"Dorg" (1972)

     When a topos has acquired sufficient ornamentation, it is blessed, or it is cursed. If it is blessed, it becomes one of the Holy Lands. If it is cursed, we don’t know what it becomes. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny

About that time, the mad cartoonist J. P. Dordogne invented just such an animal in his comic strip. It was a big, comical, rock-eating animal. It struck the popular fancy and humor at once, though it did not at once put anything into the popular stomach. It was a shambling hulk of an animal, good-natured and weird. It ate earth and rocks and anything at all. It didn’t even need vegetation, or water. It grew peculiarly fat on such feeding. "Dorg"

Some unorganized thoughts from my Lafferty notebook.

“Dorg” was Lafferty’s contribution to Orbit 10 (1972). In the story, the world faces catastrophic food shortages. A government specialist in remedial ecology teams up with a representative from Amalgamated Youth, a mad cartoonist, and a half-mad psychologist. The high concept is that creating—tied up with “naming”—a new species through art might solve world hunger. The mad cartoonist, J. P. Dordogne, draws a rock-eating creature called the “dorg,” it captures the imaginations of readers, and the creature appears in real life in a part of Oklahoma that once marked the literal end of the line, a famous railroad line in Oklahoma Indian territory, a detail that seems thematically loaded.

The team flies to a low-lying mountain range in Oklahoma and finds that the dorg does, in fact, exist. Lafferty takes a poke at evolution. The male dorg gives rise to a female, an echo of Genesis, though this time with help from a rustic who owns a Bowie knife. For a short while, world hunger disappears. Then, without warning, the dorgs begin to die off. Wailing returns. The Junoesque representative from Amalgamated Youth pressures the psychologist into proposing a solution. The bureaucrats, in turn, press the now-institutionalized cartoonist—his mind having already snapped—to keep drawing dorgs, pregnant male ones, in hope that demiurgic imagination might revive the species and save the world. In reading the story, images from the Lascaux caves should be front and center.

Cave art from Lascaux

That said, something doesn't work about “Dorg.” The Tulsa archives show that Lafferty rewrote its ending. Mere opinion, but I don’t think Lafferty made it work in the final version of the draft, so I'm curious about the revision process and the original. Those of us who see the œuvre as a single, continuous thing know that pieces of the underlay surface with greater clarity in some parts than in others. In this light, “Dorg” somehow says both more and less than it wants to, though it is very funny in parts.

First, something obvious, then something a little more subtle.

Lafferty is riffing on the postwar Shmoo craze, the pinnacle of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner. That is ambient, not structural. But this riff of a story needs to be read in conjunction with that celebrated newspaper run. You miss something if you haven't read it. The dorg is a melancholy shmoo.

Second, I think Lafferty went back to “Dorg” when he wrote The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, where he gives the monad behind the story its fullest expression. If this is right, then a rounded reading of “Dorg” measures what it says against the role of cartooning in that novel, culminating specifically in how the cave illustrations at Lascaux, in the Dordogne province of France, connect with the paper Ennis writes in November 1916. This para-text is so central to understanding Lafferty as a whole that, if a Lafferty textbook existed, it would deserve a prominent place and warrant deep analysis. So for those wanting to go deep into “Dorg,” I would implore reading that Sweeny’s essay and think about what Lafferty says about the Pan-Therium—then re-consider “Snuffles,” and a hundred other things in Lafferty.

Third, is the Hebrew word tardemah, which Lafferty mentions, the sleep that God casts over Adam before creating Eve from his rib (“The Tardemah, the deep sleep,” Riddle said reverently. “I should have guessed it.”). The word appears about half a dozen times in the Hebrew scriptures, always in moments of great consequence, most notably, after the creation of Eve, during the Abrahamic covenant. While translated as “deep sleep,” the word has other usages connected with madness, prophecy, and false prophecy. These meanings link it to the cartoonist Dorgone’s mental breakdown and to psychologist Riddle’s idea that the “dorg” is a work of harbinger art, art that prophesies, and to the physical birth of the dorg. In other words, prophecy, madness, creation—the big themes of The Three Armageddons, where we see Lafferty’s "tardemah" in its full expression.

So, while “Dorg” is an amuse-bouche, it connects with the major themes of his late career: the overlap of cartooning and primitivism, the creative act as an ontological rupture, the exhaustion of artistic forms in the twentieth century, the wellsprings of art and faith, and the relationship of man to animal. This is the dangerous side of Rocky McCrocky.

I’ll wrap up with an Easter egg. The twelve-year-old creator kid—the J. P. Dordogne figure that Enniscorthy Sweeney alludes to in his 1916 essay—is Salvador Dalí (born in 1904)—an artist who straddled fine art, cartooning, and animation (including work with Disney). Here is Dordogne’s madness from the inside, a searchlight thrown onto the half-lit world creative of Lascaux, super-charged with tardemah:

When, in Scripture, Joseph’s sheaf rose up (that happened on this same flat rock earth that is the situs or topos) and remained standing, and his brothers’ sheaves bowed down to it, that was a dream-becoming-flesh, and it triumphed over the rival dreams. When in Pharo’s dream (it also was on that same flat, rock-and-mud earth again, though Pharo describes it as a half-developed place on ne banks of the Nile among reed-grass) the ugly, thin cows ate up the seven sleek, fat ones, that was another selection-by-combat of what wouid be part of the emerging world and what would not be. I often wonder how we would be today if the fat cows had eaten up the skinny ones. The flat, rock-mud area is the basic arena; it is the topos or location of the unconscious, and also of all of the limbi or border lands. At the present time there is a twelve year old boy in Figueras in Spain who paints this topos, this floor of the unformed and the unconscious every day. This is the uncluttered and primordial earth, and it looks like a mauve pavement. The twelve-year-old Catalan boy paints this landscape as inhabited by a few flat panthers and bears and bearcats, flattened as if melted down - to the flatness of pancakes. The flat beasts are draped limply over the folded and stepped flatness of the land. The paintings are of the early mornings, so shadows are thrown in contradictory directions from dawn and false-dawn (there is a selection-by-combat between them also). It is in the early mornings that these proto-beasts are as flat and limp as melted paper, for it is then that they have belched themselves empty of dreams. These dreams or eructations are painted as flying in the low air with their vulture heads and bat-wings, or canvas-and-strut wings. This topos, this unadorned and unconscious flatland, is subject to change; but the changes are very contingent for a long time. If hills are wanted, they are dragged in on skids by creatures pulling them with ropes. If mountains are required, they are rolled in on wheels or log rollers. This is analogous to the geological mountain-bringing process. The mountains always come in on easy-flowing extrusions that are really wheels or rollers of magma. When a topos has acquired sufficient ornamentation, it is blessed, or it is cursed. If it is blessed, it becomes one of the Holy Lands. If it is cursed, we don’t know what it becomes. Even in their first form, the lands are not quite flat. There are the ledges from which the statuary stones are quarried. There are the clay-pits from which the red adam-clay is taken and from which Pan-Therium came. But the topos still maintains the appearance of flatness or of stepped flatness. (Apocalypses, 256-257)