THE DEEP ONES: "The Isle of the Torturers" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Isle of the Torturers" by Clark Ashton Smith

Discussion begins on February 20.

First published in March 1933 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/108/the-isle-of-the-torturers

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?62569

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Maze of the Enchanter
Tales of Zothique
Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zothique
http://tinyurl.com/anqcroy
http://www.thecimmerian.com/collecting-clark-ashton-smith/
http://www.blackgate.com/the-fantasy-cycles-of-clark-ashton-smith-part-i-the-ave...

There's a nice Margaret for you, paradoxosalpha! No altar, though. I shall be reading this from The Maze of the Enchanter.

> 2

Indeed! I'll be reading from Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors, I think.

ETA: I was wrong. Instead I read it out of A Rendezvous in Averoigne. It's nice to have enough CAS on hand that I have a choice of which book to read a given story from.

The Maze of the Enchanter for me.

The Return of the Sorcerer for me, as soon as I can get my butt out to the library to get a copy.

I seldom seem to get a proper night's sleep after finishing a Clark Ashton Smith tale; it's a bit like overindulging in cognac or a too-rich dessert, I suppose.

It's difficult for me to judge the merits of CAS' Zothique tales objectively, as they are my favorite creations of his aside from maybe his poetry. I just think there's something about that particular setting that harmonizes with his sensibilty just about perfectly; it's also a wondrous place for the reader to observe through a piece of fiction, but also, as David Byrne has said, a place where I wouldn't live if you paid me. :)

The homage to Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" is pretty obvious here, although Smith takes the basic idea to places that even that crazy fucker never dreamed of. I think it's instructive to compare the final lines of the stories. From "Masque":

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

From "Isle":

And oblivion claimed the Isle of Uccastrog; and the Torturers were one with the tortured.

Maybe it's just me, but I hear a echo of the fatalism of Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 here:

I have seen something else under the sun:

The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:

As fish are caught in a cruel net,
or birds are taken in a snare,
so people are trapped by evil times
that fall unexpectedly upon them.

A serious message beneath all the fantastic phantasmagoria, then.

CAS was could be very successful at attaining a Dunsanian quality, as demonstrated here, although when he ventures into the very creative tortures, we're very much in Smith's own unique world. Actually, after being inundated with sickening news stories of real-life torture and entertainment media that salivates over "extreme" horror, it was kind of nice to go back to those halcyon days when torture was, well, fun. Witness:

Then, after removing the girdle lest it slay him, the Torturers brought in certain creatures that had the shape of elllong serpents, but were covered from head to tail with sable hairs like those of a caterpillar. And these creatures twined themselves tightly about the arms and legs of Fulbra; and though he fought wildly in his revulsion, he could not loosen them with his hands; and the hairs that covered their constringent coils began to pierce his limbs like a million tiny needles, till he screamed with the agony.

The machinations of the mystery girl lvaa dovetail quite nicely with our recent reading of "A Torture by Hope" by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

The torturers of Uccastrog do not omit "Torture by Hope," in the person of the "fair girl." They're a thorough lot.

ETA: Noted in parallel, Kenton!

I enjoyed the first appearance of the Uccastrogians:

The people drew near, thronging about the barge and the galley. They wore fantastic turbans of blood-red, and were clad in closely fitting robes of vulturine black. Their faces and hands were yellow as saffron; their small and slaty eyes were set obliquely beneath lashless lids; and their thin lips, which smiled eternally, were crooked. as the blades of scimitars.

Nothing in that description bodes well.

>6 artturnerjr:

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

From "Isle":

And oblivion claimed the Isle of Uccastrog; and the Torturers were one with the tortured.

I noticed the general similarity between those two stories too, but not that particular bit. Good call, Art.

This is my favorite type of story: one that says what is to be said with no padding.

The situation is a plague that dooms Yoros. Vemdeez's horoscopes tell him that and also that Fulbra will not die in Yoros. So we have the usual irony of the accurate prophecy which is ambiguous and therefore useless. There is also the irony that the best that Fulbra can hope for is to become a 'realmless King'. For any monarch other than the Eternal Champion, is this not a fate worse than death?

The forshadowing of the function of the magic ring is handled deftly, as is the theme of "A Torture by Hope" by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (written offline before I read #7 and #8 above). For the magic ring to do its job, it is necessary that the torturers should be artistes who do not care for material gain: mundane torturers would have taken the ring before throwing Fulbra into the dungeon, thereby spoiling the climax of the story.

Other than his wonderful vocabulary, we see here some touches that show how CAS raised his stories to a higher level than his contemporaries. For example, Fulbra is tormented not merely by fumes of burning adipocere but by those of adipocere of dead cannibals. I'm not sure how Fulbra could have known what it was. Did they tell him to increase his revulsion?

In the notes to Collected Fantasies, Volume 4: The Maze of the Enchanter, CAS wrote that the story was 'a sort of companion to "The Empire of the Necromancers"' and that it was 'the best of the summer's crop'. HPL wrote "It is full of magnificent atmosphere, & has a truly Dunsanian glamour & convincingness."

Achernar (α Eri, α Eridani, Alpha Eridani), sometimes spelled Achenar, is the brightest star in the constellation Eridanus ...

The name originally comes from the Arabic آخر النهر ākhir an-nahr, meaning, "The End of the River" or "River's End".

The average temperature of the star is about 15,000 K. The high polar temperatures are generating a fast polar wind that is ejecting matter from the star, creating a polar envelope of hot gas and plasma.

The above quotes are from the Wikipedia article on Achernar. Presumably the ejecta borne on the polar wind are what carried the Silver Death to Zothique.

Forgot to mention that the astrological divination on a high tower reminded me of Vathek.

>11 bertilak:

Speaking of the Moorcock's Eternal Champion, the torture-loving denizens of Uccastrog seem to have a lot in common with the ruling aristocracy of Melniboné.

Bertilak, I got a kick out of the adipocere reference, too, and you're right - the dead cannibals make it even more revolting!

Also found in the Maze of the Enchanter notes: "Smith received sixty dollars for the story when it was published in WT in 1933."

I think everyone has made the observations I would have made about the story.

I think Jack Vance and Clark Ashton Smith had a paint salesman's vocabulary for color. (Though I admit I haven't read a lot of Vance.)

I noticed, besides the sullen and slaty eyes Uccastrogians, they have yellow skin. I wonder if Smith was in Yellow Menace mode. The next story he wrote was "The Dimension of Chance" (and not very good) which has a Japanese spy.

>14 RandyStafford:

I wonder if Smith was in Yellow Menace mode. The next story he wrote was "The Dimension of Chance" (and not very good) which has a Japanese spy.

That's an interesting question. When I read "Torturers", I took the yellow cast to signify unhealthiness, but at the same time, there is a tang of things Asian in this Zothique-set story. 1933 would have practically been ground zero for the Weird Menace sub-genre. Maybe CAS was testing those waters...

What are "slaty eyes", anyway? First time I read the story, I think I misread it as "slanted eyes" (which'd fit with yellow skin), but what does slaty refer to? Eye colour?

>16 AndreasJ:

Basically, gray. Presumably, they selected those robes of vulturine black to bring out their eye color. :D

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slaty

> 12

Yeah, generally speaking, one might say Vathek is a remote prologue to Zothique.

>14 RandyStafford:

I think Jack Vance and Clark Ashton Smith had a paint salesman's vocabulary for color.

Well, remember that CAS was a visual artist as well as a man of letters. Artists tend to know their colors (trust me - I was married to one).

>18 paradoxosalpha:

Yeah, generally speaking, one might say Vathek is a remote prologue to Zothique.

I remember thinking when I read Vathek last year that Smith was on it like white on rice. :D

I got a kick out of the aquarium from hell:

Beyond the glass he saw the blue-green, glimnering waters of the undersea, lit by the hanging cressets of the chamber; and in the waters were great devil-fish whose tentacles writhed along the wall; and huge pythonomorphs with fabulous golden coils receding in the gloom; and the floating corpses of men that stared in upon him with eyeballs from which the lids had been excised.

And... "pythonomorphs"? It makes for an intriguing bit of psychological warfare on the part of the Uccastrogians , although for me a Terry Gilliam animation sequence is actually the first thing that comes to mind. :-)

>20 semdetenebre:

Was anybody besides CAS still referring to octopi as "devil-fish" in the 20th century? :D

In evolutionary biology, Pythonomorpha is the group uniting snakes and mosasaurs (a kind of Mesozoic marine lizards - some of them indeed huge) to the exclusion of modern lizards. The proposal goes back to the 19C, was generally doubted during most of the 20C, but is now mainstream again.

CAS might more likely simply have used it in the literal sense of "snake-shaped (things)", however.

There are some interesting points made in an article written by Scott Connors. It's in Number 2 (Spring 2004) of Wormwood (the journal published by Tartarus Press).

The silver death, he says, is "nothing less than the fate which will eventually claim all of earth once the red sun of Zothique sets for the last time". He then, following Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (I have to take this on trust - I haven't read any Frye) characterises the story as ironic because there is a second level of meaning behind the obvious, and which subverts it (an explication of the main characters as subverted hero-types follows).

Connors also suggests this story also reflects the influence of Smith's mentor, the poet George Sterling, with specific reference to a dramatic poem entitled Lilith. This is in connection with the character Ilvaa, of course.

For my part, I was struck by the fact that the story fits in very well with the idea of Smith as fin de siécle decadent out of time, while simultaneously not seeming to be out of place amongst the '30s pulps. It points to their (overlooked at the time) literary merit, I suppose.

>23 housefulofpaper:

Good info.

Sterling's Lilith:

http://www.george-sterling.org/plays/Lilith%3A+A+Dramatic+Poem