Today's YouTube video on Strange Shadows: A Clark Ashton Smith Podcast is on Smith's excellent short story. Tim Mendees, co-host with Rob Poynton, was so kind as to mention me as someone who'd have ideas on the landscape in Smith's story.
First, the bib entry.
Smith, Clark Ashton. "Genius Loci." American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps. New York: Library of America, 2009. 681-697.
If you've not read the story, I urge you to do so. Get the PDF here, else nothing that follows will seem wondrous.
"Genius Loci" begins as Amberville, an artist who is a sensitive and a friend of the narrator Murphy, describes the pond and its environs. From the start, we have some of the conventions of weird fiction: the ordinary is established as context for the weird, and the speaker expresses reluctance combined with fascination.
Landscape is the motivation for Amberville's increasingly strained health and obsessive manner: Murray notes the "profound horror" and "balefully contorted features" perceptible but not explicit in Amberville's sketch. The "strange veil, a spirit of despair, malignity, desolation," is unseen and seems to be "something wholly outside of humanity" (682). In other words, the landscape is haunted by something beyond human history. The spectre of Chapman is not the source; the force, blank-faced, ethereal, yet violent, is the force in the environment that threatens the characters. History, referenced by tropes of vampirism to reflect the passing of ages, dismisses the possibility of conventional hauntings such as vampires, ghosts, and the like.
The landscape exhibits the push/pull typical of a haunted landscape: "'The place repels me--but it fascinates me, too. I've simply got to solve the mystery, if it has a solution,' he added with a slightly defensive air" (684). Amberville first, then his fiancee Miss Avis Olcott, then Murray are lured by, not the land or place, but the presence, which Amberville describes as an "emanation" during the passage where he disavows Chapman's pond and swears never to return (691). Later, Murray sees "a faint, unholy aura, neither light nor mist, that flowed and wavered about the meadow, preserving the outlines of the willow, the alders, the reeds, the pool. Stealthily it appeared to lengthen, reaching toward Amberville like ghostly arms" (690). The haunter Amberville becomes the haunted artist of weird fiction, unable to resist Chapman's pond.
The hallucinatory nature of a haunted landscape becomes part of Smith's narrative: "The place haunted me like a fantasm, horrible but seductive. I felt an impelling morbid curiosity, an unwholesome desire to visit it again, and fathom, if possible, its enigma" (695). A mere haunting isn't enough; the overlay of a ghost onto a landscape is too simple. A haunted landscape actively engages the visitor in ways that go beyond simple ghost stories and horrors of conventional tales.
As with similar places, the haunted landscape of Chapman's pond is multilayered: Chapman's ghost is overlaid on the eerie pond, which itself is overlaid on the original, unnamed and unknown source of evil. In haunted landscapes, nature is not the landscape; nature is not the source of evil, a matter that distances them from the landscapes we find in early American writers. This layering appears at the climax as well:
It was not this spectacle alone, however, that drove me in mad and shuddering flight from the meadow, without making even the most tentative attempt to retrieve the drowned bodies. The true horror lay in the thing, which, from a little distance, I had taken for the coils of a slowly moving and rising mist. It was not vapor, nor anything else that could conceivably exist—that malign, luminous, pallid emanation that enfolded the entire scene before me like a restless and hungrily wavering extension of its outlines—a phantom projection of the pale and deathlike willow, the dying alders, the reeds, the stagnant pool and its suicidal victims. The landscape was visible through it, as through a film; but it seemed to curdle and thicken gradually in places, with some unholy, terrifying activity. (696)
I've a lot to say about the notion of haunted landscapes in my book Ripples from Carcosa; I'm happy to add these thoughts about Smith's story to that larger idea.
