'Entire and Perfect Chrysolite' (1970) - brief short story review

Cross-posted from here:  http://www.ralafferty.org/works/stories/entire-and-perfect-chrysolite/


'Entire and Perfect Chrysolite' (first appeared in Orbit 6, 1970)

3/5 stars. It's interesting to see that this story was a Hugo and Nebula award nominee. I've always been intrigued by it, but never certain what I thought of it artistically. Still not sure. It's perhaps Lafferty's most overt 'dip' (pun intended) into the idea-space of the Jungian unconscious.

It's fascinating too in its depiction of white and black relations and of Europe/North America to Africa:
“Oh, white people, white people, this is real and this is death,” the black man moaned in agony.
[...]
“Oh, white people on dope, I cannot do this,” the black man moaned. “She is dead. And you joke and drink Green Bird and Bomb, and hoot like demented children in a dream.”

There are some great eco-psychotropic passages, especially of archetypal fauna:
"Now everybody conjure the animals that are compounded out of grisly humor, the giraffe with a neck alone that is longer than a horse, and the zebra which is a horse in a clown suit."
[...]
“Conjure the third of the large monkeys that is dog-faced and purple of arse.”
“We conjure it, we conjure it, but it belongs in a comic strip.”
“Conjure the gentle monster, the okapi that is made out of pieces of the antelope and camel and contingent giraffe, and which likewise wears a clown suit.”
“We conjure it, we conjure it.”

The story is pretty funny too in a brutal sort of way. It's philosophically rich as regards False Perfection (the 'Ecumene' as Laff calls it in this story) and our need for Monstrous Depths to be fully human - but also the danger of those depths if we approach them as shallow modern/postmodern selves pursuing mere pastime:
“That we go no more hungering after strange geographies that are not of proper world! That we seal off the unsettling things inside us!”
“We seal them off, we seal them off,” they chanted.

It's a small thematic coda to some of Lafferty's novels in this regard, such as Past Master, Fourth Mansions, and Serpent's Egg. It would also probably be pretty fascinating to comparatively study alongside Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and some of his African short stories and also in relation to African authors like Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and Amos Tutuola.

I like the story more every time I read it.

[For what it's worth, the only other two reviews I could find of the story on the web are not at all favourable:  The R. A. Lafferty Devotional Page rated it 'lame'  and said:  'People on a ship conjure up a forgotten land -er- Afrika actually. This was actually nominated for some award. Go figure.'  And The PorPor SF & Fantasy Books Blog said:  'another overly artsy title. This story deals with recreational hallucinations and their unpleasant side effects. Lafferty had quite a bit of stature during the New Wave era, but his stories all have aged quite poorly.']

Lafferty as writer of Mystical Slashers

They'd kill the Stutgards first, that very night, with axes.  They'd axe old man Stutgard, and all the blood would run out of his big red neck.  They'd cut off Mrs. Stutgard's head that was round as a pumpkin, and it would roll down to the bottom of the hill and look at you.  They'd kill the Stutgard kids.  It's most fun to kill kids who are just enough bigger than you to make it interesting.

-R. A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968)

What has been a slow-dawning thought for a while now coalesced for me on a walk this morning:  Lafferty wrote slashers.  Once you say it plain and simple like that, you then, of course, have to qualify it to death. But let's leave the qualifications and nuances for another time.  I'm re-reading The Reefs of Earth right now, which is one of Lafferty's blatantly bloodiest tall tales, a backwoods murder-spree told through a loose-fisted science fiction trope (the killers are alien children who look a lot like human children).  But it's not just this famously murderous early novel.  It has occurred to me that almost every one of Lafferty's published novels (and a significant number of his short stories) involves attempted (and eventually successful) murder as a crucial element of the story arc (this is often in the form of politically motivated and often state-sanctioned assassinations).  Such killing all by itself, of course, only nudges these works into the murder mystery or crime story (a genre Lafferty assayed in a number of tales, including some yet-to-be-published novels).  But anyone who has read more than a few Lafferty stories will know full well that he goes way beyond mere depiction of a murder, even a grisly murder.  His tales are often soaked in buckets of blood and gore.

To throw out some of the more conspicuous specimens from his short fiction, there are  'Snuffles', 'Once On Aranea', 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw', 'Thieving Bear Planet', 'Jack Bang's Eyes', 'The Last Astronomer', and 'Happening in Chosky Bottoms'.  (Lesser specimens could include 'Camels and Dromedaries, Clem', 'Name of the Snake', 'The Hole On the Corner', 'The Man Who Never Was', 'Cliffs That Laughed', 'Frog On the Mountain', 'Ride a Tin Can', 'Sky', 'Groaning Hinges of the World', 'Ishmael Into the Barrens', 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire', 'And Mad Undancing Bears', 'Endangered Species', 'Fog in My Throat', 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay', 'The Hand With One Hundred Fingers', 'Thou Whited Wall', 'Splinters', 'The Funny Face Murders', and 'The Ninety-Ninth Cubicle' - each of which depicts grisly death or graphic violence, even if it's not as pervasive as in other stories.)

But it is probably mainly in his novels that one encounters the most gory, slashery stuff.  In fact, those of you who have read the novels can go back and re-read them with this theme in mind.  I think you'll be surprised how much of the bloodshed and killing you may have forgotten.  The quote above from Reefs is one of the tamest samples.  (Okay, I'll add in a nuance here:  a lot of the time it may be more accurate to say that Lafferty practiced a lot of literary gore rather than slasher stuff per se.  There are some really bloody scenes that don't have anything to do with persons murdering other persons - e.g. the wildly gory slaughter of the devil fish in Past Master, or the blood-spattering high-fall deaths from wrestling with God in 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'.  But the depiction of gruesome bloodshed remains central.)

Now why call all this violence 'mystical'?  Lafferty seems to have had a sort of death-vision through which he saw the world in bloody-rosy hues.  I add 'rosy' to that characterisation on purpose.  How does such a bloody-minded author also fill us with so much joy and laughter, sometimes even as we cringe at horrific maiming and death scenes?  It's partly because Lafferty is almost always funny or wry.  He can't write anything it seems, no matter how dark, without at least a wink.  This often means that the more violent and grotesque the matter, the more hilarious (sometimes uncomfortably so) it comes across to us.  So Lafferty's work is grotesque in the comedic and carnival sense.  'I Think I Will Dismember the World With My Hands' is a chapter title in Lafferty's celebrated novel Fourth Mansions (1969) and it could be an artist's statement for Laff.  Andrew Ferguson has argued persuasively that Lafferty's practice of literary dismemberment is an artistic strategy of taking apart the science fiction genre in order to put it back together again 'renewed and revealed' in 'new potentiality' (Lafferty and His World, page 29 and following).

It is very much this and it is also very much more also.  Lafferty's comedic-grotesque slasher fiction is mystical because it exemplifies his deeply held convictions.  Comedy and laughter are huge central worldview categories for Lafferty.  He can't bring himself to flinch from writing bloody murderous horror, but nor can he bring himself to not laugh at it as well - and his laughter is ontological.  He's laughing because he thinks there's something more real than grisly horror and brutal death.  He has probably tricked you into laughing at that level too.

It seems that Lafferty just couldn't see death as termination, not finally.  Death was more of a waystation than a terminal for Lafferty.  Characters (even whole planets and the cosmos itself in Lafferty's stories) go through death on their way to something else.  Sometimes this is pretty jokey and immediate, such as when a just-severed head keeps talking and is placed at the prow of a boat in order to navigate raiders to other villages to pillage ('Groaning Hinges of the World'), or when a group of astronauts are slaughtered by their hosts on a planet only to regain life the next morning and be invited to enjoy the slaughter all over again as the day's entertainment (that's a rough remembrance of a long-ago reading of Lafferty's 1968 novel Space Chantey).

But often, neither narrator nor reader are privy to what-comes-next. Lafferty simply tells us that a resurrection, a new birth, a new creation is probably in the offing thanks to this bloody death we have witnessed--personal, communal, planetary, or cosmic.  He leaves the story open-ended on that score.  It's up to the reader whether she'll participate in the hushed anticipation that Lafferty enjoins, for example, at the end of Past Master (1968), when the narrator asks whether the destruction of the world will result in its rebirth and answers:  'Be quiet.  We hope.'

The carnival hope in Lafferty is not mere slapstick, however, as many of the deaths depicted are quite poignant and tragic ('Ride a Tin Can' is an obvious example; another for me is the intelligent talking elephant in Laff's 1987 novel Serpent's Egg).  Lafferty is aware of the big ask he is making of the reader:  to laugh even through the tears.  Indeed, to laugh in outright defiance of ultimate tragedy and sorrow (see his ending of 'I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows' as one instance of a direct depiction of laughter as subversive resistance - a story that contains amusingly grotesque surgical body-horror as its main trope).

Well, this post is just a first stab (wink) at this theory about Lafferty.  I'll have to come back to it and more thoroughly evidence it for a start - a very fun task if you like totting up and citing deliciously gory scenes. Please let me know what you think.  Agree?  Disagree?  Have you noticed all the bloodshed and if so, what do you make of it?

Related:

Cosmic Horror vs. Cosmic Laughter (Lovecraft vs. Lafferty)

The Rough Account of The Group of Twelve: 3. Solomon Izzersted (excerpt from R. A. Lafferty's East of Laughter)

‘Lector Delectus, if you are standing up, sit down for a moment. If you are alone, call somebody to be with you until a strange thing has been narrated to you. People do sometimes faint in the presence of sheer horror, and in doing so they often injure themselves. And people do sometimes come unhinged if they face diabolism uncompanioned.

‘John Barkley Towntower was born with a dark and sullen growth on his belly. When John was very small, this growth was very, very small, but already it looked like a miniature human head and face. And soon it became clear that the growth was more precocious than was John himself. It learned to talk before John did. At first, for a long time, the only words that it said were “My name is Solomon Izzersted, my name is Solomon Izzersted”, and it spoke this always in a horrible, screaming, rasping voice. This puzzled Mr. And Mrs. Towntower for they had no Solomon and no Izzersted in any of their antecedents.

‘Mrs. Towntower the mother of little John Barkley Towntower (and apparently of the shocking growth that called itself Solomon Izzersted also) tried to kill the growth with a hatchet, but she came closer to killing John Barkley than Solomon. Mrs. Towntower was then incarcerated in Eastern Oklahoma Hospital, and she is still there thirty-eight years later. John Barkley, soon after he learned to talk with his own voice, also learned to do the Solomon Izzersted voice with his own mouth and throat. And he made, when he was four years old and just starting to grade school, the first of the little Solomon Izzersted mannequins which he wore and manipulated on his hand like a glove. And John Barkley and Solomon Izzersted became an established ventriloquist’s act by the time that John was six years old. They played not only in their own school but also children’s hospital wards about town, and for all sorts of parties. And they were good. People, they were good! And they got better. And whenever, in the midst of an act or at another time and place, the furious and ugly little head of Solomon Izzersted himself would pop out through John’s shirt-front and the furious voice would shout “My name is Solomon Izzersted, my name is Solomon Izzersted”, why, it was thought to be only a part of the act, the best part of it. And the other kids, completely enraptured by the display, would cry out to John “How do you do it, how do you do it?” And John would say self-depreciatingly “Oh, it’s just a little trick that I worked up.”

‘(Dismiss your companion now if you wish, Lector. If you have survived, then you have survived the most horrible part of the symbiotic account.)

‘John and Solomon made a sort of truce with each other, though they never felt real fraternal love each for each. John became, by choice, a fat boy (do you remember those early Milky Way candy bars?) and then a fat man; and he kept Solomon pretty well smothered in his rolls of belly fat. But Solomon was a ham, and he loved to act. It was always his live voice now that was central to the act. When John was through college and was established (to the small but intense circle of people who matter) as one of the great mathematicians of the world, Solomon still compelled the arrangement that they should spend six months of each year touring with their fabulous ventriloquist act. People who didn’t understand said that it was a shame that one of the greatest mathematicians in history should have to put on a variety stage act to eke out a living. But that wasn’t the case at all.’

-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1988), pp. 11-13