Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

MASQUERADE OF A DEAD SWORD: A TRAGEDIE A review with possible spoilers, but I contend it is impossible to spoil this story. "There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them." This story is an "ugsome hilarity" in a swords and sorcery setting? Or a completely mad or confused exercise in masks and false jesters? If the latter, I guess, it is only madmen who can fathom it, so I make myself mad, for the nonce, to see if I can fathom it. To fathom its ulterior motives and to fashion a path, a subliminal exercise with gaps left for spying the true intent, a path towards this story's "fabulous hoax" or the serious philosophical area where its author is today? Probably both, I guess. A grooming of the world for real and for fun. At first it seems as if it presents, to use the coinage from The Lost Art of Twilight, an "opera of iniquity", one composed by Rossini or Mozart, where Faliol is that opera's Figaro. But soon we stumble on clues to something else. The spectacles, an objective correlative like Nathan's trousers, allowing Faliol both to blur matters into madness and to focus them into truth. (By the way, did you notice above in my review of Eye of the Lynx, the image of the jester that I used to illustrate it had spectacles?) We watch people spying on Faliol, as the Figaro-type plot thickens with a mage and a sorcerer that he trusts one minute and is betrayed by the next, as they betray each other. As the author with his reader - and now vice versa? All of this is thrust around - in Ligotti's beautiful gothic/experimental style - with the confusion of carnival night, but it is an inopportune time for Faliol to try untangling his puppet strings or undo his oneiric "envelope of sleep". The mage with sagging eyelid, who I take to be the freehold author himself, who holds the madman in a Torture Citadel threatening him, merely by means of explanation, with the Anima Mundi, something that needs destroying, but it won't let itself be destroyed by actually BEING the madman. Then the masked carnival where identities become even more confused, more confused indeed than this arguably mad review. The jester eventually becomes "composed and methodical." The mage destroys himself, as "a heroic act". Faliol destroys himself, too, at the end, in a "crimson glory". The Anima Mundi is both the jester and the mage, as one, I propose, as I pick myself out of this fantastical morass and become myself "composed and methodical", like them or, rather, like him. The synchronised shards of random truth and fiction, as I have long called them, in an audit trail from here to CATHR. Or it is just a mad swords and sorcery story, after all - one with a brilliant scene for which alone it is worth reading this controversial work: a scene that the text states goes "beyond the most gruesome". "From the highest to the lowest, they are all my children and through their eyes I see my own glory." (An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

	CATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race