For those who may not have picked up on it yet, I'm a 'mature student' (40 years old and just now getting round to obtaining a proper education). I am, at last, in my final year of a joint-honours degree in Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Glasgow. The following is the rough starting point of what I'll be writing this year for my final dissertation in the English Literature half of the degree. I was relieved when the department approved it and found a supervisor for me (haven't talked to him yet, so I have no idea if he has any familiarity at all with Lafferty).
After prematurely
claiming (over three years ago) that I was going to write a chapter on Lafferty as a Chestertonian theological storyteller for a book of Lafferty essays, it is gratifying to see that something along those lines is finally coming to fruition, even if only for degree work. Better late than never. (The editor of the proposed book of essays on Lafferty, our beloved Andrew Ferguson, has since been sidetracked by the noble and even more exciting task of writing Lafferty's biography - with which, I recently heard, he is nearly finished.)
I was not then really up to writing an essay on Lafferty, as I fairly quickly discovered. I'm still not, but at least I have some theoretical tools and preoccupations to throw at it now. Below is the dissertation proposal essentially as given to my department. Please don't be too distracted by technical jargon with which you may not be familiar. I had a word-limit that precluded much elucidation of the terminologies. I hope some reasonably clear conception of what I'm attempting will still come through.
As it reaches completion (in April), the paper will become both clearer and different. I'm not sure how it will change, but I know it will to one degree or another. Unfortunately, it's only a 10,000 word paper and I'm covering two authors, so it's not going to be able to cover as much ground as I'd like. But I think putting Lafferty in conversation with a recognised 'great writer' is worth it and will provide its own fascinating illuminations. Please let me know your questions and criticisms of the proposal and suggestions for further theoretical materials and for other elements or works of Lafferty's fiction to consider as regards the topic. (Please do tell me if you see any egregious errors based on any expert knowledge you have!)
Dissertation
proposal:
The primary texts
the dissertation will consider are Cormac McCarthy’s ‘anti-western’ novel Blood Meridian (1985) and R. A.
Lafferty’s historical Choctaw novel Okla
Hannali (1972) as well as Lafferty’s short stories ‘Narrow Valley’, ‘Smoe
and the Implicit Clay’, and ‘Days of Grass, Days of Straw’. The question the dissertation asks is: can the iterations of eco-monstrosity[2] exemplified in these two Southwestern
American regional writers be grounded in and yet transmogrify theological
readings of ‘nature’? I.e. do these
texts show ‘dark ecology’ and theological ecology to be mutually exclusive or
do they open the way for some sort of harmony or hybridity? I argue the latter. Evocations of monstrosity in these texts make
room for comic rather than tragic (or nihilistic) ecologies, undergirded by
‘dark’ or ‘weird’ theologies.
Lafferty is well known as a ‘funny’ writer,
though his ‘tall tales’ are often grotesque and even gory. It is also well known that Lafferty’s devout
Roman Catholic beliefs infused all his work.
So it is no surprise that his ecology is ultimately theological and
comic. But it is not always appreciated
that Lafferty’s fiction only achieves this ‘theo-comedy’ (to borrow a term from
the theologian Thomas Oden) by way of much ambiguity and carnivalised
horror. McCarthy’s harrowing and
hyper-violent novels, on the other hand, are often thought to be eloquent
tracts for an unflinchingly bleak nihilism.
It is often argued that Blood Meridian
in particular subverts theological readings of the world, but I will argue that
it subverts only theologies that cannot embrace ‘dark’ ecology and thereby
clears the way for more adequate theologies.
It is arguably rare that the disciplines of ecology,
theology, and monster theory all three intersect in one study. Certainly the proposed texts of this
dissertation do not appear to have received this triangulated critical
reading. Both authors are, in any case,
far from over-subscribed by academics and are thus ripe for more theoretical
work. McCarthy studies are now numerous
but by no means enormous. Lafferty
studies are nearly non-existent[3] and as
this obscure author is being slowly rediscovered[4],
critical work is needed. More generally,
the worldwide growth in cultural awareness of both ecological and religious
debates gives urgency to a cross-discipline study such as this.
The main critical tools the dissertation employs
consist of Timothy Morton’s dark ecology[5],
Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (‘weird realism’)[6],
and Timothy Beal’s theology of monsters[7]. The foci of the reading will be the emphases
the primary texts place on monstrous (usually grotesque or gigantic) evocations
of flora, fauna, and landscape, and the place of humans therein that religious
worldviews purport to provide. With
these tools I aim to show that the texts under consideration evince a
theologically pertinent eco-monstrosity that serves to situate and orient
readers within a dangerous but genuinely all-inclusive ontology. The monsters here are not ‘off the map’ – the
monsters are the map. Further, the texts evince no easy disjunction
between a so-called ‘post-human’ eco-centricity and the theo-comic ecology of,
for example, Roman Catholic doctrine. Rather, the monstrous ecologies of the
texts—in their strange grotesqueries and violences and in their characters’
lengthy theological declamations—tend to agitate for a ‘dark’ and ‘weird’ hybridisation
of theological ecology and dark ecology:
a conceptual space in which humans are decentralised in certain respects
(radically contextualised by the non-human environment) even as they bear the
divine image.
[2] This can be considered a particular
artistic iteration of eco-centric or post-human or post-equilibrium ecocritical
theories.
[3] Andrew Ferguson’s master’s dissertation ‘Lafferty and His World’ is
the only ‘official’ academic work I know of on Lafferty so far, but a handful
of critical reviews and comments can also be dug up - e.g. brief but insightful
critical comments on Lafferty’s writing can be found from the likes of Ursula
Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, John Clute, and Neil Gaiman. Ferguson in his paper utilises Mikhail
Bakhtin’s ideas on carnival and grotesque and Walter J. Ong’s ideas on orality
to read Lafferty’s body of work: http://www.academia.edu/329007/Lafferty_and_His_World.
Ferguson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia, is
currently writing the first biography of Lafferty.
[4] The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has
recently acquired the rights to Lafferty’s works and through them Centipede
Press have published the first of what is projected to be twelve volumes
collecting the complete short stories by Lafferty: The Man
Who Made Models: The Collected Short Fiction Volume One (2013), Centipede
Press, Lakewood.
[5] E.g. Ecology
Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), Harvard
University Press, Cambridge.
[6] E.g. Guerrilla Metaphysics:
Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005), Open Court Publishing,
Peru; Weird Realism: Lovecraft and
Philosophy (2012), John Hunt Publishing, Alresford.
[7] Religion and Its Monsters (2002), Routledge, London.
The Dissertation Reading Stack!
