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Teatro Grottesco - the Story
TEATRO GROTTESCO – the story is full of “Teatro stuff” etc & seems to be the most personal so far (but how would I know for certain?) and the most satirical (Cf. “Soon he will know about the soft black stars” with “The Owls are not what they seem”).
“Even I, a writer of nihilistic prose works...”
This story (Theatre of Cruelty) seems to have an unavoidable curse, like “Macbeth”, a tipping-point between embracing and rejecting death (between embracing and rejecting avant garde art (Theatre of Absurd)).
I have a similar feeling about my own prose work that both magnifies and diminishes me as a person. Smaller and smaller hands as the photographer’s focus narrows and then widens out. And moods change from day to day.
The story has an “abysmal resonance” (similar to an “architectural moan”?) and a “post-artistic” angst. It is seminal Ligotti, I sense. Even the text has intestinal troubles. And a boil in the shape of a purple woman. A Doctor that seems to me to have a disease for a name: Groddeck. And Herman Zick. (Plus elements of Tarr & Fether?).
Troubles with a landlord? Many writers complain about this, it seems.
I find this story highly disturbing.
“Whether this destructive force is a matter of intention or design on the part of the Teatro, I have no idea (at least none I can elaborate in comprehensible terms). Nonetheless, I feel certain that for an artist to encounter the Teatro there can be only one consequence: the end of that artist’s work. Strange, then, that knowing this fact I still acted as I did.”
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