American cult author Thomas Ligotti is far from the merriest of men. Any reading of his literature will prove this to you. An author of a wide body of supernatural horror, he has a devoted fanbase, and is considered a master of portraying the haunting forces of the eerie, the weird and the uncanny. His fictional work is often compared to the greatest and most legendary of his fellow countrymen, Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft.
I can’t claim to be an “expert” on Ligotti, as the only work I’ve read by him thus far are his short story compilations Songs Of A Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. But what is unique about these collections is that his stories are dominated by a constant presence beyond their narrative. Being a genre where a malevolent “aura” manifests itself in some way of form, the “horror” enters the narrative and juxtaposes itself against any orthodoxy or definition of “good” that will oppose its disruption by default.
In the work of Ligotti something is true to form. Part of it is that there is a lack of gore or bloodthirst, and for the most part, there is little of the “mangled” and bodily grotesque. His aesthetic, unlike his influences does not dwell within a generically “gothic” grandeur tinged with romanticism and plot-wise strays from the “redemptive” narratives and arc which positively resolve the “problem” that a protagonist faces in the storytelling. Ligotti’s fiction can be interpreted as being portrayed within a contemporary setting, or true to the “uncanny”, set within an environment where the place and location can’t quite be discerned.
What is unique about the horror of Ligotti is that compared to his contemporaries, the “aura” of his horror, that which haunts is more of a crippling, suffocating tension and unease. Rather than something manifested by Lovecraft’s cosmic deities or “Great Old Ones”, often portrayed as a dormant, slumbering evil awaiting to be awakened, Ligotti is focused on what he sees as the perpetual nothingness that lies beyond what he sees as the profound meaninglessness of human animation.
Though this perhaps is nuanced in his fiction, it is in his widely regarded philosophical work, Conspiracy Against The Human Race that Ligotti professes the profound reality of death above all, and refuses to see anything redemptive in individual and collective drives for optimism. Throughout this work, this theme is quite common. His largely reference material is the Norwegian writer Peter Wessel Zapffe, who has stated that bearing children is akin to “carrying wood to a burning house” and that human yearning is not merely marked by a ‘striving toward’, but equally by an ‘escape from.”
These deeply pessimistic and nihilistic views are outreaches of Zappfe’s axiom that the over-development of human conscientiousness goes against nature, and leads to what he sees as a “biological paradox” characterized by existential panic and succumbing to tragedy. For Zappfe, this can only be remedied by “artificially limiting the content of consciousness”. This pessimism largely emerges from the pessimistic worldview of Arthur Schopenhauer, and examples of what Zappfe and Ligotti would see as the flaw of consciousness is embodied in various archytpes of the “tragic hero”, with the Nietzschean ubermensch being an example.
This compliments what is central to some of Ligotti’s themes; an espousal of anti-natalism, and an outright negative view of optimism, which he illustrates in his rejection of “happy endings” in his analysis of various works from the gothic horror genre. Complimenting Zappfe’s axiom regarding consciousness, the author states the following;
“What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next – as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.”
In seeing the human race as tragically flawed, and seeing the cosmos as an inherently worthless nothingness, Ligotti is drawn to the figure of the puppet. He often refers to puppets allegorically to portray what he sees as the folly of human strife, and an embodiment of the biological paradox. Whilst puppets are inanimate, and can only be manipulated by a cloaked force, to Ligotti they seem to present what he says as a contarian folly in humanitys efforts to aspire beyond the natural. In his analogy of the puppet, this also figures how we might view the “weird” and the “uncanny” as a sublime object of horror;
“Because if we look at a puppet in a certain way, we may sometimes feel it is looking back, not as a human being looks at us but as a puppet does. It may even seem to be on the brink of coming to life. In such moments of mild disorientation, a psychological conflict erupts, a dissonance of perception that sends through our being a convulsion of supernatural horror.”
To Ligotti, the puppet has a contrarian quality. It is anthropomorphic yet seem animate, being made in the image of man, whose wooden form can be inhabited, moved, invaded by the uncanny. Expounding on this, Ligotti’s explores cult horror films such as John Carpenter’s The Thing and Philip Kaufman’s The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. What makes both films unique, and relevent to puppetry in Ligotti’s view is that both movies deal with invasive, otherworldly, unearthly forces that seize, control and determine the behaviors of their hosts, doing so in ways that blur the onlookers perception as to whether the depicted persons act out of their own free will or are “possessed” by a will that is not their own.
Conspiracy Against The Human Race also owes a deal of influences to the Romanian misanthropist Emil Cioran. Inexhaustibly cathartic and cynical, his worldview could be summed up in a short passage from Tears And Saints, where he asks;
“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
This compliments Ligotti’s idea that in the trappings of what he sees as as the undead human puppet, we are condemned to live out our “biological paradox” and remain condemned to forego the tragic striving that only ceases when we die. This also should allow us to consider the first season of the crime drama series True Detective, in which the deeply disturbed, profoundly cynical detective Rust Cohle delivers a worldview and philosophy similar to Ligotti’s.
Referring to humans as “sentient meat” and stating that consciousness is a “tragic misstep in evolution”, Cohle’s character and worldview, abundant with existential musings is tainted by the death of his child. It is a worldview that alienates those around him, rendering him a loner and outsider. This may in some respects be comparable to Ligotti’s experiences with chronic anxiety and anhedonia, of which he states that under its affects, “everything is revealed in its true purposelessness and inanity.” In parellel with Zappfe’s idea of limiting the “content of consciousness”, Ligotti also states;
“Assuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear.”
Nic Pizzolato, creator and director of the series, has acknowledged the influence of Ligotti on True Detective’s first season and Cohle’s character. Zappfe’s idea of the “biological paradox” is also clearly referred to when Cohle’s pessimistic view of human existence is elaborated on throughout the series. Returning to Cioran’s notion of nothingness as a “home” and existence as an “exile”, Ligotti elaborates the following in regard to assisted suicide;
“There is nothing in this world as important as to be able to choose to die in a painless and dignified manner, something we do have the ability to bestow on one another. If euthanasia were decriminalized, it would demonstrate that we had made the greatest evolutionary leap in world history.”
This compliments what he sees as the tormented existence and animation of the human puppet, always wanting, striving for more, never fulfilled, unable to end its functions even when existence is rendered as a downward spiral of constant and never-ending pain. Yet it is a sentiment that matches Schopenhauer’s of suicide;
“They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
It is not easy to fully find Ligotti’s conclusions and overall worldview fully agreeable on a good day, particularly in a world where despite cynical competition, people want the best for themselves, and see the world in what they deem to be their own earthly being and activity that accompanies it. His philosophy, regardless of whether you disagree with it is rendered profound by the level of withdrawal that he has from the notion of the “joy” of life itself.
Ligotti’s view of the human condition, whilst it may be atheistic from his own view, is strangely profound in that he makes us want to feel that behind Zappfe’s “biological paradox” there are forces, pupetteers, manipulators, powers of which we cannot fully comprehend nor fathom. This ultimately creates a mystique which touches the soul or the inner feelings of many a reader. Other than serving as a literary inspiration for a key element of True Detective, Ligotti has also collaborated with apocalyptic neofolk outfit Current 93.
What makes Conspiracy Against The Human Race a worthwhile read and gateway into Ligotti’s work, is that the author is fully aware of the fact that arguing for the end of human existence is not going to convince many people. Whether you feel that as a species we ought to simply die out or persevere is down to you. Like some strange magician from a dark corner of nowhere, what Ligotti does successfully is distance the anthropocentric experience from what it really is, treating humanity and all its minutiae as even as all other matter that “exists”, be it sentient or inanimate. To Ligotti, it is only the misstep of consciousness that allows the human race to somehow delude and flaw itself into believing that it can go beyond its biological limits.
Excuse The Blood 