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Special section: Short crime fiction

Investigating Dark Rituals: The Detective as Anthropologist in Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin”

Isabelle Boof-Vermesse
p. 125-140

Résumés

Le narrateur de Thomas Ligotti dans “The Last Feast of Harlequin” peut être vu comme une version modernisée des amateurs d’histoire locale que l’on trouve chez Lovecraft, et pour lesquels l’exploration du matériau folklorique conduit à la révélation de leur propre identité. Anthropologue spécialiste en études de clowns, il effectue une enquête de terrain pour étudier un obscur festival mettant en scène deux types de bouffons. En tentant de rendre compte de cette dualité, la méthodologie de l’observation-participation se montrera étrangement apte à mettre au jour les rituels sinistres de la communauté que scrute le narrateur. Cet article se propose d’explorer la troublante proximité entre la recherche anthropologique et l’enquête criminelle de la fiction hard-boiled ainsi que les trajectoires parallèles de leurs enquêteurs, qui passent du statut de profane à celui d’initié. Ce sont d’abord les méthodologies respectives de l’anthropologie et de l’investigation criminelle qui sont envisagées, afin de voir ce qu’elles ont en commun. On se tournera ensuite vers le désir herméneutique qui anime le détective et l’ethnographe, et qui les pousse tous deux à élucider et rationnaliser les comportements énigmatiques.

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  • 1 John Lagan discusses the story as an allegory of literary influence.

1Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin” was first published in the April 1990 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has been anthologized and discussed as heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Festival” (1923) and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931),1 stories which adopted as a starting point a stance of detached interest for folklore close to the anthropological attitude. Ligotti’s narrator in “The Last Feast of Harlequin” can be seen as an updated version of Lovecraft’s antiquarians; an anthropologist whose field of expertise is clown culture, he is tipped by a colleague about some little-known festival that features clowns. Such an incipit highlights research as a main motive—here of an academic nature:

Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. (“Harlequin” 255)

2What starts out as a purely scholarly pursuit takes on a more disturbing urgency, however, as he notices that the period of celebration coincides with that of an increased rate of suicides in the same community. This coincidence reinforces the analogy between anthropological research and detective investigation throughout the story. Following in the steps of Lovecraft, Ligotti uses an erudite if unreliable homodiegetic narrator who, like a detective, conducts an investigation into cryptic behavior: here, the strange practices of a winter festival. As it turns out, the practices under scrutiny, with ritual murder at their core, justify his paranoid curiosity.

3Lovecraft, Ligotti’s predecessor, was influenced by Sir Thomas Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), which traces all religions back to fertility rites. It also claims that “in rude society human beings have been commonly killed to promote the growth of the crops” (509), thus closely associating religion with human sacrifice, a connection that has gradually become symbolic in civilized societies. In Ligotti’s story, the killing preceding rebirth is found to be taken literally, marking a return to archaic proceedings. What the Greeks called sparagmos, the dismemberment of the sacrificial victim (possibly followed by cannibalism), as in Euripides’ Bacchae, is enacted by a band of revelers in some obscure Midwestern town during the festival. The final ceremony also provides the solution to a missing person case as the anthropologist turned detective identifies the scapegoat as a missing woman. The religious meaning of mystery thus overlaps with a more mundane significance.

4This contribution explores the disturbing proximity between anthropological research and criminal inquiry as rendered in fiction and the parallel trajectories that mark the evolution of the investigator from outsider to insider. It will first address their respective methodologies, to see what the procedures of anthropology and criminal investigation have in common, focusing in particular on the participant-observer stance. It will then turn to the hermeneutic impulse that drives detective and ethnographer, as they both seek to elucidate and rationalize enigmatic behavior.

The Analogy Between Ethnographic Fieldwork and Detective Legwork

5Detective work and the practices of anthropology involve common methodologies: the detective’s legwork parallels the fieldwork of ethnography (the documentary research anthropology rests on): data or information is collected via informants, and it is recorded, examined, and turned into a consistent whole; in other words, it is interpreted to provide intelligibility. Conversely, anthropology is often perceived by laymen as dealing with incomprehensible and transgressive behaviors, material fit for sensationalist fiction, as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski remarks wryly:

Savagery is still synonymous with absurd, cruel, and eccentric customs, with quaint superstitions and revolting practices. Sexual licence, infanticide, head-hunting, couvade, cannibalism and what not, have made anthropological reading attractive to many. (1)

6Ligotti’s story is initiated thanks to an informant: one of his colleagues writes to the protagonist to inform him that a town called Mirocaw holds celebrations that correspond to his field of study. Yet government sources (coming from the “State Department of Recreation”) consulted by the narrator contradict this information (“A letter inserted within the pamphlet explained to me that, according to their voluminous records, no festivals held in the town of Mirocaw had been officially registered” [“Harlequin” 256]). The matter thus lies dormant until, driving around on his way to research facilities located at another university in the summer, the scholar catches sight of the name of the town and decides abruptly to drive there. The city in question will be the object of an “investigative side trip” (256), but he gets only vague information at the city hall. His only contact with the locals is with an old tramp with a vacant stare who does not answer his question for directions, but whose face looks vaguely familiar (258), and, as he is driving through the deprived area of the town, with another “citizen of this slum.” The narrator describes how “[t]his lean, morose, and epicene person turned my way and sneered outrageously with a taut little mouth, yet seemed to be looking at no one in particular” (260). If the narrator returns home “all but empty-handed on the subject of Mirocaw” (261), these strange encounters will make sense upon his second trip to the city.

7After a first unsuccessful foray into the outstate library to check local newspapers, none of which provides information about the festival (the town is only mentioned in a news item about an old woman’s suicide around Christmastime, hardly what would qualify for a criminal, let alone anthropological, investigation), the protagonist receives a second letter from his colleague informant, which includes the references to an article on the topic, written by the protagonist’s mentor, a Dr. Thoss:

This article had its sole appearance in an obscure festschrift of anthropology studies published in Amsterdam twenty years before. Most of these papers were in Dutch, a few in German, and only one was in English: “The Last Feast of Harlequin: Preliminary Notes on a Local Festival.” It was exciting, of course, finally to be able to read this study, but even more exciting was the name of its author: Dr. Raymond Thoss. (261)

8Commenting on the article (whose text is not given in the story), the narrator emphasizes manner over matter, letter over spirit, noticing uncharacteristic formal constraints, as if there was “a struggling inner force which was definitely contained—incarcerated, I might say—by the somber rhythmic movements of his prose” (263). Such exegesis is not gratuitous: the “strategic obscurities” (263) of the article point to the secret that is tantalizingly hidden, and revealed, in the style of Dr. Thoss (the reptilian reptations of his syntax) and his use of intertext. In particular, Thoss uses a quotation from Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm,” the famous poem incorporated into “Ligeia” as an epigraph. The motif of the worm as textual clue is extended through the reference to the beliefs of a Syrian Gnostic sect about the origin of mankind as crawling creatures, a reference given in relation to Saturnalia, the pagan origin of Christmas according to the anthropologist:

At the time I supposed that the symbolic correspondences of mankind’s origins and ultimate condition being associated with worms, combined with a year-end festival recognizing the winter death of the earth, was the gist of this Thossian “insight,” a poetic but scientifically valueless observation. (263)

9The investigation thus starts with texts, as with Poe’s “Mystery of Marie Roget” or “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The technical term “etic” (264) is used by the narrator to refer to the “exterior” position of Dr Thoss in the article, his reliance on “second-hand sources, hearsay testimony” (264), a stance of aloofness and expertise that runs counter to his usual one. This would be, in detective fiction, the attitude of the Great Detective (namely a hero who is not affected by events but only reconstructs them a posteriori). In contrast, the narrator is seeking a more immersive methodology that would make him closer to the hard-boiled detective who takes part in an ongoing action; this stance of total involvement corresponds to Dr. Thoss’s teachings and usual strategy:

He was a field worker par excellence, and his ability to insinuate himself into exotic cultures and situations, thereby gaining insights where other anthropologists merely collected data, was renowned. At various times in his career there had been rumors of his having “gone native” à la the Frank Hamilton Cushing legend. (262)

10The explicit reference to Frank Hamilton Cushing, the American pioneer of participant observation in the late nineteenth century, functions as a proleptic clue, for the reader easily anticipates that the narrator himself will go native:

In these studies I was an eager participant—along with playing my part as an anthropologist, I also took a place behind the clownish mask myself. And I cherished this role as I did nothing else in my life. To me the title of Clown has always carried connotations of a noble sort. I was an adroit jester, strangely enough, and had always taken pride in the skills I worked so diligently to develop. (255-56)

  • 2 “Carnival is a pageant without a stage, and without a division into performers and spectators” (Bak (...)

11In addition, a strategy of immersion is all the more adequate for carnival, since a festival is not to be observed from afar; participation is in order.2 The story will involve the enactment of a degree of participation beyond what the protagonist bargained for, when he makes a second trip to Mirocaw, this time during the festival.

12The analogy between anthropological research and detective work has often been noted by methodologists:

Qualitative research is inductive. Qualitative researchers develop concepts, insights, and understandings from patterns in the data rather than collecting data to assess preconceived models, hypotheses, or theories. (Taylor and Bogdan 8)

13Induction is the form of backward reasoning made famous by Sherlock Holmes: one first gathers evidence and then draws conclusions. To assess the validity of testimonies, it is necessary to go beyond the surface. In Ligotti’s story, Dr. Thoss’s article notes the discrepancy between the fact that inhabitants are “superficially unaware” of the origin of the festival (to the detriment of Christmas proper), and their consistency in maintaining it for centuries (which revealed “a profound awareness of the festival’s meaning and function”; “Harlequin” 267). The article does not openly disclose the meaning and a function of the festival, as Dr. Thoss’s intradiegetic reader remarks tartly: “[A]s I later discovered, he had indeed included information on certain aspects of Mirocaw suggesting he was already in possession of several keys which for the moment he was keeping securely in his own pocket” (264). Upon first hearing of it, the narrator had been struck by the “odd” date of the festival, “Dec. 19-21,” a moment that competes with Christmas, but he chooses to discard Dr. Thoss’s interpretation of the coincidence he now finds in the article: “Thoss’s mystical subclimate, which is a colorful idea to be sure and one that seems fitting for this town of various outward and inward aspects, but is not a conception that can be substantiated” (281).

14Another point made by the article authored by Dr. Thoss has to do with a sort of seasonal sickness affecting Mirocaw’s townspeople during the festival, not unlike the narrator’s own “dark malady” (264), as he tells us later. To corroborate the academic article’s information about this local pathology, the narrator consults old newspaper sources:

The Courier story appeared two weeks after the festival had ended for that year and was concerned with the disappearance of a woman named Elizabeth Beadle, the wife of Samuel Beadle, a hotel owner in Mirocaw. The county authorities speculated that this was another instance of the “holiday suicides” which seemed to occur with inordinate seasonal regularity in the Mirocaw region. (265)

15Acting like a detective working on a missing person case, the narrator studies attentively the face of the woman who supposedly committed suicide twenty years ago and finds this cause of death unlikely: “Even in the grainy microfilm reproduction one could detect a certain vibrancy and vitality in Mrs. Beadle’s face” (265). His skills in physiognomy, reminiscent of Poe’s narrator in “The Man of the Crowd,” are put to use when he returns to Mirocaw, as he notices that the young woman at the reception desk of his hotel looks uncannily like the suicide victim:

In person she immediately radiated a chilling brilliance of manner and expression. But if this woman had not committed suicide twenty years before, as the newspaper article had suggested, neither had she aged in that time. (270)

16The oxymoronic “chilling brilliance” is ominous. In his journal about the festival, the anthropologist will later write the following entry: “‘The Winter Queen. . . . Figure of fertility invested with symbolic powers of revival and prosperity. Elected in the manner of a high school prom queen. Check for possible consort figure in the form of a representative from the underworld’” (276). The missing person looked like an eligible winter queen, and so does her look-alike, the young receptionist.

17For the time being, the nosiness of the narrator is further exemplified by his attempt to eavesdrop on the conversation between the receptionist and her father (“I smiled and pretended everything was normal, while trying to remain within earshot of their conversation” [270]), the hotel owner who is clearly being overprotective, another hint at upcoming danger. He then tries to enroll the anxious father as his respondent, the anthropological equivalent of an informant, to learn about the customs of the festival—to no avail, except that he is told that the clowns are “picked out” (271), which is an occasion to display his erudition:

Beadle’s comment that the clowns of Mirocaw were “picked out” left me wondering exactly what purpose these street masqueraders served in the festival. The clown figure has had so many meanings in different times and cultures. The jolly, well-loved joker familiar to most people is actually but one aspect of this protean creature. Madmen, hunchbacks, amputees, and other abnormals were once considered natural clowns; they were elected to fulfil a comic role which could allow others to see them as ludicrous rather than as terrible reminders of the forces of disorder in the world. But sometimes a cheerless jester was required to draw attention to this same disorder, as in the case of King Lear’s morbid and honest fool, who of course was eventually hanged, and so much for his clownish wisdom. (271)

18His digressive comments are reminiscent of Tony Hillerman’s explanations about clowns disrupting Pueblo rituals in Sacred Clowns (11-13). In a previous passage, the narrator had used the example of kachinas, or sacred dances, also addressed by Hillerman’s anthropological detective fiction, to explain Dr. Thoss’s participant observer strategy:

On one occasion I summoned up the audacity to offer an interpretation—which was somewhat opposed to his own—regarding the tribal clowns of the Hopi Indians. I implied that personal experience as an amateur clown and special devotion to this study provided me with an insight possibly more valuable than his own. It was then he disclosed, casually and very obiter dicta, that he had actually acted in the role of one of these masked tribal fools and had celebrated with them the dance of the kachinas. (“Harlequin” 262)

19The narrator will do the exact same thing; he decides to engage in what could be called “undercover clowning.”

20To be sure, qualitative research, which involves identifying with the people under study to understand the meaning they attach to things and rituals, is close to the capacity of the detective to identify with the culprit. In both instances, the investigator “brackets” his usual self to blend in with the observed environment. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” literalizes this change of persona by having the anthropologist put on his clown costume and make-up.

21At first, he is an observer more than a participant; like Poe’s anonymous narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” he observes the passing crowd through the restaurant window, and he cannot make sense of their behavior: “I watched them enter and exit store after store without buying” (“Harlequin” 272): the whole community becomes a suspect body.

“Meaningful mania” and the Hermeneutic Impulse

22As the narrator later enters the Mirocaw crowd during the festival, being inside and outside with the detached stance of the flaneur (“Mingling with the good people of Mirocaw seemed like the proper thing to do at that point in my scientific sojourn” [272]), he notices three rowdy revelers who abuse a clown figure dressed as a sort of mock Santa Claus; he is intrigued and offers them drinks to learn more about this unusual local practice—but they are respondents with limited insights: “‘I don’t think there’s anything to understand,’” the fat one said. “‘It’s just what you see’” (277), a misleading testimony if ever there was one. To make matters more complex, there is another type of clown: people dressed in rags and with a death mask painted on their face that evokes Edvard Munch’s Scream. This other group must be avoided, not pushed around, unlike the red and white clowns, according to some “tacit rule of behavior” (279):

I discovered that interspersed among the celebrating populace of Mirocaw, which included the sanctioned festival clowns, there was not one or two, but a considerable number of these pale, wraithlike creatures. And they all drifted along the streets unmolested by even the rowdiest of revelers. I now understood one of the taboos of the festival. These other clowns were not to be disturbed and should even be avoided, much as were the residents of the slum at the edge of town. (280)

23Fascinated by these alternative clowns, whom he sees as “morbid impostors” (279), the narrator decides to push the observer participant method one step further: he disguises himself as a tramp and imitates the makeup of the sinister clowns. He hopes to secure “complete invisibility” (284), to be able to wander around “seeing without being seen” (285), with the express purpose of “gaining the confidence of my fellow specters and possibly in some way coming to know their secrets” (284), a strategy and a plan that correspond more closely to those of a detective than an anthropologist. Also a definite departure from the protocol of anthropology, even in qualitative research fieldwork, is his decision to shadow an old man, like a detective tailing a suspect, as in Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” similarly noticing “that the object of [his] pursuit appeared to be maintaining the same distance from [him], though [he] did not know if this was being done deliberately or not” so that “it felt as if [the old man] were leading [him] as much as [he] was chasing him” (273); here, however, the narrator knows his prey, who is no other than his former professor, Dr. Thoss. He follows him into a dark diner, a den of crime where members of the deprived underworld seem to have activities of a criminal nature. When he is spotted as an intruder, his reaction is hardly that of a man of science, but that of a hard-boiled detective:

In a few moments the room was crowded with these tramp-like figures, all of them gazing emptily in the dimness. I was not at this point frightened of them; at least I was not afraid they would do me any physical harm. Actually, I felt as if it was quite within my power to pummel them easily into submission, their mousy faces almost inviting a succession of firm blows. (274-75)

  • 3 See Stowe, “From Semiotics to Hermeneutics.” He applies Gadamer’s distinction between semiotics and (...)

24Beyond the involvement in physical action, the hard-boiled formula collapses the distinction between the interpreter and the object to be interpreted: instead of just a solution to a dead enigma, the quest seeks meaning.3 This quest for meaning erodes the detective’s invulnerability, since it involves him in the ongoing action (Marlowe concludes The Big Sleep by saying: “Me, I was part of the nastiness now”). In the same way, etic perspective becomes emic comprehension when the anthropologist leaves behind his stance of scientific detachment to immerse himself in the other culture’s rituals, blending into the community. In other words, both hard-boiled detective and anthropologist trajectories gradually turn the outsider into an insider. They are narratives of initiation, which include qualifying tests and ordeals, including the deciphering of a riddle. The anthropologist finds that his room has been broken into and a threatening message written on his mirror:

The writing was red and greasy, as if done with a clown’s make-up pencil—my own, I realized. I read the legend, or rather I should say riddle, several times: “What buries itself before it is dead?” I looked at it for quite a while, very shaken at how vulnerable my holiday fortifications were. Was this supposed to be a warning of some kind? A threat to the effect that if I persisted in a certain course I would end up prematurely interred? (284)

25The message has been written with the make-up he uses for his clown persona, which can be constructed as an invitation to proceed with the initiation ceremony. It functions as a sign of recognition, a clue pointing to the narrator’s status as one of the initiates.

26In keeping with the polysemy of the term “mystery,” which refers to a secular enigma or to secret sacred rites, the investigation will deal with “the esoterics of celebration” (255), a loaded phrase that points to cultish practices that are kept secret from the non-initiated. As an anthropologist, the protagonist is faced with a mystery that has to do with the hidden side of the festival, or rather, the embedded festival, “another coldness within its cold” (272). This layered reality to be gradually uncovered is first expressed in space.

27As in The Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City, the whole town in tinged with green, but the usual Christmas greenery takes on a sinister hue: “An eerie emerald haze permeated the town, and faces looked slightly reptilian” (269). The profusion of green announces the fertility cult dimension of the Nordic Yuletide, the pagan ritual that had apparently been displaced by Christmas but that resurfaces under the more official celebration.

28The duality of the festival is also expressed in the urban layout. In the Chandlerian code, or more generally in the hard-boiled tradition, architecture is symptomatic and the detective reads the landscape as revealing of widespread corruption. Mirocaw displays a sort of generalized metonymy. Beyond the usual dichotomy between affluent and derelict neighborhoods, the partition of town bears the mark of the separation between ordinary existence and its spectral version:

This took me once again through that part of town which seemed to exist on the wrong side of some great invisible barrier dividing the desirable sections of Mirocaw from the undesirable. As lurid as this district had appeared to me under the summer sun, in the thin light of that winter afternoon it degenerated into a pale phantom of itself. The frail stores and starved-looking houses suggested a borderline region between the material and nonmaterial worlds, with one sardonically wearing the mask of the other. (268)

29The pallid, flimsy aspect of the deprived area is not to be attributed to poverty only, but it announces the presence of the doppelgänger clowns.

30As he discovers two modes of clowning (bright Santa Claus look-alikes that are physically abused and dark tramps that are avoided), as seen above, the anthropologist faces the challenge of their articulation:

I felt instinctively that the two groups of clowns were somehow identified with each other, even if the ghetto clowns were not welcome at Mirocaw’s winter festival. Indeed, they might legitimately be regarded as part of the community and celebrating the season in their own way. To all appearances, this group of melancholy mummers constituted nothing less than an entirely independent festival—a festival within a festival. (280)

31His interpretation is that the official merrymaking was created “in order to cover . . . . up or mitigate [the] effect” of the former, the bright clowns being merely substitutes or proxies for their sinister counterparts, disguising a rather unpalatable truth of the carnival. His theory is in keeping with the hard-boiled drive to go beyond appearances, to dig deeper under the surface, and bring to light dark proceedings and hidden meanings, “unearthing hitherto inaccessible strata of human existence” (262).

32To be sure, doubleness is inherent to festivals, as is explained by Bakhtin:

The medieval feast had, as it were, the two faces of Janus. Its official, ecclesiastical face was turned to the past and sanctioned the existing order, but the face of the people of the marketplace looked into the future and laughed, attending the funeral of the past and present. (Rabelais 81)

33For example, Pueblo (Hopi) carnival features two types of clowns: “delight makers,” who wear bright black and white stripes painted on their bodies and who disrupt ceremonies, and “mudheads,” with a round-eyed, round-mouthed face covered with earth, who perform in plays associated with fertility rites (Roediger).

34Like detectives, anthropologists seek to uncover logical connections, gradually drawing an ever-wider pattern to include the accumulation of data. Specifically here, Ligotti’s narrator must make sense of the duplication of clowns and the relation between the official festival and its underground counterpart.

35Posing as an initiate, the narrator in disguise boards a truck that takes the congregation of dark clowns to the outskirts of the town, into the wilderness and a tunnel opening into an abyss. Following his peers along the passage to a large cavern, he intrudes upon a “subterranean Sabbath” (291) and witnesses a sacrifice ceremony presided over by Dr. Thoss, now properly identified as Thoth, the god of knowledge, as minister. The underground Mirocaw festival revolves around ritual murder, so that the two enigmas, anthropological (the role of the sinister clowns) and criminal (the missing person cases), converge. The dark clowns turn into worms crawling towards the Winter Queen, the missing receptionist as Persephone “with no supernatural mother to save her” (291), to eat her alive. “For now was the transformation scene, the culmination of every harlequinade” (290): the narrator refers to the way a pantomime traditionally switched to another form of spectacle, the harlequinade, thanks to the slapstick used by Harlequin as a magic wand to transform the pantomime characters into harlequinade characters:

O God, Harlequin, do not move like that! Harlequin, where are your arms? And your legs have melted together and begun squirming upon the floor. What horrible, mouthing umbilicus is that where your face should be? (291)

36This transformation of the dark clowns into murderous worms, proleptically intimated by the article that had initiated the field trip, as mentioned earlier, is only a first revelation. The paranoid logic of mystery stories also endows other motifs with retrospective meaning: the narrator’s chance encounter with his former professor is not really a coincidence; the figurative description of the shabby diner’s guests “slid[ing] slowly toward [him] in a wormy mass” (275) and the text of the enigma written on his mirror (“What buries itself before it is dead?”) must be taken literally. The fact that his “emotional instability” is “exactly what qualified [him] most for the particular fieldwork ahead” (267) is ironic. Even his own expressionless face reveals his secret identity: “In the same window I saw the reflection of my own face. It was not the face of an adept clown; it was slack and flabby and at that moment seemed the face of someone less than alive” (272).

37Most importantly, the anthropologist’s constant questioning about not only the articulation between the two types of clowns, as seen above, but about the townspeople’s understanding of this articulation, reflects his own denial:

[H]ow much awareness is there on the other side of these two antagonistic festivals? Too horrible to think of such a thing, but I must wonder if, for all their apparent aimlessness, those inhabitants of the ghetto are not the only ones who know what they are about. No denying that behind those inhumanly limp expressions there seems to lie a kind of obnoxious intelligence. (282-83)

38The increasing intrusiveness of the narrating-I as in the excerpts of his inserted journal, which is mainly expressed in qualification and preterition (“if I’m right about this” [282]; “of my own experience with this emotionally deleterious subseason I would rather not speak at this time” [281]; “I know my mind is not entirely lucid” [283]; “It would be useless to describe what I felt at that moment and a waste of the time I need to describe the events which followed” [290]) only reveals his unreliability as an ethnographer.

39One could thus see in him a vulnerable Pierrot rather than an often victorious, cunning Harlequin, if one follows Jean de Palacio’s description in Pierrot fin de siècle, which emphasizes the return of the repressed in Pierrot’s dual identity:

  • 4 My translation of: “La double face du masque se révèle ici dans toute sa netteté, le Satan du régim (...)

The double-faced dimension of the mask is revealed in its utmost clarity, the nocturnal Satan mixing with the daytime Pierrot, who is fooled, downtrodden, miserable. . . . No wonder then, given the circumstances, if desire for revenge and murderous drives are seen as inextricably bound to the Pierrot of Decadents. (211-12)4

40For the anthropologist is now self-consciously aware of the way his investigation has affected him: “[W]ith the scene I then witnessed, my conscience vaulted into a realm from which it will never return” (“Harlequin” 290). When, running away from the sacrifice altar, he is found out as an intruder and chased by the initiates, he is not killed because Thoss/Thoth recognizes him: “He is one of us. . . . He has always been one of us” (294). The detective fiction solution doubles over by reverberating on the identity of the detective, providing claustrophobic closure in the form of anagnorisis.

41Addressing feasting and clowns, anthropologist Valerio Valeri emphasizes the self-conscious dimension of carnival:

Holbein, in his illustrations for Erasmus’ In praise of folly (1509), represents the fool in the act of contemplating his own image in a mirror or in the doll attached to his scepter. . . . These designs seem to stage the essence of feasting itself, which not only renders visible that which is invisible, but reconciles the self to the other. The latter is revealed to consciousness by the discrepancy between the internal and external images of the self. It is in recognizing one’s self in others and others in one’s self that one enters into the festive spirit; and it is for this reason that feasting consists of an increase in solidarity and renews the social bond. (100)

42Anthropology sees feasting as a moment of intense meaning, the capacity to bring together what is separated in daily life; an “experience of transparency, an increase in meaning whose effects extend into ‘normal’ society” (Valeri 99), carnival intensifies perception and lays bare social relations through transgression, something detective fiction is also able to accomplish.

43In Ligotti’s story, the regenerating energy often attributed to carnivals is shown to be grounded in sacrifice; the social masquerade is exposed as an accommodation with this foundational truth. But the revelation does not stop here. Delving deeper into the mystery of the ritual, beyond even sacrifice, to get at the core of the conspiracy of reality, the anonymous narrator understands that he is left with the prospect of becoming a member of a “new family” whose ultimate aim is to return to “the paradise of the unborn” (“Harlequin” 294), the only way to escape the curse of life.

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Bibliographie

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---. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswosky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Print.

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Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 1890. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995. Print.

Hillerman, Tony. Sacred Clowns. London: Penguin, 1993. Print.

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Notes

1 John Lagan discusses the story as an allegory of literary influence.

2 “Carnival is a pageant without a stage, and without a division into performers and spectators” (Bakhtin, Poetics 100).

3 See Stowe, “From Semiotics to Hermeneutics.” He applies Gadamer’s distinction between semiotics and hermeneutics respectively to the whodunit and hard-boiled formulas.

4 My translation of: “La double face du masque se révèle ici dans toute sa netteté, le Satan du régime nocturne côtoyant le Pierrot du régime diurne, trompé, avili, malheureux. . . . On ne s’étonnera pas trop, dans ces conditions, de voir indissolublement liés au Pierrot décadent le désir de vengeance et la pulsion du meurtre.”

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Isabelle Boof-Vermesse, « Investigating Dark Rituals: The Detective as Anthropologist in Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin” »Journal of the Short Story in English, 79 | 2022, 125-140.

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Isabelle Boof-Vermesse, « Investigating Dark Rituals: The Detective as Anthropologist in Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin” »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 79 | Autumn 2022, mis en ligne le 02 avril 2024, consulté le 23 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3939

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