Of Cosmic Laughter and the Black Melancholy of Giants – Part 2 of 2

'There is nothing like the black melancholy of giants'

Now, I feel honesty compels me to add a downbeat note here in my paean to Lafferty’s qualities of wonder and joy (see part 1). I left off on the theme of carnival death-and-resurrection that adds a redemptively grotesque element to the ‘cosmic laughter’ that pervades Lafferty’s fiction. And it is here, in the mud and blood of the Incarnation, when the Son of God, as Milton put it:

Forsook the courts of everlasting day

And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay

that we can feel some of Lafferty’s pain and travail as it were.

He too could say, at times, with Johnny Cash (covering a Will Oldham song): ‘and then I see a darkness’. Lafferty was perhaps sometimes overly frustrated or depressed with his world that he loved and in which he saw so much potential for real transcendence and fullness of life. It comes through in moments of some of the stories. Sure, anger is nearly always there somewhere in Lafferty’s fiction, but it is usually a ‘righteous’ sort of happy anger that we find admirable when directed from hope and compassion toward destructive forces—he is usually ‘cranky’ in an overall charitable way. But occasionally it can perhaps appear just a little ugly, a little more motivated by real contempt or loss of hope (an outlook that can come from feeling marginalised or censured among other things). Lafferty himself said: ‘The cynic is the realist who has given up hope’ (The Fall of Rome, p. 54). And who is exempt from being seized at times by such rage and despair?

A passage in East of Laughter that I found poignant comes into play here:

“The giants, like the fauns, live one thousand years, and they live much more in sorrow than in joy. The world has never understood the deep melancholy of the giants. Their melancholy makes them creative, in a rumpled way, but is it worth it to them? If they cry out at the idea of being extinguished at the end of one thousand years, they are given a second thousand years. But for their second thousand years, the balance is tilted still more to sorrow and less to joy, and their melancholy deepens. There is nothing like the black melancholy of giants in their second or even third millennium. And yet they work hard and try to write the world cheerfully. Perhaps somewhere, some day, they will have their compensation. But nobody would want to be a giant, from free choice.” (p. 137)

As Gene Wolfe points out in his essay ‘Scribbling Giant’, Lafferty himself just is one of these ‘literary giants’. For me, his bouts of near-pessimism or ‘black melancholy’ only make his otherwise ebullient writing all the more truly human, a sermon I can truly hear and relate to. I am genuinely moved by Lafferty’s persevering commitment to ‘work hard and try to write the world cheerfully’ no matter how he felt.

When We Un-Weird the Truth, We Become Dehumanised

There is one more thing to say about the very dark themes that are interwoven with the cosmic laughter throughout Lafferty’s body of fiction. Let me sneak up on it this way:

I recall that he said somewhere that he was, in his work, saying the complex and difficult things he had to say as clearly as they can be said. When I first heard that statement, I literally burst into a sharp laugh and thought: ‘You wily coyote.’ (For the full effect, pronounce that last word ‘kigh-yoat’ with the accent and a leisurely drawl on the first syllable and a crisply enunciated ‘t’, with just a hint of reverb to it, in the second syllable.) I thought he was being facetious. After reading Andrew Ferguson’s MA Dissertation on Lafferty, I now know better. Of all the weird consciousness-expanding moments one has in reading Lafferty, to come to realise that he was articulating a difficult philosophy as clearly as can be done through his wild and woolly stories—well, that is maybe the weirdest. Truth is weird.

And that’s one of Lafferty’s main points, I guess. His complaint is that we’ve tried to ‘un-weird’ truth and in the process have flattened not only truth itself, but the whole world, the entire cosmos, into a space too thin and shallow and paltry for the bristly, shaggy, thorny, horny, multi-dimensional human being to successfully occupy. The human soul knows this (post)modernly-conceived world is not its real home.

Going deeper, Lafferty is also moving us to understand that the whole Fallen world (however conceived in whatever age) is not our final destination. Humans are meant to ‘transcend’ (that’s Lafferty’s word) the merely human (the human as we currently know it). Lafferty contends that without that impetus upward, we descend and deform and degenerate. We are literally degraded from our natural category of human into unnatural categories of subhuman (e.g. ‘Ginny Wrapped In the Sun’, ‘And Name My Name’) or (worse) un-human (e.g. ‘Dream’, ‘And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire’): we become dehumanised.

Now, you've got to understand that behind Lafferty's damning indictment of failed humanity is actually a huge and high anthropology - the Christian anthropology is always like this. We are Fallen, yes. But that's the whole point. We are high and holy and whole creatures (made in no less than the very image of God for Christ's sake!) who have fallen from that lofty ontological height into lowness and unwholesomeness and thinness and meanness. The more you read and study Lafferty the more you really do start to get the feeling you personally actually might be a Shining Genius who is only using a fraction of what he or she could be and do. Lafferty's fiction is uplifting in that sense. Even while at the same time it is full of a creeping and sinister suspicion that we humans are selling our birthright for a mess of pottage. Lafferty thinks so highly and fondly of humanity that he crankily condemns how we sell ourselves out.

At the end of the day I do not believe Lafferty actually succumbed to cynicism or despair. The whole of the textual evidence leads me to conclude that the final words of his 1968 novel Past Master were his steady stance to the end and the one he would commend to all of us:

‘Be quiet. We hope.’

Let Us Make Common Cause in the High Hilarity!

Now, the way to look at all this from the perspective of practicing artists is that we may thus see in Lafferty, if we have eyes to see it, a fresh and fruitful WAY FORWARD for culture-making. If I may speak for a moment specifically to my fellow artists who are members of the Christian church: recovering this theistic sense of awe and theistic sense of humour ('cosmic laughter') in our culture-making would go a LONG way toward renewing our presently fraught relationship with culture at large. (Certainly this is true for an ‘evangelical’ perspective such as mine – may other Christian traditions likewise look and learn).

But believer or non-believer, take note: when I call Christians who are artist’s to imitate Lafferty’s robust craft and worldview, this is for the good of the whole world, if for no other reason because Christians are going to continue to make art, good or bad. If it has to be from a Christian perspective, don’t we all want some more steep stuff along the lines of Lafferty’s artistic integrity? (It’s a rhetorical question.) I know I appreciate a good Buddhist sermon from Ursula Le Guin or a good atheist sermon from Dan Simmons, because they are skilled and gifted practitioners who give me the gift of story, who respect me enough to weave their worldview deeply into their work and creatively invite me into it with them. As Lafferty does.

Notice this also: Lafferty does often write implicitly or explicitly Christian characters who are ‘of the faith’, who will be part of renewing the world, fighting its demise. But he usually teams them up with doubters and unbelievers (think of believing Paul and doubting Thomas in Past Master; or the secular-liberal members of the Institute of Impure Science and their non-secular-liberal associates who are denied membership because they do not meet the 'minimal decency rule' in Arrive At Easterwine). This is a way forward for us all as well. We can continue to have our hot debate about Origins and Ends and the Meaning-in-the-Middle, but we can love, respect, play, joke, and creatively work together with each other all the while.

This cooperative creativity and world-construction is the only kind of response appropriate to Lafferty by anyone who has read him with any amount of depth or sensitivity. His stories move, thrill, and tickle us, yes, but merely being passively ‘entertained’ or ‘amused’ is just not a live option that these tales present to us.

Lafferty outright challenges us in East of Laughter: who are the next Literary Giants that will write the future of our world? He refuses to let us settle for interloping intellectual wraiths who, pipe-smoking and pipe-dreaming, bat-winged and bat-brained, flap about trying to write the stars right out of the night sky. No, Lafferty’s calling on nothing less than those who will, with intrepid trepidation, prayerfully presume to wield an unwieldy, gigantic, hoary, gory goose-quill pen in an attempt at an appalling and appealing scrawl across the parched parchment that is the tired face of the modern world. Lafferty is calling for nothing less than the New Writers who will, by the aid of grace, attempt, with violent vigour and charity and clarity and humour and humility, to create worlds and characters and scenarios of real power and profundity for the renewal of a full-bodied, full-blooded humanity, so that we might have a fulsome and fine and ferocious and fecund, not a faint and fey and faded and fetid, future.

Who will answer the call?

“Who are you, Atrox, and what do you do?” Leo Parisi asked.

“I am the voice of one writing in the wilderness, Make ready the future world of the

Lord, make straight its paths.”

-East of Laughter, p. 86

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