Most pessimistic nihilistic literature you've ever read ?

[spiltteeth]

Probably the most unrelentingly bleak vision I've read is H.P. Lovecraft. Michel Houellebecq's novels too seem fairly nihilistic. Any others ?

[Poetaster]

The Outsider by Albert Camus.

[ladderandbucket]

Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco, or his non-fiction book The Conspiracy against the Human Race.

He really lays it on a bit thick though. And I can't help thinking that nihilists don't really have the right to so maudlin. If someone honestly doesn't believe that value exists, then what exactly are they complaining about? Surely to be dissatisfied with something, I would need some notion of how it could be improved upon?

[YesNo]

I usually stop reading books that are pessimistic or nihilistic, but when it comes to movies I let them finish unless they are technically so bad I've got other reasons to stop watching.

The most nihilistic movie I've seen was "Melancholia". Here one had a psychic, of all people, claiming that there was life only on earth and it was an accident that the rogue planet Melancholia was going to fix shortly by absorbing Earth into its mass.

[sandy14]

Darkness by Lord Byron

Almost anything by Bukowski

Jude the Obscure by Hardy.

[kev67]

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, and 1984 by George Orwell.

[Pompey Bum]

I draw a distinction between pessimistic authors like Conrad and Hardy, who are acutely honest moral commentators, and nihilists like Chuck Palahniuk and even (maybe) Charles Bukowski, who strike me as a bit taken with themselves. Or maybe I'm just reacting to smug hipsters, who after reading them, decide that writing must be easy. (Or maybe I'm just in a pissy mood--Bukowski's a good poet).

The only nihilist author I read much these days is Bret Easton Ellis (although he calls himself a satirist). I remember people and times just like those depicted in Less than Zero back in the 80s, even though I was living on the other coast at the time. (In fact, my problem with Less Than Zero, other than the grating quality of some of the characters, is that Ellis thinks he's being so "California decadent," but the truth is that kids that age were acting like that all over America back in the "moral" Reagan years). Or if you can bear it, OP, you might try American Psycho, although you need a strong stomach and a mind that won't rebel at depictions of the exceptionally cruel. Maybe start with Less Than Zero.

There are plenty of great pessimistic writers and books, too, although if you're into nihilists you might not go for the pessimists (and vice versa). Almost anything by Conrad is worth reading. So is Tess of the D'Urbervilles (and quite a bit more) by Hardy. My favorite passage from Tess goes like this:

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"

"Yes."

"All like ours?"

"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."

"Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"

"A blighted one.”

That's Hardy.

[Lykren]

There's also this great (I'm not being sarcastic) excerpt from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Hardy, which I haven't read yet. It's a last will and testament:

"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name.

Michael Henchard


I'm surprised no one has mentioned Dostoevsky by the way. Other pessimistic authors include Kafka, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Miller, and Shakespeare in his tragedies of course.

[Clopin]

Crime and Punishment if you avert your eyes whenever Sonya says anything and maybe skip the last fifty pages.

[kev67]

I draw a distinction between pessimistic authors like Conrad and Hardy, who are acutely honest moral commentators, and nihilists like Chuck Palahniuk and even (maybe) Charles Bukowski, who strike me as a bit taken with themselves. Or maybe I'm just reacting to smug hipsters, who after reading them, decide that writing must be easy. (Or maybe I'm just in a pissy mood--Bukowski's a good poet).



I was thinking more about several of the characters in The Secret Agent. iirc, one was a character called The Professor, who kept a bomb in his pocket. He was one of an underground group of Anarchist plotters. Another character was charged with blowing up the Greenwich Observatory, for no particular reason it seemed.

[Pompey Bum]

I was thinking more about several of the characters in The Secret Agent. iirc, one was a character called The Professor, who kept a bomb in his pocket. He was one of an underground group of Anarchist plotters. Another character was charged with blowing up the Greenwich Observatory, for no particular reason it seemed.

I was responding to the OP, Kev, not to what you said (sorry, I should have quoted). But while you are right that Conrad writes about anarchists (and worse) sometimes, he is not a nihilist himself. His view of human morality's contest with human and natural evil is extremely pessimistic, but he acknowledges the tragedy of this. Ultimately (in my opinion) he is an anguished moralist.

[ladderandbucket]

Oh yeah, The Secret Agent is very bleak and nasty. About halfway through the book, I realised that Conrad was actually trying to write a comedy - but surely one of the blackest comedies ever written. I love Conrad's writing, but can only imagine him as being afflicted with a very morbid temperament, if not clinical depression.

[Jackson Richardson]

I find Dostoevsky very encouraging, but I'm a sucker for Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

When I was very low and depressed after my father's death I went to see Waiting for Godot, I can remember coming out of the theatre (sic - I'm British) thinking "Life is awful, but it's not that bad".

I found Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow pretty bleak. In the light of imminent nuclear destruction all we can do is screw around and play with language. (I had a younger gay friend who loved the work and recommended it to me. He loved the prose style and ignored the homophobia.)

[DieterM]

Houellebecq, at any rate. Many people outright hate his writing here in France. But he's a gifted writer, and his novels are deliciously depressive and nihilistic. A really enjoyable read.

[Vota]

The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. It can be very witty, but I have to take it in very small doses or I get irritable.

[talleyrand]

I don't like the authors Le Comte De Lautréamont ["Les Champs De Maldoror"], Emil Cioran ["De L'Inconvénient D'Être Né"] and Friedrich Nietzsche ["Beyond Good and Evil"] because they were so pessimistic that their writings are not pleasant to read at all.

[Eiseabhal]

Hemingway was a nihilist.(small n). His style pared down to the bone was an expression of his nihilism. If you want to call him stoic you can. But almost all of the American "noir" writers could fit that bill :Cain, Thompson etc. Chandler was superficially nihilist. Really he was Romantic and DH was a commie highlighting the "miseries" of capitalism. I put inverted commas round miseries not because I don't believe it but because I think he wasn't a good highlighter.

[Kafka's Crow]

I don't like the authors Le Comte De Lautréamont ["Les Champs De Maldoror"], Emil Cioran ["De L'Inconvénient D'Être Né"] and Friedrich Nietzsche ["Beyond Good and Evil"] because they were so pessimistic that their writings are not pleasant to read at all.


...and I love all three for their unashamed lack of any hope in this or any other life:

"If you have not contributed to a catastrophe, you will vanish without a trace."

"When a nation no longer has any prejudice in its blood, its sole resource remains its will to disintegrate."

"The merest illiterate and Aristotle are equally irrefutable- and fragile."

"Born weary of being born, he chose to be a shade."

"Infinity dreamed of in gutter retains, ineffaceable, its imprint, its stench."

"A religion dies when it tolerates truths which exclude it; and the god in whose name one no longer kills is dead indeed."

"I loathe this life I idolize."

Emil Cioran A Short History of Decay

[mortalterror]

I just reread a book of Leopardi's poetry and they don't speak to me the way they did a few years ago. He's so pessimistic and fatalistic, even a bitter antinatalist at times which I guess makes sense considering the life he lead as a sickly hunchback. I wonder how much his physical deformity and ailments molded his personal philosophy? Would Pope have been the cutting satirical wit he was without his hunchback? Gibbon seems largely devoid of such things, but while he retains a noble tone he never rises to the level of warm or joyous either. George Orwell said that the reason 1984 was so bleak and hopeless was because he knew he was dying while he wrote it. Maybe, I haven't read enough of Keats but I don't recall him suffering from the same pessimism. In Keats it seemed more like he was sorry to leave such a beautiful world behind.

[mortalterror]

Hemingway was a nihilist.(small n). His style pared down to the bone was an expression of his nihilism. If you want to call him stoic you can. But almost all of the American "noir" writers could fit that bill :Cain, Thompson etc. Chandler was superficially nihilist. Really he was Romantic and DH was a commie highlighting the "miseries" of capitalism. I put inverted commas round miseries not because I don't believe it but because I think he wasn't a good highlighter.

I don't agree with that assessment of Hemingway. Nihilism doesn't get you lines like this from For Whom the Bell Tolls:

"The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it."

Nihilism doesn't motivate people to join an ambulance core in WW1, or join a coast guard watch looking for U Boats during WW2. He was very much a Catholic and a Republican, who believed in a lot of traditional verities. He believed in love, freedom, and nature. His nature writing is as deep and passionate as Wordsworth's and some of his best work is about fishing, hunting, and bull fighting. He was too full of life and enjoyed drinking and fighting too much to be called a nihilist. Stoic fits him perfectly.

His early style was based largely on an imitation of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and the simple straight forward observational language he picked up as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. Simplicity or minimalism were the hallmarks of his early style. That and like Wordsworth, he would search for the exact detail to evoke in the reader the feeling he felt, an emotion recollected in tranquility. He writes of reliving a sequence, but leaving out details which are irrelevant to make the story "truer" so that by reading a passage his audience will have a vicarious experience as real as having done the thing themselves. That's part of what's behind the iceberg theory, selecting details which suggest other details, and making an economy of words. Beckett does some of that too, but for very different reasons, and with a very different philosophy.

I haven't read enough Cain to dispute your point, so I'll let that one lie; but Hunter S. Thompson wasn't a Nihilist. He cared very deeply, and could be profoundly wounded by the turns which history took. His pessimism wasn't rooted in nihilism, but was more the despair of a failed idealist. He railed against Nixon and Bush, supported Carter, loved football, drugs, and guns. He was more of an absurdist, who liked to juxtapose and wildly contrast images. Also, a lot of his pessimistic style, if you want to call it that was more an artistic imitation of Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John the Revelator. In that respect he has a lot in common with his contemporary Michael Herr, who's Dispatches he wrote a blurb for. Thompson wanted to change things. That's why he ran for sheriff in Aspen.

Chandler I don't think fits that nihilistic or pessimistic model at all. He could be gritty and realistic, but he was far too lyrical, which at least suggests a love of beauty. The thing about Chandler and Hammett's anti-hero style detectives is that even while they break the letter of the law they preserve the spirit. They punish evil doers, like Batman or Dirty Harry, because they have a higher motivation, namely justice. They preserve justice even at the cost of money, love, or personal danger. They are also extremely good at their jobs, which is a new type of nobility: the hero as professional or expert, rather than the traditional squeaky clean good guy, or knight in shining armor.

[JBI]

I just reread a book of Leopardi's poetry and they don't speak to me the way they did a few years ago. He's so pessimistic and fatalistic, even a bitter antinatalist at times which I guess makes sense considering the life he lead as a sickly hunchback. I wonder how much his physical deformity and ailments molded his personal philosophy? Would Pope have been the cutting satirical wit he was without his hunchback? Gibbon seems largely devoid of such things, but while he retains a noble tone he never rises to the level of warm or joyous either. George Orwell said that the reason 1984 was so bleak and hopeless was because he knew he was dying while he wrote it. Maybe, I haven't read enough of Keats but I don't recall him suffering from the same pessimism. In Keats it seemed more like he was sorry to leave such a beautiful world behind.
Much of Leopardi's pessimism is lost in the translation, as English sensibility and philosophy doesn't speak the same way as Italian religious trauma. To really understand such things, we see him as fatalistic, an Italian would perhaps see him as a sad wandering spirit who has lost his religious sensibility, and therefore is totally cut off from the beautiful, religious world he so desires. Someone like Sylvia in his famous poem is more a religious figure than she appears in translation. Like Beatrice or Laura she is not just seen in poetic terms but contains a religious element absent from most English poetry.

Sylvia is very much a religious spiritual symbol as much as an erotic figure, and her death symbolizes as much as the loss of love, as well as the loss of religious faith. With that sense, the lines of the poem are much, much more potent, "O natura, o natura, perché non rendi poi quel che prometti allor? perché di tanto inganni i figli tuoi?" or, in other words, why is everything merely a lie, becomes a sort of loss of religious faith in truth and goodness, as well as a death of the natural beauty of the world. Without the religious element the poem is a lot more shallow.

The sort of catholic sensibility, and understanding of the piece is very much absent to our modern readers, though the poem is very, very proto-modernist in that regard, in the same way Nietzsche and Marx have been seen as figures in the movement from Romanticism to modernism. Perhaps it is the hunch back, or perhaps it is something more dark; he after all was the most enthusiastic pilgrim of the period, in his youth being said to have read 18 hours a day in manuscripts, and even had permission from the Church to read banned books.


As for the most pessimistic author, maybe Steinbeck.

[mortalterror]

Much of Leopardi's pessimism is lost in the translation, as English sensibility and philosophy doesn't speak the same way as Italian religious trauma. To really understand such things, we see him as fatalistic, an Italian would perhaps see him as a sad wandering spirit who has lost his religious sensibility, and therefore is totally cut off from the beautiful, religious world he so desires. Someone like Sylvia in his famous poem is more a religious figure than she appears in translation. Like Beatrice or Laura she is not just seen in poetic terms but contains a religious element absent from most English poetry.

Sylvia is very much a religious spiritual symbol as much as an erotic figure, and her death symbolizes as much as the loss of love, as well as the loss of religious faith. With that sense, the lines of the poem are much, much more potent, "O natura, o natura, perché non rendi poi quel che prometti allor? perché di tanto inganni i figli tuoi?" or, in other words, why is everything merely a lie, becomes a sort of loss of religious faith in truth and goodness, as well as a death of the natural beauty of the world. Without the religious element the poem is a lot more shallow.

The sort of catholic sensibility, and understanding of the piece is very much absent to our modern readers, though the poem is very, very proto-modernist in that regard, in the same way Nietzsche and Marx have been seen as figures in the movement from Romanticism to modernism. Perhaps it is the hunch back, or perhaps it is something more dark; he after all was the most enthusiastic pilgrim of the period, in his youth being said to have read 18 hours a day in manuscripts, and even had permission from the Church to read banned books.


As for the most pessimistic author, maybe Steinbeck.

Thank you, JBI. Going into the poems knowing that Leopardi was an atheist, I didn't even think to interpret Sylvia that way.

[Eiseabhal]

That's a very interesting set of comments Mortal and I'm sure many are valid. I remain unconvinced about Mr H though. I have met many active nihilists. These were men who believed in being up and doing but for them that was in effect a way of dealing with what they saw as the pointlessness and emptiness of life. There are after all lots of ways to express nihilism (small n) Just as there are many expressions of faith

[JBI]

Thank you, JBI. Going into the poems knowing that Leopardi was an atheist, I didn't even think to interpret Sylvia that way.

I cannot tell if this statement is meant to be taken as ironic or not.

[mortalterror]

I cannot tell if this statement is meant to be taken as ironic or not.

No, it was sincere. I hadn't given a lot of thought as to what Sylvia might symbolize besides a young dead girl. I liked your interpretation.

[108 fountains]

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is the most pessimistic book I've ever read. Pretty depressing, too, but as I understand it, it was a relatively accurate description of slaughterhouse (and by extension, factory) conditions in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, and actually was influential in the drafting and passage of the federal Food and Drug Act of 1906, which eventually led to the establishment of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The two exerpts above from Tess of the D'Urbervilles and from The Mayor of Casterbridge are two Hardy passages that I also found extrememly memorable. I suppose I'll have to agree that Hardy was pessimistic in general, but he also had a passion for life and a compassion for human society despite its failures. I might argue that he's more of a realist, but then, it's really hard to classify great writers into one- or two-word categories.

[Marcus1]

Can't stand nihilistic works or writers who proclaim themselves to write nihilistic fiction.

[mal4mac]

Schopenhauer