Indeed, ArkhamMaid; I just mean that CAS is not a Romantic in the historically delimited sense of that term, nor can his work be reduced to that term, but, even without CAS's explicit affirmations, the affinities between CAS and the Romantics are so obvious that it's not even clear to me why this aspect of the discussion remains ongoing!

P.S. I just realized an error in a post of mine, above, and since this board won't let me edit that post now, I'll correct it here: "The difference between Novalis and Shandy" should actually read, "The difference between Novalis and Sterne".

Smith may have wished for a return to mysticism in the letter quoted earlier in this thread, but when it actually arrived in the form of the extravagant spiritual experiment of the Nazis in Germany, he seemed less than enthusiastic. Here is what he says in a letter to Virgil Finlay dated June 13, 1937, which is also found on this site:

Quote:

I'm sure that I wouldn't last long in Germany or Russia: someone would be sure to get the idea that I was against the status quo!

Kyberean,

Regarding your comments of 5 November, 2008 01:07PM

A most interesting post, really chock-full of interesting nuggets.

Funny you mention an unease about the relationship between creator and critic. Back in college that troubled me enough to not pursue a degree in literature. Well, that was a long time ago and the world was mostly in black and white back then.

I admit, my PoMo leanings actually come via Anthropology (e.g. Levi-Strauss's Structuralism) not from the literary side. Over time, I picked up more Structuralism and Semiotics techniques as I used them for work. We did all sorts of advanced analysis for business and marketing problems from using obscure statistical tools like holographic neural nets to using Eco's "Theory of Semiotics" to help organized psycholinguistic transcript analysis of depth interviews. Well, it was a job. Even now it seems unreal. Anyhow, I did read some PoMo literature and still do. I guess I am still fond of folks like Borges and Cortazar and William Burroughs and Pablo Neruda. I am not sure all modern writing can be reduced to self-referential one trick pony. I just like these guys and am always open to the possibility of discovering someone new that I might like as well, whether or not they are considered PoMo, and whether or not they use self-referential techniques, and whether or not their techniques whatever they are had precedent in past literature.

It does seem that every era decries it's current artists to be out of touch and going down the wrong path. I used to worry about those things, but now I just sample selectively and hope for the best. Everything has precedent. The great writings of our time may not even be visible to us yet. Who knows.

It is true CAS leaves it for us to fill in what type of Face is seen. I am not sure if interpreting it as a human face is evidence of fear of the true cosmic perspective, but it is an interesting thought. It could also be a fear of what lies beyond the chain of interpretants, or the Tonal and the Nagual if you are of that persuasion.

Steve

Sverba,

Quick observations:

--You and I were leery of graduate degrees in English for similar reasons.

--Irony and self-referentiality are largely the defining characteristics, I think, of PoMo. When I mentioned a fear of Romanticism as perhaps being a motivating force of the apparent need of Moderns and PoMos alike to distance themselves from that movement, it was because I have always sensed a visceral distaste in such types for anyone who can be tragic without being ironic--that is, for anyone who can feel and express strong emotions with courage and forthrightness. For me, this means not having to dilute emotions through winking and smirking. (How this observation about Romanticism managed to lead to delirious counter-statements in defense of PoMos as clear-eyed, morally righteous observers who see that Romanticism leads inexorably to war and Zyklon B, I'll be damned if I can determine!)

--I am not sure whether the immediate figuration of the face reflects fear of cosmicism, either, hence the question mark, but it would not surprise me. As Lovecraft himself observed, those who can even begin to grasp a cosmic perspective are few, indeed. (Interesting to read the Castaneda references, by the way).

I don't think this is a flame war; I think it is a very fascinating discussion. Re. modernism: I think the modern-day concern with going off-topic is a peculiarly modern invention; in olden times, digressions were the very spice of life.

>>If CAS and HPL were NOT emergent out of the last days of Romanticism, what tradition do they belong to? In their day there was Dada and Surrealisn for example. Are they part of that tradition?

I myself have attempted to identify Lovecraft as a proto-Expressionist, analogous to the German artist, Alfred Kubin, who shares many of Lovecraft's neuro-sexual and caricatural concerns: bestiality, women, a mother obsession, suicidal tendencies, a recurring and caricatural degeneration of humanity in his works, etc. Lovecraft was kind of an Expressionist who never went to war. I'm not talking about the airy, light Expressionism of Franz Marc or Kandinsky, but the dark, mystical, proto- Expressionism of Daubler, Kubin, maybe Munch.

>>I think it is possibly at least partially due to the association of Romanticism with mass murder. We owe to the Romantics such things as environmentalism, vegetarianism, "animal rights," a peculiar obsession with a distorted view of Tibet and Buddhism, socialism, anti-Semitism, and, last but not least, the German Nazis. But, frankly, I do not see much Romanticism in Smith.

Isaiah Berlin had a similar reading of Romanticism, in his book Magus of the North, in which Berlin traces the whole of what he calls the "Irrationalist" reaction to the European Enlightenment, including Blake, Romanticism, etc., to the surreal/religious writer, Johann Georg Hamann.

W. B. Yeats likewise linked Romanticism to fanaticism and murder, in one of his mystical short stories, a concern which possibly later gave rise to his worrisome poem "The Second Coming". I understand that Objectivists/Ayn Randians likewise tend to link socialism and environmentalism to mass murder, but Randians are at pains to defend big business at all costs -even, it seems, at the cost of common logic. Vegetarianism pre-dates Romanticism by millenia, although I suppose one could argue that the Gnostics, Orphics, Pythagoreans, and other religious/mystical movements which adopted it were "proto-Romantic" in orientation.

Interestingly, the Randians see themselves as being the modern day equivalent of Romantics, cf. Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 6 Nov 08 | 08:11PM by Gavin Callaghan.

I must admit that I've learned from this thread the extent to which historical Romanticism is an even more Hydra-headed beast, in terms of interpretation, than even I'd imagined! All the more reason, then, to find room for CAS within it, somewhere!

HPL as related to Expressionism... hmm, interesting. I thought of this in the past more in relation to Expressionist film: The weird angles of Lovecraftian architectural geometry as reflected in Caligari, for instance. Have you read Kubin's novel, by the way? Good to see that Daubler is still read on occasion, too.

To lead the discussion even further afield, I should add that the Surrealists held Lovecraft and CAS (the fictionist, not the poet, since the Surrealists have an irrational loathing of "fixed forms") in high regard. Robert Allerton Parker's early Surrealist appreciation of CAS and Lovecraft may even be on this very site, somewhere. Lovecraft expressed an interested, but still somewhat distant and ironic, appreciation of Surrealist painting in one of his late letters. I don't know how CAS felt about Surrealism in the visual arts, but we all know from his satirical "Sonnet Surrealiste" how he felt about Surrealism in literature!

While I do not wish to join this very interesting discussion, the following observations may be of some help -

One of the earliest books Clark read in the Carnegie (and I know this because I read it very young also, and the same big edition) was a very colorful (full of really stylized and marvelous pictures of major scenes) editon of a telling of the Chanson du Roland -the Song of Roland - When I mentioned to him in discussing the Carnegie library in Auburn, that this book was one of my first, he brightened and shared that he had a similar experience, and we delightedly shared experiences and thoughts of this book, and its impact on us as boys -- I remember its texture in my hands to this day - and am still listening for Roland's horn --

In addition - regarding his attitude toward Surrealism et al - here is a quote as well as I remember it: It is too great a struggle to hear one's own muse to expend energy trying to hear someone else's. --

It is interesting to me how the discussions that occasionally arise on this forum, can thrust me back into the dimly lit cluttered living (and lived in) room in Pacific Grove with Clark and Carol, and bring out of the blurry past, some moment into sharp focus - curiouser and curiouser

Calonlan wrote (quoting CAS):

Quote:

It is too great a struggle to hear one's own muse to expend energy trying to hear someone else's.

I also recall CAS writing the following in a review of Marianne Moore's "poetry":

"One finds thought and observation in Miss Moore: but hardly such as to reward one for breaking the gnarled and spiny husk of diction".

This statement of CAS's could serve as both a diagnosis and an epitaph for Modernist and Post-Modernist writing (and the literary criticism that accompanies it), in my view.

Well these quotes could also be used to defend the position that the only good poetry is that which appears in greeting cards.

Seriously, the poems of CAS and HPL are to a modern ear the ones with difficult diction. It all depends on what you are used to. If you make the effort to learn to hear iambic pentameter and sonnets they will be worth the effort. Ditto for modern works as well. We are not born with an ear that predisposes us to one style of poetry or another much less one critical theory or another.

That being said, I do like the CAS quote for its precision even if I disagree with the sentiment.

Steve

Wordsworth's or Shelley's blank verse is hardly the stuff of greeting-card verse. There's also a distinct difference between the difficult and the willfully obscure, or the deliberately nonsensical.

As for the rest, I suppose that one can even learn to like the taste of liver, or brussels sprouts, if one tries hard enough.

Obviously, I am with CAS on this one. Enough said.

Kyberean Wrote:
Have you read
> Kubin's novel, by the way? Good to see that
> Daubler is still read on occasion, too.

Had no idea Kubin wrote anything. Amazing. I'll check it out......

It's called The Other Side. Fascinating stuff, especially if you like Kubin's artwork.

I found this in a letter by CAS.

"Later, I may do a brief article....This... will emphasize the implicative bearing of the weid tale on human destiny, and in particular, its relationship to man's spiritual evolution and his position in regard to the unknown and the infinite. I shall frankly outline my own stand, which is that of one who keeps an open mind and is willing to admit that all things are possible, but accepts neither the dogmatism of material science nor that of any "revealed" religion... I shall, too, point out that the only road to an understanding of the basic mysteries is through the possible development in man of those higher faculties of perception which mystics and adepts claim to develop... The point I want to make is, that a psychological interest in the weird, unknown and preternatural is not merely a "hangover" from the age of superstition, but is perhaps a sign-post on the road of man's future development."
--CAS to August Derleth, Sept. 14th, 1933.

I strongly doubt that he was on drugs when he wrote this.

I know one thing though. I would have to be on drugs, heavy drugs, if I were to enjoy something like "Wordles". That's like grabbing a handful of gravel, dropping it on the ground, and look for meaningful or pretty patterns among the pebbles.

Without a spiritual sensitivity (whether conscious or unconscious) there is no meaning or direction to living other than being a rough earth-gazing machine. And reading imaginitive fiction is not going to stop the person from looking down, even though the brain may get a temporary stimulation. I think it is quite clear that CAS was a nonreligious spiritually openminded soul as opposed to being a materialist, both from reading his fiction and poetry and from his expressed opinions.

The quotation from the letter is interesting, indeed. It repeats almost verbatim an entry in CAS's "Black Book", which was also published in The Acolyte, Fall 1944, and in Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays of Clark Ashton Smith:

Quote:

"The Philosophy of the Weird Tale
The weird tale is an adumbration or foreshadowing of man's relationship-past, present, and future-to the unknown and infinite, and also an implication of his mental and sensory evolution. Further insight into basic mysteries is only possible through future development of higher faculties than the known senses. Interest in the weird, unknown, and supernormal is a signpost of such development and not merely a psychic residuum from the age of superstition.

It is a shame that CAS appears never to have written this essay (just as it is a shame that the manuscript for an essay that it seems CAS did write, but never published, "In Defense of Imaginative Poetry", appears to be lost forever).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 16 Nov 08 | 10:39AM by Kyberean.

The first sentence in my quote, together with the part I omitted, reads , "Later, I may do a brief article on The Philosophy of the Weird Tale." So that's the one.