15 Misc Laff: Rolo N. B. Danovitz

So one question that may occur to a Lafferty reader is this: with all the Antichrist fever in popular culture, from Rosemary’s Baby to the pop theology of the sixties and seventies, and given Lafferty’s religious concerns, why did he not write a novel about the Antichrist? The answer is that he did. It is one of his more difficult books, though I now think it less difficult than several of the hardest. I thought I would set down a few thoughts on the way Lafferty handles the Antichrist theme, because it is so interesting. The novel has a baroque plot that I am not going to unpack here. Instead, I will focus on the Antichrist and provide enough context to make that element intelligible.

In Dark Shine, Rolo N. B. Danovitz is an eleven-year-old boy at the center of a group of eight people. They want to replace the existing world with a new one by expanding it. Rolo's first name comes from his maternal grandfather, Rolo Raingold, "the noted and award-winning genetic tamperer." We don’t learn much about the original Rolo, but we do get an amazing bit of background on his Numerology Noonan, his paternal grandfather, "that famed seer and illusionist and fraud." Hence, the N, for Numerology. The B. stands for Basil, which means King. The surname Danovitz Rolo picked himself. He says it points to his descent from the house and tribe of Dan, which is significant. As the novel's narrator explains:

So Rolo’s full name is a claim about who he is: King of the tribe of Dan. There are at least five ways Lafferty spins all this: the Antichrist as an in-family genetic creation, as something infernal, as an Olympian return, as a societal technological hubris, and as geopolitical espionage:

A little about Rolo's crew, who are essentially pulling off what amounts to a trial run for the appearance of the Antichrist, a rehearsal that, if it works, will be the real thing. That not working out is one of the novel's jokes, for it turns out that each time the Antichrist thing doesn’t work, it sets Hell's plans back in a big way.

There is Brendan Michaels, who is a master mathematician and magician. Creates the seven enabling equations that power the antichrist project. Then there is Beth Barabbas, whose name is, of course, important. She has been a centurion and wants to be one again. In Chapter 6, she presides over a court of centurions in Spacious City, which is the part of the world that is entering into ours and in effect rewriting it; in Chapter 11, she asks Rolo to fulfill his promise to put her "once more in command of a hundred," and he sends her to command "an Iron Hundred in Hell." There is Chrona Lorngold, Rolo's mother. She is an archaeologist and a member of an elite club called the Babylonians, whose women travel to the literal Babylon to give birth so their children can be proclaimed King of Babylon:

Lafferty calls her a fat love goddess, the chthonic mother, Venus-figured, and she and Rolo are called a mythic pair. She is quite simply the Whore of Babylon. Then there is Norbert Hardcore, the Knight of the Empty Seat, the Group's strong-arm. He assembles the whole operation without letting any member know. They all believed they were being assembled by inexorable fate, but in the old days, Norbert was an apprentice to old Numerology, Rolo’s grandpa. There is Hornblende Michaelson, the elegant one, and Nelly Mercury. Felicity Octave is a complicated character. She is shaped by Nelly but also implanted by the BAM monitors as a covert agent. In the novel, BAM is a group that monitors what is going on. Rolo calls himself an eight-stage rocket whose seven companions are disposable booster stages. He says seven fall away so the eighth can ascend.

Now the important name.

Dan is the tribe omitted from the sealed tribes in Revelation 7. Twelve tribes are sealed; Dan is not among them. The Church Fathers considered this tremendously important. Irenaeus (Against Heresies V.30.2) cites Jeremiah 8:16 ("The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan") and connects it to the Revelation 7 omission: the Antichrist will come from Dan. Hippolytus (De Antichristo 14) uses Genesis 49:17, Jacob's blessing: "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that his rider shall fall backward." In Catholic tradition, the formula is that Dan = serpent-tribe, omitted tribe, tribe of the false messiah. Serpent in the path, ambush, blade from below. All the symbols the novel plays with.

Rolo knows all this, and he takes the name Danovitz to claim it. Of course, it is a Jewish name, and the really bad kid in When All the World Was Young is the brilliant young banker Conrad “Goldfingers” Goldmeister, more complications for dealing with this aspect of Lafferty. In any case, Rolo’s moniker is Dolg the Dagger, the Driven Knife, a blade striking from the path, the Dan-serpent of Genesis 49:17. Connected to this in the novel is an important moment involving something called the I-Forget Bird in Chapter 2, a dark parody of the dove in sacred tradition. The bird explicitly warns Brendan about the entity he is serving:

This refers to the ouroboros, Dan's serpent folded into a self-consuming circle. At the destruction of Spacious City in the novel, when the whole antichrist rehearsal falls apart, Lafferty writes that the fires are "wonderful flaming visions of snakes eating themselves."

Chrona makes all this very clear for the reader. She says, "My son Rolo is the present King of Babylon. This is a cultish and 'in' thing only to conceal the fact that, for it is a valid thing also." Then: "But Rolo is also King of Babylon in a deeper way than is suspected." The deeper way is Revelation 17–18. Babylon in the Apocalypse is the great harlot city, a counterfeit of the New Jerusalem. The beast of Revelation 13 and the harlot of Revelation 17 are complementary faces of this counter-kingdom. When Rolo names himself King of Babylon, he costumes himself in the role in Revelation. As I have already pointed out, Chrona herself is the Whore of Babylon as a working archaeologist. Lafferty gives the reader his version of Revelation 17:16 in Chapter 11, where the brutal betrayal of the Whore of Babylon by the beast is made literal as Rolo enters his demonic adolescence:

This is the Revelation typology of the beast consuming the harlot in visceral, earthly terms.

Then the book has many liturgical deep cuts. Each one takes a Gospel moment and runs it backward, doing something new with Lafferty’s counterfiguration strategy.

Take Matthew 16:13–16. Christ asks, "Who do men say that I am?" Peter answers. The Father makes it possible to see who the Son is. At least persons participate in this, two Divine. Who do you think am I? is the drama behind each of the synoptic gospels as rhetorical structures, which is why the are nothing like biographies. The audience is being asked the question. In Chapter 10, Rolo parodies it:

Yeah. He’s 666. But Rolo does it all on his own. No Peter, no Father. The Trinitarian confession becomes a narcissistic mirror. He acknowledges what he is doing because "the Other" is capitalized just in case anyone needs help. The triple cube / six-sided straight / squares' squares' square: three self-referential geometric figures. Three degenerate images of itself.

Or take John 8:58. "Before Abraham was, I am" — the ego eimi, the divine name. In Chapter 11, Rolo has fun with this: "Before Beelzebub was, I am!” He claims priority before the chief of demons, the hierarchical boasting of Hell.

One more. John 10:16 is one of Lafferty’s favorite lines, recurring in his fiction and in the quotes in his letters, and is tremendously important to him. "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold." In Chapter 10, Rolo uses the same words to claim access to Olympus for his followers:

Lafferty also has Rolo parody the Chalcedonian Definition of Christ, having two natures, human and divine, without confusion or change. In Chapter 11, Rolo explains his dual existence with chilling clarity:

There is a great deal of this kind of thing in the novel.

So for the Parousia, where the Church has "I will come again" (John 14:3) and "do this in memory of me, till he come" (1 Corinthians 11:26), there is a gruesome swap in Chapter 10. Rolo admits, "Now it is only rehearsal. I will come again, with more substance, when I am older." His cultists beg for a communion of suffering:

That is a dark parody of the Eucharist.

That is probably enough to show what is going on here.

So why is the novel called Dark Shine?

Immediately after Rolo's self-naming in Chapter 11, Lafferty gives the reader a faux dictionary entry:

There is a lot there to think about in that definition as a slide, but I’m going to stick to the antichrist angle. The semantic drift—halo through mirage and show into trick and fraud and finally stench and addiction—is the Antichrist trajectory. Dark shine is the bottom of the universe counterfigured as meretricious splendor.