"Fog In My Throat" (1974/1976)

"She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it." — Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Flammus sometimes said that he wasn’t a killer by choice. But sometimes he deceived himself and sometimes he lied. And also these things happened regularly in his trade, and he took what satisfaction he could from them. His satisfaction from killing, however, was always encased in a separate horror and fear of his own: “What if I also am killed today?”

I like the polarizing Léon Bloy (1846-1917). What I find most interesting about him is the hard choices he imposes on a reader. They are so artistically aggressive and unrelentingly Catholic. Flannery O’Connor, who also admired Bloy, was a master of this technique. One story that is sometimes cited as an example of this kind of Catholic aggression is "The River" (1953), where O’Connor creates a boy named Harry Ashfield who has some pretty awful parents.

Harry is taken to a river baptism—revivalist-style—by his babysitter. There, he is swept up by the preacher’s talk of salvation and the promise of a better life in the Kingdom of Christ. The next day, he returns to the river with salvation to relive his spiritual awakening, to baptize himself, and he drowns. That is O’Connor at her most O’Connor-ish. That is also Bloy. Not infrequently, it is Lafferty. Choose, O'Connor says, for either this was idiocy and meaninglessness, or the boy, by God’s grace, has died and been saved.

It is a characteristically Catholic way of representing grace in art, almost as Catholic as the crucifix, with its refusal to look away from the broken body of Christ on the Cross. Of Christian things that won't be clear on this, Lafferty wrote,

The largest church in my city is that of a Christian sect that will not show the cross. It is built in imitation of a style that requires the cross, and the simple elimination of it would leave an emptiness and discordance. What is done to disguise this gaping omission? There is not permitted to be seen one right angle in the entire building, not one natural congruence of horizontal and vertical line. There are asymmetrical spires all over the place, there are twenty-nine degree angles, there are optical convolutions, there are mock corbels, and clashing metal-stone interplay. But every line is broken up for the eye. If one straight line were allowed, then a second one might come in by stealth; they might get together, and they might look like a cross. Great care is taken in avoiding even a hint of the cruciform.

You can see the refusal to look away in another Catholic rendering of drowning in literature: the deaths of the Franciscan sisters in Hopkins’s horrific and beautiful “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Thinking of the Franciscan sisters, who were escaping the persecution of the anti-Catholic Falk Laws by sailing to America to help with nursing care in St. Louis, Hopkins writes of himself safe in Wales as they die terribly:

Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales; She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails Was calling "O Christ, Christ, come quickly": The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best. The majesty! what did she mean? Breathe, arch and original Breath. Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been? Breathe, body of lovely Death. They were else-minded then, altogether, the men Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth. Or is it that she cried for the crown then, The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?

Lafferty’s short story “Fog In My Throat” opens in an experimental clinic where the aged Dr. Cornelius Rudisijl advances a theory about death: “I have never known a person who feared death when he finally came to it.” His view is challenged by Gretchen Schrik, a young and wonderfully alive colleague whose fear of death is her deepest obsession. In the background of their debate, something unusual stirs. Their exchange is punctuated by the “strong, sad, and sonorous ‘Song of Job,’” played by a musically gifted lab rat. Rudisijl natters on. A natural serenity settles over everyone in the final moments. Gretchen’s terror remains, a symptom of her youth, her vitality, and her distance from death.

This conversation resonates against the subject of the clinic's research project: a serenity-in-everything specific designed to eliminate all anxiety, but one that has the effect of occasionally doing too much. For those who are already profoundly un-graced, it seems to remove the cloud of unknowing entirely, though this not understood yet. But it has already happened to a few of the rats, though most experiences uplift. They are becoming cultural, these rats. They make art and music in what Rudisijl calls sheer joy. They build monuments. Rudisijl thinks the specific removes a protective "mind-cloud, of unknown function" that veils reality, and this bestows clarity. Gretchen, on the other hand, knows something is wrong because she found dead rats that didn't flourish. These were "contorted and deformed with a look of total horror." Can clarity be too total?

A parallel narrative introduces the story’s Satan figure, Lucius Flammus, a pathological killer called the Angel of Death who puts dry ice in his gun barrels to make them smoke. He, like Gretchen, is afraid of death. But his terror is tied up with libido dominandi, a drive to see others die “in terror, in total terror," a desire that Lafferty says is "encased in a separate horror and fear of his own." Pulled into God’s providential plan (or not, depending on how the reader chooses to read the story), Flammus is spurred on by a premonition to kill a man and a young woman, and sets a course for the clinic. He will bring the kind of terror that Rudisijl says does not exist at the final moment of death.

It all converges when Flammus bursts into the clinic. In the chaos, he shoots Gretchen, who dies with "no slight trace of fear on her dead face," seeming to prove Rudisijl's lifelong theory. Moments later, after mortally wounding Rudisijl, Flammus is killed by another scientist, and Flammus dies not in fear but with a "wooden look without fear," more Dante's mindlessly iced-over Satan than Milton’s lightning bolt of rhetoric and action. An important aspect of Gretchen’s death is that it brings fear and concern to Rudisijl.

That is a moment of grace, but the dying Rudisijl makes a fatal error: he refuses to let his “curiosity . . . unsatisfied” and thus reenacts Original Sin. This is Augustine’s curiositas. At the moment when a well-catechized Catholic would ask for the viaticum—the final sacrament of spiritual nourishment—the doctor shoots up an injection of the specific. Unwise and at the threshold of death, he doesn't even think to seek grace. There is no thought of the Ave Maria and Mary praying for him in the hour of his death. He just wants to taste the forbidden fruit.

So Lafferty gives him what he wants. The synthetic and needled clarity is devastating. Instead of peace, Rudisjl takes the full sting of 1 Corinthians 15:54-57. He moans: "The cloud was there for a reason . . . I was wrong!" He says the animals' art was a desperate prayer to their scientist gods for salvation from the raw vision of death, still only understanding outwardly. Denied the natural death-calm, Rudisijl's face becomes a mask of contorted animal terror, his eyes "bursting-full nodules of blood." He dies in the "grey and deformed terror" he swore was impossible.

And this is how Lafferty says, “Choose.” Choose how to see every element of this little horror story. Do you see Eliot saying,

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree Are of equal duration.

Or do you see something closer to his “The Hollow Men,” something like Beckett’s Pozzo saying,

“Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? . . . They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”

What makes this such an effective horror story is the way Lafferty poses the hardest question in the background of what happens at the lab, outside the slaughter itself. Of course, the rats are really us. Are they deluded, pathetic animals trying to propitiate an indifferent cosmos? Is worship a fantasy that protects them from confronting the kind of cosmic horror the Lovecraft circle turned into an aesthetic and then marketeers into an industry? By making the rats material—but not formal—idolaters, Lafferty hands question to the reader.

The rats display what Lafferty would have seen as the ordered drive to worship—what, following St. Thomas, Lafferty liked to call the procession of the creatures. This is a dimension that Rudisijl, in his gracelessness, simply cannot understand. Seen through Augustine, the lab experiment on the rats let them acquire the restless heart’s longing for God; seen through Aquinas, they are granted the workings of natural reason apart from revelation.

What Lafferty does in “Fog in My Throat” is to put the fog in the throat of the atheist. There is little here to trouble or alarm an educated Christian mind, apart from the natural fear of physical death and its too frequent accompaniment, physical pain. In other words, physical death and facing it well, which Rudisijl fails to do, but which Gretchen does. Her death is messy and full of bloodsmell, but it still a good death in the Christian sense. That, in fact, is the theme of Browning’s poem “Prospice,” from which the story’s title is taken, which has nothing to do with spiritual questioning or spiritual horror. It expresses a complicated Protestant poet’s faith that he will be reunited with his wife, Elizabeth Barrett, beyond life.

“Fog In My Throat” ranks among Lafferty’s finest short stories. Conceived as a challenge to the secular reader, it exemplifies one of his defining artistic methods, shared with O’Connor and other Catholic artists, aggressively testing the reader’s spiritual integrity through the pressures of art.

Fog In My Throat Notes.pdf

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