Reading the Argo Cycle part 2 - Archipelago Ch. 1: Hans & Marie & the Poetry-Eating Squirrels

Well, I've begun reading the last book of the so-called The Devil is Dead Trilogy.  That is, I'm reading More Than Melchisidech Book III: Argo.  I will say this:  whatever the trilogy's ups and downs, strengths and weaknesses, mysteries and marvels and madnesses, it makes me want to re-read not only the trilogy itself but the entirety of Lafferty's oeuvre in light of it.  The Argo Cycle seems to be some kind of metaphysical template or manual or schema by which to better grasp what Lafferty's doing in everything else.  At times, in certain respects, it almost lacks substance in and of itself while seeming to promise to flesh out everything else, like a spirit or soul or ghost that is elusive and ephemeral in itself but utterly animating when inhabiting a body.  Lafferty said that he thought the entirety of his body of work kind of added up to one long unfinished novel that he called A Ghost Story.  The Finnegan/Melchisidech Trilogy (as I'd prefer to call it) and the Argo Cycle more generally seem to be something of the ghostly animus/anima of that Ghost Story.

Though there is some kind of elusive and insubstantial quality to this series in some ways, it nevertheless sparkles and flashes reasonably frequently with fulsome style and imagery and philosophy.  Take the following for example.  I quote the entire passage - which is part 6 of Chapter One of Archipelago (1979), the first book of the trilogy - so that you can see absolutely all that Lafferty's doing and layering in an extended scene like this.  Neil Gaiman, when recently asked what sticks out to him about Lafferty's writing, responded that first of all it is the sentences.  I couldn't agree more.  Even mere clauses within sentences can effervesce, delight, or gore in Lafferty.  That's why I have a whole Twitter account of Lafferty quotes.  I think he works wonderfully at the micro level.  But the following shows how you have to see him at larger, longer levels as well to catch all of his genius.

Hans Schulz is one of the mystical 'Dirty Five', a group of post-WWII army buddies whose lives and times (told in idiosyncratic Lafferty fashion) are the subject matter of this novel.  Each of the guys pairs off with a gal, most of them eventually marrying.  What would young love feel like to the Laffertian mind?  You need wonder no longer.  But this passage is so much more than romantic.   Lafferty's remarkable linguistic and cultural erudition are on full display here, interwoven with several micro tall tales tucked inside a larger one, and rustic local colour (by which enters Lafferty's ubiquitous ecology, in this case flora and fauna).  All this juxtaposes high and low registers very amusingly.  There's also narrative experimentation with voice and structure, an instance of Lafferty's frequently exemplified 'metafictional' habit (long before that word was hot and in a way that's on the opposite end of douchey; it's clever, but it's fun - not boring or snobbish or detached).  There are several wee punchlines to laugh out loud at, as well as the whimsy of the whole segment.  And, of course, there's one preternatural or paranormal aspect very casually asserted in an almost sleight of hand manner.  For my money, this is Lafferty firing on all cylinders.

Hans was in love. He was in love with Marie Monaghan. This had come swiftly to him who usually made up his mind slowly on important things. 

Marie might not have seemed exceptional to anyone else. She had regular, nice features, but her hair was too red and her face was too freckled. She was chubby by contemporary standards, though divine by classical. Hans’ feelings were classical. Marie's eyes were green, but were green eyes classical? Were any of the goddesses green-eyed? You couldn't trust Homer with colors. 

“—my uncle Homer Hochheimer,” it was Marie speaking in Hans’ mind, “he had a fortune but he missed it because he was color-blind. He had a purple cow and he thought she was black. He kept her till she was fourteen years old and then sold her to the butcher. ‘Man, you're throwing away a fortune,’ the butcher told him when the sale was consummated. ‘You've the only purple cow in the world and you've sold her for a pittance. I'll have a million pounds for her,’ and he did.” 

But to the green eyes, this would have to be solved. The paint is gone these two thousand years from the Greek statues that were colored in their prime, but they were still painted when Pausanes had seen them. Did he call any of them green-eyed? How would he call them green-eyed? Not chloros surely. Chloros was light yellow-green. Nobody would have eyes that were chloros. Prasino was a nice green, but was it classical? What was the Greek word for eyes the color of Marie's? In Romany it was sheleno, Gypsy green. And once in French vair, the green they sang: 

Nicolette had eyes of vair,

Something, something, yellow hair— 

But vair had become vert with the disintegration of the French soul, and it was no longer the green of the Troubadors: ignorant wise men even said that vair was a shade of gray. 

The Blessed Virgin was red-headed and green-eyed in early Flemish Annunciations. Witches were green-eyed. Lilith who was before Eve was a witch and therefore green-eyed. This would give primogeniture to the green-eyed women of the world. 

Belloc wrote the only stanza to green eyes, this little bit out of all the game-legged verses that have walked on anapest and pentameter on all the lesser subjects. 

“—Belloc? I mean my uncle Biloxi Brannagan. They called him that because he went ashore then. From his window he could see the top of an old piling and he thought it was the mast of his ship. ‘There's no hurry, she's still there,’ he would say. My aunt Gertrude, she's a Biloxi girl, never did tell him any different. He's still there. He never did catch his ship.’ Marie talked so in Hans’ mind as he waited for her at the Lotus Eaters. Then she came in person and sat down with him. 

“What are you doing, little Hans?” she asked. 

“I'm writing a poem about you. You can't see it. You won't scan and you won't rime; that's the trouble with you.” 

“Shakespeare had the same trouble, Hans dear.” 

“He did not.” 

“My uncle Shakes Pearson had the same trouble. We called him that because he always had them. He entered a jingle contest once. It was put on by a chewing tobacco company and he had to write a limerick. He drank pop-skull whisky and he shook all the time. His verse would go like this:—‘There was an old lady from Gacko—Who doted on chewing tobacco—’, then Shakes would get the shakes after so much effort and have to go after more pop-skull. When he got back the squirrels would have eaten what he had written. They lived so far back in the boondocks that they didn't have any paper and he wrote on bark with oak-ball juice.” 

In the company of Shakes Pearson, Hans did not feel so incompetent, so he let go with one of the stanzas he had written: 

“The muses sang when Eve was small,

And they were but diurnal;

But you were long before them all,

For you're at least eternal.” 

“You make me seem old,” said Marie. “Am I the eternal one? Well, Shakes would get another piece of bark and start again: ‘There was an old farmer who grew it—And never had leisure to chew it—’, then Shakes would get them again and go off for more pop-skull. And when he came back it would be as before: the squirrels would have eaten his epic.” 

So Hans read again: 

“I dreamed of you before we met,

I never was without you;

And all the masters praise you yet,

For they all wrote about you.” 

“I thought they were referring to me, Hans, but I didn't know that anyone else knew. Well, Shakes would start another one (all our family are very persevering): ‘There was an old farmer named Glugg—who was always cutting a plug—He'd whittle and whittle—till it was too little—’, then Shakes would go off for more of the same before he got to the last line.” 

So Hans read more boldly: 

“But here the brighter pearls are strung

And rings for all your fingers:

I'll sing you as you ne’er were sung

By all the Minnesingers.” 

“That's nice, Hans. So Shakes would start another one: ‘When I was a cocky young Jacko—we made our own chewing tobacco—We chopped up old sacks—and boots and boot-jacks—’, then he'd go off for more of it, and what do you think the squirrels did to his opus while he was gone?” 

“Ate it up. We poets have a hard time.” He continued: 

“And though the globe become a shell

You still will be the leaven,

And I'll remember you in Hell

When you forget in Heaven.” 

“That's Swinburnish, which is the next thing to swinish, and untrue, dear,” said Marie. “We shall be together: I have decided that. Well, Shakes killed himself. His is the only blot on our escutcheon. And the only note he left said ‘Miriam’ (I'm name after her), ‘You've got to do something about those damned squirrels.’ She never did know what he was talking about or why he killed himself. I'm the only one in our family who understands these things.” 

“Why didn't the squirrels eat that last note too?” 

“Naturally when they read it they were frightened and ran away.” 

“Are there squirrels in Australia, Marie?” 

“Not that I know of. Are you trying to trap me? If I'd said wallabies I'd have had to explain what a wallaby was. And besides, wallabies can't read, so there goes the story. I have a letter from Loy to Finnegan. I stopped by the house to kiss the boys good morning. They weren't up yet so I brought their mail to them.” This was the letter: 

Cambeltown, New South Wales

Thursday, February 11, 1943 

John Solli:

Dear Finnegan: 

Margaret and I will be in town tomorrow. If you haven't any more girls, we'll see you and have a big picnic. And if you do have some more girls, bring them, and we'll get two more boys and join you and Marie and Hans. And bring the other Dirty Fiver that we didn't meet and we'll get him a girl too. No news. The garden I planted in November is all weeds. Papa wouldn't hoe the damned thing. But he killed the fatted calf for his prodigal daughter yesterday. 

Meet us at the train at 7:45 AM (yes, I said AM). I know that you think it's decadent to get up in the morning and I know that you're right. But it isn't necessary that you be wide awake; I like you better the way you are. 

Margie says to tell you that she loves you too. She wants you too now. She switched to you just because I did. But tell Vincent we both still love him also. We love Hans, we love Marie, we love your friend Casey whom we haven't yet met. Meet us tomorrow. 

Love— Loy Larkin

Me too— Margaret Murphey

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The passage is somewhat the classic 'I wish he'd stop writing verses about me long enough to kiss me' act, but it also shows a male-female dynamic that Lafferty visits again and again in the couples that frequently cross his fiction, where the man is a bit of an over-theoretical windbag while the woman is wry, witty, insightful, sensible, and cheeky.  Lines that sneak up on me and make me smile, chuckle, or guffaw (thanks especially to what precedes them) are:  'Hans’ feelings were classical'; 'Something, something, yellow hair'; 'I thought they were referring to me, Hans, but I didn't know that anyone else knew'; 'We poets have a hard time'; and, of course, 'Naturally when they read it they were frightened and ran away'.  And what a wonderful phrase: 'out of all the game-legged verses that have walked on anapest and pentameter'.  The ending of their conversation exemplifies Lafferty's recurring investigation of what makes storytelling storytelling, tall and otherwise.  And I left in the transition to the letter because that's how Lafferty ends his numbered chapter segment, creating yet more formal stylisation, appending a written personal letter to a scene of dueling love poetry and tobacco jingles and tall yarns all nested inside a dialogue that was preceded by a linguistic rhapsody.  I'm almost glad that the entire novel's not written this way.  It might (might) be too much.  But there are plenty more interwoven experimentations and styles and registers in the remainder.  To more of which we'll turn next time.

Reading the Argo Cycle - part 1

There's lots of Lafferty news afoot, but I'm not up for cataloguing it all in a Lafferty News post today. Most of you will probably be aware of it anyway.  Regardless, I will come back to that in a different post on a different day.  As you can see, with post-graduate work underway I have a lot less time to blog.  So with a spare moment today I'm going to talk about the Lafferty I've been reading.

I managed to get hold of physical editions of the complete Argo Cycle or Argo Mythos (well, all the novels anyway - the short stories in the cycle I only have piecemeal in print and the rest electronically).  This includes the so-called The Devil is Dead Trilogy:  Archipelago (1979), The Devil is Dead (1971), and More Than Melchisidech (1992).  The last novel of the trilogy was released in three volumes:  Tales of Chicago, Tales of Midnight, and Argo, each amply illustrated with some pretty wonderful art from Ward Shipman.  And there is one standalone novel in the cycle, Dotty (1990), which I was also lucky enough to obtain.  Except for The Devil is Dead, which was released widely as a mass market paperback back when Lafferty was actually recognised as a giant among his peers, the rest is in very limited small press editions that are all but unavailable now, and what is available normally costs more than I'll probably ever be able to afford.  But a very generous long time reader of this blog, whom I hadn't corresponded with before, gave me a great, affordable deal on all five books.  I was able to move on the kind offer thanks to the generosity of those who contributed to my PhD fundraising campaign, which exceeded its goal.

So, I've now read Archipelago, and cracked straight into The Devil is Dead to try to get the feel of reading the books as a series.  This is my second read of Devil (the first was over a decade ago) and I'm nearly finished.  I'll then head straight into the first volume of Mechisidech:  Tales of Chicago.  I hope to do a number of posts on Archipelago, with copious quotes since it's unavailable to most Lafferty fans out there.

First impressions:  the opening made me think this was going to be Lafferty's Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.  But after a handful of fairly dense pages, the novel settles into a more straightforward style, if not a conventional narrative.  Here's how Chapter One, 'In a Southern City', begins:

All this begins in a southern city and at nine o’clock in the morning, the same hour at which the world was made. It was a Thursday when originally man was not. 

Indeed, in these latter days there were few people in the streets and not many in the pubs. But beer was available (barley and hops had been made on the third day), and the morning had a freshness as in the earliest weeks of the world, as the older people remember them. A fast wind was driving the clearing clouds, and the pavements were wet. (When the world was first made it was as though it had just rained.) 

The first man in the world was drinking the first beer. He was Finnegan (not in name, but in self), and he looked at himself in the bar mirror. He saw for the first time that first face, and this was his appearance: he had a banana nose, long jumpy muscles along cheek and tempora, and a mouth in motion. He was dark and lean, like a yearling bull. His eyes had a redness that suggested a series of stormy days and nights, were not previous days and nights impossible. He was a little more than half Italian and a little more than half Irish, as was Adam his counterpart in a variant account. 

His mind was clear but not of a pattern. He was rootless and renegade. A moment before this, he had been in the Garden. Then he raised his eyes from the drink. The Garden was gone, and he was in the middle of the World. Finnegan looked at the World with new-made eyes, and he doubted that he would ever find a place in it.

It makes me feel as if Lafferty is signalling that he's setting up a very epic work in both narrative and philosophical scope.  The book of Genesis from the Hebrew canon is, of course, a key 'intertext' here. But there is a deep sense of amnesia and cyclical recurrence not found in the founding narrative of the Bible.  This is very much a post-creation scenario, in the thick of an old and weary world, and yet the sheer freshness of the Genesis account is intruding in the introduction to this strange man Finnegan.  The antidiluvian world feels as if it were there just yesterday; the Garden of Eden has just slipped from view as Finnegan looks up from his drink.  To see this fallen world as suddenly appearing from its unfallen state only a moment before is certainly to see it 'with new-made eyes'. Even though I've heard that Lafferty was very much not a fan of James Joyce, it's hard not to hear echoes of the 'riverrun' opening of Finnegans Wake here.  They're either totally unintentional resonances, showing like minds in spite of themselves, or it's Lafferty taking on Joyce directly to somehow combat and/or subvert him if he was indeed no fan.

At any rate, this opening filled me with wonder as well as the obvious confusion and tension it exhibits, especially with this man who already doubts he'll ever find a place in the world as it is. (The physical description of Finnegan is wonderful too.)  The sense of dialectic continues:

But he was not alone. He had a companion named Vincent. Vincent, however, was neither rootless nor renegade. His mind, not so clear not so deep as that of Finnegan, did have a pattern. He had not known the Garden. He was born in the World, and he would always have a place in it. 

“In principio,” said Finnegan, “creavit Deus masculum et feminam, that is to say, God made the first pair a man and a woman.” 

“But the earliest stories always begin ‘There were these two guys in a bar,’ ” Vincent contradicted. “I'd say it in Latin if I knew how.” 

“The two versions cannot be reconciled, and I worry about it,” Finnegan said. “But, every time the world begins, it does begin with two young men in a pub. All things else are subsequent to this.”

Two guys in a bar vs. 'male and female he created them'.  Interesting.  And funny.  Lafferty is, of course, doing his usual exploration of just how storytelling and stories work.  How do you start them? How do you do a Beginning, when really everything's always already in the Middle?  He seemed genuinely obsessed, vexed, and impassioned by how narratives work and his whole career seems to be a philosophical exploration and explication of the puzzle, Lafferty's exploration itself being in story form since this was the natural apparatus with which he was endowed.

But after this enigmatic introduction things start to get a little more pedestrian.  This is appropriate, of course, for Lafferty wants the mundane world to take over this supra-mundane entrance into it.  The tale transitions nicely this way:

Beer before breakfast, and you'll have sudden luck all day. Toohey's, Tooth's, K. B. Lager, the same beers they had in Paradise: it hadn't all been a dream. The boys left the pub but they didn't leave the pubs; there were many of them to visit.

After this the tale is one of war buddies playing drinking pranks in their time off.  Then it moves episodically to the events of the war buddies leaving the war and returning home, and then their lives back in the States.  We'll come to that in time.  But suffice it to say that many more moments of philosophy, etymology, and philology, peppered with some wonderful moments of myth and folklore, feature throughout the ostensibly mundane main narrative.

Before concluding this post I want to note that moving in to The Devil is Dead was very much an experience of moving into a very different kind of narrative.  Archipelago is a rather meandering account of the lives of five friends (the Dirty Five) and their associates, somewhat centred on the task of theological zine-making - yep!  Whereas Devil is a tight, fast-paced adventure narrative through and through.  Archipelago does its philosophising directly in long-ish asides, digressions, and dialogue.  Devil does most of its philosophising through the strange events of the narrative itself and the reeling psychology of those experiencing the events.  Devil does totally work as a standalone. Archipelago is not needed as a 'prequel' or anything like that.  But you do understand a number of the references in Devil more if you've read Archipelago, though knowing the people and events referred to does not necessarily illuminate the central and unresolvable mysteries of Devil.  I'd say Archipelago is crucial to the Lafferty completist or scholar or truly geeked out fan of Lafferty.  Such people would not want to miss some of the passages and themes in Archipelago.  I'd also say it's crucial to understanding the very, very strange and fascinating character of Finnegan (as I'm sure the rest of the cycle will prove to be as well).  In fact, that's my favourite aspect of Archipelago on this first go:  further insight into Finnegan, one of Lafferty's greatest creations I'm beginning to think. Archipelago doesn't always follow Finnegan's POV or life.  He's off stage for a lot of it.  But when it does feature him it's always fascinating and illuminating, at the same time only deepening the mystery of just what or who he is.

More to come.

(photos by my wife, who also supportively suggested I spend the overflow of funding on rare books - the gal's a keeper!)

Another brief short story review - 'The Wagons' (1959)

Cross-posted here:  http://www.ralafferty.org/works/stories/the-wagons/.

As his first to be published, this story is an incredible start to Lafferty's career.  First published in the New Mexico Quarterly Review, Spring 1959, it is a very 'literary' story that is yet about oral storytelling, especially American Frontier tall tales and Native American myth-making.  It is a sly story that uses lying exaggerations about local ecology to tell truths about the same.  It begins Lafferty's long career of widening his readers' gaze to include so much more detail and depth and layers than we are wont to include.  It is also a very quietly touching story of fathers and sons, of both learning from each other, from what each perspective uniquely brings, especially mature erudition from the older and enthusiastic invention from the younger. Indeed, the story also sets up profound discourses:  between Platonic Forms and Aristotelian minutiae, between the 'scientific' knowledge of the anthropologist and and the 'folk wisdom' of the 'native', and so on.

'The Wagons' deserves to be widely known and would make a good introduction to Lafferty's work for general readers.  It could very easily be included in a Norton Anthology of American Literature or the like.  

For more (and better) insights on this story, see http://ralafferty.tumblr.com/post/51625679547/32-the-wagons. 

Globular Narratology (and glimmerings of a case for the greatness of Lafferty's late works)

'The insoluble problem for any narrator is to express the perfect sphere by means of a straight line, or even a shaggy sphere by a crooked line. For any subject or happening is globe-shaped, or at least glob-shaped, of some solidity and substance. And any narration must have sequence, which is line.

But why narrate spheres? Why strive for such an ideal or ideated form? Surely there are other shapes more curious, more open, more pregnant, though pregnancy does tend toward the spherical. There are other shapes more varied. Why not narrate saddles or quarries?  What kind of saddles, then?

Dromedary saddles, I suppose.  They're the closest thing to the shape of it.'

-R. A. Lafferty, Arrive At Easterwine (1971), Chapter Eleven (attributed to the fictional work Ermenics of Shape by the fictional character Audifax O'Hanlon)

For years this has been one of my go-to passages on the craft and puzzle of writing and storytelling. In the scheme of Lafferty's novel I think it takes on cosmic and ontological significance as well.  But in regard to narration it speaks of a universal puzzle that all storytellers must confront.  Few perhaps have pursued it as rigorously as Lafferty did.  I think this is why his narrations can be so notoriously (yet delightfully) difficult (not least among them Arrive At Easterwine!).

Not all of his stories are narrationally difficult, of course.  As one commenter on this blog aptly put it: Lafferty wrote the 'storiest of stories'.  Some of them positively hum and buzz with taut style and plot and the reader happily trips down the paragraphs to the usually wham-bang ending.  But let's be honest, Lafferty also wrote some utterly brain-melting narratives:  wildly and joyously baffling novels like Easterwine as well as Not To Mention Camels and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney. And, of course, there are the woollier, idea-drenched and/or structurally experimental short stories like 'Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies' or 'Rivers of Damascus' or 'The Man Who Walked Through Cracks' or 'St Poleander's Eve' or 'Inventions Bright and New'.

Lafferty himself admitted in an interview that he wrote 'choppy novels', but I think that was due as much to the unwavering integrity with which he genuinely tried to 'narrate a sphere' (or a saddle or quarry for that matter) as to any lack of skills or intuition he may have suffered as regards traditional notions of plot and so on.  (And just as is the case with the short stories, there are examples of novels that, for me at least, flow quite well - e.g. Space Chantey, The Reefs of Earth, The Devil Is Dead - even if what they narrate can be fairly mind-bending or mystifying.)

In some of the later and seemingly crazier-than-ever novels, Andrew Ferguson (in an unpublished paper) makes a very convincing case that Lafferty was stepping out into the true and un-plied innovation he had been calling for in his works from earlier decades.  From what I've read of those novels - mostly published in the 1980s - I couldn't agree more.  Among these too is showcased (intentionally) 'choppier' and more 'flowing' instances:  East of Laughter being an example of the former and Annals of Klepsis and Aurelia being examples of the latter.  They strike me as the fruit of a very mature and very exciting, if inevitably disorienting (because of the sheer newness of the endeavour), phase of an author finally truly stretching forth into the great work of his life.  (Pace Webster, who's excellent and engaging article I already took issue with when I 'fisked' it here.)  If illness (and at last, alas, the weight of obscurity) had not diminished him in the 1990s, I think we would have seen Lafferty write his final and fullest masterpieces.  But even the beginnings of that late and mature work are powerful statements to behold - if we have ears to hear.

In my opinion, the way to obtain such ears is to very carefully listen to the early works and follow where they lead.  That is the huge mistake I think so many of even Lafferty's ardent admirers make. They were fond of his 60s and early 70s stuff and revel only in that era and fail to see how those very works are paving the way for later greatness.  For probably a very long time to come, our best guide to grasping how these early works set us up for later works is Andrew Ferguson.  Start with his Master's Thesis 'Lafferty and His World' - don't worry about the passages of this paper that get incredibly dense with theory and jargon.  They lighten up again and bear a lot fruit when he starts analysing specific stories by Lafferty.  Then proceed to his mesmerisingly informative and insightful blog:  Continued On Next Rock.  Pay close attention, stay tuned in.  Beyond that, all one can do is pray for the day some sane and just publisher eventually gives Andrew the go ahead to write Lafferty's biography (I've seen a sample - it's gonna blow us away), and when that happens you'll see what I mean.  Our understanding of Lafferty is gonna go interstellar.  We'll still be mere half-conscious mortals plumbing infinities, but we'll be far better off than we are at present, trying as we are to see a mosaic from too close, lacking vantage and vista.

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!

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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)