Ligotti and Aickman

[Jeff Coleman]

One more thing before I go away for awhile to keep my self-loathing from ratcheting up to unmanageable levels: I 'rate' Ligotti higher than Aickman, I think because Ligotti's writing is unambiguous at its core, whereas Aickman works with the power of suggestion, always circling around truths without ever fully revealing them. Or something like that. I think it is a matter of personal preference, and the way my brain is wired, though.

That said, if I could only read one author for the rest of my life, it would be Aickman.

[qcrisp]

Quote Originally Posted by Jeff Coleman

I made a mistake in what I wrote about the Aickman quote Quentin Crisp posted. I wrote: "Maybe I am missing the point in thinking there is something to grasp." I meant: "Maybe I am missing the point in thinking that something can be grasped." The first makes it sound like I thought there was nothing of substance there, which is not the case. I was thinking of the first part of the quote: "This brings me to life after death; though it is only part of the 'world elsewhere,' and perhaps not the major part. I believe in life after death, and I decline to particularize upon the meaning of the words, because of all futile and reductionist attempts at definition, this is the most idle."

I have a great deal of sympathy with Aickman here. I don't know about the evidence for psychic phenomenon, and that's not of great interest to me. I do think the almost universal assurances of faith count for something, however. In fact, there was a posting on Mark Samuels' site recently quoting William Blake in this connection. However, most of all I think it's the idea that life is intolerable without a 'world elsewhere' with which I sympathise in Aickman's words on the afterlife.

I believe, perhaps wrongly, that I understand why he would wish not to be specific about what an afterlife might mean. After all, if we look at what the word 'God' means to people, we find, incredibly, that after the thousands of years in which the human race has been able to ponder and discuss the matter, the discussion still, today, centres on ridiculous parodies of the notion of God that are hardly even worth discussing at all - the old 'bearded man on the clouds' etc. Incredibly (again) any notion of what the word might mean beyond that seems to be entirely esoteric, even though it should be entirely mainstream to religious discussion.

Images of the afterlife seem to suffer in the same way. To particularise seems almost automatically to be an act of creating a parody. In fact, you might say that any desirable afterlife, or any afterlife worth taking seriously, would be precisely an escape from the parody of the particular - the tendency that dogs all human thought.

I can't really speak for Aickman, but certainly I know that, if I were in his shoes and making such a public assertion, I would also be very aware of the fact that almost no discussion of things such as God or afterlife seems to be undertaken in the spirit of impartial enquiry. Grievances against the church, which has claimed the monopoly of interpretation of such matters, are too large and too numerous for people generally to speak about the matters without involving the grievances.

There's actually a lot to respond to in this thread, but I'll leave it there for now, and maybe come back to some other points later.

[Jeff Coleman]

Quentin,

I sympathize with the idea that "life is intolerable without a 'world elsewhere'" too, but I don't see how I could ever occupy that world.

For example, if I was to survive into an afterlife that lifts the curse of this life, there would have to be some sense of self, some 'I' that survives, that experiences the other world. I think there would have to be some memory, which means memory of this world also, to keep my sense of self from dissipating completely. So in a sense I would still be 'occupying' this world. I guess it could be said that eventually I would lose all memory of this world, similar to the way that I don't remember my birth, or any possible existence before my birth. But there would still need to be a sense of self that experiences the new world I would be occupying, and that world would no longer be the world beyond, it would be 'this world' and the world elsewhere would be elsewhere.

It seems like the world elsewhere is something I can never experience, just something I can know exists (or take on faith), something that is beyond the nightmare of the totality of my experience.

I wonder if Aickman was wary of particularizing upon the words 'world elsewhere' and 'afterlife', because if he did, they would lose their otherness and become incorporated into the reductionist nightmare of the here and now.

I've read the Blake quote on Mark Samuels' blog. I don't know if I understand it, but it sent the wheels spinning. I'll have to give it another read, or three. There is also a fascinating elaboration of his (Mark's) belief system there, which I recommend everyone who's interested go check out.

I agree with you about the state of religious discussion (I think), but I don't want to go into detail about it right now (there is a pack of cigarettes calling to me from the corner store, I must go heed). Thanks for responding, Quentin. I hope to write more later.

[bendk]

A few disjointed notes I gathered for this thread.

The following is an excerpt from a letter Ligotti wrote to Nyctalops Magazine in 1991:

"I'll have to leave it to admirers of Robert Aickman, which I am not one, to comment on the essays treating his work. C.P.M.'s piece seemed to display the greater critical deftness; but the subject, whom Russell Kirk called "the greatest living writer of ghost stories" when he lived, is not one I warm up to, living or dead. Too many unrewarding hours spent pondering his ineffectual subtleties, too many frustrating revelations when I finally discovered the thematic key to a tale, only to find a crude closet of cliches behind the door. It's probably my innate vulgarity which prevents me from appreciating Aickman's "obscurity" but it is not for lack of effort that I cannot."


I can understand why someone would not like Aickman's work. It is deliberately paced and subtle. The "obscurity" that TL mentions is a criticism that I have heard of his own work by people who do not like it. Although, I have found Aickman's work, at times, more obscure than anything by Ligotti. I am puzzled by his use of the words "A crude closet of cliches" because that is very distant from my opinion of Aickman's stories.

I see little connection between Aickman and Ligotti. Perhaps Aickman's story "Wood" and "The Inner Room" have elements that Ligotti has used. But to name an Aickmanesque story by Ligotti, I am at a loss. They both have negative attitudes towards humanity, but this is hardly a significant connection. I remember Ligotti saying in an interview that writers (people?)that did not come to this conclusion were dense (or words to that effect). Funny and true, IMO.

I view Ligotti'w work as being neither derivative of nor inferior to Aickman's. And Ligotti has been very forthright about the debt he owes to writers he admires and have influenced him: Poe, Lovecraft, Bruno Schulz, and Nabokov, to name a few. I do see their influence. (although my knowledge of Nabokov's short stories is rather weak.)

Given Ligotti's worldview, unless that drastically alters, for him to have children would be akin to inviting a loved one into a torture chamber.


A nice passage by Joshi on Aickman:

The notion of entering an unfamiliar realm is the key to one of the most distinctive features of Aickman's horrific technique. Although he appears on the surface to be a "supernatural realist," describing the real world meticulously and slyly inserting the weird through the accumulation of background details, the true secret of his weird artistry is his abitility to portray seemingly normal regions that are somehow wrong. A statement by a character in "Hand in Glove" gets to the heart of the matter: "There's something very wrong with almost everything" The realms he desribes do not, in the end, correspond to anything we know, even though the characters attempt to move within them as if nothing were intrisically odd about them; they are, in the end, as fantastic as Dunsany's Pegana or any of Thomas Ligotti's dream-worlds. The notion of wrongness could, indeed, be extended to virtually everything that happens in Aickman's fiction - landscape, psychological reactions of characters, and even the smallest details of what appear to be mundane transcations."

I am tempted to say that I find Aickman's work more disorienting and Ligotti's more nightmarish, but it isn't that simple. Some of Aickman's can be quite scary. The obvious connection is ambiguity. Joshi's article on Aickman "Nothing is What It Seems to Be": Thomas Ligotti's Assault on Certainty by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Robert Aickman: "So Little is Definite" by St. Joshi.


Here are two reviews I got from 20th Century Literary Criticism, published by Gale Research. (Ligotti's old company)

Steve Rasnic Tem

A transforming landscape figures prominently in most of Aickman's best fiction. Certainly no other contemporary horror writer better understood the connections between the setting of a story and the inner drives and conflicts of its characters. Aickman possessed that rare ability to show naturalistic events coaxing and pulling the unconcious out of a character, transforming the world in which that character lives. Thus, Aickman's preference for the term "strange story" over "horror story." He was after something that goes far beyond a simple scare or disruption of sleep. His narratives lead us to question our assumptions about reality itself and show "strange" landscapes which we soon discover are not so strange after all. They are the landscapes in which we actually live out our lives, which have the most profound influence on our choices and actions. As critic Mike Ashley said " Aickman's stories... are almost always unsettling, not in the visceral sense, but spiritually."


Brigid Brophy New Statesman Jan 29, 1965 p. 170

I have never before reviewed a book without reading the whole of it. I trust Mr. Aickman will forgive me for doing so now, because my excuse pays him a compliment. The first of hist ghost stories [in Dark Entires] left me cold. The second left me goose-fleshed. I have no intention of reading the remaining four, because I don't enjoy being frightened in this particular way; but I hope those who do will read the same amount of recommendation as usually goes into 'I couldn't put it down' in my solemn declaration about Dark Entries that I could never again take it up.