“The Eternal World,” we witness the presence of “Immortal beings.” These fan-
tastic visions of the eternal return do not correspond to the disparaged contemplation of the Wheel of Time that can be seen to emanate from King Kull in R. E.
Howard’s short story “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” for instance. Hyperborea
takes on the garb of Kronos, an ogre who devours humanity, which serves to ex-
plain the reason for the numerous images of swallowing that occur in this cycle where the author’s morbid poetry runs rampant.
The author’s irony culminates in “The Last Hieroglyph” (1935), unveiling the
ultimate aim of existence. This aim consists of being made into hieroglyphics and thus being tidied and filed in the great book belonging to the gods, a supreme indication of universal memory or a form of oblivion. Thus, we could conclude, by
referring to the familiar pessimistic tone of Smith’s work, that everything is reduced to death and emptiness, had the author not himself given his short story a significant epigraph. In the end, the world itself will be designated by a “circular monogramme.” Hence, Zothique’s ancient prophecy casts a different light on the
cycle, for the “circular monogramme,” which symbolizes the world in agony, plots the familiar curve of the great periodic return. The author’s emphasis on astrology in this tale is not accidental, for it serves to remind us of Smith’s cyclical conception of things and stresses the disappearance and reappearance of humanity.9
This esoteric short story enables us to better understand the concept of fate
(which permeates some science fiction tales, such as “The Letter from Mohaun
Los,” c. 1935). For at the end of a journey through time, the hero of the aforemen-
Fantasy and Decadence in the Work of Clark Ashton Smith
217
tioned short story concludes that “Perhaps we shall follow the great circle of time, till the years and aeons without number have returned upon themselves once more,
and the past is made a sequel to the future!” ( LW 365; italics added).
This futuristic cycle of events can be put into perspective by considering the
apocalyptic works that treated the theme of “empty lands” at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Zothique’s ailing sun is a reference to the decaying sun found in Fragment d’histoire future (1896) by Gabriel Tarde, or a reference to the reddish sun depicted in Wells’s story The Time Machine (1895).
Despite the cyclical turn taken by the “Last Hieroglyph,” the dark and pessimistic tone that envelopes the kingdom of Zothique enables us to liken Smith’s world
vision to the tragic vision of the universe that pervades Wells’s work. We could suggest that, following the example of Howard and Lovecraft, Smith plots the
graph of eternal return in an anguished and tormented style. The unhappy conti-
nents of Poseidonis and Hyperborea have been swallowed up by the same cyclical
destiny that gnaws away at Zothique’s condemned shores. Despite the initial in-
scription in the book of the gods, once the “last continent” has yielded to the biting effect of time, a “last hieroglyph,” burnt by the sun, will remain, and will one day be discovered by a new human race. Thus the theme of oblivion, which genuinely seems to torment the artist, will relinquish its place to the memory of the writing, which remains the only pathetic hope available for life here below.
Conclusion
Smith’s unique exotic and poetic vision, the notion of a universe “queerer than we can imagine,” contributed a new mythological framework to modern fantasy. In
Smith’s world, the amoral flourish and the good are the victims of ironic fates. In
“The Maze of Maâl Dweb” and “The Demon in the Flower,” the protagonists
ultimately fail to rescue their lovers. Smith’s fatalistic vision can only generate a decadent sort of fantasy— unheroic fantasy?—in which gloom, tomb, and doom prevail.
Smith’s fascination with morbidity must be analyzed within the context of the
entire body of his work, which reveals, as it does in Howard’s and Lovecraft’s
work, a constant obsession with portraying the struggle against time. People as well as continents appear to be threatened with extinction in Smith’s universe. His art, which portrays quasi-surrealistic worlds reminiscent of the work of Bosch or Dali, can thus be located on the boundaries of time and space. Smith can be considered one of the great demiurges of the imaginary, equaling the fantastic production of writers at the end of the previous century. But throughout his work, even when the nadir of horror had been plumbed, the beauty of the poetry remains. One of his
last tales, “Phoenix” (1954), expresses both the notions of the sublime and despair, in which humanity strives to reignite a dying sun. Since Smith can be situated in the tradition of “phantasmagorical romantic” writers (Bleiler, Science Fiction Writers
218 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
2.139), we are better able to understand Lovecraft’s tribute to Smith, written two months before Lovecraft’s death:
. . . here, apart, dwells one whose hands have wrought
Whose graven runes in tones of dread have taught
What things beyond the star-gulfs lurk and leer.
Dark Lord of Averoigne whose windows stare
On pits of dream no other gaze could bear! (Lovecraft 81)
The artist’s individual combat against time also corresponds to the Zeitgeist of a world that, since Paul Valéry, had been aware of the fact of the “mortality of our civilizations.” Even though Smith’s sombre romantic tendencies were rooted in the remote past, he used the fin-de-siècle themes as a pretext for renewing the fantastic genre and expressing a general fear of decline. Smith, on the eve of the outbreak of the second world war, realized, in much the same way that W. H. Hodgson did
while lying in the bottom of a trench in 1918, that civilization had fatally transformed itself into a “Night Land.”
Notes
1. “Je suis le Tenebreux,—le Veuf,—l’Inconsolè, / Le prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie: / Ma seule Etoile est morte,—et mon luth constelle / Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.” (Gérard de Nerval 177.)
2. See especially the work of Dennis Rickard ( Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith).
3. Wilde concluded his essay on “The Decay of Lying” with a pathetic appeal to aesthetic invention: “Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail around the high-pooped galleys, as they do in the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire. We shall lay our hands on the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird, singing of beautiful and impossible things, that are not and that should be” (Wilde 930).
4. “La terreur devant le changement et devant la mort dévorante” (Durand 95).
5. “Mère Terrible, ogresse que vient fortifier I’interdit sexuel” (Durand 113).
6. This allegory might refer to Hodgson’s apocalyptic novel, The Night Land (1912).
7. “Zeus, the god of gods, who rules by law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honorable race was in a most wretched state, wanted to punish them that they might be chastened and improve” (Plato, quoted in Stemman 18).
8. “By the power of that Sabbath wine, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water, the house of life was driven asunder and the human trinity dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of flesh” (Machen 228).
9. Mircea Eliade provides us with some historical examples in his book Le Mythe de l’éternel retour.
Fantasy and Decadence in the Wo
rk of Clark Ashton Smith
219
Works Cited
Bleiler, E. F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983.
———, ed. Science Fiction Writers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.
Buckley, J. H. The Victorian Temper. New York: Vintage, 1964.
Burleson, Donald R. H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.
d’Arcy, Ella. “Two Stories.” Yellow Book 10 (July 1896).
de Camp, L. Sprague. Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1976.
Dunsany, Lord. “The Dream of King Karna-Vootra.” In Fifty-one Tales. London: Elkin Mathews, 1915.
———. The Blessing of Pan. London: Putnam, 1927.
Durand, G. Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire. Paris: Bordas, 1979.
Eliade, Mircea. Le Mythe de l’éternel retour. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
Gérard de Nerval. “El Desdichado.” Les Chimères, in Aurelia. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990.
Gerber, Helmut E. “The Nineties: Beginning, End or Transition?” In Edwardians and Late Victorians, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.
———. The English Short Story in Transition 1880–1920. New York: Pegasus, 1967.
Hodgson, William Hope. The House on the Borderland. 1908. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1983.
Houghton, Walter Edwards. The Victorian Frame of Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
James, Henry. “The Last of the Valerii.” In The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1962, 89–122.
Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.
Lovecraft, H. P. The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works. Ed. S. T. Joshi. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2001.
Machen, Arthur. “The Novel of the White Powder.” In Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. New York: Pinnacle, 1983.
Marigny, Jean. “L’Univers Fantastique de C. A. Smith.” Cahier-Zothique, ed. Jean-Luc
Buard. Maurepas: Presses d’Ananké, 1985.
Rancy, Catherine. Fantastique et Décadence en Angleterre, 1890–1914. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1982.
Rickard, Dennis. The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith. Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973.
Stemman, Roy. Atlantis and the Lost Lands. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.
Sidney-Fryer, Donald. The Last of the Great Romantic Poets. Albuquerque, NM: Silver Scarab Press, 1973.
220 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Van Herp, Jacques. Panorama de la science-fiction. Verviers, Belgium: Gérard, 1973.
Wilde, Oscar. Works. London: Collins, 1948.
Humor in Hyperspace:
Smith’s Uses of Satire
John Kipling Hitz
Satire, in my opinion, contrary to that of my friend Benj. De Casseres, is far from being the highest form of art. As Lovecraft once remarked in a letter, if one laughs too persistently at things, it might come to seem that they were worth laughing at.
( SL 222)
Many of Clark Ashton Smith’s finest stories were essentially evocations of cosmic fantasy with a bent for the macabre, but at least an equal number of them are powerful treatments of the supernatural with a highly stylized development of weird atmosphere. To varying degrees, these “straight weirds” also rely upon ironic contrast, the grotesque, and mordant humor to intensify mood, although the limited use of humor is more overt in the imaginative flights through space and time for which he is best known.
One of the most remarkable aspects of his long-lost novelette, “The Red
World of Polaris , ” is its satire. The characterization of Captain Volmar as a vainglorious space-jock lends a mock-epic tone to this mingling of science-fiction and horror concepts. Distinctly better than the two previous entries in a short-lived series of tongue-in-cheek space exploration fantasies, it mixes satirical humor with the usual light banter between Volmar and the crew of the spaceship Alcyone (the name refers to the daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds, who aroused the wrath of Zeus by her audacity). There is some question as to whether this humor was also, as I believe, meant to soften the horror element, or if it is solely an expression of Smith’s contempt for the social conformity fostered by a machine-age culture, as represented by the alien Tloong race, which has thwarted death by transferring their brains en masse into artificial bodies of perdurable metal. Without question, social criticism is a salient feature. Witness the scene just prior to the imaginative tour-de-force detailing the cataclysmic destruction of the red world, when Volmar’s crew is told of their captor’s decision to surgically dispose of their bodies: The Koum (said the Tloong) had decreed that incorruptible metal bodies should be made for the visitors, that their brains should be transferred to these bodies, and that they should remain permanently in the red world. In time, it was hoped, by virtue of their ensuing immortality and long contact with the supremely civilized people of this world, they might develop into beings of a high order of intelligence. Through motives of benignity, as well as curiosity regarding the biological result, the Koum
222 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
had decided upon this experiment when he first beheld the earthlings ( RWP 101).
The humorous confusion apparent in each race’s perception of the other, par-
ticularly the reference to the Tloongs as “people,” serves to emphasize imagery loosely associated with the grotesque, a term defined as “a decorative style in which animal, human, and vegetable forms are interwoven and deformed to the point of
absurdity” ( EOL 495). The “half-vegetable, half-animal” Murms that eventually annihilate the Tloongs represent Smith’s ultimate mockery of the kind of formulaic interplanetary fiction offered by pulps like Wonder Stories, which rejected the story on the basis of an editorial policy that insisted upon “a play of human motives, with alien worlds for a background” ( SL 134). Introducing the book that incredibly featured its premiere appearance, seventy-three years after it was written, Ronald S.
Hilger and Scott Connors quoted from a letter to Donald Wandrei, in which Smith eccentrically declared his disdain for the sci-fi pulps: “If I proffer any ‘sops to Mammon and hoi polloi,’ they’ll have a squirt of hydrocyanic acid concealed in
them, in the form of satire. It would delight me to ‘put over’ that sort of thing”
( RWP 2). Since the Murms are subterranean creatures, “whose life-habit was one of perpetual feeding and pullulation” (100), Smith’s pride in the tale’s apocalyptic imagery, a sort of one-upmanship of repetitious pulp-fiction scenarios, is proof both of his satirical intentions and what Connors and Hilger referred to as his
“higher aspirations for the series” (2). The Tloongs’ scientific culture and “the infinite grotesqueries which they devised and created” (98) are the central attributes of the fantasy, but my concern here is with its melding of satire and humor noir, a term I first want to discuss in a more general context.
Eliciting smirks and grimaces rather than smiles and grins, humor noir (black humor) is “marked by the use of morbid, ironic, or grotesquely comic episodes
that ridicule human folly” ( EOL 144). Neither Poe nor Bierce used such humor in quite the same way that Smith uses it. Two unique features of his work are the
cosmic point of view with which it is informed and the eclectic vocabulary that characterizes his prose style. Rather than following the burlesque mode as Poe did, or mounting an aggressive satirical attack like Bierce, his satirical forays are more closely related to his cosmicism. Whether he subscribed to the view of Poe as “a misunderstood writer creating twisted and bizarre humorous pieces” in order to
reconcile “his two opposing visions of the world” (Stauffer 1) is a question of peripheral interest to Smith studies, just as Baudelaire’s suggestion that Poe’s death was a suicide is of only marginal relevance to Poe studies . But we can see the
use of humor noir as integral to Smith’s satirical or semi-satirical pieces, as well as his somewhat atrabilious dramatization of sexual contretemps in “The Holiness of
Azédarac,” “The Witchcraft of Ulua,” “The Satyr,” and several other tales. Smith also enjoyed tipping his hat to Poe, and to a lesser extent, Lovecraft. A close reading of even so minor a story as “The Supernumerary Corpse” will disclose that the romantically frustrated narrator (Felton Margrave) is a parody of Montresor, the narrator of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado ,” and the central situation, involving
Humor in Hyperspace: Smith’s Uses of Satire
223
two identical corpses of a murder victim—the one buried, the other supernaturally defying Margrave’s attempt to get rid of it—is bleakly comical. However, Smith’s sardonic sense of humor is apt to make us think not of Poe, but of his fellow Californian, Ambrose Bierce. “The Ninth Skeleton” and “The Phantoms of the Fire”
suggest an early influence, but perhaps only “The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake,”
as Smith put it, “owes something to Bierce” ( SL 109).
What is striking about the passage quoted from “The Red World of Polaris” is
the clear implication that the Koum, like other potentates in Smith’s fantasies, is vain and delusional, like so many of our career politicians and their supporters. The Koum’s edict supposedly confers the boon of “incorruptible metal bodies” upon
the humans, yet previously the narrative relates that “the tower of the Koum was invaded throughout its underground vaults; and some of the Murms had almost
reached the royal presence before they were destroyed” ( RWP 99). Here Smith is injecting the narrative with a dose of pathos, to show the inevitable result of the Tloongs’ technology-dependent existence. Their demise is caused by their own obsession with biological research. Some of the Tloong scientists toy with death, creating strange hybrids that rapidly reproduce, and then eradicating them, until the fatal creation of those “half-vegetable, half-animal” Murms by one biologist whose zeal for experimentation exceeds all rational limits, like H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau.
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