3A08: The Plots of Three Armageddons
The plot has all the unhinged unity of any shipwreck. And there is movement and force and power. Power above all! This is Destruction as pageant and presentation. One has the feeling that something very large will come out of all of this. Yes, like the destruction of the world. — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (p. 352)
My second read showed pretty clearly why I remembered merely the premise and little of the plot: there is little plot to remember, in a traditional sense. — Review
In my last post, I wrote that The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny has too many plots, not too little plot. A reader could mistake it for a gallimaufry of incidents lacking the rich unity of a memorable plot. But the novel’s plot lies in this “too many-ness”: too many plots for most readers, though not for me, and, one hopes, not for you.
I’ll be pedantic and define what I mean by plot. Plot is a rational reconstruction. It organizes narrative events and changes of state into temporal, causal, modal, and purposive relations, giving particular occurrences their significance within a developing structure of action. It results from the crossplay of fabula (the sequence of storyworld events the reader reconstructs) and syuzhet (their selection, arrangement, and disclosure in discourse). It shapes the reader’s expectations and later judgments of motivation, contingency, consequence, and significance.
A plot’s unity consists in patterned interdependence. That pattern can accommodate recursive temporalities, incompatible possibilities, and suspended closure. A narrative has multiple plots when distinct configurations of action develop their own consequential relations while intersecting, competing with, or transforming one another. This is what the very experimental 3A does.
I distinguish four main plots, along with other fictional elements that I would rank below the level of plot. The four plots interfere with each other.
First, the four plots:
Sweeny tries to save the world through his art and screws it up, dooming it because devils manipulate him.
Sweeny turns catastrophes into operas because he wants to prevent them from happening, or from having happened. He also plants safeguards in history, the hammers: elections, names, pseudo-events, and chronological arrangements that “catastrophe” would have to overturn.
Kirol calls him out on the destructive potential of his musical project; at the same time, the world's audiences increasingly accept what the works put on offer. Sweeny’s final attempt to withhold himself from destruction, through the extended year and the hollow tree, is the culmination of this plot.
Sweeny wins, loses, and rescues Mary Margaret.
This is a love-story plot, a retelling of Buile Shuibhne and his wife, Eorann, that supplements the Vogelsprachenkunde theme. The transformation of Mary Margaret into an extraordinary beauty and singer makes her harder to win, and Sweeny chases it for the meretricious glory because it is as specious as his knocking out the boxing champion. Her worldly success leads to ruin and an attempted suicide.
He reaches her by acting before her summons arrives, rescues her, and exchanges some of her beauty for wisdom. They have a good, happy, and long marriage.
This is the most human plot in the story. Mary Margaret’s claim on him, including her repeated appeals to leave the tree, both loving and hectoring, connects to his potential redemption. This love story develops its own complications and resolution.
Rival parties struggle to kill, keep alive, and, most importantly, control Sweeny.
The Devonian mathematicians think that murdering Sweeny will save the world. The devilish Marshals want to keep him alive because they want his works to bring catastrophe about, ironically, by delaying their full force until the people choose to end it all because they are indifferent to horror.
In this plot, Sweeny hires six detectives to protect him against both groups. Alliances, identities, and motives get entangled in fascinating ways. Eventually all these figures merge into Sextus while still being, somehow, the Old Man Menagerie of 13 men. This is the novel’s supernatural crime plot, one of the most fun parts of the whole thing.
Investigators try to discover what happened to the century, or, more accurately, the welcome-to-reading-the-novel meta-plot.
The reader is put in the position of these figures, half insightful, half confused. Woodbine investigates people who remember wars that his own experience apparently disproves. Their intelligence and sincerity undermine his initial explanation.
His inquiry into the mathematics also encounters a suspected demonic manipulation whose discovery kills other investigators. Elsewhere, Dredgefellow examines evidence. That includes his own wounds. The inquiry repeatedly becomes a struggle over whether witnesses will acknowledge what they know or choose to not care.
Now, within the crime plot, three developed subplots can be teased out:
Grogg’s pursuit after death.
The "past is never really dead, it isn't even past" subplot. Killing Grogg does not solve the problem. This is one of the book’s moments of definalization, the final piece of definalization being the golden spirit of Sweeny that does not fall to the earth; the other seven dark spirits are those of Matthew 12:43–45, one of Lafferty’s great motifs. He works these verses so often in his fiction that they deserve attention in themselves.
Grogg’s postmortem attacks become psychic; Branagan investigates their geographical limits, and the discovery and relocation of Grogg’s bones create a countermeasure. This is the story of laying Grogg's spirit to rest, and it's one of the best things in the book.
The Drayman’s Alley murders.
The Poe/Black Mask Chestertonian parody subplot. Thirteen substitutes die in Sweeny’s place over forty years. Sweeny’s survival is being purchased through other people’s deaths.
This relates to the scapegoat theme and the question of how Sweeny makes others suffer to avoid suffering himself. He demonstrates this character flaw from childhood.
The detectives’ doubles and the emergence of Sextus.
The AI-robot-theological/hardboiled detective/occult detective subplot, one of the deepest and strangest. This is one of the novel's main schizo-gash moments. Protectors and persecutors eventually share identities and are absorbed by Sextus, which is some kind of égrégore that stitches all the characters into a rat-king-like entity.
He comes, this rat-killer, and he says that he can divert the threatening rats away, by his art, by his artful piping, if only someone will give him the keys to the city so that he can find out all the rats wherever they may be. He will sublimate the rats themselves into a tune about the rats, he says. By making them to be rats in a tune, he will prevent them from being rats in the world. And so they will be obliterated and their threat will be dispersed. But there is something dangling down and out from under the edge of the long cloak of the rat-killer. It is the tip of a tail, of a very long and thick rat’s tail. For the rat-killer is really the giant rat-king, and he has not come for the destruction of the rat-assault but for its enhancement and support. Give him the keys to the city indeed! So you have blown up my pretense of artful sublimation of the organized destruction of the world by turning it all into an art form. Did you see my devil’s tail, red and ending in a red dart, hanging down below my cloak? Well then, you are right and I am wrong. But by now I am locked into my wrongness and they will not let me out of it.
Sextus claims to control the world and the Devil, then turns to absorb Sweeny, who takes the place of the Flesh in the World, the Flesh, and the Devil formula:
“All that is left now is the World and the Sweeny and the Devil,” Sextus said. “And, as everybody except Enniscorthy Sweeny has guessed, I, Sextus, have subsumed the world, and perhaps I am the world. And likewise I have subsumed the Devil. And now I start on the Sweeny.” “As everybody except Sextus has guessed,” Sweeny said “I am—” But I either slept or was subsumed then, for Sweeny’s incomplete sentence still dangles at dawn, after dawn.
Now we come to the mini-plots, which could be called incidents. They point to and deepen the four main plots in various ways, but it is a mistake, I think, to see the "novel" as a jumble of these with little plot to remember:
The boxing match
The baseball game
The banking venture
The boy preacher
Skantling’s deformation
The snake-making boy
Prohibition, A Farce
Secret Agents Six
Etc.
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