Roland Topor - The Tenant

Written in 1964 in French, Roland Topor's The Tenant is a mundane and horrific example of the most depressive strains of horror. As the novel opens, Trelkovsky learns of an apartment just vacated by a suicide. Nominally in order to pay his respects, and really to ascertain if she'll die so he can move in, he visits her in the hospital. Semi-conscious at best, the former tenant opens one eye to see a friend and Trelkovsky, and she responds with an "unbreakable scream." (p. 20) At the time, neither Trelkovsky nor the reader can understand her terror. By the end of the book, both will know all too well, for Topor's world is one where all of humanity is at once utterly absurd and grotesquely terrifying, and there is no escape.

I came to The Tenant, as a fair few others no doubt did, because of Thomas Ligotti. In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Ligotti discusses Topor as both an outsider and as an exemplar of the "anti-idealist position." (p. 195, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) As far as those goals go, Topor does not disappoint, and it's easy to see why Ligotti – and the man's fans – found the novel so captivating. That being said, my Ligottian expectations were not perfectly accurate. It's true that, in the end, Topor's bleak vision is one comparable to Ligotti's, but his method of achieving that darkness is quite different.

Topor's writing is clear and rational throughout, conveying description and action in a carefully controlled fashion. This is a novel filled with both insanity and the most caustic of humors, but the organized nature of the prose proves a stabilizing bulwark against both. Like all the best of the hapless, Trelkovsky is unaware that his life is a source of bleak amusement, and, as for the madness, it's the logical way it's shown that makes this such a harrowing read. Topor describes the impossible, but he does so with such a straight face that, even in the midst of the climax's melodrama, you may take a few lines to catch the absurdity.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Topor and Ligotti, however, is that The Tenant is a fundamentally interpersonal story, one focused almost entirely on each man's relationship to both his friend's and his neighbors. Moments of eroticism, too, pervade the text. All of those however, proves hollow, sex a goal not for its own ends but for what it averts: And little by little, in the presence of swooning women and writhing flesh, the image of death became less clear, faded into the distance, and eventually vanished completely, like a vampire at the first light of dawn. (p. 27) Friendship, too, is, by the end of the novel, a tool to avoid loneliness rather than a boon on its own. Trelkovsky's interactions with his old pals is forced and unbearably awkward, and his romance with Stella is worse, a mixture of self deception and disgusting detachment sewn together by a talismanic fixation on her breasts and body.

Trelkovsky spends much of the novel studying those neighbors, spying into the building's toilet with a set of binoculars from his apartment window, and therein comes the second authorial comparison that I want to make. While the theme of The Tenant might be pure Ligotti, the execution is more similar to Cornell Woolrich's It Had to be Murder, which may nowadays be better known by the film adaptations by Alfred Hitchcock (entitled Rear Window, which the story itself now often seems to goes as in anthologies) and the more recent Disturbia. Like Trelkovsky, Woolrich's main character is a people watcher, spying on the inhabitants of the apartment building across the way with a set of binoculars and, eventually, he catches a murder by observing the subtle signs of nervousness he displays. That story's greatest quotation, too, applies just as well to both tales: The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free. (p. 2, It Had to be Murder)

Both Woolrich and Topor believe that people reveal themselves with their habits and traits. Furthermore, I'd argue that both show that to break those traits is to transgress, to reveal your true self. That, however, is where the two stories diverge sharply. It Had to be Murder is a Crime story, and, as such, is exceedingly rational in its approach to the world. When the main character is cut off from the outside world, he remains connected to it in any way he can, but the villain reacts differently and abnormally. By deviating from the common path – a path that the protagonist, the other characters, the author, and the reader are all assumed to be adherents to – the antagonist gives himself away as a criminal. In Topor's tale, on the other hand, the common path is all there is. Underneath that, we humans are nothing. We're but a set of traits, but – as Ligotti might put it – puppets stumbling about their routines with no mind or soul underneath our felt skin, and we're only here because we delude ourselves into thinking that we are, as dear Trelkovsky realizes after passing street after street of grotesque humanity:

Martians – they were all Martians. But they were ashamed of it, and so they tried to conceal it. They had determined, once and for all, that their monstrous disproportions were, in reality, true proportion, and their inconceivable ugliness was beauty. They were strangers on this planet, but they refused to admit it. They played at being perfectly at home. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a shop window. He was no different. Identical, exactly the same likeness as that of the monsters. He belonged to their species, but for some unknown reason he had been banished from their company. They had no confidence in him. All they wanted from him was obedience to their incongruous rules and their ridiculous laws. Ridiculous only to him, because he could never fathom their intricacy and their subtlety. (pp. 97-8)

In Topor's world, humanity is omnipresent and oppressive, a corrupting force that can't be stopped. By knocking on his walls, they leave him a frightened animal cowering alone on his bed. They strip him of his personality and friends, turn him into a shut in too tamed to raise the slightest dispute. For dozens of pages, Trelkovsky tries to escape them by surrender, tries to turn into the perfect tenant. But they never stop. At some point, he begins to wonder if it's not simple malice that's driving them: The Bastards! What the hell do they want – for everyone to just roll over and play dead! And even that probably wouldn't be enough! (p. 95) But that's not it either, as Ligotti points out when discussing the book and that passage in the aforementioned Conspiracy Against the Human Race: [Trelkovsky] is more right than he knows. Because what they wants is for everyone to roll over and play them. (p. 198, Conspiracy…)

That, right there, is the core of The Tenant. This is a book, in the end, about the influence that we have on each other. So, Woolrich's solidly insider story written for insider readers, acts almost as proof of Topor's.  Here, the herd of humanity demands compliance and will achieve that end at all costs, forcing the outsider into whatever role it must to maintain the illusion of a sane society and a sane world, casting – as Woolrich's narrator does – the deviant unacceptable, a criminal, an enemy of all society. Trelkovsky, occupying the same apartment as the former tenant, finds the world pushing him into her role, and he can't refuse.

In The Tenant, the only reality is the purely physical. As such, when Trelkovsky's apartment is burglarized by his neighbors, causing him to lose his pictures and mementos of his childhood, he realizes that he "no longer had a past." (p. 64) Later, when he dons a dress in a fit of submissive dementia, he realizes that: It was a picture of a woman he saw in the mirror now. Trelkovsky was astounded. It was no more difficult than this to create a woman? (p. 121) Stripped of what he has, what is Trelkovsky now? What was there that was uniquely his, that made him an individual? What was there that differentiated him from everyone else. What was his label, his point of reference? What made him think: this is me, or, that's not really me? He sought the answers in vain, and was forced to admit at last that he didn't know. (p. 128) When those around him take the old physical hallmarks of his life away, Trelkovsky ceases to exist.

But, you're no doubt thinking, such a conspiracy is ludicrous. What would his neighbors gain from forcing him into a dead woman's life? What advantage could they possibly achieve by pushing for his suicide? When it comes to those questions, Topor plays a fine game. To outright write such a conspiracy, devoid of the supernatural or any other mollifying factors, would be to immediately distance the reader via the unlikeness of the whole affair. Instead, Trelkovsky is clearly insane, and so the conspiracy is at first easily dismissible and more. The novel seems an exploration of dementia. And then, at the height of Trelkovsky's madness, proof piles up. Conversations become inexplicable, and the actions of those around him go from absurd to malevolent. But no conclusions can be drawn, for our narrator is, alas, quite far round the bend. So, as the neighbors cavort in an obscene parody of a circus beneath Trelkovsky's window, the reader can retain his suspension of belief while, of course, anticipating the final blow. But that anticipation renders the result no less effective, for, in the superb final scene – the only one in the book to directly show the supernatural – we finally see undeniable proof that Trelkovsky's mania was real. And it is far too late.

All that praise having been dispensed, and Topor's (sadly deceased) head having no doubt swelled to its full capacity, it's time to turn to the book's main flaw: the pacing. Now, condemnation here is difficult. As I discussed in the above paragraph, the normalcy at the beginning is absolutely necessary for the insanity at the end. That being said, the first two thirds of the book pass at a pace that can best be described as an amusing but near eventless crawl. Topor's dry, dry wit prevents the reader from ever growing genuinely bored, but little momentum is acquired until the reader's halfway through. I don't think it's a coincidence that the vast, vast majority of my memories of the book – and I only read it the morning of this writing – came from the final third, and so I was at least thirty or forty pages too early each and every time I went to search for a particular quotation.

Still, the Tenant is a labyrinthine and disquieting exploration of interaction and madness, with the ultimate conclusion that the two may not be all that far off. Though not the flawless gem that Ligotti's or Lovecraft's finest tales are, this is still one of the bleakest novels I've read. Beginning and ending on the same interminable note, The Tenant is a novel likely to haunt the back of your mind for weeks, coloring your every conversation. Upon finishing, you may cast about for what makes you you. And, if Topor's to be believed, that search will be at once brief and endless, fruitless and hopeless…

[A final word of caution: as I've no doubt made clear, Thomas Ligotti's analyses of the story in The Conspiracy Against the Human race is fantastic, and is – I believe – published in similar form in the introduction to the Centipde Press edition of the novel (which I, alas, do not own). That being said, his analysis of the story is filled with spoilers and reveals the end. While this is far from a twist based story, I would still advise reading the novel before the analysis.]

Interview: Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti is the author of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, Noctuary, My Work is Not Yet Done, Teatro Grottesco, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and others. He has won the International Horror Guild Award, multiple Bram Stoker awards, and has been nominated for several World Fantasy Awards. Often considered a successor to Poe and Lovecraft, Ligotti's developed an incredibly dedicated following on fan sites like Thomas Ligotti Online and The Art of Grimscribe. On a personal level, I can think of no living author who's had a greater impact on the way that I think and perceive the world. The results of our conversation are as follows…

1. The Subterranean Press reissues are definitive editions of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, and the forthcoming Noctuary are, we're told, the "revised, definitive edition[s]." So, of course, the question must come: what's different? Was there a specific element you looked for with your changes, an intended change of focus, or were they more focused on strengthening the effects already present? Would it, perhaps, even be possible for you to quote some later-altered line and its newer counterpart, and state the reason for the changes therein?

One thing I did not do is deliberately seek out changes. Of course there would be errors that needed corrections and phrases that needed to be polished. But I didn’t look to shorten or lengthen the stories or any part of them, or to make my prose leaner or more baroque, or to in any way alter the tone of a given story. I just read the books carefully from start to finish and keep on the lookout for additions and deletions that would enhance each story, at least to my mind. The following paragraph was chosen at random and illustrates typical revisions I made throughout Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. It’s the penultimate paragraph of “The Last Feast of Harlequin.”

At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner realm of awful purity and emptiness. I remember those invisible moments when in disguise I drifted through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around me: untouchable. But in instantly I recoil at this grotesque nostalgia, for I realize what is happening and what I do not want to be true, though Thoss proclaimed it was. I recall his command to those others as I lay helplessly prone in the tunnel. They could have apprehended me, but Thoss, my old master called them back. His voice echoed throughout that cavern, and it now reverberates within my own psychic chambers.

At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner realm of purity and emptiness, the paradise of the unborn. I remember how I was momentarily overtaken by a feeling I had never known when in disguise I drifted through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around me: untouchable. I was the feeling that I had been liberated from the weight of life. But I recoil at this seductive nostalgia, for it mocks my existence as mere foolery, a bright clown’s mask behind which I sought to hide my darkness. I realize what is happening and what I do not want to be true, though Thoss proclaimed it was. I recall his command to those as I lay helplessly prone in the tunnel. They could have apprehended me, but Thoss, my old master, called them back. His voice echoed throughout that cavern, and it now reverberates with the psychic chambers of my memory.           

               

It would be a lengthy process for me to point out every change and why I made it. One thing I particularly like is the sentence that includes the added phrase “the weight of life.” I feel that it bolsters and encapsulates the theme of the story in four words. I’ll leave it to the reader to consider other additions and deletions, and to judge whether they improve this passage. In several stories throughout the two books—including “Flowers of the Abyss” and “Eye of the Link”—I sat back at some early stage of revision and thought, “What is this story really about?” These cases might involve the addition and deletion of whole pages to focus the original intent of the story.              

2. Revising these stories must have involved countless rereads of them. How did it feel to revisit in your older work in that fashion? If you were to articulate one major way your writing's changed or evolved in the time since Songs of a Dead Dreamer, what would it be?

Well, since I’ve revised only my first two collections, I can’t say that I’ve seen that much change in the stories gathered in these books. If anything, I would have to say that with Grimscribe I started to venture further into more symbolic narratives and landscapes while still keeping them leashed to typical “reality” of the horror tale. I should point out that “The Last Dream of Harlequin” and “The Dreaming in Nortown” were written before the stories in my first collection.

3. Your work is complex and thematically rich, the stories well suited to sprout a variety of different interpretations on TLO and elsewhere. Amidst all that, do you have any stories that you feel have been continually misunderstood? Also, has there ever been a theory (or theories) so strange that you couldn't at all understand how they drew that from your words?

I’ve read only formal reviews and essays on my stories, and I can’t say that any of them have veered toward readings that I didn’t intend for the most part.

4. You write fiction about the darkness of the world, and yet so many have gained great pleasure from your works, myself included. How can you reconcile this? Is there something wrong with enjoying such dark fiction, some sort of suicidal mechanism that makes the rare defective organism enjoy being told of its inadequacies?

Your question implies that there is an ideal human against whom those who read dark fiction may be compared. But there is no such organism. All human beings are randomly generated, arbitrarily conditioned units. What we would call “defects” in a given individual is probably best measured by characteristics relevant to its fitness to survive and reproduce. Everything else has to do with psychological or sociological conventions and peculiarities. By the broad conventions of modern Western civilization, reading dark fiction is a form of escapist diversion like any other. (Getting bored yet?) In this sense, it might be considered one of many survival mechanisms we employ to burn off the cognitive excess endemic to our species. We think too much, and thinking is the destroyer of what we need to live. And what we need are irrational, immediate pleasures or an unreasoning prospect of the same. Nothing of great importance in our lives—what we consider makes them worth living—is rational. This includes pleasurable emotions and sensations derived from a variety of sources, such as sex without reproductive purpose, mountain climbing, and rock and roll. Without these and other irrational enjoyments, life is not worth living for human beings. You could even add to the previous list irrational activities that are not usually considered hedonistic:  devoting ourselves to the well-being of others from whose survival we seem to have nothing to gain; prayer or meditation intended to release us from an egoistic, survivalist way of life; reproducing more human beings for the continuance of a race that cannot be proved to be worth continuing, and so on. All these irrational actions are of the conventional sort, and their purpose of which is not often questioned.

As for psychological or sociological peculiarities, reading dark fiction to burn off the cognitive excess endemic to our species is frequently viewed as a perverse pastime that is especially irrational and practiced with enthusiasm by only a small cadre of human beings. Although it does serve a survival need as an escapist from of diversion like any other, it does so in a roundabout manner that on its face is indefensible and at a deeper level is a negation of what makes life worth living. From the perspective of survival and reproduction, reading dark fiction is a degenerate indulgence that revels in what is against human life. Aside from the common self-satisfying pleasures that we believe make existence worth the trouble, there are other pleasures that are uncommon in their satisfactions. They are unhealthy and sometimes are demonstrably the pursuit of those who have been randomly generated by a corrupted line of genetics or arbitrarily conditioned by traumatic experiences or detrimental environments. People who tend to the use of alcohol or illegal drugs must have some reason for engaging in such self-destructive habits, notwithstanding that these reasons cannot be pinpointed with exactitude. Ultimately, however, their principal reason is analogous to that of more healthy individuals: to experience the pleasurable emotions and sensations that make life worth living over and against those and emotions and sensations which put in question the worth of life—physical or mental illness (either due to genetics, traumas, or pernicious environmental conditions), tragic events that cast a shadow over an individual’s existence, a general lack of existential satisfactions, and other types of awful experience. 

Even if the genetics, traumas, and environments that drive us to alcohol, drugs, or dark fiction are not obvious, they may nevertheless be in play all the same. What makes nightmares? More to the point, what make an individual dwell with a morbid excitement over his nightmares? And what makes someone wish to convey their nightmares in artistic form for the excited consumption of others with a taste for some of the most sick and morbid productions of the human brain? There are those who yearn for the days of carnival freak shows, to lay their eyes on the rare and repulsive beings nature is capable of sprouting forth. While such individuals may not wish to visit hospitals where such aberrations are given birth many times per day in this world, they shiver with delight to read of them on the page or see them on the screen. Like addicts of the emotions and sensations granted to us by nature’s bounty or a pharmaceutical laboratory, fanatics of dark fiction must have what they must have, because their lives would be deprived without it and their bodies and minds would tremble with craving for depraved imaginings. Thus, in my opinion, if your life—or some portion of your life—depends on the consumption of fiction founded on the darkness of the world for it to be worth living, then there is definitely something wrong with you both as a conventional and a peculiar being.

When I was a child reading horror comic books, I was told by my parents that a priest was coming to visit our house. Immediately, I gathered up my horror comics and him them under the cushion of one of the living room sofas. When the priest entered the house, he was invited by my parents to sit down. Of course, he sat upon the cushion of the sofa beneath which I had hid my horror comics. I was terrified because I believed he knew what I had hidden there. I was a very religious child, and I felt intensely that reading those horror comics was a sin. I’m not exaggerating this anecdote in the least. I felt it was diabolical for me to be enjoying horror comics for the same reason that you asked me if it was irreconcilable to take pleasure in reading dark fiction and wallowing in the darkness of the world—because it is diabolical and irreconcilable. Years later, when I had started writing horror fiction, I asked one of my co-workers who was a born-again Christian if he thought that I was doing something sinful. He was someone I considered a work-friend and had conversely with honesty on a variety of subjects. He said he didn’t think that writing horror fiction was sinful. Later, he wrote a book on the conservative thinker Russell Kirk, who wrote what I would describe as moral horror stories. Maybe my work-friend didn’t think that writing horror fiction was sinful because he was thinking of moral horror fiction, which is mostly the kind of horror fiction that is written. The point is that even when I was in my twenties, and an atheist, I still wondered if enjoying horror fiction was sinful—sinful and wrong. Sometime later in life I had ceased to care whether reading or writing horror fiction was wrong. I had read all kinds of literature that was considered sick and evil, and I loved it because it was sick and evil. I loved it because it was against the human race and its values. Perhaps that’s why other readers of horror fiction—or at least certain kinds of horror fiction—get pleasure from it. They can answer only for themselves. You have my confession.

5. The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein is clearly a very different work than the most of your stories, seemingly a homage in large part. What were your intentions when writing it?

I didn’t have any intentions of writing a book of “rewrites” of classic horror fiction and films when I wrote the first piece in Agonizing Resurrection. In the early eighties, I was asked to contribute a short piece to a one-off fanzine with the title and theme of “Animality.” I wasn’t sure what the editor wanted, nor what “anamality” might imply. After thinking a while, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau occurred to me as a narrative that could be described as focusing on the idea of anamality. In the novel, Dr. Moreau’s mission was to turn animals not only into human beings, but into human beings of an ideal rationality (if you read the book). In my version, however, the manwolf’s behavior is wholly irrational by its display of courtly sentimentality when he kneels with loving devotion before Moreau’s female assistant (an extra character introduced for my purposes). This is not what Moreau had in mind at all, and once again he has failed. “Now the creature,” as I write in the introduction to The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, “will require further adjustments in order to nudge its nature closer to that untainted rationality that Moreau values above all else.” He wanted to make men, not silly sops—brutes on the make that will as likely tear out their fellow creatures’ throats as they are to beg pathetically for what they want. Such a gesture implies the capacity for a range of actions endemic to human beings what it meant to be human, something that did not include the courtly sentimentality that the manwolf displays. Moreau’s House of Pain was intended to torture animals into becoming human, to mutilate and brainwash them into the kind of heartless because that Wells portrayed Moreau as exemplifying.

Now, my wont has never been to produce short, stand-alone pieces. Even my so-called poetry collections are cyclical and follow connective theme of some sort. So naturally I wanted to write more pieces along the same lines as “Moreau.” First, I did two more rewrites of horror narratives that featured other scientists—Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll—and thus had a short series of tales with like characters. I also had a theme that was common the series. In my early horror stories, I seldom produced any works that turned on romantic or strongly emotional relationships between people. (Examples include “Les Fleurs” and “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech.”) At some point I made a conscious decision not to include this element that was so common to horror, and especially Gothic literature. It just seemed irrelevant to what I was trying to do as a writer, which was to portray a wholly nightmarish existence. This was the essence of my experience of being alive, and everything else seemed of little or no import. However, it so happened that around the time I was asked to contribute a work of short prose on the theme of animality to a one-off fanzine I was again ready to write about romantic or strongly emotional relationships, and to use them to express the most excruciatingly painful scenarios I could conceive that were based on such relationships. This was how I expected The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein to be perceived by readers, although I’m not sure it was. Nevertheless, the first person to read the entire book, believe it or not, described it as an “apotheosis of pain.” Bingo.

Titling the first section of the book Three Scientists, I proceeded to write other sections of a like nature, taking my characters and narratives from famous works of horror fiction and films and giving each of them a twist that I thought made them more appalling than the originals. Some of the sections contained pieces of my own devising. These were stylistically and thematically similar to the pieces based on the Wolfman and Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera and the Phantom of the Wax Museum, etc. These were not intended to be homages to the works featuring these characters but extensions or mutations of them linked by a common
subject. Ultimately, the book was an entirely fortuitous project, if I may be generous to myself.

6. The majority of your fiction is not only out of print but scarce, with the rarer works regularly commanding prices well beyond a hundred dollars. How do you feel about the exclusivity that brings, and the cost that any potential fan must pay before reading your work? Are there any authors that you collect in such a manner (by which I mean the hunting down of rare and costly volumes, or the obsessing over particular editions)?

I’ve never been a book collector, but I’ve always found that I had enough money to spend on the books I’ve wanted. I feel bad that readers of my books have to pay high prices for some of my books. I wish my books had more readers and brought in more money. Just because the cost of my books if high doesn’t mean that I make a lot of money from them. In my experience, the more a book cost is in inverse ratio to how much an author makes on the book. Authors receive a certain number of copies of their books from a publisher. Sometimes I make more money selling these books than I do from the advance I received for the book itself. On the other hand, having a pricey book released means that it will be of a higher production quality and will probably be around longer than an author whose book was published in a print run of five thousand copies.

7. A major tenet of the brand of antinatalism you discuss in Conspiracy is that most men are unaware of the horrors around them, that they are deluded in their faiths and securities. But, if asked, the devout Christian would answer that those without Christ are deluded, and the happy atheist would confirm that answer with different words along with the Jew, the Muslim, and anyone of any other faith that you cared to ask. How can you be sure that antinatalism is not just another delusion, that the rationality of depression and/or ego-death is not just another false enlightenment?

I don’t think that a Christian or a believer in any religion is less aware of the horrors around than an atheist. Ask Blaise Pascal. They may be less aware, but it’s not a major tenet of antinatalism that they are or that they are specifically because they believe in Jesus. If I believed in God, I think I would go mad with the horror that the universe is some kind of moral laboratory. Fortunately, no one can prove that God exists, not even God. Whatever wonders He performs for us could be attributed to an advanced life form, even if it tries to pass itself off as one or another of the gods portrayed in religious scriptures. But that advanced life form would have a time of it impersonating all gods at the same time. If he did, then we would be in the same position of factional belief we are in now. Of course, an advanced life form might be able to do anything it wanted. Then we would have to decide whether we are all being fooled into believing in multiple gods or an advanced life form that can impersonate multiple gods.

Antinatalism is based on the principle that suffering of whatever kind or degree should not be caused or perpetuated, and that human existence necessarily entails suffering that we can neither escape nor justify, least of all by experiencing pleasures. Thus, the only way to end all suffering would be to cease producing beings who suffer. In the abstract, I hold to that principle and believe that those who do not hold to it are simply of a different mindset. In everyday life, I live for the most part as a deluded individual except when I sit down and recall what I believe in principle. Writing Conspiracy against the Human Race was the same kind of drug for me as believing in Jesus is for some people. If it hadn’t been, then I wouldn’t have written it. I say as much in the book. As for ego-death, we don’t know what it is or how it happens. Personally I believe that ego-death is a neurological condition that by many accounts mimics what has been called “enlightenment” among those who are concerned with this phenomenon. I also believe with Thomas Metzinger and many other philosophers that ego-life is an illusion. Now, whatever one believes or does not believe, as I wrote in Conspiracy, is an opinion. I quote a lot of antinatalists in my books, but I don’t think that I argue that if someone isn’t an antinatalist they are immoral or knowingly perpetuate pain in the word. To quote from Conspiracy:  “Opinion: There are no praiseworthy incentives to reproduce.” I can’t prove that there are not praiseworthy incentives to reproduce. If someone has an opinion that there is a praiseworthy reason to reproduce, I’d love to hear it. For years I’ve queried parents or women who are pregnant if they could offer a reason for having children that was based on the good of the child and not on the good of the breeders and their society. I do try to contrive perspectives from which this opinion may appear sound, which is why I subtitled my book “A Contrivance of Horror.” And I do say that no one can prove either that life is desirable or undesirable. And no one can. Most people think that they can prove that reproduction is praiseworthy and that life is by nature desirable. But their opinions don’t stand up to scrutiny. They absolutely can’t prove that their opinion proves mine to be wrong. This is not a problem for me, because I will never contribute to the produce of a child whose life may, by conventional opinion, not be worth living. I won’t ever have to imagine the pain of that child or experience pain for having produced it. I can be sure of this. But no prospective parent can be sure that they won’t be responsible for the making of a child with such a fate. No one can say what vicissitudes may cause a life to become not worth living. Parents may or may not blame themselves for producing a life that in the worst way becomes not worth living. But they can always take comfort in the fact that it was not their intention for their offspring to end up having such a life. However, we can at this point in time prevent children from coming into the world with defects that would almost surely—or sometimes surely—make their lives not worth living. I’m not speaking of birth defects of all types. I’m speaking of defects that, barring any beliefs that would preclude abortion for fear of hellfire, would cause few but radical pro-lifers to disallow the parents from exercising the abortive option. So while no one can prove that there is any praiseworthy incentive to reproduce, there are cases in which most would agree there are praiseworthy, or at least not blameworthy, incentives not to reproduce. This fact is not definite proof that antinatalism is the correct stance to take, but it’s not just an opinion either.

8. If the majority of people are existing in a fashion that they consider better than not existing, if they would answer that Life is Alright, how can it be stated that Life is Not Alright for the entirety of the human race?

This question is rather difficult to sort out. It’s certainly possible, subjectively, for an individual to feel that “it’s good to be alive,” but that doesn’t mean that it was always good to be alive for that individual or that it will always be good to be alive for that individual. I know that it’s possible for some number of people not to have a “good day” for practically their entire lives. It’s also possible for some number of people to never have a “bad day” for practically their entire lives. But it’s pretty futile to get into calculating how many people have never had a good day or a bad day, and by this means conclude whether or not being alive is all right. The whole proposition is so hypothetical that it’s not worth giving a moment’s regard. To my mind, it’s also rather crass and unfeeling to propose that as long as a majority of people exist in such a fashion that they consider it better to exist than not to exist, it can be said that life is all right for the entirety of the human race—that the minority counts for nothing in this useless calculation. Furthermore, those in the majority at one time may find themselves in the minority at another.  At the end of any given generation, it would be possible for almost everyone to occupy a place in the majority as well as the minority. Then you would be back to where you started. And where you started is where we are now and have always been, not to speculate that it is where we will always be. The pronouncement of the majority with respect to the value of live is the one that rules. Antinatalists must be insane. My children will not be one of those people who never have a good day for practically their entire lives. My children will be in the majority, if there really is a majority and not just a deluded consensus.

9. While I agree that the minority shouldn't be discounted, can it really be counted equally with the majority with regards to a subjective question (which, without the consideration of some kind of god or objective truth, that of life's worth seems to be)? Regardless of the malleability of the borders and the frequency of migrations between the two, if the larger of the two camps would argue that Life is Alright, can the negative be said to be true in any sense greater than the personal?

In Conspiracy I anticipated your question. On page 44, I wrote that one of the arguments used (by the majority) against the reason that pessimists believe certain things is their “intractable wrongheadedness, a charge that pessimists could turn against optimists if the argumentum ad populumwere not the world’s favorite fallacy.” That is, pessimism must be wrong because, even though it is an outlook that has lived for thousands of years and articulated in the most sophisticated terms, the majority denies its precepts. You’ve applied the same fallacy to antinatalism that others have applied to pessimism. You’ve also entertained the idea that holding to the question of antinatalism versus pro-natalism is a subjective matter. It’s hard to see how antinatalism could be any more subjective than many other, quite reputable, philosophical questions (determinism versus free will, for instance) just because neither side has proved its case, which by its nature may be not be subject to proof. Despite the fact that neither anti- nor pronatalists can prove their positions, pro-natalists have to live with the possibility that they might be wrong. That is a heavy burden to carry, and a heavier burden to pass on to subsequent generations. Antinatalists don’t have a similar burden. When action is taken on their side and a child is not born, no harm is done. No one has to suffer and die. If the whole species chose extinction, the situation would be the same, because extinction is our fate. Someday it won’t matter if anyone lived or died. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t presently doomed to live in a world where people suffer and die. Personally, I’m afraid of suffering and afraid of dying. I’m also afraid of witnessing the suffering and death of those who are close to me. And no doubt I project these fears on those around me and those to come, which makes it impossible for me to understand why everyone isn’t an antinatalist, just as I have to assume pronatalists can’t understand why everyone isn’t like them. In an essay on David Benatar’s antinatalist book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, the Finnish philosopher, Sami PihlstrÖm (Metaphilosophy, Volume 40, Number 5, October 2009 , pp. 656-670), argued that whether or not life is worth living is a question that is intolerable and should never be discussed. I hope things don’t come to that.

10. It's one thing to argue, as you do in Conspiracy, that the joys of life are, essentially, delusions and escape mechanisms, but it's another to argue that that invalidates those joys. Even if our art is created solely to allow us to forget the darkness around us, why would that make the resulting joys less true?

Maybe I let my fingers slip across my keyboard at some time during the writing of Conspiracy, but I don’t recall arguing that joys are delusions. Here’s a quote from p. 43: “Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence is basically undesirable. I you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply ‘Of course,' before returning to their ecstasy.” Just because a given joy (such as reading dark fiction) is an escape mechanism doesn’t mean it’s invalidated  or untrue, whatever those words may mean  in this context. But the very fact that we can legitimately refer to joy as an “escape mechanism” doesn’t say much for joy.     

Metzinger's Being No One

11. For me – and, I suspect, for others – the section of Conspiracy that was most powerful was on determinism. One of its most memorable parts was your mentioning of a saying by Metzinger, namely: Can one really believe in determinism without going insane? In the light of those words – and your arguments surrounding them and quotation of them – do you believe in determinism? If so, how can you reconcile that with daily life?

I don’t argue that determinism is true in Conspiracy. To do so would be futile.  I do discuss the subject because it’s related to other matters in the book, especially the reality or unreality of the “self.” Whether our thoughts and behavior are determined or free is of no consequence if, as Metzinger argues, no selves exist or have ever existed and there is nothing that can be determine or free. I think the question of the self is far more interesting because scientists are getting closer to being able to test how our perception of ourselves, other people, and the world in general are formed. My own opinion regarding the issue of determinism versus free will is that it has no practical import in our lives. Either of these positions, or any of their many combinations and variations, function more as philosophical doctrines in which one believes than can actually experience in a definitive way. If I stop and concentrate on how I perceive other people, I have to say that they seem to me like robots in their behavior and their being. This is definitely the case when I see people on TV who are accused of murder. I never blame them or hold them morally responsible for their actions. It seems stupid to do so if you look at the situation with a cold eye. Surely such a radical act must have had radical causes, some of which seem obvious and others of which seem unknowable. This perception is more difficult when it comes to considering someone closer to you in your life.  I’ll look at someone I believe I know very well and think: ”Who is that? What makes them act the way they do and not some other way? What’s going on inside them, if anything?” That can be upsetting. People who are getting divorced have been known to say about their ex-beloved, “I thought I knew (him or her), but I couldn’t have been more mistaken about (him or her).”  Supposedly we extrapolate from our experience of ourselves and transfer that experience to other people, and that this gives you the sense that they’re like you—that you can read their minds in some way. While it may seem to work that way, it really can’t. When I turn from other people to myself, I can’t say much more about how I work. I can never know what my next thought is going to be—how it forms or where it comes from, so to speak. I absolutely don’t feel that I’m choosing my thoughts. They just come one after another depending on the circumstances of the past and present, some of which I could name but most of which I can’t. It’s the same with my behavior. In everyday life, none of this matters because we don’t think deeply about it on an hourly basis. I have impulses to do things, but I don’t know how those impulses formed or why they make me do a particular thing and not some other thing. Whether we’re puppets or real human beings, whatever the latter may be, we go on thinking and acting in certain ways because we’re moved to do by certain forces we’re not aware of. You could argue with this perception, but it’s my perception and the whole thing would come down to I say, you say. To me, determinism just seems common sense, but I couldn’t tell you why it does. Since it’s so ferociously opposed by most philosophers and lay persons, it must be a disturbing idea that they don’t want to be true. I can understand that. Even if determinism seems like common sense to me, it does seem to be a component of this world of horror we live in. And just by discussing it in Conspiracy, although not arguing for it, it was my intention to arouse a sense of the uncanny in my readers. When I’m writing for an audience, people don’t seem like robots to me. I’m not sure they seem like anything. In the end, I suppose the best thing is not to think about it.

12. Is antinatalism a philosophy or a lifestyle? By this I mean that, if the sane Christian attempts heaven and the sane Buddhist enlightenment, why do antinatalists not work towards their own paradise, their own nonexistence? Furthermore, how can antinatalists (and, for these purposes, determinists along the lines of those quoted and studied in Conspiracy) profess love or even have children? Do these things make them hypocrites or human? If life is a hell, and nonexistence a heaven, then are things like murder acceptable to the antinatalist? If it is better to not live, then, are murderers and even the perpetuators of genocide not doing good deeds?

I think that the antinatalist counterpart of the Christian’s heaven (Buddhist enlightenment actually is a type of antinatalism in a superficial sense) would be to reduce this world to a place where no one was ever born. Obviously, this is not sane idea. (I’ll leave it to others to decide the sanity of believing in heaven or enlightenment.) As for love or the desire to have children, these are powerful impulses in most people and not possible to override under normal circumstances. Galen Strawson, one of the most deterministic determinists, was asked a version of this question in an interview. He answered that in his everyday life, he was just like anybody else. David Hume said the same thing. This answer makes no rational sense, but neither do love or the desire to have children. They are nature’s way of keeping the species going until something happens and we cease existing, an eventuality that will certainly come about and has almost come about a number of times in the past. As for antinatalists, falling in love has nothing to do with their principles. Some antinatalists have had children before they became antinatalists. From what I’ve read, they love their children as most parent do but regret having reproduced. An antinatalist who does not have children would cease to be an antinatalist if they willfully and knowingly reproduced. Not all people who do not reproduce are antinatalists, although some of them do not reproduce for similar reasons as antinatalists. Nonexistence isn’t anything, so it would have nothing to do with antinatalism. The desire not exist would be a tenet of pessimism, and some antinatalists are pessimists. But pessimism isn’t required for antinatalism. A pessimist believes that being alive is not all right, and even if it occasionally seems all right, this is an illusion. As Cioran wrote, “Pleasure prepares pain.” Antinaltalists don’t necessarily think that life is hell, they just think that it necessarily involves such suffering that anyone would be better off not having been born. Interestingly, those who believe that life is worth living often begin making their case by pointing out the goodness of ice cream. If you’re not diabetic, lactose intolerant, obese, or have any number of other ailments, ice cream is indeed very good. Given the link made between antinatalism and murder or genocide, I hope that the replies I’ve given to this question demonstrate that no such link exists. An antinatalist may have a passion for murder and genocide, but this is by no means an element of antinatalism. Murder and genocide are two phenomena that antinatlists would offer as reasons for why it would be better never to have been born. I hope the logic of this statement is evident.    

13. Let's end on a happy note. What's the most enjoyable thing you did this week?

I watched Little Murders, an old favorite of mine.

Thank you once again for doing this interview, Mr. Ligotti.

Thomas Ligotti - the Conspiracy against the Human Race

Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up? (p. 54)

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is the first nonfiction work of horror author Thomas Ligotti. If you’ve been following Ligotti, the views expressed will not come as a surprise. This book has all the markings of a magnum opus. Here, Ligotti takes the ideas that he’s been advancing for his whole career and strips them of their fictional trappings, explores their raw realities and their naked implications.

This is not a dry read. Though there is no story or characters, this is still a deeply engaging work. The tone is set by the brief fable of humanity’s “Loss of Innocence” (so titled in the Notes section), which is one of the many times that Ligotti uses his virtuosity as a fiction author to get across dense abstractions.

Reading Ligotti’s stories is being immersed in a strange, inimical atmosphere, and Ligotti proves just as capable of getting across moods and feelings (alienation, fright, or whatever it is that he wishes to evoke) with only a few phrases, conjuring powerful images with apparent ease: Life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would have us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, starring void. (p. 29)

In addition to the terror that he can so easily create, Ligotti’s prose can also, at times, have a lightness to it. His writings are always elegant, beautiful as they tear into your beliefs. The moments of black comedy (and it is a black so dark that fulign barely begins to describe it) do nothing to damage the import of the ideas all around them, but rather succeed in drawing us closer and enmeshing us further still.

But to review a work of philosophy and talk about prose and imagery, and then to leave it at that, is to miss the point entirely. How does one review a work of ideas without either shallow dismissals or equally worthless panegyrics? I’m not sure. I don’t think that there’s a way to read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and not be affected by its ideas, and, by the same token, I don’t think it’s possible to do a worthwhile review of the work without, at least partially, allowing objectivity to fall by the wayside and interacting with those ideas.

The rest of this article will be a combination of review and response, going through the first two sections of the book and both looking at Ligotti’s arguments and my own feelings about his conclusions. If you would prefer to draw your own conclusions about Ligotti’s ideas, feel free to bow out until you’ve tracked down a copy.

THE NIGHTMARE OF BEING

This section deals with a broad array of pessimistic, nihilistic, and antinatalistic philosophies. I have a minor quibble with Ligotti’s terminology (I think it’s one step too far to say that, in order to be a pessimist, one must also be an antinatalist), but I’ll bow down and use Ligotti’s definitions for this article.

We are first exposed to Peter Wessel Zapffe’s essay The Last Messiah, which is the cornerstone of Ligotti’s argument and likely the most discussed work in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Zapffe believed consciousness to be an evolutionary accident and held that, in a universe governed by uncaring natural law, the realization of our predicament (which consciousness would bring about) would cause the end of our race. As a result, the entirety of human endeavor can essentially be summed up as an attempt to minimize consciousness.

In order to accomplish those aims, Zapffe provides four means of repression: Isolation, Anchoring, Distraction, and Sublimation. These ideas are not left as abstracts. By the end of the section, almost every one of our accomplishments or emotional outputs is explained in the darkest possible light. The final of the four means of repression, Sublimation, accounts for the entirety of human art, and our enjoyment of that art is nothing but an attempt to distract ourselves from our predicament:

(4) SUBLIMATION. That we might annul a paralyzing stage fright at what may happen to even the soundest bodies and minds, we sublimate our fears by making an open display of them. In the Zapffean sense, sublimation is the rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human race. Putting into play both deviousness and skill, this is what thinkers and artistic types do when they recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed manner as entertainment. In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it – a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance […] just as King Lear’s weeping for his dead daughter Cordellia cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing. (p. 31-32)

After Zapffe, we explore Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will to Live, a blind and uncaring force that drives us ever onward to procreation and thoughtless expansion, as well as a whole host of other pessimistic philosopher’s, a list that includes, by the book’s end, Fredrik Nietzsche, Philipp Mainländer, Carlo Michelsteadter, Karl Popper, David Benatar, and others. The synthesis of these ideas is remarkably smooth, and one often finds ideas here represented in the abstract that have been featured prominently in Ligotti’s fiction, such as the idea of the puppet universe:

To Michelsteadter, nothing in this world can be anything but a puppet. And a puppet is only a plaything, a thing of parts brought together as a simulacrum of real presence. It is nothing in itself. It is not whole and individual but exists only relative to other playthings, some of them human playthings that support one another’s illusion of being real. However, by suppressing thoughts of suffering and death they give themselves away as beings of paradox – prevaricators who must hide from themselves the flagrantly joyless possibilities of their lives if they are to go on living. (p. 32-33)

And yet, Ligotti never argues for any of the concepts put forward. The philosophies are exposed and either favored or criticized based on Ligotti’s overall ideas, but this section is strictly informational, not persuasive. The reader is, it seems, either assumed to be an antinatalist already, therefore in little need of convincing, or, if they don’t happen to already be sufficiently pessimistic, impossible to convince:

People are either pessimists or optimists. They forcefully “lean” one way or the other, and there is no common ground between them. For pessimists, life is something that should not be, which means that what they believe should be is the absence of life, nothing, non-being, the emptiness of the uncreated. Anyone who speaks up for life as something that irrefutably should be – that we would not be better off unborn, extinct, or forever lazing in nonexistence – is an optimist. It is all or nothing; one is in or out, abstractly speaking. Practically speaking, we have been a race of optimists since the nascency of human consciousness and lean like mad toward the favorable pole. (p. 47)

Since there are so many ideas proposed, it’s inevitable that some are more persuasive than others and that some contradict one another. The ideas of Philipp Mainländer – the Will to Die, to follow Schopenhauer’s Will to Live – are fascinating but, ultimately, feel as sentimental, although admittedly negatively so, as any of the major religions.

Mainländer theorized that the ultimate goal of everything in the universe is, essentially, entropy, and that life and existence ultimately amounts to nothing but the pursuit of death. He gives us the idea of a suicidal god, who made existence only so that, when existence ended, it could enjoy nothing afterwards. But the idea of a suicidal god, while an interesting one, is no more practical than that of a benevolent god, and both thoughts depend equally on the unsubstantiated existence of a deity, whether it be a negative or positive figure. Antinatalism in general is seen as the disregarding of all conventional notions (to use Ligotti’s phrasing, it is to say that life is NOT alright), but Mainländer is more inversion than negation, more akin to theistic Satanism than atheism.

Mainländer’s inverted spiritualism leads us in its way to the book’s title. The Conspiracy against the Human Race is a fittingly evocative phrase, as are all of Ligotti’s titles, but I’ll admit to being perplexed when I first considered it. Isn’t the crux of Ligotti’s argument that there’s not only no conspiracy but that there’s nothing aware enough to even dream of such a conspiracy? Upon the course of reading, however, the meaning becomes clearer. Ligotti uses the word ‘conspiracy’ as something perpetuated by optimists; the conspiracy against the human race is our own collective refusal to deal with reality. The emergence of our consciousness was not something that we could have stopped. The perpetuation of the suffering that can only be brought about by existence, however, is something that we have no one to blame for but ourselves.

To go back to the arguments presented in The Nightmare of Being, several rely on either an overuse of absolutes or for the listener to have already adopted the central tenants of the philosophy. David Benatar says that there is a chance that a baby will experience happiness, but a certainty that it will experience suffering. Up to this point, I think that most will agree. He then goes on to say that, since happiness is a possibility and suffering a guarantee, the only moral act is to curtail the suffering and cease reproduction.

But this idea only works under the (frankly bizarre) supposition that all suffering and happiness are equal. While there are some lives, I’ll admit, that contain absolutely no happiness (death soon after birth, say), the majority will experience some kind of joy in their lives, and a good many of them will say that the pleasure in their lives outweighs the pain. So while more may, numerically, experience pain than pleasure, it is illogical to say that pain overweighs pleasure overall, rendering the conclusion that, in order to benefit the majority we must end birth, unattainable.

Which brings us to the key problem that I have with antinatalist arguments. I agree with the nihilism of, say, Lovecraft (though there we’d likely be better off with the term Cosmicism). I see no possibility of a benevolent deity, and I believe that the world is without objective purpose. But does that mean it is without personal purpose, also?

A key tenant of antinatalism is that the majority, as per Zapffe’s minimization of consciousness, suppress all knowledge of their ultimate position in the universe and go on to live their lives in a happy fiction. That the majority is, to some extent, happy is almost undeniable, and the pessimists make no attempt to refute it; the majority of the population is (at least under the strict optimist/pessimist definition put forth by Ligotti) optimistic.

So if most people are, in the end, happy, why is the sum value of existence a negative? It’s one thing to argue that the ways in which they make themselves happy are, ultimately, false, but it’s far from certain that that invalidates the resulting joy. Regardless of the ultimate meaning of existence (and on that question I am in agreement with the Ligottis and Schopenhauers of the world), if the majority of people are existing in a fashion that they consider better than not existing, if they would answer that Life is Alright, how can it be stated that Life is Not Alright for the entirety of the human race?

WHO GOES THERE?

The second section of The Conspiracy against the Human Race concerns itself with humanity. Who are we? Why are we the way that we are? Do we control ourselves? Do we understand ourselves? As before, anyone with a familiarity of Ligotti’s thoughts as expressed through stories and interviews will likely not be surprised by the conclusions that he draws, but the depth that he goes into and the frank insidiousness of his arguments is almost like a physical blow at times.

Like endlessly probing a cut, human thought circles around those areas that make it uncomfortable. But why does the uncanny make us so uncomfortable? In his essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny, Jentsch says:

But if this relative physical harmony happens markedly to be disturbed in the spectator, and if the situation does not seem trivial or comic, the consequence of an unimportant incident, or if it is not quite familiar (like an alcohol intoxication, for example), then the dark knowledge dawns on the unschooled observer that mechanical processers are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche. (p. 88)

This discomfort with the realities of our bodies, and our attempts to distance ourselves from those realities, show our acute discomfort with who we really are. This is, Ligotti concludes, one of the key ways in which supernatural horror can make us afraid: by showing us our bodies stripped of the romanticization of consciousness, with the added benefit that – unlike, say, a medical drama – no training can desensitize you to the uncanny of the supernatural.

This is one of several passages in The Conspiracy against the Human Race that deals with the casues, so to speak, of supernatural horror. Like the others, the symbolism makes sense, but there’s the fact that Ligotti is only ever describing the upper echelons of horror. While it is effective in explaining why movies like The Thing and The Bodysnatchers are so affecting – and while such creatures as Shelly’s Frankenstein, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, and Ligotti’s own unnamed (at least in the works I’ve read) beings are powerful symbols – I think that your average zombie picture is far more concerned with decapitations than symbolism, fake blood being held in much higher esteem than any sort of stripped bare analogy. Or perhaps my skepticism just relays my total lack of faith in every aspect of your average horror products, from the writer to the audience.

Jentsch and the discussion that followed are interesting, but it’s Ligotti’s analysis of free will that makes this section so powerful. Consider: you have the ability to act in the manner that best suits your desires. Hence, you have free will. Correct? But wait: how did you come by those desires? Did you chose them? Could you chose them?

Within the structures of commonsense reality and personal ability, we can choose to do anything we like in this world…with one exception. We cannot choose what any of our choices will be. To do that, we would have to be capable of making ourselves into self-made individuals, as opposed to individuals who simply make choices. For instance, we may want to become bodybuilders and choose to do so. But if we do not want to become bodybuilders we cannot make ourselves into someone who does want to be a bodybuilder. For that to happen, there would have to be another self inside us who made us choose to want to become bodybuilders. And inside that self, there would have to be still another self who made that self want to choose to choose to make us want to become bodybuilders. This sequence of choosing, being interminable, would result in the paradox of an infinite number of selves beyond which there is a self making all the choices. (p. 94)

Of course, the interesting thing about Determinism is that it’s impossible to believe in while still remaining anything even approaching human (or, as Metzinger put it: Can one really believe in determinism without going insane? (p. 110)). After all, you feel responsible for your actions, do you not? To imagine that you are not the cause of your actions is to wholly leave behind any societal framework.

But that feeling of responsibility isn’t something that can be trusted, because we all feel responsible for a whole variety of actions that we are, in no way, responsible for. Ligotti discusses the idea of inviting your friend over to your house to move a couch. On the way there, they are hit by a car. You feel as responsible as if you’d killed them, but that feeling is, by any objective measure, false. So how can you trust your feelings in other matters, if examples of how they can mislead you are so easy to conceive?

Taking the discussion of feelings and emotional further still, Ligotti brings up the idea of an emotionless state, a frame of mind that’s wholly rational. The pathway to the state is depression, or, at its extreme, anhedonia. In this state of mind, as close to enlightenment as it is, perhaps, possible for us to come, we would realize that our endeavors are wholly fruitless:

In […] depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.

[…]

The image of a cloud-crossed moon is dreadful not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical; it is only an ensemble of objects represented to us by our optical apparatus and perhaps processed as memory. This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. (p. 116)

Of course, it could be argued that esteem for depression (or, later, for the ego-dead) is no different than any other religion’s reverence for their holy men, with just the robes and means of enlightenment altered. Ligotti does admit that the sick self is no more “the real you” than your hale self, but I’m curious about the significance he lends rationality. While anhedonia is no doubt an effective tool for showing the ultimate emptiness of our world, I’m unconvinced it’s a good tool to defeat consciousness with. After all, if our foe is not life but consciousness, why is the depressive the one who has achieved enlightenment? Rather than believe that the man who has eliminated emotion and lives with only rational thought (a product of our consciousness), wouldn’t it make more sense to revere the man wholly given into his emotions, or his baser nature?

CONCLUSION

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is an incredibly affecting work of poignant imagery, masterful prose, and powerful arguments. I’m aware that my review has consisted of far more dissension than adoration, and that’s not something incidental. First, it would have been pointless for me to simply summarize every one of Ligotti’s arguments and merely nod my head.

More importantly, however, I want to get across that I am not recommending this book because I agree with everything that Ligotti says. I do not, but I don’t think that that was Ligotti’s intention. This is a work that makes you think; the reader who proceeds with an unconsidered affirmation of every pessimistic sentence and nihilistic turn of phrase has, I think, missed Ligotti’s point as thoroughly as the reader who just throws the book in a fire after the first few pages.

We end with a man dying. As we experience the last moments of his life, we’re put through, once again, the wringer of all of Ligotti’s arguments. Reading and finishing this book is apt to leave you shaken, with a black cloud hanging over your head that filters out all light, and with the sensation of everything you know and love having been insulted. I think that means that Ligotti succeeded, don’t you?