is Ligotti's work experimental or traditional?

[Druidic]

Quote

Surrealism was once experimental and later became a tradition.--Nemonymous

True enough!
I'm a pretty practical guy when it comes to Art. It either works or it doesn't for me. Your own stories, which I enjoy considerably, don't strike me as experimental: they work and linger like dreams in my consciousness.
I've read too many botched attempts by writers who wanted to break with convention. It seems to me a writer should simply tell a story the way that story demands to be told. Let the reader decide if it's experimental or not.
An experiment is always an attempt to discover, to prove; once something is found or proven it's no longer experimental, it's a success.
But what do I know. Mark has it right.
I'm an old Tyger...not a cool cat!

Thanks for the words of sympathy, Nemonymous!

[Druidic]

I suppose it may be a matter of semantics or just perspective but--

In Durrenmatt’s novel The Execution of Justice the storyline at times seems a little tricky to follow. Chronologicly.

It doesn’t impair the reader’s understanding og the events but a reader might think things like, “Oh, that happened before this occurance…” or “Ah, that happened at a later time than I thought.”.
The story is narrated by a lawyer, now a hopeless drunk, who has allowed a wealthy monster to escape justice and who now decides to take on the role of the executioner. I suspect Durrenmatt was intentionally and subtly reflecting the foggy consciousness of the alcoholic main character by creating a narrative that didn't read ultra-smooth.
But because it worked for me I never regarded it as experimental. I suppose it was...

Coming back to Tom Ligotti for a moment, I am a bit astonished that no-one has taken into account what he's up to right now. His recent work's essence is didacticism, even to the extent of the revision of earlier weird tales not in accordance with his post-CATHR philosophy. You can dance around the intentionality idea with postmodernism if you like but that's the bottom line. It serves the purpose of a definite philosophy. He's putting all of us Ligottian devotees on the spot and saying "are you with me or against me?" It's made me rethink my entire attitude to his output.

Mark S.

[teguififthzeal]

Surrealism is not a tradition. It has infinite permutations that keep spinning. The Breton vs. Bataille dichotomy is patently false; there have been many theoreticians of Surrealism since then, Andrew Joron being a major one. Plus, Surrealism existed long before Apollinaire coined the phrase in the person of figures like, say, Novalis or Lautreamont.

[teguififthzeal]

Mark, you think so?

Mr. Ligotti seems to me to be a humble guy. I think, even with the mind numbing and soul crushing power of a work like TCATHR that he would have a great deal of humility (or sense of humor) about the whole thing.

Quote Originally Posted by teguififthzeal

Mark, you think so? Mr. Ligotti seems to me to be a humble guy. I think, even with the mind numbing and soul crushing power of a work like TCATHR that he would have a great deal of humility (or sense of humor) about the whole thing.

It's the problem of an individual as a totality versus one aspect, in this case, their philosophy, that is taken as paramount. The person "Tom Ligotti" I've encountered via interaction does not equate absolutely to the logic of the philosophy.

Mark S.

[teguififthzeal]

I must say that I find the book oddly soothing. Whenever I feel too stimulated by life or too caught up in things, I read a few passages from TCATHR and it feels like a fast acting opiate.

[Druidic]

Quote

His recent work's essence is didacticism, even to the extent of the revision of earlier weird tales not in accordance with his post-CATHR philosophy. --Mark S.

I wasn't aware the difference was that great in the revised texts. Now I'll have to read them. The originals were fine by me, really quite magical!

[Druidic]

I’m not sure a strong admiration for a writer’s work equals an acceptance of his worldview. Lovecraft is my God of Fiction but I’m not interested in crank theories of racial superiority; I have a genuine fondness for the best stories of Russell Kirk but I’m not a Christian. I admire Durrenmatt almost as much as I do Lovecraft but—Oh, wait. I pretty much agree with everything the guy ever said. We’ll stop here.


“I am a Protestant. I’ve spent my entire life Protesting.”—Friedrich Durrenmatt.

[gveranon]

In the thread Nemonymous linked to in his original post, he made a distinction between experimental and avant-garde - "two different sensibilities, the former breaking some rules of a traditional medium but abiding by others, the latter only abiding by its own rules." I see what he's saying, but I tend not to make this distinction between experimental and avant-garde. And, responding to qcrisp and others -- Yes, there is a sense in which all fiction is experimental, but I don't see a point in actually calling it that unless it is formally very unconventional.

In addition, I probably wouldn't see a point in calling something experimental unless it actually foregrounds its experiment(s), or "thematizes" its experiments, as a po-mo professor might say. Historically, many great and innovative works in various arts have manifested their innovations subtly; the focus is on effects and not on the means to those effects. In most of his fiction, Ligotti works in this way. Within the genre of horror fiction, it was innovative of him to use stylistic effects from Nabokov, Schulz, Bernhard, and others. But he does this subtly, and the reader doesn't even have to realize what he's doing to appreciate it; the experiment is "under the hood," so to speak.

Ligotti could have been more overt about this, and thus more experimental as I would use the term. An example of a horror story of this experimental type is Nick Mamatas' "Hideous Interview with Brief Man," a Lovecraftian story that is an overt David Foster Wallace pastiche -- funny and poignant and quite successful, in my opinion. But here we see one reason why experimental literature of this and other types has limited appeal -- there tend to be fairly specific prerequisites to fully appreciating it. In this case, you would need to have read both DFW and Lovecraft to get what Mamatas was doing.

Of course, avant-garde or experimental as these words are used nowadays doesn't necessarily even mean innovative. Often these are just convenient labels for certain familiar-but-still-unpopular artistic forms and styles that have been around for a century or more. I am reminded of Paul Valéry's quip "Everything changes but the avant-garde."

On the question of whether experimentalism entails an attention to craft or not, there are some deliberately chaotic or aleatory experiments. But much avant-garde work has been highly formalistic -- e.g., 12-tone serialism in music. Piet Mondrian famously wrote, "We are painters who think and measure." I mentioned Richard Kostelanetz in the thread Nemonymous linked to. Kostelanetz is an extreme formalist, and not only in his evaluation of contemporary avant-garde arts. Here is a provocative quote: "Bach was the greatest artist who ever lived. Compared to him, Rembrandt and Shakespeare seem semi-professional." From a formalist standpoint, I see what Kostelanetz means.