Take
the wordies
from hind brain
tell of weirdies
in a great word-rain
--Grimorie of Aloys
Blurbers (those
who blurb) say two contradictory things about the work of R. A. Lafferty.
Often both poles will appear in the same blurb; blurbers do not aim
for consistency, but instead for creating a mood that will induce
the sensory-overloaded reader to purchase the book. The first remark
is how familiar Lafferty's work is—he is either compared to Twain
(or some likewise wholesomely American figure) or to the folktale,
ghost tale, or talltale. The opposite pole stresses the uniqueness
of his work—unique, quirky, one-of-a-kind. It would seem that either
the blurbers have indeed read the work, and are hard put to find words
to explain the effect of Lafferty's prose on their psyches, or they
are merely quoting other blurbers.
I wish to argue
that Lafferty deliberately creates the mythic effect through a technique
I call effective arcanum, and that rather than examining his work
with the conventional tools of science fiction criticism, we need
to examine his system—firstly for our pleasure, and secondly so that
we may re-create it (because the sign of an authentic religo-magical
system is the power of the followers to reproduce the results). It
may seem strange to think of Lafferty's writing in terms of religious
phenomena, but if you consider the devotion that the small press world
has shown, you'll begin to see what I mean. Behold, now I speak prophetically:
with Lafferty gone there will be (unfortunately) a lot of bad Lafferty
pastiche—not because of the commercial viability of such writing (Lafferty
being one of the least commercial writers we have) but because of
the desire of the writer to re-create the effects of Lafferty's writing
on his or her psyche.
In this (and
a few other ways as well) Lafferty is very similar to H. P. Lovecraft.
Let us examine six ways (there are nine, but three must remain hidden
for I use them myself and don't want to give away any of my tricks
just yet) in which Lafferty's fiction creates the Unknown rather then
the Known, and then let us give some consideration to the strengths
and weaknesses of the method (and its reception and lack thereof in
the world of Science Fiction and fantasy). Hopefully some later, more
qualified writer than I will begin the task of putting Lafferty into
the bookshelf of literature, where he belongs. By the way, each of
these points can be expanded into a dissertation—and no doubt will
be in the fullness of time.
1.
Lafferty uses textual devices to estrange the reader in a hypothetical
time before the beginning of the narrative. He comments on the method
himself in one of his created texts:
"'Atrox Fabulinus,
the Roman Rabelais, once broke off the account of his hero Raphaelus
in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet
of six yards' span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these
words: "Here it becomes necessary to recount to you the history
of the world up to this point."
"'After Fabulinus
had given the history of the world up to that point, he took up
the action of Raphaelus once more. It happened that the giant goose
egg contained a nubile young girl. This revelation would have been
startling to a reader who had not just read the history of the world
up to that point: which history, being Fabulinian in its treatment,
prepared him for the event.'
THE FALL OF ROME, Auctore."
(From East
of Laughter.) By creating a text of seeming antiquity, the defamiliarization
of the world is seen as something that already happened before the
narrative. The story doesn't have to explain the strange state of
affairs it begins with or ends with. This runs counter to the paradigms
of Science Fiction, in which texts which are cited are real (or presumed
to deal with the hard factual world), and provide a springboard for
the Man With A Plan to demonstrate his cleverness based on the facts
of the matter. Likewise it violates the paradigms of horror (our everyday
world with one intrusion or anomaly which can be isolated or at least
explained), and of fantasy (another world with its own consistent
laws). Lafferty uses created texts, either created out of whole cloth—such
as the frequently-cited The Back-Door of History by Arpud Arutinov
or The Fall of Rome, an actually published Lafferty book ("auctore"
simply being Latin for "by the author")—or partial cloth, wherein
Laffertyisms are attributed to the Psalms, or reference made to Aristotle's
Beard in Essential and Beard in Existential. These are
legitimated by the actual quotations from actual people mixed into
the stream. Therefore reality is carefully displaced, sometime somewhere
before either writer or reader has anything to do about it. This is
an extremely effective modification of the fairy tale formula of in
illo tempore. But instead of the "Once upon a time," where we
know what the different laws are—Lafferty just convinces us that the
laws are different.
2.
Lafferty makes use of dead language words to play upon our collective
unconscious. Mainly Hellenisms work their unconscious magic upon us;
although like Joyce he combines his Greek with Irish—note the Puca
in The Reefs of Earth. Consider the following examples. In
My Heart Leaps Up, Lafferty's "autobiography" from Chris Drumm,
the lead character is named Helen Anastasis. We may sense the rightness
of the name, but unless we know Greek, we don't realize Anastasis
= against inertness. Likewise, in "Continued on the Next Rock" the
hero's name of Anteros = "One who loves in return" sadly sums the
hero's love and the girl's obstinacy (which are seen as a mechanism
of their reincarnations—reminding one of the strangely Greek-named
heroes of the Mummy films—Kharis, whose name means "gift,"
and Anake, whose name means "necessity"). Lafferty's use of Greek,
Latin, Irish, and Hebrew tags is not merely demonstration of his vast
erudition. It is a technique used by magicians for centuries to give
their spells potency. Whereas he directs most of his narrative at
our conscious—using simple daytime language—he also directs the same
tale at our unconscious achieving a form of meta-communication. This
is one of the most subtle forms of displacement. We feel early on
in the Lafferty story that more is going on then we know, and at the
end of the story that more has gone on than we can know. The use of
foreign tags and the use of rhythm discussed below are good tools
in displacing the narrative.
3.
Lafferty plays upon our subconscious in another way—the use of rhythm.
Yevgeny Zamyatin developed the concept of a "prose foot" as a way
of internal pacing of fiction. He saw it as a kind of rhythmic device
that by causing the reader to remember an earlier part of the narrative
became a force for a choral (as in pertaining to choruses) cohesion
that bound the story together in a different way than plot mechanics.
This method, which I can't detect in Zamyatin's works (since Russian
is Greek to me), is the core of Lafferty's work. He has invented the
postmodern equivalent of the Homeric epithet. Now that I've told you
what the magician's about to do, see if you can catch the trick the
next time. Oops, went past you! A couple of examples will suffice.
In the short story "The Transcendent Tigers," the device of a rhyming
couplet to destroy a city of the world is used throughout the story.
We become so in rhythm with the words that Lafferty doesn't have to
provide the name of the city when the last half of a couplet ends
the story—"Knife and Fork—and the reader provides "New York" thus
having his own imagination and language complete the terrifying little
tale. Likewise, rhyming nonsense is the way a character may enter
the world of the Shelni in "Ride a Tin Can"—perhaps more significantly,
the understanding of the nonsense can turn you into a Shelni.
4.
Lafferty uses the image of the wonder child to evoke a past that never
was. This is the emotional equivalent to the intellectual process
mentioned in #1. Unlike Bradbury, who invokes some kind of Norman
Rockwell past by visual detail, Lafferty invokes the very rapid sense
of childhood as we remember it. His heroes in "Lord Torpedo, Lord
Gyroscope," Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex, are typical Lafferty wonder
kids who do everything very very fast. His children as well as his
hard-drinking young men move in a world that has been condensed by
memory, and so we match with our own perceived fast and fleeting moments
of childhood. Otherwise his children possess special powers, which,
unlike the typical mutant of SF or demon-possessed horror kiddo, are
never explained. These powers can be anything from the ability to
make things disappear, in "Seven Day Terror," to—perhaps the greatest
Lafferty trick of all—remaining perpetually four years old. This is
a wonderful assertion of the fictive impulse—instead of appealing
to our memories, he appeals to the type of story we told each other
at that age and combines that appeal with the nostalgia we have for
our youths. A careful blend, there; we read and feel nostalgic for
realities that never were. And if we feel nostalgic for realities
that weren't—we are displaced before the narrative happens.
5.
Lafferty denies the uniqueness of the spectacular events, and by so
doing once again displaces reality. The most outrageous situations
are either ignored (as "In our Block," wherein the presence of a group
of beings who can make anything instantly and in any quantity—a favorite
Lafferty motif—is simply explained away as there are lots of odd people
in the world), or a figure shows up claiming to have previously done
the deed, but in a different way. The latter role is usually filled
by Willy McGilly. In "Seven Day Terror," he marvels that current kids
use a beer can to make a disappearer, when he had used an oatmeal
tube. In "Thus we Frustrate Charlemagne," he points out that all he
needed to kill historical figures was a dart, rather than huge computer.
And so forth. By denying the uniqueness of a spectacular event, Lafferty
simultaneously accomplishes three things. One, he postulates that
the world (at leas this fictional world) is actually much, much stranger
than our own. It is not only broad enough for the strange event—it
is broad enough to hold the laws which permit the strange event. Two,
he postulates that, in general, people's memory of wonder is so poor
that they generally have forgotten the true marvels of the age. The
truly successful people in Lafferty's works—the true geniuses and
übermenschen—are Those Who Remember the wonder of the world,
such as Willy McGilly. Three, he once again dislocates reality before
the narrative starts. The reader is not presented with a world that
he or she knows with one anomaly to puzzle out; the reader is presented
with a world that he or she has never known. Or, to create a more
dreamy distancing effect—a world that he or she has forgotten. Which
leads us to:
6.
Lafferty uses the feeling of estrangement, of "I think I've forgotten
something," as a mood to displace the narrative. We've all had those
haunted days when we felt that we should've known something more than
we knew. Lafferty often invokes that mood as the voice of a tale.
Although not the only writer to do this—Robert Pinget comes to mind—Lafferty
is certainly the only popular English writer who pulls off this particular
trick. Two examples come quickly to mind. In "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne,"
the history changers at the Institute for Impure Science decide to
change history, but they will have an objective reference to the world
before the change, so they can see if their attempt worked. Of course—following
a long established tradition in Science Fiction—the change changes
their memories and their external object. Now this is more than commonly
interesting, because the Institute for Impure Science is here doing
to itself what Lafferty does for his readers—changing the rules at
some time before the action begins (this is one of the many uses of
self-reference which haunt Lafferty's work). A second example would
be "What's the Name of that Town?", in which Epikt (note the wonderful
Hellenism: Epiktistes means "The Equitable One," a great name for
a calculating device that takes all elements (Stoichae) equally)
sorts his facts to discover that something must be missing. The missing
thing is Chicago, and when Epikt pronounces the hidden name, no memory
results. Here's a primary Lafferty formula. Even when all the facts
point to the mysterious nature of the matter, people simply can't
remember the mysterious (except the Epiktistes—who as his name implies
takes all facts equally, from padding in Hungarian dictionaries to
Little Willy jokes about blood and chewing gum—and the most inspired
genius of the day, Gregory Smirnov, who has tingles of memory). There
is a Platonic theme in much of Lafferty's work: the world would no
longer seem so dreary if we could only remember it. He even points
out the two methods suitable to induce memory: the precision of Epiktistes,
which he himself shows in researching and coining such names; and
the inspiration of Smirnov, which Lafferty shows doubly strongly.
There are two
benefits and two drawbacks to Lafferty's use of techniques of estrangement.
The first drawback is that since his work doesn't fit the paradigms
of Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror writing, the publishing world
approaches it with great reluctance. I have never seen a second edition
of any of his works, very few have made it into hardback, and, with
the decline of the short story as a commercial medium, his work more
and more has become the province of the small press. The radical openness
of his texts, which, although they may offer a solution to the particular
situation, leave that world more open by suggesting that such have
happened before and will happen again, have clearly prompted editors
to request new endings of several stories. Pick up any collection
of Lafferty's shorter works and look at the ends of the stories. Note
how many of them have the four or five paragraph ending (in another
voice) that in a humorous and off hand fashion undercut the narrative.
The lack of satisfactory endings reflects the need to comply with
genre restrictions.
The second drawback
is that since Lafferty's use of structure and displacement techniques
place him outside of the paradigms of science fiction, and his venues
place him outside the scope of academic criticism, very little is
said about his work. Although we live in an epoch where the bold academic
adventurer is like to go into the Venusian swamplands of SF, such
academic probes are looking for SF in its pure state and will regard
sports (particularly those infused with humor) as anathema. Those
individuals looking from within the SF world may lack, or simply disdain,
the linguistic and critical skills needed to begin to reveal that
in Lafferty's work there is much more going on than meets the eye.
The brave individuals who have attempted to do so have either merely
produced fulsome praise or attempted to classify Lafferty's writings
on the basis of superficialities (i.e., calling him a surrealist).
Lafferty's use of displacement is not unique, but so few writers have
consciously attempted the process, and their works are so varied,
that there are no unifying articles, no language for the critic with
a day job to draw on. Some bright lad or lass (with the appropriate
dignifying letters following their names) may read this and look for
the method of displacement in H.P. Lovecraft, James Joyce, Robert
Pinget, Gilbert Sorrentino, Flann O'Brien, R. A. Lafferty, Howard
Waldrop, and R.A. Wilson. Now there's a book worth reading. The astute
observer will note that all the names on the list are Irish, saving
those which are not.
The first benefit
is the sheer memorability of R. A. Lafferty stories. The techniques
of displacement, which work well on the shorter work, tend to over-weary
the reader trying to hold it all in the longer pieces. However, any
of the shorter pieces, once read, can be recalled because the effect
that his work has on the psyche is ongoing. We may think of some classic
SF tale such as Asimov's robot stories and use it to illustrate a
point, but people recalling Lafferty tales do so with wonder. As an
experiment, try to start telling any Lafferty story you know to anyone
who has read any SF at all. Notice how early on they say, "I read
that. It was neat." This is markedly different from the purely nostalgic
reaction we have to E. R. Burroughs or Bradbury. I deem Lafferty's
stories effective arcanum, since they clearly continue to work the
soul once read.
The second benefit
that Lafferty's stories have is that they give the rest of us something
to shoot for. Over my writing desk I keep a copy of the Russian critic
Victor Shlovsky's remark, "The technique of art is to make objects
'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult. To increase the difficulty
and length of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be
prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object,
the object itself is not important." Shlovsky wasn't writing about
Lafferty, but I doubt if few writers could so clearly be an example
of art as Shlovsky defines it.
