In The Shadow Of Another World

[Nemonymous]

IN THE SHADOW OF ANOTHER WORLD

On one level, a post-Lovecraftian vision of Bulwer-Lytton's 'The House and the Brain' or Danielewski's 'House of Leaves' or Poe's various houses. About a haunting and an exorcism with spiritual crises and kaleidoscopes of colours to spice the weird plot, dense and textured with dark theosophies, and in many ways, for me, delightfully inaccessible, like the building of this book itself. Inaccessible, but something does permeate the reader involuntarily.

Like the earlier J.P.Drapeau work, this presents another version of the philosophical core of the whole book, the book as this House of Spare, transposed as the structure of all our body parts as a single body-gestalt with the metaphor of optically stained-glass apertures looking in and looking out, originally spare or antiseptic inside, a "spiritual wasteland", with the apertures shuttered before birth, with an unknown outside, an outside eventually bearing in on the post-birth self, a birth, as if forged by the shape of the house's turreted erection. A "ceremonious desecration", the only defence mechanism becoming the act of showmanship, the trumped-up histrionics of some tout of mystical freak shows - to use words trumped-up by myself from the text. A "marriage of insanity and metaphysics." Ultimately a self "bare and abandoned", as it once began with birth's antiseptic hopes, hopes now dashed.

There is a paragraph in this story (including six extra lines at the end of it which were not included in this paragraph by the Robinson text of the story in 1991*), a paragraph that now straddles pages 372 and 373 of the Penguin Classics book. I feel it is significant to the phenomenon that is the inferred author, whatever today's value of my own views as represented by this my own quickfire and instinctive real-time analysis of these pure texts day by day in accordance with my own obsessive sense of the Intentional Fallacy in literature, texts re-read by myself since first reading them in 1989 and 1991 (inasmuch as the texts are assumed to be largely unchanged).

And I also feel this paragraph is significant whatever the perceived value of the author's own such "esoteric analysis" (in the sense of that phrase as used in this paragraph), an analysis of possibly misremembered intentions upon proofreading (and editing, subtracting from or adding to) the text of this new book.

The past is its own shadow of another world here today, but presumably a longer, more tenuous shadow. A shoddy shadow, or as the above specific paragraph has it, a 'sacred' one?

*this is the only time so far that I have studiously compared the two texts at length.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

IN THE SHADOW OF ANOTHER WORLD On one level, a post-Lovecraftian vision of Bulwer-Lytton's 'The House and the Brain' or Danielewski's 'House of Leaves' or Poe's various houses. About a haunting and an exorcism with spiritual crises and kaleidoscopes of colours to spice the weird plot, dense and textured with dark theosophies, and in many ways, for me, delightfully inaccessible, like the building of this book itself. Inaccessible, but something does permeate the reader involuntarily. Like the earlier J.P.Drapeau work, this presents another version of the philosophical core of the whole book, the book as this House of Spare, transposed as the structure of all our body parts as a single body-gestalt with the metaphor of optically stained-glass apertures looking in and looking out, originally spare or antiseptic inside, a "spiritual wasteland", with the apertures shuttered before birth, with an unknown outside, an outside eventually bearing in on the post-birth self, a birth, as if forged by the shape of the house's turreted erection. A "ceremonious desecration", the only defence mechanism becoming the act of showmanship, the trumped-up histrionics of some tout of mystical freak shows - to use words trumped-up by myself from the text. A "marriage of insanity and metaphysics." Ultimately a self "bare and abandoned", as it once began with birth's antiseptic hopes, hopes now dashed. There is a paragraph in this story (including six extra lines at the end of it which were not included in this paragraph by the Robinson text of the story in 1991*), a paragraph that now straddles pages 372 and 373 of the Penguin Classics book. I feel it is significant to the phenomenon that is the inferred author, whatever today's value of my own views as represented by this my own quickfire and instinctive real-time analysis of these pure texts day by day in accordance with my own obsessive sense of the Intentional Fallacy in literature, texts re-read by myself since first reading them in 1989 and 1991 (inasmuch as the texts are assumed to be largely unchanged). And I also feel this paragraph is significant whatever the perceived value of the author's own such "esoteric analysis" (in the sense of that phrase as used in this paragraph), an analysis of possibly misremembered intentions upon proofreading (and editing, subtracting from or adding to) the text of this new book. The past is its own shadow of another world here today, but presumably a longer, more tenuous shadow. A shoddy shadow, or as the above specific paragraph has it, a 'sacred' one? *this is the only time so far that I have studiously compared the two texts at length.

Quote

Although I still have a few stories left to re-read and review in the Penguin Classics collection (to re-read for the first time since 1989 and 1991 in the two Robinson collections), I thought I would make my first trial conclusion about this new double book -- Melted oxymorons: a text that is a blend of various pairs like scatological and eschatological, avant garde and traditional, Gothic and Baroque, Horror and Philosophy, Fiction and Truth, Not-Death and Not-Birth, showman-like and serious, nihilistic and subliminatory, accessible and inaccessible, inspirational and desperate, entertaining and dryly fustian, Intentional and Non-intentional... Regarding the Intentional Fallacy literary theory itself, to the Wimsatt version of which I was introduced in 1967, I can empathise when people tell me it is important to have a biographical approach, i.e. read interviews with the author and learn about other such matters external to the pure text, before being able fully to judge that author's work of fiction. But when I read Ligotti's fiction, my faith in the Intentional Fallacy is renewed. By reading the pure Ligotti text and trying to insulate it from what I know about the man himself, I am reminded that there are forces outside the author's control that are bearing down upon or lifting up the nature of his work. After all, that very phenomenon is what the stories are written <u>about</u> <I>and, in my view, what the stories are overtly instigating - successfully so.</I> PS: In other words, having slept on it, the whole perceived ethos of the Ligotti fiction canon so far seems to me to be essentially predicated on some form of authorial Intentional Fallacy existing, a fact that I have felt to be the case since reading the earlier ones in the 1980s. This perhaps at least is partly true of much fiction, but I feel this consideration is central to the REAL cosmic and human terrors that transcend fiction like Ligotti's and Lovecraft's.

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

[spore]

Not sure how this one passed me by but I found it to be almost perfect and probably one of Ligotti's most ornate and aesthetically singular works.