A Prelude to Lafferty's Weirder Tales

I want to review Lafferty's short story 'For All Poor Folks At Picketwire' (1975) next, but I feel compelled to try to get this off my chest first.  It's probably completely unnecessary for a lot of readers, but it's something that puzzles and intrigues me.  Feel free to demur from or expand on the view expressed below.

Since I first started publicly writing about Lafferty in 2009, I've claimed that Lafferty is weird, odd, strange, experimental, and bizarre in a way that the first-time reader is just not going to expect. Nothing will have prepared you for how Lafferty goes about being offbeat, even 'crazy'.  I know that people often hear about 'the Lafferty madness' (as the likes of Harlan Ellison and Samuel Delany called it when Lafferty's fiction emerged on the scene in the 1960s) and they understandably think of the experimentations of the likes of Captain Beefheart perhaps, or the paranoid but fascinating open and subversive universe of the likes of Philip K. Dick perhaps.  Or you name it.  Whatever your background makes you think of when you hear the claim that someone is utterly original and 'insane' and the like, that thing you're thinking of, it's almost guaranteed to not be an apt comparison or preparation for Lafferty.

Even as I say all this - that no one is like Lafferty, nothing can prepare you for his brand of weirdness - you're getting the wrong idea!  Why?  Because when we hear such encomiums we generally think of one of two things (or both).  We think either of something crazy in a really cool and 'hip' sort of way, something experimentally-minded college students might get into maybe, or something a well-(if-defiantly-)dressed 'alternative' crowd of one variety or another might champion. I get that.  I was a teenage punk rocker and never grew out of it.  When I think of crazy and original, I think of bands like The Birthday Party or The Fall (or in an alterna-metal direction, Mike Patton and his projects Mr. Bungle and Fantomas).  If you're thinking speculative literature, you might think Neil Gaiman or China Mieville.  If film, maybe David Lynch or the wackier and wilder aspects of the Coen brothers or Tarantino.  But Lafferty's work is not (or not immediately) like all this, not soaked in these kinds of aesthetic assumptions and expressions.

On the other hand, the 'crazy-original' claims might make us think of really 'out there' bizarro examples like maybe Daniel Johnston or the aforementioned Captain Beefheart.  If film, then maybe the likes of Terry Gilliam or John Waters.  This impression is closer to the mark.  But in most of these cases there can still be an aura of (usually countercultural) 'coolness' about the weirdness.

Now don't get me wrong.  I often exclaim 'Cool!' in response to what I read in Lafferty.  But I mean it the way I meant it as a kid in the 80s - an expression of sheer enthusiasm for something that strikes me as in some way excellent.  Not as a confirmation of something's 'hipness', something's trendy now-ness, even by 'alternative' or 'indie' standards.  Nor do I mean to deny that Lafferty is deeply countercultural in his own way (indeed, he's probably better called counter-ontological so reality-bending is his work and perspective).  Lafferty was indeed what he called a 'queer fish', swimming crankily but joyously against the mainstream.

I also don't want my denial that Lafferty is 'cool' to give the impression that his weirdness is 'geeky'. Lafferty isn't comic-con weird either.  Lafferty can, in certain respects, fit in both worlds - the geeks and the hipsters.  Yet he is a misfit in both as well.  That was seen to be the case when the 1960s/70s New Wavers of U.S. science fiction - Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, and the like - championed Lafferty.  They never lost their love of Lafferty's work, but they eventually didn't know how to categorise him as he was clearly not of or in the fold.  All in all, Lafferty is by turns too literary, too genre, too experimental, too dark, too comic, or too difficult for various groups.  That's why his work has tended to generate its own category of literature (what Theodore Sturgeon called 'lafferties') and its own following of Laffertyans or Laffertians, a diverse fan base comprised of all schools and allegiances, the unifying commonality being that they are struck and captured by Lafferty's unique genius.

So what should you think of when you hear that Lafferty is 'a genius, an oddball, a madman' and 'a genre in himself' (Neil Gaiman) or that 'Lafferty has the power which sets fires behind your eyeballs' (Zelazny) or that Lafferty 'bends or breaks normal story restrictions apparently at will' and has 'the most unfettered imagination' (Terry Carr) or that 'Lafferty is fun, sophisticated, and utterly insane', 'a madman, a wild talent' (Reader's Guide to SF)?

Well, maybe start by thinking of the likes of Amos Tutuola or Black Elk.  Like them, Lafferty is a native primal force, an individual that grows out of the fecund soil of an ancient communal worldview and speaks the cosmic magical vision of a people, stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, sure, but overflowing with more than what one individual could ever imagine or convey.  Yet Lafferty had more than one soil to grow out of - not only his family's Irish-Catholic soil, but also the Southwestern American Frontier and the lives and lore of his Native American neighbours.  If you cut Lafferty, he bleeds all three.

Further complicating this possible resonance, Lafferty was classically educated in Augustinian and Thomist traditions, well-read in history and theology and philosophy, knowledgable of the hard and soft sciences, abreast of some major 20th-century developments in thought such as Jungian psychology and Teilhardian cosmology. Lafferty was a largely self-taught but impressive polymath. So his weirdness is going to be not only primally visionary like Tutuola and Black Elk, but also inevitably book-learned (albeit inclusive of some cranks and conspiracy theorists).  So maybe when you hear about Lafferty's mad experimentation you should be thinking also of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.  Or in a slightly different register, the wildnesses of Chesterton's buoyant dialectics and carnivalisations.   (The weirdest parts of Kafka might be appropriate here too, but minus the unmitigated bleakness.)

Yet Lafferty is even more than the above hybridity of Mystic and Man-of-Letters (+ a pinch of crackpot) suggests, for he also embodies regional and class (Oklahoma and blue-collar) dialects, dictions, and perspectives that liberally salt his visions and sophistications with homespun wit and wisdom.  And these perspectives puncture a whole helluva lot of pomposity and intelligentsia-speak along the way (though they don't foreclose Lafferty's own arcane and sesquipedalian theorisings, which are frequently embedded into his stories).  I suppose Lafferty might be a bit of a Mark Twain in his knowing and humorous use of colloquialism, except that he comes across as more thoroughly from these classes, child of an extended frontier family as he was.  This sincere rusticism is one crucial way in which Lafferty will surprise many a reader expecting The Cool Weird from him.

Now, all that said, once you've encountered and immersed yourself in Lafferty a while, it's not altogether unlikely that you will indeed end up thinking of him as a literary-yet-rustic Beefheart or Lynch, an 'outsider artist' and auteur in one.  And dammit, Lafferty's weirdness is cool!  So utterly cool, what would've made us 80s kids exclaim with approbation:  'Bad!'  And it does get crazy weird and beautifully bizarre and sometimes disturbing.  And its weirdness is deep, because Lafferty, like Lovecraft, is playing for keeps.  This is a cosmic view of things that gets beneath the surface into the ontic architecture of existence.

All right, let's get back to reading these stories one by one.

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.