Lovecraft Annual 1
Page 16
IV. Conclusion: The Enchanting Nightmare
Having gone on at such length about Ligotti’s “appropriation” of Lovecraft, let me now hasten to add that I do not consider his subjective attitude to be at all inappropriate. Far from being a detriment, it is the proper attitude for any artist who comes under the sway of a powerful, life-changing forebear. Indeed, it recalls the response of Lovecraft himself to the writings of Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft first read Dunsany’s A Dreamer’s Tales in 1919, and later said the first paragraph had “arrested me as with an electrick shock, & I had not read two pages before I became a Dunsany devotee for life” (SL 2.328). He felt that Dunsany was saying everything that he, Lovecraft, had hitherto wished to say as an author, and four years later he still claimed a thorough sense of identification with the man: “Dunsany is myself. . . . His cosmic realm is the realm in which I live; his distant, emotionless vistas of the beauty of moonlight on quaint and ancient roofs are the vistas I know and cherish” (SL 1.234). Far from injuring or cheapening his work, Lovecraft’s love affair with Dunsany served as a catalyst for the crystallization of thoughts, emotions, and a narrative style that were already imminent in his own writing. His felt identification with the man acted as a midwife for his own birth into creative maturity.
I cannot think but that Ligotti’s position with regard to Lovecraft is analogous. Intellectually, he probably has as balanced an understanding of Lovecraft as any scholar, but this necessarily takes a second place to his emotional response. As an artist, his primary calling is not to pursue the strict scholarly accuracy of a Joshi, but to bear witness to what he sees, feels, and knows within the depths of his being. And even though his understanding of Lovecraft is intensely subjective, it is also for that very reason all the more potent. In an artistic or “spiritual” sense, it may even be more accurate than Joshi’s, the evidence of which can be seen in the fact, with which we commenced this exploration, that while Ligotti’s stories “only resemble Lovecraft’s in the most tenuous manner,” they almost invariably “evoke Lovecraft’s shade” in the minds of his readers. “I hope my stories are in the Lovecraftian tradition,” he has said, “in that they may evoke a sense of terror whose source is something nightmarishly unreal, the implications of which are disturbingly weird and, in the magical sense, charming” (Shawn Ramsey, “A Graveside Chat: Interview with Thomas Ligotti,” 1989, quoted in Joshi 2003, 142). He has also said, “In my eyes, Lovecraft dreamed the great dream of supernatural literature—to convey with the greatest possible intensity a vision of the universe as a kind of enchanting nightmare (Ford 32). Whether or not he is technically accurate in this assessment of the deep nature of Lovecraft’s artistic vision—and in this particular case I think he is dead-on—his belief that this was Lovecraft’s dream has led him to produce a priceless body of weird fiction. One likes to think that Lovecraft himself would have been deeply pleased by this showing from his most worthy disciple.
Works Cited
Angerhuber, E. M., and Thomas Wagner. “Disillusionment Can Be Glamorous: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti.” In The Thomas Ligotti Reader, ed. Darrell Schweitzer. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003. 53–71. Also at The Art of Grimscribe, January 2001.
Ayad, Neddal. “Literature Is Entertainment or It Is Nothing: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti.” Fantastic Metropolis (31 October 2004).
Bee, Robert. “An Interview with Thomas Ligotti.” Thomas Ligotti Online.
Bryant, Ed (and others). “Transcript of Chat with Thomas Ligotti on December 3, 1998.”
Cardin, Matt. “Thomas Ligotti’s Career of Nightmares.” In The Thomas Ligotti Reader, ed. Darrell Schweitzer. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003. 12–22. Also at The Art of Grimscribe
Ford, Carl. “Notes on the Writing of Horror: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti.” Dagon Nos. 22/23 (September–December 1988): 30–35.
Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996.
———. “H.P. Lovecraft.” The Scriptorium, at The Modern Word. Revised 1 June 2000.
———. “Ligotti in Triplicate” [review of My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror by Thomas Ligotti]. Necropsy: The Review of Horror Fiction Vol. VI (Summer 2002).
———. “Thomas Ligotti: The Escape from Life.” In The Thomas Ligotti Reader, ed. Darrell Schweitzer. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003. 139–53. Originally published in Studies in Weird Fiction No. 12 (Spring 1993) and rpt. in The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.
Ligotti, Thomas. The Conspiracy against the Human Race. Pre-publication manuscript. Forthcoming from Mythos Books, Poplar Bluff, MO.
———. “The Dark Beauty of Unheard-of Horrors.” In The Thomas Ligotti Reader, ed. Darrell Schweitzer. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003. 78–84. Originally published in Tekeli-li! No. 4 (Winter/Spring 1992).
———. Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. New York: Jove Books, 1994 (1991). [Abbreviated in the text as G.]
———. The Nightmare Factory. New York: Carroll & Graff Publishers, 1996. [Abbreviated in the text as NF.]
———. Noctuary. New York: Carroll & Graff Publishers, 1995 (1994). [Abbreviated in the text as N.]
———. Songs of a Dead Dreamer. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989. [Abbreviated in the text as SDD.]
Padgett, Jonathan. “Thomas Ligotti FAQ.”
Paul, R. F., and Keith Schurholz. “Triangulating the Daemon: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti.” Esoterra No. 8 (Winter/Spring 1999): 14–21. Also at Thomas Ligotti Online.
Schweitzer, Darrell. “Weird Tales Talks with Thomas Ligotti.” In The Thomas Ligotti Reader, ed. Darrell Schweitzer. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003. 23–31. Originally published in Weird Tales No. 303 (Winter 1991/92).
Wilbanks, David. “10 Questions for Thomas Ligotti.” Page Horrific, February 2004.
* * *
1. More recently, Joshi has spoken positively of the increased stylistic realism evident in Ligotti’s My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002). In this short novel, Joshi says, “Ligotti has tempered what in the past might have been regarded as his excessively tortured prose, and has instead evolved a smoothly flowing narrative style that, if perhaps a bit more spartan in its exotic metaphors than before, is nonetheless capable of powerful emotive effects” (Joshi 2003). The change Joshi notes is indeed prominent in My Work Is Not Yet Done, and is somewhat surprising in light of Ligotti’s longstanding, self-avowed shunning of realism in favor of surrealism and oneiricism—a fact that Joshi also notes. But we may observe that Ligotti has clearly not abandoned his commitment to warped and fantastical narrative and prose styles, as evidenced by such relatively recent stories as “Our Temporary Supervisor” (2001), “My Case for Retributive Action” (2001), and “The Town Manager” (2003). Another tale, “Purity” (2003), represents an interesting hybrid of Ligotti’s typically
oneiric thematic content, couched in a realistic narrative style reminiscent of the one he employed in My Work Is Not Yet Done.
2. An important aspect of Ligotti’s psychological preparation for becoming a horror writer that I have not yet mentioned in this paper is his Roman Catholic upbringing, which he himself has cited as an important influence: “I was a Catholic until I was eighteen years old, when I unloaded all of the doctrines, but almost none of the fearful superstition, of a gothically devout childhood and youth” (Schweitzer 29).
3. Consider, for example, the already-quoted passage from Ligotti’s “The Tsalal” with the following passage from Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: “Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place” (MM 306). The parallels and divergences are equally instructive. Both passages present protagonists who are in the act of surveying and responding to moody architectural scenes. Both are written from the intensity of the respective authors’ genuine emotional and artistic visions. But what a titanic difference there is between their respective tones and intents! The very magnitude of the difference suggests a fundamental disparity between the respective metaphysical absolutes which the authors are straining to conceive.
4. “This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation [of fictional horror]: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and—like it or not—peculiar set of experiences to appreciate” (NF xxi).
5. For a general elucidation of this point, see Ligotti’s words in The Conspiracy against the Human Race, in the section titled “Happiness,” where he points out that even Lovecraft, who in his letters wrote about his nervous breakdowns and other personal troubles, as well as about the ultimate futility and miserableness of existence in general, “more often . . . wrote about what a fine time he had on a given day or expatiated on the joys of his travels around the United States and Canada or simply joked around with a correspondent about a wide range of subjects in which he was well-studied.” Ligotti closes the section by asserting that “the very idea of happiness [is] an unconscionable delusion conceived by fools or a deplorable rationalization dreamed up by swine.” Obviously, he does not think Lovecraft was a fool or a swine, so the implication is that Lovecraft was merely taking a break, as it were, from his real concerns—i.e., he was being just another “goof and sucker”—whenever he distracted himself from the final truth of perpetual, horrified misery.
Thomas Ligotti’s Metafictional Mapping:
The Allegory of “The Last Feast of Harlequin”
* * *
John Langan
For Fiona, Without Whom . . .
Up to now, Thomas Ligotti has achieved his considerable success writing horror fiction through the media of the short story and novella. Nor does he seem likely to write anything else, having expressed his doubts about his ability to write a successful horror novel in an interview. “I find this form too difficult for me,” Ligotti has said, attributing the difficulty to the “realist novel . . . [making] . . . certain demands that are entirely alien to supernatural literature as I understand its aims and possibilities” (quoted in Joshi, Modern 8). “The best” Ligotti believes he could achieve with the novel “would be to produce a mystery or suspense narrative with a supernatural plot motive. But,” Ligotti adds, “such a work bears little resemblance to the masterpieces of the form that it’s been my ambition to ape” (Modern 8).1 These masterpieces include “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Willows,” “The White People,” and “The Colour out of Space” (Modern 8), all examples of what Ramsey Campbell has termed “the tradition of visionary horror fiction” (Campbell vii).
Leaving aside the question of whether Ligotti’s observations are accurate (no small matter, given his position within the horror genre), we come to his 1991 collection Grimscribe, which seems to me his most serious attempt so far to work at the very length he writes of in his remarks above. Grimscribe, I contend, represents Ligotti’s effort to solve the problem of book-length horror in a way that is faithful to his conception of the genre. He does so by employing the short-story cycle, a group of stories held together through use of common characters and/or themes. He thus transforms what might otherwise be little more than a grouping of thirteen interesting stories into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.2 Grimscribe is not the first attempt by a horror writer to employ the short story cycle: such works as Skipp and Spector’s Dead Lines (1988) and Clegg’s Nightmare Chronicles (1999) have preceded it, but it is among the most effective. Where Dead Lines and The Nightmare Chronicles try to unify their various stories by placing them within a framing narrative to which they have no real link, Ligotti makes the telling of the stories in his collection the central interest. He does so principally through his Introduction. In the Introduction, an unnamed narrator meditates on the identity of a being whose name is a mystery to him but whose “voice” he has always known (Ligotti ix). This voice he recognizes “even if it sounds like many different voices . . . because it is always speaking of terrible secrets. It speaks of the most grotesque mysteries and encounters, sometimes with despair, sometimes with delight, and sometimes with a voice not possible to define” (ix–x). “Everyone needs a name,” the narrator declares, and then, in a clever rhetorical twist, asks, “What can we say is the name of everyone?” (x). In reply to his own question, the narrator declares, “Our name is Grimscribe,” adding, “This is our voice” (x).
Grimscribe’s Introduction makes the collection into something more: not the broken-backed novels of In Our Time and Go Down, Moses, perhaps, but a work with greater unity than a simple sampling of stories.3 The stylistic congruences that mark the contents of any story collection as the work of a single author here become evidence of the great voice of Grimscribe speaking with a multiplicity of tongues. In a sense, Grimscribe is Ligotti’s aggrandizing and mythologizing himself as a writer, since he is the voice behind all the voices, the face behind all the masks. At the same time, the Introduction suggests that Ligotti himself may be no more than another role Grimscribe is playing. Thus Grimscribe jeopardizes Ligotti’s own identity as a writer, as an individual author.
Indeed, the collection returns time and again to questions of authority and identity. Its stories are full of older characters who relentlessly threaten and betray their younger charges. This is perhaps most dramatically the case in “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” which dramatizes such themes more strikingly than any other story in the book. The first and longest story in Grimscribe, its concerns continue to resonate throughout the tales that follow it, making it a particularly fitting story on which to focus our discussion. S. T. Joshi has remarked on Ligotti’s facility for writing stories that “metafictionally enunciate” his concerns, and “The Last Feast of Harlequin” confirms this insight (Joshi, “Escape” 32). As Robert Scholes’s Fabulation and Metafiction shows us, however, there are different varieties of metafiction, and it will help our understanding of Ligotti’s work if we can identify the kind of metafictional frame around which he constructs his story (Scholes 1–4). In “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” the frame Ligotti
employs is that of allegory. It is possible to read the story with no awareness of the subtext boiling beneath its surface and enjoy it greatly. A series of clues placed throughout the story, however, point to its subterranean concerns. The story encodes the general problem of the influence of the past, and the more specific dilemma of literary influence, particularly that of H. P. Lovecraft. As such, the story represents Ligotti’s attempt to engage Lovecraft’s continuing presence in the horror genre in a way that goes beyond mere imitation or pastiche. Rather than simply adopting or adapting Lovecraft’s themes, locations, or objects, Ligotti writes about the actual experience of influence itself. In this way, he succeeds admirably in doing something new with Lovecraft’s continuing presence in the horror genre.
The most obvious signpost pointing us beneath the story’s surface is its dedication, “To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft,” which, interestingly, is not listed until its very end, as if it were the story’s true conclusion (Ligotti 48). With “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” Ligotti places himself in a tradition that stretches back to Poe, taking in Blackwood and Machen on the way, with Lovecraft very much at its center. Such affiliation is fraught with peril. In positioning yourself within a tradition, there is the danger that it will overwhelm you, that your new family will swallow you whole, that you will become just another face in the family portrait hanging over the fireplace, your own identity as a writer lost in the sepia crowd.
The view of literary relations I invoke here is a more sinister one than we might be used to. In this regard, I myself am influenced by the ideas of Harold Bloom. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom formulates the view of literary influence as anything but benign. As it were, the younger writer does not receive the torch of literary greatness from her/his predecessor, to pass it on in turn to her/his descendent; rather, Bloom contends, influence has more in common with the Freudian Oedipus Complex (Bloom 8). Faced with a great predecessor, the younger writer feels a sense of her/his own belatedness, that s/he is too late, that the older writer has been there first, done that first, written what could be written as well as was possible (6). The only course available to the younger writer is one of struggle with the older writer’s priority. This struggle does not take the younger writer away from the predecessor’s influence; instead, the younger writer, if s/he is sufficiently strong, ends up writing a kind of variation on a theme, plunging into the very heart of the older writer’s work and rewriting it (15–16). At best, the younger writer may be able to produce the illusion in the reader that the lines of influence flow backwards, that s/he is in fact the one doing the influencing, which is to say, through deep engagement with the predecessor’s work, the younger writer may cause us to see it in a new way (16).