As a Serpent's Egg (Abandoned Novel)

Voltaire

They had been having a hard time waking Voltaire up and keeping him awake. But, once he understood that it was one of his highest desires really being presented for him, he was able to stay awake pretty well; and he cackled and carried on like a person a hundred and fifty years younger than himself. But it takes a long time to strangle a man with entrails as slick as those were. Fourteen choruses of Grave-Stone Rock were done while it was going on, and one of those choruses can’t be done in less than ten minutes. Even with a good loop around the last royal neck in the world, and with twenty-five select senior youths tugging and lugging on each entrail length, it was hard to do a quick job with such a greasy hawser. But, really, a quick job hadn’t been what was desired. It was slow, and the face of Hiram III turned every rainbow color during the presentation. — How Many Miles to Babylon

That passage was inspired by Father Jean Meslier. Regarding it, Kevin Cheek has written, “In How Many Miles to Babylon I found the grotesquerie unnecessary and overdone, especially the scene where they strangled the last priest with the entrails of the last king (or was it vice versa?).” I like it, but the set piece has a history. It isn’t just grotesquerie. It is political satire as well as a lampoon of the Enlightenment, and as such it ties in with “Condillac’s Statue.” How Many Miles to Babylon is also one of Lafferty’s hardest texts, as complicated as a Lafferty novel. It is really hard. Cheek might be a little too outside the cathedral to appreciate this. Then again, I love Catholic grotesquerie and Lafferty’s bloodsmell.

Setting all that aside, what follows is something of an afterthought on “Seven Story Dream,” which explores the themes of perfection and murder. With “Seven Story Dream” recently on my mind, I thought to say something about the As a Serpent’s Egg fragment.

At one point, long after having written “Seven Story Dream,” Lafferty seems to have wanted to explore murder and perfection at novel length. He imagined a world in which Jean Meslier (1664–1729) got what he wanted.

Who was Jean Meslier? Someone Lafferty did not like, a world-class hypocrite. He was a French Catholic priest, made infamous by Voltaire for radical writings that attacked religion, monarchy, and social inequality. He had lived a double life. Outwardly, Meslier served as a parish priest for decades. At the same time, he was secretly scribbling away (while living on the Church) at his massive manuscript—now known as the Testament—in which he rejected the existence of God, denounced organized religion as an instrument of oppression, and expressed sympathy for the poor against the ruling classes. After his death, these writings circulated among Enlightenment thinkers and became notorious. Voltaire made Meslier one of the earliest and most uncompromising figures in European intellectual history, though Voltaire softened him with deism.

Meslier himself had a great deal to say about the idea of perfection. The title of Chapter 62 puts it this way:

The Beauty, Order, and Perfection That Are Found in the Works of Nature Do Not at All Prove the Existence of a God Who Made Them.

Large chunks of the Testament are freethinking about questions of perfection. As an eighteenth-centuryist, I am interested in this. Lafferty doesn’t use any of it.

But Lafferty did write a note on Meslier while conceptualizing the background for As a Serpent’s Egg. Though the novel was abandoned, the Serpent’s Egg title was obviously used. The phrase shows up a few times in Lafferty, most significantly at the end of Reefs of Earth. What survives are some notes for the novel and the typed first chapter. Had Lafferty not abandoned the novel, it would have centered on the themes of murder and perfection, making it a thematic cousin of “Seven Story Dream.”

The novel imagines yet another dystopian future. Humanity believes it has achieved absolute perfection through the total application of science. This perfection is recent, having been reached seven years earlier with the brutal, ritualistic execution of the last king and the last priest. The deaths thus fulfilled the eighteenth-century wish long attributed to Jean Meslier: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

Interestingly enough, the line is not Meslier’s. In the Testament, Meslier writes:

I remember the wish of a man a while back who had no culture or education, but who, to all appearances, did not lack the common sense to pass sound judgments on all these detestable abuses and tyrannies. In his wish and in his way of expressing his thought it seemed that he saw rather far and penetrated rather deeply into the detestable mystery of iniquity of which I just spoke, and recognized very well the perpetrators and instigators. His wish was that all the rulers of the earth and all the nobles be hanged and strangled with the guts of priests.

Wherever Lafferty got the quote, it probably wasn’t from reading Meslier firsthand. But Imagine a dystopian Lafferty novel with themes touching on the French Enlightenment and the Terror that followed the French Revolution.

Back to the sterile utopia and the novel.

In Chapter One, Lafferty introduces the reader to the man who would (presumably) be the novel’s protagonist. He is one Falcon Lintner, a cynical “old crime detective.” It turns out that “crime detective” is a really bad job to have in a perfect world, but Lintner is about to get lucky. Enter the powerful Duke Locusta, the “Master of the Gentle Needle”—because of course the world is not in fact perfect. An impossible series of murders has just taken place. This is similar to how Lafferty begins the unpublished Iron Tongue of Midnight. In this case, however, the murders threaten to scandalize the world’s façade.

Locusta characterizes the metaphysical mystery as a reverse “locked room” problem. It isn't how someone escaped a sealed area, but how an eradicated evil managed to break back into the room. He wants Lintner to crack the case. Lintner accepts, saying that “it is the business of any upright person to feel out of place” in such an allegedly perfect world.

However, Lintner knows there is real danger. He is now a marked man and a bait fish. He looks to the man for the job because he vanishes from Locusta’s locked room and sets out to uncover the reality beneath the surface of a perfect society. I wish Lafferty had not abandoned it.

As a Serpent's Egg Notes.pdf

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