because of their mythological provenance.
By far the greatest use of referential coding, however, involves the creation of Zothique’s imaginary culture. They have religious scripture (the Testament of Carnamagos) and well-defined social stations for the various characters, ranging from goatherd to king, and from merchant to leper. Smith creates the world of Zothique with its geography, its flora and fauna, and so on, by the use of this code in its creative aspect. On this level, “Xeethra” works largely by references to contemporary cultural ideas. The mention of “spires,” “turrets,” “odalisques,” “mummers,”
and so on, gives the tale an Arabian Nights or Vathek- like setting and mood, with perhaps a flavor of mediaeval Europe as well.
The Symbolic Code. Here the two opposed images appear clearly: that of the goatherd and the king. These in turn define themselves by contrary negative and positive attributes. The goatherd has a contentment that arises from his relative lack of care, and a counter-balancing lack of power and wealth. The king, contrariwise, has great power and wealth, but lacks contentment because of the great responsibilities that come with them. (These refer, as well, easily enough to our cultural stereotypes of the referential code, with its literary model of pastoral shepherds and rustics leading an idyllic life, and the “crown that sits heavy on the head” of him who wears it. Almost all elements work through more than one of these codes.)
Appropriately for a tale of loss, each of these defines itself for Xeethra by
what it lacks. The mediation that appears further reinforces and in effect totally finalizes the sense of loss. The “dark empire of Thasaidon” mediates between the two in the same way that the castrato in “Sarrasine” mediates the opposite sexes: by its lack of the positive features of both. Having lost the power and wealth of kingship, Xeethra cannot regain them; and having had them, he cannot regain the contentment that comes from life as a goatherd. This represents the absolute loss
Loss and Recuperation: A Model for Reading “Xeethra”
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of both extremes.
We have now seen how an application of Barthes’s methodology helps to lay
bare the kind of activity necessary to read “Xeethra” successfully. By carrying this out overtly and explicitly, we see the process that enabled adolescent readers of pulp magazines to recuperate stories that literary critics of the day could not recoup. More specifically, we see that the operations of naturalization differ primarily on, first, the weird tale’s code of connotations, which emphasizes codes of the object and codes of atmosphere over the codes of character that realist works emphasize, and second, we see that the fantasy genre’s use of the referential code in its creative aspect differs very widely from the realist genre’s primary uses. (Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings started a trend toward very heavy emphasis on the creative aspect of this code in fantasy works; many science fiction writers, such as Jack Vance, utilize it heavily as well.) In addition, the hermeneutic and symbolic codes take on an additional importance.
In conclusion, the structuralist and semiotic methods of analysis employed here can help make apparent the operations needed to appreciate the genius of a writer like Smith. They show us not only how his texts work, but equally important, how certain methods of reading have failed to give them their proper estimation. As Northrop Frye, speaking of another noted fantasist, says, “a great romancer should be examined in terms of the conventions he chose. William Morris should not be left on the side lines of prose fiction merely because the critic has not learned to take the romance form seriously” (305).
Works Cited
Anderson, James. “‘Pickman’s Model’: H. P. Lovecraft’s Model of Terror.” Lovecraft Studies Nos. 22/23 (Fall 1990): 15–21.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. Pref. Richard Howard. New York: Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Joshi, S. T., ed. H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980.
Scholes, Robert. Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
Smith, Clark Ashton. Xeethra. The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Steve Behrends. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1988.
Wilson, Edmund. The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.
“Life, Love, and the Clemency of Death”:
A Reexamination of Clark Ashton Smith’s
“The Isle of the Torturers”
Scott Connors
The tales of Zothique, the last continent of an earth dimly lit by a dying red sun, are among the finest fantasies to emerge from the imagination of Clark Ashton Smith.
However, the second story in the series, “The Isle of the Torturers,” is often dismissed even by Smith enthusiasts as inferior and derivative, or perhaps we should say inferior because it is derivative. However, the perceptive reader who examines closely Smith’s poem “Zothique” may infer that there is more to the story than may appear at first. The last stanza reads:
He who has sailed in galleys of Zothique
And seen the looming of strange spire and peak,
Must face again the sorcerer-sent typhoon,
And take the steerer’s post on far-poured oceans
By the shifted moon or the re-shapen Sign. ( LO 113)
Stephen Posey recently provided a masterful explication of this stanza in an
Internet discussion group dedicated to Smith. He posted the following comments: CAS set Zothique in the far future, he surely knew (or intended) that the orbit of the moon (“the shifted moon”) and the arrangements of the constellations (“re-shapen Sign”) would alter over time. So, someone from our age wanting to navi-
gate in the age of Zothique would be confronted with a sky altered from its present configuration. By implication then, the reader must find different touchstones than familiar literary ideas and symbols to properly read and appreciate (“navi-gate”) the poems and stories of Zothique.
The old gods and devils may have returned to Zothique under new names, but
the same cannot be said of the old chestnuts about literature. Smith warns us that his work cannot be judged by what we have read before, but that it requires the reader to judge its on its own terms, just as we should approach any work of art.
Brian Stableford describes Zothique as “the most dramatically appropriate” of
Smith’s “imaginary milieux,” but warns that “Isle” is not “entirely original” due to
“echoes of Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’ and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s ‘Torture of Hope’” (245–46). However, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” the titular
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325
plague is omnipresent throughout the plot and the atmosphere. The story is, in
Hervey Allen’s description, an ecstatic evocation of “the ruthlessness of nature”
(415), whereas in Smith’s story the “Silver Death” is what Alfred Hitchcock called the “maguffin”: it is merely an excuse to set the plot in action.
Villier de l’Isle-Adam’s “The Torture of Hope” was first published in his col-
lection Contes cruels, and as the title implies it is indeed a story where the cruelty that human beings inflict on their fellows is the theme. A prisoner of the inquisition who is due to be immolated at the auto da fé attempts to escape, only to discover that the seemingly open path was deliberately left open to him so that his despair upon recapture might be all the greater. Smith’s story likewise involves a similar psychological game of cat and mouse, yet it is the tortured prisoner whose deception resolves the plot, not the actions of the torturers.
In this st
ory, Smith tells how the Silver Death has descended upon Yoros,
causing all in its capital city, Faraad, to perish, except for its young king, Fulbra.
His survival is due to a ring given to him by Vemdeez, the court astrologer, because the king’s horoscope shows that he will not die in Yoros. The magician
warns his king that he bears the contagion of the Silver Death, and that should the ring be removed it would immediately resume its former virulence.
Fulbra is overpowered with grief by the loss of his people, so he sets off on an ebon barge across the seas to an island-tributary, Cyntrom, to the south. The barge is blown off course by an uncanny storm, running aground on an “unknown
shore” ( RA 453) that turns out to be the ill-famed island of Uccastrog, of whose hospitality mariners did not speak well. Fulbra believes that the king of the island would not mistreat a brother king, but this hope is soon dashed.
King Ildrac is a sinister figure whose invitation to partake of the sundry diversions offered by his people accepts no refusal, and Fulbra is imprisoned in a deep dungeon cell bordered on one side with thick glass overlooking a submarine scene of horror. While being escorted to his cell, Fulbra meets a young girl, “fairer and less sullen of aspect” ( RA 456) than her sisters, who urges him in his own language to endure bravely his ordeals and assures him that he is not friendless. Fulbra takes much comfort from this over the next few days, as he is subjected to a variety of novel tortures. One night the girl, Ilvaa, comes to him in secret and confides to him that an escape has been arranged. The next day he is bound to the wheel and it is revealed that Ilvaa’s ministrations are part of his torment. Now that he is without hope, a drugged wine will be forced upon him that will evoke a series of hellish visions robbing him of all memories of his royal status.
Seeing no other escape, Fulbra pleads with Ildrac to do anything to him but not to take away his ring. Ildrac of course takes the ring, freeing the Silver Death: Fulbra dies immediately, and the courtiers and torturers seconds later. Ildrac, who is unaware that the ring is his protection, throws the ring away thinking that it is the cause of what has happened. He dies, and Smith ends the story: “And oblivion claimed the Isle of Uccastrog; and the Torturers were one with the tortured” ( RA 463).
326 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
A close reading of the text of “The Isle of the Torturers” may surprise the
reader who does not expect to encounter its sophisticated imagery and classical construction. The opening tells how the Silver Death descended “from the great
star, Archernar,” which evokes an association with the river Acheron, the river in the Greek underworld across which Charon ferries the souls of the dead. “Borne by the dim currents of ether” to the land of Yoros, it smites all “with an icy, freezing cold, an instant rigor, as if the outermost gulf had breathed upon them” ( RA 449).
As we reflect on the opening paragraph, we realize that Smith is saying more
than his words’ obvious meaning. The fate that has befallen Yoros is nothing less than the fate that will eventually claim the whole earth once the red sun of Zothique sets for the last time, leaving our world helpless before the cold of space.
Smith tells us in the first paragraph of the first story of the cycle, “The Empire of the Necromancers,” that these stories were meant to “beguile for a little the black weariness of a dying race, grown hopeless of all but oblivion” ( RA 316). When Fulbra mourns the loss of his people, he is in fact mourning the impending doom of all humanity as the interstellar cold inches ever closer.
Fulbra is supposedly a king, the establisher of justice and peace who ensures
the prosperity of his people (Chevalier 567, 568), but he now stands apart from his people by virtue of the ring that provided him the protection that he could not give to his subjects. The ring symbolizes both Fulbra’s isolation from his people as well as his ultimate bondage to their fate. Despite his royal status, Fulbra’s freedom of action is inferior to that of the reader, as shown by his naive faith that Ildrac would not harm a fellow monarch or his unresisting surrender of personal weapons. Combined with Smith’s detached point of view, “The Isle of the Torturers”
clearly belongs to that fictional mode which Northrop Frye describes as ironic.
Irony is a subtle word whose meaning can be elusive, but which describes
Smith’s fiction very well indeed, especially when employed in its near-synonym “sardonic,” which means “bitter irony.” Smith often employs the detached viewpoint of the objective observer who is merely reciting the events as he watches them unfold, but there is a second level of meaning to his words that subverts the obvious. An excellent example occurs in Smith’s “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan.” A beggar
whom the titular moneylender has refused alms predicts that
“The hidden opulence of earth shall allure you and ensnare you; and earth itself shall devour you at the last.”
“Begone,” said Avoosl Wuthoqquan. “The weird is more than a trifle cryptic
in its earlier clauses; and the final clause is somewhat platitudinous. I do not need a beggar to tell me the common fate of mortality.” ( RA 124)
The prophecy turns out to be quite accurate, although in a manner that a concrete reading of the prophecy could not foresee. Likewise, when Smith writes of the devastation wrought in Faraad by the Silver Death, he tells how “Diggers died in the half-completed graves they had dug for others; but no one came to dispute their
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327
possession” ( RA 450) These lines bring a smile to the reader, but it is a risus sardoni-cus, a death’s-head grin, as we realize the immensity of the literal disaster which be-fell the land, besides which mere questions of land tenure are inconsequential.
Fulbra’s story is tragic in that tragedy deals with the separation of the individual from society: first he is separated by his failure to share the fate of his people, and second by his imprisonment and torture by the inhabitants of Uccastrog. Frye distinguishes this type of tragic irony from other, more familiar types where a leader is brought down by a “tragic flaw” by removing any responsibility for his fate from the hero. His fate is out of proportion with anything he has done. Fulbra has become the scapegoat chosen solely by fate (his horoscope) to undergo terrible torments at the hands of the Torturers, and as such his fate is as terrible and as undeserved as that of Job.
Frye points out that “the incongruous and the inevitable . . . separate into opposite poles of irony” (42). At one pole is the inevitable, whose archetype is Adam,
“human nature under sentence of death,” justifying Fulbra’s fate not by what he has done but by what he is, a human being as guilty as any other of belonging to a corrupt race. At the other pole is the archetype of the incongruous, Christ, “the perfectly innocent victim excluded from human society” whose innocence transforms
all attempts at transferring guilt onto him into dignity (42). Fulbra falls between these poles, attaining through his suffering something of a heroic nature. Frye describes his archetype as that of Prometheus, the Titan who gave man fire and suffered terribly for that.
Irony is one of five fictional modes that Frye describes, each one set apart by the nature of the hero. The highest of these modes is myth, where the hero is superior to other men and to his environment by kind. They descend in a cyclical
progression through romantic and high and low mimetic modes until in the ironic mode the central character is inferior to the reader in power, intelligence, and understanding (33–34). Each of these modes has enjoyed a period of ascendancy,
gradually metamorphosing into its successor. We see especially in the tragic ironic mode a tendency to evoke the mythic, especially in suggestions of dying gods.
Charles K. Wolfe was one of the first to note that “Smith’s basic plot—the hero crossing the threshold into an alternative reality—is closely related to the classic hero my
th as traced throughout the ages from primitive myth to folk legend to literature” (21). He quotes Joseph Campbell (“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there
encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons upon his fellow man” [30]), noting that in Smith the second half of the structure (where the hero returns with the boon for his fellow man) breaks down. However, this structure survives more intact in “The Isle of the Torturers” than it does in other Smith stories.
Regardless of his failure or inability to fulfill his royal duties, Fulbra remains a king, and as such is a being removed from ordinary humanity by an order of mag-
328 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
nitude. Although protected by the ring, Fulbra has been contaminated by the Silver Death and will immediately show its effects if the ring is removed. Later on, Fulbra is tormented by “a mirror of strange wizardry, wherein his own face was reflected as if seen after death” ( RA 460). He sees therein also his fellow prisoners, their faces “dead, swollen, lidless and flayed, that seemed to approach from behind”
( RA 460). Upon turning, he discovers that the mirror had reflected these figures accurately, raising a question about the veracity of his own image. In “The Enchantress of Sylaire,” a similar mirror reveals to the coquette Dorothée her true nature. The hero, Anselme, declines to view the true visage of the lamia Sephora in the same mirror, casting it from him with the declaration that “‘I am content with what my eyes tell me, without the aid of any mirror’” ( AY 140). The poem “Enchanted Mirrors” warns that therein one “shall behold unshapen dooms / And
ghoul-astounding shadows of the tombs; . . . But nevermore the moiling world of man” ( LO 126). Based upon Smith’s other uses of enchanted mirrors, it is not incredible that the self-image beheld by Fulbra in the mirror was indeed emblematic of his status of having transcended death.
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