It begins then on the many-layered surface of the globe. There is the muffled sound of footfalls. That is the ironic beginning of it all: "The world is empty and void of all life. There are muffled sounds of footfalls," like the beginning of a short story. The footfalls are those of Panther and his panthers. And who is Panther?
Panther is Pan-Therion or Pan-Therium, the All-Animal, the prototypical animal. He is the cool-fever-flesh from which all others diverge. He is the composite ("you should have seen some of the things and pieces of things that went into him") and the generating force. He is the red-clay which is clay-flesh. He is also the Dream-Master.
But many mythologies say that it was the Bear who made the world. Yet, there is no contradiction there. The Bear is one of the very strong elements in the Pan-Animal. This primordial dream-master beast is in fact the "Bearcat" who appears both in the Prophet Elias and in Mark Twain and who is found in the common expression of today "Boy, is that ever a Bearcat!" It is Pan-Therium, the Bearcat that is in the beginning. It's the flesh that is the red grass. It belches the dreams out of its stomach and they battle for supremacy, whether they shall survive as "World," or not survive at all.'
-R. A. Lafferty, The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, collected in Apocalypses (1977)
2 comments:
One reviewer once commented on Lafferty's prose saying that he could go "from high falutin to just plain falutin and back again in one sentence"
You give us a perfect example here in the paragraph:
Panther is Pan-Therion or Pan-Therium, the All-Animal, the prototypical animal. He is the cool-fever-flesh from which all others diverge. He is the composite ("you should have seen some of the things and pieces of things that went into him") and the generating force. He is the red-clay which is clay-flesh. He is also the Dream-Master.
He went from this narrative voice of cosmic erudition to colloquial speech (in the parentheses) and back. Those little asides can be jarring, but the add a tone to the work, reminding us that this is a tall tale told in a Tulsa bar--or could have been. By extension, it reminds us that his cosmic pronouncements apply to (and are often about) us--the normal, middling men of the middle state.
I do love "The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny" but I find it a tough read. Something about the disjointed prose and the story told entirely by different reflections and recollections by diverse people, almost lacking any straightforward narrative text, all in a setting where history is changing out from under the narrators, makes this more difficult to wring all the juices out of. I need to re-read it soon, because I gather there is more meaning and import there than I have been able to glean from it in a single reading.
Excellent close reading, Kevin! It's one of my very, very favourite things about Laff's style. As to Three Armageddons, I found it to be a pretty hugely difficult read as well. This 'Pan-Therion' bit stuck out to me when I read it and I wanted to feature that piece here since I liked it so well. I found Armageddons highly intriguing and some passages were very good indeed (I remember being quite impressed by the boxer part), but it also made my head want to explode a few times like no other work of his has. (This is coming from someone who rates Arrive At Easterwine as probably in my top three fave works by Laff.) But I've heard most fans of Lafferty consider Armageddons one of his very best, so I'm definitely willing to give that opinion the benefit of the doubt and I'm looking forward to a more enlightening re-read.
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