"All Pieces of a River Shore" (1969/1970)
- Jon Nelson
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Imagine a man who declared that he had painted a picture three miles long and a rival artist who announced a few months later that his painting was four miles in length! They were liars, of course, but what magnificent lies! . . . These lies were no less than colossal and supercolossal. Clearly the men were doubly artists: they were both painters and press agents. —John Francis McDermott, The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi, p. 23
Today I will be tentative: tentative about Lafferty’s primary source, and tentative about how to read the challenges that “All Pieces of a River Shore” raises about creation, artistic media, and metaphysics. It is a more difficult story than people have given it credit for being. At least, it challenges me. It is probably that its high concept premise stops people from struggling with its mind-bending logic. That is where this post will end. It is obviously relevant to mature works such as Three Armageddons and East of Laughter.
If you look online, you will find a readerly pattern. A reader reads “All Pieces of a River Shore” and discovers the nineteenth-century panoramas. As is often the case, historical truth underwrites the fantasy. Lafferty loves technological dead ends and byways. One sees it in his interest in interurban trolley system and his alt history of television. Some Lafferty readers have speculated about what sources he used to write “All Pieces of a River Shore,” but no one has mentioned what seems the best candidate for his primary text, one he could have checked out from the library as he was studying the American West: John Francis McDermott’s The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi.
Published in 1958 by the University of Chicago Press, The Lost Panoramas is a really fun book. It covers the popular but short-lived nineteenth-century entertainment form at the center of Lafferty’s fantasy, the moving river panorama. These were monumental works of popular art, consisting of hundreds of yards of painted canvas unrolled across a stage. They gave audiences something like a simulated travelogue crossed with a newsreel of the Mississippi River. Queen Victoria wanted to see one. There is a quaint YA novel about the phenomenon that I read and enjoyed. To see a fragment of a river panorama in action, click here. For an overview, here.
One reason to think Lafferty likely knew McDermott’s book is that it contains incredibly rare reproductions of posters and other ephemera of the kind he imagines in his counter-history of panoramas. There is overlapping verbal texture. For hard echos of McDermott, we need look no further than the broadside Leo Nation unrolls for his friend:
"The Arkansas Traveler, World's Finest Carnival, Eight Wagons, Wheels, Beasts, Dancing Girls, Baffling Acts, Monsters, Games of Chance. And Featuring the World's Longest Picture, Four Miles of Exquisite Painting. This is from the Original Panorama; it is Not a Cheap-Jack Imitation."
Then there is the title: The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi. It looks to me like a source for the story’s quest structure, with its emphasis on loss and recovery. Lafferty’s story is about the greatest of the lost panoramas, one McDermott won’t tell you about.
The book tells the interesting story of five panorama artists of the 1840s (John Banvard, John Rowson Smith, Sam Stockwell, Henry Lewis, and Leon Pomarède), and it is the kind of nonfiction one can easily imagine Lafferty enjoying. In it, one learns about the arduous sketching expeditions, the ingenious machinery used to display the scrolls, and the rivalries fueled by “supercolossal” claims about the paintings’ lengths.
All the panoramas shared the mythology of size, as if they would have been inhuman to produce. The panoramas inspired braggadocio. The panorama trade encouraged this. Their creators cast themselves as great river picture painters, which is another sign that McDermott’s approach to the phenomenon is in the story’s DNA, because his book is a mystery about historical recovery. Although all the original panoramas were thought in 1958 to have been lost or destroyed, McDermott uses contemporary prints, diaries, anecdotes, and newspaper accounts to reconstruct their outrageous history. “All Pieces of a River Shore” has a a point to make about the wonderful plenitude and mystery of creation, but it also parodies John Francis McDermott.
Lafferty’s short story one-ups McDermott’s mystery of the lost panoramas. It tells a myth about their origin by recontextualizing their real history. In his reimagining, the 19th-century river panoramas are a synthesis of primordial artifacts and historical forgeries rooted in a forgotten prehistoric moment that overlapped with migration. In fact, the genuine sections are not paintings at all, but indestructible, microscopic records of the Mississippi riverbank from 15,000 years ago—a discarded "microfilm" left by a gargantuan entity known in legend as the Great River Shore Picture Painter.
The original river artifact was divided up and held as sacred relics by ancient northern tribes who, 800 years prior, carried them into Mexico as tokens of ancient luck and ancestral memory. Some newer Mexican families even commissioned "cheap-jack" imitations (crude, hand-painted canvases), which were eventually looted by U.S. soldiers during the Mexican War. As Leo’s Mexican contact, Don Caetano, explains:
"These cheap-jack imitations are of Mexican origin, just as the staining originals were born in the states. They were done for the new great families in their aping of the old great families, in the hope of also sharing in ancient treasure and ancient luck. . . . The cheap-jack imitation pictures were looted by gringo soldiers of the U.S. Army during the Mexican War, as they seemed to be valued by certain Mexican families. From the looters they found their way to mid-century carnivals in the States."
“All Pieces of a River Shore” begins with all this in the background. Our protagonist is the Native American Leo Nation, a wealthy collector of Americana who distinguishes between crude, 19th-century carnival panoramas of the Mississippi River and rare genuine versions of the same subject: the primordial artifact. The real pieces of the river shore picture are composed of a sophisticated, nearly indestructible material. There is no evidence of pigment or brush strokes. Under high-powered magnification, the images show microscopic cellular detail in leaves and moss, as if they were high-fidelity records of a physical environment. As Leo explains the sheer impossibility of the medium to Charles Longbank:
“It's all there, Charley, every leaf, every knob of bark, every spread of moss. I've put parts of it under a microscope, ten power, fifty power, four hundred power. There's detail that you couldn't see with your bare eyes if you had your nose right in the middle of it. You can even see cells of leaf and moss. You put a regular painting under that magnification and all you see is details of pigment, and canyons and mountains of brush strokes. Charley, you can't find a brush stroke in that whole picture! Not in any of the real ones.”
Leo decides he must collect the primordial river. He intends to be the person who reconstructs the entire shoreline. To do this, he travels across the American continent to acquire additional segments from academic, geological, and historical sources. Putting it together reveals a world populated by extinct species, including mastodons, giant ground sloths, and passenger pigeons, as well as native flora that indicates a much colder climate. The evidence is conclusive: the origin of the pieces of the river shore goes back thousands of years into the past.
The story has a dramatic third act. Leo’s buddy Charles uses computer analysis of sun angles to organize sixty miles of the recorded shoreline. This proves that the segments were captured during the same hour of a single day. The northernmost reel depicts the presence of an advancing glacier, making it definitive: the picture dates back fifteen thousand years to the late Pleistocene. Charles finds he has to abandon his scientific rationalism. No human made the original panorama. This is confirmed by the discovery of recurring "clouds" on the film, which are in fact eighteen-foot-long fingerprints consisting of gargantuan loops and whorls.
“All Pieces of a River Shore” is one of the harder Lafferty stories for me, though it seems easy for other people to understand. One publication even calls it one of Lafferty’s simplest. I can think of several reasons it gives me real trouble when it does not give others the same degree of puzzlement, but the main one is the ending. I have read it many times, and it still feels like a fake-out, with the focus shifting to Charles being spooked. How are we to understand the “they” referred to at the end of the story? Are they demiurges, Watchers, persons of the Trinity, or simply the idea that personhood is larger than created nature, if one holds that the universe is “persons” deep down? The question is unresolvable and, as a result, the ending reads as something of a red herring. It is far less interesting than what Lafferty is saying about ontological depth and about what it means to be a person looking at the world.
A silly thought experiment. If you are lucky enough to have two eyes, and each is working and a few centimeters apart, each eye receives a slightly different image of the environment, a difference known as binocular disparity. Your brain compares these small discrepancies. Larger differences tell your brain that an object is nearer, and smaller differences indicate greater distance. It then fuses the two images into a single three-dimensional percept through a process called stereopsis.
Now, as part of this thought experiment, imagine that someone behind you is projecting all that depth, or creating it. Trying to look over your shoulder to see who is doing it would be like trying to spin fast to see the back of your own head. I think Lafferty is primarily interested in this phenomenological experience. If you look through your eyes, nature becomes infinitely deep. If you look into the picture of the original panorama, you can keep going, as if binocular disparity went all the way down. Put two eyes to the microscope. He wants us to think about that, not why Charles is scared; hence my fake out view of the ending. It as if the world were made infinitely. That is Lafferty's sacramental poeis again. That much is easy.
Here is where the story bends my brain. The reconstituted panorama exists physically in the narrative present, so the segments are not identical with the river-world R; they are a medium that can be stored and handled. At the same time, the medium presents a scene as trace or capture rather than as reproduction, the way traditional (analog) film causally acts on silver halides. I take this to be the Ginger’s point about it being picture, not canvas. To understand this bridge principle, we should look closely at how Lafferty presents the final revelation:
"Another cloud on the picture, Charley," Leo said. "It's like a big smudge in the air between us and the shore." "Yes, and there will be another," Charles moaned. "It means we're getting near the end. Who were they, Leo? How long ago was it? Ah—I'm afraid I know that part pretty close—but they couldn't have been human then, could they? Leo, if this was just an inferior throwaway, why are they still hanging in the air?"
"It already is microfilm, Leo, to them. A rejected strip, I believe."
The marks . . . too exactly like something, and too big to be: the loops and whorls that were eighteen feet long . . .
On a forensic view, the fingerprint is extrinsic to R because it is like a handprint on a window pane. The story, however, pushes the reader to consider a bridge principle: given the scale implied by “microfilm . . . to them” and the enormous “loops and whorls,” what counts as casual contact for the maker becomes, for us, inscription. Accept that, and the fingerprint becomes an authorial index, something like God’s finger in Hugh St. Victor’s idea that nature is the Book of Nature. It is physically extrinsic to R but inseparable from how R is given, because one encounters the river-shore's endless depth only through a medium already bearing the maker’s touch.
Longbank reacts to a presence: the fingerprint is experienced “between us and the shore.” It is within the binocular viewing of the panorama, even if it is on the film. The metaoptical metaviewing presence (whatever it is) enabling world depth comes from behind the shoulder. The fingerprint is in one’s field of vision but external to the depicted scene because it is on the carrier rather than part of what the scene depicts; but it is also internal to the viewer’s access because the scene is only available through that carrier, so the viewer cannot see the scene without the mark once the shape of the mark is discerned. Consider Da Vinci’s fingerprint, which is the painting. An eerie sense of cohabitation results from working through the configuration of elements in “All Pieces of a River Shore.” We see demigurges like Snuffles or Enniscorthy do their demiurgic thing in Lafferty. Rarely do we feel their proximity outside of their explosive violence quite the way we do in this story. That happens if we give ourselves over to the story’s weird double movement that estranges while opening onto dizzying creative depths and innumerably possible forking objects of attentional focus. It a story that makes the created order sublime.
One last thing about this story: Lafferty did his homework on the river’s biological and geographical details:
I was curious about the sequence of images in John Banvard’s original panorama. The images are lost, but I reconstructed the order from a nineteenth-century description of what each segment depicted.
