"Animal Fair" (1972/1974)
- Jon Nelson
- Sep 3
- 11 min read
Updated: Sep 21
But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? — Job 12:7–9
“What is really the situation, Austro?” I asked. He drew a hand in his drawing tablet. Somehow he had the perspective all wrong, for the hand was a million times bigger than the drawing tablet it was drawn in. It was the Shaper's hand, and it looked as if it might come down on us at any moment.” “Animal Fair”
“Animal Fair” is one of the Barnaby Sheen stories I’ve thought a lot about. It carries dim echoes of literary precedents like Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, where birds gather in a parliament to debate love and social order, mirroring human politics. But what Lafferty does is so different—that’s why I say the echoes are dim. Once again, the story centers on the Sheen household and its friends. This time, it turns on a strange gathering of animals and spirits in the wooded draw behind his home. Austro, Loretta, Mary Mondo, and Chiara (with her “Really Eyes”) help cleanse the doors of perception for the Men Who Knew Everything.
Animal archetypes appear, from buffalo to giant cardinals, forming what “Animal Fair” calls the “Broader House.” An indictment is about to be passed on mankind, the “Upper House,” who had been given dominion over the Broader House but may no longer be trusted with it. Like many of Lafferty’s deepest stories, "Animal Fair" looks light on the surface, but it carries some of his major ideas about evolution, order and chaos, pollution, and the human place in creation.
There’s much to say about “Animal Fair.” Here I want to focus on two things that are key to appreciating its deeper layers: the strong presence of Chesterton and St. Augustine.
When it comes to Chesterton, "Animal Fair" is intriguing because of the way it twists the big man about agreeing with his work but qualifying it through Lafferty’s own vision. It does this not just once, but on two story levels. First, within “Animal Fair”, Lafferty has a character, Cris Benedetti, retell Chesterton’s parable “The Roots of the World” in a version he attributes to his daughter, Chiara. This altered parable appears as a story within “Animal Fair”. While interesting on its own, it serves more as misdirection than as the heart of Lafferty’s engagement with Chesterton.
The second, deeper rewriting happens at the level of structure and theme, where "Animal Fair" responds to The Everlasting Man and other Chestertonian works on animals. Here, Lafferty does more than allude. He puts pressure on Chesterton’s worldview regarding animals. Chesterton presents the human–animal divide in sharp terms. Lafferty, instead, offers the metaphor of two houses and an important statement about his zoon anthropikon, the human who once contained all animals. These elements make “Animal Fair” visionary in a Chestertonian mode of fantasy, but they also take it far beyond the Chestertonian.
What follows are a few relevant passages from The Everlasting Man:
“An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture.” Lafferty creates Austro to solve this problem. What Chesterton points to as being impossible is the status quo in Sheen household.
“But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him. In short, it is the purpose of this introduction to maintain this thesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we know he is not an animal.” The “Really Eyes” in “Animal Fair,” along with much of its language about perception, speak directly to this shift. Chesterton says quite a bit about eyes and vision in The Everlasting Man, and it’s all relevant to what Lafferty is doing.
“What he did see at last was a cavern so far from the light of day that it might have been the legendary Domdaniel cavern, that was under the floor of the sea. This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse.” Austro being a visual artist ties directly to this line of argument in The Everlasting Man. It is also worth noting the presence of Domdaniel, one of Lafferty’s favorite imaginative locations and the base of Carmody Overlark in Fair Hills of the Ocean, Oh.
“The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. “ Here Lafferty breaks with Chesterton. His animals laugh. This is part of the deep rewriting of Chesterton that is going in the story. Lafferty writes, “There was sniggering, there were guffaws just off the edge of the ear, there was animal laughter; slashing, fanged laughter.
Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man includes some of his most direct writing on natural selection and evolution. It is an essential background for understanding what Lafferty is doing in “Animal Fair.”
Chesterton's "The Roofs of the World" vs. Chiara Benedetti's Retelling
The second note is shorter. Like much that connects to Barnaby Sheen, “Animal Fair” is intensely Augustinian. It belongs to The Men Who Knew Everything/In a Green Tree stories, whose members all went to an Augustinian school, and it is one of the stories in the cycle that mentions the saint by name. Those who know Augustine will recognize that the Seedman is a theological allusion to St. Augustine's rationes seminales, the “seed-like reasons” planted in creation. This also connects to George Drakos’s reflections on the Word as archē, the origin. It is no accident that the Seedman appears as a professor. Augustine, after all, is a Doctor of the Church. For another disguised St. Augustine quasi-cameo, read “Brain Fever Season.”
