Commentary on The Sect Of The Idiot

Thomas Ligotti’s The Sect of the Idiot begins with a man who arrives in a strange town, with “infinite stillness on foggy mornings, miracles of silence on indolent afternoons, and the strangely flickering tableau of never ending nights.” (201) However, his peaceful solitude is interrupted by the visit of a strange man knocking on the door, who seemingly disappeared as fast as he appeared. Later that same night, he is haunted by a strange dream, in which he, in a disembodied state, observes a strange ritual of communication in which strange hooded figures stand around an altar, and speak in cryptic clicking noises. Throughout the course of the dream, there appeared from the robes “delicate appendages that appeared to be withered, wilted claws bearing numerous talons that tapered off into drooping tentacles… all of these stingy digits seemed to be working together with lively and unceasing agitation.” (204). Even after waking up, the narrator recalls that “it seemed that I had carried back with me a tiny, jewel like particle of this horrific ecstasy, and, by some alchemy of association, this darkly crystalline substance infused its magic into my image of the old town.” (205). Upon leaving his apartment he found that in his mind the town had completely changed, and the whole day he “wandered in a fevered exaltation throughout the old town, seeing it as if for the first time.” (206) 

Upon entering an abandoned building, he comes across what seems to be the same room that was in his dream, with the strange chairs and the altar. They were as strange as he had dreamed, “more closely resembling devices of torture than any type of practical or decorative object.” (207). He stood there, observing for some time, recalling all the details of the room, before turning around to leave. However, he was stopped by a man who happened to be the same man who had visited his apartment, who now appeared to him as “malignant puppet of madness. From the twisted stance he assumed in the doorway to the vicious and imbecilic expression that possessed the features of his face, he was a thing of strange degeneracy.” (208). The man took his hand and said to him, in mock politeness, “thank you for coming to visit… they want you with them on their return. They want their chosen ones. Upon freeing himself from the stranger, he wandered the streets aimlessly and frantically, surrounded by the whisperings of strangers who spoke in hushed tones of his disfigurement and deformity. At first he was confused, unsure of the meaning of these hushed whispers. Upon returning to his apartment and looking in the mirror, holding his “head in balance with a supporting hand on either side.” Only one of those hands was his. “The other belonged to them.” (209).

The Sect of the Idiot takes the view of a man who becomes further and further alienated first from his view of the world, then from his own body. First the narrator's view of the town becomes increasingly strange and foriegn, with “A previously unknown element” emerging “in the composition of the town, one that must have been hidden within its most obscure quarters.” He observes that “while these quaint, archaic facades still put on all the appearance of a dream-like repose, there presently existed...evil stirrings beneath this surface.” (206). Still further, the narrator eventually comes to find that his own body no longer belongs to him, but rather, to an alien entity that exists outside of himself. “Neither my motives nor my actions matter in the least. They are both well known to the things that whisper in the highest room of the old town. They know what I write and why I am writing it. Perhaps they are even guiding my pen by means of a hand that is an extension of their own.” (210). 

This view of estrangement and alienation is, oddly enough, very Marxist. Despite the fact that the narrator perceives that he is guided by an alien force, he himself is becoming that alien force. Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts that “The alien being, to whom labor and the product of labor belongs, in whose service labor is done and for whose benefit the product of labor is provided, can only be man himself.” Marx further writes that “If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure.” Furthermore, the process by which the narrator becomes estranged from his worldview and his body falls in line with the way the worker becomes estranged from his labor in the labor process; “In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.” The estrangement from nature, in this case, can be interpreted as being his alienation from his fellow man, which takes the form of the visceral reaction to his condition that occurs in the people he encounters outside the apartment building. And, in this case, he is quite literally estranged/alienated from his species being, as slowly but surely becomes non-human.

The Sect of the Idiot takes on a point of view that is pessimistic, negative, and life denying, a point of view that affirms not the here and now, but the other-world. In the very first paragraph, the narrator says that “the extraordinary is the province of the solitary soul. Lost the very moment the crowd comes into view, it remains within the great hollow of dreams, an infinitely secluded place that prepares itself for your arrival…” (200). This is life denying precisely because it surrenders the possibility of joy to another world, a “great hollow of dreams.” Deleuze, the philosopher of life par-excellence, writes that “Life takes on a value of nil insofar as it is denied and depreciated. Depreciation always presupposes a fiction; it is by means of fiction that one falsifies and depreciates… the whole of life then becomes unreal, it is presented as appearance…” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 147). This is precisely what happens to the narrator; the town put on “the appearance of a dreamlike repose” with “evil stirrings beneath this surface.” (206). 

        Later, the narrator makes the following comment; “life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.” (209). Is this not life denial in its purest form? Is this not the narrator condemning his life based on his new found knowledge of the world he lives in? Deleuze writes that “for a long time we have only been able to think in terms of ressentiment and bad consciousness. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous.” (35). For the narrator, life is horror, pain, and therefore bad, but what must be understood is that “pain is not an argument against life, but, on the contrary, a stimulant to life, ‘a bait for life,’ an argument in its favor. Seeing or even inflicting suffering is a structure of life as active life, an active manifestation of life.” (130).