'Well then, this was something that did not explain itself at all'; Or, 'the grin of a tribal deity full of rogue power and eternal youth'

Overlark breathed out deeply, emptying chest and collapsing his whole upper body in the expelling. Then he plunged his head and neck and shoulders into the large bowl and began to breathe the water deeply.  If this was fakery it was good fakery,and it hadn't been rigged just to impress Freddy Foley.

The man, if he was a man, was breathing very deeply under water - if it was water.  His eyes were open and they had a new snap to them.  He grinned, a not altogether fish grin.  It was the grin of a tribal deity full of rogue power and eternal youth, one at home in all the elements.  Something false about both the power and the youth, though.

Fred Foley scooped water and tasted.  It was half salt - brackish, like tide-turning estuary water, or water from the sea very near the mouth of a great river.  Or it was like water from an ancient ocean, one with less salt in it than have the oceans now.  But why did Fred Foley think of that?

There were minute plants in the water, and small fish.  It was not tap water.  It was either drawn from a particular source, or carefully mixed.  Foley had a sudden belief that there might be an upwelling of that water in that room, even though it was an upper-floor room, just as there was an upwelling of water on Auclaire's mountain, though there were dry caves below.

Well then, this was something that did not explain itself at all.   Carmody Overlark had had his head under water for more than five minutes, and the water itself was in constant change or parade.  There were schools of small fish that passed through it laterally.  They did not follow around the curve of the bowl, they disappeared.  And other sorts of fish appeared, all traveling a parade in the same direction, coming out of the glass itself (for all that could be discerned of them), traveling across the bowl in a straight line and disappearing into the glass wall again.  There was optical illusion or there was strong current flowing through that bowl.

Was the underwater breathing of Overlark somehow the key to suspended animation?  It was a funny key; it didn't seem to fit any of the locks.  It was plain that an ordinary man would be dead, as it was now ten, now fifteen minutes that Overlark had his head and breathing below the surface.  It was plain that he was not an ordinary man.

Then the water went out of the bowl.  It could not be said that it drained out, for there was no drain. Air followed water in the current-parade across the inside of the bowl, and then the inside was dry. Overlark pulled his head out.  He was beaming and greatly refreshed.

"Wonderful, Foley, wonderful.  You should try it.  There's nothing like it to set a man up."


-R. A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions (1969)

Again, Buffalopunk - Lafferty and Weird West

Okay, I'm going to try to keep more 'notes' here on my long-term project of interpreting Lafferty through the nexus-lens of:

* Monster Theory,
* Southwest Regional Writing,
* Environmental Writing,
* Ecocriticism (especially Dark Ecology),
* Theology (especially Ecotheology, Theology of Monsters, and Thomism),
* Metaphysics (especially Object-Oriented Ontology, Speculative Realism, Weird Realism, et. al.),
* and my own emerging (puling to be precise) theory of an 'Ecomonstrous' aesthetic.

Today I just want to scratch a few thoughts about Lafferty's fiction in relation to the Weird West subgenre.  Roughly, a 'weird west' tale tends to mix classic western genre motifs with the monsters and horror of Weird Fiction (ala Lovecraft if you're Old School and Vandermeer if you're New School [and Miss Jackson if you're Nasty]). 

It's kind of like Cowboys & Cthulhu.

Or Lovecraft meets L'Amour. 

(art by Jim Rugg)

To me, it's a plenty stretchy genre that can also include things like Space Westerns and Future Westerns (e.g. android gunslingers) and other such genre-blending permutations (in the far reaches there are comic books series such as Cowboy Ninja Viking and Six-Gun Gorilla).  And it can draw not only on roots of classic westerns but also American Indian lore and Weird Mexicana (e.g. Día de los Muertos).  It overlaps a little with Spaghetti Westerns and Gonzo Westerns and Anti-Westerns (Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian being the quintessential specimen of this last type) and even the Southern Gothic literature of the likes of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.  For me, it's a loose and suggestive conglomeration of tangentially related imagery and concepts.

Enter Lafferty.  He's never going to truly fit any genre.  He mutates everything he touches.  Such is the case here.  He overlaps with some of the territory of westerns because his settings are frequently those of his own lifelong Southwestern environs, mainly his native Oklahoma.  Though many of his Oklohaman settings, in both novels and short stories, are urban, many also feature the wider non-urban landscape.  (And even the tales set in a city - frequently Tulsa - tend to have an eye for regional features.)  Since Lafferty's fiction tends to have a hefty dose of American Indian influence as well as stylistic innovations that made him at home in 1960s/70s New Wave science fiction for a while, I call his excursions into western-y territory 'buffalopunk' (think 'cyberpunk', 'steampunk', etc.).

Indeed, buffalos themselves sometimes feature in his yarns (e.g. 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw', 'Inventions Bright and New') as well as their 'byproducts' (hides, horns, meat, etc.).  And just think of all the instances where some character, instead of crying bullshit, cries 'Oh, Buffalo Hokey!'    And so it is with all the other fauna, flora, landscape, and general ephemera of the Southwestern region, which show up in equal doses of focused attention, background assumption, offhanded asides, and enmeshed textural detail.  You may not have even noticed it, but once you're paying attention, you'll see it often:  mesquite, coyotes, mesas, cattle, mountains, mountain lions, plains, 'bottoms', 'flats', crayfish, kit foxes, bears, and much, much more.

Of course, all these regional elements are either themselves 'weirded' in some way or are attendant upon the joyfully bizarre Laffertian carnival we've all come to expect from his tales:  the weirdness may be in the form of magic, horror (both visceral and ghostly), mad science, aliens, monsters, extreme violence or gore, dystopia, and general metaphysical antics (doubled people, landscapes that won't behave properly, skies raining everything but cats and dogs, talking fauna, persons filled with sawdust or confetti, etc.).  Hence the '-punk' suffix. 

You can think of your own list of stories that feature strains of Lafferty's buffalopunk, but some that spring to my mind are (in addition to the few named above) 'Boomer Flats', 'Happening at Chosky Bottoms', 'Narrow Valley', 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire', 'Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas' and 'Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight'.  These all take place in the Southwest, but even in Lafferty's offworld stories there is often a noticeable element of buffalopunk:  e.g. 'Pig in a Pokey', 'Snuffles', 'Golden Trabant', 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay', etc.  (Also, a number of his earliest stories, which are only recently beginning to come to light to a wider audience, are quite regional, though some are perhaps a little lighter on overtly freakish 'punk' elements:  e.g. 'The Wagons', 'Rain Mountain', 'Ghost in the Corn Crib', etc.)

His novel most relevant to this theme is obviously his historical epic of the Choctaws Okla Hannali (1972), but The Reefs of Earth (1968) comes a close second as a science fiction novel in full Southwestern Gothic-Weird mode, with its backwoods setting, murderous alien children, lively Indian mounds and so on. 

But what provoked this whole meditation for me was that I ran smack into a whole chapter of buffalopunk (IV: 'Liar on the Mountain') in my now third re-reading of Fourth Mansions (1969).  I'd remembered that the landscape behaved strangely in this passage, but I didn't remember how repletely Weird West this chapter was, complete with a Texas-Mexico setting (the same territory as McCarthy's Blood Meridian).  There is a very western 'mesquite and sagebrush' landscape described, which is rolling like the sea (an image of western plains I've seen in sources as diverse as McCarthy and Zane Grey, but here rather more literalised) and taking on impossible dimensions the further into it they go.  There's a preternatural guardian, a short bloody boar hunt, a cave-cooked meal, and even a many-tentacled black monster in a fountain in this chapter.  A delightful excursion into weird western!

The rest of the novel is very Tulsa urban, and still evinces not a little of buffalopunk, but that Lafferty just went full western in this chapter kind of freshly hit me and reminded me how frequently recurring is his element of buffalopunk.  Now I'm going to be trying to catalogue all its appearances and allusions.  (What, me obsessive? Pshh.)

Fourth Mansions again: it's like a vintage animated cartoon made of words, w/ slapstick & monsters; it's also the weirdest theological treatise ever written

Inspired by a couple of recent excellent blog posts on Fourth Mansions (1969) by John Owen HERE and HERE, and by the excellent page dedicated to it on the Lafferty website, and by browsing Amazon reviews, today I wrote my own off the cuff Amazon review.

I'm cross-posting it here:

4/5 stars

It's really a five star book. Very much so. In some ways, it might be Lafferty's masterpiece - in terms of his novels. But I'm trying to be realistic here and not come across as too fanboy-ish, as lacking any critical distance. The truth is, as a HUGE Lafferty fan (I've been writing a whole blog dedicated to his works since 2009), this is not actually my very favourite of Lafferty's novels. I prefer Past Master, Space Chantey, The Reefs of Earth, Arrive At Easterwine, Aurelia, Annals of Klepsis, and East of Laughter and I'd recommend you read several of them in addition to Fourth Mansions to really get the measure of this author.

But I'm not sure any of those other novels quite match the linguistic opulence and descriptive verve of Fourth Mansions. (That's how I feel about Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle: my favourite is the last trilogy, Book of the Short Sun, but I can't deny that the first tetralogy, Book of the New Sun, is probably Wolfe's masterpiece and surely the richest in language and prose.)

Lafferty's voice in Fourth Mansions is like Charles Williams refracted through Raymond Chandler. Or Chesterton refracted through Black Elk. Or Flannery O'Connor refracted through George Orwell. Or Mark Twain refracted through Lovecraft. Or Colson Whitehead refracted through Kafka. Or Chaucer refracted through Walker Percy. Or the converse of any of those. Probably the nexus of all of them.

That's the main thing I want to say that hasn't been much mentioned by the other reviews here. That this is a delicious volume of prose style. Not in any way you might expect, though. Lafferty doesn't write like other humans. The narrative flow admittedly seems to bumble sometimes, but it's usually doing something deep at the moment it appears to be faltering a bit. And you'll probably only find that out on re-reads. But mostly the narration sings and sizzles and coruscates. It's a bit like a vintage animated cartoon made of words. Sentences seem to leap off the page and dance about in that mixture of fluidity and juddering jumpiness that early cartoons have. And it's also like old cartoons in that mixture of really silly slapstickery and really quite terrifying monstrosity they often evince in the impossible physical peregrinations they take the viewer through - where both bodies and landscape refuse to follow any known physics, yet cohere madly according to their own laws. It's very funny and very disturbing. That's Fourth Mansions.

One reviewer complained that the characters in this novel aren't developed, nor are they distinguishable from one another. I need to re-read it to see what I think about that. I've only read it one and half times so far (gave up half way through the first time, so I can sympathise with those who don't initially like it), but I've also dipped back into many passages many times over. What I will say is that the characters are drawn extremely richly in the 'cartoonish' mode I have just described. They are sketched in an incredibly vivid manner - Chesterton especially comes to mind in this connection - that makes them quite colourful, if of uncertain depth or distinction. It's worth noting that I have thought Lafferty characters weren't too 3D in some of his short stories, only to find on re-reads how incredibly wrong I was. They were rendered in a way I hadn't encountered before, so that I missed how incredibly solid and rich they were actually given to the reader, already fully formed. That may be the case in this novel, I'm not sure yet.

What makes the mad, terrifying, hilarious quality of the prose the more remarkable is that it is the vehicle of a deeply theological meditation, which many somewhat forgivably miss on a first read. Indeed, this book might be the funniest, wildest, weirdest theological treatise ever written. It's kind of about God making 'monsters' an indispensable but dangerous element of our inner and outer ecologies, that we must learn to integrate or be devoured by. Doesn't sound like anything you ever heard in Sunday School or 'Christian movies' or the like, right? Well, Lafferty is schooling believers as much as unbelievers in this book, calling everybody who will hear to a more fun and ferocious faith than we are wont to imagine Christianity is really all about. And he's trying to put readers in touch with ancient traditions that were really all about this kind of wild faith all along. According to Lafferty, modern religion has lost its way and needs to reconnect to its rich roots in order to evolve to its true potential. That's why the book is titled after a chapter in St. Teresa of Ávila's The Interior Castle and why some of the main biblical imagery it cryptically draws on is that of the prophet Ezekiel's terrifying Cherubim (angelic beings with four-faces - Ox, Lion, Eagle, Man - which attend the throne of God). Much of modern faith is too tame, suppressing holy monstrosity and thereby fostering unholy monstrosity. That seems to be a central aspect of the 'message' of this novel. And, admittedly, it is a sort of 'preachy' or 'lecturing' novel (there are long segments of actual lecturing and preaching late in the book!), but in a way that, if you ever experienced such in a church or university seminar room, you'd be on the edge of your seat - if not cowering behind it (trembling with laughter as much as terror).

For what it's worth, I first wrote about this book some three years ago here. That post has some great comments from other insightful Lafferty fans as well.

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)

Wings Not of Fire, But Weak and Feeble

'John said that a hermit saw in a rapture three monks standing on the edge of the sea and a voice came to them from the other side saying, "Take wings of fire and come to me." The first two did so and reached the other shore, but the third stayed where he was crying and weeping. Later on wings were given to him also, not of fire but weak and feeble so that he reached the other shore with great difficulty, sometimes in the water, sometimes over it. So it is with the present generation: the wings they are given are not of fire, they are weak and feeble.'

-The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks (Penguin Books, 2003)

I don't know if Lafferty knew much about the Desert Fathers (at least one story features a group like them - 'And Mad Undancing Bears'), but I think this little vision resonates strongly with what Lafferty was saying and some of how he was saying it. I wonder if a reading of Lafferty would be hugely enriched by reading these and other early church sources. Certainly Teresa of Avila's The Interior Castle had a huge effect on his novel Fourth Mansions. Perhaps Catholic visionary literature is a significant source influencing Lafferty's whole vibe of life-is-bigger-than-you-think-and-here-let-me-show-you. It would make sense as yet another historic root that makes his writing so vastly weird and wonderful and devilishly irascible in a post-Enlightenment world.

Some Initial Thoughts on R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions

It's usually agreed that Lafferty is stronger at his short stories than his novels. The wonderful weirdness that is usually a strength at the short story length can sometimes threaten to become overwhelming, or even unreadable incoherence, at novel length. Nevertheless, besotted fans of Lafferty's short stories are impelled by sheer addiction to his prose--the sweaty, shaky need for more Laffertian lore, from any source whatever--to wade into the novels and grapple with Lafferty's uber potent strangeness in depth, for one long sustained narrative. And though Lafferty fanatics are often not a little baffled by the novels, we tend to go back for more!

Besides Fourth Mansions, I've read the following novels by Lafferty: Past Master, Reefs of Earth, Space Chantey, Arrive At Easterwine, The Devil Is Dead, Annals of Klepsis, Where Have You Been Sandaliotis, and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney. That's nine novels in total (over a period of about as many years), so it's not as if they're unreadable. Indeed, you get the hang of them. You start to love some of them, or parts of them, as much as the short stories. In fact, I've read the afforementioned Past Master, Annals of Klepsis, and Space Chantey at least twice-over each (the latter two I even read out loud to my children!) for sheer pleasure--just delighting to savour again the prose and the narrated events.

The bottom line is that I've found, basically, however Lafferty's novels may compare to the short stories, however much they may or may not 'succeed' as cohesive versions of that particular art form - they usually ALL contain some amount (usually quite a lot) of solid Laffertian gold.

Interestingly, despite the sometimes overwhelming concentration (or diffusion) of weirdness in Lafferty's novels, I have usually found them quite 'easy' reads. I can usually get through them in fairly short order. Despite the wonkiness, they still manage, oddly, to have a fairly page-turning flow. The novels sometimes reel, roil, and riot, but they seem to be eminently finishable.

But this is where Fourth Mansions was the exception to the rule for me. When I first tried to read it some 8 or 9 years ago, I just couldn't finish it. I had finished all the ones I had read before that and have subsequently finished all the ones I've read after abandoning it. I knew that a number of fans and critics considered Fourth Mansions Lafferty's best (and some even said it was possibly his most coherent plot), but this just baffled me as I found that its story just didn't pull me in beyond a few chapters and the strangeness wasn't cohering into anything inviting for me. I gave up half way through. I knew also that some fans found Fourth Mansions to be one of Lafferty's 'worst' novels. (The R. A. Lafferty Devotional Page categorises it as 'lame'--below even 'OK'--then again, how LAME is it that a site 'devoted' to Lafferty even has the category 'lame' for his works! Honestly, I admit I've read what comes close to 'average' from Lafferty, but 'lame'? Never.)

Anyway, I assumed that since I had more or less easily downed all the other novels I'd tried, this one was just truly flawed. Still, I had always intended to go back and get through it. I recently read a 1975 paper by Sheryl Smith on Arrive At Easterwine that mentioned Lafferty had written three 'end-of-the-world comedies'--Past Master (1968), Fourth Mansions (1969), and Easterwine (1971)--which she recommended reading in that order if possible. I found this to be a fresh way of labelling and grouping some of his works. Having recently re-read Past Master and planning to re-read Easterwine soon, I decided now was the time to finally muscle through to the end of Mansions.

Basic result? I totally missed it on my first reading. This is an amazing book. Definitely one of Lafferty's very best and most important. It is packed with tons of the finest of Lafferty's prose on a lot of levels. It is also packed with fantastic marvels and action-adventure (of an utterly bizarre variety, of course) as well as Lafferty's usual long and creative portions of exposition - ranging from various types of conversations to college lecture Q&A sessions to prophets preaching on the streets. It is bristling with a wonderful cast of weird and well-sketched characters of various ethnicities and powers and beings. The pedestrian protagonist, newspaper reporter Freddy Foley, is a bumbling favourite for me alongside Past Master's Thomas More.

The novel is still very, very strange and hard to follow and even hard to finish toward the latter half (though all the later chapters are as good as the early chapters - it's just that mere mortals flag in trying to quaff one of Lafferty's most potent brews). Yet it is full of joys and thrills and pleasures.

In one sense it is a sustained meditation on a theology of monsters (which is very exciting for one of my lifelong study projects). But even more centrally, it is another crucial piece in the puzzle that Lafferty's body of work constructs: a profound, pungent, tenacious argument that we need to wake up and rebuild intellectual and spiritual DIMENSION in an intellectually and spiritually FLAT modern/postmodern world.

‎'Somehow there is the belief that people in the Dark Ages believed that the world was flat. They didn't. But it is the contemptuous ones of today who have made a really flat world that is the sad answer to everything. What is wrong with the world and why is it not worth living in? It's flat, that's what.' (Fourth Mansions, p. 59)

This novel, as all of Lafferty's work, joyously and rambunctiously attempts to diagnose this problem and proffers a beautiful and scary cure: unleash all the metaphorical, metaphysical, and material monsters inside us and outside us, reintegrated under the good rule of God again, freed to gleefully destroy a fake world that has been foisted on us and gruesomely rebirth a real one again.

That diagnosis and cure is no doubt unpalatable to many, but Lafferty is cooking and seasoning a musky rump roast according to his own recipe (yet one he claims is not at all his own) and he has a disarming and seductive way of wafting wonderfully inviting aromas our way, inciting our salivating mouths and rumbling bellies.