Le surnaturel dans l’oeuvre de Thomas Ligotti: Cette absolue ténèbre derrière la semblance des choses
The Supernatural in Thomas Ligotti’s Fiction: This Absolute Darkness Behind the Appearance of Things

Author(s): Denis Moreau
Subject(s): Studies of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: supernatural; fantastic literature; darkness; ontological loneliness; selfreflection; metafiction; metalepsis; Thomas Ligotti;
Summary/Abstract: The weird fiction of Thomas Ligotti uses a variety of images and subjects within a thematic unit focused on the presence of a shadowy and malevolent force, an unintelligible darkness hidden beneath the surface of the sensible world. In the philosophical thought of Ligotti’s fiction, inherited from Arthur Schopenhauer and Peter Wessel Zapffe, the supernatural appears as a base for ontological questions about the limits of the knowable, the meaning of the world and the humankind’s place and role in the universe. This question of humankind’s relation to the rest of the universe induces a primal and epistemic anguish. The supernatural takes here the form of an absolute blackness, as an embodiment of the epitome of the unknown and its impact upon the human psyche.The world, deprived of transcendence and finality, is not the way it appears, and becomes a grotesque chaos of fear, nonsense and epistemological isolation. On the other hand, this epistemological problematic is coupled with elements of metafictional self-reflection and different metaleptic layers, with the aim of illustrating the theme of illusion and reality and the permeability between the fictional and the real.

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