Severini

Nemonymous

Nemonymous

Grimscribe
SEVERINI – “There is no way out of the nightmare once you have gone so far into its depths.” And I feel that way with my current expedition into this book.
I hope Ligotti’s work as an “amalgam of hearsay” has by now “attained the status of a potent legend.” Yet it is hard to imagine how a Disease of a Disease (as depicted in this particular story) or a vicious circle of spider venom could ever become a mass market book. Surely those paperback editions of ‘Teatro Grottesco’ that I see these meltdown days in Airports and Supermarkets and Railway Stations are only the ghost children born from virgin “sleeptalking” ... teasing you across the frog-choked miasma towards Severini’s shack. Or are you intended to “deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know”?
Here we see narrations and viewpoints of me and you in full spate along the “tropical sewer” of the reader’s mind – and the jesting smeary scrawl on my back says “the nightmares of the Organism” but I cannot turn on the narrow carrel-shelf of my eternal death to read the melting message.
teatro3.jpg


======================
 
From Ligotti's SEVERINI – “There is no way out of the nightmare once you have gone so far into its depths.”
“deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know”
The story that really deals with 'the nightmare of the organism' (the nightmare of the organisation, too?) and possibly an interesting companion/ comparison piece with the recent controversial thread on TLO in these last few weeks before Christmas.
Severini as a severer of knots? or of body traps?


==========================

My Christmas 2008 review of his TEATRO GROTTESCO:
Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti my sixth real-time review (Christmas 2008) | Real Books Rock

My July 2010 review of his CATHR:
The Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Thomas Ligotti my review | Real Books Rock
 
Nemonymous, do you own the Durtro edition of TG? If so, I was wondering if I could trouble you with a couple photos of the tome. Reviews I've read keep mentioning how beautifully made this edition is, but due to its limited availability and the high prices it commands I have this feeling I'll never get to lay my hands on it. But I would settle with some pictures. Not many of course, two or three might do it. (Though I would really like to see a page of text to see what the typographic and page design looks like.) If it's not much trouble, that is...


Anyway, 'Severini'. Mild spoilers ahoy.

Toward the end of the story we finally get a semblance of an explanation as to what's going on. Much like the narrator from the previous two stories (Carnivals and Bungalow), the narrator in Severini seems to suffer from something that's either repressed memories (or 'implanted' new memories), a mysterious separate personality. In this case it's probably a combination of both, as there was a deliberate split peformed by some mysterious healers in some mysterious country, possibly in south-america, though the clever distortion of language ("disantaría!") makes it impossible to pin down an exact location. It's probably a made up place anyway, like the Nethescurial islands.

So we have our narrator, the self-that-knows-not, and Severini, the diseased self. That's why the influences he brings on the artists community in the story is all about 'the nightmare of the organism' and similar concepts. He is all disease, or at least has a deep understanding of it, as knowing disease is pretty much all that Self can do. (Is the sleep-talking perhaps the stream-of-consciousness speak of a mind delirious with fever?) This has echoes in Teatro Grottesco and The Shadow, The Darkness, where diseases bring the narrator of the first and Grossvogel in the latter to experience some form of ultimate reality that lies hidden behind the facade we call reality (and this is clearly one of the core themes in Ligottian fiction). In a way the artists understand this, even if they're not entirely concious about it, and that's why they feel so drawn towards Severini's ideas and sleep-talking: deep down, they realize that's how things really are.

Incidentally, "disantaría" strikes me as a portmanteau of disentería (spanish for disentery) and santería, which is the name given to the beliefs and religious practices of certain south-american groups, which could be compared to sorcery and witchcraft but is really closer to the sibernan shamans, a mixture of wisdom, healing, and divination, the work done in the name of saints (hence the name)... essentially, a form of what these mysterious healers perform on the narrator. I don't know if this was intentional, though. From what I can tell Mr. Ligotti can read (and translate from) a few foreign languages, but I've no idea if spanish is one of them.
 
Last edited:
ramonoski said:
Nemonymous, do you own the Durtro edition of TG? If so, I was wondering if I could trouble you with a couple photos of the tome. Reviews I've read keep mentioning how beautifully made this edition is, but due to its limited availability and the high prices it commands I have this feeling I'll never get to lay my hands on it. But I would settle with some pictures. Not many of course, two or three might do it. (Though I would really like to see a page of text to see what the typographic and page design looks like.) If it's not much trouble, that is...


Anyway, 'Severini'. Mild spoilers ahoy.

Toward the end of the story we finally get a semblance of an explanation as to what's going on. Much like the narrator from the previous two stories (Carnivals and Bungalow), the narrator in Severini seems to suffer from something that's either repressed memories (or 'implanted' new memories), a mysterious separate personality. In this case it's probably a combination of both, as there was a deliberate split peformed by some mysterious healers in some mysterious country, possibly in south-america, though the clever distortion of language ("disantaría!") makes it impossible to pin down an exact location. It's probably a made up place anyway, like the Nethescurial islands.

So we have our narrator, the self-that-knows-not, and Severini, the diseased self. That's why the influences he brings on the artists community in the story is all about 'the nightmare of the organism' and similar concepts. He is all disease, or at least has a deep understanding of it, as knowing disease is pretty much all that Self can do. (Is the sleep-talking perhaps the stream-of-consciousness speak of a mind delirious with fever?) This has echoes in Teatro Grottesco and The Shadow, The Darkness, where diseases bring the narrator of the first and Grossvogel in the latter to experience some form of ultimate reality that lies hidden behind the facade we call reality (and this is clearly one of the core themes in Ligottian fiction). In a way the artists understand this, even if they're not entirely concious about it, and that's why they feel so drawn towards Severini's ideas and sleep-talking: deep down, they realize that's how things really are.

Incidentally, "disantaría" strikes me as a portmanteau of disentería (spanish for disentery) and santería, which is the name given to the beliefs and religious practices of certain south-american groups, which could be compared to sorcery and witchcraft but is really closer to the sibernan shamans, a mixture of wisdom, healing, and divination, the work done in the name of saints (hence the name)... essentially, a form of what these mysterious healers perform on the narrator. I don't know if this was intentional, though. From what I can tell Mr. Ligotti can read (and translate from) a few foreign languages, but I've no idea if spanish is one of them.
Click to expand...

tg1_zps50a7acd3.jpg


tg2_zpsaa99af18.jpg
 
Thank you! Much obliged :)

That does look indeed like a rather gorgeous edition. Feeling quite envious over here, if I may say.




But... aah! I just can't ignore this. And this is merely the amateur book designer in me speaking, and I clearly hold no authority on the matter and may be disregarded completely, but... Papyrus? No. NO! :mad: There truly is no way out of the nightmare once you've gone so far into its depths...
 
Thanks, Cynothoglys. Much appreciated. Didn't know there was a second edition of this. And you have both? Damn. :)

Also, is that crimson ink on the Decade edition (last pic)? That's amazing. Only once I've seen a book (a deluxe collection of classic latin-american short stories) that used coloured ink for the main copy; it was a purple-ish tone that looked beautiful. It doesn't quite look right in photos, but I bet this Decade edition also looks beautiful in person.
 
Maybe they manufactured the ink with a strange, colourful substance they found in a certain blasted heath near Arkham, Mass....
 
Great photos of TEATRO GROTTESCO. Thanks.

As a further aside, I notice that Guido Severini was a Futurist painter. As I recall from CATHR, Ligotti is interested in such art.
 
This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:-

SEVERINI

"There are two faces which must never confront each other."

I have never met or even privately corresponded with the author of this book, as if that has always been meant to be. i know that I am at best a literary sideshowman and like the disciples of SEVERINI in this story. But I can't help thinking that illness - here "belly sickness" or "cancerous matter" - is a combining force, those potential doppelgängers in the previous two stories now melding as one in tune with inimical "body changes" or in some diseased spirituality of Aesthetics, a museum of imaginary exhibits or of real sculptures, a marshland hermit called Severini in a shack who wants you to be invited as a kindred spirit, the earlier mention in my Ligotti reviews of the CATHRian-Catholic "pool of snakes" (cf Mauriac's NOEUD or Knot of Snakes)...
On a different level, this is a rarefied texture of words building on Ligotti's Art of Delirium (here as 'tropical landscape" and "common sewer"), his Scatology of Eschatology, sleeptalking...
A yearning to become not only kindred spirits but also "sympathetic organisms" - as a guard against this book's dark truth represented by its backcover emblem of the words "the nightmare of the Organism" originally used in this important story?
Dysentery and Prostate (Antistate?) cancer as just another pair of "sympathetic organisms"? Who knows? The answer may be in another emblem of words in this story: "The way into the nightmare is the way out." The knot of knots.

(I will now read my 2008 review of this story shown at the start of this thread.)

*

Scattered throughout this edition of TEATRO GROTTESCO is this symbol as a break-marker. It seems to be something poised to tie itself into a knot - or a knot that has already been untied?
severini.jpg
 
Nemonymous said:
This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:-

SEVERINI

"There are two faces which must never confront each other."

I have never met or even privately corresponded with the author of this book, as if that has always been meant to be. i know that I am at best a literary sideshowman and like the disciples of SEVERINI in this story. But I can't help thinking that illness - here "belly sickness" or "cancerous matter" - is a combining force, those potential doppelgängers in the previous two stories now melding as one in tune with inimical "body changes" or in some diseased spirituality of Aesthetics, a museum of imaginary exhibits or of real sculptures, a marshland hermit called Severini in a shack who wants you to be invited as a kindred spirit, the earlier mention in my Ligotti reviews of the CATHRian-Catholic "pool of snakes" (cf Mauriac's NOEUD or Knot of Snakes)...
On a different level, this is a rarefied texture of words building on Ligotti's Art of Delirium (here as 'tropical landscape" and "common sewer"), his Scatology of Eschatology, sleeptalking...
A yearning to become not only kindred spirits but also "sympathetic organisms" - as a guard against this book's dark truth represented by its backcover emblem of the words "the nightmare of the Organism" originally used in this important story?
Dysentery and Prostate (Antistate?) cancer as just another pair of "sympathetic organisms"? Who knows? The answer may be in another emblem of words in this story: "The way into the nightmare is the way out." The knot of knots.

(I will now read my 2008 review of this story shown at the start of this thread.)

*

Scattered throughout this edition of TEATRO GROTTESCO is this symbol as a break-marker. It seems to be something poised to tie itself into a knot - or a knot that has already been untied?
severini.jpg
Click to expand...

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK
 
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