Fantastic Metropolis

The subjective world of the nervously afflicted narrator becomes blurred with the objective world of the musician Zann, who seems to be battling to keep at bay unfathomable forces that would destroy the tenuous order of an already crooked, creaking world as represented by the decayed and architecturally unsound Rue d’Auseil. It is suggestive horror at its best. To some extent “Erich Zann” resembles Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” where the menacing forces are as nameless and overwhelming as they are in Lovecraft’s story. However, Blackwood can’t help but have one of the characters in “The Willows” offer possible explanations for the supernatural incidents in the story, referring, I believe, to the “fourth-dimension” or some other realm of reality in which everything would make sense if one could only attain that perspective. Laughably, this character, the Swede, is described as an unimaginative individual. Lovecraft offers no such comfort in “Erich Zann” but only a world of “weird notes,” which only work in a literary form—no film could duplicate these harmonic or melodic impossibilities—and a battle that will always be lost against the nightmare that is our lives if we should be so unlucky as to confront it in the tilted, twisting streets that form both our minds and the world in which they are tossed about until they break.

Neddal Ayad: Edgar Allan Poe…

Thomas Ligotti: In his Marginalia, Poe offered a simple guideline for any writer who wanted to be renowned, revered, and revolutionary—write a book called My Heart Laid Bare and be true to the title. At the same time, he acknowledged the impossibility of writing such a book because the attempt to do so would destroy the writer. Nevertheless, I believe that underlying Poe’s most important works is the mania and the mission to write this book. And no one before or since has come as close as he did to accomplishing this self-destructive feat.

The mere attempt in this direction did gain Poe the reputation and worldwide influence that he so desperately sought, even if he didn’t see it in his lifetime. The problem, of course, is that not only did writing My Heart Laid Bare present a threat to the balance and being of the author, it did the same to readers… if they would only read the works as Poe meant them to be read. But almost no one has. With a few exceptions, Poe’s works have been viewed from a distance that keeps readers safe from their incendiary power.

His morbidity has been dismissed as vulgar or domesticated as ironic. Respectable writers—writers that students and critics unapologetically relish; Henry James, for example—keep their subject matter at arm’s length, writing as if through a microscope about the soap opera the spins about them like a merry-go-round. Poe, on the other hand, was his own subject—not merely in an autobiographical sense but in a profoundly emotional and psychological sense. I don’t think that it’s overstating the matter to say that Poe was a true literary, and perhaps even evolutionary, mutant. He also encouraged similar mutant qualities in the French Decadents and Symbolists before that generation died out and left us with the tedium of Modernism.

For a time, Lovecraft raised Poe’s black and tattered flag, but even Lovecraft’s contemporaries never quite caught on to what he was about, let alone the horror writers of subsequent generations. At this point, let me pause a moment and acknowledge the obvious, namely, that my celebration of Poe and Lovecraft, and my derogation of writers who are unlike them, is a pure outpouring of personal temperament… and nothing more. I strongly identify with the viewpoint of these two men, which is no excuse for pontificating on their singularity or their genius. The same could be done—and is done all the time—for writers who are quite the opposite of those whose camp I see myself, for better or worse, as inhabiting. Poe and Lovecraft were among the most alienated authors of all time. They were sick and isolated and well outside the mainstream of any society. And they were both well aware of this fact.

As evidence of this assertion, I refer you to Poe’s poem “Alone” and Lovecraft’s poem “Alienation.” To a significant degree, these poems are rather pitiable lamentations of these authors’ inability to fully belong to the common mob of humanity. It is an irrational regret, given the nature of any society throughout world history, but who hasn’t felt it at some time or another? So I suppose that if Poe and Lovecraft stand out as anything special in course of literature, as well as society, it is as specimens of a deep conflict between the desire to lose themselves in the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, to smash its illusions to tiny, twitching bits.

Neddal Ayad: Vladimir Nabokov…

Thomas Ligotti: The unique thing about Nabokov is that he practiced the writing of fiction as a form of sorcery. His novels and stories draw you in with their language and their humor, not to mention his troupe of demented narrators who seem to be descendants of Poe’s band of madmen. But behind the language and the humor there is another dimension, a world of a terrible desperation where Nabokov works like a wizard to make the impossible happen right before the readers eyes—specifically, to defeat the limitations of time and space, to recover the losses brought about by the ravaging vicissitudes of one’s life and by the course of history itself, and, ultimately, to defeat death.

This is the underworld of Nabokov’s works, and it’s most obvious and moving in his masterpiece, Lolita, wherein the principal characters, who are declared as dead in the preface to the book, are all brought back to life in quite spectral ways by the writing of the book itself. Of course, the magic doesn’t really work, except from a strictly aesthetic perspective, but perhaps that’s the deepest meaning of Nabokov’s fiction. In commenting about the taboo subject matter of Lolita, which has since become even more taboo, he mentioned two others that at the time were off limits to American writers: that of a successful black-white marriage and that of an atheist who lives a good and purposeful life and dies in his sleep at an advanced age. Nabokov was himself enough of an atheist not to believe in magic of any sort. Lovecraft argued that only a non-believer in the occult could successfully create the thrill of the fantastic and the supernatural—the feeling that all common sense and the apparent order of the world have been overturned—because such a thing was so alien to their view of the world as wholly materialistic. This was a self-serving remark, since Lovecraft himself didn’t believe in any form of the supernatural.