I am most grateful to this chapter in THE UNCANNY by Nicholas Royle for the alert to many things that may have already been part of me by means of some angel guardian or daemon muse or unknown kindred spirit as ‘concursor’ of which I have, until now, been unaware, one of these many things being the word ‘concursor’ itself here connected with D.H. Lawrence, whose ‘Women In Love’ novel invoked in me an essay in 1967 of which I was most proud as a student. More recently, I reviewed (with two further links to my reviews of ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Daughters of the Vicar) HERE:
The Rocking-Horse Winner | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews : The Rocking-Horse Winner’ story by Lawrence that is mentioned in this chapter.
Also while absorbing this chapter’s thoughts about returns, recurrences, repeats, doubles, silences, blanks etc. (also see the aforementioned Nemonymous) in connection with the DEATH DRIVE contextualised by the subject matter and references in this Royle book on the uncanny and the eerie as now differentiated (and dare I also mention a further slant known as the ostranenie?), I thought of the work of Thomas Ligotti, a great writer of Weird Fiction, comprising Horror and Ghost Story and Uncanny and Philosophical Anti-Natalism, the latter Emil Cioran type aspect actually denying the experience of the death drive by not being born at all! Something here seems to generate the ultimate gestalt of the Uncanny and Literature and La Vie Inconnu and the Blank of Silence, i.e. this inability to repeat or return by not doing it once? (I started reading Ligotti many years before the Penguin Classics edition of his work and my reviews are linked HERE:
Le Nœud de Ligotti | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews)
From my review here:
THE UNCANNY by Nicholas Royle | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
01-10-2024
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