Lovecraft Annual, No. 1

by S. T. Joshi (ed. )

  Bloom presents influence, and literature in general, as a claustrophobic, self-referential affair. His theories remain controversial, and I do not want to suggest that we accept them wholeheartedly.4 They are useful to us for the model of authorial relations they establish, a particularly Gothic model in which, to paraphrase Gothic scholar Judith Wilt, enjoyment is the province of the old, suffering that of the young (Wilt 29). Every writer, Bloom argues, is under threat from those who came before; at the beginning of her/his career, every writer is really little more than a mask for her/his predecessor(s). In Bloom’s formulation, the danger for a writer is that s/he will remain such a mask, never achieve any kind of identity (however circumscribed such an identity may, in the end, be). For anyone, the thought of being nothing but the mouth for someone else’s speech would be horrifying; for the writer, whose identity is founded in the expression of her/his self in the creative act, it is an especially terrible prospect. It is this fear that drives “The Last Feast of Harlequin.”

  The story relates the quest of an unnamed, first-person narrator to discover the inner workings of the Winter Festival of the Midwestern town of Mirocaw. An anthropologist with a particular interest in the figure of the clown, the narrator is intrigued to discover that the town and its festival were the subject of a scholarly article by his old teacher, Dr. Raymond Thoss. Attending the festival himself, the narrator is intrigued to notice the presence of two types of clowns among the entertainers. The first are the subject of acts of spontaneous abuse by the festival’s participants. The second, who all appear to hail from the poorer part of town, inspire the opposite effect: the onlookers conspicuously avoid them. Disguising himself as one of the second group of clowns, the narrator travels with a group of them by truck to a spot outside the town proper, where they leave the truck to descend a tunnel winding deep under the earth. At the tunnel’s end is a great cavern, where the narrator discovers his old instructor, Dr. Thoss, presiding over a ritual that transforms the clowns into giant worms that fall on and devour the girl chosen to be the Festival’s Winter Queen. Horrified, the narrator flees, to be pursued by Thoss’s echoing remark that, “He is one of us. He has always been one of us” (Ligotti 48).

  As both Robert Price and S. T. Joshi have pointed out, Ligotti’s story draws on two stories by Lovecraft: “The Festival” (1923) and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) (Price 29; Joshi, “Escape” 33). Its connections to “The Festival” are particularly strong. Lovecraft’s story is also a first-person narrative related by a nameless young man who returns to his ancestral home to be part of its Yuletide festival. His activities include a descent under the earth with a man who is probably his many-times-great-grandfather (or what used to be him, anyway), and a confrontation with monstrous creatures and a monstrous ceremony. The story ends with a worm-ridden quotation from the notorious Necronomicon: “For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl” (Lovecraft 118). “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” then, can be read as Ligotti’s updating of the earlier story.5

  The horror of Ligotti’s narrative, however, runs deeper, to a vision of the relationship between generations, between the past and the present, old and young; with those who have come before us— teachers, mentors, models, parents—presented as at best impotent and at worst actively malevolent. In addition to its dedication, there are three principle features of the story that indicate its concern with influence, Lovecraft’s in particular. They are the descriptions of Mirocaw’s landscape, its townspeople, and of Dr. Thoss. Taken together, they lead us to what waits beneath the story’s skin.

  Our first clue to the story’s allegorical concerns comes long before we have reached its dedication, in its imagery. The narrator describes the town’s “irregular topography,” and comments on the effect it has on his perception of Mirocaw:

  Behind some of the old stores in the business district, steeply roofed houses had been erected on a sudden incline, their peaks appearing at an extraordinary elevation above the lower buildings. And because the foundations of these houses could not be glimpsed, they conveyed the illusion of being either precariously suspended in air, threatening to topple down, or else constructed with an unnatural loftiness in relation to their width and mass. This situation also created a weird distortion of perspective. The two levels of structures overlapped each other without giving a sense of depth, so that the houses, because of their higher elevation and nearness to the foreground buildings, did not appear diminished in size as background objects should. Consequently, a look of flatness, as in a photograph, predominated in this area. (Ligotti 5–6)

  What should be reduced in perspective, the houses behind, is not; rather, it looms over what is in front of it. The houses seem lofty, without foundation, sinister castles in the air. So, too, does the past loom over the present in the story; specifically, so does the narrator’s old teacher overshadow him. This overshadowing defeats depth, frustrating perspective in both a literal and figurative sense, giving the past more significance than it should have. To readers familiar with Lovecraft’s efforts at representing strange and distorted landscapes in his fiction, the passage is clearly Ligotti’s attempt to mine the same vein. The passage is noteworthy because it symbolizes its own status: it bears the influence of an earlier writer while giving us a trope for that same influence. Later, the narrator will write, “Mirocaw has another coldness within its cold. Another set of buildings and streets that exists behind the visible town’s façade like a world of disgraceful back alleys” (23). This impression of more lurking behind the surface of things resonates with the earlier description, transforming the tangible houses leaning over the shops into something intangible, something that cannot be seen yet whose presence can be felt lurking behind everything. The narrator draws an x across the page in an effort to repress such thoughts, but, in the end, they can not be denied. X marks the spot.

  Our second indication of the story’s subtext comes in the description of the town’s inhabitants. The characterization of Mirocaw’s population as “solidly midwestern-American, the probable descendents in a direct line from some enterprising pack of New Englanders of the last century,” as well as the suggestion that there might be a “Middle Eastern community” in the town, also point in Lovecraft’s direction (9). The great majority of Lovecraft’s stories are set, of course, in New England, so for Ligotti to stock his town with transplanted Yankees is for him to suggest that he is re-imagining the older writer’s concerns in a new locale. Ligotti follows up this reference to New England with another, even more provocative one, which occurs while the narrator is summarizing an article Dr. Thoss published on the Mirocaw festival. It is the festival’s “link to New England that nourished Thoss’s speculations. He wrote of this patch of geography as if it were an acceptable place to end the search. For him, the very words ‘New England’ seemed to be stripped of all traditional connotations and had come to imply nothing less than a gateway to all lands, both known and suspected, and even to ages beyond the civilized history of the region” (16). The narrator admits he can “somewhat understand this sentimental exaggeration” due to his own acquaintance with the region (16). “There are,” he declares, “places that seem archaic beyond chronological measure, appearing to transcend relative standards of time and achieving a kind of absolute antiquity which cannot be logically fathomed” (16–17). If we were to change the name in this passage from Thoss to Lovecraft, we might be reading a slightly overwritten piece of literary criticism. The passage distills Lovecraft’s sense of place, his use of the deus loci. That sense of place supercharges certain areas with meaning because of their ability to stir the imagination; in this regard, there are interesting connections to be m
ade to Faulkner and Lawrence’s uses of the idea. As a rule, it is not a technique Ligotti himself particularly emulates, either in this story or others. He favors strange and alien landscapes that do not evince the added qualities of antiquity and particularity that so appealed to Lovecraft. It is possible to locate the originals for Arkham and Innsmouth; I am not sure it would be possible for us to do the same for Mirocaw (in fact, I rather doubt it). The rituals that are celebrated in “The Last Feast of Harlequin” are old, but the place where they are observed is not. There is an implicit contrast between Lovecraftian New England, which in ironic contradiction of its name is soaked in history, and the story’s Midwest, whose history lies more lightly upon it. Still, if Ligotti does not employ his own sense of place in the story, he succeeds in evoking Lovecraft’s.

  In similar fashion, the suggestion that the horrors under Mirocaw have a connection to the Levant (a connection bolstered by reference to “a sect of Syrian Gnostics” [12]) references Lovecraft, who in such figures as the notorious Abdul Alhazred locates the sources of his horrors in the exotic other. As is the case with his use of sense of place in the story, Ligotti does not develop his references to the exotic; again, it is as if they are more significant for the way they bring Lovecraft into the story.

  With the figure of Dr. Raymond Thoss, Ligotti gives us his most complex figure for influence. As we have glimpsed already, Thoss emerges as the story’s substitute for Lovecraft, and for the more general past leaning over the story’s present. Thoss is associated with writing, and that connection runs deep. He is introduced to the story through reference to his article on the Mirocaw festival, “The Last Feast of Harlequin.” The story we are reading is thus the second document both to bear its title and treat its subject.6 Thoss is brought into the story, then, as the one who was there first, the man the narrator is trying to emulate. An anecdote the narrator relates indexes the difficulty, if not outright impossibility, of ever bettering Thoss: during one of Thoss’s lectures, the narrator offered a differing interpretation of the material at hand—in this case, the “tribal clowns of the Hopi Indians”—and sought to bolster his argument through his “personal experience as an amateur clown” (11). In response to this challenge, Thoss revealed “that he had actually acted the role of one of these masked tribal fools and had celebrated with them the dance of the kachinas” (11). Not only has Thoss been there first, he has had a fuller, more authentic experience while he was.

  Thoss’s article makes two significant allusions. The first is to Poe’s poem “The Conqueror Worm,” a loaded reference. Most obviously, it foreshadows the story’s climax, when the symbol of the conquering worm is made hideous reality. It invokes Lovecraft in two ways: in the more general sense of his well-known fondness for and esteem of Poe, and in the more specific sense of the ending of “The Festival,” which might be taken as another gloss on the notion of the conquering worm. Finally, naming Poe brings him into the story as another statue in Ligotti’s gallery of influences, albeit one who stands a bit farther in the distance. Poe is an influence who is reached, as it were, through Lovecraft.7

  The article’s second significant allusion is to Roman god Saturn, who enters the story through reference to “the modern Christmas celebration, which of course descends from the Roman Saturnalia,” as well as to that “early sect of the Syrian Gnostics” who “called themselves ‘Saturnians’” (12–13). Given the story’s festival setting, the invocation of Saturn and his principle celebration is not surprising: Saturnalia was a time of unrestrained festivity, when full license was given to its revelers, so allusion to it helps to present the Mirocaw festival as one in which similar license is granted, to perform acts that would have made even the Romans blanch (Webster’s). It is interesting to note that when Christmas is named, it is brought into the story as another example if influence, something else whose identity is not fully its own. The more significant sense of the reference, though, is to Saturn himself, whom the Romans identified with the Greek Chronos. Saturn/Chronos was the father of Jupiter/Zeus, and, as such, the god who devoured his own children for fear that one of them was going to overthrow him (Hamilton 80–81). In the end, this was exactly what happened to him. He is thus a symbol of the past, and of the devouring past in particular, the past that eats its own get in an attempt to forestall the future. Saturn’s role as evil father intersects nicely with Bloom’s Oedipal model of literary influence: he is the Freudian father, all his metaphoric terror made literal. As such, he is the prefect god to preside over the telling of this story.

  The style of Thoss’s article, like that of the lectures the narrator once attended, is described as marked by “its author’s characteristic and often strange obscurities,” and by “the somber rhythmic movements of his prose and . . . some gloomy references he occasionally called upon” (Ligotti 12). As was the case with the evocation of Thoss’s sense of place, change the name in this quotation to Lovecraft and we might be reading a somewhat vague extract from a critical article. As is the case with Lovecraft’s work, Thoss’s article ultimately gives the impression that he “knew more than he disclosed” (13).8 Thoss always knows more, occupies a position to which the narrator may aspire, but never reach. The idea of hidden knowledge is, of course one of the hallmarks of horror fiction. The narrator’s sense of this hidden knowledge contributes to his decision to attend Mirocaw’s Festival and discover its secrets. What he discovers, beyond the horrors under the earth, is that Thoss still knows more. Indeed, Thoss’s climactic recognition and description of the narrator at the story’s end demonstrate the reach of his knowledge.

  It is during that climactic vision of Thoss that the narrator makes his most telling remarks regarding Thoss’s influence over and importance to him. Looking at Thoss dressed in his white ceremonial robe with its “abysmal folds,” the narrator asks, “Had I really come to challenge such a formidable figure?” (42). He proceeds, “The name by which I knew him seemed itself insufficient to designate one of his stature. Rather I should name him by his other incarnations: god of all wisdom, scribe of all sacred books, father of all magicians, thrice great and more—rather, I should call him Thoth” (42). Thoth was the god associated with the very invention of writing. To re-name your professor/predecessor after such a deity is to make a dramatic statement about his relation to the written word, namely, that he made it, that he is its point of origin.9 To do so is to envision his influence on you as absolute, overpowering, and irresistible. At the crucial moment, the narrator loses his Oedipal struggle; loses it, really, before he even attempts it. His reference to the “abysmal folds” of Thoss’s robe indexes the limitless depths of the older man’s knowledge, as well as the professor’s knowledge of the limitless depths.

  It is for this reason that I disagree with Robert Price’s assertion that “[i]t is absolutely clear that the narrator of ‘The Last Feast of Harlequin’ is his mentor Raymond Thoss at a later time, simply a recurrence of the same note in a later symphony” (Price 30). Granted, it is possible to take the narrator’s descent under the earth as a symbolic journey down into his own subconscious. What he finds there, however, is not himself, but another. Price suggests that this other represents a self sundered from itself by a “psychotic break,” but this does not fit with what we have seen of the story (30). It makes more sense to say that the narrator discovers his self as little more than the mask for another self, which will wear him as a hand wears a glove.

  This discovery returns us, once more, to Bloom’s notions of influence (not that they have been that far). Individual will plays an important part in Bloom’s theory, since it is only through the exercise of such will that the young writer can struggle with the older. For Ligotti, however, will is not the province of the narrator; indeed, rarely is it the province of any of his narrators. Rather, in best Gothic fashion, will in Ligotti’s work is reserved mostly for the old.10 The best the young can do is flee, as the narrator does at the story’s end. Even then, there are still Thoss’s words, the wo
rds of his teacher, his predecessor. With them, Thoss claims the narrator as his own. In terms of the allegorical subtext we have been exploring, the narrator is marked as a horror writer. In such an identity, he will always be under his old teacher’s sway, little more than a mouth for someone else’s voice. The story mentions Gnosticism, and Robert Price has considered some of the more cosmic implications of that reference (28–29). He does not mention, however, that Gnosticism also involves knowledge of the self, the journey into the self.11 S. T. Joshi has praised the story for its evocation of ancient and loathsome rituals that have survived into the present (Joshi, “Escape” 35). I would suggest that the story’s deeper horror lies in its plumbing of the depths of the self only to discover it as no more than a vessel whereby another writer continues to work out his strange obsessions, a space wherein the loathsome rituals of someone else’s creativity are made manifest.

  Thus far, we have kept to those aspects of “The Last Feast of Harlequin” that most clearly demonstrate its allegorical subtext, its concern with influence, Lovecraft’s in particular. As we conclude our discussion of the story, and make our way back to Grimscribe as a whole, there is one more feature that requires our attention, and that is the story’s use of the clown. With this figure, Ligotti appears to depart most strikingly from Lovecraft. Early in the story, the narrator tells us that he has authored an article on “The Clown Figure in American Media,” which has been published in the Journal of Popular Culture (Ligotti 3). By the story’s end, he has come to understand the figure of the clown in a new, much less pleasant way, as have we along with him. Given the story’s extensive exploration of influence, it is reasonable to suppose that the clown has some relation to that concern.