Thomas Ligotti and Twenty First Century Nihilism
Nethescurial/The Mystics of Muelenberg from Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991)
My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002)
Teatro Grottesco (2006)
The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (2011)
This review is essentially about the later Ligotti of the current century. We hope to return to the earlier Ligotti in a later review but we can set the scene with just two stories from his second major collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991). Nethescurial, for example, appears to be a very obvious homage to Lovecraft almost to the point of pastiche in terms of
structure and mood although it is clearly very much a Ligotti
production. It is as if Ligotti decided to see how he could take
as many Lovecraftian tropes about ancient cultic lore and the dark
occult, refine them to their basics and come up with a definitive
layered narrative oozing unease rather than outright horror.
Ligotti
is at his best not in trying to present something visceral, disgusting
or terrible but in presenting something that unnerves us with the sense
that the world is not as it seems - something closer to Sartre's
'nausea' than to most horror fare. In this story he possibly
over-reaches himself. The attempt to create unease through an adroit use
of formulae that we recognise is skilled and will please those with a
post-modern and ironic sensibility but it is perhaps all a little too
clever and neatly structured. There is unease here certainly but
also a hysteria towards the end that implies a literary concoction
rather than an honest attempt to create an emotion or a sense of things
not being as they should. Highly skilled, always part of the Ligotti
canon, but a story to be admired rather than loved.
The Mystics of Muelenberg is nother tale of unease whose style reminds one of
the shadowiness of Bruno Schulz. It questions not only our reality but
our remembrance of other realities. Usually a 'hero' sees occult reality
and we do not. Here, we all see it but only our 'hero' remembers seeing
it. The source of our unease is obvious. The point is that, in these two stories, we see Ligotti's continuity with the past of Weird Fiction and how he develops it with an intensity that is all his own. But in both stories he is 'looking backwards' and the works we are reviewing below are very different in being embedded in a weird present and a recognisable weird reality where the horror comes not from a quasi-nostalgic emotional or intellectual engagement with the 'tradition' but with a breaking of the tradition to create horror and unease about the world we think is real and all around us. In the two stories the horror is 'over there' and a 'thrill'. In the stories we review below it is 'here and now' and 'feels like' a very possible state of our being in the world, much more existential about us, about the reader and his world.He is still very much within the Gothick tradition but the Gothick is now intruding on our own space.
From this perspective, My Work Is Not Yet Done did, in all honesty, give, or at least
contribute to, nightmares. The sheer viciousness of the evil acts of
the protagonist of the main novella might be enough to do that for some
people ... but the real nightmare, as always with Ligotti, lies in his
dark vision of existence. The
book is slim - really it is a novella with two short stories attached,
culled from previous journal publication. Ligotti does not do extended
narrative in general. He is not entirely comfortable with plot
or characterisation though he is not bad at it either. The main title story My Work Is Not Yet Done seems to stretch him to his limits though it
cannot be said that he fails in what he wishes to achieve. As
always, we are wary of spoilers so the main guideline here is that
these stories take us into the world of the modern corporation, a common theme with him, but here the horror is more obviously cosmic.
These
may be counted as tales of both demonic possession and of human evil.
The novella in its first section gets closer imaginatively to the
mind-set of a person 'going postal' than anything I have read before
(although I suspect no killer is quite this self aware). What
Ligotti does is turn creation into a 'great black swine', a blind
thrashing animal of destruction, while everything that we do with our
consciousness is just a puppet play, theatre: '"... only costumes and
masks, the inventory of an ancient and still flourishing theatrical
supply company". In this world, the obsessive-compulsive
personality (as he refers to it) simply wants to tidy things up. Things
can only be tidied if everything is destroyed. This stance is truly
pathological and not within the normal imaginative range of the vast
majority of non-adolescent humanity but nevertheless he takes up the 'rage against the
machine' and recrafts it.
Ligotti's use of the corporation as
the site for his horrors (with the caveats outlined below) is not quite
so modern as it appears. Big lumbering corporations are now being
displaced by the very different creative chaos of the internet, much as
industrial society had long since replaced the castles by the time that
castles had become the centre of Gothic writing. Horror, even
Stephen King's small town settings, generally positions itself in what
is passing, even when the subject is future apocalypse, and less
frequently in what is now or is to come. It is as if horror
writers are anxious about being confused with their brother, dystopian
science fiction. They must articulate one of the primal cores of their
art - anxiety about change and modernisation. To do that, they have to
set the horror where things are being lost and not where they are being
created.
However, in his final short tale [The Nightmare
Network], Ligotti does switch gear with a deliberately confused
picture of all human consciousness as struggling brutal competition
within one massive oneiric/nightmare corporation spreading outwards -
reversing his usual Lovecraftian position that brute cosmic matter,
working out its 'swinish' anti-human destiny, is the blackness of evil
in order to make its counterpart, collective human consciousness,
equally chaotic, cruel and expansionist. By this point, while he
does not state this, his world-view seems to shift from humans as
puppets in a black universe to that black universe and the collective of
humanity competing to be chaotic evil - doubling the chaos and doubling
the horror. And the role of the person in all this? "I - and you
- now understood: We would be pulled back into the flowing blackness
only when we had done all the damage we were allowed to do, only when
our work is done. The work of you against me ... and me against you."
Mind
you, anyone who is not American and who has worked 'with' or for
Americans in business and politics will know what he is getting at.
American individualism can seem incredibly counter-productive and
unnecessarily time-consuming. No wonder American executives rarely get a
proper holiday ... Between the main novella and the 'oneiric'
nightmare lies a more familiar style of Ligotti story [I Have A Special
Plan For The World] bridging the tale of the demonisation of the
human and the demonic nature of the human with a sense of the demonic in
the world, a demonic that may not be human at all. The story is
worth reading just for the use of the metaphor of haze, a worthy
successor to Dickens' use of fog in Bleak House. It is the
obfuscation, crass politics and isolation of life in that type of
corporation where things just happen and one knows not why. The blurring
of perception and ignorance are made physical in the most remarkable
way. As the story progresses, the haze is linked to the
construction of a false (whether theatrical or public relations) reality
by corporatism to cover up what actually happens in the world - in this
case, 'murders'. This is a very subtle story, if written in that formal
style that, derived from Poe and Lovecraft, positions Ligotti within a
specific tradition.
Taken as a whole, we have in this book a
ruthless competitive individualism (people only combine to effect a
conspiracy) operating within seas of ignorance although, by placing
detectives and waitresses outside this system, Ligotti
uncharacteristically suggests that, though no doubt 'swine' at their
core, 'ordinary people' at least are not directly complicit in this
machinery of corporate horror. Ligotti appears to hate any claim
to organisation whatsoever and sees it as lying cover for underlying
soul-destroying chaos (yep, he definitely must have had a job in a Western capitalist corporation!). His contempt for the expansionary and
acquisitive plans of the various corporations and executives in his
stories are manifest in this volume.
Although written at the
height of global happy-clappy capitalist Friedmanism in 2002, the
release of this book more widely by Random House in 2009 might well have expressed a new
mood after the credit crunch had created a growing sense of a capitalist
system out of control and run by incompetent buffoons. Let us
return to the third story to get a feel for this. A Memo from the CEO
states: "As the forces operating in today's marketplace become more
shadowy and incomprehensible we must recommit ourselves every second of
our day to a ceaseless striving for that elusive dream which we all
share and which none of us can remember, if it ever existed in the first
place." Yes, well, that pretty well fits corporate life for many
people. The last two pages of the last story pull together these
themes in a transition from horror to science fiction, a flip from a
Lovecraftian resistance to the modern and to a dark observation of where
we are heading ... I won't spoil it.
All this is encapsulated in the final story - The Shadow, The Darkness - which requires what has gone before in the book and leaves one with a taste of a nihilism that must surely cause us to worry about Mr. Ligotti's mental state. I have never read a more credible account of that blackest state of existence, existential depression - one without Satanic or demonic dark forces, a pure expression of (perhaps) Lovecraft's Nyarlothep's malign and meaningless rule over all being. This alone is not a story to be read lightly - certainly not by someone mentally vulnerable. Personally, I found it powerful, a necessary read and one that triggered a sense of commitment to life in me precisely because, in literary form, it exhibited the darkest mental state imaginable, Styron's and Milton's 'darkness visible'. To see this darkness, feel it inside oneself as a possibility and then turn away from it is a liberation - but some may not be able to do that. Approach with care if you are unsure of your own hold on life. But we run ahead of ourselves ...
The book is divided into three sections -
Derangements, Deformations, and The Damaged and The Diseased. The
first [Derangements] comprises five stories of alienation and, since I
am not into spoilers, let us just say that he presents a world of
individuals and communities where the protagonists are victims or
observers of various mysterious, unfathomable, apparently random,
external forces whose general tendency is towards madness, dissolution,
degradation and death. This is Lovecraft shorn of even the hope
that there might be a heroic conclusion or an ultimate triumph of the
ordinary against dark forces. The Old Ones are no longer 'personalities'
out there to be feared and fought but have become diffuse mindless
malignities inside us and our communities. Dark forces are embedded very
deep indeed within the ordinary and seem to be loki-like in their
conduct, engaged in a snide and sardonic sideshow at our expense.
Malicious almost out of boredom, accident and blind nature. Indeed, the
hint is that nature, our nature, is 'nihil' or, at best, a blind willing
of itself at our expense.
The second [Deformations] set of three
stories are centred on a very particular environment - a mysterious and
foggy border town where a faceless corporation is in league with
manipulative forces, the medical profession it would seem, to pull in
unsuspecting and mentally vulnerable people and force them into lives of
inescapable drudgery 'lightened' only by random acts of cruelty which
seem to be without personal malice. An air of cosmic malice
depersonalises the horror. Existence is seen as almost
accidental, a situation where all we can see are the workings of systems
that cannot be understood, operating according to unknown rules and
rivalries, that entrap us as readers to the degree that we identify with
the neurasthenic, paranoid personalities who act as narrators. Hidden
within the text are hints of the sort of practices that Lovecraft and
Howard would have assigned to 'unspeakable cults'.
If the first
section is about the horror of being at the mercy of specific events and
processes and the second is seemingly an allegory of the meaningless of
modern life, working as drudges towards death, the real darkness,
centred on art and philosophy, comes in the third section [The Damaged
and the Diseased].This culminates in the vile, dark tale with which I began. Again no spoilers but these last five stories seem to
centre on the presumption of art and of the intellect in their claims
to come close to meaning in a meaningless existence. The characters are
possibly all mad, certainly disturbed and often sick in body as much as
mind, introvert and stuck in their dreams or in environments that are
claustrophobic. The best known work is Teatro Grottesco itself, a descriptor of
the world of Ligotti, as much as the story The Clown Puppet is a
descriptor of the individual in that world. There are clowns, carnivals,
costumes, cabarets, theatres, puppetry, art, all supposed to be
providers of fun and entertainment but all, following the tradition of
Stephen King and Ray Bradbury, twisted into paranoia, deception, madness
and tragedy.
Why go on? The world of Ligotti is disturbing. I
have mentioned the obvious influence of Poe mediated by Lovecraft. There
are small nods to King (an underestimated writer) although Ligotti
writes in small amounts to concentrated effect whereas King tells long
rollicking tales that somehow always seem to affirm humanity somewhere
in the text, even if the general tone is pessimistic. In my
view, Ligotti is a must-read and a re-read. The fact that the book
can contain perhaps half the material of another anthology and yet the
two anthologies bear complete separate (possibly repeated) readings
(like Poe and Lovecraft) suggests that the artistry lies in the
positioning of the stories against one another as much as in the stories
themselves. But for a taste, I give you two extended quotations:-
"Even in a northern border town of such intensely chaotic oddity and corruption there was still some greater chaos, some deeper insanity, than one had counted on, or could ever be taken into account - wherever there was anything, there would be chaos and insanity to such a degree that one could never come to terms with it, and it was only a matter of time before your world, whatever you thought it to be, was undermined, if not completely overrun, by another world." [In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land]
"Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race ... Words are simply a cover-up for this conspiracy. They are the ultimate means for the cover-up, the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness - its ultimate artistic cover-up. Because of the existence of words, we think that there exists a mind, that some kind of self or soul exists. This is just another of the infinite layers of the cover-up" [The Shadow, The Darkness]There is one last thing to note - the style. Ligotti uses repetitions a lot, much like Lovecraft might use a word like 'eldritch' to make the reader feel some intensity of engagement with the story. The style is hard to pin down but it is detached and world-weary, observing, emotionless, sometimes allusive so that some horror or disturbance is seen (as it were) slightly offstage, like a twitch of a curtain or rat running across the aisle of the show. The mood is of being stuck in a grey, misty or sepia stage set or geographical location where, if you walked too far in any direction, you might fall off the ends of the known world and into nothingness. Those borders seem to shrink as the stories progress so that claustrophobia is inevitable. There is something European about the sensibility. Ligotti is not in the least optimistic like your average American. This is the world of Dr. Caligari and black and white art movies of long ago, of Kafka (one is reminded of 'In the Penal Colony') ... there are a lot of hospitals and medication, a lot of attempts to avoid reality through art, work, society and drugs that are ultimately useless. So, if you have a strong stomach for existential horror, try it.
The Cosnpiracy Against The Human Race is, on the other hand, a disappointment but perhaps not an unexpected
one. Thomas Ligotti happens to be one of the greatest exponents of
uncanny fiction, equal to his earlier masters Poe and Lovecraft - but in
small doses. His short stories are magnificently disturbing and thought-provoking but he has difficulty in developing them to novella length as we have already noted. His
art is that of the oblique story. This foray into non-fiction is little
more than an opinionated, often repetitive, often very dull, literary
rant, bad philosophy and weak literary criticism.
But perhaps it
serves a purpose because it takes existential pessimism to such
absolute extremes that, if even the argument is not accepted, it manages
to demolish all lesser forms of the death instinct on the way. The
nearest analogy I can find is a book that appeared on the shelves
briefly some years ago - a pseudo-existentialist rant by a child
murderer, Ian Brady, one of the two notorious Moors Murders. According
to the Daily Mail of January 21st, Mr. Brady (77) wished he had taken
his own life many years ago (poor bunny!) and the same negativity about
life infects this philosophical pot boiler.
The quality of
thinking is exemplified by the amount of time taken up by literary
figures and by an obscure Norwegian post-Schopenhauerian merchant of
gloom, one Peter Wessel Zapffe. The writing is uninspiring and
the 'narrative' incoherent - others have liked it less even than I have
done. There is too much repetition of both themes and language
(e.g. 'vehicular misadventure'!). At times, it appears to swerve away
from the major theme to be a disjointed essay on supernatural fiction
and on his favourite short story theme of the uncanny puppet.
Nietzsche,
the ignorant excuse for the crimes of Brady and the Nazis but actually a
force for Life and defiance of the death instinct, gets a few
dismissive paragraphs. The major existentialists ... nothing! Zapffe
was the depressive exponent of something called antinatalism which
assigned a negative valuation to the very fact of being born. The
implication is that the human race should eventually genocide itself
through non-procreation. This is a mentality that can be found
amongst a certain class of life-negative conservative thinkers whose
political heirs are the deep green planet lovers who think of us humans
are mere scum on their Gaia.
But Ligotti goes further than this -
future specicide, implicit in his callous and unemotional view of the
world, is presented as a rational claim that should have the security
state checking out anyone found marking the margins of a copy of this book in green
ink. Let us be frank. The human condition is one of considerable
variation and it is no surpise that, within that variation, there should
be highly articulate and literary extreme self-hating pessimists. This
is their book - and that of adolescents going through a temporary Goth
phase, those sinking into black and irreversible clinical depression and
those facing a death they cannot come to terms with.
If this
book gives them 'comfort' (and does not result in some dim-witted nut
trying to bring forward human extinction by a few millennia), then it is
simply (ironically) part of life's rich pattern. And the book
has its uses even to us who think its thesis to be absurd and silly -
just another literary confection by someone trying to fight above their
intellectual weight. In fact, the sheer extremity of the analysis - which
contains a legitimate position on the meaninglessness of existence which
even us optimists can share - usefully smashes to pieces lesser
pessimisms.
I especially like the knife job done on Buddhism - the most life negative of religions - because it is decisive: no sane person could be a Buddhist after this and it is confirmation that Pope John Paul II could get at least one thing right. Similarly, Ligotti is prepared to face off the nature of evolved human consciousness and be 'logical' about it. He pins down that point where choices between Life and Death are made. On the one hand, we have apparently suffered horribly because we can think yet (it would seem) thinking suggests that we can end that suffering with suicide in the short and specicide in the long term. It has to be said that his arguments for euthanasia stand up in this context. For those who really are this clinically depressed, then perhaps a voluntary removal is fair to them and the gene pool.
On the
other hand, his is still merely a stance based on chance and biochemistry. He
has no right to impute negative value to meaninglessness if someone can
accept lack of meaning and live well. For him and Zapffe, self
awareness, the Self itself and consciousness are horrors that make life
unbearable. He accuses the rest of us who do not share this view of
evasion and delusion. This is part of that fashionable philosophical negativity that insists on ego death as a good, that there is no Self really and that we have no self determination - a fashionable petit-bourgeois stance. This
is the province of a certain type of over-thinking continental
philosopher, new age users of 'mind-expanding' (ho, hum!) drugs and
people who crave non-duality as substitute for reality.
To be
fair, he gives short shrift to such fools which makes his position at
least one of some integrity but the same seed of denial of our evolved
nature is there but as Reason murdered by Reason. As he
admits, he cannot prove his point any more than we optimists can prove
ours. The stance of being depressed about meaninglessness is merely that
- a stance, a temperamental sentiment. He has his unjustified
normative stand against the alleged evasions of the masses yet seems not
to consider it possible that a person can accept the fact of
meaninglessness and still choose Life. The problem strikes me as
this. Given the condition of things on which Ligotti and I both agree, there is no
reason to choose radical pessimism if a positive optimism is equally
valid with the same shared facts. The only difference between us
is that my life and that of optimists is happy while it can be happy and
that of he and his pessimists is carried out in a blue funk until extinction.
You choose, matey! My world takes life as it is - with all its
chance and necessity - and makes the best of it, far nearer to his
praised animal state than he can manage. But he seems to want a final
Ragnarok, the destruction of creation itself.
Here, tolerance is
in danger of collapsing as much as it does with Ian Brady. If he is
serious, then he is my enemy or at least his followers may be, so
perhaps, all things being equal, Ligotti delenda est. I
would not go so far as this because his efforts are for armchair
depressives whose greatest act is to reach for the whisky bottle yet
this book should still be on the reading list of our security services. Why?
Because, as we have seen in the case of Breivik (another gloomy
Norwegian), the death instinct is a material factor in the near-infinite
variation to be found within the species and it can act. To understand where this death instinct might go in the hands of less literary hands, this book should be studied much as one would study the work of Ian Brady for the underpinnings of child murder. After
all, a cursory reading of some of the very Deep Green lunacy on the
internet or the radical reaches of occult fascism indicate levels of
pessimism that make Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna. This is
not ever to say that Mr. Ligotti means in any way to do bad things in
the world - he is probably far too pessimistic to do anything actively. He is a litterateur. Such types do nothing.
But
that there are radical pessimists who present themselves in these
terms, far beyond all previous forms of radical pessimism, unleavened by
Buddhist evasions or literary tropes, should be watched.The
book has its purpose as part of the radical liberal literature of
extremity. It will continue to be read not by philosophers but by those
interested in the psychology of weird fiction. It is a necessary
excrescence on the decadent corpse of late liberal capitalist culture,
that point where everything must be said and freedom insisted upon to
permit all to be said. I am tempted to upset liberal sensibilities by burning this book and yet there is no writer of horror literature that I admire more than Thomas Ligotti.