"The Impasse" and "My Case for Retributive Action"

Mark Samuels, "The Impasse" from The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press: 2003).

Thomas Ligotti, "My Case for Retributive Action" in Weird Tales, January 2001.

Mark Samuels cites Ligotti as a literary influence, and he often takes a Ligottian theme and twists it into something nightmarishly different. Samuels is particularly good at showing, through his fiction, the emptiness of our epistemic foundations and the ephemeral or vacuous center of things, whether that be reality, the self, the corporation, or any number of other concepts. I argue “The Impasse” is not merely Ligottian corporate horror. “The Impasse” is the narrative form of a kind of nihilistic theory that claims originality, memory, and the self have no center. The story presents as a metafictional copyright case involving Ligotti’s short story “My Case for Retributive Action.” 

Ligotti’s story was published in Weird Tales in the Summer of 2001, while Samuels’s story was published in January of 2003. A reader of these stories can’t help but see striking similarities between “The Impasse” and “My Case for Retributive Action.” Both present an uncanny picture of the corporate workplace, complete with odd, taciturn fellow employees, meaningless, never-ending work tasks, and a decrepit end-of-the-line corporate office. Both David Cohen, working at Ulymas (Samuels’s creation), and the unnamed protagonist of the Quine Organization (Ligotti’s creation) find their work experience confusing, nonsensical, and unreal. They wonder whether it is all a bizarre experiment or perhaps an elaborate joke, and, in the end, for both, a safe escape from their respective corporations is impossible. Reflecting on the title of Ligotti’s story, “My Case for Retributive Action,” other connections become apparent. Not only does Samuels’s Cohen refer to his work as “cases,” but he also wonders if his work experience at Ulymas is “retribution” for somehow wronging the corporation in his past work. At one point in “The Impasse,” Cohen’s immediate supervisor chastises him for his work and states, “It is time we take punitive action [emphasis added].” Furthermore, the form itself of Ligotti’s short story is a kind of brief written to the reader, bringing you up to date and imploring a retributive action on your part (Ligotti’s brief wants you to act against the doctor under the employ of the Quine Organization). So, already, we see many nods, connections, and similarities.

Curiously, Samuels’s protagonist works in corporate copyright infringement law, tasked with legally protecting the company from people stealing Ulymas Organization’s ideas. The resemblance between the stories starts to look like the very kind of infringement Ulymas prosecutes. But the connection gets tighter. Cohen comes across an important case file about an author of weird horror fiction who writes about a person devoured by a huge spider, whose body is later found hanging in cobwebs in an abandoned room. Ligotti’s “My Case for Retributive Action” includes something adjacent to this rather singular scene that happens to a character in his story, and, given the other similarities, one can’t help but think that the author at the center of Ulymas’ case is none other than Thomas Ligotti. But as he reads the case, Cohen finds the company’s claim of infringement to be ludicrous, and he wonders if it is all a joke. Likewise, readers who know Ligotti will read this reference as an inside joke for fans. But this meta-fictional point is much more than just an inside joke.

Although couched as prosaic corporate horror about, of all things, copyright law, “The Impasse" gets metaphysically deep quickly, and ultimately, the Ulymas Organization maintains that no one can have an original thought because it owns it all. The company cites refutations of linear time and theories of psychical leakage to ground claims of “retrospective infringement” that occurred before the company existed and “inevitable infringement” that will take place in the future.

To elaborate the organization’s claims, the spiral without a center becomes a recurring image in the story. It is used, among other things, to describe a theory of memory that holds that we don’t, in fact, ever remember actual events; instead, we remember only the last memory we had of the event. So, the more times we remember, the further we move from actuality. We only experience memories, and we can never quite reach anything beyond memory, because as you break your experience down into finer-grained memories, you keep spiraling in but never reach the limit; you never reach reality or the now. People and their reality turn out to be just centerless spirals of their own rememberings. Across Samuels’s oeuvre, he repeatedly writes systems like this that generate reality from a source that cannot exist. In this story we have memory-spirals, but in other works, see “Apartment 205,” Samuels gives us dead dreamers who sustain the structure of our waking world, making our experience the dreams of our future dead selves.

“The Impasse” posits a system that generates all thoughts and ideas even though none are original. The Ulymas Organization in Samuels’s story manufactures cases of infringement in both the past and the future. Arguably, Ligotti’s case gets filed away in Ulymas’ archives. So did the story originate with Ligotti or inside a manufactured copyright infringement case created at Ulymas? In answer to that question, we return to the image of the spiral with nothing at its center. Just as there is no reality at the foundation of our memory and no self at the center of the never-ending spiral, there are no first thoughts—the concept of the original thought is empty. Corporate pre-ownership of thought is yet another example of a system, like memory-spirals and dead dreamers, that generates reality from a source that cannot exist. If there are no first thoughts, the question “Ligotti or Ulymas?” is the impasse.