02 Scorner's Seat
- Jon Nelson
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Well, why did not the men of Kyklopolis get together in great numbers with many boats and torches and weapons and hunt out and kill this Grendel? Should such a peril be allowed to live? But this is to ignore who Grendel really was, to forget of what race he was the last surviving member. For Grendel, who had once been completely human, was of the race of Cain. Moreover, Grendel was not only the descendant but also the murderer of the murderous Cain. He had disregarded the Mark of Cain and had killed its bearer. Then the Mark of Cain was transferred to Grendel himself. It was prohibited to kill him; it was prohibited by God to kill him. The sewers of Kyklopolis were full of ghosts and ghost stories, and perhaps the starkest of them was Grendel. There is no denying that Grendel had his ghostly elements, just as he had his human and monstrous and fishy and devilish elements.
One of Lafferty's underappreciated masterworks is "Scorner's Seat", published twice in quick succession and much later reprinted by Centipede Press: all but forgotten, another rose petal dropped into the Grand Canyon that never made a boom. That was Lafferty's favorite metaphor for sending his fiction off into the world. When Apocalypses eventually and improbably found a publisher, he wrote to Sheryl Smith, "As to 'Project Rose-Petal Down the Grand Canyon,' yes, two of them have hit bottom with a pleasant clang. I've sold two of the modern period novels, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, SANDALIOTIS? and THE THREE ARMAGEDDONS OF ENNISCORTHY SWEENY. These have both been sold to Pinnacle and they will appear together under the name APOCALYPSES in a double-book in their new double-book SF line in October." No boom has followed "Scorner's Seat," but it is a skunky triumph. The prose is on fire, and the story offers effects and imaginative tonalities that you will find nowhere else. It is one of the Lafferty stories that sticks in my head, a deeply personal piece of art, with just so much of him in it.
Tonight I was playing with some new tools, trying to work out the geography of "Scorner's Seat," thinking through a few things that puzzle me about it, and it seemed a good occasion to share the audio file, in case it is one of the Lafferty stories you have overlooked.
The story itself is something of an intellectual love poem to Lafferty's mythically inclined correspondent Sheryl Smith. As I have written before, the Grendel of the story is named after her cat, and I think he has written a version of her into the story. Lafferty once mused to her about when he first realized that the "archetypal-underneath" is a vital aspect of reality, admitting, "I suppose it occurred to me while reading Jung, so it had to be some time in the last forty years." In "Scorner's Seat" he lays out some big mythic thoughts.
