My Work is Not Yet Done: Thomas Ligotti's Dark Buddhism?

I don't read very much horror fiction. I enjoy Poe and Lovecraft and even occasionally King, but the genre doesn't grab me in quite the same way that SF does. But the biggest exception for me is Thomas Ligotti, a little-known writer whose short fiction has mostly been confined to small presses and tiny print runs despite the fact that he's one of the best writers in any genre, living, dead, or otherwise. His sort of most recent work, a novella (or just a short novel, depending on your page count threshold) called My Work is Not Yet Done, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild in 2002, but didn't get a print run bigger than 1,000 copies until Virgin Books re-released it earlier this year. Some long-time Ligotti fans have complained that the story is too mundane, and certainly its setting, a modern cubicle-ridden office, is more down-to-earth than some of Ligotti's previous work. But despite-- or perhaps because of-- its accessibility, the story contains perhaps the most extreme example of Ligotti's bleak philosophy than anything else he's written to date.

My Work is Not Yet Done is the story of Frank Dominio, a mid-management drone in a company that does... well, we're never quite sure, and it doesn't much matter. Dominio becomes convinced that his co-workers, who he calls the Seven Dwarfs, the Seven Swine, or just the Seven, are conspiring against him. At first it seems like simple paranoia, but events soon begin to prove him right, leading him on a bizarre path of revenge that takes more than a few unexpected turns. More importantly, though, Dominio's understanding of the conspiracy against him grows. He begins to understand that it's not simply the Seven who hope to destroy him, it is the system that they represent-- their company, and, on a greater level, the entire corporate system. In a particularly powerful passage, Dominio decries the aims of his company and others like it:

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product-- Nothing. And for this product, they would command the ultimate price-- Everything.

This market strategy would then go on until one day among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be-- will be-- only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it...

Ligotti's aim, at this point in the story, seems to be to depict the dehumanizing horror of capitalism. But, as Dominio descends further to the bottom of the conspiracy against him, he begins to see it as a much, much larger problem than simply a poorly-designed economic system. By the end of the book, he describes the being behind the conspiracy, a cosmic entity he calls the Great Black Swine: "a grunting, bestial force that animated, that used our bodies to frolic in whatever mucky thing came its way." This force "moved and manipulated all the created life of this world and gave me the power to move and manipulate things according to my will." The Great Black Swine is more than simply a plot against a single middle-manager; it is something more akin to sin itself-- and, for Ligotti, that nameless evil is ultimate reality.

There are a lot of parallels between Ligotti's worldview and Buddhism. In an interview with the New York Review of Science Fiction, Ligotti acknowledges the similarity, stating that "Buddhism isn’t my point of departure, but I’m in a similar place." Dominio gives a description of the ultimate nature of reality, which he experiences after crushing a cockroach, that seems to express the Three Marks of Existence of Buddhism: that all things are impermanent, that all reality is suffering, and that there is no self. His statement of this enlightenment (not a term he uses, but certainly applicable) could come directly from the Dhammapada:

We were brought into this world out of nothing... We were kept alive in some form, any form, as long as we were viciously thrashing about, acting out our most intensely vital impulses... We would be pulled back into the flowing blackness only when we had done all the damage we were allowed to do, only when our work was done. The work of you against me... and me against you.

But where the Buddhist response to this understanding of existence is to seek to liberate all beings from the cycle of suffering, Dominio's reaction is much darker: he concludes that all existence must be destroyed, or, failing that, he must destroy himself. He must do "all the damage he is allowed to do"-- and, by the novel's conclusion, he seems to have gained enough eldritch power to do a great deal of damage indeed. That desire for destruction is the result of the enormous difference between Ligotti's worldview and Buddhism. To Western eyes, Buddhism can appear pessimistic, or even nihilistic: all that talk about existence being suffering, and the ultimate goal being "cessation" from existence as we know it. But in fact Buddhism sees a potential, if not a necessity, for a positive end to the universe in which all created beings cease suffering. Dominio does not see that possibility: he sees only the conspiracy, and not the solution to it.

That pessimism is the biggest distinguishing characteristic between the philosophy of Ligotti's stories and Buddhism. His stories are bleak, but that bleakness is presented in such a singular manner, with such gorgeously-composed prose, that it's impossible not to be intrigued by it. The true horror about which Ligotti writes is ontological; the fear he hopes to awaken in his readers is: what if he's right? By setting this terror of being in so recognizable a setting as a fluorescent-lit office space, My Work is Not Yet Done makes this bleak argument all the more frightening.

Comments

[Elliot]

This sounds vaguely Phildickian. Especially like the horrifying realization at the end of "The Faith of Our Fathers," if I'm remember the title correctly.

Also a bit like paranoid schizophrenia.

[readingthedark.livejournal.com]

Delightful essay. Much appreciated.

[Raandy Stafford]

Thanks for the essay and link to the interview.

I just discovered Ligotti in the past year and wrote some relatively long Amazon reviews of his My Work Is Not Yet Done and Teatro Grotessco. The interview confirmed some of my suspicions about his worldview.

Dark Buddhism indeed! Only the unexamined life, it seems, if worth living.

[Harvey Molloy]

I pop in and read your log from time to time and I'm always rewarded. Thank you.

[Sepehr]

Excuse me, but where did you find that statue of the Buddha? I would like to purchase it because it captures the "essence" of the Void/emptiness. May you give me the URL or the place you found that image? Thanks.