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.)

Eco-Monstrosity in Cormac McCarthy and R. A. Lafferty (my dissertation proposal - approved!)

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’[1].  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.

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[1] Possibly also drawing from the stories ‘Snuffles’, ‘And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire’, and ‘All Pieces of a River Shore’.

^[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!