Dan, Doubles, and Doppelgängers

The second change in the nature of Suspense was at the time of the Redemption (those of other orientation may call it the End of an Era or the Anamnesis, but they must recognize that something happened then). The suspense was not abolished; perhaps it was sanctified. Some of the dread was removed, but the bow itself was not unstrung. The tension was likely increased, but tension in grace became more possible. Suspense is now a requirement of the pleasure principle, of the victory principle, of the high comedy of being. And it will be a requirement of the Vision, which will not be static. It is a necessity to the feeling of immediacy, to the constant newness of outlook and experience. It is at the heart (the courage) of things Suspense is not the same thing as uncertainty, not the same as apprehension, not the same as doubt, not quite the same thing as danger, certainly not the same as fear. — Lafferty, review of Some Things Dark and Dangerous

Instead of finding the fully satisfying object-relation, the goal of psychoanalysis becomes that of an interminable reading. And in contrast with those who would seek to fill the negativity of our desires with “lively matters,” this book never stops reading desire as constitutively dis-contented. — Steven Swarbrick, The Environmental Unconscious, p. 105.

Read Lafferty, and you quickly realize how important doubles, split persons, and all things duplicated are. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen’s recent paper on this aspect of Lafferty is something of a unified field theory of the double. Because the theme is so significant in Lafferty, one needs a way to think through what is nearly an all-pervasive theme.

Petersen’s essay draws on some pretty heavy theory, most of which I am going to set aside because I’m not sure that one really needs to go deep into Lacanian ideas to perceive its general thrust, which is metaphysical. What I call the unified field Petersen proposes is ultimately metaphysical, since it goes beyond what could be called the fictional to indicate something about the structure of the real world. As simply as I can put it, for Petersen, Lafferty’s doppelgängers are divided people that tell us about the world they inhabit. Although they are not real beings, we are, and their fictionality tells us something about our reality. His readings of “Camels and Dromedaries, Clem,” “Splinters,” and “Cabrito” connect human doubling with animals, weather, and other material conditions because his approach is large and ambitious, trying to capture something about the world's order. My difficulty with his argument comes down to two points. The first is theoretical and has to do with the Lacanian idea of the Real and how it gets rewritten in Swarbrick, but that would only interest people who care about theory and might not even interest them. The deeper pressure I would want to put on Petersen is this: Does Lafferty show us creatures suffering divisions they cannot overcome by their own powers, or a reality in which fulfillment/completion/perfection is impossible? I think the first is the case, which fits with the Christian notion of grace. Petersen seems to imply the latter.

Petersen’s principal source is Steven Swarbrick’s The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton. Drawing on Lucretius and Lacan, Swarbrick makes lack constitutive of desire and matter. There have been shades of this for as long as there has been writing. I think, for instance, of Thomas Hobbes’s great account of desire passing from one object to another, but it needs a little explanation. You can ordinarily find or replace a missing object. This morning I misplaced my boots. I’m a Texan. That lack can be fulfilled. Constitutive lack cannot be remedied that way, because it helps determine how desire works in the first place. Each apparent satisfaction will open onto something further because lack is absolutely foundational. This will be the sense in which lack can produce abundance in Swarbrick and Petersen: the failure of satisfaction generates further desires, interpretations, and pursuits. Swarbrick supplies the generative language, and this is where, if my critique were theoretical, I would want to ask questions about the Lacanian Real in his paper versus how Swarbrick modifies the idea in his correction of Lacanianism.

But here is the main point: Swarbrick takes lack, which is a feature of human language and psychology, and pushes it beyond psychology into nature. Petersen follows him in describing “the more-than-human lack of which all things are made.” There is a good reason for doing this with Lafferty because Lafferty’s doppelgängers and doubles are not just psychological, as, for instance, old-school Freudianism might have reduced doppelgängers to the psychological. An ontological dimension must be accounted for. Petersen’s view is that Lafferty’s additional selves and mutilated bodies become embodiments of a relation between lack and excess. Lafferty’s grotesque comedy, in turn, may also change how we read. Rather than demanding that nature form an intelligible whole accommodating our humanocentric purposes, we might learn to be more Laffertian, as Petersen sees it. We might learn to enjoy the frustration that comes from recognizing the lack built into the order of things.

Petersen offers this as an interpretive framework. As with any interpretive framework, its value depends on what it helps us understand about the stories, and how many stories it opens up to us.

To get at why I disagree with Petersen, I’ll just say where I disagree with Swarbrick. The best way I can see to do this is to start with Swarbrick as a brilliant close reader of literature. In his book, he has an exciting interpretation of Milton. He argues that Eden’s unruly growth already frustrates Adam and Eve’s desires. Their imagined paradise of completed work and satisfaction keeps receding. He concludes:

Although we are invited to see paradise as something that Adam and Eve lost, this is only a fantasy. Milton’s real point is that paradise exists only as missing. We desire it because it is missing.

Many years ago, Stanley Fish wrote a book called Surprised by Sin in which he argued that Milton’s Eden reveals our own Fallenness to us. For instance, when Eve’s hair is called wanton, the word means unrestrained, but we, as sinful readers, cannot help but project our sinful state onto what must be innocent because it is the earthly paradise. By contrast, Swarbrick shows that something is already amiss in paradise. He thinks it is that lack is already there.

Now, Petersen does not quote Swarbrick on Milton. But it brings into view something consequential about the philosophy he uses because Lafferty took the notion of Eden very seriously. A paradise that would finally satisfy desire is already, in Swarbrick, an object constituted through a metaphysically enabling absence. Elsewhere, Swarbrick writes that “desire never stops failing to realize itself.” Hobbes’s restless earthly desire, or some variation of it, is already in the garden just as much as the serpent is. But Hobbes expressly limits his account to “the felicity of this life” (Leviathan, VI). Whether desire can finally find fulfillment is a further question.

This, I think, is very different from Lafferty’s Augustinianism. One of the best-known things Augustine ever said is:

You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.

The word to know is “until” (Confessions I.1.1). If Swarbrick’s account is meant to establish the final possibilities of human existence, that “until” becomes a fantasy. One would never get there. Restlessness would just be how things are because reality and lack are inseparable. That is the implication I want Petersen to address. I should be careful here because Swarbrick and Petersen are talking about nature, not God. But an account of what nature cannot accomplish by itself does not settle what grace can accomplish in it.

If you read the blog, you know I’m not going to be fond of this idea of a constitutive lack in personhood that would keep it from the perfection of the saints, nor am I a fan of the idea that pure actuality isn’t at the base of all things. The Thomistic distinction between limitation and privation helps here because I think Lafferty thinks in terms of privation, not lack. And when Petersen reads Lafferty through a metaphysics of constitutive lack, I want to know what becomes of that distinction. To twist the old example, a stone’s inability to see is no privation in the stone. Blindness in an animal is a different matter: a power proper to its nature is absent or impaired. We can call that a lack, but it is a lack that can be satisfied by the condition of vision. Likewise, being finite, dependent, or distinct from other creatures does not damage a human being. Perfection means attaining the good appropriate to what one is. Not to preach, but the idea of final beatitude, which Lafferty accepts, is one in which grace brings the creature to fulfillment in God. Aquinas denies that this requires exhaustive comprehension of God or knowledge of everything. That is just to say that a fulfilled creature remains a creature (Summa theologiae I, q. 48, a. 3; I, q. 12, aa. 7–8; I–II, q. 3, a. 8). There is no constitutive lack in it that would lead to an endless circuit of unfulfillable desire simply because it is a creature. Back to Augustine and restlessness.

Some care is necessary in making the comparison because Eden obviously is not the beatific vision, nor does a wish to finish all the gardening in Eden refute fulfillment through grace. Swarbrick’s technical account of desire is not interchangeable with everything Augustine or Aquinas means by human longing. His book does not address Catholic beatitude, and there is no reason it should be slammed for that. His account is intellectually coherent, as far as I can tell. The philosophical conflict between Lafferty and a Swarbrickian view does, however, arise when constitutive lack is taken to rule out final fulfillment itself. An account of what we cannot accomplish by our own powers leaves that question open.

Moreover, the ideas in Lafferty’s fiction might point towards a Swarbrickian account of reality despite Lafferty’s intentions.

But I doubt it, and Lafferty gives us reason to keep open the notions of completion, perfection, and fulfillment. In his essay “Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus,” he takes to task Pope’s description of humanity. He says that “we are hurled in ‘temporary’ and not in ‘endless’ error.” The larger essay describes humanity’s “normal but occluded powers” as inhibited by an “abnormal situation.” He also says that stories set after a catastrophe, by which he means the Fall, are really “‘After the Fall’ stories or ‘Love in the Ruins’ stories.” His own emphasis is on a damaged condition understood in relation to a prior good. The recovery of lost preternatural gifts is not itself final beatitude. But healing and fulfillment are what many of his characters move toward (we should be hopeful) in their anagogical leaps.

Just because there isn’t a permanent void baked into the bottom floor of the universe doesn’t mean that there isn’t tension. This is a tricky part of Lafferty, and it could support Petersen’s view, but I think Lafferty is saying there is activity even in completion and perfection. Elsewhere, when writing about Redemption, he has a formula for it. He writes, “tension in grace became more possible.” Suspense will remain “a requirement of the Vision, which will not be static.” Thus the continued presence of activity, difference, and surprise cannot by itself count against his idea of perfection. Petersen reads those things through a void-like lack. Lafferty gives us reason to ask whether they require it.

Maybe it’s time to cash all this out with a reading. I’m going to use “All-at-Once Man,” from which Petersen takes the term “schizo-gash.” The story works well because it can support my Augustinian case or strengthen Petersen’s. As I have written elsewhere, I believe this to be one of Lafferty’s gnostic stories. Penandrew intends to become the human analog of the eons united in the pleroma. I think that if one read the failure of his project as the necessary condition of our world, which I call Prime, one would risk treating the failure of a gnostic project as a refutation of Christian fulfillment.

Briefly, John Penandrew wants all his ages simultaneously and to escape ordinary mortality. His friends discuss Adam’s lost preternatural gifts, and Cris tells him that he lacks the necessary integrity:

I use the word to mean unified totality and scope—that is integrity in the theological sense. I use the word as Tanquerey uses it.

Penandrew, being a fool, presses on and acquires the powers he wants. Lafferty writes, “This was no fakery.” In possessing them, however, he never achieves the integrity Cris described. Penandrew even says:

This excellent gift was taken away from us long ago, and for a reason. I had it as a tainted and forbidden remnant, and I held onto it like a snake in the hand.

He says he knew something was wrong before he even seized it. Once he had it, he would not let go. “I held it too tight,” he says, “and it shattered me.” One could say this points to the fundamental lack that structures Penandrew as a part of nature, though I would say that it is a story about his corruption. It is not that nature is unnatural, but that fallen nature is unnatural.

But it’s a hard story. Lafferty doesn’t give one a tidy moral here. The Augustinian training itself contributes to Penandrew’s intransigence. Zoe’s removal of the gift complicates his account of his collapse, and even after his surviving manifestations apparently coalesce, he remains “unclosed, lopsided.” These are real grounds for a Swarbrickian reading. To me, the Augustinian reading works better because it explains the distinction between the good gift and its corrupted possession. Penandrew gains the powers without the integrity. His failure to secure that integrity does not establish that grace could never give it. Think of all the Lafferty works that end by opening onto the hope of grace.

Petersen is entitled to read Lafferty through a philosophy Lafferty would reject. Swarbrick gives a strong theoretical reading of Christian poets, one that certainly isn’t a reconstruction of their professed beliefs.

When R. J. Whitaker asked whether he believed in perfectibility, Lafferty answered in the spirit of gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit:

The perfectability of “man”? I believe in the perfectability of people, some people, possibly most people. I do not believe in the perfectability of society, or of the world, or of “man” in the abstract. Maybe it is a madness that surrounds and rebuffs abstract man. But each person can select his own ambient, because it is subjective to such a large degree. The madness is optional, both for one’s self and for the surroundings. You can send it back to be cooked right. But you don’t have to accept the raw madness. Sure the individual is perfectable (though there’s probably a less pompous word for it somewhere). Perfection (the real meaning of the word is “completion,” not “faultlessness”) is always there for the taking. A person will finally come to it unless he refuses it. You’re making me sound pompous the way you put these questions “ . . . constant fool at odds with the gods of the universe . . .” that’s not a real phrase; that’s one of the consensus impositions that somebody stuck in your pocket when you weren’t looking. Throw it away.

Contrast this with Petersen. He describes the subject as “constituted by the fundamental lack” and speaks of “the more-than-human lack of which all things are made.” Incompleteness is a condition of human existence. Lafferty, though, calls incompleteness the undercooked. What he believes is clear enough: a created person can attain perfection without becoming actus purus, pure actuality. Finitude does not constitute a constitutive lack. The completion Lafferty believes in leaves the person finite and dependent on grace.

On my reading of Lafferty, the Fall impairs human powers. That impairment is not a part of human essence. Petersen rejects the idea of human essence. He does make room for certain kinds of repair and integration, so it would be unfair to suggest that he makes every wound incurable. But what can healing finally achieve in his model? Is there room in it for the healing hands of Easterwine in his account? Rather than assume that the divisions in these stories express a lack built into existence, I think it is more fruitful to ask how Lafferty’s statements about personhood help us understand the stories. He is a metaphysical comedian, and the possibility of personal completion is one of his satirical norms. That fundamental quality in Lafferty cannot be reconciled with Swarbrick’s account of Lucretian materialism:

Life sings endlessly of its own incompletion and failure of full speech. Moreover, as a symptom of the void, life’s sole drive, its animating thrust, is to repeat the absence that Lucretius installs at the very center of things. [emphasis added]

Petersen’s grand unified field theory of doubles amounts to singing about the maggoty holes in the cheese:

“It’s a cheese,” Valery offered hysterically, “rotted cheese and full of holes. A whole cosmos of maggotty cheese, turned green in its taint and rot. And the eggshells! What hatched out of them? I dreamed of them before I was born, pieces of broken eggshell millions of parsecs long.” Her shoulders were shaking. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing. “It does have a strong smell, though,” she said, “the only one, ever, strong enough to suit me.”

Valery can affirm life with a primordial appetite that neither rejects nature for its privations nor accepts them as its final condition. She might even sing of them, but she recognizes the wound as a wound. The lack she describes is “taint and rot.”

Petersen writes that Lafferty’s doubles dismember us from “an overly meaningful, thus anthropocentric, construal of matter.”

The point is corruption: damage to something good. I have argued that his theory of the monstrous lacks a normative basis. His theory can recognize cruelty and injury. What I doubt is whether it adequately explains their relation to the hope of final healing that orients much of Lafferty’s work. Describing doubles as products of a lack that generates abundance still leaves much to explain: fallen nature, the need for story after the primal catastrophe, and the possibility of personal completion.

Now walk through it with me.

Premise: A person who must remain incomplete in a given respect cannot attain completion in that respect.

Premise: Petersen's model makes persons necessarily incomplete in the respect in which Lafferty affirms their possible completion.

Conclusion: Petersen's model excludes the personal completion Lafferty affirms.

Premise: A model that excludes personal completion altogether also excludes personal completion through grace.

Premise: Petersen’s model excludes the personal completion Lafferty affirms.

Conclusion: Petersen’s model excludes the perfecting work of grace that Lafferty affirms.

Premise: A reading that excludes personal completion cannot affirm a story’s promise of that completion as a realizable hope.

Premise: Lafferty’s anagogical endings (versus the endings in his gnostic stories) hold out the completion Petersen’s model excludes.

Conclusion: Petersen’s reading cannot save those endings’ promise without qualifying its model.

The crucial premise is italicized. Is it true?

The evidence is cumulative. Petersen describes “the primordial lack that evokes the human subject into being” and writes, “The subject is thereby constituted by the fundamental lack experienced as its desire or jouissance for the Real.” His account pictures “the human person as riven by, thus composed of, gaps in nonhuman landscape”; these “open wounds are ontological as well as psychological.” He calls this “the more-than-human lack of which all things are made.” Nor is the division merely a passing condition: “We are riven beings because we are evolving beings.” In “Camels,” he describes Clem’s disorientation as “permanent” and proposes that his divided condition is “something quintessentially ‘natural’ in that he is riven and doubled just as all ‘nature’ is.” Alternatively, “he is discovering that all reality is ‘unnatural.’” The strongest statement comes in the discussion of “Splinters,” where Petersen applies Swarbrick’s account of what the ecological subject “cannot ‘get over’.” Despite its attempts at “surpassing, posthumanizing, and networking its way into harmonious accord with the web of life,” the subject “cannot surpass [. . . ] the obscene jouissance at its core,” because this enjoyment “sustains the ecological subject as a breach or tear.” The breach therefore appears to belong to what makes and sustains the subject. Petersen’s conclusion extends this account to biomes “singing (or screaming) of perpetual incompleteness” and an ecological consciousness that “ever acknowledges the incompleteness or open-endedness” of planetary coexistence. He also declares that “Gaps and voids can never be plugged or paved over,” although here he specifically means “the impossibility of a complete and total communication or readability.” Taken together, these passages give me substantial grounds for reading his incompleteness as constitutive and unsurpassable. He lets characters “engage or integrate” their doubles, which seems to me incompatible with Swarbrick, though I have yet to develop the distinction between Lacan’s Real and Swarbrick’s. Yet the subject, whatever it is, remains constituted by the breach. He has not explained how that breach relates to the personal completion Lafferty affirms, which I think matters more for understanding the overall shape of Lafferty’s work.

As always, I find Petersen’s arguments interesting, but I think they would hinder a fuller understanding of what Lafferty is doing. Any general theory of Lafferty’s doubles ought to explain why doubling does different work in different stories. It should not foreclose the possibility of perfection through Redemption. My view is that doubling in the Gnostic stories usually points to self-sealed corruption; in the Frazerian stories, including “Bird-Master,” “Scorner’s Seat,” and “The Only Tune That He Could Play,” it points toward reintegration and restoration; and so forth. His doubles do not offer a single field for indexing a variety of metaphysics he would have consciously rejected, even if some stories can be reduced to that metaphysical radical. We have his positive statements, and we also have his stories, open to completion as perfection. If a unified field theory of the double were possible, I would certainly want it to distinguish between wholeness his characters cannot achieve by their own powers and wholeness that is impossible altogether.