3A07: What in Blue Blazes Is Really Going On?

The face was skinny and ruddy. The nose was powerful and beaked; not like that of a bird of prey but like that one of the Roman-nosed water birds. The nose was always peeling, as though it were growing out from the inside and flaking off in those strips.

That gnarly ant and aphid image with its glistening drop? Really important for understanding 3A.

Nuts and bolts or maybe bolts and nuts. The Three Armageddons can melt one’s brain, so I think it helpful to have a baseline for understanding what is happening, and then to complicate that account. There are few descriptions of it online. Ironically, the best of these says it doesn’t have a plot, when the problem is that it has too much plot, or plot running on parallel tracks at once. So this is my crib on how to get a really good grip on it. The passages to start with are the ones at the very end of the novel where Lafferty introduces the idea of Chinese box time, and Sweeny goes back and forth between seeing himself as a rabbit Achilles is chasing and the world as the rabbit. I’ll say how I read it as simply as possible, with the caveat that I would want to go back and show how the book complicates this baseline.

My reading begins with the reality of the twentieth century’s catastrophes. The wars happen, even while the novel’s peaceful century continues alongside them. Sweeny absorbs those catastrophes into his operas, hoping that what has been made into art need not be lived in the world. This is bidirectional: he wants to prevent the wars from having happened. But the conversion can’t be completed, and Sweeny will run out of time. At the same time, traces of what is happening remain. For the art to achieve its dark catharsis, people must repress things that continue to exist on a parallel track, and the contradictions become increasingly hard to contain.

Sweeny’s intentions are ambiguous. By giving catastrophe an artistic form, he also makes it available for people to imagine, rehearse, and adopt. The book sees something meretricious in this catharsis. Pope Kirol I gives what I take to be the soundest view on what is happening: the visions are “action-prints” for destruction. The Marshals who protect Sweeny and torture him into continuing the work are more of Lafferty’s devils. They might as well be the Nine with their heads of three in Past Master. They understand that by preventing the suffering of the 20th century, they can also stave off repentance and forced accountability. Eventually, the visions' nihilism will become real when the tension Sweeny holds back through the music is released.

Spectators of Armageddon II leave with Sweeny’s face on their own, a sign that his confused relation to catastrophe has become theirs. He tries to absorb the century into his work; people begin to absorb the work into their lives; and Sweeny contributes to the conflagration he says he wants to avoid. At the same time he knows he, too, is being manipulated.

One of the most grotesque and sexual images in all of Lafferty is how Sweeny sees his relationship with the devils who are manipulating him. Ants “milk” aphids by stroking them with their antennae, encouraging them to release droplets of honeydew, which the ants drink. Honeydew is gross stuff in my book. Honeydew is a sugary waste: aphids suck a lot of plant sap, take in far more sugar than they need, and excrete the excess. Ants, protective of their little aphid patsies, guard them against predators such as ladybugs and lacewing larvae. They farm the aphids. For Sweeny, honeydew becomes a correlate of sexual emission, a symbol for his art, bound up with his sexuality and sublimation of a desire for violence. Because the manipulating "friends of catastrophe" are devils, they are fire ants:

No, I do not devise these things myself. It’s as though they were planted in me and I must excrete them. Yes, sometimes I take pleasure in these speculations, but sometimes I take pain. I am being manipulated, and not by loving hands, though sometimes they are cajoling and flattering. Sometimes they are accompanied by an abdominal kneading that is of porno effect. I do not know why I am being used in this when there are so many other persons who would surely be more useful. What fire-ants are these anyhow, they who milk me as if I were an aphid?

Ennis is, in some ways, a version of Pilgrim from Not to Mention Camels, but while that book uses parallel spaces, this book uses parallel time. Ennis is far more human than Pilgrim, and he dies with there being some hope for redemption, something we can't say about Pilgrim. Having tried to make scapegoats of his works, he tries, at last, to become the scapegoat himself at the end of the book, Christlike in his disordered, cowardly way, admittedly. He wants to be a scapegoat that won't come out of the hollow tree. This is his consummation, where he becomes a version of Mad Sweeney from Irish legend.

And he’s wrong about himself and the world, because his corrupt, sexually disordered art, his devil-haunted art, has also conditioned people into indifference. In this way, too, 3A is part of Lafferty's ongoing media critique. By trying to avoid suffering, he created more suffering in the world because he failed to understand the reality of redemptive suffering. There is a hint that the iron collar that devils use to manipulate him might become a crown of thorns:

Yeah, I notice what happens. Death face-to-face, do I know what happens! Strongheart, my friend, you yourself have noticed what happens. The last time you saw me you were curious about the heavy scarf I was wearing around my neck in a warm room. With your customary brusqueness, you shipped it off. And you saw the premonitory wounds of the instant iron spikes. I came up with something pretty good to tell you in explanation, as I thought. It was ingenious. And you said “Your fictions, Ennis, are wonderful, but they will never be mistaken for facts. You worry too much on that score. People will always be able to tell the difference. But I wonder what the fact is that you are trying to cover up by such a fiction as that one.” The fact, Strongheart, is just as I tell it. There is an invisible iron collar around my neck, and sometimes my enemies thought-trigger it into very slight action. Even a slight action of it comes near to being the ultimate pain. (pp. 312–313)

Marshal Mosco orders Enniscorthy Sweeny to continue to promulgate the catastrophic visions, or to suffer tortures of the iron collar that has been put around his neck. Other persons in this particular struggle have threatened Sweeny with death. Marshal Mosco (along with Tosco and Rosco) threatens him with life. The Marshals state that Sweeny will not be permitted to die; that he must remain alive now and provide scripts for the Armageddons: and only after the last persons on Earth have all died of the terrible wars and catastrophes will Sweeny finally be permitted to die. (p. 335)     

Sweeny’s spiked, iron collar is grotesquely misplaced. Its whole meaning is misunderstood because it is around his neck. It is really the “Crown of Thorns” that so many of the holy bearers of the invisible stigma suffer from. But Sweeny’s holiness has always been misplaced by about eight inches, and so is his crown. (p. 336)

In broad strokes, this is how I understand the novel's meaning. Of course, all the pleasure is in the monumental collision of detail.