Ligotti and Decadent Literature

[bendk]

Would you place Ligotti in the Decadent literary tradition?


Ligotti's brand of decadence seems to have a different starting point than the norm. It is often a nightmare, a dreadful sequence of events, or an encounter with the uncanny that begins the decomposition of consensus reality. As accepted truths give way, this leads to an unmooring of self and his characters fall prey to debilitating thoughts, ideas, memories, and perceptions. The characters in a Ligotti story wander through a nightmarish scenario of decaying illusions. I googled certain terms like metaphysical decadence, epistemological decadence, etc. but I couldn't quite find what I was looking for.


His prose style can certainly be compared to Poe's, who TL referred to as "The First Decadent".



When he worked for Gale Research in compiling the criticism on H.P. Lovecraft for the series Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Ligotti quoted extensively from the book H.P. Lovecraft New England Decadent by Barton Levi St. Armand. I believe this was the second book published by Harry O. Morris for Silver Scarab Press in 1975. Armand makes a good case for Lovecraft's inclusion into the decadent literary tradition. (This book has just been reissued to partially celebrate Necronomicon 2013). I may post relevant passages later.


If Poe and Lovecraft can be considered "Decadents", I think it is fair to include Ligotti in their company.



The following entry on Ligotti was written by Brian Stableford for The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers. Stableford has not only edited several of the Dedalus line of books on Decadent literature, but he has written extensively on the subject. He has also translated some of the French Decadents into the English language.



St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers
/with a preface by Dennis Etchison; editor, David Pringle.
Detroit, MI.: St. James Press, c 1998



The school of American horror fiction which crystallized out around the central figure of H.P. Lovecraft - as much by virtue of his indefatigable letter-writing as his insistent theorizing- was never fully professionalized; even its long-time association with the pulp magazine Weird Tales was weakened by the uncertainty and unsteadiness of the various editor's sympathies. August Derleth's small press Arkham House provided a more secure anchorage through the 1950s and 1960s, but after Derleth died the torch was taken up by even smaller presses whose products were conspicuously amateurish. such enterprises still remain, however, the only practice-ground for writers whose interest in the horrific and the gothic is rooted in the calculatedly artificial and conscientiously ornate kind of prose style which Theophile Gautier-referring to works produced by Charles Baudelaire under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe- called "decadent." Lovecraft's friend and associate Clark Ashton Smith was by far the finest American writer in this exotic vein while he was active in the 1930s, and was unrivalled thereafter until the emergence in the 1980s of Thomas Ligotti.

The expanded trade edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer is still the definitive Ligotti collection. It establishes his Lovecraftian world-view, which takes as a given that everyday life is only sustainable by those who refuse to cultivate an awareness of the awesome magnitude and utter unfriendliness of the universe in which we live. It also establishes his unusually catholic approach to the exploration of this world-view. A few of his characters, including the dead Dr. Locrian in "Dr. Locrians Asylum" and the protagonists of "The Journal of J.P. Drapeau" and "Vastarian" are scholars in the classic Lovecraftian mode, who unwisely pursue their researches to the only possible conclusion. Ligotti prefers, however, to use protagonists unwillingly drawn across a borderland whose threat they appreciate even though they cannot measure it. The psychiatrist in "The Frolic," the author in "Alice's Last Adventure" and the half-human artist in "The Lost Art of Twilight" all belong to this category. The strangest of the author's products are, however, those which deal with casts of characters who have already crossed those borderlands and have made what efforts they can to adapt themselves to a world of terrible strangeness and intrinsic hostility. It is in these stories that Ligotti penetrates to the heart of the decadent sensibility - and where Clark Ashton Smith once discovered an incredible gorgeous exoticism Ligotti discovers a marvelously disturbing surrealy. "Masquerade of the Dead Sword," " Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech," and "The Sect of the Idiot" displace the reader into realms whose eeriness is entirely new.

His is a unique voice, which speaks with a profound elegance - and a precious seriousness - of matters which few other literary voices have ever touched. An interest in decadent style is, virtually by definition, old-fashioned, but Ligotti is old-fashioned in the very best sense of the term and there is nothing dated about his work, which is unmistakably contemporary. He is, in fact, the only writer who has succeeded in bringing the ambitions of the Lovecraft school up to date.

-Brian Stableford




An excerpt from an interview with Ligotti concerning decadent literature.


Neddal Ayad "The Ligotti Outtakes"

How much of an influence did the Decadents have on your work?

The Decadents were an extension of Poe. He was the writer who, through the translations of Baudelaire and others in France, really legitimized morbidity as a literary subject as well as a worldview. The French already had a tradition of cynicism, morbidity, and pessimism from the eighteenth-century works of authors like Sade, Chamfort, and La Rochefoucauld. I believe that this made them receptive to Poe's anti-life-affirming genius. He not only appealed to the negative spirit in French writers, but he did it with consummate artistry and technique, which are essential to transmitting one's attitudes. If Poe had been a bad writer, nobody would have taken notice of him. Even though there already existed a philosophical tradition of morbidity and pessimism going back to the Greeks in the Western tradition, it wasn't until Poe came along that poets and fiction writers could feel free to express these feelings in literary works. Take the first couple sentences of "Berenice"--"MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform." Who in earlier Western literature would have dared to open a short story in this manner except perhaps for the purposes of parody? Poe's authority in the literary sphere inspired others throughout the world to align themselves with him under the same black flag. In the United States, it wasn't much of leap from Poe's declaration in "Berenice" to Lovecraft's opening of "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family"--"Life is a hideous thing . . . ." This is the form of Decadence that has always interested me--the freedom, after thousands of years under the whip of uplifting religions and the tyrannical politics of the positive--which are nothing more than a means for crowd control--to speak to others who in their hearts could no longer lie to themselves about what they thought concerning the value, or rather lack of value, of human life.




I have some other quotes by TL on the subject, but I will post them later.

[gveranon]

I don't know enough to try to explain the relationship between Decadent literature and Symbolism, but there is a relationship, not least in that some authors of that time (e.g., Baudelaire) are regarded as both Decadents and Symbolists. Steven J. Mariconda's essay in Lovecraft and Influence (ed. Robert H. Waugh) posits a literary genealogy in which Lovecraft and then Ligotti departed from Poe's psychological Gothic in a symbolist direction, Ligotti moving also into surrealism. This way of looking at it clarifies some things for me, and seems relevant to this thread.

"Relative to the Gothic, Poe took its conventions to an entirely new level -- the psychological. Any Gothic after Poe is necessarily reflective of his influence, and is the better for it. But Lovecraft and Ligotti do not stand primarily in the stream of Poe's Gothic influence in the manner of (say) Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Shirley Jackson. On the contrary, Lovecraft and Ligotti share most profoundly the Poe influence that comes down in parallel through Baudelaire and the symbolists.

"Several recent studies of the Gothic have shown how difficult it is to shoehorn Lovecraft into the category. He does not fit comfortably in the Gothic tradition, and neither does Ligotti. Both writers have taken important steps into other fictional areas suggested by Poe, specifically those expanded and refined first by the symbolists and subsequently by the surrealists. I suggest that at bottom Lovecraft is an innovator, best seen as following this alternate stream of Poe's influence -- not Gothic, but symbolist. Lovecraft's fiction is less like that of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Fitz-James O'Brien and more like that of Baudelaire and Lautreamont. Ligotti follows him further in this line of innovation, extending Lovecraft's symbolist tendencies into the territory of Georges Rodenbach, Louis Aragon, and Bruno Schulz -- that is, to the surrealists, and perhaps beyond."

Steven J. Mariconda, "Easy as Falling off Logic: A Consideration of Lovecraft and Ligotti as 'Weird Realists'"

[teguififthzeal]

Yes. Thomas Ligotti's work is more influenced by, say, Aloysius Bertrand or Ernest Dowson than even the late blooming surrealist/decadent hybrids like Alfred Jarry.