THE ONEIRIC DEFILING OF REALITY: THOMAS LIGOTTI’S SUPERNATURAL HORROR

Text topic: cultures of resistance

Text author: Марко Пишев

Practically from its inception, the Enlightenment ideal of rationality

was equally criticized and fostered in European intellectual tradition.

The belief in reason as an exclusive property of human mind capable

of reproducing an authentic image of reality quickly revealed itself

as highly disputable from the standpoint of philosophy and art, as

well as from the angle of particular scientific disciplines (above all,

psychology and anthropology). Within the sphere of contemporary

literature, one of the greatest adversaries of the Enlightenment idea

of the rationally apprehensible nature of reality is the horror fiction

writer Thomas Ligotti. For this author, “the world as it is” has little or

nothing to do with rational consciousness, and correlates more strongly

with our deepest irrational fears which reveal themselves in feverish

visions and nightmarish images. While establishing his personal and

artistic worldview on the inversion of the usual ideas about reality,

Ligotti creates a specific type of subversive prose: one that depraves

the world of any higher meaning and denies all possibilities of

consolation to humankind. In this paper I pose the question whether

such disillusionment may leave any possibility for an individual to

act independently, be it in a subversive or non-subversive sense of the

word.