The Skokie Who Lost His Wife

This is the way they tell it. 

A Skokie heard a Shelni jug flute jugging one night. 

‘That is the voice of my wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I'd know it anywhere.’ 

The Skokie came over the moors to find his wife. He went down into the hole in the ground that his wife's voice was coming from. But all he found there was a Shelni playing a jug flute. 

‘I am looking for my poor lost wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I have heard her voice just now coming out of this hole. Where is she?’ 

‘There is nobody here but myself,’ the Shelni said. ‘I am sitting here alone playing my flute to the moons whose light runs down the walls of my hole.’ 

‘But I heard her here,’ said the Skokie, ‘and I want her back.’ 

‘How did she sound?’ asked the Shelni. ‘Like this?’ And he jugged some jug music on his flute. 

‘Yes, that is my wife,’ said the Skokie. ‘Where have you hidden her? That is her very voice.’ 

‘That is nobody's wife,’ the Shelni told the Skokie. ‘That is just a little tune that I made up.’ 

‘You play with my wife's voice, so you must have swallowed my wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I will have to take you apart and see.’ 

‘If I swallowed anybody's wife I'm sorry,’ said the Shelni. ‘Go ahead then.’ 

So the Skokie took the Shelni apart and scattered the pieces all over the hole and some of them on the grass outside. But he could not find any part of his wife. 

‘I have made a mistake,’ said the Skokie. ‘Who would have thought that one who had not swallowed my wife could make her voice on the flute!’ 

‘It is all right,’ said the Shelni, ‘so long as you put me together again. I remember part of the way I go. If you remember the rest of the way, then you can put me together again.’ 

But neither of them remembered very well the way the Shelni was before he was taken apart. The Skokie put him together all wrong. There were not enough pieces for some parts and too many for others. 

‘Let me help,’ said a Frog who was there. ‘I remember where some of the parts go. Besides, I believe it was my own wife he swallowed. That was her voice on the flute. It was not a Skokie voice.’ 

The frog helped, and they all remembered what they could, but it did not work. Parts of the Shelni could not be found again, and some of the parts would not go into him at all. When they had him finished, the Shelni was in great pain and could hardly move, and he didn't look much like a Shelni. 

‘I've done all I can,’ the Skokie said. ‘That's the way you'll have to be. Where is Frog?’ 

‘I'm inside,’ said Frog. 

‘That's where you will have to stay,’ the Skokie said. ‘I've had enough of both of you. Enough, and these pieces left over. I will just take them with me. Maybe I can make someone else out of them.’ 

That is the way the Shelni still is, put together all wrong. In his wrong form he walks the country by night, being ashamed to go by day. Some folks are startled when they meet him, not knowing this story. He still plays his jug flute with the lost Skokie Wife's voice and with Frog's voice. Listen, you can hear it now! The Shelni goes in sorrow and pain because nobody knows how to put him together right. 

The Skokie never did find his lost wife. 

This is how it is told.

~R. A. Lafferty, "Ride a Tin Can" (1970)

Art (fromthe story's original publication in IF Magazine) by Jack Gaughan.
Image found here: https://archive.org/details/1970-04_IF


What's interesting about isolating this passage (and two other similar passages I recently blogged from this story) is that it shows, simply by virtue of its authentic indigenous voice, how naturally sympathetic Lafferty was with the aboriginal imagination.  These micro-stories genuinely sound like tribal folk tales from around the world.  But, just as interestingly, what isolating such a passage doesn't show is that in this story Lafferty is actually writing overall in the voice of a rather traumatised anthropologist who is watching an indigenous people being wiped completely out. Lafferty shows real knowledge of this 'soft science' in the larger story as well, and of how the researcher on the ground must compete, often unsuccessfully, with larger stronger forces such as the scientific establishment and powerful commercial concerns.  It's a prime example of how Lafferty holds in one head a genuine 'native' sort of perspective as well as that of a 'modern' educated perspective, and one highly sensitive to 'post-colonial' issues at that.  The story is very dark and poignant beneath its rather joyful and rambunctious prose style.  That exuberance is authentic though, not mere style.  It is the joy of the oppressed refusing to die even if their bodies are slain (and eaten!) by the corporate cannibals. The story is grim, and yet this indomitable joy (though it can be silly in some respects, leading even to an undeserved credulity and trust that leads to death) is somehow crucial, a refusal to give the oppressor the very last inch of his conquest - your own bitterness.  That's how it's striking me at the moment anyhow.  It's one of his more complex tales in a way and will require further rumination and analysis.

Laughing Lamentations

Right.  It's obvious I've had almost no time for this blog for some months now, but I've just got to try harder to at least jot down some notes about 'Lafferty theory' as my thoughts develop.  Lafferty's fiction is ever haunting the edges and centres of my imagination and I need to let some of this poltergeistic activity manifest itself in 'print'!

I've just read the first three stories in the collection Golden Gate and Other Stories (1982, Corroboree Press, signed copy, illustrated).  I'm struck afresh with the profound commingling of deep joy and deep sorrow in Lafferty's fiction that I began to try to analyse previously here.  These opening stories are wonderful specimens of consummate storytelling, each framed with certain types of narrational rhythmic repetitions characteristic especially of oral forms (which give his stories a 'live' and performative sort of feel - if you haven't done it yet, you must try reading some of  his tales out loud to family or friends; it adds whole new levels to the experience).

The first story ('Golden Gate') takes place within a week's time, narrating several rollicking evenings of contemporary (1970s) working class folks having a high time at an 1890s style bar and pantomime venue.  Each major scene is a ritual repetition of the build up to and then occurrence of a given weeknight's vaudeville-type melodrama, which is then capped by group singing to round out the night's rowdy fun.

The second story ('Mr. Hamadryad') takes place in semi-secret bars in Africa, North America, and Polynesia during short, apparently incidental, meetings between the narrator and the mysterious man of the title.  Each major scene is a ritual repetition that recounts the bartender's making of the titular character's mixed drink (each one crowned by the cracked egg of a local exotic bird placed in the completed drink still in its shell and sprinkled with the local version of something like sesame seeds).

The third story ('This Boding Itch') takes place within, I think, less than two hours in a near-future America running at a hyper-productive speed similar to Lafferty's celebrated story 'Slow Tuesday Night' and the packed passage of time is marked by the ritual repetition of television news reports at 6:21, 6:41, 7:01, 7:31, 7:46 and so on.

Now, for me, it is its own pleasure just to notate these narrational framing devices.  But they very much serve a purpose in - or rather, evince and exemplify a purpose underlying - all of Lafferty's writing, revealing of the existential wrestlings he performs in his art.  The narrational significance can be seen when noticing and notating the theme of each of these stories.

Each one is about a grave loss to the human world.  More and more I see how much so many of his stories are elegiacs and jeremiads.  He wrote not only comic prophecies with cosmic laughter (jibing and joking as a means of calling his society to very sober choices and actions) but also wrote out-and-out lamentations, beautifully and heart-rendingly chronicling just what it is we've lost, what we've failed to choose, how we've failed to act - or indeed, how those of us who perhaps may have wanted to choose and act have been brutally denied this path by the powers that be.

'Golden Gate' is about an era's loss of a clear Villain or Devil.  'Mr. Hamadryad' is about an era's shift-change from the Monkeys ('scatterbrained, petty, inefficient and human') to the Cats ('clear and clean, and cool and cruel') - i.e. from being bumblingly human to being efficiently inhuman.  'This Boding Itch' is about the grotesquery of Thought Police acid-burning-off the maps of the future on the palms of our hands and the acid-burning-out of the third eyes on our foreheads that understand that map of the future - i.e. being bureaucratically and brutally severed from our own possibility of transcendence into fuller meaning, fuller humanity.

Loss, loss, loss.  When you enter into sympathy with Lafferty's work, you really feel the deep sorrow and bereavement of these stories.  The effect on the reader is a kind of reverse-Sensucht. (This was a term C. S. Lewis employed to describe our piercing sense of 'inconsolable longing' for 'another world'.  So in Lafferty's counterpoise version it perhaps describes something like an 'inconsolable mourning' for a 'lost world' or better, an 'inconsolable stupefaction' due to a 'missed world' that we have somehow sidestepped and 'misplaced'.  Possibly this is relevant to understanding Lafferty's oft-used term 'amnesia' to describe our contemporary cultural state).

But that's not all.  That is not the entirety of the effect on the reader of these jeremiads.  You had also been experiencing a deeply haunting joy intertwining the sadness as you read each story.  Where  does this strange ecstatic (I would say 'eucatastrophic') element come from if the theme is about a terrible loss - indeed, the loss of our humanity, or at least its severe diminishment?  I suggest it comes from the storytelling itself:  mainly the orally organised narration I've briefly described here, the richly (but raucously) poetic and polyvalent ( = multi-level meanings) language, and, of course, the unbounded imagination the author exercises - or rather, a very powerfully bound and bridled imagination that is thereby ferociously empowered to CREATE a kind of elemental fantasy writing that may well have no equal, a scarily deep level of creativity that is submitted to an infinitely wealthy spiritual orthodoxy which liberates and unleashes the artist into a truly primal and preternatural exercise of expression and craft.


Yet, to complete the incarnationally paradoxical sort of miracle that Lafferty's writing is (in the ballpark of the Divine Word becoming Human Flesh), the issuing forth of its nearly unspeakable wonders is never without a firm eye and ear on real people, usually 'salt of the earth' people, everyday folks.  (There are a plenitude of 'tall' characters too, of course, but even they seem to be grown from the rich red clay beneath our feet.)  Indeed, in this regard, Lafferty is probably the wildest, woolliest mixture of the canny and uncanny the world is going to see.  This latter 'ordinary folks' sort of element is, in fact, where a lot of the fun, funny, joking quality comes in.

So, it is by means of these in-woven elements that a certain unspeakable elation seems to be infusing the stories, a pungent gladness that poignantly mixes with the sorrow and bewilderment the stories also exhibit.

(Look, I know that's wordy.  Someday perhaps I'll hone my own writing craft to trim down much of this teetering verbosity.  I do have a poet's free-association imagination and intuitive communicativity, so there is a lot of 'play' in my word-hurling, I admit.  YET, please believe me that I am here combing through my words and trying to sculpt them until they really seem to fit the subject matter.  I believe that if some thought and patience is given to the above paragraphs, it is at least a pseudo-noble, if pitiful, effort at apprehending this great man's craft and artistry.  I mean for it to gain traction, to get purchase, on Lafferty's writing and truly help elucidate it.)

To try to sum it:  there is a very piercing sorrow in many of Lafferty's tales at the level of the theme that the events narrate - namely, loss or diminishment of humanity in a socio-cultural era of the philosophical denial of the human person (following from the era's denial of the divine and/or divine revelation).  And, at the exact same time in the reading experience, there wrestles with this sorrow a piercing joy at the level of the storytelling itself - a wild joy and mystery and even hope comes through in the very narration and events narrated, the mind-and-heart-expanding wonder of experiencing impossibilities tumbling out and over you in exquisite pungency and potency.  (Indeed, I haven't even explored here the weird wonders these particular stories contain - a man in a crowd shooting and killing another man on a stage and only the two them know it has happened; a baboon-faced man with a giant invisible panther for a slave; thirty freshly severed left hands crawling out the windows of a room of thirty people to escape being eaten by dogs bred for the purpose - you get the idea.) This strange commingling of opposed elements makes the stories Laughing Lamentations it would seem, a fitting tag perhaps for the writer who took up Chesterton's mantle as merry maker of paradox and brought the practice to whole new levels.

Indeed, Lafferty has a constant 'double vision' in a variety of ways and themes, so this fits in with that.  (And there's lots of academic literary terminology about 'twinning' and 'doubles' and so on that could be tapped into for theoretical equipment with which to analyse this central aspect of Lafferty.)

If you made it through to here - thank you and congratulations:  you are undisputedly a lusty, robust, stamina-stacked, longsuffering reader!

http://thursdaycitynews.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html

Lafferty and Eucatastrophe

'Fairy tale' is a category I've rarely if ever heard used when discussing Lafferty - tall tales and myths, yes. But not fairy tales. I, however, have been struck with a certain fairy tale quality (mixed with all theother resonances) from my earliest reading of Lafferty's stories. At any rate, I will from time to time reference the following excerpt from Tolkien's seminal essay on the fairy tale and so am posting it here. (The last sentence of the second paragraph is perhaps the most significant in direct relation to what Lafferty is doing.)

But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairystory. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality…

In such stories when the sudden “turn” comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.

–J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’ (1947) – see especially the section toward the end of the paper entitled ‘Recover, Escape, Consolation’

Creative fantasy, because it is trying to… make something new… may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.

-ibid.

The Sylvan Spirit Who Stepped Out of The Laughing Christ

Perhaps the greatest of the forgeries of Denis Lollardy was his Laughing Christ of Creophylus which he had done only short months ago. The original Laughing Christ had disappeared from a villa North-by-East of Rome in the year of the Lord 453. And this one had been dug out of the storied Italian marl-and-loam very near to that place. Was this indeed the original Laughing Christ? people asked.

This was better than the original. Howin was it better? It worked miracles, and there was no tradition of the original statue working them.

What miracles did it work? It cured the melancholy of people who gazed on it. But miracles of that sort are only subjective miracles. It changed the horrible nose of a Roman lady and made it a thing of joy instead of a thing of horror. But really, it had changed the configuration less than a millimetre. And it happened that such was enough to make it into a good-natured and pleasant member instead of a horrible member. It was still not a beautiful nose, but the lady accepted it with pleasure and glee.

Thunderation! The statue did work genuine miracles. And it terrified one man. Denis Lollardy had never been a pious man. He had only been a borderline believing man. But he knew miracles when he saw them, and he was terrified (Oh, but there was joy mixed with the terror also) by the miracles worked by the Laughing Christ that he himself had carved.

A Travelogue of the Laffertian Landscape, part 0 – Reading Lafferty like watching Flaming Lips perform live, says Comedian

Let’s start with something recent, mainstream, and hip (for the kids) to show the ongoing (albeit underground) influence of Lafferty on pop-sub-counter-culture: a comedian from Tulsa, Oklahoma (Lafferty’s home also) likened Lafferty’s fiction to a live gig of the Flaming Lips:

In the New York Times, Jan. 31, 2008, Bill Hader (‘29-year-old actor and comedian of “Saturday Night Live” and “Superbad” fame’) said the following about Nine Hundred Grandmothers, a short story collection by R.A. Lafferty: [The quote you can't read from Neil Gaiman on this picture of the book cover runs: 'The funniest, oddest short stories in this, or any other, world. Lafferty was a madman who made myths, a true American treasure.']

'It all goes back to Neil Gaiman. In the foreword to “Fragile Things,” he wrote that his short story “Sunbird” was his way of trying to write his own R.A. Lafferty story. So I found “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” and it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before. It’s very blue-collar science fiction – all the familiar tropes of people going to outer space and to other planets. It’s hilarious, incredibly funny and at the same time it’s insanely dark. You get the feeling like it’s a guy just writing to amuse himself: “I don’t care if any of this makes sense, but I want to see weird stuff happen.” One of his stories starts off, “He began by breaking things that morning.” There’s a short story called “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” and it’s just about this little girl who’s super strong, running around, picking things up. You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something. It’s so incredibly Tulsa. You get that feeling when you see a Flaming Lips show. It’s not like we’re dark and hurt and twisted. It’s like, “I’ve got blood on my face – come on, y’all, this is awesome.”'

Let me just single out some of the sentences there as they so aptly sum up Lafferty’s work:

It’s hilarious, incredibly funny and at the same time it’s insanely dark.

You get the feeling like it’s a guy just writing to amuse himself: “I don’t care if any of this makes sense, but I want to see weird stuff happen.”

You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something.

And of course, the hilarious kicker:

You get that feeling when you see a Flaming Lips show. It’s not like we’re dark and hurt and twisted. It’s like, “I’ve got blood on my face – come on, y’all, this is awesome.”

It’s always good to hear someone use the word ‘joy’ in describing Lafferty. There’s dark humour, light humour, gentle humour, acidic humour, crankiness, generosity, prophetic insight, philosophical speculation, bizarreness, wildly warped physics and psychics, bloodshed, charm, ordinary friendship, cosmic conflict, and much more. But to miss the abiding joy underscoring so much of it is a big and disastrous miss. In this connection Lafferty’s more famous science fiction contemporary, Roger Zelazny, is often quoted:

Lafferty has the power which sets fires behind your eyeballs. There is warmth, illumination, and a certain joy attendant upon the experience. He’s good.

I’ll talk in subsequent posts about the fact that ‘you feel like it’s about something’. Hope this begins to whet some appetites. Next: some brief reasons why this is worth writing and reading before we get into the discussion proper.

Bonus: here’s a snippet of what the above-mentioned Neil Gaiman (English author of science fiction and fantasy short stories and novels, graphic novels, comics, and films, notably the 2007 films Beowulf and Stardust) says about Lafferty (from the obituary in the Washington Post, April 4, 2002):

He was a genre in himself, and a Lafferty story is unlike any story by anybody else: tall tales from the Irish by way of Heaven, the far stars and Tulsa, Oklahoma.