'There were also - hold it, hold it!': R. A. Lafferty's Object-Opulent Ontology

One of the things I'll be looking at in my dissertation on Lafferty is how he evinces a wide-angle and deeply layered view of physical existence similar to that advocated by a recent philosophical movement known as 'object-oriented ontology' (OOO).  Graham Harman's writings on OOO, for example, are often replete with rhapsodic lists of non-human objects, a vivid reminder of the physical surfaces and entities that surround, uphold, and impinge on every one of us during every single second of every single day.  Lafferty's writing has a habit of frequently and lavishly enumerating such layered lists as well.  His story 'And Read the Flesh Between the Lines' (1974) contains the longest instance of this I have encountered so far.  The passage lasts for over two pages and it is one of my favourites.  It's too long to quote in totality in my dissertation, so I want to share it here. 

As the tale opens, there is a rumble in a room over Barnaby Sheen's garages, at Sheen's residence in Lafferty's native Oklahoma.  But before we get to the source of that rumble, Lafferty dishes out a historical feast of artifacts, and even the smells of previously occupying artifacts, with his characteristic erudition.  (And he slips in a line about something 'almost-ape', which will become the subject of the story.) 

The sense of deep (even though relatively recent) history Lafferty induces is poignantly nostalgic, quirky, and full of wonder.  It puts me in touch with my own boyhood moments spent overwhelmed and delighted in time-cluttered garages, rooms, attics, and the like, and of times with boyhood pals reading comic books and pursuing our hobbies.  And it reminds all of us what an endless array of overlapping objects and their 'remnants' accompany our human life.  Indeed, I suspect Lafferty would say that so-called 'inanimate' objects are a lot more animate than we think.  See, for example, his story 'Symposium' (1973).  And this would be in some measure of agreement with OOO theory.  To Lafferty, we are not alone - in this object-opulent sense as in others.  Life is full, even of 'non-living' things. 

Let’s hear a little about this room, then.

            In the time of Barnaby Sheen’s grandfather, who came out here from Pennsylvania at the first rumor of oil and who bought an anomalous “mansion,” this was not a room over the garages, but over the stable and carriage house.

            It was a hayloft, that’s what it was; an oatloft, a fodderloft.  And a little corner of it had been a harness room with brads and hammers and knives and needles as big as sailmakers’ needles, and a cobbler’s bench, and spokeshaves (for forming and trimming singletrees), and neat’s-foot oil, and all such.  The room, even in its later decades, had not lost any of its old smells.  There would always be the perfume of timothy hay, of sweet clover, of little bluestem grass and of prairie grass, of alfalfa, of Sudan grass, of sorghum cane, of hammered oats and of ground oats, of rock salt, of apples.  Yes, there was an old barrel there that would remember its apples for a hundred years.  Why had it been there?  Do not horses love apples for a treat?

            There was the smell of shorts and of bran, the smell of old field tobacco (it must have been cured up there in the jungle of rafters), the smell of seventy-five-year-old sparks (and the grindstone that had produced them was there, operable yet), the smell of buffalo robes (they used them for lap robes in wagons and buggies).  There was a forge there and other farrier’s tools (but they had been brought up from downstairs no more than sixty years ago, so their smell was not really ancient there).

            Then there were a few tokens of the automobile era, heavily built parts, cabinets, tools, old plugs, old oil smell.  There were backseats of very old cars to serve as sofas and benches, horns and spotlights and old battery cases, even very old carbide and kerosene headlights.  But these were in the minority:  there was not so much room for a room over the garages as for a room over the stables.

            There was another and later odor that was yet very evocative:  it could only be called the smell of almost-ape.

            And then there were our own remnants somewhat before this latter thing.  This had been a sort of club room for us when we were schoolboys and when we were summer boys.  There were trunks full of old funny papers.  They were from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe, The Kansas City Star, the Chicago Tribune—those were the big-city papers that were hawked in our town, and our own World and Tribune.  There were a few New York and Boston and Philadelphia funny papers also.  And the funnies of the different papers were not nearly so uniform as they later became.

            There were the comparatively more recent comic books.  We had been older then, almost too old for such things.  Yet there were a few thousand of them, mostly the original property of Cris Benedetti and John Penandrew.

            There was the taxidermy of George Drakos:  stuffed owls, snakes, barn swallows, water puppies, mountain boomers, flying squirrels, even foxes and wildcats.  And there were the dissections (also by Drakos) of frogs, of cat brains, of fish, of cow eyes, and many other specimens.  The best of these (those still maintaining themselves in good state) were preserved in formaldehyde in Pluto Water bottles.  Pluto Water bottles, with their bevel-fitted glass corks and wire-clamped holders, will contain formaldehyde forever:  this is a fact too little known.  (Is Pluto Water still in proper history, or has it been relegated out?)

            There were the Lepidoptera (the butterfly and night-moth collections) of Harry O’Donovan, and my own aggregations of rocks and rock fossils.  And there were all the homemade radios, gamma-ray machines, electrical gadgets generally, coils, magnet wire, resistors, tubes, of Barnaby Sheen.

 

            There were also—hold it, hold it!  If everything in that room were listed, there would not be books enough in the world to contain it all (there were even quite a few books in there).  There would be no limit to the remnants, not even to the remnants of a single day.

'Today, I wonder why I didn't simply do it' - Michael Bishop reminisces about R. A. Lafferty

There are three professional and critically acclaimed science fiction/fantasy authors that I know of now who have trepidatiously attempted to write what Theodore Sturgeon called 'a lafferty'. (Sturgeon predicted, in his introduction to Lafferty's story 'Quiz Ship Loose' in Chrysalis 2, that 'some day the taxonomists, those tireless obsessives who put labels on everything, will have to categorize literature as Westerns, fantasies, romances, lafferties, science fiction, mysteries….')

Neil Gaiman's 'Sunbird' (collected in Fragile Things), Gene Wolfe's 'Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?' (collected in Starwater Strains) and Michael Bishop's 'Of Crystalline Labyrinths and the New Creation' (collected in Brighten to Incandescence) are each a valiant effort.  I find all three authors to have plenty of Laffertian serum in their writerly bloodstreams when they write their own original and excellent yarns.  And while I do find all three's attempts at writing lafferties to be entertaining and amusing, ultimately the pastiches (or whatever you want to call them) are not really as powerful as these writers' own stuff, when they're letting their obvious love of Lafferty well up from hidden depths without any conscious effort.  (I reviewed Bishop's excellent early novel Stolen Faces here.) But as one who has myself, though not at all a professional, attempted to write a few lafferties of my own, and who has similarly found Lafferty's influence put to better use at a welling-up unconscious level, I heartily admire their chutzpah - and I know something of the fun and frustration they had doing it.

At any rate, I only recently discovered that I had a nice non-fiction piece about Lafferty by Michael Bishop in my possession.  At the back of Bishop's aforementioned collection, he reminisces about trying to write his lafferty.  Gaiman and Wolfe expressed similar misgivings and ambivalences about their own attempts as you hear Bishop expressing here (though Bishop has had the chance to go back and correct a lot of what he felt was wrong with his).  But what's special here, beyond Bishop's encomium of Laff's writing (and it's nice to also hear a little appreciative shout out to Lafferty fans trying to keep his memory alive), is Bishop's personal reminiscence of he and his wife seeing Lafferty in person at a conference, which closes the passage.  If you are a true Lafferty fanatic, I challenge you not to choke up a little bit.  Writes Michael Bishop:


"Of Crystalline Labyrinths and the New Creation" owes everything but its original maddening length to that cunning fantasist and oversized leprechaun, R. A. Lafferty.  When Virginia Kidd, then my agent, sent it to Robert Silverberg, a Lafferty admirer and the editor of the top-flight hardcover anthology series New Dimensions, Silverberg winced and called it a "stunt."  Roy Torgeson, a Lafferty admirer and the editor of the second-tier paperback anthology series Chrysalis, proved more receptive, or more gullible.  He bought the story at almost twice its new wordage, ran it in the final spot in Chrysalis 7, and declared me in his introduction the author of the "only genuine lafferty ever written by anyone other than 'The Man' himself" and as "a genius... of sorts." (Punch of sorts.)  In 1979, out of respect for a writer now shamefully neglected, I had written my so-called lafferty in logorrheic high spirits, but what it really needed was a ruthless blue-penciling. Twenty-two years later, I've given it one.

Not long after I wrote the foregoing paragraph, Ray Lafferty died - on Monday, March 18, 2002, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.  Although he allegedly stopped writing twenty years ago, Lafferty left to posterity some of the funniest stories and most lyrical oddball novels in the history of our field.  In his hilarious novella Space Chantey (1968), he created a classic science-fictional pastiche of Homer's Odyssey long before the Coen brothers transposed that story to the Depression Era South, as they do in their hit film O Brother, Where Art Thou?  First published as half of an Ace Double, Space Chantey is now sadly out of print and exasperatingly hard to find.  My copy disappeared from my shelves years ago.  His major collections - Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970), Strange Doings (1972), Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? (1974), and Lafferty in Orbit (1991) - feature dozens of his most inventive and flamboyant tales, but try to find any of them nowadays without recourse to the Internet.  (Thank God for Lafferty's fans, who have done yeomen work to keep his memory alive.)

I have Lafferty's signature on two or three of my copies of his work, but I recall meeting him only once, at a convention in either Memphis or New Orleans.  He had fallen asleep on a sofa in the hotel lobby, and his head had slumped forward, pressing his chins into his chest.  As Jeri and I walked through the lobby, I paused to look at him and resisted with all my will an incongruous impulse to kiss his naked pate.  Today, I wonder why I didn't simply do it.

(2003)

'against-the-grain stories; songs-of-rebellion stories even... restructuring and rebirthing myths' - Lafferty's Introduction to Ringing Changes

The following is the introduction found at the beginning of the 1984 Ace collection of Lafferty's short fiction Ringing Changes.  As far as I am aware, it is the only introduction that Lafferty himself wrote to one of his collections.  It's a rare treasure.  It gives some indication of what he hoped many of his stories were doing at the larger scale (rebellion and rebirth) and many witty little insights into individual tales.  He seems to me to be having quite a bit of fun in this introduction.  He is wryly sardonic as always, fun-loving and warm as always, penetrating and insightful as always, cranky and cracked as always, joyously energetic and raucous as always, and delightfully weird and whimsical as always.  I think this little piece of non-fiction by Lafferty, about his own work, is a treasure that deserves to be more widely known about and read and considered when interpreting and enjoying Lafferty's strange brew.  (All ellipses and emphases are in the original.)

INTRODUCTION

by

R. A. Lafferty

Most of these stories were written in the years 1968-1974.  They are of various sorts, but several of them are against-the-grain stories; songs-of-rebellion stories even, though their singing may be a little bit cracked and croaky.  This is because the world was unpatterned and unstructured during those years, and intolerably narrowed and shriveled.  (They conquered us so easily!)  We were a mesmerized world, and we were lost on a day when there wasn't even a battle scheduled.  So several of these pieces are restructuring and rebirthing myths, and there is a touch of groaning and travail in them.

But most of them are no such things.  The stories are these:

"Parthen."  The aliens had landed!...The world rang with cracked melody and everyone was in love with life....Never had the girls been so pretty....I believe that our minds are now on a higher plane....And every one of those men died happy.  That's what made it so nice.

"Old Foot Forgot."  One does whatever one can for "the oneness that is greater than self."...They say "Pray for the happy obliteration."...But somewhere there is a person who revolts and cries, "I would rather burn in a hell forever than suffer happy obliteration.  I'll burn if it be me that burns."

"Dorg."  Rain dances are good; fertility dances are good; so is prayer and chanting.  But there is nothing like ritual drawing and painting on cave walls to keep the world well fed.  What did you think was keeping the world so fertile and burgeoning these days?

"Days of Grass, Days of Straw."  Without the special days that are not in the regular count it just wouldn't be worthwhile.  We need them, we need them, and some of the champions will have to wrestle with the principalities and powers to get them.

"Brain Fever Season."  The seasons have returned in their appointed strengths.  Now we can live again.  Now we can be seasonable fools again.

"And Read the Flesh Between the Lines."  We'll not allow ourselves to be narrowed down forever in a straited world.  We'll explode and regain our real spaciousness.  We'll explode, we'll explode!

"Old Halloween on the Guna Slopes."  O ghostly night, O antic night, when we were ourselves young and ghostly.

"The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos."  Maybe life is no more than globs of gas plasma, green and faintly translucent.  But how is it possible to grow hairs on globs of gas?  This is a sympathetic story about the only animals that everybody loves, mice.

"The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen."  Barnaby's world was about a cubic meter in volume and it weighed 4,500 pounds.  It had a good selection of rocks, and it developed weather and lively inferior fauna.  Then it got a little bit out of hand.  This tale contains the saddest lament in all literature:  "My house is on fire, my shirt is on fire, and my houseboy has fleas.  What worse can happen?"

"Rivers of Damascus."  There are several way so of looking at any past event in history.  The para-archaeological probe, with a little dowsing added to it, may not be the ideal way, but it can sure cut through theat polarized data of what is sometimes called "conventional history."

"Among the Hairy Earthmen."  This was the "Long Afternoon" that lasted two and a half centuries, possibly the most puzzling two and a half centuries in the history of our world.

"In Outraged Stone."  This is the stubborn refusal to accept that there is no transcendence, that there is no ultimate reality.  

When they try to tell you that you are only an artifact in a collection, that you are not alive, that you have never been alive, that is the time to get mad.

"And Name My Name."  Is it possible that our true identity has been taken away from all of us, that we are only an apish shambles now?

"Why is our identity stolen from us.  Why are we robbed of it?" we ask.

"You aren't robbed of it.  You threw it away," we are told.

"Sky."  Yes, you can pick and choose from among the various realities, selecting the best and most eventful of them and then selecting from the still more rarefied best.  You can do this for quite a while, so long as you are not spooked by things that are the wrong color of white, so long as you are able to refinance your bill with the piper, so long as you have hollow bones and a hollow heart.

"For All Poor Folks at Picketwire."  It wasn't a bad place at all compared to some others.  Consider that you can have a workshop in total vacuum, that it is dust free and without gravity, that it is spared the effect of every magnetized cloud, of every voltage differential, of every solar wind.  And it's beyond the influence of time and temperature and hard radiation and "all beautiful beams."  Nuggets of gold and orichalcum!  What a place to work!  Even the main disadvantage of it can be turned to an advantage, sort of, sort of.

"Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?"  On November 7, 1999, the well ran dry.  This was the well of Wit and Idea.  It was the Well of the World.

Ah, but there was a way to get more water out of the well.  There were shabby people who still had plenty of shabby water, and they were willing to share it.  But it was stronger water than any of the people had met before.  It was raunchy water, it was vile water.  And the wit and ideas that came from the well now were raunchy also.

There's a twist to the tale of course, but it doesn't make the condition any less raunchy.

"And Some in Velvet Gowns."  Well, if you got all the skin burned off you by space winds, maybe you'd cover yourself with gaudy clothing too.  This is a "the-aliens-are-in-town-and-they're-taking-us-over" story.  But most of them weren't really wearing velvet gowns.  They just had their torsos painted to look like that.

"The Doggone Highly Scientific Door."  If you turned into a dog, would you be the first person or the last person to know it?  And if you turned into a dog interiorly but still kept your human appearance, who would know it first?  If there is an electronic device that can discern between dogs and people, where will it draw the line?

These questions are important since a lot of people are turning into dogs lately.

"Interurban Queen."  This is a "what-if" story.  What if the gasoline-powered internal-combustion "automobile" had not been outlawed early in its career?  What would the effect on manners and mores have been if the automobile, the "selfishness symbol," had been allowed to compete with such communal symbols as the Interurban Electric Trolley Cars?

"Been a Long Long Time."  We will not give a commentary or résumé of this story.  Should we begin to do so, you'd say "Oh, that's old, I know that one," and you'd be wrong.

These stories are intended to be entertainments, even the several of them that leak a little blood out of them.  They are amusements.

Be entertained then, be amused!  And the superior among you will even be delighted in several places.

(Dutch edition: Days of Grass, Days of Straw)

Related on this blog:  Oh rise again and fight some more, dead people! (A Memoir by R. A. Lafferty)

Neil G. gettin in on the Lafferty banter...

Eco-Monstrosity in Cormac McCarthy and R. A. Lafferty (my dissertation proposal - approved!)

For those who may not have picked up on it yet, I'm a 'mature student' (40 years old and just now getting round to obtaining a proper education).  I am, at last, in my final year of a joint-honours degree in Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Glasgow.  The following is the rough starting point of what I'll be writing this year for my final dissertation in the English Literature half of the degree.  I was relieved when the department approved it and found a supervisor for me (haven't talked to him yet, so I have no idea if he has any familiarity at all with Lafferty). 

After prematurely claiming (over three years ago) that I was going to write a chapter on Lafferty as a Chestertonian theological storyteller for a book of Lafferty essays, it is gratifying to see that something along those lines is finally coming to fruition, even if only for degree work.  Better late than never.  (The editor of the proposed book of essays on Lafferty, our beloved Andrew Ferguson, has since been sidetracked by the noble and even more exciting task of writing Lafferty's biography - with which, I recently heard, he is nearly finished.) 

I was not then really up to writing an essay on Lafferty, as I fairly quickly discovered.  I'm still not, but at least I have some theoretical tools and preoccupations to throw at it now.  Below is the dissertation proposal essentially as given to my department.  Please don't be too distracted by technical jargon with which you may not be familiar.  I had a word-limit that precluded much elucidation of the terminologies.  I hope some reasonably clear conception of what I'm attempting will still come through. 

As it reaches completion (in April), the paper will become both clearer and different.  I'm not sure how it will change, but I know it will to one degree or another.  Unfortunately, it's only a 10,000 word paper and I'm covering two authors, so it's not going to be able to cover as much ground as I'd like.  But I think putting Lafferty in conversation with a recognised 'great writer' is worth it and will provide its own fascinating illuminations.  Please let me know your questions and criticisms of the proposal and suggestions for further theoretical materials and for other elements or works of Lafferty's fiction to consider as regards the topic.  (Please do tell me if you see any egregious errors based on any expert knowledge you have!)

Dissertation proposal:

The primary texts the dissertation will consider are Cormac McCarthy’s ‘anti-western’ novel Blood Meridian (1985) and R. A. Lafferty’s historical Choctaw novel Okla Hannali (1972) as well as Lafferty’s short stories ‘Narrow Valley’, ‘Smoe and the Implicit Clay’, and ‘Days of Grass, Days of Straw’[1].  The question the dissertation asks is:  can the iterations of eco-monstrosity^[2]  exemplified in these two Southwestern American regional writers be grounded in and yet transmogrify theological readings of ‘nature’?  I.e. do these texts show ‘dark ecology’ and theological ecology to be mutually exclusive or do they open the way for some sort of harmony or hybridity?  I argue the latter.  Evocations of monstrosity in these texts make room for comic rather than tragic (or nihilistic) ecologies, undergirded by ‘dark’ or ‘weird’ theologies.

Lafferty is well known as a ‘funny’ writer, though his ‘tall tales’ are often grotesque and even gory.  It is also well known that Lafferty’s devout Roman Catholic beliefs infused all his work.  So it is no surprise that his ecology is ultimately theological and comic.  But it is not always appreciated that Lafferty’s fiction only achieves this ‘theo-comedy’ (to borrow a term from the theologian Thomas Oden) by way of much ambiguity and carnivalised horror.  McCarthy’s harrowing and hyper-violent novels, on the other hand, are often thought to be eloquent tracts for an unflinchingly bleak nihilism.  It is often argued that Blood Meridian in particular subverts theological readings of the world, but I will argue that it subverts only theologies that cannot embrace ‘dark’ ecology and thereby clears the way for more adequate theologies.

It is arguably rare that the disciplines of ecology, theology, and monster theory all three intersect in one study.  Certainly the proposed texts of this dissertation do not appear to have received this triangulated critical reading.  Both authors are, in any case, far from over-subscribed by academics and are thus ripe for more theoretical work.  McCarthy studies are now numerous but by no means enormous.  Lafferty studies are nearly non-existent^[3] and as this obscure author is being slowly rediscovered^[4], critical work is needed.  More generally, the worldwide growth in cultural awareness of both ecological and religious debates gives urgency to a cross-discipline study such as this.

The main critical tools the dissertation employs consist of Timothy Morton’s dark ecology^[5], Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (‘weird realism’)^[6], and Timothy Beal’s theology of monsters^[7].  The foci of the reading will be the emphases the primary texts place on monstrous (usually grotesque or gigantic) evocations of flora, fauna, and landscape, and the place of humans therein that religious worldviews purport to provide.  With these tools I aim to show that the texts under consideration evince a theologically pertinent eco-monstrosity that serves to situate and orient readers within a dangerous but genuinely all-inclusive ontology.  The monsters here are not ‘off the map’ – the monsters are the map.  Further, the texts evince no easy disjunction between a so-called ‘post-human’ eco-centricity and the theo-comic ecology of, for example, Roman Catholic doctrine. Rather, the monstrous ecologies of the texts—in their strange grotesqueries and violences and in their characters’ lengthy theological declamations—tend to agitate for a ‘dark’ and ‘weird’ hybridisation of theological ecology and dark ecology:  a conceptual space in which humans are decentralised in certain respects (radically contextualised by the non-human environment) even as they bear the divine image.

---

[1] Possibly also drawing from the stories ‘Snuffles’, ‘And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire’, and ‘All Pieces of a River Shore’.

^[2] This can be considered a particular artistic iteration of eco-centric or post-human or post-equilibrium ecocritical theories.

^[3] Andrew Ferguson’s master’s dissertation ‘Lafferty and His World’ is the only ‘official’ academic work I know of on Lafferty so far, but a handful of critical reviews and comments can also be dug up - e.g. brief but insightful critical comments on Lafferty’s writing can be found from the likes of Ursula Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, John Clute, and Neil Gaiman.  Ferguson in his paper utilises Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on carnival and grotesque and Walter J. Ong’s ideas on orality to read Lafferty’s body of work:  http://www.academia.edu/329007/Lafferty_and_His_World.  Ferguson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia, is currently writing the first biography of Lafferty.

^[4] The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has recently acquired the rights to Lafferty’s works and through them Centipede Press have published the first of what is projected to be twelve volumes collecting the complete short stories by Lafferty:  The Man Who Made Models: The Collected Short Fiction Volume One (2013), Centipede Press, Lakewood.

^[5] E.g. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

^[6] E.g. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005), Open Court Publishing, Peru; Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012), John Hunt Publishing, Alresford.

^[7] Religion and Its Monsters (2002), Routledge, London.

The Dissertation Reading Stack!

Oh rise again and fight some more, dead people! (A Memoir by R. A. Lafferty)

The following is from Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (1980).

Memoir by R. A. Lafferty 

Galaxy was the golden magazine of science fiction.  At its best, there were nuggets in at least half its issues.  No one else came close to that.  

Let the hills leap like little lambs at the memory!

“About a Secret Crocodile” was a shot in a war (since lost) against a cabal that was forcing “trendiness,” whose other name is “unoriginality,” on the world.

Oh rise again and fight some more, dead people!

Galaxy died several times from embracing this trendiness or unoriginality.  The “magazine-that-is-different” became quite like all the other “magazines-that-are-different.”  And it died because it spent all its retrospection on things past.

The newest Galaxy editor, Hank Stine, is an experienced resurrectionist.  He brought a dead and rotting Louisiana alligator back to life by laying his reanimating hands on it and breathing into its nostrils.  Later he brought back to life a dead rabbit, a dead goat, and a little dead boy.

(He has not told these things himself.  Others have told them of him.)

Now he will, probably raise the magazine from its second or third death.  You’ve got to have faith!

(If he isn’t still at the helm when this appears, that just means that good guys move around a lot.)

Never trust  a retrospectionist who isn’t two-faced.  A little of that retrospection for the future, please!

Galaxy, esto perpetua:  Thou art forever!  (I hope.)

But, for all that, the way-it-used-to-be was quite extraordinary.

 

The editors (Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander) introduce Lafferty’s memoir piece, which is followed immediately by his collected short story ‘About a Secret Crocodile’, this way:

Raymond [sic] Aloysius Lafferty began writing science fiction when he was well past forty, producing a large body of work that can only be described as wonderful, wild, and often bewildering.  His is an original voice, and his contributions to sf are only now becoming apparent.  Lafferty also meant a great deal to Galaxy in the 1960s, with something like 20 stories, including such major works as “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” (December 1962), the fabulous “Slow Tuesday Night” (April 1965), “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” (February 1967), and “Primary Education of the Camiroi” (December 1966) and its “sequel” “Polity and Custom of the Camiroi” (June 1967).

            “About a Secret Crocodile” is one of his best and most famous stories, one that rewards rereading time and time again.  Lafferty’s agent, Virginia Kidd, tells us that whent eh story appeared in Galaxy, she received an indignant call from the editors of Playboy magazine wanting to know why they hadn’t seen it first.  Virginia says, “Frankly, it had never occurred to me that it was anything but a Galaxy story, so that is where I sent it.”

[I for one can vouch that this particular story has hit me with new and profound depths of both artistry and significance every time I’ve read it over the years.  It is of keen relevance to our current meta-culture of opinion-forming social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google +, Buzz Feed, and so on.  Lafferty did oddly fit the usual projected role of an SF writer being a ‘prophet’, but he did so, as Neil Gaiman has recently remarked, in an uncanny social, cultural, psychological, and philosophical way rather than in a technological way.  Then again, his social ‘predictions’ are all about current information technology.  So really, he fit that aspect of the role too.]

R. A. Lafferty writes like no one else, inventively strange and characterful and sparkling with deadpan wit

The astonishing emergence of R. A. Lafferty on the horror and science fiction scene over the last dozen years is a subject of much discussion and a Hugo Award.  Appreciated by both those who favor the more traditional story and those inclined to prefer the most offbeat and experimental, he has been a favorite of the best anthologists: Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and Damon Knight.  And while best known for his inimitable short stories, he has also turned out fine novels of science fiction, as well as Okla Hannali, which deals with the American Indians.  All this from a writer who has published most of his work past age fifty. But readers should not confuse Mr. Lafferty's chronology with an identifiable style of writing.  R. A. Lafferty writes like no one else, inventively strange and characterful and sparkling with deadpan wit.  Like this bit of regionalistic myth-lore, set in his native Oklahoma.

-from Frights: Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Terror (1976), edited by Kirby McCauley, featuring Lafferty's story 'Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight'.

Lafferty news (that’s right, NEWS!) – Reminiscent of a Future

All great smells […] have a reminiscent element, but with this it is reminiscent of a future.  There is a pleasurable mustiness here, that’s sure, but it isn’t of a past time:  it’s of a future time, long waiting, and now beginning to unfold suddenly.

-R. A. Lafferty, ‘World Abounding’ (1971)

There is indeed a whiff of something approaching in the air.  Lafferty’s breakthrough into a larger audience has been ‘long waiting’ and seems as if indeed it may be about to ‘unfold suddenly’ in this the centenary year of his birth.  Neil Gaiman has been talking about him a lot in podcasts recently, so much so that Lafferty’s name made it into a Wall Street Journal blog alongside Flann O’Brien.  Just scant weeks after this brief article appeared, another more lengthy news piece was featured in The Guardian this past week devoted exclusively to Lafferty, citing again Neil Gaiman and also ‘our own’ (as I like to think of him) Lafferty scholar, Andrew Ferguson.  This Guardian article is currently being repeatedly tweeted on Twitter and no doubt other social media networks.  The article comes out in conjunction with the Lafferty panel  (hosted by Ferguson and featuring Michael Swanwick) that was held last week at the London WorldCon. 

In my own Lafferty news, I recently started an RALaffertyTweets account on Twitter that has garnered 80 followers in just a few weeks (seems a lot for such an obscure writer).  I started it because I have been officially approved to write my dissertation this year on Lafferty (more on that in the next blog post), but it has come in handy as this article on Lafferty has broken.  

All in all, it seems like exciting and auspicious times for all things Lafferty.  The following from Lafferty’s story ‘The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen’ (1973) comes to mind:

“Get ready for it, kids, don’t miss it!” Mary Mondo chirped so clearly as to be heard by every ear in the room. “This is going to be good.”

But, of course, Mary Mondo is a ghost and most of the time the people around her only slightly hear her, if at all.  One can’t help but feel that this potential breakthrough for Lafferty’s work is profoundly promising, but also precarious.  This moment of wider recognition for Lafferty feels a bit like the uncertain cliff-hanger endings to so many of his tales (e.g. ‘Frog On the Mountain’, ‘The Configuration of the North Shore’, Annals of Klepsis, Serpent’s Egg).  But I’ll gladly take the expectant stance of the ending of his seminal 1968 novel Past Master:

Remember it?  Then it happened?

Be quiet.  We wait.

[…]

Well, does it happen? Does the reaction become the birthing? What does it look like?

Will we see it now, in face and rump, the new-born world?

Be quiet. We hope.

(artwork for Past Master by Leo and Diane Dillon)

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)

An Excessively Normal Childhood (according to Lafferty)

Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal, for he came very near the high norms themselves.  He had walked and talked with ghosts from the day he was able to walk and talk.  All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel.  Abel was an imaginative, a creative boy.  He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world:  that is always important.  And he did not like empty spaces at all.  Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space he filled it with his imagination.  There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house.  He filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes.  He would eat apples and blackberries there till he got sick.

There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley.  A house had once stood there.  It had burned down: the house had faced on the side street.  Abel put another house there, a funny-looking house.  He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house and fixed their names to be Mrs and Mr Ostergoster.  He put a boy to live in the house.  He fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster.  Mikey fixed a cat.  Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away.  Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick.  Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man (he was a soldier such as they used to have in another time, not the sort of soldier they have now).  Mrs and Mr Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier.  Everybody began to have a big fight then.  Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking.

"You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters," Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into a secondary patina.  "There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them and remember how they burned in the little house there - ah, in the little house that is not there.  And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off that crazy man. With our reputation we can't afford to seem too old-line Southern.  And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog.  I remember that dog before they had to kill it.  It was one mean dog; its a wonder that you weren't bitten.  Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think that you're an odd kid."

But Abel wasn't an odd kid at all.  He was absolutely normal.  It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd.

The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel.  The family seemed to attract ghosts and the neighbors objected.  (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts... Both his father and his mother had talent.

And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult.  An average child will lose such talents, but a normal child will retain them:  the two aren't the same.

-R. A. Lafferty, 'Rivers of Damascus' (1974)

Not To Mention Camels (1976) - Interworld Horror & Ultra-Purple Fun with the Media Lords

This is probably the most brain-melting work of fiction I've ever read.  I'm a huge fan of Lafferty, but I would not recommend the novice start here.  (Then again, I once saw someone on a forum say this was the first thing they had read by Lafferty and they were hooked.)  The novel's quite exciting, full of very strange and gruesome wonders, but possibly even fuller of philosophical exposition about the multiple identities of one person instantiated across various possible worlds:  'that wide tangle of buckling, parallel worlds' and 'the smell of bi-location' or 'bi-location kickback'  and 'interworld routes' and 'transworld impetus' and many other such modal locutions abound.  Characters often chat to one another thusly:  'It is the slight deplacement of two coincident worlds that generates incredible force in the line of creativity and shaping also.  Half the pattern has to come from another world' (p. 42).

Even the names of the characters add to the oddity in the air of the narrative:  Pilgrim Dusmano, Aubry Pim, Cyrus Evenhand, Howard Praise, Rhinestone Suderman, Noah Zontik, Mary Morey and many more.

The protagonist (Dusmano) is an unlikeable political villain, which makes for unpleasant reading sometimes.  Then again, the lampooning of media-manipulated spin of political-celebrity identity is some of the most enjoyably acerbic I've ever seen.  There are Media Lords and cults of personality and at one point a meteorological Hand of Heaven pointing down at the political candidate, which has been contracted in advance.  This manufactured divine approval is a central motif of the novel.  It's a viciously satirical study of the intersection not only of media and politics, but also of theologies, both bogus and true.

Resistance to the cult/cultural group-think is dispatched by 'the chopping down of uncultic and unelectronic persons... Who would want to save them?  They are the unelectronic people, the nontinsel people, the folks of the unfractured flesh, and they never showed a deep love for us of the Media' (p. 73).  Remember, this was published in 1976.  I can't imagine what Lafferty would make of our internet generation.  No, I think I can.  I think he'd just quietly sardonically remark:  'Told ya.'

Counterpoising the jargon and philosophical discourse are moments of focalised narration that can reach grotesque lyricism:

To swoop it all in!  That would be the last great commercial stroke for Pilgrim Dusmano before leaving the world.  This would be the real final pleasure, a break-bone and blood-suck pleasure.  The red joy of it, gathering in all the fine property with its long roots with bits of flesh still clinging to them, would go far to nourish even the parallel Dusmanos on alternate worlds or aspects.  It was a corporate good, really (p. 89).

It's not all dialogue and terminology and commentary, of course (though there's a ton, which is often the case in Lafferty).  Vivid (but usually brief) scenes of action are furnished now and again as well:

The scarf that Pilgrim had been twisting in his hands now overflowed or exploded into a mantle or a cloak.  Arrayed in this, Pilgrim went right through the walls of the Prismatic Room and the Personage Club in incipient flight.  Noah Zontik stepped to a window and watched Pilgrim ascend the incandescent blue air of the outdoors in slanting, soaring flight.  He had a finesse beyond that of any bird.  A bird doesn't understand how to pose in the air, how to get the most from his natural lines, how to live a lyric in quick stanzas of flight.  Pilgrim covered half a city in the ticking off of a dozen seconds.  It was perfection... Pilgrim Dusmano, halfway across town, descended from his flight into the interior of an unspecified house.  He quickly killed a startled man there.

"A bit casual, was it not?" the victim rasped with his dying breath (p. 24).

Or witness a snippet of the boar hunt that takes place as part of the festivities on Hieronymous Bosch Day in one alternate world:

Parrots were like flights of fat green arrows in the air.  Dogs had a catchy bark on every gasping breath... But the present and embattled boar wheeled again and killed several of the harrying peasant girls and lads.  It left them awkwardly broken in the sunny grass.  The boar coursed again, and it foamed, not with weariness, but with fury.

Lorica, on a steep bay horse, closed in on the boar and let his horse overrun itself and become impaled on the wheeling boar.  At the moment of overrunning, Lorica's lance went into the boar in snout and mouth and throat, but the bogus-stone lance head did not touch the boar brain in any way.  That animal, disdaining even to notice the lance, was into the horse with long tusks, richly and redly into the belly; and it raised horse and rider high into the air as it reared on giant bristled hams and small feet (152-153).

The modus operandi of the book appears to be:  'This requires a new way of looking at margins, which are spaces outside of accepted spaces' (p. 15).  The action usually takes place in fairly solid and essentially rational, if wild and violent and dystopian, variations of worlds.  But late in the book there's even some time spent right inside one of those psycho-freakish liminal voids:

Foremost of the threats was a hulking apelike creature that the polymorph saw high ahead.  (This was all by firelight, there being no sun in the iron sky, so the seeing and the seeming ran together.)  The ape-thing was moving down the terrible and steep path toward the three climbers.  It was coming fast enough to intercept them at the Narrow Corner.  The path was fearfully narrow even where the three climbed it.  The ariel had her crest drooping and smoking; the dog had his singed tail between his legs; the polymorph himself had teeth in his heart that crunched it and gnawed it away (p. 123).

Oh heck, there's even a bit of loveliness thrown in here and there:

She was freckled and unaccountably brilliant.  She was dappled and sunbeamed.  She was daylight itself, freckled daylight with clouds roiling up behind her (p. 150).

I really can't begin to convey how chock full of delightfully inventive jargon and mind-bending ontology this novel is.  It simultaneously hurts and thrills the brain.  You often feel as some characters are early on described as feeling:  'There was a bit of horror gnawing at them in the area there, but also some ultra-purple fun' (p. 10).

I leave you with a final sample of the visceral carnival ontological chatter that bristles throughout the book:

Let me tell you a little bit more about the Prime World of prime people, Pilgrim.  It is the uninfused world, the grubby world, the spiritualist world, the quack world, the Fortean world.  That world is real, and all others are shadows of it.  You say this, but you are afraid to mean it, and you are afraid to acknowledge yourself a citizen of it.  But your only alternative is to own yourself to be a reflected and not a real person.  On Prime World, fish and rocks and blood do indeed fall on the earth out of low and stationary skies.  For these are stale skies and do not turn.  One can reach those skies with stones thrown by a ballista, and such shots will bring other stones falling in showers onto prime earth.  Everything moves very slowly on prime, like objects moved by poltergeists.  It is like things moving underwater.  It is things moving in prime atmosphere and the reek and heaviness of it.  There are vulgar shouts out of that lowering sky.  Why not?   There are giants living up there, dimwit giants who are the original people.  What, Pilgrim - would you swallow only half a camel?  And what will you do with the rest of it? (p. 24).

Serpent's Egg (1987) - 'That wonderful, that blessed, that hope-of-the-world thing'

Meet the Twelve Children of the Experiments, each one hyper-intelligent, each one a Mega-Person, each one under suspicion and surveillance as a potential Serpent's Egg to be crushed in the shell:

The Lynn-Randal Experiment:  Ruddy Lord Randall, the young male human; Inneall, the young female ambulatory computer; Axel, the young male Golden Ape (or Blue-Eyed Ape or Gargoyle, a member of the Unfallen People or Second Humanity).

The Wintergreen-Luna Experiment:  Marino the young male seal ('his mind and his personality and his outgoing spirit gleamed as his hide gleamed with its wetness in the sun when he came out of the water'); Luas the young male angel (who wouldn't be greatly missed in heaven - 'he was of one of the lower classes of the highest of creatures'); Henryetta, the young female human (flame-haired, flame-tempered, and flame-powered, gifted with pyro-kinesis).

The Dorantes-Saleh Experiment:  Lutin, the young female python (a prophetess); Dubu, the young female bear (whom all the other children called Little Mother); Schimp, the young male chimpanzee (erudite, degreed with a doctorate, he regularly wore an academic cap and gown).

The Gruenbaum-McGregor Experiment:  Gajah the unborn female Indian elephant (in the tenth and final year of her gestation in the womb of her mother, an Empress elephant; she communicates by telepathy as well as by means of a percussion language on a tiny drum inside her mother's belly); Carcajou, the young male wolverine (half animal, half devil); Popugai, the young male parrot (from New Zealand, big enough to kill and eat a sheep; with perfect recall and understanding and pronunciation, 'he knew the basic vocabularies of six hundred human languages, and of many thousands of insect, reptile, animal, and bird languages').

The location is only barely named, but this is one of Lafferty's many Oklahoma stories.  It is the end of summer in the year 2035, specifically the Last Three Days of Summerset.

Each set of three 'children' grew up together and now all twelve have been brought together as each approaches his or her tenth birthday.  Their project has been to find 'new ways of looking at the world, but not too cockeyed new'. But it looks like they have indeed been 'too cockeyed new' in their shining intelligence and vision and thus the Dolophonoi, the knife-wielding assassins, are drawing near to put an end to it before it really gets started.

Serpent's Egg is another of Lafferty's many apocalypses and shares themes (e.g. 'is this world an Egg that will shortly birth a new world?') strongly in common with Past Master (1968), Arrive At Easterwine (1971), and Annals of Klepsis (1983).  The novel also shares, in a more minor key, the theme of 'is any of this real or are we just dreaming?' with Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney (these two short novels are collected together in Apocalypses, 1977) and East of Laughter (1988).  The novel's satiric dystopian quality (e.g. a Kangaroo Court rules the Global Village) resonates with works like Lafferty's novella Ishmael Into the Barrens (1971) and his short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972).  The characters are said to be living on the Floating World and this critique of modern society's lack of depth frequently recurs in Lafferty's fiction - e.g. Fourth Mansions (1969), 'Encased in Ancient Rind' (1971), From the Thunder Colt's Mouth, (1975),  and 'Bequest of Wings' (1978).

From the above thematically associative list it's easy to believe Lafferty's own claim that his body of work really added up to one long unfinished novel (which he called A Ghost Story).

The prose in Serpent's Egg is perhaps not as dense or as lyrical as the likes of Fourth Mansions, Past Master, Annals of Klepsis, or The Devil Is Dead (1971) or indeed of many of Lafferty's most famous short stories (the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers contains many prime examples).  The poetry seems to mostly have been externalised into the very characters and events of the novel more than in the language that describes them.  The above cast is a shining example and various scenes in the novel sing out in sheer conveyance of the happenings.  Examples of the latter are that Inneall the little girl computer is making a New Ocean right there in the town and Heart's Desire Cove springs up round it as a local carnival or fair, the description of which is classic Lafferty 'high time' fun, full of outrageously oddball activities and elements:

Hearts Desire had become a great entertainment center, all within a week... A feature there was 'Computer Enhanced Music', and all sorts of music lovers came there.  The birds also were faithful listeners and participants.  Human music alone had never touched them much, but the enhanced music struck a chord with them.  Sometimes there were whole choruses of larks and catbirds and mockingbirds and of the multi-songed cardinals.  There was even the mightiness of ten-thousand voice crow-calls.  And the swifts and swallows and even the evil shrikes did air dances when the people and the 'people' danced.

And the fast-lunch and fast-drink places were attractions for old and young... Where else could one get Hot Coon Sandwiches?  Where else Ocean Catfish garnished with Crayfish tails?   Where else Persimmon Wine?  Where else Choc Beer as Mother Used to Make It?

[...]

At night there were the bonfires on Ocean Shore.  They were built out of folk memory... Oh the Campfire Songs that the people and the 'people' sang and entoned [sic] on the rocky shores of the Cove on those chilly End-of-Summer-Nights!  They sang 'Star People' and 'Skokemchuck Rag', 'Bandicot Blues' and 'World Village Medley', 'Ambulatory Ambles' and 'The Socsollabcomdem Party Potlatch', 'New Directions Ramble', 'Charisma Concerto', 'The We-Owe-A-Lot-To-Otto-Wotto Hootnanny', 'The Sixth Dream of Molly Mechanicus', 'New Entity Rock', 'Oh New Rice Feeds the Far-flung World!', 'Interspecies Intermezzo', 'Inneall's Ocean Hallelujah'.

[...]

Every night, some of the Computers sang 'Moon People Vaunt', a song that always caused at least a small amount of friction.  Only computers lived in the Moon Colonies.  Humans couldn't live on the Moon without elaborate support systems.  But Computers could live anywhere, even on the blistering hot surface of Venus or on the killingly cold surface of Jupiter... But everybody could enjoy such sing-a-longs as the 'Excitements Hot and Cold Suite' and 'It's the Crustacean in Me', a song of aeons-spanning nostalgia; and 'Going Home Over The Star Bridge'.

(pp. 57-60)

Or take the antic images that fizz and sparkle in your mind after hearing a series of little wisdom tall tales related by Dubu:

"I have a notion," said the young female bear Dubu, "that the answer to all the hard questions are written on the inside of one single Acorn somewhere.  This particular acorn, if placed in lye-water, will swell to a billion times its original size, and then it will burst open.  And whole mountains-full of writing will come tumbling out of it.  Then everyone can come and read it and enjoy it and know everything.  The only difficulty is knowing which acorn in the world is the right one.  I believe that there are clues pointing directly to the right acorn, but we do not notice them because they are so big and so plain and so close to our noses."

[...]

"Many bears in their natural state know everything.  Go down into the Winding Stair Mountains and walk out on the bear tracks.  When you meet another bear, if he is one of the bears who know everything, he will give you the 'All-Knowing Wink'.  No animal except the bear can give the 'All-Knowing Wink'.  The face muscles of other animals simply aren't adequate for it."

[...]

"I have a notion that turtles have uncanny and cryptic information written in the groove on the bottom side of their tongues.  The turtles themselves do not know about this, nor do the chelonologists.  But the people who work in turtle-soup factories are so very smart because they know about this hiding place.  They  read the turtles' tongues like Chinese fortune cookies, and what they read is total knowledge."

(pp. 74-75)

Lafferty's weaving together of folkloric, anthropological, and ecological tropes is both bewildering and awe-inspiring.  That, I suppose is part of the point of this novel.  It is a search (as is most of his work in one way or another) for how we can obtain an adequate view of the world that doesn't leave anything out and also Ties It All Together in some satisfactory and even salvific coherence - a coherence, we may be assured from the above quotes, that is comedic and carnival, not static and 'tidy'.  Indeed, it was the putting forward of two contrary views about this vision-casting that prompted Dubu's reflections:

"As to why we are here, Satrap, and what we are supposed to be doing here," Felix Snake-and-Dove got on the track again, "we are here to weave the seamless garment of our individual lives, and of the lives of those around us, of the neighborhood, of the countryside, of all the creatures down to the smallest, of all realms and continents and oceans. We are here to weave the seamless garment that will be highly detailed from the subatomic particles to the galaxy clusters. It must include all minds and ideas and inklings, all joys and all immediacies. There can never be enough weavers, there can never be enough brilliant details in the seamless garment known as 'The Life Affair'. And we can never be finished with it, for it continues to grow seamlessly."

"Weaving is outmoded, Felix," said Livius Secundus the history-writing Computer.  "Fabrics are no longer woven.  Now they are extruded by extruding machines.  Personal groups, landscapes, worlds, galaxies, all are extruded by a simple extruding machine which you could make yourself."

(pp. 73-74)

As always in Lafferty, there is a deadly urgency to these philosophical debates, as the presence of the aforementioned assassins attests (reminding one of the mechanical killers in Past Master and the nothoi-hunters in Ishmael Into the Barrens).  The Powers That Be in this tale are not only perpetrating socio-massive thought-control (another theme dear to Lafferty who repeatedly bemoaned catch-phrases and slogans and how the masses were made into 'sheep' by being 'fed' on them), but also death-dealing population control.

As to the former - thought-control - Lafferty describes a scenario very much like our 21st century internet planet:

It became a world in which everything and nothing was public.  It became a world with very little superstructure.  It became a world in which ideas and notions were transmitted instantly to every part of it.  But could such a world work? (p. 80)

He's asking the question honestly.  It is evident from his body of work that Lafferty loved technology and the sciences and he longed for humanity to truly stretch out and mature in itself, spiritually and intellectually, and in harmony with the natural environment.  Lafferty believed in the 'Fulfilment and Enlargement of the World' (p. 94), but his works dramatise how competing visions of what this is and how to bring it about collide. Wrong-headed utopias, Lafferty averred, would only make the bottom drop out on such maturing processes. The Kangaroo that Rules the World, as the elite social engineers in this tale are called, had backed the 'leveller movement':

One used to thinking of levelling as trimming the top off something into a semblance of evenness. But these 'levellers' trimmed the bottoms off of humanity and computerdom and the world itself. (pp. 80-81)

This was tragically not only the cutting out of our psychological and spiritual depths through reductionist philosophies and worldviews, but also the cutting out of our population depths:

The lower classes of everything were terminated without particular ado, without much apparent suffering, without any great quantity of visible bloodshed.  The bereft families did not ask where their inept members had gone because most of the families that had inept members went with them. Persons seldom asked where their neighbors had disappeared to, because usually it was entire neighborhoods that disappeared. The 'Don't make a big thing out of it' mentality was rife in the world, so a big thing was not made of the disappearance of eighty-seven percent of the persons in the world.  After all, that eighty-seven percent of the persons in the world had made ninety-seven percent of the trouble in the world.  In all logic there was much to be said for the 'removals'.

This is skin-crawling stuff.  The wisdom of Dubu the young female bear had earlier countered this pogrom programme:

"Oh, Oh, Oh, what will we do, Dubu, with all those countless billions of unwashed commoners?  I wonder whether they're necessary at all."

"Yes, they are necessary," Dubu answered in that 'ruf-ruf' voice that bears use for human talk. "We are the tree.  You are only the top leaf on the tree.  It's the one that quakes and moves in the wind as though it were an aspen leaf, the first one to fall when the inclement weather comes.  And I'm unwashed myself.  I don't use water.  I use a curry comb instead.  Curry combs are too good for horses, but they're just right for bears."

(p. 63)

If you read Lafferty long enough, you'll notice what might amount to a paranoia about this possibility of mass extermination of those who don't 'fit in' to certain versions of utopia.  But then again, his was a century that included literal secret police, travesties of trials, public executions, and dicatatorial mass exterminations of millions of people who didn't fit in to certain social visions.  (Not just Hitler and Nazism, of course, but also Stalin and Pol Pot and others.)

At any rate, though Lafferty was self-professedly 'cranky' and certainly had a dark turn of imagination, I can't in good conscience call his body of work pessimistic.  His themes of hope and of new birth on the far side of tragedy persist from the earliest to the latest novels and stories and Serpent's Egg is no exception.  The wonderful later chapters of this novel with their depictions of whales and sea lice building profound monuments on the ocean floor give vivid form to Lafferty's hopeful vision.  Chapter twelve in particular immerses the reader in an 'Oceanic Hyper-Active Dream State', which provides 'new eyes and new ways of looking at the world' full of creativity and possibility.  Our dream guide is a man who is one of the 'metamorphic creatures who can turn into Deep Ocean Denizens'.  Such a man is an 'Ocean Obscenity or Monster' for 'All Ocean Creatures are obscene, in the nicest sense of that word'.  Thus he is 'in his beautiful oceanic-ugliness-monsterness as we saw him and loved him today' (p. 144).  Lafferty is always very comfortable with placing grotesquery and monstrosity in the category of beauty and virtue.  With these phantasmagorical goggles on we see:

And the whales were making giant crypts and cenotaphs and menhirs from the blocks and shafts and trabants of marble.  It was utterly strange down there at Whale Town, and completely homey also.  A sign which the whales had put up proclaimed to all visitors "We're Glad You're Here".

[...]

The Temple-City that the Whales were building was certainly prodigious and entirely wonderful.

[...]

The beautiful pink, lilac, tan, orange, and mauve-tinted marble of the Whales' Constructions had also on it happy blotches and gouts of the greenest green ever.  It was a color so green that no language of Earth except only Malay has a word for the color.  Malay does have a twelve-syllable name for the color, a name that might be translated as 'The Green of Swarming, Ocean-floor etching, deep-sea lice'.  Yes, that vivid green was a living color, and one beautiful blotch of it, festooning the caput of a pillar, might contain a million of the small ocean-floor sculpturing Lice. They were quite small.

The small ocean-lice were etching figures and faces into the big marble and granite stone-pillars. Though not one, and not ten thousand of the little lice had enough scope and reach to comprehend what they were sculpting, to know what the statuary was all about, yet the lice were receiving and obeying orders from somebody, and likely from the whales.  The portraiture art, cut in high-and-bas relief out of the giant stone pillars and walls and lintels, had to be the Art of the Whales.

Mostly the faces and forms were those of famous whales of yore.  But there were also distinguished-looking animal faces, human faces, god faces, even strange computer faces, all emerging from the big stones that the sea-lice were sculpting for the whales.  And whenever they finished one of the great and distinguished faces, the sea-lice covered it over with a beautiful and thin plaiting of nacre or mother-of-pearl.

(pp. 137-138)

By the novel's end this dream of a coalescing vision of life has not yet saved the day.  It is still an underground thing. It is the resistance movement that stubbornly refuses to be stamped out.  It is the 'egg' of promise and new beginnings.

Indeed, one of the surviving Children of the Experiments, Lutin the young female python, who had become pregnant earlier in the narrative, appears to have given birth to a giant egg:

"Lo! - and Behold It!"

"That thing!" Inneall cried out aghast.

"Yes, that thing with the beautiful golden and blue light pulsating about it!"  Lutin spoke out of her mood of rapture.  "That wonderful, that blessed, that hope-of-the-world thing." 

(p. 154)

Dubu the wise young female bear says that 'a couple of odd fellows' gigglingly informed her about the egg:

"It is the joke by which the World will be saved and transformed". (p. 155)

And this too resonates with one of Lafferty's consistent themes.  In his early story 'Nine Hundred Grandmothers' (1966), when a space explorer asks "How Did It All Begin?" of those who purportedly can tell him the answer, those who were actually there at the Beginning, he is met with giggling and laughter and told: '"Oh, it was so funny how it began.  So joke! So fool, so clown, so grotesque thing!" [...] And they laughed. And laughed.  And went on laughing...' Storming off angry, thinking he hasn't received an answer, the explorer misses that he has.  He misses that he is being told that the universe is rooted in Cosmic Laughter.  In the short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972), the scattered disciples of Christ are the only hope left for rebuilding a post-catastrophe world and one of them informs another that sometimes 'the Lord... jests, He jokes, and we be the point of His most pointed jokes.'  And so here in Serpent's Egg also, Cosmic Laughter is the creative power for the New Beginning as much as the Beginning. We are not told what is inside the egg, but only given clues and hints and an 'Epilog by a Sea Louse'.

This novel is one of the more coherently structured and executed of Lafferty's notoriously difficult novels.  It meanders a bit in the third quarter, but the majority of it is packed with Laffertian wit and wisdom and weird wonders.  It is perhaps not quite the feast that, say, Annals of Klepsis or Fourth Mansions or Past Master or Arrive At Easterwine are, but I would definitely call it unmissable.