Count Finnegan and an Argo Atlas
- Jon Nelson
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
Today, an Argo Atlas, to be combined with a Coscuin Atlas at some point. As I put it together, I thought it would be fun to mention some connections between Finnegan and Dana Coscuin, too. Readers who come to The Devil is Dead without having read the Coscuin Chronicles meet a character named Angela Cosquin in chapter seventeen. She is a Basse-Terre barmaid with an odd last name, and the reader learns that her father drew treasure maps for confidence men. Nothing in the novel tells the reader that this is a cross-reference to Dana Coscuin or that this girl is Dana's granddaughter, but we can work out the relationship. Because she has not yet been born, and, more importantly, because Lafferty had not yet written the last two volumes of the Coscuin Chronicles, nothing in The Flame Is Green or Half a Sky tells this either. One can work it out only through the two later Coscuin books, Sardinian Summer and First and Last Island, which stayed in manuscript in Lafferty's lifetime and are still moldering in Tulsa.
Let’s start with the spelling of Angela’s name, since that might be puzzling first. Dana's name is Coscuin in The Flame Is Green every time it appears. It’s Cosquin in The Devil Is Dead every time it is mentioned. First and Last Island explains this. In chapter one, Dana reaches Basse-Terre in 1863 after nine years away, and he sees his nine-year-old son for the first time. Lafferty writes that "Dana's surname was always spelled Cosquin in Basse-Terre, in the early written-down legends especially. The reason it was spelled Coscuin in Ireland was that there is no 'q' in Irish." Ah hah! Now we know what she is: Angela Cosquin. In chapter seven, Lafferty lists the three sons, and he says it again: "Yes, their names were Cosquin, with a 'q'. But the surname of the Irish Dana and his son (born this very month of February 1867) was Coscuin." This is followed by a fun fable about a sinning Irish king whom God tells that one letter of his alphabet must be destroyed. What did he do? He gave up Q, the letter he used least. The island legends have the q in Half a Sky, where the House of Dana Cosquin and the Grave of Dana Cosquin have the name before Dana arrives. This means that the spelling in The Devil is Dead is not a slip, or if it was, it was one that Lafferty had fun with as he began to close shop, finishing off his last masterpiece, The Coscuin Chronicles.
But we can go deeper.
In Half a Sky, Dana comes back to Basse-Terre, and he finds the island preparing his wedding to a bride known only as the Bride of Dana Cosquin. Who is that bride? Angelene Domdaniel: a woman of every blood the island has hosted. She is also a seer who can look into Dana's dreams, and she is the wife he leaves early in 1854. First and Last Island extends this. In chapter seven, she is called "a sibyl, a Christian Prophetess, a sabla or wise woman." She is said to have "dove down deep into the Great Thermal Springs four times a year to be renewed," and she knows her own future: "She had three children, and she would have two more, why yes, she knew that for certain."
Who are these children? Dana Saint Thomas Cosquin, born in July 1854 and not seen by his father until 1863. Then there is Dana Saint Dominic, and Dana Saint Cyril. Francesca then follows. The fifth child appears in chapter twelve, on the night Tom dies. At the end of chapter eleven, an episode shows a ghost mongoose carrying Prince Dorn killing Tom in Dana's house on his eighteenth birthday, in July 1872. Angelene, already in labor, says of the dead boy, "It will be his brother's birthday too, if he hurries." Within the hour, Dana goes in to see "his new son Dana Saint Brandon Cosquin." The child is laughing, and he has a birthmark on each cheek. Dana looks closely at the birthmarks and sees that he can read them: "Have you noticed that they are maps of the world? The left cheek has a map of the old world and the right cheek has a map of the new world." Angelene understands immediately: "That means that he will be a map-maker, Dana."
Enter a prophecy. This is the hinge. It’s one of a handful of places where the reader can see that the Argo Legend and the Coscuin Chronicles are a single megatext. Brandon's godmother is named Celeste the Belle. Lafferty writes that "On Basse-Terre, a god-mother is always able to make a true prediction about the god-child." Celeste puts a glob of black island dirt in her mouth and says:
"This Child Brandon will be a far-traveler only on parchment. He will be a map-maker; his treasure maps, in particular, will be famous, and a bit of blood will be shed over them. He will be a bachelor till he is forty-nine years old, and then he will marry a Basse-Terre girl. At fifty, he will have a daughter named Angela. She will be his only child. Born in July 1872, Brandon will marry at forty-nine in 1921 and father his one daughter at fifty, in 1922 or 1923.
Now set The Devil is Dead beside these passages. Angela Cosquin "was French, of course, but more than French. She had in her everything that had ever been on that island, from the Carib Indian to the English. Some of her forebears had been noblemen, and some had been slaves." That is Angelene's ancestry, which in First and Last Island runs through Spain, France, England, Ireland, Guatemala, Polynesia, Africa, and the East Indies, with Count Dana added. Most of Angela's stories "had to do with her father and his interesting occupation," and the occupation is the one Celeste describes. "He was a cartographer and antiquarian," she says. "He made maps by hand. He did this beautifully upon old leather and vellum and parchment." So, Angelene had foreseen a son who would never leave the island and would still be a consummate world-traveler. Devising his shipwreck maps, "He put himself in the place of the ship. He said to himself, If I were a ship, where would I go to be shipwrecked.”
How does Finnegan fit into all this? Well, the first way depends on X. In chapter eighteen of The Devil is Dead, sitting on a grave, X tells the story of Ifreann Noonan Columkill Gregorovitch Papadiabolous Chortovitch, born in a hay field near Krakow in 1830 to an Irish governess named Katie Noonan and to the Devil. Then he adds a further important point: "This manifestation of the Devil was, I am convinced, my own grandfather. He was also your own great-grandfather, Finnegan, and also that of the beautiful Anastasia." This Ifreann is, of course, the Ifreann of the Coscuin Chronicles. Catherine Dembinska tells Dana about the same birth in The Flame Is Green, the hay field between Skawine and Krakow, the year 1830, the governess Katie Noonan, and "The Devil" written in the line for the father. Of course, this Ifreann is Dana's enemy in all four books. In Half a Sky, he holds the Basse-Terre estate called Porte d'Enfer (Hell's Gate) and disputes Dana's ownership of the House of Dana Cosquin. In chapter nineteen, X tells us what happened to him. Ifreann "lived to be a hundred years old," and "The father was buried in the year 1930 in the grave on which we are sitting."
The second way is through Finnegan arriving "at Paradise by accident, the only way it is ever arrived at." When he shows up, Dana's granddaughter is the only person on the island who understands him, and she is the first to call him Count. The title of count has a history of the Coscuin family. It isn’t an inherited title. Elena gives it to Dana at her uncle's table in The Flame Is Green: "Count Dana Coscuin of County Kerry in Ireland." A doctored deed to Seven Heads Castle in chapter one of First and Last Island ratifies it, since "that 'Count' could not be erased without looking suspicious." By then, "Many people already called him Count Coscuin." Dana's countship rests on other people's say-so, and Angela confers Finnegan's in the same manner. So if you wondered why Finnegan is Count Finnegan in “How Many Miles to Babylon?” you now know: it goes deep into the Argo Legend’s connection to the Coscuin Chronicles.
