Reflection on Clark Ashton Smith's "The Return of the Sorcerer"

I recently participated in a discussion on the RPG podcast Plot Points about a Clark Ashton Smith story, "The Return of the Sorcerer" (Strange Tales, September 1931).  Here is an excerpt from Plot Points description: discusses "table-top role-playing games and their supplements as literature. Our quirky panel discusses games old and new, spotlights innovations in the hobby, and links to literature."

The discussion was with Ben Riggs, the host, and Clinton Boomer, a game writer and designer. The concept of the discussion was "Appendix N University." We selected a single author from Gary E. Gygax's "Appendix N" and discussed a story written by that author.

"Appendix N" is a famous list of (mostly) pulp writers that influenced Gary E. Gygax as he co-designed Dungeons and Dragons. It was revised for the recent 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons and has been re-labeled the "Appendix E."

Curious enough, Clark Ashton Smith is not actually on the original Appendix N (but instead appears in the Appendix E of 5th edition). Pulp canon usual suspects, such as H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, are there, but Smith isn't included, and his absence is something of a controversy. When people discuss the Appendix N, it is common that Clark Ashton Smith is referenced. Most assume that Smith is an Appendix N author and only realize later that Gygax left him off. Perhaps this is why they included him in the updated Appendix E?

As an enthusiast of the Weird Tales Three (Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith), I have something of a theory about why CAS is left off the original but I can't verify this. I speculate Smith was left off because Gygax wasn't able to read Smith's works. In the late 1970s, Lovecraft would have been available in at least the Arkham House editions and probably (more likely) the Ballantine Editions. Howard's Conan stories would have been available in the Lancer editions. Alas, Clark Ashton Smith wouldn't have been available except for the original pulps and some earlier, rarer paperback editions, such as the Panther Lost Worlds anthologies. Am I wrong? Were the Panther's of CAS widely available?

Anyway, as a supplement to the podcast, I want to briefly analyze "The Return of the Sorcerer," the story we discussed in the podcast episode linked above. Spoilers below.

Plot Summary (spoilers): The story is about an out-of-work Arabic scholar, Mr. Ogden, who is hired by a scholarly recluse, John Carnby. Carnby wants Ogden to translate certain passages from the dreaded Necronomicon. Ogden does so. The first translated passage tells of how sorcerers can return from the dead to perform evil acts, and most often for revenge. Carnby then has Ogden translate another passage and this one treats "a singular incantatory formula for the exorcism of the dead" (17). By and by John Carnby confesses that he has murdered his twin brother, Helman Carnby, and so mutilated his body; alas, the many pieces of Helman's body have been shambling around the house. John Carnby is sure that his brother is going to wreak vengeance and so he struggles to exorcise his spirit from the house. The story ends when Helman's mutilated corpse reconstitutes into a gruesome form and murders Carnby. Ogden runs screaming from the house.

I love this bizarre story. There are so many elements that are just right. The way that setting and atmosphere are put to the service of characterization is one element that I want to touch on. Consider this description of the house:

It was a large, two-story house, overshaded by ancient oaks and dark with mantling of unchecked ivy, among the hedges of unpruned privet and shrubbery that had gone while for many years. It was separated by a vacant, weed-grown lot on one side and a table of vines and trees on the other, surrounding the black ruins of a burnt mansion. (11)

The house is painted with shadow and choked by unruly vegetation. On the left is an empty, abandoned lot; on the right, another house, a charred ruin, a fleshless architectural skeleton. Although Smith is rendering a conventional haunted house here, he does so masterfully. It's almost as if the house has a disease. The lots in proximity to it have suffered for their closeness.

Another element of the story that I love are certain descriptive passages. Consider this description of Carnby's study:

There were tables strewn with archaic instruments of doubtful use, with astrological charts, with skulls and alembics and crystals, with censers such as are used in the Catholic Church, and volumes bound in worm-eaten leather with verdigris-mottled clasps. In one corner stood the skeleton of a large ape; in another, a human skeleton; and overhead a stuffed crocodile was suspended. (14)

This description is so satisfying and suggestive and bears some of the weight of characterizing John Carnby and his sorcerous endeavors: Carnby is meditating on the stars (charts), mortality (skull), the past (books), and the evolution/devolution of life (ape, skeleton, crocodile). In a highly compressed description, the narrator has given us a sense of the intellectual hubris of the the character.

I love when writers braid characterization into setting. Even though we have heard very little at this part in the story from Carnby, we have experienced his house from the outside and his study, his intimate space, and so we learn a lot about him.

The final passage I want to look at is the climax, when Helman Carnby's shambling corpse kills John Carnby, his murderous brother. Focus on the shadow and notice how what Smith hides is just as important as what Smith describes:

Huge, elongated, misshapen, the shadow was seemingly cast by the arms and torso of a naked man who stood forward with a surgeon's saw in his hand. Its monstrosity lay in this: though the shoulders, chest, abdomen, and arms were all clearly distinguishable, the shadow was headless and appeared to terminate in an abruptly severed neck. (26)

The shadow of a headless corpse wielding a surgeon's saw to murder: this is pulp at its finest, a kind of literary "Death Metal." The fact that we are not getting the bald description of the phenomenon but instead the shadow cast by it makes it all the more enthralling.

Smith is a masterful storyteller. "The Return of the Sorcerer" is a tightly constructed horror narrative that is structured around the climax of the demented murder. The climax is only one intense paragraph. So, Smith uses that rest of his words to build up to this most important of moments.

In this story, character and setting are inextricably linked; place shines light on character. By contrast, consider the protagonist, our surrogate, Mr. Ogden, who is almost a non-character, an abstract avatar (and strategically so). His function is to allow us, the reader, into this strange world to see for ourselves the horrible, climactic spectacle.

I highly recommend "The Return of the Sorcerer." I read it from an anthology, The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith published by Prime Books in 2009. It has an excellent introduction by Gene Wolfe.

Read the story, check out the podcast episode, and let me know what you think.

The Centrality of Gothic Fiction in Modern Genre Fiction

Question: To what extent are the "weird" genres--supernatural horror, science fiction, and fantasy--distinct" genres? Or, are they truly separate and autonomous traditions? Should we write histories of supernatural horror, science fiction, and fantasy? Should be categorize works along those lines? Should literary critics and fans discuss their differences?

Or, are these genres they part of the same tradition?

Many would say swiftly and categorically provide answer: "they are distinct."

J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, and Stephen King are clearly qualitatively distinct writers writing in different traditions and genres that treat different plots, characters, and conflicts. Right? What does Bilbo's quest to Erebor have to do with an investigation into the Cthulhu cult? What do the three laws of robotics have to do with Uruk-hai? How is Arkham relevant to the Foundation?

I would agree that the modern weird genres are distinct, but I have some essential conditions. Although, at this point, due to several causes, these genres have become separate and distinct, they are, and importantly so, connected, and most likely share an origin point.

Beginning as literary genres, they all emerge from the same deep and variegated cultural stream, which is literary history, of course. But such a flaccid, generalizing claim is not so interesting. So, let's get more specific.

I think there is a compelling case to be made for the idea that supernatural horror, science fiction, and fantasy emerge from the tradition of "Gothic" fiction in the late 1700s.

What is "Gothic" fiction? Let me spend the rest of this brief post giving a general overview of "the Gothic."

First, what does that word, "Gothic," even mean? It is one that changes meaning with context. In its earliest use, it referred to "the Goths," a quasi-historical group of Germanic people who were, at least in the popular imagination of 18th century Europe who were intrigued by them, responsible for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.

Thus, when the adjective "Gothic" is used in English in the 18th century to describe architecture, art, and literature, the actual Germanic tribes who are referred to by the Goths had been homogenized in the European imagination.

I don't want to go into the complicated ancient historical distinctions here. Let it suffice it to say that there were several types of "Goths," and the two major strains who played an important role in the establishment of the culture of the middle-ages were referred to by by historians as the "Visigoths" (western Goths) and "Ostrogoths" (eastern Goths). To summarize, "Gothic" refers to the aesthetic style of the "the Goths," which was already a shorthand for a people who had been homogenized and mythologized by the European imagination.

So, when the adjective "Gothic" is used by 18th century Europeans to describe architecture, art, and literature, it is a very loose reference, which means non-Roman or even "Medieval," i.e. from the middle ages. But the theme that gave this reference power, I think, was time.

The Gothic, as a loose tag, referred to something outside of time.

Here are some undeveloped speculations and questions:

To what extent is science fiction a literature unfettered by time? It often focuses on the future. To what extent is fantasy a literature unfettered to time? It often focuses on the cultural past and myth. How about horror and its relationship to time? It channels elements of both fantasy and science fiction to the extent that it dramatizes the destruction of the ordinary, the order, the natural law, and so renders a violation, a transgression, and often of time, i.e. the past returns, erupts into the present. That which is dead doesn't stay dead.

Could these "Gothic" genres, these "weird" genres, thematize the destruction of the ordinary. I think they do indeed trouble the orthodoxy of now.

"She is so beautiful, she is unnatural": Angela Carter's Beautiful Monster

Angela Carter's vampire story, "The Lady of the House of Love," is about how beauty held in stasis becomes a horror. What a compelling idea. It reminds me of John Keats' poem, "Bright Star," which is a thematically comparable meditation on how beautiful things cannot, and probably should not, endure. Beautiful things are, and perhaps should be, ephemeral.

The protagonist of a the story is a vampire, referred to only as "the Countess," and her horror derives from the fact that she is a beauty held in firm stasis. She is living yet she is dead, a paradox. Here is how she is described:

"She is so beautiful, she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching human imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, her soullessness."

The Countess is characterized by her joy in tarot cards and augury. This fits thematically, a perfect brushstroke. What is an augur but someone who views the world not as an unfolding narrative driven and shaped by character but instead a finished tableau, a cartouche, a fully environed and unchanging form, beginning, middle, and end?

Carter's Countess allows us to imagine the unreal psychology of a vampire. This bizarre character allows us to think a strange thing, the possibility that a certain timeless perspective transforms one into a darkly beautiful monster. To come to view the unfolding cosmos not as an unfinished activity but as a completed gesture is a dark epiphany that dehumanizes.