Fantastic Metropolis

In his book The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto contends that horror stories provide a kind of low-level spiritual experience, a pale and primitive hint of a full-fledged encounter with the divine as a terrifying and otherworldly force. But Otto was a professional theologian and a Christian, so his ideas, interesting though they are, are as self-serving as Lovecraft’s.

Nabokov’s statement that portraying an atheist as a decent person is a taboo subject in literature betrays his stance as someone who felt atheism to be an unjustly persecuted intellectual posture. On the other side, believers have made frequent declarations to the effect that they are being shoved aside by what they perceive as the dominant forces of secular humanism.

There’s a Canadian scientist who has modified a football helmet so that the brain of its wearer is affected by adjustable magnetic fields that induce a variety of strange sensations, including supernatural experiences. Atheists have used this as evidence to support their position that anyone’s sense of the supernatural is purely subjective, while believers have written books claiming that the magnetic-field emitting football helmet proves the existence of a god who has “hard-wired” itself into our brain.

A whole field of study called neurotheology has developed around this and other laboratory experiments. It really seems that whichever side of the question you come down upon, you’re doomed to be discredited by the other. The value of this dispute for writers of supernatural horror is that it insures the large part of humanity will remain in the state in which it’s always existed—permanent fear. Because no one can ever be certain of his own ontological status in this world, let alone that of gods, demons, prophetic nightmares, alien invaders, and just plain old weird stuff.

Forget about whether or not all the bogymen we’ve invented or divined are real, the big question is this: are we real? This is presently being determined by neuroscientists, who will no doubt contest the answer until the day that human beings cease to walk the earth like so many ghosts in the making.

Neddal Ayad: Thomas Bernhard…

Thomas Ligotti: Bernhard’s fiction is captivating for two reasons. First, he uses repetition. Along with metaphor, repetition is the true mark of the literary. It’s also inherently funny. Repetition has this effect in some of the major works of Gertrude Stein, and it’s the same with Bernhard. Second, repetition in Bernhard, unlike in Stein or any other author I can recall, heightens the expression of his intense rage and the creation of his persona as sort of a literary madman. From book to book, Bernhard harps on a particular set of hatreds, including the malign stupidity of doctors, the malign stupidity of the Catholic Church, the malign stupidity of the Austrian government, the malign stupidity of the Austrian people as stand-ins for people everywhere, and the malign stupidity of life itself. Even in his autobiography, especially in his autobiography, he swings his verbal blade at these targets. The wonderful thing is that he never makes the mistake of trying to argue a case against anyone or anything. He and his narrators just spit bile—for example at Heidegger for being a complacent moron or the relatives of his narrators for being complacent morons—and then moves on to another target. You’re either with him on a specific point or you’re not.

He knows that arguments are useless and pathetic. If you’re not fortunate enough to be above having opinions, and almost no one has this luxury, then the only course available to you, the only source of satisfaction, is to attack what inspires hate in you. You could also celebrate what inspires admiration or even love, but this doesn’t happen very much in Bernhard. In this sense, he very much resembles E. M. Cioran, whose philosophical essays are an assault on the highest level of the pure crumminess of all creation, a position that has led some commentators to classify him as a latter-day Gnostic—minus any god.

Like Bernhard, Cioran is a consummate stylist, which is a vital quality for any writer whose essential attitude is that of negation. Readers with put up with the sloppiest, most puerile, and intellectually commonplace writer if only he brings them comforting lies. If you have nothing but bad news to offer, then you had better write in a sterling and entertaining manner. Both Lovecraft and Poe have been criticized for writing badly, which in their case means writing in an overly melodramatic style. It’s true that their prose is high-strung to hysterical. It’s also true that if they had not written in this way, nobody would be reading them today. The quality of their writing is precisely the reason that their works have endured. The darkest vision of life requires the most dazzling pyrotechnics of language. Of course, neither Lovecraft nor Poe is in the same literary class as Shakespeare, but Shakespeare’s plays are more tricked up soap operas than a vision of… anything. This qualifies in the eyes of some as that wise man of no opinions mentioned above or at least in a league with Stephen Dedalus’s artist-god who stands above creation paring his fingernails. How lofty and yet how human! It must be nice.