Teatro Grottesco 
by 

Thomas Ligotti

 

Industrious Nihilism

Look not here for meaning. But, upon finding any, do try to restrain your enthusiasm. The meaning of these stories is that there is no meaning. Our instinct is to fight against this, to supply explanations or additions to Ligotti’s prose. We are prone to create meaning out of thin air, as it were. But with Ligotti, don’t. Meaning doesn’t exist ‘out there’. And what’s ‘in here’ is totally arbitrary, including, of course, the absence of meaning. One suspects a limitation with the genre; but given Ligotti’s following, that doesn’t seem to matter.

According to Ligotti, we merely ‘rent’ ideas - a thoughtful and useful metaphor. All ideas are old and withered before they ever get to us: “Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next... We live in a world where every surface, every opinion or passion, everything altogether is tainted by the bodies and minds of strangers. Cooties – intellectual cooties and physical cooties from other people – are crawling all around us and all over us at all times.”

These include big ideas like family, constitutional politics and rational thinking, but also commonplace ideas like the biographical details of one’s life, work (including writing as work), casual relationships or the idea that one can actually choose anything. These are all nonsense. At best they’re all part of a sort of un-billed show business, a pointless entertainment. At worst, and most often it’s worst, we dream this stuff up to avoid awareness of how absurdly pointless it all really is. This leads a number of Ligotti’s characters to consider ending it all. Surprisingly, none do.

The world consists of unreadable prescriptions made out by unnamed physicians and presented to uncaring pharmacists by menacing customers who probably want to do us harm. But then again perhaps this is an hallucination which itself is generated by our inveterate commitment to meaning. 

“The attic is not haunting your head – your head is haunting the attic.” This is the central tenet of horror fantasy. Ligotti wants to make sure we know this. This is what makes his fiction interesting. It means absolutely nothing, at least nothing about which to take hemlock. If you ‘get’ anything out of it, you’re a dupe. And I suppose if you get that, you’re a double-dupe. There's only so much 0f this one can take without serious literary indigestion. 

I wonder where I might get a prescription.