Art, Drugs, and Religion: Clark Ashton Smith's "The Disinterment of Venus"

So I've revving up my engines to prepare for writing my next dissertation chapter. This chapter will focus will on Clark Ashton Smith (13 January 1893 – 14 August 1961), a poet and writer of fantasy fiction who published in Weird Tales alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. I wanted to discuss one of this stories here, "The Disinterment of Venus." Published in Weird Tales in July of 1934, it appeared alongside the famous novelette, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," a collaboration between H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price.

The story takes place in Smith's imaginary French province of Averoigne, at a 16th century Benedictine monastery. While the monks are digging in their garden, they come upon a giant statue, "the grimy head and torso of what was plainly a marble woman goddess from antique years." The statue is revealed to be somewhat supernatural. It evokes in people who look upon it deep desires. These desires are animal in nature: lust, hunger, the desire for alcohol. To a large extent, the statue emanates a kind of vice aura that contaminates those who look upon it. As the story progresses, the statue turns many of the otherwise god-fearing monks to sin. Eventually, one monk decides he has had enough. He approaches the statue with an intent on destroying it, with a heavy hammer. He is found the next day in the hole from which they exhumed the statue. The statue has crushed him to death, is on top of him, and it seems as though--even in death--he is embracing it.

Though this story didn't "scare" me, I found it extremely intriguing. I think allegorizes a certain kind of relationship to art, to drugs, to religion. In this story, an art object becomes monstrous. It becomes a kind of narcotic, something the monks become addicted to. And it leads to their ruin. I think this comparison between art and addictive drugs quite intriguing. Both drugs and art are reagents to ostensibly expand one's consciousness, yes? And furthermore, both drugs and art are sometimes offered as substitutes for religious experience. In this story, you have a drug-like art object set in a monastery, a place of worship. For me, this temple place with a goddess statue that attracts like a drug is a kind of "bridge point" between this world and other worlds. It is a kind of precipice that the monks throw themselves into in order to escape mundane existence in the seeking out of other worlds.

I think there is an ever prevalent attraction to the idea of "escaping" the world through art, through drugs, through religion Clark Ashton Smith's oeuvre as a whole.

The Weirding of the Writing Process: The Protagonist as a Portal (Post 2)

On Friday I started writing about the "narrative function" of the protagonist. And, after some etymological analysis, I "distilled" the characteristics of the protagonist down to three attributes:

1) They are the main character.
2) They end up in conflict.
3) The audience identifies with them.

Afterwards, I brought these attributes to question.

1) Does the idea of a "main" character necessarily entail a certain narrative structure (can you tell a story where there isn't a main character?).
2) Do all protagonist have to move toward conflict? Can there be a protagonist who resists conflict?
3) Can you have a protagonist that repulses the audience or that cannot be identified with?

I explore these questions in more detail in my previous post. Here is a link if you're interested: Post 1

But in this post I'd like to offer an alternative definition of a protagonist, a different way of thinking about protagonists.

So, protagonist's have been traditionally defined this way: the main character who approaches the conflict of the narrative who the audience identifies with and who opposes the antagonist, the villain.

Hmm...let's modify this for specifically weird narratives (i.e. science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror).

It seems to me, speaking strictly in terms of weird fiction, this definition structurally isolates the way the reader accesses your imaginary world. Let me explain.

In fantasy, you often have a secondary world; in science fiction, you often have a world of the future; in supernatural horror, you often have a world where supernatural terrors do indeed exist. In other worlds, you have in this narrative types a distinct "alternative aesthetic space" where the rules are different.

The problem that weird writer needs to solve is, how, precisely, do I get my reader into this world?

The protagonist seems to be the key narrative tool for doing this.

Let me offer an example. Let's consider an example everyone knows, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In The Lord of the Rings the protagonists, if you will--traditionally defined as, say, Frodo, is that access point into middle earth. He is a kind of modern character who lives in a cozy, civilized society who then branches out and explores the dangerous fantasy world.

I don't have much time to explore this idea fully here. In Post 3 I'll explore the following idea: the protagonist as a portal.

Is it useful to think of protagonists as portals to other worlds? We shall see.

"Extremes more terrible than madness": Clark Ashton Smith's, "The Isle of the Torturers"

So, I've been doing reading for my dissertation prospectus. Some of what I've been reading is the work of Clark Ashton Smith, who I believe will have his own chapter. This morning I want to review a short story of his I just read, "The Isle of the Torturers."

Original illustration in Weird Tales, March 1933

Published in in the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales, I highly recommend it. I'd describe it as a kind of "sword and sorcery" "weird fantasy."

Let me briefly summarize it: it's about a king whose kingdom has been beset by a horrible disease that has come out of the cosmos, a disease called "the silver death." Everyone in his kingdom dies, and so he flees his kingdom over sea. While fleeing, his ship crashes on an island where there is a decadent civilization that loves nothing more than to torture people. After being subjected to a horrible variety of tortures, he infects everyone on this island of torturers with the silver death. They all die.

We have here the story of a "sleeper agent," a single individual who seems like they are powerless before a great power but who is actually quite powerful.

I don't have much to say about the plot other than it's very gripping. I'm not very familiar with Smith's work, but my impression is that the strangeness and latent violence of the plot is characteristic of his work.

What fascinates me intensely by Smith in his style. He was a critically acclaimed poet before he began writing weird fiction. And this artistic past can be glimpsed in his prose style. Consider this passage, which relates the arrival of "the silver death" to the kingdom--it is called "Yoros"--of the protagonist:

There was no time to flee from the strange, inevitable scourge. Dreadfully and quickly, beneath the clear stars, it breathed upon Yoros; and few were they who awakened from slumber at dawn. Fulbra, young king of Yoros, who had but newly succeeded the throne, was virtually a ruler without people. (187).

Consider the cadence of the end of each sentence. Each sentence builds towards a stirring image or imaginable action: "inevitable scourge," "breathed upon Yoros," "slumber at dawn," "ruler without people." We have here a staccato of imagery that evokes a kind of despair.

Smith's prose style in this story is particularly rich, and I think this richness is a function of the story's plot, its preoccupation with the senses. Torture is, at its most basic level, the agitation of the senses. Consider this passage, where the torturers are torturing the protagonist:

For the islanders of Uccastrog had designed innumerable torments, curious and subtle, wherewith to  harry and excruciate the five senses; and they could harry the brain itself, driving it to extremes more terrible than madness (194).

Smith's prose style is pervaded by such imagery and other attempts to evoke sensory experience: sights, smells, tastes; his rich vocabulary and strange new words are, on the level of text-as-image, visually stirring. In a strange way, Smith's style is a kind of torture, a "harrying" of the senses, if you will.

There's a whole tradition of art being agonizing, excruciating, but also satisfying. There's something of that going on in this story. And I wish I had more time to trace it out.

By the way, I read this story is a famous anthology of Weird Tales titled, Weird Tales: 32 Unwearthed Terrors, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowcisz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (New York: Bonanza Books, 1988). It's available used on Amazon and a beautiful book.

Also, I've been compiling some Weird Tales resources, if you're interested. Not much is here just yet. Here's the link: Weird Tales

Charles Dicken's and the "Tweaking" of Reality: Collapsing Subjectivity and Objectivity

All the Year Round: the Magazine

where Great Expectations was 

originally serialized.

So, I'm auditing a Victorian literature course this semester. And I'm interested in sharing some of my thoughts about the texts we're reading in there. We're currently reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Why discuss Charles Dickens? Why discuss Charles Dickens on a blog that is ostensibly focused on science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror?

Good question. I have a roundabout answer that will require a brief excursion in more general issues.

Tweaking Reality

I felt this for a while and am only now beginning to articulate it clearly, but, what draws me to science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror aren't necessarily their content--the aliens, the zombies, the sorcerers, etc.. Rather, what draws me to them is their unique relationship to reality. These genres--which I call the "weird genres"--tweak reality. What do I mean by tweak?

This is an obscure word usually thought to come from twiccian (to pluck) but has been used since the late sixties to refer to "fine-tuning or adjusting a complex system" (Lord Wikipedia). It's also used more colloquially to refer being "under the influence of methamphetamine" (Urban Dictionary).

I like calling upon all these shades of meaning when using the word tweak in terms of tweaking reality: (1) slightly altering the ontological rules that determine reality; (2) doing so in such a way the experience/effect of it suggests a drug-induced state, a different mode of perception; (3) and doing so in a slightly aggressive, violent way.

By tweaking reality, I mean, making it strange, bending its rules, allowing something to exist or something to happen that shouldn't happen. And the effect of this tweaking reality might be best articulated as a kind of altered perception, a new experience.

For science fiction, fantasy, and horror, quotidian reality is a starting point that is deviated from. It is a kind of base that, through contrast, foregrounds non-reality. Its aesthetic effects depends on a reality principle to deviate from.

Back to Charles Dickens...


In Great Expectations Dickens plays with reality in a significant sort of way. He continuously "tweaks" reality. Consider the following passage. Some background: the main character, Pip, is watching as a convict is being taken to a prison ship:

"By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners.” (39)


I’m struck by the figurative language here, the simile comparing the soldiers to the ship and vice-versa. Also, I’m struck by how Pip metaphorically figures the Hulk as a “wicked Noach’s ark.” Let me try to explain why.

Not only do we have individuals being turned into objects, we have a reversal of this effect here, the turning of the ship (an object) into an individual (a subject). Also, we have the ship being figured through a kind of literary citation, if you will, an allusion to the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark.

We have here an intense example of what narrative theorists would call “focalization.” The surface texture of the world is filtered through the interpretive lens of young Pip. It's focused through him.

Indeed, the world derives from his subjectivity—his identification of visual patterns, his literary corpus knowledge.

Remember: “Seemed in my young eyes” (39, my emphasis). This verb “seemed” gives me pause.

“Seems” implies that the world unfolded through narration is an interpretation. We don’t have here a purely subjective interpretation of the world. Folded into the narrative is an allegorical “material,” a—I’m not sure what to call it—“story substructure” that Pip’s subjectivity is colliding with.

My hunch is that there is an interplay between two worlds here: the subjective world of the narrator and the objective world. It seems that Dickens tends to play with collapsing clear cut distinctions between the subject and the object.

He tweaks reality by breaking down clear cut distinctions between where characters' "interior" consciousnesses end and where the material, "external" world begin.

Subjectivity (consciousness, if you will) spills out onto the the objective world.

The Weird History of the Novel (Part 2): Robinson Crusoe, Realism, and Deviations from Realism

I came across a couple passages from Robinson Crusoe recently that gave me pause. A little context: Robinson has been stranded on the island for some time now. In the first passage Robinson is admitting to having no spiritual thoughts at all. To an extent, he is surprised at himself, at his non-spiritual viewpoint. That he thoughtlessly applies himself to gathering materials for a shelter and food and thereby thinks nothing of the divine importance of his being stranded is strange to him:

"I began to be very easy, applied myself to the works proper for my preservation and supply, and was far enough from being afflicted at my condition, as a judgment from Heaven, or as the hand of God against me; these were thoughts which very seldom entered into my head" (91).

Of note here is Robinson's acknowledgement that he was not looking into things. Upon remembering his experience, he finds it strange that, taken up by more basic, economic concerns--where will he sleep, what will he eat--he thinks very little of the spiritual dimension to his fate, being stranded, alone, on an island.

A few paragraphs later, spiritual questions erupt within him. Consider this passage:

"After I had eaten, I tried to walk, but found myself so weak that I could hardly carry the gun (for I never went out without that); so I went but a little way, and sat down upon the ground, and looking out to sea, which was just before me, and very calm and smooth. As I sat here, some such thoughts as these occurred to me:

'What is this earth and sea, of which I have seen so much? Whence is it produced, and what am I, and all other creatures, wild and tame, human and brutal, whence we are?'" (93).

This passage is an interesting counterpoint to the first passage I cited. Robinson is moving along, organizing for his survival on the island. He is struggling with the "material" realities of his misfortune; and then, out of nowhere, spiritual questions flame up. They are basic questions about reality: what is the earth? What am I?

What has happened is that the immanent world has become strange to Robinson.

I find this so intriguing because often Robinson Crusoe is often cited as being unique, an innovation in fiction, for its shedding of "imaginary" plot devices like mythology, literary citatons, folklore, etc.. In this novel the material, "immanent" world--the surface texture of the world, if you will--has become a theme. 

Here, after the surface texture of the world is considered, a desire to look beyond it is betrayed. What is this world? What am I? What are those things?

We have here, in this early example of the English novel, stirrings of subsequent realism and deviations from it.

The Weird History of the Novel (Part 1): Robinson Crusoe and Reality

Introduction: So, I decided to try and "thread together" my professional life (teaching, literary scholarship) with my hobby/obsession (creative writing, weird fiction). And so, I'm starting a new post series, "The Weird History of the Novel." This will basically be a running commentary on the class I'm teaching this semester at Case Western Reserve University, "The History of the Novel." Though the class is an introduction to the history of the novel, this post series will have a thematic "slant" to it.  

Meta-comment/Blogging comment: Sorry for the crappy banner. Doing hand-drawn ones is taking up more time these days than I have. ::sigh:: I did, however, want to highlight this series as something I'm returning to. And, I've been told banners "brand" series and kind of make a commitment to your blog readers that this is an issue/line of thought you aim to return to.

Anyhow...

***

I started re-reading Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe this morning. I'm starting my history of the novel class with it. This novel (along with a press of coffee) made me start thinking about "realism" and how "realism" is just as important for the weird genres as "deviations" from realism. Let me explain.

Robinson Crusoe is often cited as being an example of realism because, unlike the literary works that preceded it, it cites no mythology or legends nor does it overtly cite any previous literature; it's completely new, completely novel. Thus, it's considered one of the first true novels.

I like this way of defining the novel. Very often people define the novel in terms of what it is: a long narrative; lots of description; characters who come from the middle class. It's useful, though, to consider what novels aren't. In the case of Robinson Crusoe, the suggestion is that novels are realistic; that is, they represent the world as it is, devoid of mythology or the obfuscations of legend.

Hmm. It's true that some literary historians describe the first novels as a reaction against non-realistic literary genres like the romance. And yet, to say that the novel is necessarily preoccupied with the "realistic" is to set oneself up to argue that science fiction novels, fantasy novels, supernatural horror novels, aren't novels at all. I'm not sure what's at stake in this claim. For now, I'll table it.

But it's interesting. If we accept Robinson Crusoe as an example of one of the earliest novels, then we can use it to frame the novel not just as another media vehicle (e.g. the play, the song), and not just as another literary genre (e.g. the epic poem, the sonnet). In other words, we can begin to define the novel in terms of a discrete theme.

What is that theme? Reality.

Is it useful to think of the novel, the earliest novels, like Robinson Crusoe, as being thematically preoccupied with the real? Is the novel, by its very nature, preoccupied with a kind of reality principle?