Lovecraft Annual 1

by S. T. Joshi (ed. )

  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.

  The clown features in the story in three ways. The first is in the title, which references the Harlequin, a character from Renaissance Italian commedia dell’arte (Webster’s). A youthful trickster, Harlequin stars in dramas that pit him against the older Pantaloon, a caricature of the staid, stolid middle class, with Harlequin’s object the hand of Columbine (Smith 12, 202). Pantaloon is mocked and humiliated at the hands of Harlequin, old age defeated by youth. Given the age difference between the narrator and Thoss, it is reasonable to associate him with Harlequin, and Thoss with Pantaloon. Such an association ironizes the references, since it is Thoss who stands triumphant at the story’s end, Pantaloon who has routed Harlequin. The only figure who might play Columbine is the young girl elected to be Mirocaw’s Winter Queen, who appears in the story just long enough to be the main course at its hideous feast. The story’s concern with influence, then, infects and perverts its first and most obvious allusion.12

  In similar fashion, the clowns who feature in the festival itself reverse conventional notions of the role. Rather than figures of fun and laughter, these clowns are sources of contempt and of terror. Two types of clowns wander the festival: the first hail from Mirocaw’s more affluent neighborhoods and wear a “costume” of “red and white with matching cap, and the face painted a noble alabaster. It almost seemed,” the narrator observes rather acidly, “to be a clownish incarnation of that white-bearded and black-booted Christmas fool” (Ligotti 27). These clowns are the targets of random abuse by the festival’s participants. This “playful roughhousing” appears “to have humiliation as its purpose” (29, 28). The clown is thus transformed from comedian and fool to scapegoat.

  The second type of clown originates in Mirocaw’s underside. “Its clothes were shabby and nondescript,” the narrator tells us,

  almost in the style of a tramp-type clown, but not humorously exaggerated enough. The face, though, made up for the lackluster costume. I had never seen such a strange conception for a clown’s countenance….The thin, smooth and pale head; the wide eyes; the oval-shaped features resembling nothing so much as the skull-faced, screaming creature in that famous painting (memory fails me). This clownish imitation rivaled the original in suggesting stricken realms of abject horror and despair: an inhuman likeness more proper to something under the earth than upon it. (30)

  The conclusion of the narrator’s description is ironically accurate, as it is these clowns who will be gathered up and transported underground, where they will transform into the great worms that will feast on the Winter Queen. While they wander its streets they are avoided scrupulously by the townspeople, each clown surrounded, as it were, by an invisible circle. These clowns transform the role from one of laughter to one of screaming, from joy to terror.

  The narrator intuits a relation between the two species of clown, noting Saturn, whose significance we discussed earlier, is also “the planetary symbol of melancholy and sterility, a clash of opposites contained within that single word” (30). The two clowns represent “a conflict within the winter festival itself,” one that “appeared to be that secret key (to the festival’s significance) which Thoss withheld in his study of the town” (30). The presence of the second type of clown seems to him “nothing less than an entirely independent festival—a festival within a festival” (32). In his journal, the narrator speculates that, “Mirocaw’s winter festival . . . appeared after the festival of those depressingly pallid clowns, in order to cover it up or mitigate its effect” (32). “The bright clowns of Mirocaw who are treated so badly,” the narrator notes, “appear to serve as substitute figures for those dark-eyed mummers of the slums. Since the latter are feared for some power or influence they possess, they may still be symbolically confronted and conquered through their counterparts, who are elected precisely for this function” (34).

  It is with these clowns that the story becomes most challenging, its allegory veering towards opacity. The temptation exists to see the two kinds of clowns as halves of a whole, as representing, say, a fundamental divide in human consciousness. What we are being given, however, is an elaborate figure for self-knowledge and the lengths to which we will go to escape it. To describe the matter spatially, the two types of clowns do not stand beside each other so much as the bright clowns struggle in vain to keep the dark clowns hidden from view. And the bright clowns have much more to hide than the dark clowns’ final metamorphosis. That horrific transformation is forecast much earlier, in Thoss’s article on the Festival, with its reference to the sect of Syrian Gnostics. Those Gnostics believed that “mankind was created by angels who were in turn created by the Supreme Unknown. The angels, however, did not possess the power to make their creation an erect being and for a time he crawled upon the earth like a worm. Eventually, the Creator remedied this grotesque state of affairs” (13). Humanity is no more than a worm that walks upright; thus, the clowns’ final transformations are actually a return to humanity’s true origins. Rather than disguising them, the dark clowns’ costumes call attention to the impoverished state of humanity. Saturnalia, with its emphasis on the throwing off of human custom, becomes the perfect time to throw off the custom of humanity.

  Such a revelation is, needless to say, too much to be borne, and so the necessity for the bright clowns. In their resemblance to Santa Claus, these clowns are associated with gift-giving, with sentiment and sentimentality, with all those shining decorations we put up against the winter darkness. Despite such associations, however, the bright clowns are the subject of abuse. It is abuse of a particularly ignorant kind: when the narrator asks a group of young men why these clowns are the recipients of such violence, none of them can tell him the reason. For them, this is the way things are. The men do note, however, that there is nothing special about the role, that any of the town’s inhabitants can and probably will play it at some time or another. If these bright clowns are supposed to oppose or counter the dark clowns, they do so in a rather unique way, one marked by its passivity. The narrator is correct in his assertion that the bright clowns are the townspeople’s effort at symbolically mastering the dark clowns; they take the violence the townspeople feel toward the other clowns onto themselves. Since the dark clowns represent what it fundamentally means to be human, though, the violence the townspeople project against them is actually violence against themselves, against the horror that is human nature. Thus, the significance of the young men’s remark about the universal availability of the bright clowns’ role: anyone can assume it because everyone has something to hide. Since the knowledge with which this displacement deals is intolerable, the ritual is wrapped in an ignorance one suspects to be very deliberate.

  Needless to say, such a view of human nature is one of the hallmarks of the visionary horror tradition with Ligotti has aligned himself, especially of Lovecraft’s work. Indeed, it is in this regard that “The Last Feast of Harlequin” shows most strikingly the influence of Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth.” In a sense, Ligotti goes Lovecraft one better: when Lovecraft’s narrator discovers the horror at the root of his existence, it is that he is a human-monster hybrid; Ligotti’s narrator discovers horror in his humanity alone.

/>   The presence of the two clowns, then, is an effort to escape identity. Through their association with human origins, the dark clowns represent the awful past that continues to live amongst us; that is us, really. In this regard, they may be seen as the background against which Thoss has his being. Thoss, of course, does not flee that past, but embraces it, and in so doing rises to master it. It is tempting to see the dark clowns as symbols of the horror writer, who is in some sense more in tune with the darker part of humanity than others. This is especially true of the horror writers to whom Ligotti referred above, as well as of those others for whom he has expressed his admiration, a list that includes “Aloysius Bertrand . . . Georg Trakl and Bruno Schultz . . . Samuel Beckett, Dino Buzzati, and Jorge Luis Borges” (Schweitzer 69). If such is the case, though, the allegory becomes somewhat hard to follow. What are we to make of the bright clowns? Do we take them to be other writers in general? And if so, then why are they visited with so much abuse by their fellows? As a rule, we do not witness such displacement in the pages of the New York Review of Books. I must admit the urge to identify the bright clowns with those popular(ist) writers of horror fiction Ligotti parodies in “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” (1985). In such a configuring, the bright clowns would suffer for trying to make more agreeable what cannot be made so. Such an interpretation verges on the needlessly obscure itself, however, and so is unlikely. It seems simpler to say that the two kinds of clowns represent the horror that is our nature and our past, which continues to walk among us even as we try to cover it over. The clowns thus give the story’s concern with influence an added layer of resonance.

  The third and final way in which clowns function in “The Last Feast of Harlequin” centers on the narrator. As he tells us early on, he is an amateur clown himself, and part of his reason for attending the Mirocaw Festival is so that he can break out his own clown makeup and participate in the Festival from, as it were, the inside out (Ligotti 3–4). In so doing he imitates Dr. Thoss, who is famous for researching his subjects in a similar manner (including, we are told, an insane asylum in Massachusetts: another nod to Lovecraft [11]). Near the story’s end, this leads to the narrator’s making himself up as one of the dark clowns, a richly ironic action. Where the narrator believes he is disguising himself, he is, as we have seen, only revealing his true, loathsome humanity: paradoxically, by putting on his white clown makeup, the narrator discloses his essential self. He does not disguise himself from Dr. Thoss, as Thoss’s climactic pronouncement about him reveals. His imitation of his predecessor fails. If the clown is a kind of fool, then the narrator succeeds in achieving the role, but, needless to say, in a way he did not anticipate. The joke is on him.

  The narrator’s clown makeup figures in one of the more important moments in the story, when he returns to his hotel room to find its door open and a riddle written across his mirror in his makeup pencil: “What buries itself before it is dead?” (36). In the context of the story, the answer seems obvious: the worm. There is another answer open to us, however, and that is indicated by the surface on which the riddle is written, by the mirror: the narrator himself. In descending under the earth he will bury himself alive literally, and in his role as representative of the young writer he buries himself alive by wrestling with the influence of his predecessor. The image of the riddle written on the mirror is key to the story: it recalls the end of Lovecraft’s “Outsider” (1921), in which the mirror is essential to revealing that narrator’s identity. This mirror serves a similar function, but with a difference: there is writing on it. That writing both asks a question and, through what Jacques Derrida calls its subjectile, the substance on which the question is written, provides its own implicit answer (Derrida 61). Writing is thus what causes the self to question itself, unpleasantly at that, and it is what points to that question’s answer. We should add that the riddle seems most likely to have been scrawled on the mirror by none other than Raymond Thoss. So, following this scene, when the narrator makes himself up as a clown, using that same makeup pencil on himself, there is a sense in which he is disguising himself with Thoss’s medium, with his language. In this regard, it is no wonder that Thoss should be able to recognize the narrator, as he is wearing, as it were, Thoss’s words, making the narrator’s disguise still more ironic. The story’s third and final use of the clown returns us to influence, giving us a striking and subtle figure for it in the riddle written on the mirror.13

  It is clear, then, that the clowns in “The Last Feast of Harlequin” are more than ornament, more than mere caprice on Ligotti’s part. Their presence in the story adds depth and complexity to its concern with influence; indeed, it is through the clowns that Ligotti achieves many of his most memorable tropes for the presence and pressure of the past, that is allegory achieves some of its most memorable moments.

  With “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” Thomas Ligotti has succeeded in writing a story that transforms a traditional Gothic plot form, the revenge of the past, into a figure for the writing process. Given more time and space, we could consider the myriad of ways the other stories in Grimscribe approach the same theme. In particular, we might examine “Nethescurial” (1991), in which Ligotti engages and rewrites Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” (1926) as part of his continuing exploration of the Providence writer’s influence. Even without such additional consideration, though, Ligotti’s profound engagement with not just the tradition of horror fiction, but with what it means to be so engaged, is obvious. Because of its use of non-realistic images and plots, fantastic fiction in general is already a step closer to romance and allegory, to the metafictional, than most genres. While a few horror writers have recognized this proximity and explored it, in many ways it remains undiscovered country.14 With his fiction, Thomas Ligotti joins the company of the new cartographers of horror, mapping the genre’s blank spaces with each story he writes.

  Works Cited

  Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

  Campbell, Ramsey. Midnight Sun. New York: Tor, 1991.

  Derrida, Jacques. “To Unsense the Subjectile.” In The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Trans. M. A. Caws. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. 60–157.

  Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Boston: Little, Brown, 1942.

  Joshi, S. T. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

  ———. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. 1996. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press, 1999.

  ———. “Thomas Ligotti: The Escape from Life.” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 12 (Spring 1993): 30–36.

  Ligotti, Thomas. Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. New York: Jove, 1991.

  Lovecraft, H. P. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin 1999.

  Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: New American Library, 1996.

  Price, Robert M. “Thomas Ligotti’s Gnostic Quest.” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 9 (Spring 1991): 27–31.

  Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of the Supernatural. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, 1994.

  Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. New York: Pocket Books, 1976.

  Smith, Winifred. The Commedia dell’Arte. New York: Arno Press, 1964.

  Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language.

  Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

  * * *

  This essay is forthcoming in the second edition of The Thomas Ligotti Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (Wildside Press).

  1. Ligotti’s short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) falls under the designation of the suspense novel.

  2. Indeed, the importance of treating Grimscribe as a whole is underscored by Ligotti’s including
the entire collection in his 1996 retrospective, The Nightmare Factory (although, interestingly, without its Introduction).

  3. Ligotti appears to find the form of the short story cycle a congenial one, as witnessed by his continuing use of it in such series as In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (1997) and My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002).

  4. I do believe, however, that given his day job doing “editorial work” for the “literary criticism division” of Gale Research, there is a good chance Ligotti would have been exposed to Bloom’s ideas at greater length and depth than most readers (Schweitzer 70). My argument does not hinge on this being the case, however.

  5. I must note here a faint echo of Hamlet’s remarks concerning the “supper” where Polonius does not eat “but where he is eaten” by “a certain convocation of politic worms” (Shakespeare 4.3.20–21). I am unsure what to make of such resonance, but suspect it connects to Shakespeare’s play’s concern with generational struggle. The narrator of Liggoti’s story would figure as a kind of Hamlet manqué.

  6. There is a difference, of course between the order in which we as readers experience these events and the order in which the characters do so. Nonetheless, the reference to the second title causes us to revisit and revise our understanding of the first, making it seem to us as if we had encountered the first reference secondly.

  7. There is more to be done with this allusion; indeed, an essay might be devoted to exploring the specific connections between “The Last Feast of Harlequin” and “The Conqueror Worm.” I note here that Poe’s poem makes reference to a “play,” to “mimes,” and of course to the eponymous conquering worm (Poe 88–89). The poem presents another great production that ends in horror; it also presents the image of God being played by a mime.