The Shadow, the Darkness

[Nemonymous]

THE SHADOW, THE DARKNESS – Not so much a story as a philosophical treatise disguised as a story and makes mention of a “Conspiracy Against The Human Race” – with a photographic 'negative' Maat called Tsalal. It takes place in a Twin Peaks town (Crampton) (plus mention of “psychic coffee house” and the town’s metamorphosis at the end into, inter alia, “strange peaks”), a ‘storefront’ art gallery (Cf The Bungalow House) and a character called Grossvogel who reminds me of Madoff the disgraced hedge-fund operator. A very apt comparison, I found!
“Soul or self” are dubbed “nonsense and dreams”, and Grossvogel is like the “giantlike” Russian ‘man’ in Algernon Blackwood’s THE CENTAUR. In fact this Ligotti ‘story’ (almost novella length) is the precise 'negative' version of THE CENTAUR novel.
It also treats of Art as a “swindle” (akin to hedge funds?) and other Aesthetic matters in 'The Bunglaow House' - and, in this respect, reminds me very strongly (but also, in its way, very differently) of the story ‘The Point of Oswald Masters’ (the authorship of which is currently unknown in the ‘Cone Zero’ anthology (Nemonymous 8)).
The style of 'The Shadow, the Darkness' is hypnotic, almost like Philip Glass music as well as clumsily amorphous, yet paradoxically tight and sinewy, in the textual texture of Elizabeth Bowen fiction.
The gastrointestinal disease (here seen as a religious Road to Damascus!) echoes the story ‘Teatro Grottesco’ and, not surprisingly in view of this ‘disease’, there is the need of another Art installation lavatory to be placed into the ’story’!
This ‘story’ also has labels like “drab abyss”. A 'story' about “absence” and the “useless desire to do something, and to be something.”
In many ways, perhaps against its authorial intent, this ‘story’ uplifts me. I fail to explain why.

[Jezetha]

I just read ´The Shadow, the Darkness´ for the first time. It struck me ever more forcibly that this story, the nucleus of the forthcoming CATHR, is not only strongly allegorical, I suddenly realized I was reading a negative gospel. Reiner Grossvogel - a rather ludicrous German name, literally meaning Pure Big Bird - figures as Christ. The people who follow him rather critically and reluctantly (his disciples as it were) are all 'losers' and twelve or thirteen in number (p. 256 'about a dozen in all'). There is also one woman in this entourage called Mrs Angela - Mary Magdalen? Grossvogel dies and is resurrected, though here it is called 'metamorphic recovery'. The animating God in this Ligottian Gospel is the Tsalal, p. 272: "It means "to become darkened... to become enshadowed" in Hebrew. What Ligotti has done here is to have made the Good News of the New Testament into its obverse. And CATHR will be the Ligottian Bible.

	CATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[Ascrobius]

While I don't have time to get into why I feel the way I do about it, I do believe that though it will take some time for people to begin referring back to The Shadow, The Darkness, after more people read TCATHR, after seeing the obvious connectedness between the two, and recognizing it for what it is; a true Ligotti masterpiece. Not only that, but in Ligottian terms, it's an epic when compared to the majority of his other works, which puts it into a category of its own.

	TCATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[EemeliJ]

Though not my personal favourite of the collection, I always thought that The Shadow, The Darkness was the most powerful story in Teatro Grottesco. Quite excellent it was at the time of reading, about a year ago, and I've been slowly going through the stories again just recently. The second reading has proved to be more intense and I wonder how the story will strike this time. Severini and The Shadow, The Darkness are still left. There is some anticipation in me. I'm excited to go through the story again and make a little analysis of my own. For now though, I shall occupy meself with Songs of a Dead Dreamer, which I haven't read too much yet.

[fodull]

I'm a novice to Ligotti, but the journey I took to him (via Lovecraft, True Detective, Chambers, Barron and then Ligotti) has me somewhat expectant regarding the depth of his fiction, yet nothing could prepare me for the tour de force that was The Shadow, The Darkness. Even better, I read it in the 999 anthology, so I had the works of other contemporaries to compare.

I immediately recognized the gospel-like tones of the story mentioned by others, but the only true sermon by Grossvogel is in the back of the gallery and so heavily laden with philosophic jargon that it seems a mock-up of something Dostoyevsky might have written in Brothers Karamazov. In fact, the entire story has that "19th century Russian lit" theme of suffering/failed intelligentsia and their "struggle". Grossvogel thus provides the initial experience, the example, but what I feel is the core of the concepts conveyed is the nihilistic discussion of the narrator with the writer of the TCATHR, where they deduce that without the mind or soul, the organism feels and acts but fails to comprehend...thus I think rendering mankind a von Neumann machine. The darkness and the shadow are the motivation, but if the only way to envision the driving (or thriving) force is to lose comprehension then how can the darkness exist... ?

The story ends with the pentecostal experience in the diner as the "disciples" see the thriving force, and the darkness that envelops the world, and go forth to "spread the shadow".

I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and I cannot wait to start the Nightmare Factory collection. The only part of the story that I could not rationalize is the symbolism of the rotten hospital or the need of Grossvogel to be on copious drugs while at the same time preaching the power of his endarkned organism.

	TCATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[xylokopos]

I agree that TSTD could be seen as the Gospel According to Ligotti [otherwise known as the Really Bad News]. It is very metafictional and quite self-referential in the context of his work. This becomes obvious if the Teatro Grottesco stories are read in order, with TSTD being the last one: it is the final iteration of the theme of the artist as doomed Messiah and Messiah of Doom, the previous ones being in the collection's eponymous story, in the Bungalow House and in Severini. It also plays on the notion of an inverse Enlightenment, of a regression of the human back to the purely biological. As such, it is also a philosophical treatise in fictional form that engages with the myth of progress. And more than that - and this is bloody spectacular - it offers something equivalent to Schopenhauer's Will or Bergson's Elan Vital: a force or a unifying principle as an answer to the problem of Being.

Quote Originally Posted by fodull

The only part of the story that I could not rationalize is the symbolism of the rotten hospital or the need of Grossvogel to be on copious drugs while at the same time preaching the power of his endarkned organism.

Hospitals, viruses, drugs and illnesses serve as catalysts for the 'metamorphic recovery', the realization of the truth of the flesh and of the illusions of consciousness. You were very insightful to reference Dostoyevsky: his Notes from the Underground are almost perfectly compatible and beautifully juxtaposed with TSTD, as they also deal both theoretically and in fictional form with consciousness as a disease. But the true twin of Ligotti's story is, of course, Zappfe's The Last Messiah, an essay that sees self-awareness as the origin of our unnatural suffering. Ligotti just takes the idea to its ultimate conclusion: if awareness of the self makes the human animal suffer, a return to the purely bestial state through self-loss will restore us to the preferable state of being unaware of the incoming oblivion.

[mrcordano]

Hi. I'm new to the site and Ligotti, and like other neophytes, I've only come to know Ligotti as a result of True Detective. I just finished Teatro Grottesco, and while I'm very impressed, I found myself--like Nemonymous writes--"uplifted" by "The Shadow, The Darkness" rather than haunted by it. This notion of the self as an illusion is not at all the haunting thing the story describes; I've always found that to be a very liberating idea. Not that I'm looking forward to experiencing any excruciating gastrointestinal pain, but I'm comforted by the idea that the source of whatever insecurity or fear I experience is essentially an illusion that will--in its time--end, and whatever shadow I host (or light, right? After all, we're trapped in the binary language game) will reacquaint itself with the blackness (or, hell, why not a great light).
I loved the collection, particularly his hypnotic refrains throughout the stories, but weirdly, instead of feeling haunted after "The Shadow, the Darkness," I felt as if a very strange coach patted me on the back and said, "Hang in there, lil' buddy, your ego is an illusion that eventually will be broken!"
Great stuff! Hope I have the luxury of time to read it again someday soon!
Has anyone written any psychoanalytical criticism of Ligotti or the works in TG?

[josh]

Quote Originally Posted by mrcordano

Hi. I'm new to the site and Ligotti, and like other neophytes, I've only come to know Ligotti as a result of True Detective. I just finished Teatro Grottesco, and while I'm very impressed, I found myself--like Nemonymous writes--"uplifted" by "The Shadow, The Darkness" rather than haunted by it. This notion of the self as an illusion is not at all the haunting thing the story describes; I've always found that to be a very liberating idea. Not that I'm looking forward to experiencing any excruciating gastrointestinal pain, but I'm comforted by the idea that the source of whatever insecurity or fear I experience is essentially an illusion that will--in its time--end, and whatever shadow I host (or light, right? After all, we're trapped in the binary language game) will reacquaint itself with the blackness (or, hell, why not a great light). I loved the collection, particularly his hypnotic refrains throughout the stories, but weirdly, instead of feeling haunted after "The Shadow, the Darkness," I felt as if a very strange coach patted me on the back and said, "Hang in there, lil' buddy, your ego is an illusion that eventually will be broken!" Great stuff! Hope I have the luxury of time to read it again someday soon! Has anyone written any psychoanalytical criticism of Ligotti or the works in TG?

I agree, though Ligotti's left me haunted, too.

[Nemonymous]

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:-

THE SHADOW, THE DARKNESS

"Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race..."

Where does one start with this large work? With my own take on the TSALAL earlier in these Ligotti reviews HERE ('La La La La La, I’m not going to listen to you. La La La La…Until the LAST LA')?

The crucial sculptures by the 'devious ' or 'dubious' "artistic visionary Reiner Grossvogel" - sculptures synchronously illuminatory of the very recent HPL bust WFA Award controversial Aesthetic war of political (in)correctness - were all entitled TSALAL.

But that is only one aside among many asides I could summon up regarding this major fiction-philosophical work, a work that ranges from hypnotically obsessive repetitions of its stock phrases (in tune with minimalist Morton Feldman music) to what I see as the Dada or Zeroist happening embodied in gallery shows, embodied by words about death, human ambition / despair and scatological (results of belly illness) / eschatological conspiracies, bodily ailments as intellectual property...and much more.

Grossvogel's reluctant disciples (more reluctant than those of Severini) gather in an unsatisfactory diner ("intestinal discomfort which might have been attributed to the poor quality of the coffee and donuts") in a mutated and decaying Twin Peaks township called Crampton. They await the artist and we readers are word-swaddled in thoughts about his original storefront gallery exhibit showings, his own self-contradictions as to failure and success, his stays in an unsatisfactory hospital with his intestinal trouble, all in interface with the actual writer of the still unwritten CATHR as one of this story's characters.

"A metaphysical swindle", "metamorphic recovery", "pervasive shadow", "all-moving-darkness", "a fog of delirious and sometimes lurid gossip and speculation", a traveller on buslines, not so much "the artist who has failed" but "a body that has succeeded", listening to his all pervasive "lecture or fantasy monologue"...

But who is the "one man artistic and philosophical freakshow"?
Grossvogel himself or the then would-be CATHR writer or the real-time dreamcatcher? Reading this story does make the reader paradoxically feel more self-important than is warranted. This is by having transcended the word-nihilism in actually buying the book within which it is expressed! The 'pulling and tugging' of triggers that are either tangled puppet-strings or ultimately imaginary internal synapses of nothing but "nonsense and dreams". La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la...

(I shall now read my 2008 review of this story at the start of this thread.)

	CATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

It might be significant that the name "Grossvogel" is German, and could be translated into English as Big Bird? And what is Big Bird? A puppet.