Sverba:

You've misunderstood and/or misrepresented the basic point of my "blockhead" post in so many ways that I hardly know where to begin. You're entitled to your perspective, of course, but if you don't see the patronizing and condescending aspects of Davis's post, then I really don't know how to make them any clearer for you.

My remark about PoMo types and their allergy to Romanticism was merely a speculative aside, but I stand by it. If others have found it an interesting point to develop in the context of this thread, then I really fail to see the problem. It's obvious that you sympathize with PoMo, since what really seems to trouble you here is my reference to some of them as "blockheads", whereas the incredibly bizarre and negative misrepresentation of the entire Romantic movement by JoJo, you let pass without a word! Of course, you are entitled to fly whatever flag you like.

In any case, my point with the "blockhead" reference is simply that many PoMos of my acquaintance seem to think that they are brighter than their predecessors, including the Romantics, and they often harbor a patronizing attitude toward them. Post hoc, ergo hoc melius is a favorite logical fallacy of PoMos; they commit it constantly. In Davis's particular post, he tacitly takes a similarly patronizing approach to CAS's work, in my opinion. That's the link, if you really need it spelled out for you.

Quote:

Some day there will be a return toward mysticism, a recovery of spiritual values. The question is, will it come before - or after Armageddon?

If such a thing comes, it will cause Armageddon, of course. But, anyway, that letter is certainly damning evidence! I have no idea what drugs he had been taking at the time. Happily, however, in his fiction, at least, Smith comes across as a robust humanist.

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Some day there will be a return toward mysticism,
> a recovery of spiritual values. The question is,
> will it come before - or after Armageddon?
>
> If such a thing comes, it will cause Armageddon,
> of course. But, anyway, that letter is certainly
> damning evidence! I have no idea what drugs he had
> been taking at the time. Happily, however, in his
> fiction, at least, Smith comes across as a robust
> humanist.

Whatever drugs he was taking, I guess that I'm addicted to them as well, since I agree wholeheartedly with everything that he said in that letter! I am glad, however, that you have the honesty to concede that Smith is clearly in opposition to your own viewpoint in regard to both Romanticism and spirituality.

You do realize that in order to be a Romantic proper, you should ideally be an aristocrat, i.e., a member of a family of European nobles? Romanticism was, among other things, a reaction to the loss of aristocratic privileges that attended the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe. Smith, by virtue of his rather humble origins, is sort of automatically disqualified. In fact, the very idea of an American Romantic is deeply problematic, as the US owes its entire existence to the Enlightenment ideals that the Romantics condemned.

Saying that to be a qualified Romantic, one must be an aristocrat, is as patently ridiculous as saying that to adhere to a certain religion, one must also have been born into the same sort of background and social position as the founders of said religion. Romanticism is a way of thought, not a way of life; the aristocracy of Lord Byron and Shelley was secondary to the ideas that they explored in their poetry. And yes, Americans can be Romantics -- Poe, Melville, and the New England Transcendentalists are good examples of such.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 3 Nov 08 | 04:28PM by ArkhamMaid.

Kyberean,

Well I just didn't see the Davis article as so patronizing when I first read it. Now I admit if I want to I can read it again and see it in that light. This effect is pretty well explained in the Role of the Reader by Umberto Eco (see Ideological Overcoding)...OK I could not resist that, I am sorry...LOL. I happen to have once been a big Eco fan...BUT I have always been a fan of HPL and CAS and REH too and they have a special place in my heart, so here is one PoMo dude that does not want to be patronizing. I don't see any disconnect. But then again I don't see literature as beginning or ending with these 3 Weird Tales writers either. That was Melville.

Anyhow, you are right. I was staying too close the subject of the start of this thread and not the 'dissing' of Romanticism. BTW there is a similar 'dissing' of Deconstructionism that ties it to the Nazis. When I got the chance to attend a series of lectures by Jacques Derrida in the late 80's, he had to have bodyguards. Crazy.

I did hang around a lot of PoMo folks for a few years. Some big egos sure, but I also met some wonderful folks with wide tastes and open minds.

I think the virtue of this discussion so far was to highlight possible literary influences on CAS such as Romanticism or the Decadents and make the cases for which were most relevant. Along the way I'll try not to be such a blockhead myself, but it is hard at my age.

Steve

Well spoken. Hopefully now that this discussion has served its purpose, it will now quietly die. ;)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 3 Nov 08 | 04:30PM by ArkhamMaid.

Fine with me, but we never got to the crux of the biscuit (per Frank Zappa)...there is an informal term I remember called "a semiotic smell". It comes up when folks seem to ignore something in a discourse what ought to have garnered attention but didn't.

I find it interesting that in this thread we never addressed the following section of the original Davis article...

[/i]"...But Smith is a frequently brilliant writer.... The effect that interests me in this poem is how its coruscating language, these clotted phonemes and obscure but tantalizing meanings, come to stand in for the visions themselves. The alienating otherness of darkside visionary experience becomes the alienating otherness of this hermet autodidact's verbal compulsions. ...Smith's gaudiness, so apparently old school, is the precise point where he secretly shares in a lingo-haunted modernism marked with exhaustion.

Towards the end of the poem, a kind of clearing occurs. ...This is the great horror that Smith, along with Lovecraft, glimpsed: that there really was no ordering principle in the universe, no pivot of creation, but only a vast atheistic cosmos more horrible in its meaninglessness than any demonic scenario.

In the end, though, the hashish eater quivers on the brink. Staring into the depths, he does not finally confront the naked void, that implacable interstellar maw that swallows all language, all images, all narratives. Instead he sees a bright light, the light of a million moons, and behind that light a “huge white eyeless Face.” ..... Though Smith has brought us to the verge where visions finally exhaust themselves, he provides an image where images must finally decompose into meaningless noise, and blankness is all..."[i]

This thread's participants seems to have not found this passage of interest? Most curious indeed.

Steve

Interest in matters of substance, here? Nah, flame wars are much more fun! (Just kidding, I swear!)

I find little that is original or interesting in the lines by Davis that you've quoted, actually. The first bit is condescending, as I mentioned previously, and the rest is just more PoMo/Deconstructive drivel, from my perspective.

Of far greater interest, to me, is the line you omitted, the one that questions whether use of the "face" image in a supposed cosmic poem is an anthropomorphic "cop-out". It certainly raises the question of just how "a-human" a work, or a writer's perspective, has to be in order to qualify as unreservedly cosmic.

Well Kyberean, in that drivel Davis is praising CAS from his frame of reference. He is looking at CAS from modern critical theory and finding things to admire and praise. I guess if you damn the theory the praise doesn't mean much, that is your frame of reference. I am OK with modern critical theory, parts of it are pretty interesting and have moved things along in new ways to look at texts. But I've along been around long enough to know newer theories will emerge.

Anyhow, I agree that the interpretation of the 'face' is interesting. Does it signal a step back from the absolute hopeless cosmic abyss of Lovecraft? Or is it saying we will be present at the abyss but robbed of the features that express who we are to others, and bereft of key senses by which we know others? Unable to exchange signs? Or beyond the limits of signs? ....the horror, the horror.

Steve

You are quite right, regarding my frame of reference: I see most PoMo/Post-Structuralist critical writing as being the Emperor's New Clothes. I especially loathe its pretensions to revolutionary innovation. For instance, in 1798, Novalis wrote a text about the self-referentiality of language, and Tristram Shandy, from 1759, "plays" with narrative as self-consciously as any unreadable PoMo novel published in the past quinquagenary.

The difference between Novalis and Shandy and LitCrits today is that the former realized how easy, trivial, and even obvious are such aspects of literature, and therefore how unimportant they are. Only in a decadent age such as ours, when literature is dying, would minor curiosities such as self-referentiality come to the forefront, and would the critic try to elevate himself above the creator--that is, the individual to whom the critic bears, and will always bear, a parasitic relation.

But I digress.... With regard to the face, the trouble I have with Davis's observation is that he seems to assume that it is a human face, or even that the narrator reliably figurates it as a human face, or any sort of face, at all. The poem itself makes no such clear assertion.

I would add parenthetically that perhaps the reason why so many critics rush to question or denigrate the cosmicism of authors such as Lovecraft and CAS is because such critics find the cosmic perspective itself too frightening to contemplate? Therefore, let's nitpick it out of existence, so we won't have to confront it any longer, and then we can go back to pretending that the "human aquarium" is the only reality, or, at least, the only reality that matters?

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You do realize that in order to be a Romantic
> proper, you should ideally be an aristocrat, i.e.,
> a member of a family of European nobles?
> Romanticism was, among other things, a reaction to
> the loss of aristocratic privileges that attended
> the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe. Smith, by
> virtue of his rather humble origins, is sort of
> automatically disqualified. In fact, the very idea
> of an American Romantic is deeply problematic, as
> the US owes its entire existence to the
> Enlightenment ideals that the Romantics condemned.

Smith's father came from a wealthy English family, who used up his inheritance on travel and gambling before ending up in the Sierras. In his own mind, Smith most definitely regarded himself as an aristocrat, and was in fact friendly with several titled Europeans who lived in this area, and who regarded him as a peer.
On other matters: regarding the relationship between Romanticism and various unpleasantries such as National Socialism: I went into that in an essay published in Don Herron's critical anthology The Barbaric Triumph. It is titled "Twilight of the Gods: [Robert E.] Howard and the Volksstumbewegung." I don't discuss CAS per se therein, but I do discuss the relationship between Romanticism, High Fantasy, and fascism, at least as regarded by certain PoMo critics in Europe. (I don't agree with them, incidentally: Hitler may be a lineal descendent of Rousseau, but so are a lot of other figures who have no similarities to Adolf in the least: ideas can have lots of off-shoots).
Romanticism was out of fashion in CAS' day thanks to Irving Babbitt and T. S. Eliot, who regarded it as overly emotional. I went into this here [http://www.eldritchdark.com/articles/criticism/6/gesturing-toward-the-infinite%3A-clark-ashton-smith-and-modernism].
Scott

Scott Connors Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Smith's father came from a wealthy English family,
> who used up his inheritance on travel and gambling
> before ending up in the Sierras. In his own mind,
> Smith most definitely regarded himself as an
> aristocrat, and was in fact friendly with several
> titled Europeans who lived in this area, and who
> regarded him as a peer.

To European minds, at least, wealth never equalled aristocracy. Quite the contrary, in fact. The traditional idea behind the institution of nobility was that it was something awarded for services to royalty that exhibited some martial virtue such as bravery in combat. No wealthy merchant was ever knighted. Indeed, one central preoccupation of the Romantics was a deep contempt of commerce and industry, and a celebration of the martial virtues.

> On other matters: regarding the relationship
> between Romanticism and various unpleasantries
> such as National Socialism: I went into that in an
> essay published in Don Herron's critical anthology
> The Barbaric Triumph. It is titled "Twilight of
> the Gods: Howard and the Volksstumbewegung." I
> don't discuss CAS per se therein, but I do discuss
> the relationship between Romanticism, High
> Fantasy, and fascism, at least as regarded by
> certain PoMo critics in Europe. (I don't agree
> with them, incidentally: Hitler may be a lineal
> descendent of Rousseau, but so are a lot of other
> figures who have no similarities to Adolf in the
> least: ideas can have lots of off-shoots).

I am familiar with your paper, and find it very interesting. I think you would agree that Howard is even further from the Romantics than Smith. To summarize it crudely: The Romantics wished for society to revert to an idealized version of the Middle Ages. Howard wished for it to revert to the Stone Age.

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:

> You do realize that in order to be a Romantic
> proper, you should ideally be an aristocrat, i.e.,
> a member of a family of European nobles?

Yes, like John Keats, for instance, the son of a stable-keeper. And of course, there was William Blake, as working-class as they come, and a fierce foe of aristocracy. I guess that no one told him about the blue-blood test, either.


> Indeed, one central preoccupation of the Romantics was [...] a celebration of the martial virtues.


Yes, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, a noted war-monger.


> The Romantics wished for society to revert to an idealized version of the Middle Ages.

Indeed, this is a constant theme in the poetry of Wordsworth, I've noticed.


By the way, no one is saying that CAS is a Romantic; merely that his work and views were influenced by, and have several aspects in common with, the ideas of the major Romantics. Also, that CAS had high regard for the Romantic poets. For instance....


"Keats and Shelley are in the first rank of greatness [...]"

--CAS, letter to George Sterling, August 8, 1912


"[It] seems he [Browning] is not a poet of the very first rank, like Poe, Milton, and Keats".

--CAS, letter to George Sterling, May 26, 1912.


"If imaginative poetry is childish and puerile, then Shakespeare was a babbling babe in his day, when he wrote that delightful fantasy, 'The Tempest'. And all the other great Romantic masters, Keats, Poe, Baudelaire, Shelley, Coleridge, etc., are mentally inferior to every young squirt, or old one, who has read Whitman and Freud, and renounced the poetic chimeras in favour of that supreme superstition, Reality".

--CAS, letter to George Sterling, November 4, 1926.


Etc., etc.....



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 5 Nov 08 | 06:44PM by Kyberean.

Excellent citations, Kyberean -- particularly the last one. I would argue that Smith was a Romantic, but even if one was going for the lowest common denominator, it is certain that he was heavily informed by the concepts and themes of Romanticism.