Daily Lafferty # 9

"You are a double-decked, seven-stranded, copper-bottomed, four-dimension liar!" Runkis roared out that day.

"Yes, I know," Lado said. He was pleased when praised for his specialty. He was the best liar in the neighborhood, and had the most fun out of it.

-R. A. Lafferty, 'The Man Who Never Was' (1967)

Speaking of Aurelia...

Gregorio and I got a little sidetracked on the 'Nine Hundred Grandmothers' thread into talking about Lafferty's neglected (I'm tempted to say 'little masterpiece') novel, Aurelia (1982). I was saying that where so many of Lafferty's novels feel like an Apocalypse, this one felt more like an Advent. Gregorio took it one step further and wondered whether it was Lafferty's attempt at the genre of 'Gospel'.

I found the book, whilst very funny at times and full of weird and sometimes grotesque wonder, also to be rather poignant and a little sad (in a 'touching' way, though not with any sentimental sense that word might imply). It almost felt like Lafferty's last will and testament or something.

Anyway, with all that rolling round my head and heart I came across the beautifully kitschy illustration by my wife below (posted today on her blog Flannery O'Kafka) and felt it resonating strongly and strangely with this novel about a young girl from another world set down on Earth in a mountainous village - who eventually receives violent rejection.

Amusingly, in this illustration there is also a cameo by Snuffles the alien ursine from Lafferty's short story of that name (or is that King Riksino, 'the cave-bear, the musk-bear', from his short story 'Frog On the Mountain'?) as well as by St Joseph who makes an appearance in Lafferty's novel East of Laughter! (My wife has read none of these, so any real resonances are unintentional on her part.)

The Rough Account of The Group of Twelve: 2. Jane Chantal Ardri (excerpt from R. A. Lafferty's East of Laughter)

'JANE CHANTAL ARDRI was an artist of all the arts. But she denied that her art was completely computerized art. Her personal computer, in the family room of the Ardri home, was invisible, except to the eye of another artist. It was housed in a hunting-horn that hung on a rafter (a computer-hewn hickory rafter) in that pleasant room. But every artist who came there (and most of Jane’s friends outside the circle of Twelve were artists) would say at once, “Oh, how quaint, Jane Chantal, how cult! How could anybody not put her computer in her hunting-horn! How could anybody not have a hunting-horn! And does it still sound like a hunting-horn?”

‘And, in her programming voice, Jane Chantal would immediately order, “Sound, horn, sound, and mean it when you sound!” And lively and rousing (though computerized) hunting-horn tunes would immediately tumble out of the rafter-hung horn-computer. Jane was a huntress, of course, always and in everything, but she was a fuzzy and somewhat lazy huntress, one who was seldom in a hurry. She knew that her game would wait for her, that her prey would take only token (though colourful) flight. She was the huntress who was always in charge of the hunt.

‘But Jane Chantal always maintained, “I use the computer only for the tedious and difficult things in art, and in my hunting. Many of the things in art are hot and heavy, or they are cold and clammy, or they are back-breaking and finger-breaking. These things the computer does, but I do all the artistic parts, and all the really avid pursuits.”

‘Yes, certain aspects of bronze-casting are hot and heavy, as is the carrying-in of a full-grown elk on the shoulders and hanging and drawing it. Certain aspects of massive sculpture in travertine-marble-limestone are rockdust-breathing and arm-breaking and unpleasant. So also are aspects of stalking a prey by the belly-crawl through frozen grass on a winter pre-dawn. And the whole process of writing and regaling of Heavy Drama is nerve-jangling and emotion-wrenching. So let it be the computer whose nerves are jangled and whose emotions are wrenched. And it is the business of the computer to find rimes for unrimeable words and to devise new meters, just as it is the business of the computer to find new Canadian Geese to rise from the lake in the morning and to make their turn-back when a furlong in the air to receive the shot. And the computer can gaze directly into the sun (directly by remote-control) and then record the after-images that result form that encounter. Or the computer can go, not physically itself, but in its probing processes, down into the bottom of the deepest well or aquafer and there record the curious poetry of the blind brooks and the blind fish. And, whenever Jane Chantal returned from one of her frequent trips to other parts of the world, she would find that her artistic production had gone on unabated in her own absence. Her joyous computer (it was named Joyeuse Vice-Reine and it was a female computer) never failed her. Her newest productions were always in the newest style, whether Jane Chantal was physically present at their production or not.

‘Like the computer of her husband Hilary, that of Jane Chantal Ardri was also inhabited by a sprite that was kindred to a poltergeist, but less obtrusively adolescent. And the two sprites were excellent friends. The two people with their computers and with the two infestations of their computers all lived together in one happy household.

‘Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri also had five children of their own flesh and blood, good, pleasant, smart children. They will be mentioned without hesitation if ever there is a reason to mention them again. The names of the children (they were named by the computers: neither Hilary nor Jane Chantal was good at naming children) were Hilary Henry, Jane Chanteclaire, Marie Rieuse, Anne Auclaire, and Urban Urchin. Urban Urchin, the squeaking wheel, got a certain amount of attention form them simply because he was the squeaking wheel. And the eldest of them, Hilary Henry, was their “man in New York” and so they maintained a sort of business relationship with him.

‘“If you ever meet a happy artist in any of the arts, fall back and regroup,” a brilliant critic in the late twentieth century has written. “Fall back and regroup, or back out of it any way you can, for you will have stumbled into an unreal world.”

‘But the fuzzily-beautiful and fuzzily-avid Jane Chantal Ardri was a happy artist in all the arts. This wasn’t the first or the second indication the Ardris had that they lived in an unreal world, without difficulty or complication. But it was another of those most telling indications.’

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), pp. 6-8

A Travelogue of the Laffertian Landscape, part 1 – How to Be a Joyously Subversive Blessing Instead of a Hackneyed Subcultural Blight

R. A. Lafferty is a truly great, largely unknown author who deserves the ‘devotion’, attention, and thoughtful reflection. That alone makes this series worth it. These are very early days indeed for Lafferty criticism, so we’re far, far from having too much written about him.

These entries are also incidentally and unavoidably autobiographical and hence at times insightful into my mind, for those interested (you sick people!). (I assume this will mainly be ‘fans’ of Blaster the Rocket Man and Voice of the Mysterons. But some friends, co-workers, neighbours, and family members may also benefit in better understanding their weird half-overbearing, half-reclusive, alternately affable and recalcitrant, bearded bespectacled acquaintance. On the other hand, it may confirm your fears and suspicions and rouse you to unite and take up your torches and pitchforks to finally rid the village of the vile fiend!)

Furthermore, and very importantly, to write about Lafferty is, for me, necessarily a socio-cultural commentary/exploration on a ‘way forward’ for Christian artists: how to be a joyously subversive blessing instead of a hackneyed subcultural blight.

Christians have a long history of being profound and provocative culture-makers: I mainly think of literary innovators like Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Bunyan, John Milton, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Gene Wolfe (just to name a few that spring to mind). In modern/postmodern/post-postmodern times this tradition is largely lost within huge swathes of the broad Christian church. Hearing comments (from critics who did not share Lafferty’s faith) like the below about an artist who is a self-professed ‘public’ Christian gives me conviction and hope and… ideas:

R. A. Lafferty is one of the most original writers in science fiction. He bends or breaks normal story restrictions apparently at will, pokes fun at serious matters and breaks into a kind of folk-lyricism over grotesqueries. All this, plus the most unfettered imagination we’ve enjoyed in years. [Terry Carr]

R. A. Lafferty is possessed—a madman, a wild talent… Lafferty’s world is not always comfortable, since he takes particular delight in subtly twisting the meanings of words. His world is usually delightfully absurdist, and often bristling with pins to prick the soap-bubbles of whatever you hold sacred. Lafferty is fun, sophisticated, and utterly insane. [A Reader’s Guide to SF]
Too often the label ‘Christian’ in many people’s minds cannot go in the same category as ‘original’, ‘breaking normal restrictions’, ‘fun’, ‘grotesque’, ‘unfettered imagination’, ‘mad/insane’, ‘wild’, ‘subtle’, ‘twisting’, ‘delightful’, ‘absurd’, ‘bursting sacred bubbles’, ‘sophisticated’, etc. Admittedly, a Christian embodies many of these descriptors only in certain senses and sometimes in ways that are dangerous and/or hilarious. But to fail to live out the connections between Christian history, experience, and belief and these ‘edgy’, unconventional signifiers is to sell out the true story of what this social, cultural, philosophical, ‘religious’ revolution called Christianity is all about. The faith’s origins (to say nothing of the faith’s Founder) are, historically, nothing if not in some ways well described by the adjectives above. Look into it if you doubt me.

You see, Christian Orthodoxy is frankly unorthodox. Art created from a community soaked in this tradition and trajectory simply must reflect this untameable character or else inherently deny the soil it grew in and show itself to really be the product of some more arid agriculture.

Not all my readers will readily appreciate this ‘faith and art’ element in the entries to follow. But the discussion is by no means limited to this; it is simply an inevitable component of the larger investigation into Lafferty’s work. I think anyone from any pre-commitment can enjoy and benefit from an honest assessment of the work of such a great author. (It is worth noting that we all exercise ‘faith’, not just ‘religious’ types. We all have unprovable ‘ultimate commitments’ [just name yours and then try to prove them] which we may have good or bad or no reasons for trusting, but we do trust them nevertheless. They are discussable, testable, alterable – but they are finally matters of an act of faith. I hope you can see that this is the case. Obviously, please feel free to argue to the contrary.)

Next: my personal story of discovering Lafferty.