Notes
1. Aickman’s definition of the “ghost story” is astonishingly broad. In his introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, he writes “The majority of ghost stories, however, have no actual ghost. . . . The technique, like the subject is fragile but with a grip of iron. And a vital ingredient is beauty.” (Aickman, “Introduction,” 7, 9).
2. This theme deserves to be explored in the context of the mythic hero archetype.
292 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Works Cited
Aickman, Robert. “An Essay.” In First World Fantasy Awards, ed. Gahan Wilson. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977. 63–65.
———. “Introduction.” In The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, ed. Robert Aickman.
London: Fontana, 1964. 7–10.
Behrends, Steve. “The Song of the Necromancer: ‘Loss’ in Clark Ashton Smith’s Fiction.” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 1 (Summer 1986): 3–12.
Bradbrook, M. C. Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.
Burleson, Donald R. “The Mythic Hero Archetype in ‘The Dunwich Horror.’” In A Century Less a Dream, ed. Scott Connors. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2002. 206–13.
Cawthorn, James, and Michael Moorcock. Fantasy: The 100 Best Books. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988. 95–96.
Dunsany, Lord. The Gods of Pegāna. 1905. Boston: John W. Luce, 1916.
Murray, Will. “Introduction.” In Tales of Zothique. By Clark Ashton Smith. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1995.
Rockhill, Jim. “The Poetics of Morbidity: The Original Text to Clark Ashton Smith’s
‘The Maze of Maal Dweb’ and Other Works First Published in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies. ” Lost Worlds No. 1 (2004): 20–25.
Sidney-Fryer, Donald. Clark Ashton Smith: The Sorcerer Departs. West Hills, CA: Tsathoggua Press, 1997.
———. “Introduction: Lyricist of Lost Worlds.” In The Monster of the Prophecy. By Clark Ashton Smith. New York: Timescape, 1983. 7–10.
Stableford, Brian. “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith.” In American Supernatural Fiction: From Edith Wharton to the Weird Tales Writers, ed. Douglas Robillard. New York: Garland, 1996. 229–52.
Into the Woods:
The Human Geography of Averoigne
Stefan Dziemianowicz
Writing to H. P. Lovecraft in 1930, Clark Ashton Smith referred to his recently written “A Rendezvous in Averoigne” as a tale of “the purely fantastic” ( LL 15).
Only when given its proper context—Smith was juxtaposing this superior tale of
the supernatural to the second-rate science fantasies he was churning out for Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories—does his description make any sense, for Smith’s story of two lovers waylaid in the woods of medieval France by a vampire lord and lady reads like an exercise in the sort of literary realism he so abhorred, when compared to more otherworldly (and as-yet-unwritten) fantasies such as “Xeethra” (of his Zothique story cycle), “The Coming of the White Worm” (of his Hyperborea cycle), “The Last Incantation” (of his Poseidonis cycle),, and numerous others.
Although Smith believed “that there is absolutely no justification for literature unless it serves to release the imagination from the bounds of everyday life” ( SL
123), the eleven stories of his Averoigne cycle are a distinct exception: they are remarkable, if anything, for their realistic insights into human nature and their evocation of a mundane world in which supernatural machinations seem all the more
exotic. As Steve Behrends has noted, it was in his Averoigne tales that “Smith
came closest to producing a series with a non-fabulous backdrop” ( CAS 49). More to the point, these stories temper Behrends’s otherwise astute observation that Smith “revelled in exoticism and the ultra-human, in coined names, in descriptions of unearthly flora and strange, vapor-hung sunsets” ( CAS 12). Smith did indeed strive to make the “ultra-human” the focus of all his stories, but the sympathy for humanity that permeates his tales of Averoigne gives them a psychological and philosophical substance too often lacking in the rest of his fiction. As a result, these stories can be read both as links between Smith’s horror and fantasy stories and at the same time fiction that transcends the limitations of Smith’s aesthetic of the purely fantastic.
The template for all the Averoigne stories can be found in the first published
story in the series, “The End of the Story.” The tale is presented as the written narrative of Christophe Morand, a young law student from Tours who has disap-
peared following a journey through the province of Averoigne in 1798.
Christophe’s manuscript recounts his overnight stay at the abbey of Périgon,
wherein resides a sect of Benedictine monks headed by the liberal abbot Hilaire.
294 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Hilaire recognizes in Christophe a fellow scholar and delights in showing him
some of the abbey’s rare manuscripts. Among these is an account of one Gérard
de Venteillon, who on the eve of his wedding centuries before was lured by a satyr to the nearby Château des Faussesflammes and never seen again. Despite discouragement by Hilaire, Christophe finds himself irresistibly drawn to the château
whose ruins sit on a hill just above the abbey. He visits there the next day and upon entering a grove finds himself transported to a glorious pastoral landscape presided over by the seductive Nycea. Christophe’s idyll is abruptly ended by the appearance of Hilaire, who dispatches Nycea with holy water and explains to the crestfallen young man that she is a lamia who has used her sorcery to beguile him.
The story ends with Christophe so smitten by Nycea’s enchantments that he vows
nevertheless to return and seek her company.
Although the most recent story of the Averoigne cycle by internal chronology—
it takes place later than eight other stories for which Behrends has been able to date events ( CAS 54)—“The End of the Story” exhibits most of the characteristics that make the series so compelling. Primary among these is Smith’s evocation of the landscape. The story opens in the forest of Averoigne, which surrounds the principle towns of Ximes and Vyones and plays a crucial role in, if not serving as the actual site for, the marvels related in nine of the tales. Smith’s delineation of the interrelationship between this dense and often impenetrable forest and the local towns lays the foundation for the fantastic in these stories much the same way rural settings do in contemporary horror fiction: it creates a sense of isolation and removal from the rest of the world. Although there are allusions in several of the stories to the larger world beyond the woods of Averoigne, for the most part this remote sector of the Provence region seems untouched by time or world events. A perfect example is the mise en scène of “The End of the Story,” which takes place nine years after a political and social revolution that convulsed not only France but also much of Western civilization, yet still unfolds as though it were taking place in the medieval times of the earliest stories in the cycle.
In addition to having a literal presence, the woods of Averoigne also have a
symbolic weight. As Smith tells us in the sixth published tale, “A Rendezvous in Averoigne”:
[T]he gnarled and immemorial wood possessed an ill-repute among the peasantry.
Somewhere in this wood there was the ruinous and haunted Château des Fausses-
flammes; and also there was a double tomb, within which Sieur Hugh du Malin-
bois and his chatelaine, who were notorious for sorcery in their time, had lain unconsecrated for more than two hundred years. Of these, and their phantoms,
there were grisly tales; and there were stories of loup garous and goblins, of fays and devils and vampires that infested Averoigne. ( RA 77)
In the seventh published tale, “The Satyr,” Smith reinforces this image of the
woods as a wellspring of local superstition:
Into the Woods: The Human Geography of Averoigne
295
Here, some of the huge oaks were said to date back to pagan days. Few people
ever passed beneath them; and queer beliefs and legends concerning them had
been prevalent among the local peasantry for ages. Things had been seen within
these precincts, whose very existence was an affront to science and a blasphemy to religion; and evil influences were said to attend those who dared to intrude upon the sullen umbrage of the immemorial glades and thickets. ( GL 157–58)
Untamed and imbued with a sense of antiquity that dwarfs the age of the towns it surrounds—we are informed in “The Holiness of Azédarac” that the woods was
once the site of Druidic worship in 475 A.D., and in “The Enchantress of Sylaire”
that the moor the forest gives way to “was studded with Druidic monoliths, dating from ages prior to the Roman occupation” ( AY 130)—the forest of Averoigne is a locus of mystery upon which the townspeople project their primitive (and not entirely unfounded) fears. Thus, it does not take much of an interpretative leap to view the interrelationship of the towns and woods of Averoigne as an externaliza-tion of the psyches of the inhabitants of Averoigne: the civilized self, threatened on all sides by the primal fears it has pushed to the periphery of its consciousness but not entirely dispelled.
It is surely no coincidence, then, that Smith’s favorite symbol of the horrors
that lurk in the forest is the werewolf. Although werewolves appear in only three of the Averoigne stories—“The Beast of Averoigne,” “The Enchantress of Sylaire,” and (by implication) “The Mandrakes”—they are omnipresent in the back-
ground of all the stories. Smith repeatedly describes the woods as “haunted” or
“infested” with werewolves, a subtle evocation of the rational self overwhelmed by the primitive side of its nature.
If the forests of Averoigne represent the irrational side of human nature, then the Church can be viewed as embodying the rational side. Although the religious authority of the Benedictine monks and Catholic clergy is woven into the social background of all the Averoigne stories, in six—“The End of the Story,” “The Maker of Gargoyles,” “The Beast of Averoigne,” “The Holiness of Azédarac,” “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” and “The Disinterment of Venus”—Smith specifically uses the godliness represented by either the cathedral of Vyones or the abbey of Périgon as the standard against which the ungodliness of the supernatural is measured.
Like the forest, the Church occupies both a literal and a symbolic space in the stories: the cathedral of Vyones is the largest building in the town, and thus a symbol for the pinnacle of civilization, serving to remind us of the role the Church played in preserving western culture during the Dark Ages (which have just about ended by the time of the events in “The Maker of Gargoyles,” the first story in the cycle by internal chronology). When the supernatural occurs in these stories, it represents not only an affront to the teachings of the Church, but by extension a threat to the values that define the humanity of the characters.
Smith broadens the human dimension of this part of the backdrop to the Av-
eroigne cycle by showing that the separation between the forest and the town, the
296 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
irrational and rational sides of human nature, is far from clear-cut. When Hilaire invokes the power of Christ to save Christophe from the lamia in “The End of the Story,” Smith portrays the event not so much as a triumph of good over evil, but of religious faith over pagan belief. This distinction is important for understanding the world-view of the citizens of the province. Averoigne, as Smith sketches it, is a region where paganism still exerts a strong hold on the imagination and where religious faith and superstition coexist restlessly in the minds of the people. Smith reminds us of this by several means in the “The End of the Story”: symbolically,
through the physical proximity of the abbey of Périgon to the ruins of the Château des Faussesflammes (they are separated by only a half-hour’s walk), and literally, through the speech of the satyr to Gérard de Venteillon:
“The power of Christ has prevailed like a black frost on all the woods, the
fields, the rivers, the mountains, where abode in their felicity the glad, immortal goddesses and nymphs of yore. But still, in the cryptic caverns of earth, in places far underground, like the hell your priests have fabled, there dwells the pagan loveliness, there cry the pagan ecstasies.” ( RA 64)
As is evident from the history of the ruins told to Christophe by a young monk, not even the clergy are immune to the influence of the pagan beliefs they struggle to supplant with their religious faith:
“For untold years, men say, they have been the haunt of unholy spirits, or
witches and demons . . . Some say that the demons are abominable hags whose
bodies terminate in serpentine coils; others that they are women of more than
mortal beauty, whose kisses are a diabolic delight that consumes men with the
fierceness of hell-fire . . . As for me, I know not whether such tales are true; but I should not care to venture within the walls of Faussesflammes.” ( RA 66) In Averoigne, it would appear that Christianity is a relatively recent, and sometimes temporary, affectation of the populace. The most devout are forever in danger of falling back upon their primitive superstitions, and in moments of moral weakness, such as “the suffocating burden of superstitious terror” that grips the townsfolk of Vyones in “The Maker of Gargoyles,” some are capable of reverting
to ungodly practices:
Everyone now felt a truly formidable assault was being made by the powers
of Evil on the Christian probity of Vyones. In the condition of abject terror, or extreme disorder, and demoralization that followed upon this new atrocity, there was a deplorable outbreak of human crime, or murder and rapine and thievery, together with covert manifestations of Satanism, and celebrations of the Black Mass attended by many neophytes. ( TSS 175)
The Averoigne stories are nothing if not studies of such moments of human
fallibility. In virtually every one, the supernatural gets the upper hand only after
Into the Woods: The Human Geography of Averoigne
297
human characters succumb to their passions or give in to illicit desires; in fact,
“The Colossus of Ylourgne” and “The Beast of Averoigne” are the only tales in
the cycle in which romantic passion, or lust, are not the catalyst for the weird events that follow. Although Smith divides these episodes of human frailty evenly between men and women, he relies on a favorite emblem of flawed humanity to
make his point: the monks of Périgon. Regardless of whether he portrays them as too ascetic for their own good, as in “The Disinterment of Venus,” or as holy
hypocrites in “The Holiness of Azédarac,” Smith achieves some his most poignant and satiric moments as a writer by showing his monks to be the perfect embodiment of the contradictions of the human condition, people with divine aspirations but feet of clay.
A fine example is the abbot Hilaire in “The End of the Story.” Smith treats
Hilaire more kindly than any other clergyman in his stories, portraying him as both holy and enlightened when he introduces himself to Christophe:
“We are a Benedictine order, who live in amity with God and with all men,
and we do not hold that the spirit is to be enriched by the mortification or impoverishment of the body. We have in our butteries an abundance of wholesome fare, in our cellars the best and oldest vintage of the district of Averoigne. And, if such things interest you, as mayhap they do, we have a library that is stocked with rare tomes, with precious manuscripts, with the finest works of heathendom and
Christendom, even to certain unique writings that survived the holocaust of Alex-andria.” ( RA 5
9)
Nevertheless, Hilaire’s openmindedness has its price, for it leads to Christophe’s introduction to the manuscript of Gérard de Venteillon and thus indirectly implicates the abbot in Christophe’s temptation and eventual destruction.
More often, Smith presents his monks in a less flattering light as men who use
their holy station as a cloak for their inadequacies as human beings. In two stories, there is actual collusion between the clergy and the sorcerers who cater to the pagan beliefs of the people. This collusion is indirect and almost benign in “The Mandrakes,” in which we learn that because of the number of honest marriages
promoted by the philtres of a husband and wife team of sorcerers, “the local clergy were content to disregard the many illicit amours that had to come to a successful issue through the same agency” ( OD 253). But in “The Beast of Averoigne,” when the abbot of Périgon and the marshal of Ximes engage the wizard Luc le Chaudronnier to use whatever means necessary to destroy a legendary monster beyond
the control of the Church and state, the collaboration is direct and a testimony to the limits of religious faith:
“[I]n dealing with this devil, it may be that you shall succeed where all others have failed. Not willingly do we employ you in the matter, since it is not seemly for the church and the law to ally themselves with wizardry. But the need is desperate lest the demon should take other victims. In return for your aid we can
298 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
promise you a goodly reward of gold and a guarantee of lifelong immunity from all inquisition which your doings might otherwise invite. The Bishop of Ximes, and
the Archbishop of Vyones, are privy to this offer, which must be kept a secret.”
( LW 150–51)
The seriousness of the stories mentioned above prevents Smith from attempting
more than a few wry observations regarding the duplicity of the clergy. But in “The Holiness of Azédarac,” the one overtly humorous tale of Averoigne, he is at his satiric best. Azédarac is the Bishop of Ximes, but secretly a sorcerer who has adopted the guise of holiness to put himself above suspicion. As he observes to a subordinate, “‘the chief difference between myself and many other ecclesiastics is, that I serve the Devil wittingly and of my own free will, while they do the same in sanctimonious blindness’” ( RA 5). The monk who bears evidence of Azédarac’s blasphemies to Vyones, the likeable Brother Ambrose, exemplifies Azédarac’s insight: when sent back in time 700 years by a potion concocted by Azédarac’s henchman, he indulges in a sexual relationship with the Lady Moriamis and rationalizes away its sinfulness, because theoretically he has yet to be born. Smith ends the tale with
Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc Page 47