Thomas Ligotti - Cosmic Pessimism
The American writer and theorist Thomas Ligotti, in his much acclaimed philosophical treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race in 2010, has elaborated in philosophical as well as cultural history on the premise posed by ‘Cosmic Pessimismʼ. In doing so, he takes Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Imagination as a starting point; the latter questions the ratio of the will to life by defining the invisible driving force behind this will as an abstract anchored in the consciousness of man, which, when logically scrutinized, actually turns out to be a blind pressure, a striving completely without reason or motive. Schopenhauer highlights in this passage, according to Ligotti’s interpretation, that for humanity existence is a state of demonic mania, with the will to live being the spirit that has taken possession of these transient and tormented individuals.
For Schopenhauer, consciousness was an accident of life, a gross mistake. Precisely the formation of a consciousness, in turn, is an unheard-of process in the history of evolution, because it is senseless, since it has imposed on man an existence that is primarily fed by the denial of its actual senselessness: “Wound up like toys by some force — call it Will. Èlan vital, anima mundi, physiological or psychological processes, nature, or whatever. “ In the moment in which man wants to, yes, must, disregard the basic needs of any organic species — meant are survival, reproduction and dying — he begins a process of self-deception, which Ligotti summarizes with the Norwegian philosopher Peter Weesel Zapffe as consisting of isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation 27. Because of these rehearsed defense mechanisms, man does not want to understand that he is merely a puppet on strings, controlled in chaotic movements by a ruthless And indifferent universe. This is precisely the titular ‘conspiracy against the human species’, namely the self-imposed refusal to recognize the futility of human existence and therefore to permanently fight against it with the help of the above-mentioned factors. Humanity conspires against itself in order to gain the illusion of control over its own consciousness. The cosmic horror now tears the mask of meaningfulness from humanity’s face and confronts it with the naked, cold essence of its existence, i.e. nothingness.
Based on this hypothesis, Ligotti now writes his short stories, in which he returns again and again to his definition of cosmic horror or cosmic pessimism, sometimes in symbolic-literary, sometimes in tract-like form. Interesting here is a partial demarcation to Lovecraft’s writings, in which the cosmic horror in many cases ultimately takes on a concrete form, which, however, is possibly to be interpreted symbolically for the reader; one thinks only of the famous tentacle beings, whose pure existence is beyond any human imagination (and which therefore embody that cosmic horror), which, however, at the same time becomes a tangible entity for the respective narrators in the form of imaginable tentacle beings. Whether those beings are merely the product of the imagination of those narrators, to give form to the incomprehensible, remains mostly in limbo. Ligotti sees his writing more in the tradition of Lovecraft stories such as The Music of Erich Zann, in which the cosmic horror is not given physical form, while it gives man the terrifying insight into the meaninglessness of his existence that is symptomatic of his texts.
Ligotti’s later stories have increasingly taken tract form, most strikingly the final, autofictional narrative in his 2008 story collection Teatro Grottesco, The Shadow, The Darkness, which also describes the genesis of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. The narrative is about an artist named Grossvogel who, following an illness of his digestive system, experiences an artistic epiphany, having managed, in the wake of that painful, life-threatening illness, to recognize his mind for what it actually is, namely a fiction. Man, Grossvogel informs his artist friends after this realization, is exclusively organic matter, which is a part of that above-mentioned indifferent cosmic whole, and only when he succeeds in also recognizing everything spiritual as fiction, man can create true art : “ [T]he mind and the imagination, the soul and the self, are all simply nonsense and dreams. “At the unveiling of the first work of art after his artistic rebirth, Grossvogel now submits to those friends in dissolute monologues his new Philosophy: “ For that is what we have become, or what we have all but become — bodies without the illusion of minds or imaginations, bodies without the distractions of souls or selves “ The world consists exclusively of “ a mountainous pile of human and non-human bodies. These are all we have and all we are; these are what is used and thrived upon “. And there is nothing that can dissolve or undermine this nightmare, because nothing exists that can do anything, that can be anything: “ The very idea of such a thing is only nonsense and dreams. “
And yet there is something that permanently pulls on these bodies, but they should not be understood as a collective at all, because each entity stands alone in the cosmos :
A collective entity called the human race cannot exist where there is only a collection of non-entities, of bodies which are themselves only provisional and will be lost one by one, the whole collection of them always approaching nonsense, always dissolving into dreams. There can be no conspiracy in a void, or rather in a black abyss.
And what I saw was a black snow falling from a black sky. There was nothing recognizable in that sky — certainly no familiar visage spread out across that night and implanted into it. There was only this blackness above and this blackness below. There was only this consuming, proliferating blackness whose only true and final success was in merely perpetuating itself as successfully as it could in a world where nothing exists that could ever hope to be anything else except what it needs to thrive upon…until everything is entirely consumed and there is only one thing remaining in all existence and it is an infinite body of blackness activating itself and thriving upon itself with eternal success in the deepest abyss of entity.
As mentioned above, some of Ligotti’s later narratives, including The Shadow, The Darkness, resemble tracts rather than narratives in the classical sense, as they lack a congruent narrative structure, so that they can rather be seen as mediating instances for his philosophical theorems. However, even in the context of narrative constructs that approximate those classical horror stories, his nihilistic worldview is conveyed in the form of cosmic horror. Often the carnivalesque plays a decisive role; recurring figures in his stories are the clown, the harlequin, the marionette, or the traveling circus with its sideshow and its shady characters. It is above all the marionette that Ligotti sees as symbolic of man’s fate, since he too hangs on the strings of an overpowering string-puller. At the same time, it repeatedly appears as a cruel reflection that makes him shudder at the sight of it. Marionettes are modeled on humans, but only to a certain extent, because a “ resemblance to our soft shapes would be a strange and awful thing, too strange and awful, in fact, to be countenanced without alarm”. One knows, when looking at such a puppet, that it is a puppet, that they are inanimate objects, and yet, in the dark of a cellar, for example, one sometimes gets the disturbing feeling that the puppets are looking at us; not as people do, but as puppets do. “In such moments of mild disorientation,” writes Ligotti in The Conspiracy Against The Human Race, “a psychological conflict erupts, a dissonance of perception that sends through our being a convulsion of supernatural horror “. We know that our fear of the puppets is based on our existential fear of also being puppets in a chaotic system through which we are controlled, as a pure organic mass punished with a consciousness. When puppets in films or books suddenly come to life, they do so in full awareness of no longer wanting to be puppets. Since they suddenly have a consciousness in these moments, they fight against their purely material existence, just as we as human beings fight against our organic one. And so, precisely in its function as a mirror, the puppet serves excellently as a medium of cosmic horror, as Ligotti’s narrative The Clown Puppet makes clear.
This begins, as the beginning of the narrative can be interpreted, with a bow to one of Ligotti’s literary models, Thomas Bernhard. As is well known, in his treatise-like novels, the latter inveighed in a deliberately enervating repetitive gesture about the ‘dullnessʼ of human existence. The Clown Puppet also begins in the style of Bernhard, in which a first-person narrator talks about an initially unspecified curse that seems to hang over his life:
It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense. As long as I can remember, every incident and every impulse of my existence has served only to perpetrate one episode after another of conspicuos nonsense, each completely outrageous in its nonsensicality. Considered from whatever point of view — intimately close, infinetely remote, or any position in between — the whole thing has always seemed to be nothing more that some freak accident occurring at a painfully slow rate of speed.
The first-person narrator, haunted by this nonsense of his own existence, works in the pharmacy of a certain Mr. Vizniak in one of those non-places typical of Ligotti ; small towns that cannot be clearly assigned either geographically or temporally. Like most of Ligotti’s narrators, this one is a wanderer who, for reasons he does not explain, has ended up in that very town and behind the counter of that pharmacy. But he is constantly plagued by a recurring nightmare, to which, however, he seems to have become accustomed in the course of his life : Again and again, a diabolical-looking clown puppet appears before him and pays him a ‘Besuchʼ, as he calls those strange meetings. Whenever the light flickers and takes on a reddish-golden tone, he knows that the “ already familiar routine of nonsense” is about to begin once again. At first he notices only an eerie, shadowy presence that keeps wriggling out of his field of vision until he hears a clack, and suddenly “ an antiquated marionette, a puppet figure of some archaic type “ stands before him : “ Its design was that of a clown puppet in pale pantaloons overdraped by a kind of pale smock, thin and pale hands emerging from the ruffled cuffs of its sleeves, and a powder-pale head rising above a ruffled collar. “The creature also hangs on puppet strings that seem to lead to heaven:
I always looked at the wires which were attached to the body of the puppet thing, and I tried to follow those wires to see where they led. But at some point my vision failed me; I could visually trace the wires only so far along their neat vertical path…and then they became lost in a thick blur […] This phenomenon of the wires disappearing into a blur supported my observation over the years that the puppet did not have a life of its own.
At each of its visits, the narrator is handed strange, barely legible demands on a piece of paper by that puppet and must thereupon try to solve tasks set for him, which are not particularly difficult, but always without any discernible meaning or benefit. At some point, he reports, he then began to test the puppet, for example by asking it for certain things that it should get for him, whereupon the puppet always silently pulled the desired thing out of its trouser pocket in the blink of an eye, however impossible the demands seemed to be. But during the visit to Mr. Vizniak’s pharmacy now described, the narrator decides to defy the doll’s wishes, which are difficult to decipher anyway, for the first time, appropriately enough for the place, for medical preparations, and challenges it to search for the requested medicine itself in the back room. To his surprise, the puppet actually disappears into the back room to search, as he suspects, for the medicine. Suddenly, Mr. Vizniak, who lives above the pharmacy, comes into the store, even though it is the middle of the night. The latter thinks he has heard noises from the back room and goes in despite the narrator’s warning. When he catches sight of the puppet, the narrator realizes that Vizniak, too, was a haunted man and is now being pulled into the air by the strings on the puppet until he disappears out of sight along with the eerie apparition. At the end, an envious narrator is left behind because of the missed resolution of the question of who is holding the strings in his hand, and he keeps circling the thought: “Now he would see. Mr. Vizniak would see what controlled the strings of the clown puppet. “
The Clown Puppet refers to the human urge to give meaning to existence. The figure of the clown puppet here fulfills a dual function : on the one hand, it initially acts, as in a classic horror story, as an agent of evil, as the narrator’s nightmare, as it also repeatedly haunts the protagonists of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. It is an uncanny apparition, in this place and especially in this form, that is, without a recognizable human agent controlling it, must not be. At first, the reader, trained on Poe, still doubts the narrator’s sanity and puzzles over the symbolic meaning of the visitation, especially since it has appeared to him, throughout his life, time and again during his mostly nighttime jobs.
Unlike in Poe’s texts, however, the interpretive possibility of the insane and therefore unreliable narrator, often inherent in this kind of uncanny narration, is not given; it appears, of course, in the realm of possibility, because it is always the reader’s only option to accept the irrational as the reality of an insane man, but it is not obvious in view of Ligotti’s philosophy. The puppet seems to have psychic abilities, and its purpose puzzles both the narrator and the reader. In fact, the narrator has lost his fear of the puppet over the years, why else would he challenge it in this case because, in his words, “ its silliness is beginning to get on his nerves. “ As an agent of evil, a messenger of a malevolent puppeteer who literally pulls the strings (and in whom the narrator steadfastly believes), her function suddenly fails as the narrator dismisses the apparition as “ nonsense “ that has lost its terror.
To the reader, the puppet, and this is its second function, appears uncanny in any case, not only because it is staged in the tradition of literary horror, but also because a puppet is always a mirror of ourselves. As the mirror image of the narrator, who continually wonders where her mysterious strings might lead, she is self-evidently an effective allegory in terms of cosmic horror and the related notion of a universe that is not malevolent but rather indifferent. Her true horror lies not in her malevolence, in any sinister plans she may be pursuing, but in the fact that she demonstrates to the narrator (and apparently to other people as well) the futility of her existence. There is presumably no one holding the strings, but the strings lead into the endlessness of a cold, indifferent universe. The puppet, despite its sinister appearance, has no malevolent agenda; it is simply there, as a puppet and as a clown, that is, as a silly, comic reflection of the human with whom it plays its tricks.
Ligotti also returns to the motif of the clown and the puppeteer in another narrative to convey his philosophy in the form of fictional horror stories. In The Bells will sound forever, a traveling salesman stops in an undefined “ place on the northern frontier “ where he stops at an inn. Although the eerie building appears to be empty, the no less eerie owner, Mrs. Pyke, assigns him only a cramped garret instead of the spacious rooms on the lower floors. The traveler wonders why the opposite entrance to the attic has been left open and his curiosity is aroused. He enters the attic and finds a variety of carnivalesque costumes — this is not surprising at first, since Mrs. Pyke was active in a fair in her former life, as she told him earlier. He feels a sudden urge to put on a harlequin costume lying around there, and, as he wears it, an even greater one to rest in place. Half asleep, he keeps hearing a strange ringing sound, and when he finally awakens, he sees himself in the mirror as a harlequin head on a wooden handle in Mrs. Pyke’s hand, while his body remains motionless on the floor. The next morning he awakens in the bed of his chamber and Mrs. Pyke greets him as if nothing had happened. He leaves and when he returns from his journey beyond, he learns that the eerie building has burned down.
In this story, too, the metaphor of man as defenseless puppet is rendered in the form of a horror story that uses tried and true devices. But while reader and victim succumb to the belief that Mrs. Pyke is the all-powerful puppeteer, a witch who succeeds in turning her victims into hand puppets, all that remains of the night is an inexplicable urge to return to this place again and again. However, the apparent puppeteer herself has fallen victim to a fire. So who is really pulling the strings ?
Ligotti deliberately refrains from explanations in these and in all other stories. It is striking, not only in the stories referred to, that the ostensible figure of evil, which is repeatedly alluded to, turns into a shapelessness at the end. The physical threats that initially emanate from humans, ghostly apparitions, even monsters, as in the story Our temporary supervisor, turn out to be a false lead because the protagonists do not want to admit the reality of an indifferent universe. The monster will never appear because the threat is existential, not physical.
Ligotti wrote the Town Manager, a post-apocalyptic town surrenders to the increasingly absurd rules of the ever-changing ‘Town Managerʼ until he disappears without a trace in each case and is replaced by his successor. When suddenly a ‘ Town Manager ‘ appears, who does not show himself, but is conspicuous by brutal murders of all who do not want to follow his demands, and who seems to be a supernatural entity, readers and protagonists believe to have recognized the ‘ evil ‘ sense of this mayoralty. But suddenly this ‘ Town Manager ‘ demands only absurdities, ‘nonsenseʼ, from the citizens, until he too disappears. The narrative ends with the narrator, who has fled the town and had to recognize that the same game is played in all towns, being approached in a diner to ask if he would like to take over a town as a ‘ Town Managerʼ.
Again, the human urge to make sense of evil, however cruel, is evident. Moreover, as horror stories, beyond the philosophical superstructure around cosmic horror, Ligotti’s narratives function on the level of generating existential dread, which is, of course, closely related to cosmic pessimism, that is, Kierkegaard’s separation of fear from anxiety. The fear of a monster, a ghost, a supernatural apparition, which populates classical horror literature, gives way to an existential fear, which fears an endless, inexplicable darkness that is not object-bound. It is like the protagonist in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, who, trapped in a senseless, endless, incomprehensible labyrinth, begs for the ‘monsterʼ to finally appear in the form of the Minotaur to deliver him from this existential fear, which he experiences as a formless evil.
