Effective Arcanum
A second example would be "What's the Name of that Town?", in which Epikt (note the wonderful Hellenism: Epiktistes means "The Equitable One," a great name for a calculating device that takes all elements (Stoichae) equally) sorts his facts to discover that something must be missing. — Don Webb, “Effective Arcanum”
Polemical post.
Don Webb gives a lot of power to the unconscious meaning of words, which is amusing, given how unselfconsciously wrong that claim about Epiktistes is. Webb seems to have confused Epiktistes with ἐπιεικής (epieikēs), which really does mean “fair” or “equitable.” The words have a superficial resemblance in transliteration, but their stems and formation differ. That might look like quibbling, but it gets to the core of what I am about to say. “Effective Arcanum” is sometimes cited as one of the good pieces of Lafferty criticism. It is well written, but I don’t think it’s very good. Here are six reasons addressing Webb’s six points.
Invented authorities and earlier histories. Webb is right about a lot, but what he is right about is what any smart reader is going to already know. Lafferty gives extraordinary events a past. So what? This is how he makes his fictional worlds more intelligible. Webb’s Fabulinus example gives the reader enough history to understand the girl inside the egg. Webb calls this displacement. His example also shows explanation at work. Look, and you usually find that Lafferty isn’t being weird to be weird: he defamiliarizes something he cares about to make the reader sensitive to it, but the point is for the reader to return home with new eyes.
Greek words acting on the unconscious. This is particularly unconvincing. Webb is unclear about how words unknown to a reader are supposed to operate unconsciously. Without explaining how this works, he leaves it sounding like magic, like the occult correspondences in Crowley’s Liber DCCLXXVII. Maybe sound, context, and learned associations could account for the response, and sometimes one still gets it wrong. One can understand a person being described as “dilapidated” without knowing the word’s connection to lapis, “stone.” Dickens applies it to Rosa Dartle, comparing her to a house. Those associations are learned through usage, and linguistic communities keep alive the architectural sense even when the word crosses from buildings to human beings. Webb’s gloss of Anastasis as “against inertness” is funny here because it blows right past resurrection, the obvious Christian meaning of the word. Before invoking the unconscious, I would want to get the allusion right, because sometimes an obvious allusion is an allusion. Maybe it is mystically powerful for some people, but anyone who goes to the Roman Mass will know by heart that she is one of the seven women mentioned in it (Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, and Anastasia). Sometimes you have to look up some context if you know more about the Temple of Set than you do about Catholicism, or what a word like Epiktistes means, or learn that it doesn’t mean what you imagine in the defamiliarized foggy nostalgic thrall of effective arcanum.
Rhythm and the “prose foot.” His example from “The Transcendent Tigers” is supposed to show how rhyme and anticipation work: the reader supplies the missing city because the preceding pattern makes it predictable. Sure enough. Webb also describes rhythmic recurrence that binds a story together, but I don’t see what calling it a “prose foot” adds. If he means something more metrical, I would love to see how the prose foot works. A guy a long time ago tried to work it out: George Saintsbury. His mistake was trying to be too rigorist about it. Webb’s account seems to me to have the opposite problem: vagueness about what a prose foot is. English accent does tend to fall into duple and triple rhythms that rise and fall, and English has a slew of ways to heighten prose intensity. But rhyming couplets embedded in a story are pretty slim evidence for his larger account of prose rhythm. If he is just saying that Lafferty’s prose is often appealingly rhythmic, then he is saying something trivial and true.
Wonder children and nostalgia. Webb writes that Lafferty’s extraordinary children reproduce the speed of remembered childhood and make us nostalgic for things that never happened. Maybe, but he gives little evidence that those stories have this effect. I think a stronger argument is that Lafferty disarms nostalgia, even when he evokes it.
Marvels that have happened before. Here, Lafferty usually just has his characters fly past what is odd for comic effect. This ties into other aspects of his work, including his tendency to exteriorize psychological states as action and world.
Forgetting and recollection. Webb mentions Platonism. That doesn’t get you very far with Lafferty. Lafferty is interested in an ontological form of amnesia. That shows up in the powers of men and women after they lost preternatural grace. He is also interested in historical forms of amnesia. The connection between the two forms, ontological and historical, is Lafferty's conspiratorial paranoia about infernal presences in history, from the tempter in Eden to the devils and demons, and their poleznye duraki, who are busy mucking up the present.
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