The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (26 page)

When Pirandello’s character Moscarda describes his escalating perplexities about his identity as a “horrible drama,” these words appear as a formality—a perfunctory gesture that fails to convey the nightmarish quality of his situation. This criticism may not be lodged against The Tenant, wherein Topor affectingly dramatizes the horror of his non-117

hero Trelkovsky as he traverses the same nightmare terrain as his Italian counterpart. (A pivotal passage in Topor’s novel begins with the following sentence: “’At what precise moment,’” Trelkovsky asked himself, ‘does an individual cease to be the person he—and everyone else—believes himself to be?’”) A Parisian with a Slavic name, Trelkovsky is an outsider and moves in a world where outsiders are persecuted, as they are in the real world. While seeking a new home in an apartment building, he is made to feel as if he is nobody by the landlord, Monsieur Zy, and then by the other residents of this sinister place. By flexing their self-appointed prestige, Trelkovsky’s persecutors can maintain their own delusional status as somebodies, real persons who are comfortable in the hell they have created for themselves. Anyone who is marked as being outside of the group is fair game for those who would assert their reality over all others. Yet they, too, are nobodies. If they were not, their persecutions would not be required: they could pass their lives with a sure mindfulness of their substance and value. But as any good Buddhist (or even Pirandello’s Moscarda) could tell you, human beings have no more substance and value than anything else on earth. The incapacity to repose alongside both the mountains and the mold of this planet is the wellspring of the torments we inflict on one another. As long as we deny a person or group the claim to be as right and as real as we are, so long may we hold this dreamlike claim for ourselves alone. And it is the duty of everyone to inculcate a sense of nothingness, an ache of being empty of substance and value, in those who are not emulations of them. Without being consciously aware of it, Trelkovsky experiences an epiphany about his neighbors at the midpoint of the novel: “’The bastards!’” Trelkovsky raged. “’The bastards! What the hell do they want—for everyone to roll over and play dead! And even that probably wouldn’t be enough!” He is more right than he knows. Because what they want is for everyone to roll over and play them.

Martians—they were all Martians. . . . They were strangers on this planet, but they refused to admit it. They played at being perfectly at home. . . . He was no different. . . . He belonged to their species, but for some unknown reason he had been banished from their company. They had no confidence in him. All they wanted from him was obedience to their incongruous rules and their ridiculous laws. Ridiculous only to him, because he could never fathom their intricacy and their subtlety.

Trelkovsky’s neighbors cannot admit to themselves what he comes to realize: everybody is nobody; no one is empowered to define who they are. But people do arrogate to themselves the authority to make a ruling on who you are, and you will stand mute before their bench. At first, Trelkovsky is manipulated by others toward this knowledge; finally, he comes to embrace it. In his broken mind, the only way to defy his neighbors’

murderous conspiracy against him is to cooperate in it. He does this by allowing himself to fall from the high window of his apartment. The first time does not quite do the job, so he drags his bloody anti-self back up the stairs, jeering at his neighbors who have come out to lunge out at his body with sharp objects. He then falls a second time from the window. Following in the footsteps of Anna Karenina and Gloria Beatty, he decides to call it quits in the world’s lugubrious game. Interestingly, The Tenant concludes with the 118

same kind of leap beyond the known criteria of the everyday world as does One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Sadly for Trelkovsky, it is a leap in the opposite direction.

More accurately, it is a leap that does not deliver Topor’s protagonist from his “horrible drama” but one that catapults him into the outermost nightmare of nobodies.

As an insider, Pirandello was under orders to resolve the themes of his work in a spirit-lifting, vacillating, or at least tolerable mode. Outfitted with a different consciousness, the outsider can only give up a resolution from another prospect overlooking the nature of things. For the past few slivers of human history, those of us living in what is called the

“free world” have been allowed to have our diversity of worldviews accredited, but only on the condition that they are affirmative and not pessimistic, nihilistic, or any other negative modifier one chooses to pin upon the chest of those who are not on the inside.

These qualities might well be valued by outsiders, but the preponderance of insiders that compose humankind will not incorporate outside ideas and attitudes into their philosophies, ideologies, national policies, or fraternal by-laws. Both Pirandello and Topor dealt with the same theme: the transformative dissolution of one’s self-concept.

The former writer ended his story with a portrait of a man who joyously transcends himself by becoming the “no one” in the novel’s title. This resolution has already been deplored as an indecent imposture. An insider might say the same about the ending of Topor’s novel, which implies a descent into nightmare that Trelkovsky never saw coming.

In the epilogue to The Tenant, it turns out that Trelkovsky survives what should have been his death-plunge. But he does so in a strange way. Coming to consciousness in a hospital bed—the same hospital bed where he stood, at the beginning of the story, looking over the former tenant of the apartment he hoped to rent, who also fell from that shabby room’s window and was not expected to survive—the newly bedridden patient, like the one before, now sees who the visitor is. It is himself. Immobilized by his injuries and his face bandaged to expose only one eye and an opening for his mouth, he realizes that he has been metamorphosed into Simone Choule, the woman whose apartment he once coveted. Perhaps not for the first time, caught in a series of reincarnations, he has come to be at his own bedside. He emits a scream when he learns what has happened to him, the one in the bed, and what is going to happen to the one standing over him.

Trelkovsky has now solved his (and Moscarda’s) riddle: “At what precise moment does an individual cease to be the person he—and everyone else—believes himself to be?”

Answer: when one’s defenses, conjointly with those of this fabricated world, cease to hold up and break down into the overweening lies they have ever been and ever shall be.

Because conscious life is not just onerous but is also, as every philosopher has clandestinely argued, refractory to comprehension, supernatural stories are most suitably fitted to relate horrors that are true to life and worse than death, those which almost everyone disarms their heads from imagining.

As neither Pirandello nor Topor underwent the transformative dissolution of the self-concept that is the common theme of their stories—it would be the highlight of each man’s biography if they had—are they not equally disingenuous? That would turn upon which author’s representation of the world you buy as more symbolically credible: 119

ending one’s days in serene communion with all that makes up the world . . . or lying with a damaged body in a hospital bed, unable to do anything but scream at the sight of a clueless specter, the nobody who was you and has already died time and again in the dream or delirium that was your life. Whichever ending to these thematically analogous stories appears more faithful to human experience depends on who you are . . . or who you think you are, which amounts to the same thing. (This is a very Pirandellian theme.) While Topor’s vision seems empirically more robust, Pirandello’s is the crowd favorite.

To receive the prize Pirandello awards Moscarda, if only for a moment before one’s death, would make amends for a lifetime of afflictions. Grievously, just because something is a desideratum does not mean that believing in it will save you. But Pirandello and his kind want you, and themselves, to die trying. All Topor and his kind have to say is that you should always have your affairs in order, which may bring you some peace of mind if you are lying in a hospital bed . . . or only looking for a new apartment.

In conflict with Nobel Prize winners and other insiders, the literary outsider is prone to be non-idealistic. He will not stand in awe before the pyramids of the past, present, or future; he will not salute the flag of the status quo. The characters in his works will get nothing for their sufferings except the imprint of pain, that is, should they survive, since the outsider is not skittish about depicting death and doom as our natural birthright. Beckett’s Malone may die in Malone Dies (1951), but the representative slogan of the Irish genius is “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” This is the theme of Beckett’s novels and plays—going on—and his characters do it rather well. In the face of exhaustion, confusion, and debris, his casts of outcasts remain unstoppable. Cornered by his consciousness of the ever-flushing crapper of existence, however, the outsider resolves the theme of going on as follows: no one will go on, and in our inevitable going there is only gore without glory, madness and mutilation without deliverance. The outsider will not lap up the illusions of his neighbors, those insiders who either actively oppress him for not sharing in their delusions or undermine him with indifference. Nevertheless, the outsider may still endure as amusing freak with a niche audience. How else can one explain the shadowy careers of a Zapffe or a Topor?

Among commentators on horror, consideration has been given to the question of whether or not this popular genre is by nature conservative, a form created by and for insiders.

Naturally, mass-market novels and movies are under duress to follow the orthodoxies of their society and the entertainment industry. These powers forbid the peddling of items that would depress a paying customer. This is a rule of popular culture and its attendant economics, which enforce a conservative outlook. Obviously, the word "conservative" is here being used in a sociological rather than a political sense. Every society must be conservative if it wants to stay in business, and all but the most marginal writers obey this law of survival. For his short novel The Stranger (1942) and other works in which he publicized the absurdity of human life, Albert Camus may have seemed a pernicious bohemian or an anarcho-nihilist to the shopkeepers and salesmen of the state. But to any outsider he was only preaching the party line of his or any other time: "We must content ourselves with all that is the status in quo for the sake of the future." This is more or less 120

the philosophy behind Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus. We should not be astonished, then, that Camus was a recipient of the Nobel Prize.

For the record, the full statement of what qualifies a writer to win the Nobel Prize is the production of “the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency.” Do The Tenant and Topor’s other writings make for “outstanding work”? They may for some and they may not for others, readers’ tastes being a funny thing. But they damn well do not if you are one of the insiders, who are not gung-ho for a literary artist, even those writing in the horror genre, to resolve their themes in a pessimistic, nihilistic, and defeatist vein. Is it so absurd to think that an art form denominated as “horror” should do anything else? Ask Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, and any other writer whose works are the bedrock of horror literature.

CHARACTERS

Life on earth had been percolating for billions of years before human beings became the latest comers to the festivities of the organic. This fact has raised questions in our heads that called forth two types of answers, one mythological and the other scientific. Either we were created by a superior entity or we just “happened” as part of a sequence of events extrinsic to the appearance of H. sapiens. It does not particularly matter toward which explanation one’s head may list; some have even adopted both without becoming flustered or conflicted. What does matter are these words from Cioran’s essay “The Undelivered”: “The more we consider the Buddha’s last exhortation, ‘Death is inherent in all created things; labor ceaselessly for your salvation,’ the more we are troubled by the impossibility of feeling ourselves as an aggregate, a transitory if not fortuitous convergence of elements.” While Thomas Metzinger addresses the science behind this practical impossibility in Being No One, what use is it to know why you are an illusory self, an obstinately believable character, if no remedy exists for your condition? But though we may be only make-pretend beings, fly-by-night ephemerids of eternity, we can still establish a pecking order in the unreal. To compensate us for being nobodies without a diplomatic bag or a self to stash inside it, we may lord it over characters in fiction. With some experimental exceptions, fictional characters do not display any awareness that they are just paper people, odds and ends of a human being held together by words, absolute nothings that exist only in someone’s imagination—first that of a writer and, later, that of a reader. “Why should it be so crucial,” one might ask, “that characters in a work of fiction believe that they are real and never become enlightened as to their true status in the imaginary?” More to the point, why must we believe that they believe in the lie of their character? To this query there is only one response: because their whole-cloth nature reinforces the legitimacy of our perception that we are really real, or as real as things get.2

As long as they are not aware of what they are, the undergirding of our grand illusion—

selfhood—is secure. They exist only in a story, giving us the superior position of beings who serve as the models for their fabrication. This envelopment of one reality by another is redolent of Russian nesting dolls, wherein smaller dolls are inset beneath the shell of larger dolls. We are the big doll that has the others inside it, the mother doll gravid with copies of itself. This shell game is made both possible and necessary by our consciousness.