Some years ago, Penguin co. collected the short fiction of gothic/cosmic horror luminary Thomas Ligotti as a full volume, entitled Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, and just this week the unabridged audiobook was released, read by Linda Jones and Jon Padgett.* I highly recommend checking it out if you’re curious about Ligotti or just enjoy being read to. Old heads might remember my recommendation of literally robotic readings of un-adapted work, but you can’t beat a real person, and I’m glad to have this official, well-considered adaptation of Ligotti to listen to.
As a reader I’ve never quite vibed with Ligotti, in a way that slips dangerously between principle and scornful reaction — and like a nazi in a punk scene, one should never tolerate the poison presence of a reaction, if it can be at all helped. I’m listening to Jon and Linda’s recitations of Ligotti and revisiting my own dislike of the work — not necessarily revising that dislike, but examining it. I’m dragging out my reaction (in the impulsive sense) and, if there is something articulable within it, judging its worth.
In large part my feelings regarding Ligotti’s name and stories are imbued with contexts unfair to the man — he is by all accounts a decent person, generous with other authors and publicly aligned with good causes (I remember that when Trump stepped up America’s violence at the border early in his presidency, Ligotti’s “The Town Manager” was included in fundraising anthologies against that violence). The matter was that when I first heard of Ligotti, it was in the context of various goth-adjacent online communities I came up through. I don’t think Ligotti is a goth (in whatever sense), I don’t think of his work as necessarily gothic,** but if you know anything about the man you’re probably aware of his reputation as an anti-natalist: To put it reductively, his philosophical position is that bringing people into the world is morally wrong. In this post I’m treating his fiction and his non-fiction (mainly his opus The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) as of a piece with one another in this.
For what it’s worth, I believe Ligotti earnestly aims to persuade people with his thinking — whatever his arguments, his position is not reactionary in the ways I will come to describe its use — but it touches a couple of different third rails (philosophical inquiry has this tendency), and as such it lends itself, especially in its rough-hewn elevator pitch, to use by other people toward unpersuasive ends, as a cudgel or a provocation. All of which is to say that when you surveyed Nine Inch Nails message boards in 2005, avowed anti-natalists (of which there were a few) tended to be of a certain stripe: white, male, and often depressed in that way which manifested in men as inchoate anger. We’d come to call them “edgelords”.
I’m not looking to vindicate anti-natalism, but it’s fair to say the extent to which a good swath of those who referenced it over the years cared to understand (or even read) what Ligotti was putting down was negligible. This was, it should be said, years before Nic Pizzolatto would infamously draw upon Ligotti’s non-fiction (alongside other philosophical pessimists such as Schopenhauer) to inform the colorful worldview of Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle in True Detective’s first season. To hear most tell it, Pizzolatto used Ligotti in a largely cosmetic way.*** That isn’t surprising.
The problem was that it didn’t matter, practically speaking; the extremity of Ligotti’s philosophy made it an adornment for a particular subset of guys who saw its value not just in its tendency to freak out the squares, but in its (vague, slapdash) use as pretense to articulate self-serving visions of the world and their relationships to others. It hardly bears repeating that Neitzche also had this problem (they were often found together in lists of influences).
Such people were frequently abusive to their partners and families, beyond being generally unpleasant. They felt that the quality of their lives was incommensurate with what they believed was theirs by dint of perceived intelligence. And that this was by and large the problem with the world. Ligotti by their lights was, principally, a condemnatory voice.
Ligotti’s work itself did not, when I first read it, break him out of the box he’d been put in by that adoptive association. If we take a tack in saying that Ligotti’s philosophy generally is a reflection of the famous depression he often suffers from, his is not the externalized, volcanic depression of edgelords, but a more inward-facing and existential anhedonia. The plainly stated ontological metaphors in his fiction read to me, initially, as myopic and navel-gazing. I could never wring much horror out of considering the idea of a mannequin, just as I failed to see much of any horror in the idea of a clown when reading Ramsey Campbell’s Grin of the Dark.
More than anything, the gesture of anti-natalism seemed to unerringly careen into a space where aesthetic reaction and ontological insight became crucially difficult to distinguish, or were always threatening to merge. At the time I was reading Ligotti I could freshly remember my time in special education classes alongside people with more severe developmental disabilities than mine, or people who dealt with profound pain and addiction. It felt like an extreme leap to regard the latter as evidence to an ontological conclusion, because I was close to it and because I could feel it, and because I could only wield suffering as rhetorical evidence if I didn’t feel it. And regarding the disabled, coming within a hundred miles of a concept like the propriety of existence seemed to beg a question that led either to eugenics or Malthusianism or both. Keeping them away without, at the very least, allowing them basic legitimacy seemed like a fool’s errand to me.****
Which is not to say that Ligotti endorses such ideas (to my knowledge), but inquiry leads us toward certain paths. The fundamental question for me became whether the value of the work could justify the lengths needed to disentangle it from its contexts and potential meanings. I think it probably can, for some — I’ve been fairly open about, for example, claiming old Swans albums for my own as though Michael Gira were dead (which he is, to me). I believe such a thing is possible. While Ligotti is an elegant writer (and subject to many readings, such as G.L. McDormand and Brandon Budda’s fascinating interpretation of “The Frolic” as a condemnation of white flight), I simply cannot escape the tinge of all that abominable noise. So I’m listening, and appreciating, but always at a far distance.
A question I sometimes ask myself when Ligotti comes up, is whether I would feel the way I do had he not so staunchly presented himself as an ideologue with Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It is less that having done so imbued the work itself with some greater political significance, more that having done so makes the context of “what does the author mean to convey” harder to shake in putting together a way of seeing the work and its meaning, especially when the text is not particularly ambivalent in its presentation (see also: Ayn Rand, a lesser writer in every respect).
That comes to bear for me personally in where my joy in reading fiction comes from. If we think of a story or storytelling as a zone or a space in three dimensions, then the act of reading and understanding (or misunderstanding) carves a particular path of movement through that space. Where you start and where you end up can vary wildly, and that’s the beauty and fun of it, to look back and recognize your pathfinding is one of many (potentially infinite) possibilities.
Contexts, the ideas and awareness(es) which you bring to a reading, and which you can never quite escape, beat trails through the space of a story; at best they provide common waypoints at which different travelers can meet, consider and appreciate the story as a gift that can give in many different ways. But the stronger the context brought to bear on a reading, the more prominent the paved way, the harder it is to experience the space by means that are not in some sense preordained and managed into uniformity.
I think of this in Baudrillard’s terms of the public-park-as-terrarium: The experience of wilderness, from the perspective of a visitor to a park, is mediated in a way they may not realize, to the extent that the very idea of wilderness as it was known and appreciated before that point becomes lost. Wilderness looks like a park; squirrels are not thin little things that dart into the underbrush but portly little dudes with no fear of humans. Is it that some “true” quality of the wilderness is being erased, or that an amended idea is being created and enforced? There is always a bespoke quality in the way we read — that is the threat of reading that censors live in terror of — but some ways of reading are more unique than others.
Given my druthers, I would rather not have those contextual paths set out before me. Fiction is one of the few places in which it is safe to become totally and senselessly lost. We should endeavor to do so as much as we can. I wish I could shake Ligotti’s contexts.
* I don’t know Padgett personally, and I’ve never interacted with the man, but he’s well-known and beloved in weird fiction circles as an enterprising devotee within Ligotti’s substantial cult following, a publisher (via the aptly named Grimscribe Press and its Ligotti-themed periodical Vastarien) and a great horror author in his own right. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned and intimate about being a specialist in the reading aloud of an author, and Padgett is just such a specialist for Ligotti. It’s clearly a passion project. Which, given the anhedonic quality of Ligotti’s work, is gently ironic.
** I think there’s a stronger argument to be made that Ligotti’s prose and poetry are sited moreso in a capital D Decadent tradition. David Tibet, the world’s foremost Count Eric Stenbock superfan, publishes Ligotti for this reason (and Stenbock’s late-in-life relationship with a life-size doll is, if nothing else, highly Ligottian).
*** For my part, I read Rust Cohle as a kind of (intentional? Unintentional?) satirical caricature of dudes who are really into pessimist philosophy. It’s a tremendous, and funny, performance.
**** Keeping Boyd Rice out of spaces with affinity for goth aesthetics was often a challenge, once upon a time, not to mention the many industrial-goth acts which flirted more or less subtly with fascist aesthetics inextricable from fascist ideas. These days few things cause me to lose respect for an artist like a rhetorical turn toward Malthus. I’m still pissed off about Jenny Hval’s The Practice of Love.