by Clark Ashton Smith
We have been told that literature dealing with the imaginative and
fantastic is out of favour among the Intellectuals, whoever they are.
Only the Real, whatever that is or may be, is admissible for treatment;
and writers must confine themselves to themes well within the range
of statisticians, lightning calculators, Freud and Kraft-Ebbing, the
Hearst and McFadden publications, NRA, and mail-order catalogues.
Chimeras are no longer the mode, the infinite has been abolished;
mystery is obsolete, and sphinx and medusa are toys for children. The
weird and the unearthly are outlawed, and all mundane impossibilities
(which, it may be, are the commonplaces of the Pleiads) have been
banished to some limbo of literalistic derision. One may write of
horses and hippopotami but not of hippogriffs; of biographers, but
not of ghouls; of slum-harlots or the hetairai of Nob Hill but not
of succubi. In short, all pipe-dreams, all fantasies not authorized
by Freudianism, by sociology, and the five senses, are due for
the critical horse-laugh, when, through ignorance, effrontery, or
preference, they find a place in the subject-matter of some author
unlucky enough to have been born into the age of Jeffers, Hemingway,
and Joyce.
Let us examine these amazing dicta, fathered, as they must be, by
people whose literal-mindedness can be surpassed only by that of their
"four-footed betters." Surely it is axiomatic that in thought or art
we deal not with things themselves, but with concepts of things. One
may write, like Villon, of Muckle Meg and the Fair Helm-Maker; or, like
Sterling, evoke Lilith and the blue-eyed vampire: in either case, only
figments of the poet's mind are presented. It is for the creator, not
the critic, to choose that image or symbol which suits him best. People
who cannot endure anything with a tinge of trope or fantasy, should
confine their reading to the census-returns. There, if anywhere, they
will find themselves on safe ground.
To touch on other considerations: Why this thirst for literalism, for
nothing but direct anthropological data, which would proscribe the
infinitudes of imagination, would bar all that can lift us, even in
thought, above the interests of the individual or the species? Does
it not imply a sort of cosmic provincialism, an overweening racial
egomania?
Indeed, if all things fantastic or impossible are to be barred as
literary subject-matter, where is one to draw the line? Many thinkers
who lived before Freud, and some who live contemporaneously with him,
have maintained that the world itself is a fantasy; or, in De Casseres'
phrase, a "superstition of the senses." Gaultier has pointed out that
we live only by illusion, by a process of seeing ourselves and all
things as they are not. The animals alone, being without imagination,
have no escape from reality. From paretic to psychoanalyst, from poet
to ragpicker, we are all in flight from the real. Truth is what we
desire it to be, and the facts of life are a masquerade in which we
imagine that we have identified the maskers. The highest intellects
have always delighted in poetic fantasy and philosophic paradox,
knowing well that the universe itself is multiform fantasy and paradox,
and that everything perceived or conceived as actuality is merely
one phase of that which has or may have innumerable aspects. In this
phantom whirl of the infinite, among these veils of Maya that are
sevenfold behind sevenfold, nothing is too absurd, too lovely, or
dreadful to be impossible.
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