I read "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" (celebrated as the debut of Tsathoggua, or anyway of its idol); I would have read it before, in the early Seventies, but I didn't remember it upon revisiting it just now. It is an example of a type of story common in the weird fiction-imaginary world genre -- I mean, who of us has not only not read, but has not
written, a story of attempted theft from an ancient temple -- ghastly consequences ensuing for the would-be burglar? There must be dozens or hundreds of these in print, and more in the files of unpublished fan fiction. In my case it was called "Teloktek's Eyes." Thief rows boat to abandoned (ho! ho!) temple; steals rare stone from bird-idol's eye-socket; out in boat, "stone" hatches; curtain falls, with implication that hatchee was ready for immediate carnage. I thought Smith's temple-guardian was clever, particularly when it oozes in separate streams through gaps in wall and then reunites. It is possible that a very distant memory of this scene influenced something in my so-far-not-quite-finished-let-alone-published
Ash Lad. Perhaps there was a teensy bit of
Ashton Smith to thank there.
Then I read "The Last Incantation," which departed from Wikipedia's generalization (which I think is probably true) about Smith's stories: "his weird fiction is generally macabre in subject matter, gloatingly preoccupied with images of death, decay and abnormality." The story is about disenchantment. As such it reminded me of a good, though obscure, essay by C. S. Lewis, called "Talking of Bicycles." The essay suggests a fourfold experience:
1.unenchanted
2.enchanted
3.disenchanted
4.re-enchanted
One of the examples, the one most pertinent for the Smith story, deals with romantic love.
1.In the unenchanted state, a boy (the example given is of a male) is not yet interested in girls.
2.The lad falls in love with a girl.
3.Married to her, he comes to see that the woman is not the radiant being that he perceived when they both were younger.
That's about where Smith's story stops (of course, Malygris never married Nylissa; his disenchantment comes after he brings her back from the dead and soon is disappointed in her) and where many stories and, I suppose, many people's experience, stop.
However, a further stage is possible:
4."'[T]here comes a time when you look back on that first mirage, and yet, seeing all the things that have come out of it, things the boy and girl could never have dreamed of, and feeling also that to remember it is, in a sense, to bring it back in reality, so that under all the other experiences it is still there like a shell lying at the bottom of a clear, deep pool -- and that nothing would have happened at all without it -- so that even when it was least true it was telling you important truths in the only form you could then understand -- '" etc.
Lewis also suggests that there's a difference between genuine disenchantment, which can be worth reading about, and unenchantment that falsely presents itself as disenchantment, which is a waste of time to read. "'Has the writer been through the Enchantment and come out on the bleak highlands, or is he simply a subman who is free from the love mirage as a dog is free....?'"
By the way, but this is irrelevant for Smith's story -- Lewis also suggests it's important to be able to distinguish between enchantment and re-enchantment. "'The war poetry of Homer or
The Battle of Maldon, for example, is Re-enchantment. You see in every line that the poet knows, quite as well as any modern, the horrible thing he is writing about. He celebrates heroism but he has paid the proper price for doing son. he sees the horror and yet sees also the glory.'"
