” (28). And as it does so, it speaks, inviting Liang to enter it “because your heart is native here but alien to all the world beside” (29). Stripped of all his other possessions, he finds release in this last, most treasured one. Because of words like “nostalgia” and “illusion” we might suspect that this is the voice of the artist’s narcissism, but Smith clearly intends more than a mere escapist fantasy. As he wrote to Donald Wandrei in 1926,
“Poetry such as mine, properly considered, is not an ‘escape,’ but an extension [of life]” (Sidney-Fryer 20). The concluding lines of the story reject the blindness of the so-called primary world and celebrate the fleshly vitality of the secondary one
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with a directness bordering on crudity: had the painting’s new owner look at it more often, he “might have found that the peony maiden and the person who resembled Shih Liang were sometimes engaged in other diversions than that of
merely passing the time of day on the bamboo bridge!” (30) This final fantastic reversal of the ground rules for art transfers the quality of illusion from the secondary world to the primary one, making it clear that the implied author prefers