08 Aurelia

Gregorio Montejo does something funny in his essay on Aurelia and Thomism. He does the classic academic "let the dumb thing hang on the page" move by quoting Langford as calling Aurelia’s homilies "flatulent," and shows that Langford seems to lack even the most rudimentary awareness that Lafferty is doing something with Thomism. Why does Montejo do it?

Farty.

I, too, despise it. It is untutored, pun intended.

Montejo was provoked by gussed-up idiocy that Aurelia culminates in a series of homiletic sharts. Maybe that is unfair to Langford: Langford is smart and obviously a decent writer. He can certainly explain the hell out of the profundities of Harry Potter. But he is interpretively instructive. Who knows what he knew about Aristotle or Thomism in 1982? But it was still a dumb thing for David Langford to say, and, make no mistake, there are degrees of dumb. He just happened to be the one guy saying anything, really. People who write well can dress up dumb exceedingly well.

On the other hand, Langford is undoubtedly right about how many people will experience Aurelia: namely, those who do not live within a cave of resonance where Scripture is heard in odd places. The inventive surface will seem to have proliferated to the point of obscuring the depths, an impenetrable algal bloom, when in fact it is simply something Lafferty knew anyone who attended daily Mass would recognize. After all, if one goes to Mass, one passes through all of it over the course of the lectionary cycle.

The dangerous stupidity in Langford’s review, the one that will block you from understanding Aurelia as a book, is in the phrase "surface distractions." Speedster critics like David Langford are going to get the right elbow from the real Lafferty. Langford implies that the novel wants to shore up meaning additively from below, when in Aurelia, the locus of meaning comes from above, from the real Shining World that Aurelia's far smaller Shining World parodies.

Langford seems to have thought that if you dove deep enough, you might find something, but he himself chose to stay in the surf zone of Gaea. So he ends with his reluctant hypothesis, one horn of a dilemma. Pick one: distracting detail or shallowness. No sense of the tertium quid. Aurelia teaches the reader to stop decoding Lafferty downward and start receiving Lafferty upward. It is his most unapologetically Christian novel.

Aurelia, like "Ishmael into the Barrens," is a different kind of Lafferty work: postfigural + amnesiac, apocalyptic, symbolic, intertextual, and comic-grotesque. Its Thomistic homilies are mediated through Farrell and insufficient by themselves.

Langford's review can be found here. My favorite part of it:

Let it hang there. The presumption of “presumably.” Zero awareness of grace or how it works in the novel. Langford's post-Christian cognition grinds against a book that takes post-Christian cognition as one of its comedic themes. (That term, post-Christian, is ironic. From a traditional Catholic point of view, there are pagans, heathens, Jews, Muslims, unbelievers, heretics, schismatics, apostates, and the lapsed. But there are no “post-Christians,” because Christianity is not a phase of consciousness one graduates beyond. Elevation will come from within Christian fulfillment, as it does in Fourth Mansions, The Elliptical Grave, and in so many of the other Lafferty books about the leap.)

If someone asked me what Aurelia is about, I would say the same thing I have been saying all along in this series of posts: it is about the seven-day visitation of a girl from a planet of Shining People. She descends onto a fallen world and, without knowing it, postfigures the life of Christ, who has already come and has largely been forgotten. Planet X, her destination, is a disguised version of a terribly amnestic Flatland. If you don’t know old words such as Michal, Achen, and Caiaphas, you live there. All part of Lafferty’s point. It isn’t his fault that people forgot the grammar of Revelation.

At first, the novel seems to suggest that Aurelia’s own world will be the source of her final strength. It is not. The Shining World is not the world where the Compensation occurred. The novel opens in a double channel, apocalypse and nativity, with the order reversed, and the apocalyptic is as important as the nativity. Thus I would pass along my two favorite formulations of apocalypse, not simply as a theme, but as a mode that acts upon the reader, because this is what Lafferty is trying to awaken by displacing Earth history:

and

When Lafferty destroys a world order in a book—his favorite way of ending a novel—he is out to create “a way of seeing that order that keeps it confined to the world of time and history as we know them.”

At the level of inner form, Aurelia is a partially realized eschatology. Informed people will grasp this. The last things promised by God—judgment, salvation, the kingdom, eternal life—are not merely future events. They have already begun in Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, and gift of the Spirit. A Catholic can affirm this in a qualified sense: eternal life begins now through communion with Christ, especially in faith, charity, and the sacraments. But a Catholic like Lafferty would never accept a realized eschatology that erases the future consummation of history. Christ will come again. The dead will rise. Judgment will be final. Creation will be fully renewed.

The Catholic position is therefore an already-but-not-yet eschatology. The kingdom is present in Christ and in the Church, but it remains incomplete until God brings all things to fulfillment. This is what Aurelia means when she says, “Can these things be? Yes, they can. Where and when? Right here and right now. These are the things that happen and exist every day in the real world. And here and now we are at least in the ante-room of the real world. The right key that opens the door in the wall is called on one side of it ‘Grace’ and on the other side of it ‘Love a-burning.’ It opens the door even if you use it upside down. In one hour, I will go from one room of this incredibly fair land to a larger room of it.”

That seems more important to me, in relation to Aurelia, than, for instance, knowing the Camiroi stories themselves. Lafferty treats the Camiroi precursor material much as he treats the Institute stories in Arrive at Easterwine: the Institute is a point of radical departure. His interest lies elsewhere. Aurelia does something similar with Camiroi. So while it is useful to know that Camiroi is the planet that could not choose the highest thing—and while that idea was as much one of Lafferty’s starting points for the plot as the tenth-grade assignment—you do not get Aurelia out of the Camiroi stories.

First, Aurelia lands and is found by Rex Golightly, the tycoon who becomes her guardian. This introduces the magi motif. By the time the reader meets the Floating World people, the nativity phase of the novel is over. Before this, the reader is told that the children of Light are the race Aurelia comes from, and here Lafferty uses his old trick, counterfiguration, playing with the idea in Daniel 12:3: those who shine as the brightness of the firmament.

The Dark Counterpart, Cousin Clootie, follows Aurelia onto the planet within minutes of her arrival. The planet, we are eventually meant to assume, is Anti-Earth, or Gaea. Clootie is sent to govern in shadow as Aurelia governs in light. As he explains to the bodyguard, their shadow-mission operates strictly beneath the “bright distraction”:

This sets up the book’s pattern of doubling. Aurelia represents the bright, consoling side of Christianity; Cousin Clootie postfigures its harder side: divine hiddenness, judgment, and purgation. He belongs to the line that runs from Psalm 18:11—“He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies”—to Revelation 3:16: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of My mouth.” It is made comical because Cousin Clootie is such a broody teen, but make no mistake: he is there to remind one of the consuming fire of judgment, the fire that burns Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10:1–2, and the fire Elijah calls down on the captains and men sent by King Ahaziah, and that Clootie uses to threaten Aurelia's bodyguard Julio Cordovan, who is also Michael

Straightstreet, who, in turn, postfigures St. Michael, the archangel warrior who knows that God "will make all your paths straight" and alludes to verses such as Isaiah 40:3: A voice cries, 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

The events of the four days leading to the triduum can be broken out in different ways, but it is useful to have them in mind as plot beats:

During these days, Forcedmarch recognizes Aurelia as the Beatrician Moment. Aurelia asks who his Beatrice is; he deflects, assuming it's the one she had herself just mentioned; she corrects him. It is one of the most important exchanges in the book:

This is, of course, the historical Bice Portinari, the donna angelicata of the dolce stil novo, the Marian mediatrix. She stands in for divine grace, ultimate truth, and spiritual salvation. Aurelia is postfigured inside it. Aurelia's spacesuit should be blue, not red.

One of the more puzzling aspects of the novel is the fish-prophet—speaking, on its second appearance, through what may be Rex's own ego-fragment in the river. On the first occasion, by the lake, the fish delivers the countdown, a Lafferty joke about time and eschatology: forever can't come first or last:

In the conversation recalling this prophecy on the second day morning, the fish, with all of its obvious Christian associations, confirms that Aurelia will die the next night. By then, the peripateticus is already underway (it had begun the previous morning with Aurelia's leap from the tower), and what organizes the three days is the twelve-meal grid (Ientaculum, Prandium, Merenda, Cena). It is where one gets the Thomistic homilies.

The writ-in-water scene comes later. What seems to be a medium of evanescence (water, grass, flesh, etc.) becomes the permanent inscription in the Book of Life:

During the peripateticus, Aurelia mentions the Compensation doctrine at Herr Boch's table. Aurelia is at the largest scale about postfiguring the Compesnation. Aurelia asks if they are in the final age, and Boch confirms the planet's unique theological status, and we learn that we are in St. Augustine's sixth age:

Of course, the Compensation is the Atonement. We aren't told what the Compensation was or is, but it gathers a lot of language around the Crucifixion without crassly bringing in the image of Passion Week: Anselm's satisfactio, Aquinas's satisfactio superabundans, and Tyndale's at-one-ment or, really, unity. On the heels of this, we get the yin-yang false balance, a false unity, which is named with the same words, but Aurelia rejects it.

The third day of the peripateticus is the death-day. Spencer-Trencher, who is said to be a great philosopher in the novel, brings Aurelia a bowl of Slowpoke Snails. The Slowpoke Snails are one of the weirdest things in the book. Elsewhere in the novel, they are connected to the Media-Extinction Arm's slow-poison weapon. Miraculously, the bowl does not empty. Aurelia ladles the snails to all five thousand of her regular entourage and to many irregulars. She dumps the leftovers in the river, and the fish rose to them gratefully, Lafferty writes. We learn that assassins were going to use Slowpoke Snails to poison Aurelia, but postfiguration is used to make a didactic point: the murder-attempt becomes fish food.

In that same scene, Spencer-Trencher delivers the world's diagnosis. He says an alliance was formed between Aurelia and the people of Gaea. It is the sickness of a fallen environment rejecting its cure:

This is a flipped version of the earth sickness that sometimes shows up in Lafferty, most memorably in The Reefs of Earth, where it affects the Dulantys. In The Reefs of Earth, in other words, sickness says, "There is something wrong with this environment." In Aurelia, the environment, which is actually sick, rejects the postfigured gospel. The next day, after Aurelia's death, Doctor Thorgrimson develops a theory about it all in Wide Awake, the Morning Medical Journal. This rejection of the Word is likened to an antibody response:

Here is the most dramatic, final variant in the novel of a theme that gets repeated many times in the book on smaller scales, the gospel-rejection doctrine of John 1:11—He came unto his own, and his own received him not—but it has been crossed with Mark 12's wicked husbandmen, Matthew 23's ye would not, and Romans 8's enmity-against-God. Rejection of the Word is an anaphylactic response, a mucosal membrane response, and an antibody response, but that is Lafferty using counterfiguration. What Gaea's immune system rejects is medicine. Rejection is described as drug-induced anaphylaxis. Thorgrimson is, in the novel, a marginal but sympathetic figure who hopes the world can be taught to modify its reaction. There is probably a pun here because Thorgrimson's name refers to the son of a god and fits into the typological network.

At one point, Aurelia's bodyguard relays the warning of Aurelia's spaceship-monkey (the mechano-organo) that she can only be killed by a worm with a pistol, and that she will have to cooperate by bending low—a third oracle alongside the fish and the sibyl:

It comes to a head when Aurelia sees the worm-with-pistol image painted on the murder weapon, the double dart (echoling Ephesians 6:26's "quench all the fiery darts of the wicked"), without recognizing it in time as her own death. Here we are seeing, in the worm with the pistol, one of the more difficult images in the book, a compression of many traditions, but four Christological traditions are surely important: the patristic Christological reading of Psalm 22 (Christ-as-worm, I am a worm, and no man), the worm-redeemed of Isaiah 41, the suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, and the consent of Philippians 2 and John 10. That, in addition to all the figuration around the worm as a symbol of death. The cooperation requirement might be called the consent doctrine: no man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself.

Does Aurelia really do this, or is it taken from her? The question remains ambiguous, and I think only something like a category of postfiguration can keep it sufficiently open: she is falling into the fulfilled antitype of Christ, innocently and sillily, and her last words about it all being silly are as Scottish as Cousin Clootie’s name—silly originally means innocent. In the chaos of the climax, the physical act of bending low gets her killed:

What has Aurelia done in bending low and dying? Maybe that is Christ accepting the cup; maybe it both is and is not. Those who want to read Aurelia as a simple Christ figure will emphasize the bending low, while those who see the comedy of it are better served, I think, by seeing it as postfiguration: a figure that brings together typology, quotation, allusion, and echo.