Lafferty as writer of Mystical Slashers

They'd kill the Stutgards first, that very night, with axes.  They'd axe old man Stutgard, and all the blood would run out of his big red neck.  They'd cut off Mrs. Stutgard's head that was round as a pumpkin, and it would roll down to the bottom of the hill and look at you.  They'd kill the Stutgard kids.  It's most fun to kill kids who are just enough bigger than you to make it interesting.

-R. A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968)

What has been a slow-dawning thought for a while now coalesced for me on a walk this morning:  Lafferty wrote slashers.  Once you say it plain and simple like that, you then, of course, have to qualify it to death. But let's leave the qualifications and nuances for another time.  I'm re-reading The Reefs of Earth right now, which is one of Lafferty's blatantly bloodiest tall tales, a backwoods murder-spree told through a loose-fisted science fiction trope (the killers are alien children who look a lot like human children).  But it's not just this famously murderous early novel.  It has occurred to me that almost every one of Lafferty's published novels (and a significant number of his short stories) involves attempted (and eventually successful) murder as a crucial element of the story arc (this is often in the form of politically motivated and often state-sanctioned assassinations).  Such killing all by itself, of course, only nudges these works into the murder mystery or crime story (a genre Lafferty assayed in a number of tales, including some yet-to-be-published novels).  But anyone who has read more than a few Lafferty stories will know full well that he goes way beyond mere depiction of a murder, even a grisly murder.  His tales are often soaked in buckets of blood and gore.

To throw out some of the more conspicuous specimens from his short fiction, there are  'Snuffles', 'Once On Aranea', 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw', 'Thieving Bear Planet', 'Jack Bang's Eyes', 'The Last Astronomer', and 'Happening in Chosky Bottoms'.  (Lesser specimens could include 'Camels and Dromedaries, Clem', 'Name of the Snake', 'The Hole On the Corner', 'The Man Who Never Was', 'Cliffs That Laughed', 'Frog On the Mountain', 'Ride a Tin Can', 'Sky', 'Groaning Hinges of the World', 'Ishmael Into the Barrens', 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire', 'And Mad Undancing Bears', 'Endangered Species', 'Fog in My Throat', 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay', 'The Hand With One Hundred Fingers', 'Thou Whited Wall', 'Splinters', 'The Funny Face Murders', and 'The Ninety-Ninth Cubicle' - each of which depicts grisly death or graphic violence, even if it's not as pervasive as in other stories.)

But it is probably mainly in his novels that one encounters the most gory, slashery stuff.  In fact, those of you who have read the novels can go back and re-read them with this theme in mind.  I think you'll be surprised how much of the bloodshed and killing you may have forgotten.  The quote above from Reefs is one of the tamest samples.  (Okay, I'll add in a nuance here:  a lot of the time it may be more accurate to say that Lafferty practiced a lot of literary gore rather than slasher stuff per se.  There are some really bloody scenes that don't have anything to do with persons murdering other persons - e.g. the wildly gory slaughter of the devil fish in Past Master, or the blood-spattering high-fall deaths from wrestling with God in 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'.  But the depiction of gruesome bloodshed remains central.)

Now why call all this violence 'mystical'?  Lafferty seems to have had a sort of death-vision through which he saw the world in bloody-rosy hues.  I add 'rosy' to that characterisation on purpose.  How does such a bloody-minded author also fill us with so much joy and laughter, sometimes even as we cringe at horrific maiming and death scenes?  It's partly because Lafferty is almost always funny or wry.  He can't write anything it seems, no matter how dark, without at least a wink.  This often means that the more violent and grotesque the matter, the more hilarious (sometimes uncomfortably so) it comes across to us.  So Lafferty's work is grotesque in the comedic and carnival sense.  'I Think I Will Dismember the World With My Hands' is a chapter title in Lafferty's celebrated novel Fourth Mansions (1969) and it could be an artist's statement for Laff.  Andrew Ferguson has argued persuasively that Lafferty's practice of literary dismemberment is an artistic strategy of taking apart the science fiction genre in order to put it back together again 'renewed and revealed' in 'new potentiality' (Lafferty and His World, page 29 and following).

It is very much this and it is also very much more also.  Lafferty's comedic-grotesque slasher fiction is mystical because it exemplifies his deeply held convictions.  Comedy and laughter are huge central worldview categories for Lafferty.  He can't bring himself to flinch from writing bloody murderous horror, but nor can he bring himself to not laugh at it as well - and his laughter is ontological.  He's laughing because he thinks there's something more real than grisly horror and brutal death.  He has probably tricked you into laughing at that level too.

It seems that Lafferty just couldn't see death as termination, not finally.  Death was more of a waystation than a terminal for Lafferty.  Characters (even whole planets and the cosmos itself in Lafferty's stories) go through death on their way to something else.  Sometimes this is pretty jokey and immediate, such as when a just-severed head keeps talking and is placed at the prow of a boat in order to navigate raiders to other villages to pillage ('Groaning Hinges of the World'), or when a group of astronauts are slaughtered by their hosts on a planet only to regain life the next morning and be invited to enjoy the slaughter all over again as the day's entertainment (that's a rough remembrance of a long-ago reading of Lafferty's 1968 novel Space Chantey).

But often, neither narrator nor reader are privy to what-comes-next. Lafferty simply tells us that a resurrection, a new birth, a new creation is probably in the offing thanks to this bloody death we have witnessed--personal, communal, planetary, or cosmic.  He leaves the story open-ended on that score.  It's up to the reader whether she'll participate in the hushed anticipation that Lafferty enjoins, for example, at the end of Past Master (1968), when the narrator asks whether the destruction of the world will result in its rebirth and answers:  'Be quiet.  We hope.'

The carnival hope in Lafferty is not mere slapstick, however, as many of the deaths depicted are quite poignant and tragic ('Ride a Tin Can' is an obvious example; another for me is the intelligent talking elephant in Laff's 1987 novel Serpent's Egg).  Lafferty is aware of the big ask he is making of the reader:  to laugh even through the tears.  Indeed, to laugh in outright defiance of ultimate tragedy and sorrow (see his ending of 'I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows' as one instance of a direct depiction of laughter as subversive resistance - a story that contains amusingly grotesque surgical body-horror as its main trope).

Well, this post is just a first stab (wink) at this theory about Lafferty.  I'll have to come back to it and more thoroughly evidence it for a start - a very fun task if you like totting up and citing deliciously gory scenes. Please let me know what you think.  Agree?  Disagree?  Have you noticed all the bloodshed and if so, what do you make of it?

Related:

Cosmic Horror vs. Cosmic Laughter (Lovecraft vs. Lafferty)

A New Introduction to R. A. Lafferty

R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) is truly my all-time favourite author of fiction, a huge inspiration on my own writing and thinking. Here is a fresh attempt at introducing him to my small world:

Dostoevsky meets Chesterton
Let’s start with a hefty dose of a few Old World masters of moral-spiritual fiction: Dostoevsky and Chesterton. Think of the deep, dark, and tenacious quest for God in a post-theistic world in the former mixed with the biting, satirical, joyous exuberance, wit, whimsy, farce, fancy, and wildness of the latter. (And, in terms of being predecessors to Lafferty, it is no coincidence that both of these great authors were creative adherents to Christian Orthodoxy.)

American Tall Tale meets Native American Folklore
Does this sound a bit serious and weighty? Well, Lafferty was such. But he is also constantly called ‘mad’, ‘insane’, ‘zany’, and the like. And he has the reputation of making the reader laugh aloud. So much so that the weightiness of his art has not often been appreciated. Chesterton’s influence can certainly account for some of the ‘lunacy’ and laughter. But for his unconventional qualities we must now also mix in the ingredients of American tall tales and Native American myth and folklore: Paul Bunyan meets Coyote the Trickster as it were. Think of the larger than life, hilarious, and gigantesque frontier exaggeration of the former mixed with the sly, wry, tribal, traditional, spiritual, ancient magic and mystery of the latter.

With these two major streams of Old World authors and New World folklore (you might call them ‘high’ and ‘low’ respectively, in terms of ‘register’) you can already see how Lafferty’s is going to be fiction that doesn’t easily fit moulds and that needs very large, wide-open spaces of thought and imagination to breathe and move and play and preach and fight and astound. But we’re far from through concocting this utterly strange brew.

Vaudeville meets Carnival

Keeping in the register of ‘Cowboys and Indians’, bring in the Vaudeville variety show and the Carnival barker. It’s the comedic, popular fun and 'burlesque' (as in absurd parody and exaggeration: there's no striptease in Lafferty's stories) of the former mixed with the freakish grotesquery and weird wonder of the latter—and the call for the audience to participate in both. There's song and dance and feasting and drinking and brawling and bragging a plenty in Lafferty's tales.

Irish meets Greco-Roman

Now let’s reach back to the much older Old World for influences before we finally charge into the latter 20th century context of when Lafferty was actually writing. Lafferty the Oklahoman was of Irish Catholic descent and it shows. The Irish storyteller is in him and he’s often been compared to both Flan O’Brien and James Joyce. You can also hear resonances in the contemporary playwright, Martin McDonagh. There is often even an Irish lilt or brogue to Lafferty’s cadence, syntax, and word choice.

In terms of wording and style and content we must also look back to ancient Greco-Roman sources of all varieties—plays, myths, philosophers, church fathers, politicians, treatises, epics, satires, ‘histories’ and so on. Thoughts and ideas from these ancient sources abound in Lafferty as well as everything else we’ve mentioned up to this point. The Bible and Medieval literature also make their influences felt, adding both a Hebrew and European flavour. And it’s worth mentioning here that there is some Arabic influence to be found also, perhaps mainly from the Thousand and One Arabian Nights and from Muslim culture of the Charlemagne era. From these Old World sources too I think comes Lafferty’s great interest in languages (partly by a working knowledge of which he re-invented the language and syntax of English Literature fiction to suit his own purposes).

American New Wave Science Fiction meets Southwest Regional Fiction

Lastly, we mention not so much influences as context—but a context that very much shaped the contours of Lafferty’s fiction. Lafferty’s fiction emerged mostly in the science fiction magazines of the 1960s among a constellation of ‘New Wave’ writers who were experimenting with new directions in the genre, focusing more on the ‘soft sciences’ of language, psychology, and anthropology rather than the traditional ground of science fiction in the ‘hard sciences’ of physics, technology, and so on. Harlan Ellison and the authors that populated his Dangerous Visions anthologies such as Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany warmly welcomed Lafferty into their midst and praised him almost without qualification and with some genuine awe at the raw potency of his imagination and originality.

Many of these New Wave s.f. authors have a strong feel of the Beat Generation stylisings of the likes of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac—and you often hear echoes of beatnik and jazz talk in Lafferty, but it is mostly just played with; his real roots are in the aforementioned, which arguably enabled him to out-jazz the ‘cool’ set at their own game.

But ‘cool’ Lafferty was not. He might be mistaken for such at a glance, but he was actually quite a bit older than most of his fellow writers of the time and really was doing something that was strange in a truly bizarre and pungent mode, not just a bit zany in a ‘hip’ sort of way. His experimentation, frankly, went far deeper and was more truly radical and structural, not least by being rooted in and nourished by potent traditions rather than attempting any kind of clean break with the past into a ‘new age’ or ‘summer of love’ or what have you. He was searching for bigger, muskier, shaggier, bloodier, spookier, gladder, subtler game.

One way he wasn’t as ‘hip’ as his contemporaries was by being far more of a ‘regional’ writer, particularly of his native Oklahoma and Southwest region. The open feel of the plains and prairies, of cattle and horses and horns and hooves, of fishing and hunting and living under the open sky, of saloons and ropes and saddles, of bucks and buffalos and bears, of Native Americans and ranch hands and cowpokes and so on, all permeate his fiction. Indeed, I felt so many tactile resonances with Lafferty’s fiction when recently reading Cormac McCarthy’s anti-western novel Blood Meridian. That was really when my eyes were fully opened to Lafferty as a regional writer of the Southwest. This places him, with all his other associations, loosely alongside some of his fellow Catholics who were Southern regional writers like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.

A Ferocious, Generous, Joyous Storyteller
Does all this sound like perhaps a little too much broiling and roiling inside one man, too much for one artistic output? Well, frankly, sometimes it is! Lafferty at his very best (usually in his short stories) has a gemlike quality of concentrated power that swiftly and furiously, but smoothly, weaves and blends and infuses all or most of these streams of influence into an exquisitely coherent piece of art. It is truly awe-inspiring when it comes off. Really. But often his fiction is over-full, bristling, and careening with this background and all his feral genius firing and flailing.

Lafferty's world is one that feels like absolutely anything can happen, and yet it has an underlying coherence and solidity – it’s not a drugged up, tripped out psychedelic fantasia. It’s meaty, earthy, punchy, mythic, transcendent, wry, jokey, gruesome, funny, wily, ornery, amiable, farcical, grave, gritty, grotesque, delightful, magical, realistic, wild, noble, uncanny and canny all rolled into one. Indeed, this makes it something of a minor miracle that he can write an almost-mediocre story now and again (though there’s almost always a memorable wonder in there somewhere). His short story collections are the best place to start before moving on to the usually less cohesive, but equally wonder-filled, novels.

Lafferty can make you laugh harder and think harder than you’re used to, and also amaze your imagination and sense of wonder like few ever will. He called himself ‘the cranky old man from Tulsa’ and yet he fought hard to imbue the world with highly creative and inventive hope for a spiritually renewed present and future, calling all who would hear to join in world-up-building with all their powers and faculties on full throttle. He was a ferocious and generous and exuberantly joyous storyteller who spun out whopping tales at breakneck speed in a tumbling torrent of wild and glad and angry urgency and ecstasy. We are truly blessed to have had him. We must make the most of what we can get hold of.

‘Come on, y’all, this is awesome’
In closing, I want to mention that contemporary giants of ‘alternative’ dark fantasy such as Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman have cited Lafferty as a hero and influence. Both Wolfe and Gaiman have attempted to write stories in the ‘Lafferty genre’ (he really did essentially invent his own genre – in many ways he is the Captain Beefheart of American literature).

A few years ago, the New York Times asked the Saturday Night Live comedy actor, Bill Hader (a fellow Oklahoman), what books he recommended and he started his list with R. A. Lafferty’s collection of short stories entitle 900 Grandmothers. I’ll leave you with his apropos words trying to describe the experience of reading Lafferty:

‘It’s hilarious, incredibly funny and at the same time it’s insanely dark… You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something. It’s so incredibly Tulsa. You get that feeling when you see a Flaming Lips show. It’s not like we’re dark and hurt and twisted. It’s like, “I’ve got blood on my face – come on, y’all, this is awesome.”’