posted on 2/7/2019 by the Salt City Sinner
The towering influences of writers like Shirley Jackson,
Edgar Allen Poe, and Mary Shelley extend well beyond the boundaries of horror
and into the wider realm of literature proper, a point that has been belabored
enough that I don’t need to make it again here. Less explored (and perhaps more
interesting) are the occasions on which writers who are well-loved and
respected outside of the cobwebbed graveyard of macabre literature have slipped
through the gates of that cemetery for a midnight jaunt. My favorite example
might be the short story “the Comet” by William E.B. DuBois, a brilliant writer
not usually known for his ghost stories. “The Comet” can be read as many things
– an early science fiction story, a sharp-eyed tale about race, class, and
American society, and – with its necropolitan flair -- an excellently-crafted
horror tale. I think it is best understood as all and none of these, and a
great example of how fluid and arbitrary the boundaries that separate so-called
“genre fiction” from so-called “literature” can be.
We live in an age when the lines between genre fiction and
mainstream fiction have never been blurrier, nor the contributions of genre
writers more widely appreciated. Thus, I’m a little surprised that Thomas
Ligotti isn’t a bigger deal than he is. The short fiction of Thomas Ligotti,
after all, might be most easily compared to the writing of Franz Kafka. Ligotti
constructs environments in which dread and anxiety are explored as a form of
architecture – a feature as much of the environment as of the internal
landscape or moral struggles of the unfortunate protagonists (take, for
example, “the Glamouur,” which explores this dissociative affect directly: "How
difficult to say anything precise about this mood that overcame me, because it
seemed to belong to my surroundings as much as to myself.").
In the narratives Ligotti constructs, there is usually no
clear cause-and-effect, no dream of ordered life waiting to be disrupted by the
boogeyman of change or chaos (and then subsequently restored to comforting
order). In Ligotti’s stories, our protagonist is awakened in the middle of the
night by a malign presence, or she is visited by a mysterious medical professional,
or sets out in search of ritual clowns or magic pants or morbid amusements
that, if we’re lucky, will be left to our febrile imaginations. But the running
theme is not blessed normalcy placed temporarily (if hideously) out of joint,
to be enjoyed anew once a monster is vanquished.
No, Ligotti does not deal in the rupturing of the peaceful
life. In his stories, dread is inescapable, because dread is the environment in which we live. Dread is expressed in
the light, which in his descriptions is ever watery and uncertain and does not
behave as it should. Dread is in the shape
of objects, the shadows they cast, their very four-dimensional existence as
they grate against one another, never quite resolving into sense or order. Ligotti’s
attention to this atmospheric wrongness
so thoroughly confuses the relationship between the objects and subjects of his
tales that the real question – the central question – of much of his fiction is
not “how can I cope with the unreal,” as it is in much of horror and weird fiction,
but rather “am I real?”
The answer, to the abiding horror of Ligotti’s unfortunate
menagerie of maniacs and paranoids, is often “no,” and this dissociative break
with autonomy is often represented by the use of dolls and manikins, either as
metaphorical descriptors or as unsettlingly literal participants in the story.
In this way, Ligotti works the fertile soil of the uncanny valley, but he’s
after something deeper than just that. More than merely exploiting the
unsettling “reality” of facsimile humans, Ligotti attempts to undermine our
confidence – our faith – in such a distinction’s very existence. We are dolls,
he writes, with delusions of humanity, of specialness, of separation from the
world of objects and elevation to the world of subjects.
(To be concluded in Part 2 – stay tuned!)
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