This suggestion is strengthened when we consider that he departed Yoros by
sea on an ebon barge, ebon suggesting funerary associations. Frye notes that “Water
. . . traditionally belongs to a realm of existence below human life, the state of chaos or dissolution which follows ordinary death, or the reduction to the inorganic” (146). The sea voyage to Cyntrom is analogous to crossing the river Ach-
eron (evoked earlier by the “great star Achernar”), but instead of arriving at an Elysian Fields, Fulbra is instead delivered to “an unknown shore” (so suggestive of Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country”) redolent with demonic imagery: the people are clad in garments of “blood red and vulturine black” ( RA 454), their voices are
“high and shrill and somehow evil” ( RA 454), ruled by a monarch at whose side stood “a tall, brazen statue, with cruel and demonic visage, like some implacable god of the underworld” ( RA 457) presiding over a court strewn with instruments of torture. Fulbra is imprisoned in a cell “after descending many steps,” one side of which is walled with thick glass. The submarine imagery revealed, of tentacled
devil-fish and flayed corpses, reinforces the infernal imagery, and also suggests some intriguing possibilities. For instance, during his quest the hero often slays a dragon or other monster, which represents the fallen world of sin and death. A
variation on this is the leviathan, a sea monster sometimes depicted as a squid or octopus similar to the kraken or Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. Inasmuch as Uccastrog is a terror of seamen and is intimately associated with death, perhaps Uccastrog is the Leviathan and all who dwell therein are trapped in the belly of the beast, waiting for a redeemer (see Frye 190).
It should not be forgotten that the inhabitants of Uccastrog are just as doomed as the other inhabitants of Zothique, and their sadistic pastimes are perhaps the means by which they lessen their own fear and ennui. In the film Tombstone, Wyatt Earp asks Doc Holliday what the matter is with men like opposition gunslinger
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Johnny Ringo, and is told that he is seeking revenge. “For what?” asks the lawman, to which his friend replies, “For being born.” Racial stereotypes of the cruel Oriental aside, Uccastrog could not be a pleasant place even for its inhabitants. It is hard to credit that its torture devices would remain idle under a tyrant such as Ildrac if there were no distressed mariners at hand. Perhaps some of their merriment at the suffering of Fulbra and his companions derives from the same impulses that cause Winston Smith to urge his captors in George Orwell’s novel 1984 to put the rat cage on the face of his lover instead of him.
Ildrac (whose name evokes associations with Dracula, although Smith would
have meant the vampire and not the actual Wallachian prince who was terrifyingly close to Ildrac come to life) is a demonic double or Shadow of Fulbra, representing the fallen world. Frye describes their character-types as opposite ends of the same pole: “In the sinister human world one individual pole is the tyrant-leader, inscrutable, ruthless, melancholy, and with an insatiable will, who commands loyalty only if he is egocentric enough to represent the collective ego of his followers. The other pole is represented by the pharmakos or sacrificed victim, who has to be killed to strengthen the others” (148). It is Ildrac that Fulbra must overcome in order to save himself, thereby saving the world around him. Ildrac is like Satan guarding the gates of Hell, trying to prevent the escape of his charges when Christ descended into the underworld after the crucifixion. In many ways Fulbra’s suffering is reminiscent of the Passion, since both are essentially accounts of dying gods whose suffering redeems their worlds.
Ildrac is assisted in his harrowing of Fulbra by a young girl, Ilvaa. She differs from her sisters outwardly because her mother came from Yoros and because,
upon being shipwrecked, she chose marriage over the alternative. By providing encouragement to Fulbra, she tricks him into prolonging his own suffering:
And through his clouding terror and sorrow, he seemed to see the comely face
of the girl who had smiled upon him compassionately, and who, alone of all that he had met in Uccastrog, had spoken to him with words of kindness. The face returned ever and anon, with a soft haunting, a gentle sorcery; and Fulbra felt, for the first time in many suns, the dim stirring of his buried youth and the vague, obscure desire of life. So, after a while, he slept; and the face of the girl came still before him in his dreams. ( RA 456–57)
This passion is not to be consummated, but “frustrates the one who possesses it”
(Frye 149). Ilvaa is revealed later to be not the innocent she pretends, but is instead the “harlot, witch, siren or other tantalizing female, a physical object of desire” that goads men on with promises of pleasures never kept (Frye 149).
It is at this point that we stumble upon an example of where Smith actually
was influenced by another writer, to the point where he borrows a motif or idea from another’s work and develops it further, making it his own. Smith’s great mentor was the California poet George Sterling. Sterling’s greatest work was perhaps
330 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
the dramatic poem Lilith (1919, rev. ed. 1926). This drama tells how Tancrede was driven by his love for the temptress Lilith to commit terrible crimes, only to have her disappear after their commission. She appears to him a total of three times, each time driving him to forsake loved ones by promising him her body, but each time denying it to him. Many years later, we discover, Tancrede is an ascetic monk at the royal court, and the ageless Lilith is the mistress of the king. Tancrede’s wanderings have given him a certain wisdom, but he remains an idealist who rebukes the king for squandering the taxes of his peasants on feasts. Lilith tricks him into attacking both church and state, whose representatives demand his death. The femme fatale appears to him in the dungeon, where she reveals that he is to be tortured to death over several hours, but Tancrede clings to his ideals. Lilith grants him a cosmic vision:
Nothingness . . . Nay—I see a drop of blood
Far down, yet visible. Beside it now
A drop of dew appears, touched by a sun,
Unseen, to many hues. And now from each
Rise vapors, ever denser and more bright.
They soar, they robe us in magnificence.
Great chambers open in the splendor, rooms
Of changing opalescence. Phantom shapes
Are dwellers there, that woo and wed and war,
Mingling in shadow.
(101)
Lilith reveals to him that only the two drops are real:
All is illusion, born of those twin drops
Alone found real. See! The mists subside,
Thou gazing in relentlessness, and now
That orb of Pain glows redly, and the orb
Of Pleasure gleams in subtle iris-flame.
Of those thy dreams are born, and every thought
Of good or evil. There is naught beside.
(101)
Shaken, Tancrede clings to his illusions despite his horror at his impending fate, but resolves to remain steadfast and accept his pain and his pleasure as all the meaning that there is in this world.
Smith thought highly of the poem, writing in a letter published in Edward F.
O’Day’s Oakland Enquirer column that it was “certainly the best dramatic poem in English since the days of Swinburne and Browning. . . . The last scene—to mention nothing else—is unforgettable in its perfect beauty and terror—a complete
symbol of life.” The last scene depicts the assignation of Raoul the Troubadour with Jehanne the servant girl in the garden, where their tryst is disturbed by the sounds echoing from the dungeon where Tancrede is being flayed alive. Raoul
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overcomes her disquiet by stuffing her ears with rose petals, and their sighs echo antiphonally with his groans. Benedikts
son observes quite correctly that Lilith is
“herself Pleasure and Pain” personified (143). He quotes Sterling’s description of the ending of the play: “I ended it with a contrast between pleasure and pain as indicative of that strangest and most awful of human faculties, our ability to be happy when we know others are in agony. I can never forgive myself nor humanity for that” (142).
Sterling asserts the philosophy behind Lilith in an essay called variously “Life,”
“The Implications of Infinity,” and finally “Pleasure and Pain.” A thorough exploration of its argument is beyond our current discussion. What is relevant is Sterling’s pronouncement that, Schopenhauer to the contrary, “we exist not to escape pain but to embrace pleasure” (242). Good, evil, mercy, truth, beauty, and all other abstractions are just synonyms for the two opposing realities of pleasure and pain.
“It is from our sensations, painful or otherwise, that we have derived what we are pleased to call our souls. Our very term ‘the riddle of the universe’ is meaningless in the Absolute, and has significance relative to us alone. The universe is. It is the Absolute” (242).
Viewed in the light of Sterling’s essay, Uccastrog is revealed as a metaphor for the World itself: Fulbra’s tenacious hold on life is renewed by the illusion of love to endure the most abominable tortures, just as we suffer the pangs of hunger because of the pleasures of food. When the Torturers explode this illusion, revealing Ilvaa’s complicity and his own status as a fool, this is intended to intensify his emotional suffering. It has the desired effect: “The brief, piteous love that had been born amid sorrow and agony perished within him, leaving but ashes steeped in
gall.” In a Christ-like manner, he forgives his tormenters: “Yet, gazing at Ilvaa with sad eyes, he uttered no word of reproach” ( RA 461).
By playing Brer Rabbit to Ildrac’s Brer Fox, Fulbra tricks the demonic king
into removing the ring, which like the ring of Polykrates symbolizes the fate which man cannot escape. No sooner is it removed than Fulbra meets the yearned-for
death, and soon the entire court save the king is dead. We have come full circle, once more the king is isolated from all around him. Yet although he is dead, Fulbra is the one who is victorious, since not only does he escape the death that the Torturers had outlined to him, but he also puts an end to the abominable civilization founded on pain, despair, and Schadenfreude that was Uccastrog. This is an example of what Philip Wheelwright describes as paralogical dimensionality. Don Herron is probably the first critic to apply this to weird fiction, and I follow here his discussion of the concept.
Paralogical dimensionality refers to the ability of a symbol to transcend its
concrete or universal meanings and express something “for which there is no publicly accepted word, formula or symbol already available” (30). The aspect of
paralogical dimensionality which Herron applies, and which is applicable to our present discussion, is “the ability of literature successfully to convey the feeling of
332 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
victory-in-defeat” (31). He cites as examples the manner in which Lear and Othello regain their dignity after enduring much suffering. By renouncing pleasure and love as illusions binding us to the pain of this world, Fulbra succeeds in tricking Ildrac into removing the ring and thus uniting their fates, thereby achieving a type of victory-in-defeat. Fulbra succeeds in liberating not only himself but also the inhabitants of Uccastrog from the wheel of destiny to which they were all bound
together, as stated so eloquently in the last sentence of the story. Fulbra becomes an ironic inversion of Christ, a nihilistic Messiah who delivers mankind out of a life of pain to merciful oblivion, the only salvation possible in the insentient and uncaring universe visualized by Smith.
While conventional critics of Smith’s work have overplayed the influences of
Poe and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam on “The Isle of the Torturers,” they have missed completely the strong influence exerted on the story by Sterling. Smith was familiar with this sort of critical myopia, writing to a fan that “the bane of every new creative artist . . . [is] people who can see nothing but resemblances either real or fancied (usually the latter) and who can always be depended upon to miss or ignore the essential differences between a new talent and its predecessors” ( SL 365; italics in original).
Viewed in light of this and other critical approaches, we can appreciate Smith’s achievement in recasting the work of his mentor into his own artistic image. “The Isle of the Torturers” illustrates Smith’s quintessentially ironic detachment at the same time that it presents his most hellish portrait of the individual isolated from his society. The story is not just a conte cruel, but a parable about man rejecting the traps of this world and achieving a rough kind of transcendence. It is in this manner that the achievement of Clark Ashton Smith in this and other works needs to be
reexamined and reappreciated.
Works Cited
Allen, Hervey. Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: George H.
Doran, 1926.
Benediktsson, Thomas E. George Sterling. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. 1968. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1996.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Herron, Don. “‘The Red Brain’: A Study in Absolute Doom.” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 2 (Summer 1987): 30–35.
O’Day, Edward F. (as “The Clubman”). “Men and Women in the Mirror.” Oakland Enquirer (10 January 1920): 8.
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Posey, Stephen. “Meaning of ‘Zothique’s’ Last Line.” Online posting. 25 June 2003.
Zothique Nights. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZothiqueNights/message/11031.
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.
Sterling, George. Lilith: A Dramatic Poem. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
———. “The Testament of an American Schopenhauer: George Sterling’s ‘Pain and
Pleasure.’” Ed. Joseph W. Slade. Resources for American Literary Study 3 (1973): 230–48.
Tombstone. Screenplay by Kevin Jarre. Dir. George P. Cosmatos. Perf. Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer. Touchstone Studios, 1993.
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Philippe-Auguste. “The Torture of Hope.” Magazine of Horror 10 (August 1965): 19–23.
Wolfe, Charles K. “CAS, A Note on the Aesthetics of Fantasy.” CAS-Nyctalops. Ed.
Harry O. Morris. Special issue of Nyctalops 7 (1972): 20–22.
Regarding the Providence Point of View
Ronald S. Hilger
In 1996, Necronomicon Press published The Book of Hyperborea by Clark Ashton Smith, as edited by Will Murray. I have read the book with mixed impressions of interest and confusion. The book itself appears well made, the cover art by Robert Knox is striking, and the title is very appropriate. Will Murray’s introduction is informative and exhaustive in its research of completion dates of the tales, as well as dates of magazine submissions, rejections, and publications. While all this is well and good, and I applaud every effort to publish the work of a neglected master of horror and fantasy, I still must disagree with his assertion that H. P. Lovecraft was somehow responsible for Smith’s Hyperborean tales. Will Murray states in his introduction: “If Clark Ashton Smith had not come into contact with H. P. Love-
craft and fallen under his mesmeric literary influence, he would probably not have written his legendary Weird Tales stories. And he would certainly never have written the Hyperborean tales
that comprise this volume” ( BH 7).
Perhaps Murray has some information that I am unaware of, but even so, he
does not explain how he came to his astonishing conclusion. I have researched the five volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, and also Steve Behrends’s collection of Smith’s letters to Lovecraft, but see little to support this statement. In fact, a careful study of the letters Lovecraft wrote to Smith shows very little actual encouragement regarding Smith’s fiction, especially when compared to Smith’s constant praise of Lovecraft’s stories and frequent suggestions that Lovecraft spend less time on revisory work and more on writing fiction.
Frankly, I am more than a little tired with this narrow-minded “Providence
point of view” in which all weird horror seems to emanate outward from the
sunlike Howard Phillips Lovecraft, influencing, inspiring, overshadowing all other writers in the field, his contemporaries as well as subsequent writers, who are too often viewed as diminutive satellites basking in the light of his glory and success.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the writings of Lovecraft. I do. I’ve read all his stories (several times, in fact), and I enjoy them very much and recommend them
highly. But I don’t see why Lovecraft’s success should detract from the achievements and recognition of Smith.
Even more inaccurate and misleading is Murray’s suggestion that Clark
Ashton Smith would probably not have written any of his legendary stories had he not come into contact with Lovecraft. On the contrary, Smith received his main
impetus toward entering the pulp fiction market from the urgent suggestion of his
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great friend Genevieve Sully during the well-documented camping trip of August
1927 to the Donner Summit/Castle Peak region of the Sierra Nevada. Shortly
thereafter, this “prodding” led Smith to begin plotting, writing, and turning out weird fiction in earnest, beginning with “The Ninth Skeleton” in March 1928. Mrs.
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