Re: Why isn't CAS more popular?
Posted by:
jdworth (IP Logged)
Date: 20 April, 2014 05:39PM
Jim, I would disagree that, for HPL, language was simply "a means to an end"; else he would not have so agonized over the choice of each word, as his manuscripts show he most definitely did. (For that matter, his critical essays for the amateur journals go into this aspect of things quite a lot as well.) He was very concerned with choosing exactly the right word to convey not only sense, but varieties of implication, association, and ambiguity, and tone. He was not (in the main) a good poet, but he was very aware of the poetry of language, and his prose utilizes that to a very intense degree. Try reading his fiction aloud, and you'll find that he uses a number of poetic techniques to achieve a wide range of effects; and a fair amount of his prose is in itself quite poetic both in structure and sound.
As for his monologues -- more properly, in most cases, dialogues where we hear only one side -- some very perceptive pieces have been written on the effectiveness of these for conveying information in the most efficient way. Not only do they serve as (to use a hideous neologism) "infodump" in the usual sense, but the choice of dialect itself conveys a great deal about the characters and their milieu, and even about the very alienness of the setting -- e.g., the extreme archaism used in "The Picture in the House" or the manner of speech of the inhabitants of Dunwich, which in themselves convey the feeling of a place "out of time", where things have survived long beyond their proper time. These are places where time itself is "out of joint", and which are themselves a rupture with the natural order... all of which are conveyed without direct statement, but rather through the use of the particular vernacular chosen.
As for Smith's lack of popularity... in large part, I would say it is because, even in his prose, he was chiefly a poet of an older, more traditional school who yet was influenced by many of the same things as brought about the Decadents; a peculiar combination, to say the least, and rather rarefied stuff for the average person raised on the post-Hemingway use of language so prevalent in America (and, to a lesser extent, the larger English-speaking world). As I've said before, there are a number of writers who have suffered from such a resistance because of this, such as Mervyn Peake, who so effectively used his language to build the structure of Gormenghast in the readers' mind. There the language becomes the very stones of the place, so that one feels the weight not only of all that sprawling bulk, but the centuries of strangling traditions and beliefs which are so much a part of its fabric.
So with Smith, albeit even more poetically. People in general have been out of touch with poetry since the Modernists, and even the older forms no longer have the recognition in the public at large that they once had. Combine all these elements, and Smith built for himself a rather restrictive (as far as popularity is concerned, though not the artistic possibilities) niche. Lovecraft, while using a peculiar idiom, actually struck a bit more broadly, I think, on this score, what with his poetic influence being combined with that of the classic essayists. He also was oddly forward-looking in his philosophical points where based on the implications of science and what they meant for society, which has fortuitously allowed his work to appeal to a broader modern audience.
Still, I do think Smith's appeal is growing, and I hope to see a much wider recognition of his abilities emerge over the next few decades. I won't be around to see a lot of it (most likely), but I think he, like Lovecraft, has been going through a period of eclipse for a long time, and is slowly emerging from that, so that his work will achieve a more just assessment; at which point I think he will be seen as a much more significant (not to mention better) writer than he has so far been given credit for being.