Check this out:

[techgnosis.com].

: )

Scott

I hate to seem negative, but, despite the possibility that "there's no such thing as bad publicity", I fail to see much that is positive in this article. The writer seems to admire CAS, in his way, but, like most today who confess to liking those who write in the "grand style", he appears to feel compelled almost to apologize for this "guilty pleasure", or to qualify his admiration to the point of near-meaninglessness. I also find the tone of the article as a whole to be patronizing and condescending ("Smith is frequently a brilliant writer").

The writer's throw-away remark regarding the work of George Sterling is ignorant, and borders on the idiotic, as well. Still, if this piece somehow stimulates awareness (and sales) of CAS and The Hashish-Eater, then that is all to the good.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 31 Oct 08 | 09:36AM by Kyberean.

Smith also gets reprinted with somewhat less than enthusiastic marketing. As you may know, the University of Nebraska Press reprints of OUT OF SPACE AND TIME and LOST WORLDS both have new forewords by a Jeff VanderMeer, apparently a celebrated SF or fantasy writer.

VanderMeer does not seem to enjoy Smith very much, so one wonders why he was chosen for the task. In particular, Smith's humor is completely lost on VanderMeer. Consider the following passage from the foreword to LOST WORLDS.

Quote:

[. . .] "The Door to Saturn" contains beautiful description but also lines like "'Detestable sorcerer! Abominable heretic! I arrest you!' said Morghi with pontifical severity." What are we to make of such camp? Is it intentional? Is it intrinsic to writing this kind of story? I don't know the answer. I only know that Smith must have found it necessary, and that readers must forgive him for it if they want to enjoy the stories.

Yes, the VanderMeer prefaces are a good example, as well. In any case, inadequate as it is, I suppose that Davis's piece is better than our having another Blish on our hands.

I also like the fact that writers such as CAS and Sterling make apparent PoMo hipsters such as Davis ill at ease, on whatever level; that's another earmark of their quality, so far as I am concerned.

Remember that Mr Davis is coming to CAS not so much as a Fantasy Fan, but as a "mainstream" reader. That he is able to recognize Smith's merits despite all of the indoctrination he's received about what modern poetry "should" be is testimonial enough. But he remains uneasy about this, thus the snips at George Sterling as "unreadable"--in precisely the same way that Wagner was "unlistenable" to people brought up in the tradition of, say, Meyerbeer.
Scott

Scott:

I see what you mean, and, again, I suppose that some recognition of CAS's work on the part of such writers as Davis is better than none. It's interesting, though, that I first approached CAS in 1980 from the perspective of an undergraduate English major steeped in Romanticism and Surrealism, and not as a "fantasy fan", either. I actually first heard of CAS through a glossary entry in an anthology of writings by Andre Breton!

In any case, I find that Romanticism seems to be the common element or ingredient that gives most Post-Modern types a case of the hives. I can't understand that, myself, and I suppose that that is where the gulf between me and such types lies. From my perspective, if some blockhead nurtured intellectually at the teats of Foucault, Eco, and mass culture, for instance, wants to believe that his mind and understanding are more sophisticated than, say, Percy Bysshe Shelley's, then he is welcome to his delusions!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2 Nov 08 | 11:13AM by Kyberean.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> In any case, I find that Romanticism seems to be
> the common element or ingredient that gives most
> Post-Modern types a case of the hives. I can't
> understand that, myself

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.

I've read some ignorant remarks about Romanticism in my time, but I must say, yours take the prize. I can only hope that you are joking.

If you see no influence of Keats, Shelley, et al. in CAS's poetry, then you cannot have read much of it carefully, if at all.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I've read some ignorant remarks about Romanticism
> in my time, but I must say, yours take the prize.
> I can only hope that you are joking.

No, I am not joking, of course; I gave a fairly standard summary of the intellectual legacy of Romanticism, outside of the arts. Perhaps you could elaborate on what it is you object to, specifically?

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Kyberean Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > In any case, I find that Romanticism seems to
> be
> > the common element or ingredient that gives
> most
> > Post-Modern types a case of the hives. I can't
> > understand that, myself
>
> 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.

As a scholar and admirer of the Romantics, I, along with Kyberean, stand in frank amazement at what you have just said. Surely you do realize that what you are saying is over-simplification to an almost pathological degree? I am assuming, for instance, that you are associating Wagner with the Nazis and that sort of thing; but I really fail to see how even if Wagner was associated with the Nazis, how that association could taint the entire movement of Romanticism. And I would be very much interested to learn how Shelley, Byron, Keats and Blake -- arguably the four most important figures of the Romantic movement in England -- could have been associated with anti-Semitism, environmentalism, etc. (I do believe that you're getting the Romantics mixed up with the 1960's Guiness-type hippie movement.) Another thing: if the Romantics were so anti-Semitic, then why did they take typical figures such as the Wandering Jew and portray them so sympathetically? Also, the Romantics were very anti-war -- consider how anti-imperialist Shelley was, even going so far as to be one of the few Englishmen of his time to publicly deplore Britain's treatment of Ireland.

Also, Kyberean is one hundred percent correct in saying that it is absolutely impossible to read Smith and not to perceive the extensive influence that the Romantics had on him. His use of the motifs of the Medusa, his romantic perception of Milton's Satan, and his portrayal of Nature and Otherness in both his poetry AND his prose are all blatant proofs of his association with English Romanticism.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2 Nov 08 | 04:23PM by ArkhamMaid.

Brava, ArkhamMaid. I should add that some of JoJo's farrago of nonsense likely stems from the ideas of the French so-called "New Philosophers" from the late '70's-early '80's, whose brainless "argument" runs something along the lines of, "Hegel was a product of the Romantic era. His thought leads to the works of Marx, which lead directly to Stalin, which leads to the Gulags. Ergo, Romanticism leads to mass murder". I haven't read JoJo's rejoinders so far, if any, but again, I can only hope that his grotesque caricature of Romanticism was a joke.

Anyway, I doubt that there are many individuals here, other than JoJo, who may need a refresher regarding the basic concepts of the Romantic movement, but those who do will find them here. With all due respect, anyone who fails to see not only the influence of the English Romantics upon the works of CAS, but also the clear relationship of CAS's works to the major themes of Romanticism (the primacy of imagination; the author as an individual and a creator in his own right; nature, landscapes, and their description; emotion; lyricism) quite likely needs to have his shoes tied for him, as well.

A writer does not become a Romantic just because he writes about flowers. The most obvious influence on Smith is that of the Decadents, who wrote in reaction to Romanticism. Remember, Smith translated Baudelaire, and in general displays a thoroughly materialist obsession with sexual matters that is highly un-Romantic in nature. Furthermore, as in the writings of, e.g., Villiers de l'Isle Adam, there are rarely, if ever, any triumphant Romantic heroes in Smith's stories. On the contrary, his stories often end in some kind of ironic disaster for the protagonist.

Well this is a curious place to start this Monday morning before election day here in the States. I thought all the debates I'd be engaging in this morning would be political.

First off, let's go back to Mr. Davis CAS article at his very nice website. Mr. Davis comes out of the WIRED magazine crowd and there is an undercurrent of scifi interest in that community as I recall (I stopped reading after the dotcom bust for reasons I won't go into here). My reaction to Mr. Davis article on CAS was that it was a delight to see anyone NOT in fantasy and horror even acknowledge that CAS existed. The fact that he also provided some positive and interesting reasons for new readers to sample Smith is all the more surprising. I think we are missing the forest for the trees here.

Now as for the comments "if some blockhead nurtured intellectually at the teats of Foucault, Eco, and mass culture, for instance, wants to believe that his mind and understanding are more sophisticated than, say, Percy Bysshe Shelley's, then he is welcome to his delusions!"....well I am not sure where this comes out of. I did not see references to that effect in Mr. Davis article. The shift to a different type of language (e.g.Hemingway) in literature and popular fictions preceded, and was orthogonal to, the emergence of structuralism, semiotics and deconstruction. Generally, criticism lags new directions in art. Mr. Davis reflects accurately that Smith's style is no longer practiced today, and yet he finds it not without charm and interest. As an aside, I know for a fact that at least Lovecraft was read and admired by Mr. Umberto Eco (I've been to some of his lectures and met him) and folks in that circle (Thomas Sebeok and his wife, Michael Riffaterre, etc.). It seems to me that the blaming critical theory for artistic trends is to deny the power of the artists themselves.

Trying to create a debate that Romanticism is better than Post-Modernism or that adherents to one or the other are blockheads is not so useful. There is no question the world moves on, tastes and theories evolve. Great artists capture somethings specific to their time and culture, and at the same time succeed in somewhat transcending those constraints. I have a livelong friend stuck on Blake and Northrop Frye's interpretation of Blake. He is frozen in that 'snapshot'. It resonates with him in some profound way. I don't see it, but I what do I know? What I can say is that if you allow create such a snapshot you also become a figure in its static world.

As for the last posts between Kyborean and JoJo and Arkham Maid on Romanticism and CAS, I am not sure where this one is going exactly. It does seem to me that Lovecraft and CAS are both a part of preceding movements and somewhat out of synch with those same movements. Yeats was deeper in the occult than either HPL or CAS and his writing is so thick with it that you could drown, yet, nonetheless his poems transcend even the strange tastes that inform them in a way that neither HPL nor CAS could approach. Everyone who practices any art from within a culture has some relation to the movements before. No-one can avoid doing so. 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? Narrowing to CAS in particular, if he is not emergent from Romanticism or Dadaism or Surrealism or Realism or Symbolism or Imagism then what? Surely CAS has more affinity with some of these more than others?

That being said, I've lost the connection between why that matters in terms of a intriguing write-up on CAS from a well read modern blogger who did more in his post to expand CAS readership than probably all of our posts in this forum over the past year.

Steve

Well, I finally read that blog post, and found it very interesting. In particular, I note that, contrary to what some earlier posts in this thread would seem to indicate,

1. the essay is very enthusiastic about Smith, and

2. it points out the anti-Romantic nature of Smith's poem.

Sverba, I agree with you that there has been a little too much parsing of that blog post. I fear as well that this thread had turned into a discussion of whether Clark Ashton Smith was a Romantic or not -- but I think that such a discussion is important and ought to be clarified rather than ignored, in spite of the awkwardness of its position in this thread.

Jojo, I have something that I want you to read: [www.eldritchdark.com]

After reading Smith's poetic love letter to Romanticism, also consider this quote from a letter to Virgil Finlay:

"I believe that you should congratulate yourself on being, as you say, "out of tune with your generation." Undoubtedly a serious condition of unbalance is prevalent at the present time, as indicated by exclusive or excessive preoccupation with drink, amorous orgies, etc. This seems to be part of the intense materialism, "realism," or whatever you want to call it, of the age. Modern science, philosophy and invention are at least partly responsible. Some day there will be a return toward mysticism, a recovery of spiritual values. The question is, will it come before - or after Armageddon? I am not making any predictions; but the query is more than pertinent."

(The letter in its entirety may be read here: [www.eldritchdark.com])

A very unusual paragraph to be written by an anti-Romantic who is preoccupied with portraying the grosser material side of sexuality!



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 3 Nov 08 | 12:08PM by ArkhamMaid.

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.

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.

Another interesting (and very disturbing) anti-Romanticism view---

I was recently going through a volume of French right-wing/conservative theory, published in George Steiner’s Roots of the Right series, and the notorious Charles Maurras, editor of the French Catholic/Royalist periodical, Action Francaise (sort of a pre-WWII European version of William F. Buckley’s later Catholic periodical, the National Review), had a vaguely similar view of the “destructive” effects Romanticism- although Maurras’s anti-Romantic writings are colored by a fundamental racism and anti-Semitism. (Maurras, as one might expect, was a supporter of the French Vichy government, and, writes editor J. S. McClelland, “hated the same things that the [n]azis hated- democracy, the republic, certain kinds of socialism, Jews, and individualism.“ [213])

For Maurras, Romanticism (in France) was ANTI-Royalist. And as a classicist (and anti-Semite), Maurras directly links the origin of Romanticism to Judaism, via the seminal Judaic-Zealot rebellion against Rome. (One wonders what Charles Maurras would have thought if he ever learned of Robert Eisenman’s recent theory, relating Christian origins to these same Jewish revolutionary forces!)

In his rather paranoid 1922 book, Romanticism and Revolution, Charles Maurras asserts:

“…friend and foe of romanticism agree that its identity with revolution is close and deep. Romanticism and revolution resemble nothing so much as two stems, which, though they look different, grow from the same root. The movement of ideas or rather of dreams, of which 1750, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1898 are the landmarks, is something which obtains or which can be sustained in every field of action or the imagination: morality, politics, poetry, history, philosophy, religion.” (pp. 239-40)

Maurras then goes on to contrast the so-called “classical spirit” with this romantic/ revolutionary one, observing rather dubiously that,

“The traditions of Athens and Rome are as innocent of revolutionary content as was the inspiration of the medieval Catholic Church. The ancestors of revolution are to be found in Geneva, in Wittenberg- more distantly in Jerusalem. They spring from the Jewish spirit and from the varieties of independent Christianity that grow wild in the deserts if the East, or in the dark Teutonic forest, wherever barbarians meet.” (p. 241)

Elsewhere, Maurras goes one even more explicitly, and writes:

“…Catholic political thought appropriates to itself the methods of Roman politics. Such is the nature of the classical tradition. The classical spirit is the essence of the doctrines of humanity at its highest point. To call the spirit of the [French] Revolution classical is therefore to strip the word of its true meaning and to open the way for unimaginable misunderstandings.
“Revolution came from a different direction altogether: the Reformation Bible, the statutes of the Geneva Republic, the Calvinist theologians, the old individualist ferment of the Germanic race for which trilingual Switzerland already served as the European corn-exchange, the personal élan of a sensibility unrestrained by either hereditary morality, rigorous scholarship or healthy reason- these were the humble origins of the ideas which were born in the spirit of Rousseau.” (262)

By its very nature, Maurras writes, the “German and Anglo-Saxon world”, which was “ill-infused by Catholic humanism”, allowed “Judaism” to “penetrate unchecked”. (p. 242)

Therefore, Maurras goes on, when French philosophers Montesquieu and Voltaire visited London, it marked:

“the first important encounter of the classical French spirit with that Hebrew and German spirit by which England recently had been troubled. The intellectual curiosity of these two great writers should have been accompanied by vigilance. Mediocre novelty more than it should caught their eye. They brought home to Bourdeaux some seeds of foreign anarchy and unrest, without being greatly affected by it themselves: in their great works both bear the marks of fever while remaining free from its rage: the Oriental graft has left their blooms unwithered….” (p. 243)

Not so, however, for French naturalist/pre-Romantic writer, Rousseau ---who came from a part of the world, Maurras writes, “where for two hundred years had hung the stench of decomposition” (243), and whose works went on to directly, Maurras writes, influence the French Revolution. (240) Rousseau’s works, Maurras asserts, contain:

“in almost equal measure the criminal, the savage and the lunatic. Madness, savagery and crime, the adventurer, fed on Jew-inspired revolt, called that virtue. Virtue, incarnate in a ‘me’ of dingy quality, was declared the right and proper judge of the human race…” (244)

And, Maurras writes, although “the Paris of 1750” to which Rousseau’s ideas came “was nothing like an Asiatic shanty-town full of grubby Jews [these are Maurras' words]”, still:

“The glory of France and the dominance of Paris were used to spread abroad the ravings of a madman. This wild subhuman thing, this life-form scarce emerged from the principal swamp, seduced the world by the paradox and the principal challenge of his primitive intellectual equipment. Hearts too sensitive, minds too cultivated, found it interesting; inevitably those parts of the world [Germany] that were least advanced were more responsible: unsophisticated Europe could hardly fail to see itself and to admire itself in that child of nature that sophisticated Paris had made its adored idol….” (245)

Worst of all, Maurras goes on, it was Rousseau’s reduction of religious life “to the god within oneself, without ritual or priest, that is the culmination of Protestant logic; his political ideas are soon to subject France to the doctrine which destroys monarchies and which dreams up republics.” (246) The “The French Romantics of 1830,” Charles Maurras goes on, “furnished an admirable example” of this, in that "their literary taste, which turned them away from classical ideas and principles, shook their loyalty to the established crown.” (247)

As an aside, it is interesting to compare the overwrought, paranoid, and almost hysterical aspects of Charles Maurras’ language here, with that of the equally conservative and anti-Semitic H. P. Lovecraft, although in Lovecraft, such things as a “two hundred years …. stench of decomposition”, “wild subhuman things”, and “life-forms scarce emerged from the principal swamp”, are not figural, but rather literal embodiments of Lovecraft’s polemical antagonisms (much in the same way that nazi propaganda films, right around the same time Lovecraft was writing, were literally depicting Jews as “the rats in the walls”….)

For my part, I have always thought of Romanticism as something of a second European Renniassance: a return to vulgate forms and language, to native folklore and local legendry, after centuries of slavishly aping the stultifying forms of the classical past and the language of Rome. Romanticism brought about a revival of antiquarian forms: the ballad, folklore, the broadside, paving the way for the use of regular English, and everyday language, in poetry and literature. The German Romantics, in particular, made the novel, or "roman", the basis of an entirely new form of European art, and performed feats with structure, medium, and plot, which the Surrealists, a century later, only vainly and palely were able to recapture.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 20 Jan 09 | 05:55PM by Gavin Callaghan.

For me, Romanticism is far more about the exaltation of the imagination, emotion, and the confrontation with sublimity than anything else, and that is its enduring legacy, as well as its link to such poets as CAS. In this context, though, I am glad to see this example of anti-Romantic Fascism, which, with its idealization of war, monarchy, and Classicism (ever see the style of architecture known as "Mussolini Modern"? Ugh...) is far truer to reality.