Investigating Dark Rituals: The Detective as Anthropologist in Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin”
Thomas Ligotti’s narrator in “The Last Feast of Harlequin” can be seen as an updated version of Lovecraft’s antiquarians whose exploration of folklore ironically leads to self-revelation. An anthropologist whose field of expertise is clown culture, he engages in fieldwork to investigate some little-...
محفوظ في:
| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2024
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| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | Thomas Ligotti’s narrator in “The Last Feast of Harlequin” can be seen as an updated version of Lovecraft’s antiquarians whose exploration of folklore ironically leads to self-revelation. An anthropologist whose field of expertise is clown culture, he engages in fieldwork to investigate some little-known festival that features two types of clowns. In its attempt to account for this duality, the observer-participant methodology will prove uncannily adequate to unearth the dark rituals of the community. This article explores the disturbing proximity between anthropological research and criminal inquiry as rendered in hard-boiled fiction, as well as their parallel trajectories, whereby the evolution of the investigator from outsider to insider is delineated. It does so by first addressing the respective methodologies of anthropology and criminal investigation to see what the procedures have in common. It then turns to the hermeneutic impulse that drives detective and ethnographer, as they both seek to elucidate and rationalize enigmatic behavior. |
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