"The Last Incantation"

I haven't written for a while, so I thought I'd say something, even though I don't feel I have much to say. I've found, while writing a blog, that it's sometimes difficult to try to reconcile three things I think are essential to a good blog post: a topic I find interesting, a topic my audience might find interesting, and a topic I can write at significant length about

At any rate, moving on from navel-gazing to the meat of the thing, I've been doing a lot of reading in the old Weird Tales-esque sword and sorcery genre. In moving beyond Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft in the genre, I have been reading Clark Ashton Smith. I find Smith's writing in general weaker than either of the two masters I mentioned. His characters are flat caricatures, his prose is excessively stilted and at times purple, and in general his stories feel more like sketchy anecdotes of strange misadventures than they do full stories. That being said, I've found one story I felt moved by: "The Last Incantation."


For your perusing pleasure

It's not long. You can read it in a few minutes.

There's some pretty classic evil sorcerer stuff going on here: the long-bearded ancient magician, the viper familiar living in a unicorn's skull, the ancient and unholy knowledge that no man should possess. But, at its root, the story is about love, melancholy, and remembrance. Even all the power of the universe cannot make Malygris happy, nor recall the happiness he had as a young man who had neither the knowledge nor the magic he possesses in his old age. He doubts even before he begins that the spell will bring him what he wants, and yet he must attempt it.

The emotion is subdued in the end. The magician is neither heartbroken nor furious; I get the feeling he is too old and withered to feel much even from this final disappointment--he has nothing left to him but his weariness and anguish. There is no single dusty tear; the only sign that he is moved is that his voice has become "thin and quavering." This withheld emotion is what makes the story work for me. Nylissa does not recoil from what he has become; she responds empty of emotion, leaving the scene's resonance squarely on Malygris.

Malygris, living alone except for his familiar, has long since seen all that is to be seen and conquered all that he had to conquer. He has sucked the juices out of life, and only the husk remains. He lives in dust and shadows. Even in this last scene, in which he performs an impossible and beautiful miracle, he is only an old man who has outlived his passions, waiting to die alone.

I do think the story is at times over-written, despite the restraint I praise. Smith, as he does in many of his stories, tells the reader what the reader already knows. For instance: "He could believe no longer in love or youth or beauty."


Or later, when Malygris refers to the "Nylissa whom I knew, or thought I knew?", the "or thought I knew" again hits us over the head with the theme.

And, if we still missed it, we get the familiar's Aesop-like endingline: "This, my master, was the thing that you had to learn."

Also, this would make for a wonderful low-budget short film.