Lychgate:

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Smith was anti-Psychology? That surprises me greatly, as I thought he would have been interested in the concept of exploring "inner space" and the human mind.

CAS was against reductionism in any of its forms, and psychology is the Great Reducer. To his immense credit, CAS also had very little interest in humanity, including the "human mind", whatever that is. Regarding the exploration of "inner space" (a shibboleth of arch-Freudian J.G. Ballard's, as I recall), here is a representative comment:

"A sense of the superhuman is to be conveyed; therefore one does not want the human--at least, not to an extent that would impair and detract from the proper focus of interest. For this reason, I fear that the weird tale, if written mainly as psychological analysis, would tend to forfeit some of its highest and rarest values. Modern literature has become so thoroughly subjective, so introverted in its tendencies, so preoccupied with the anthropocentric, that it seems desirable for one genre, at least, to maintain what one might call a centrifugal impetus, to make 'a gesture toward the infinite' rather than toward the human intestines".

I can understand his view point I guess, I guess, and agree with it to a certain extent. And, certainly within the "weird fiction" or "cosmic terror" genres I agree that stories should be kept as purely objective and external rather than the internal, but to dismiss psychology is a bit brash in my opinion.

To return to Dr. Farmer's point of Smith's Aristotelian view of art - do you think perhaps, rather than attriubting it to "gods" as such, he rather would take the Jungian view best summed up by using his own words?:

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The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realise its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense - he is "collective man," a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.

FOrgive me if I sound like I am trying to retrospectively "force" anything upon Smith, I'm not. Just exploring him as a person :P.

I don't know that anyone would dismiss psychology per se, but merely its reductionsm and its pretensions to truth, despite its being on very scientifically shaky ground. It's all a matter of perspective, I suppose, but what seems brash to me is psychology's arrogant insistence that the mind is the origin of all things, and that psychology alone is the arbiter of "reality", "normality", "mental health", and a host of other dubious categories. The psychologico-scientistic-materialist/hedonist paradigm is so deeply ingrained in the majority during our decadent, transitional age, though, that it is almost useless to speak of, let alone debate, such matters. One may as well try to explain to a fish that it lives in water. (Note that these last are general comments, and not directed specifically at Lychgate or anyone else here).

Regarding Jung: There's nothing wrong with casting around for affinities. Where I strongly suspect that CAS would balk at the statement you cited (and where I know I do) is the assertion regarding "collective man" and the artist as a "vehicle" for this creature. CAS would, I think, retort that there is no such thing (just as there is no such thing as "the human mind"). The first part of Jung's statement is also too broad. Insert the word merely after the phrase "the artist is", and I think that the statement is more defensible. The Platonic/Aristotelian formulation, unlike the Jungian one, however, removes these matters from the realm of the human altogether, and I suspect that CAS would find such a perspective to be more congenial. I imagine, though, that Dr. Farmer has some interesting comments to interject on this subject, and may even have discussed Jung's work with CAS(?).

I only have a moment and will write more fully at another time,
however this point needs to be made at this juncture:
When I mention the Greek concept of "abolutes" and "Mimesis", I am referring to a philosphical attitude which was a "given" at the turn of the century - part of the mental furniture of the Western world following the immense upsurge of the Greek revival, the interest in antiquities after the Rosetta Stone etc. Even as today,
younger folk cannot imagine a world without psycholgists and their
pervasive (I would almost say 'cancerous') invasion of society at
every level - again I would refer you to Dr. Tana Dineen's,
"Manufacturing Victims" -- the typical therapist dialogue:"You were abused as a child." - "I don't remember" -- "that's because you are in denial" etc. etc. Clark would have been little concerned with what anyone thinks by the time I knew him -- what men do in any circumstance is far more to the point, even when their "doing" is ultimately pointless - (see CAS Weaver). One point occurs to me at this moment - with all Clark's writing of horror/fantasy and the
outre, he never himself lost the capacity to appreciate beauty.
His younger contemporaries, largely influenced by the new "science"
created a genre in which "real life" always means the vulgar, ugly,
and depraved - yet Clark's world (and his writing) has room for wonder and beauty -- "real life" he once said, "includes watrfalls."

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One point occurs to me at this moment - with all Clark's writing of horror/fantasy and the outre, he never himself lost the capacity to appreciate beauty. His younger contemporaries, largely influenced by the new "science"
created a genre in which "real life" always means the vulgar, ugly, and depraved - yet Clark's world (and his writing) has room for wonder and beauty -- "real life" he once said, "includes watrfalls."

Hah, I like that notion. It makes me appreciate him a lot more :).

But, like Romanticism, doesn't much weird fiction and poetry--not least CAS's--involve a redefinition of conventional notions of "beauty"?

I don't see it as primarily a redefinition of conventional standards of beauty, rather, a reapplication.

That is, the standards are kept, but applied to aspects of being that may not normally be considered beautiful, and it is then the artist which sees whether these are in fact beautiful or not. Thus, in addressing poems to witches, CAS sees in them beauty, whose standards remain the same, albeit standards applied to a traditional nexus of horror.

This freedom to apply the standards at will, and the freedom to accept or reject them, is in accord with the worldview as developed within the poem or body of poems. Thus CAS' corpus sees certain figures -- witches, lamiae, etc. -- as both beautiful and, as a result, also alluring, despite the traditional dangers. We see much the same in the portrayal of Dracula's brides in Dracula, btw.

Quite feasibly, though, a poet could easily reject such a figure, as I have in some of my poems, and yet retain the weird aspect.

I intended my statement to apply much more broadly than the application you're giving it. I'm thinking, in particular, of Pater's definition of Romanticism as "the addition of strangeness to beauty". I also mentioned "notions", not "standards". Few would find much conventional sexual allure in the creature at the end of "The Monster of he Prophecy", for instance. Although our difference of opinion here may be principally semantic, I stand by the notion that both weird writing and, in its darker forms, Romanticism share an interest in portraying as beautiful that which, by ordinary standards, would often be considered strange or even repellent. Just as Romanticism arose largely in opposition to neo-Classical ideas of beauty by rejecting the rigid distinction, so popular in 18th-Century aesthetic theorizing, between the Beautiful and the Sublime, so does weird writing lead us to question notions of beauty based upon conventional sentimental and aesthetic perceptions.

Perhaps, what we are looking at is less a widening of the notion of beauty, and more a widening of acceptable subject matter, to include the ugly, the malformed, the disgusting. Thus, whilst conventional tastes reacted away from the subject matter of, say, Baudelaire, he was able to apply the same regard for it that others would place on more convetionally aesthetic material, through this widening of subject, rather than of notions of beauty.

This distinction allows the possibility that these notions may or may not be applied, as warranted, and draws the reader away from fruitless considerations of the author towards the more fruitful, and relevant, focus upon the individual text. Thus, it allows a diversity, a range of approaches towards what is beautiful and what is not, and allows us to see that we should not always consider what is in terms of its beauty (or even utility).

The point is, to learn to approach and appreciate the thing for what it is, not what it means to us. Thus we learn to appreciate, say, "The hashish-eater" on its own standards, and not to some pre-defined, and ill-suited, modernist creed, the same way we learn to appreciate the modernists without rejecting their stance on form and rhyme.

Of course, I've just gone off on a tangent...:)

There's no question that both Romanticism and weird literature advocate an expansion of acceptable literary subject matter. I suppose that what interests me, though, is the apparent attraction, even if it is often ambivalent, to things previously considered "horrific", "in poor taste", and the like; the allure of the forbidden and the alien. In that respect, at least, one would have to re-define, or at least expand, the idea of "beauty" in order to accommodate such subject matter, as well as the psychological and emotional effects that it engenders.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I suppose that what interests me, though, is the apparent
> attraction, even if it is often ambivalent, to
> things previously considered "horrific", "in poor
> taste", and the like; the allure of the forbidden
> and the alien.

Perhaps we may look at the parallel development of the anti-heroic, and the ironic, in early Modern literature for a parallel. What we are then looking at is not so much a consideration of what is heroic but a reaction to its bankruptcy, as we might consider the Romantic as a reaction to the bankruptcy of hitherto held standards of what is beautiful.

Thus the horrific elements in poetry, starting with the Graveyard school, could be read as a reaction to the failure of the beautiful as a creative force.

Thus we can also see, perhaps, in part, CAS' reaction to modernism -- he saw that the poetic milieu in which he was working was still capable of fine work, as opposed to the apparent bankruptcy implicit within the rise of the Modernist sensibility, that he was still capable of approaching beauty without recourse to the gutter-minded depths of psychoanalytically inspired modernism.

Phillip,

Yes, I agree with this analysis, although consideration of the limitations of a concept or aesthetic standard might lead to theorizing about its expansion or re-definition, as well. I'm thinking once again of the concept of the Sublime, for instance, which arose to fill a need in 18th-Century aesthetic theorizing to encompass emotional reactions for which standard definitions of the Beautiful could not account.

Small interjection into this interesting dialogue -

In discussing "waterfalls" with Clark (there is an excellent climb on the
canyon wall opposite Clark's land with ascends the cascade of Knickerbocker
creek) he observed, and I verified from my own experience, that the emotions
evoked standing at the base of a fall are quite different from those when
you edge cautiously to the edge at the top. The one is filled with the sound of a Bach fugue - the other has the element of vertigo, and approaches the
experience of the child carefully looking under the bed for monsters -- if you fall, or if what you fear comes to pass, is "self" lost? We both found no awe
or grandeur looking straight down, rather the "i did it!", or "I dared, and lived!" sensation - while it is self that admires from below, self is not the object of admiration. This phenomenon informs philosophy and literature from time immemorial - The two creation stories in the book of Genesis for example -
down to Martin Buber's "Ich und Du" (available in translation as "I and Thou".

The elements of vertigo and the sensation akin to that of the child seeking monsters beneath the bed would fall very much within the ambit of the Sublime, particularly Burke's notion of it.

Hej!

In regards to the Sublime, I have seen a similar argument in that the gothic arose as part of an aesthetic reaction to the wilderlands, to what is approached through the Sublime in nature. Thus the importance of the wild aspects of nature in gothic aesthetics such as art and the like.

The relevant work, which may interest you, is: Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 400 years of excess, horror, evil and ruin.

Phillip


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