Thoughts on MAD NIGHT OF ATONEMENT

[sundog]

This is my favourite story from NOCTUARY. I love its grandiose mockery of religious revelation and belief in a benevolent creator god (a nightmarish obscenity if ever there was one), as well as of the vain hopes, ambitions and utopian dreams of average humanity. I feel fully in harmony with the "Creator's Great Design" and perceive "nothing but ruins and the ghosts of puppets" in the thriving scenes around me. The conclusion to the story, however, has been puzzling me somewhat. But I think I've resolved it by now. [ Plot spoiler ahead! ]

Clearly, it is the Creator (of the World as well as of the story) who is speaking to us (who once constituted the so-called "human race") in the epilogue. The strongest proof for this has to be the final line in which He capitalizes pronouns in reference to Himself ("receive My prayer") just as the late Dr. Haxhausen has done throughout his speeches when referring to the Almighty. This, then, would mean that it is ultimately the Creator Himself who has transgressed upon His own divine law when baptizing the whole world in His Sacred Ray, whereby the entirety of our human race has been converted into inanimate puppets. The divine law in question is that which Dr. Haxhausen has already referred to; namely that our puppet-conversion has to take place with the willingness of our human hearts. Bringing it about without this willingness on our part would be "the greatest sin in the universe, the unpardonable sin." And so it is clear that The World Famous Dr. Haxhausen had been chosen by the Creator as His final prophet whose mission it was to make us turn away from our false dreams of vitality and perfection and embrace His Great Design of disintegration. But we ridiculed this prophet as we have so many others, typically unappreciative of "gestures from on high." What other option did the Creator have in the face of our idiotic vitality than transgressing His divine law and installing His puppet paradise without our willingness? Even though His transgression means that He must exist in eternal banishment from that paradise. Because what could be of greater importance to the Creator than His Great Design? Was it originally part of that design that the Creator Himself should be converted into a puppet? Or is it the agony of his eternal banishment from puppet paradise that makes Him wish He were one as expressed in that final line?

Philipp Mainländer, Eduard von Hartmann and Ulrich Horstmann seem obvious philosophical predecessors to Dr. Francis Haxhausen.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I couldn't help myself, but had to put some of Ligotti's phrases together in a comment I made to the picture below posted recently by an ex-girlfriend of mine (turned Catholic). It came with the following faithful sentence:

"Patiently Jesus is waiting and watching— Watching for you and for me!"



Comment:
"Awww... He won't have to wait that much longer. Soon enough all of us will turn into inanimate puppets, dolls and mannequins - posing idiotically in the display windows of a department-store paradise or next to any old bus stop. Just like Him. With a nice bright gleam in our eyes."

[NealJansons]

Interesting interpretation, and one I can heartily agree with. Like TCATHR, in my opinion it shows Tom's Schopenhauerian influences...but then again, I just finished reading literally everything Schopenhauer wrote last month, so perhaps I am just primed to see his thought everywhere.

	TCATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[Nemonymous]

MAD NIGHT OF ATONEMENT - A Future Tale

": the world thrives on its faults and strives, by every possible means, to aggravate them, while at the same time to mask them like a congenital deformity."

That sounds like a keynote for this world. This Mad Scientist story seems also to present, for me, what I shall now call the NOEUD of Ligotti (cf the 'Catholic / CATHRian' symbiosis that was evoked earlier for me by remembering "Le Noeud de vipères" (Knot of Snakes) by Francois Mauriac) and I say that this NOEUD is the essential Prophet / Showman conundrum residing at the core of how I see this Mad Scientist author or how I see the image of this author that is conveyed by a deeper author even than the one who is named Ligotti on the cover.

Here we have a wonderfully described Heath Robinson contraption or patchwork scrapheap (cf todays' review by me of 'The Night Clock' HERE), a contraption or creative scrapheap wielding a single snake-like 'Sacred Ray', one that puppetises or immortalises (or both) the representative 'mankind' of the Mad Scientist's lecture audiences. The "decrepitude" word again used here as DUE CREED of the PIT when anagrammatised. The Creator as manikin, or like the insignificance that was found to manipulate the Land of Oz?

It is subtitled 'Future Tale' because it is published in the mid-1990s, now seen as premonitory of a well-respected scientist becoming a Mad one (or "crank doomsayer" as it says in this story), just as, arguably, the respected cult author of weird fiction became a mad author with the long gestation of the eventual publication of CATHR, something that has been imitated or plagiarised in recent times:
"But among these mock-people, as became evident the longer one gazed at the stage, were hidden real ones who, rather ably, imitated the imitations."

(Above is an extract from the on-going review of my re-reading NOCTUARY.)

	CATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

MAD NIGHT OF ATONEMENT - A Future Tale ": the world thrives on its faults and strives, by every possible means, to aggravate them, while at the same time to mask them like a congenital deformity." That sounds like a keynote for this world. This Mad Scientist story seems also to present, for me, what I shall now call the NOEUD of Ligotti (cf the 'Catholic / CATHRian' symbiosis that was evoked earlier for me by remembering "Le Noeud de vipères" (Knot of Snakes) by Francois Mauriac) and I say that this NOEUD is the essential Prophet / Showman conundrum residing at the core of how I see this Mad Scientist author or how I see the image of this author that is conveyed by a deeper author even than the one who is named Ligotti on the cover. Here we have a wonderfully described Heath Robinson contraption or patchwork scrapheap (cf todays' review by me of 'The Night Clock' HERE), a contraption or creative scrapheap wielding a single snake-like 'Sacred Ray', one that puppetises or immortalises (or both) the representative 'mankind' of the Mad Scientist's lecture audiences. The "decrepitude" word again used here as DUE CREED of the PIT when anagrammatised. The Creator as manikin, or like the insignificance that was found to manipulate the Land of Oz? It is subtitled 'Future Tale' because it is published in the mid-1990s, now seen as premonitory of a well-respected scientist becoming a Mad one (or "crank doomsayer" as it says in this story), just as, arguably, the respected cult author of weird fiction became a mad author with the long gestation of the eventual publication of CATHR, something that has been imitated or plagiarised in recent times: "But among these mock-people, as became evident the longer one gazed at the stage, were hidden real ones who, rather ably, imitated the imitations." (Above is an extract from the on-going review of my re-reading NOCTUARY.)

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

	CATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race