"Assault on Fat Mountain" (1973/1976)

[T]he image realized in pictorial form is not a garden-variety product but, on the contrary, the response to an intuitive vision whose invisible substance it seeks to realize and communicate in visible form. Far from contriving some idolatrous appearance or other, the true image attests to the fact that the visible scene or face it depicts has found the iconographer or artist. —Thomas Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (2022)

The mountain of God is a fat mountain. A curdled mountain, a fat mountain. —Psalm 67:16, Douay-Rheims Bible.

Consider the wealths in High Appalachia; the red grapes of Roane and the white grapes of Smokey Mountain Vineyards; the sweet corn centers of fertile Shelby, and the popcorn plantations of Cumberland; the flax, the wool, the cotton, the Jim-pie-weed cloth; the peat and the coal and the pine-knots for fuel; the rock oil from the hills and the catfish oil from the streams; the pumpkin bread, the hickory nut bread, the bean bread every day of the week; fat beef, fat pork, fat mutton; ducks and geese and woodcock and savanna hen, turkey and guinea; the plump rabbits of Ozarkia and the meaty woodchucks of Doniphan; light wheat, dark rye, barley, and rolling fields of oats; sunflower seeds, pecans and peanuts. Would it be robbery if we took our fair share of these things, nor waited for their niggardly food trains? — “Assault on Fat Mountain.”

Advanced Lafferty.

One of my favorite Lafferty stories is “Assault on Fat Mountain”, an alternate-history piece in which Appalachia has become America’s richest region. It imagines a different future for the State of Franklin.

As much fun as the alternate history is, what interests me today is the rhetoric of lists. Several readers have pointed out Lafferty’s love of lists and offered explanations for it. Here he pushes the list as a structural principle about as far as he ever would, building a story almost entirely out of three of his favorite devices: the paratext, the list, and the speech. His lists take several forms: ordered series, enumeratio, itemization, and congeries. The ordered series moves from greater to lesser or lesser to greater; enumeratio sets out parts that point toward larger wholes; itemization simply lists; and congeries uses overlap and repetition to enrich a lexical field. I’ll break down the story’s construction below, showing how these different kinds of lists work across its paratexts, speeches, and straight narration.

The result is a dazzlingly rhetorical story, but its unusual patchwork form and relative lack of action may have helped obscure its formal virtuosity. The whole thing ends with an anticlimax, as Lafferty’s stories so often do, with the actual assault on Fat Mountain amounting to an epic whimper. The story’s commercial oblivion, and its neglect in academic studies of alternative history, have more to do, I think, with how Lafferty understood the form of a story than with any difficulty the story poses for the reader. It is as clear and easy to understand as anything he ever wrote.

In many ways, it is easy Lafferty. John Clute gives the dominant account of Lafferty’s fate as a writer. He attributes Lafferty’s neglect, despite his gifts, to his lack of interest in making his work conform to the critical and marketing definitions of fantasy and science fiction. Clute writes, “For his career’s sake, it was certainly unfortunate that his response to renown seems to have been an intensification of the oddness of his product.” “Assault on Fat Mountain” is interesting here because it separates unconventionality from difficulty. Its formal departures are considerable, but they do not make the story difficult to understand. It is radically unconventional without being obscure. It isn't odd.

The formal question leads directly to a commercial one: what happens when a story becomes a commodity with an expected shape? Lafferty certainly enjoyed being paid for his work, but from the beginning he seems to have thought of the story as something more than a product. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he submitted to every market he could, hoping to break into print. He was commercially hungry and wanted to be read. Yet even his prenucleation stories undermine the commercial expectations he was being paid to satisfy. This is often chalked up to his being an American original, and that must be part of it. But I think the difficulty people have had commodifying Lafferty also has something to do with the way his work understands idolatry. A useful narrative pattern becomes an idol when it is treated as the only legitimate form a story can take, so that whatever falls outside it is denied a place in the telling. Lafferty never lets any one narrative form claim that kind of authority. That principle runs through his stories from beginning to end. He was pumping out stories, not product. And hidden in the title of “Assault on Fat Mountain” is an assault on God, perhaps specifically on the God of providence, for it is, of course, the mountain of God that is the “fat mountain” of Scripture.

Lafferty didn’t write much about story form, but he did contribute a short memoir to a retrospective anthology of Worlds of If. There, tongue in cheek, he recalled almost accepting the rule that a story must have a story-line and an ending. His own “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” he said, had neither. “A story-line and an ending, if handled right, will not hurt a story, may even help it; but they are not essential.” He credited If with sometimes publishing stories that dispensed with them. That was one reason, he said, If was superior to its big brother, Galaxy. Sure, plots and endings can improve a story, but Galaxy made them de rigueur and so constrained the kinds of stories that could appear in it, even within the confines of genre. “Assault on Fat Mountain” shows how much a story can do without making its plot and ending the chief attractions.

In “Shape of the Science Fiction Story (A Scholarly Study),” his longest discussion of story form, he considers the particular arrangement concealed by the familiar terms beginning, middle, and end. He calls the default story pattern a “trilobite,” with three segments: sighting, pursuit, and killing or conquest. Its models are the hunt, the battle, and the sexual encounter. Again, he recognizes the form’s power and adaptability but argues that its dominance has restricted what stories can do. To explain its authority, he imagines an armed host arriving to enforce the rules: “For these are the heroes laying down the rules for their own accounts.” The hero claims the story’s center. He makes its construction serve his adventure. This, too, bears on “Assault on Fat Mountain,” which has no single hero whose adventure governs the story.

Why does Lafferty care about all this? It comes down to what the three-lobed shape excludes. Lafferty has a list. It includes farming and business, but also enjoyment: the story ends when the sky breaks, he says, leaving the pleasure of the rain outside it. He compares departures from the pattern to waves that break incompletely, fail to reach a climax, or leave an “after-irony.” Then he does something very typical of him, which helps explain his opposition to conventional closure and his love of strategies of definalization. He alludes to Christ’s death and Resurrection as the story that will not accept killing as the final end.

What follows are fifteen rhetorical maneuvers by which Lafferty outflanks the “trilobite” story shape. Building “Assault on Fat Mountain” almost entirely out of catalogues, speeches, and paratexts, he replaces the forward momentum of a standard commercial plot (the hunt, the battle, the kill) with patterns of accumulation. By definalizing the story, Lafferty offers an interesting variation on the historical and theological vision he sets out in his non-fiction.

1. Arutinov's historical theory about flourishing and decline

The dominant party will thrive; it will grow fat in money and fruit; it will flourish in the arts and in the body politic; it will become inventive and vital. And the party or realm that has backed down will shrink and shrivel. No matter what its natural advantages had been, they will now become inapplicable and spooked and sterile and unnatural.

The paired accumulations classify history as bidirectional. There will be either flourishing or decline. The outcomes seem comprehensive; the later catalogues will fill out the particulars for the scheme Arutinov proposes before the action. We have a schema that isn’t yet filled out. The story will be the filling out of the schema.

2. Boston's abundance

Consider the wealths in High Appalachia; the red grapes of Roane and the white grapes of Smokey Mountain Vineyards; the sweet corn centers of fertile Shelby, and the popcorn plantations of Cumberland; the flax, the wool, the cotton, the Jim-pie-weed cloth; the peat and the coal and the pine-knots for fuel; the rock oil from the hills and the catfish oil from the streams; the pumpkin bread, the hickory nut bread, the bean bread every day of the week; fat beef, fat pork, fat mutton; ducks and geese and woodcock and savanna hen, turkey and guinea; the plump rabbits of Ozarkia and the meaty woodchucks of Doniphan; light wheat, dark rye, barley, and rolling fields of oats; sunflower seeds, pecans and peanuts. Would it be robbery if we took our fair share of these things, nor waited for their niggardly food trains?

Enumeratio decomposes a greater whole into parts. Here, the figure breaks down “wealths” into particulars grouped by kind and locality. Semicolons order the bounty; repeated conjunctions drag out its accumulation.

3. Boston's dependence

Why should we be beholden to the Fat-Land People for most of our food and our clothing, for our machinery and our music and our books, for our motor-carts and our trains and our telegraph lines, for our entertainments and excursions, even for our sins?

Synecdoche here makes selected necessities, technologies, arts, and pleasures stand in for the entire Appalachian civilization. Repeated “our” thumps throughout the passage, driving in the United-Staters’ bitter dependence.

4. Boston: manufactures

Consider their Kentucky precision machine shops with their manufacture of Kentucky rifles and reapers and motor-wagons and trains that obsolete our own factories.

Four products. They stand in for the whole industrial system. Polysyndeton links military, agricultural, and transport capacities; the closing comparison makes this synecdochic catalogue describe Appalachian productivity and, indirectly, the Union’s obsolescence.

5. Boston's arms purchases

Not all the self-development money sent to us by rich Appalachia goes for the things that were intended. We divert a big part of it. We buy guns and cannons from England. We buy grenade-launchers and mortar-guns from France. This will be our self-development. And, when we have arms enough, we will invade and take what is ours by right. We’ll be top dog then.

Paratactic “We buy” statements create an assertive rhythm. Calling diverted aid “our self-development” is part of what makes the story so fun as rhetoric. The Union’s dependence becomes political initiative: Appalachia is at fault for creating the money spent on preparations for its own invasion.

6. The children’s history and the founding consequences

Had it been otherwise, had the coin come up ‘crows’, we would not now be our own thriving selves under our Child of God flag . . . . Had it been otherwise, we would not have grown into a great realm of the thirteen states . . . . Had it been otherwise, we would not be here to send relief trains to the lowlanders, the United-Statsers. And who would feed them if we were not established in our fat mountains?

Anaphora presents national identity, territorial expansion, and relief as consequences of one founding decision. A repeated counterfactual makes Appalachian independence seem necessary to the neighbors’ survival.

7. The thirteen states

Kentucky, Tennessee, Outer Virginia, Western Carolina, Lupkin, Tom Bigbee, Tishomingo, Izard, Giradeau, Terre Haute, Gallatin, Oklafalaya, and Kansas; with our Capital at the District of Watauga.

This quasi-practical enumeration gives the nation authority while replacing the unwritten narrative of expansion with membership.

8. The relief train

It was heavy with foodstuffs and clothing; it had some tools and machinery and vehicles; there were a few carloads of radios and luxury appliances. This was one of the daily free trains into that town.

The inventory-like description here creates a reality effect. General freight categories replace the speeches’ sumptuous particulars; “daily” and “free” make necessities, productive equipment, and luxuries routine gifts.

9. Port Chicago and enjoyment

They are a people in the rich heartland (which should be our own heartland) enjoying dew-berries and blueberries, June berries and huckleberries and elderberries, blackberries and gooseberries; enjoying hazelnuts and butternuts; pleasuring themselves on tomatoes and musk melons; the rich Appalachians!

Repeated berry endings and “enjoying” give the catalogue a savoring rhythm. Sound-patterned enumeration invites sensory pleasure within a denunciation; the parenthesis has already claimed the country providing that pleasure as “our own.”

10. Port Chicago and producers

Consider their crackerjack factories in Council Bluffs and their alligator farms in Memphis! Regard the wealth of their windmill-makers and rubber-plant growers. Be amazed at the daily wages of their iron-makers and cucumber pickers. Do you know that even the poor people in Appalachia have pumpkin every day?

The catalogue moves from enterprises to wages to daily food. Carefully selected examples stand for general prosperity.

11. Red River's productive ingenuity

Do you know that they have found ways to get olives to grow in their land? And lemons and oranges and coconuts? Do you know what millions of pounds of honey they take from what billions of bees? Do you understand that they make six potatoes grow where only one would grow in our country? Do you know that they tamper with their trees so that they have apples to pick on Christmas, and that they can get nine cuttings of clover a year in their hay fields? Do you know that not ten miles from here they have a factory that makes cactus taste like beefsteak? Do you know that they make better Horse Whisky in Kentucky and better Mule Whisky in Tennessee than we are able to make anywhere?

Anaphoric questions marshal productive achievements as accusations. Quantities lend the marvels an empirical air; “found ways,” “make,” and “tamper” identify ingenuity as the subject of the complaint.

12. Red River and the promised conquest’s rewards

I can promise that we will eat high on the hog when we despoil Appalachia. I can promise you gold, girls, and glory.

Anaphora and then alliteration. Promised reward makes wealth, women, and prestige parallel acquisitions. The pledge of plunder supplies the list’s commodifying force; alliteration gives the end the force of a slogan.

13. The assembled arsenal

The attackers had a few guns and cannons from England, they had launchers and mortars from France, they had some moose guns from Canada. And they had maybe a hundred dozen Mexican trade pistols.

The inventory gathers the speeches’ scattered purchases into one muster. Qualified quantities temper the promised conquest; the force’s immediate failure gives this recapitulation a mock-epic effect.

14. The Revolt and how Lafferty folds Arutinov's paratext into the narration

Arutinov:

This will likely be a senile, slobbering, tatterdemalion, witless, even insane revolt.

The narrator:

It was a senile, tatterdemalion, foolish, even insane invasion.

Congeries accumulates related epithets into a derogatory portrait. The narrator shortens and revises the opening sequence, replacing “will likely be” with “was”: the verbal recurrence calls back Arutinov’s prediction.

15. The forbidden response

Oh, there was a temptation to take ungovernmental steps, to take inhumane steps, to take un-Appalachian steps to abate this nuisance! But that must not be allowed.

Three four-word “to take . . . steps” units form an isocolon. Ending on “un-Appalachian” makes inhuman retaliation a betrayal of national identity; admitting temptation makes restraint a duty rather than an automatic virtue.