The Dollcraft of Thomas Ligotti (Part 2)

posted on 2/12/2019 by the Salt City Sinner

I hope that, at some point, Thomas Ligotti’s literary interest in dolls and manikins has extended to Matryoshka dolls – the famous Russian “nesting dolls” that sit, hollow, inside each other in a recursive cascade that (reassuringly) ends with the smallest, solid doll at the center.

Ligotti frequently constructs narratives in the style of a Matryoshka. He nests characters, narratives, and themes inside of each other. My favorite example of this technique (and, additionally, one of my favorite Ligotti stories, period) is “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” which is three versions of a horror story hidden inside a single story about a horror author that sits within an essay on the art of writing horror fiction. It’s quite brilliant, and unlike anything I’ve read in the way of avante garde or experimental fiction, let alone “genre” fiction.

“Notes” contains no overt references to dolls, puppets, or homunculi – making it quite unusual for Ligotti, who perhaps thought that the nesting narratives themselves were doll-like enough to satisfy him. References to dolls are scattered throughout the entirety of Ligotti’s short fiction. You’ll find at least a passing mention of a doll or puppet in almost all of his stories. Often, dolls aren't just throwaway metaphors, used for effect, but are dangled in a more deliberate fashion -- as a horrific plot device (the scarecrow in “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World” or the wind-up toy displays at the beginning of “the Glamour”). In some instances, they play a ore central role still. as in the unspeakable doings of “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” or the eponymous homunculus of “Dr. Thoss."

There are two passages in Ligotti’s writing that, for me, exemplify both the horror inherent to the doll, manikin, or dummy as a class of object in itself, and the deftness with which Ligotti wields existential dread and meta-narrative. The first is from “Nethescurial”:

 For these actors are not so much people as they are puppets from the old shows, the ones that have told the same story for centuries, the ones that can still be very strange to us. Traipsing through the same old foggy scene, seeking the same old isolated house, the puppets in these plays always find everything new and unknown, because they have no memories to speak of and can hardly recall making these stilted motions countless times in the past. They struggle through the same gestures, repeat the same lines, although in rare moments they may feel a dim suspicion that this has all happened before. How like they are to the human race itself! This is what makes them our perfect representatives—this and the fact that they are hand carved in the image of maniacal victims who seek to share the secrets of their individual torments as their strings are manipulated by the same master.

… “how like the human race,” indeed.

The second passage is from “Dream of a Manikin,” which is perhaps the Ligotti story that best represents the whole range of his short fiction. It has so many elements that you’ll find throughout his work, all in one place: mental illness, toxic infatuation and malevolent masculinity, dissociative horror that makes one question the nature of the cosmos. The narrator does not so much break the fourth wall as break himself against it: 

Suppose I allow that she was not a girl but actually a thing without a self, an unreality that, in accord with your vision of existence, dreamed it was a human being and not just a fabricated impersonation of our flesh? … And by all means forget dreams. I, for one, know I’m not a dream. I am real, Dr.——. (There, how do you like being an anonymity without foundation in this or any other universe?) So please be so kind as to acknowledge the reality of my existence.

“I’m real!” screams the figment from the pages where he is forever bottled away, a Matryoshka nested inside his narrative, with another story trapped inside him. “Other people may be dolls that dream – or dreams in the form of dolls – but I am real, I matter, I am possessed of the special characteristics that separate me from illusion, from object!”

The excellence of Thomas Ligotti’s dollcraft lies in his ability to make us ask these same questions in the lonely night – to whisper to ourselves (but are they ourselves?) “I am real. I am the one in control.

“Aren’t I?”