Globular Narratology (and glimmerings of a case for the greatness of Lafferty's late works)

'The insoluble problem for any narrator is to express the perfect sphere by means of a straight line, or even a shaggy sphere by a crooked line. For any subject or happening is globe-shaped, or at least glob-shaped, of some solidity and substance. And any narration must have sequence, which is line.

But why narrate spheres? Why strive for such an ideal or ideated form? Surely there are other shapes more curious, more open, more pregnant, though pregnancy does tend toward the spherical. There are other shapes more varied. Why not narrate saddles or quarries?  What kind of saddles, then?

Dromedary saddles, I suppose.  They're the closest thing to the shape of it.'

-R. A. Lafferty, Arrive At Easterwine (1971), Chapter Eleven (attributed to the fictional work Ermenics of Shape by the fictional character Audifax O'Hanlon)

For years this has been one of my go-to passages on the craft and puzzle of writing and storytelling. In the scheme of Lafferty's novel I think it takes on cosmic and ontological significance as well.  But in regard to narration it speaks of a universal puzzle that all storytellers must confront.  Few perhaps have pursued it as rigorously as Lafferty did.  I think this is why his narrations can be so notoriously (yet delightfully) difficult (not least among them Arrive At Easterwine!).

Not all of his stories are narrationally difficult, of course.  As one commenter on this blog aptly put it: Lafferty wrote the 'storiest of stories'.  Some of them positively hum and buzz with taut style and plot and the reader happily trips down the paragraphs to the usually wham-bang ending.  But let's be honest, Lafferty also wrote some utterly brain-melting narratives:  wildly and joyously baffling novels like Easterwine as well as Not To Mention Camels and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney. And, of course, there are the woollier, idea-drenched and/or structurally experimental short stories like 'Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies' or 'Rivers of Damascus' or 'The Man Who Walked Through Cracks' or 'St Poleander's Eve' or 'Inventions Bright and New'.

Lafferty himself admitted in an interview that he wrote 'choppy novels', but I think that was due as much to the unwavering integrity with which he genuinely tried to 'narrate a sphere' (or a saddle or quarry for that matter) as to any lack of skills or intuition he may have suffered as regards traditional notions of plot and so on.  (And just as is the case with the short stories, there are examples of novels that, for me at least, flow quite well - e.g. Space Chantey, The Reefs of Earth, The Devil Is Dead - even if what they narrate can be fairly mind-bending or mystifying.)

In some of the later and seemingly crazier-than-ever novels, Andrew Ferguson (in an unpublished paper) makes a very convincing case that Lafferty was stepping out into the true and un-plied innovation he had been calling for in his works from earlier decades.  From what I've read of those novels - mostly published in the 1980s - I couldn't agree more.  Among these too is showcased (intentionally) 'choppier' and more 'flowing' instances:  East of Laughter being an example of the former and Annals of Klepsis and Aurelia being examples of the latter.  They strike me as the fruit of a very mature and very exciting, if inevitably disorienting (because of the sheer newness of the endeavour), phase of an author finally truly stretching forth into the great work of his life.  (Pace Webster, who's excellent and engaging article I already took issue with when I 'fisked' it here.)  If illness (and at last, alas, the weight of obscurity) had not diminished him in the 1990s, I think we would have seen Lafferty write his final and fullest masterpieces.  But even the beginnings of that late and mature work are powerful statements to behold - if we have ears to hear.

In my opinion, the way to obtain such ears is to very carefully listen to the early works and follow where they lead.  That is the huge mistake I think so many of even Lafferty's ardent admirers make. They were fond of his 60s and early 70s stuff and revel only in that era and fail to see how those very works are paving the way for later greatness.  For probably a very long time to come, our best guide to grasping how these early works set us up for later works is Andrew Ferguson.  Start with his Master's Thesis 'Lafferty and His World' - don't worry about the passages of this paper that get incredibly dense with theory and jargon.  They lighten up again and bear a lot fruit when he starts analysing specific stories by Lafferty.  Then proceed to his mesmerisingly informative and insightful blog:  Continued On Next Rock.  Pay close attention, stay tuned in.  Beyond that, all one can do is pray for the day some sane and just publisher eventually gives Andrew the go ahead to write Lafferty's biography (I've seen a sample - it's gonna blow us away), and when that happens you'll see what I mean.  Our understanding of Lafferty is gonna go interstellar.  We'll still be mere half-conscious mortals plumbing infinities, but we'll be far better off than we are at present, trying as we are to see a mosaic from too close, lacking vantage and vista.

Ah, for the Halcyon Days...

Hey Lafferty friends, I was just re-reading the long comment thread on my post about Fourth Mansions and I gotta say - I miss the chat and community over this great man's works!  It's been a while.  That thread honestly made an incredibly powerful and coherent symposium on Lafferty and his themes (and I know we had a few more just as ripe after that).  'It was all strong talk with the horns and hooves still on it' (The Devil Is Dead).

'Wha' happened?'  Is the Fellowship (of the, what, about half dozen of us?) breaking up?  Heh.  I'm joking.  I know we've all been super busy with all our responsibilities (me as much as anyone).  We just simply, honestly don't have time for it right now.  BUT...

Let's meet up here again this summer and get back to the Lafferty POW WOW!  What say you, friends, earthlings, Laffertians?

As Epiktistes, our patron sentient computer, said:

'Oh, come along, reader of the High Journal; if you do not love words, how will you love the communication?  How will you, forgive me my tropes, communicate the love?' (Arrive At Easterwine)

Daily Lafferty # 8

'Consciousness is a state which no one of us has yet attained. All that anyone has are intimations of consciousness, quick glints of light that sometimes flick through the cracks of a greater room to which we aspire.'

-R. A. Lafferty, Arrive at Easterwine (1971)

The Boy and the Box

As to Aloysius, I am reminded of the account of the boy and the box. This wasn't a very big box or a very pretty one. It was battered and shaggy, with those banjo eyes with the lavender circles around them, with the clay feet clear up to the eyebrows, pepper-colored, and looking older than it was. I am talking about a box? Sure, a box.

The boy opened the box and he noticed at once, though he didn't take in the full implications of it, that the box was much larger inside than outside. He began to unload things out of it, treasures, misunderstood and complicated treasures, old gold with deep incrustations of sea scum, rough maps with the lettering in Chaldee, live birds of the psittacine sort, Arabian gumtrees, clavicles of saints, kidskin scrolls, astrolabes, gnomon dials that will read correctly only at the location of Cos-Megara, the third city of Atlantis, the stones named Shamba that are found only in variant readings of the Apocalypse--all the things that are commonly found in old boxes, but in unusual profusion here.

Then the boy noticed that, however many things he unloaded out of that box, the box still stood full. The box is Aloysius Shiplap, and I am that boy.

-R. A. Lafferty, Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine (1971)

The First-Ever Book of Essays On Lafferty (for which I will contribute a chapter)?!?!

Ok, after about a year's silence on this blog, I'm picking it up again. I'm delighted to report that I've been asked to write a chapter for an upcoming book of essays about the fiction of R. A. Lafferty (the first ever!). This is being pulled together from various sources by Andrew Ferguson (who recently wrote his MA dissertation on Lafferty's carnivalesque world-building narrative strategy - a very lengthy in-depth, technical, and thrilling read!). It may be sometime before the proposed book sees publication and, of course, my chapter will only be included if it 'makes the grade'. But I'm honoured and thrilled to be asked to contribute and to have this opportunity.

The contributors to the book will be looking at Lafferty and his large, diverse, and brilliantly/notoriously unconventional body of fiction from various angles. I've been asked to cover Lafferty as a Catholic/Christian storyteller, sort of an Irish American G. K. Chesterton. He was one of the very best of the 2oth century and puts so much 'Christian art' to shame. I will probably begin by looking at the praise heaped on him by the New Wave s.f. movement from which he emerged and how 'new weird'/'urban fantasy' writers like Neil Gaiman still praise and emulate him, none of whom share his Catholic faith, yet all of whom find a companion, mentor, and inspiration in him.

Then the main body of the chapter will look at how Lafferty's fiction evinces his Christian worldview inventively, invitingly, feistily, and generously, mainly in the short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire'. But probably also with reference to some elements in the novels Past Master, Arrive At Easterwine, and Fourth Mansions, as well as other short stories like 'In Deepest Glass', 'Symposium', and 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'.

I'm toward the end of doing a close reading of 'Walk Now' (that I've written previously about on this blog here). This story is about the Queer Fish, who are also called the Ants of God 'for their building proclivities' that are troublesome in an 'unstructured, destructed, destroyed society' (and now you can see where the title of the blog derives from). It is a story full of laughing irony and biting satire that paints a bleak picture of the possibility of 'post-humanity' only to incite a very rowdy hope for redemption, toward which we are urged to build, to reconstruct, to renew. I'll be quoting some passages from it in upcoming posts.

Please feel free to make suggestions of how I ought to tackle this subject!