THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK - "The Bungalow House" Commentary

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"The Bungalow House" Commentary

"The Bungalow House": Commentary
from http://www.ligotti.net/tlo/ss-bh.html

Early last September I discovered among the exhibits in a local art gallery a sort of performance piece in the form of an audio tape.

This tale is written as a first person narrative. The nameless protagonist is a librarian in the language and literature department of a public library; the story relates his identification and quest to communicate with an anonymous artist who makes audio tapes on the subject of the very desolate strangeness that the librarian has felt throughout his life.

The reader knows very little about the life of the protagonist, aside from the fact that he is a single and rather solitary librarian, choosing to spend his lunch breaks at a nearby art gallery. The most vivid character in "The Bungalow House," moreover, is the proprietor of this dingy, rundown gallery, Dalha D. (of Dalha D. Fine Arts), who, according to the protagonist, makes "arrangements" of a highly questionable nature in her spare time. Dalha is a loud, tacky, older woman who arranges the display of the artist's dream monologue tapes in the first place, and eventually attempts to make an arrangement for this artist to meet the protagonist.

The narrator becomes obsessed with the strange tapes, in which a "...feeling of being in a trance in the most vile and pathetic surroundings was communicated to me in the most powerful way, by the voice on the tape, which described a silent and secluded world where one existed in a state of abject hypnosis." This communication between librarian and artist is uncanny; he is taken with awe that "...another person shared my love for the icy bleakness of things. "

The narrator's own views on this subject come into focus as he relates, "I wanted to believe that this artist had escaped the dreams and demons of all sentiment in order to explore the foul and crummy delights of a universe where everything had been reduced to three stark principles: first, that there was nowhere for you to go; second, that there was nothing for you to do; and third, that there was no one for you to know." Obviously, the artist's dream tapes, while communicating these "principles" so well, break at least one of them--or do they? The nihilistic principles that have served the protagonist for so long are shaken by what appears to be a true and powerful connection with another living being, and, though he revels in the artist's vision that has helped alleviate the "killing sadness" that he himself has always felt, he is troubled by the fact that the artist seems to be sharing something that could and should be only felt individually.

It is this question that leads the solitary librarian to meet this mysterious artist, and brings him ultimately to an extremely surprising answer, which reveals as much about the true nature of the narrator as it does his sad existence.

In "The Bungalow House," Ligotti toys again with the idea of identity: what separates artists from librarians, both from the "Dalhas" of the world, and finally what separates each individual being from every other being. The author is at the height of a defining nihilism in which he teaches a lesson about the solitary nature of personal obsessions and thereby ultimately resolves his protagonist's philosophical dilemma. "The Bungalow House" is a brilliant and melancholy psychological narrative that explores the depths of an internal monologue while simultaneously telling an engaging story of existential yearning and despair.

--Jonathan Padgett

Ligotti Comments

JP: "The feeling of being in a trance among the most vile and pathetic surroundings was communicated to me in the most powerful way by the voice on the tape, which described a silent and secluded world where one existed in a state of abject hypnosis," I've noticed that many of your protagonists (as in, say, "The Cocoons" as well as BH) strive for this "state of abject hypnosis" in "a silent and secluded" world.

TL: I've experienced this state several times in dreams and don't consider it entirely unpleasant. The initial dream monologue in "The Bungalow House" was pretty much a transcription of one of these dreams and was written before I had any idea of using it as the basis for this story.

JP: … about Dalha, the owner of the dingy gallery who (it seems to the protagonist) makes "arrangements" of a decidedly questionable nature. Dalha is overbearing, a tacky dresser (all emerald green), has had a variety of careers, is extremely rude, insensitive, selfish, arrogant, and pretentious in the extreme. It seems to me that this is a recurring character, especially in the fiction you've written most recently (The Crimson Woman of "Gas Station Carnivals," Miss Glimm of In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land, and Miss Angela in your most recent story). Certainly this character personality has had a profound effect on you as a writer. What is it about the Dalha persona that has induced you to include her so prominently in these stories?

TL: To my mind this character is someone very much connected with the everyday world, as least as I see it, and provides an effect of vulgar realism that I think complements the more dreamlike and fantastic aspects of the stories in which they appear.