"Funnyfingers" (1973/1976)
- Jon Nelson
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
And Duffey, dipping into the Sebastian mind, found that there really was a countess and that she was now twelve years old. Duffey even extracted the information (not from Sebastian — he couldn't have known it — but from the fates somewhere) that he, Duffey, would someday make the acquaintance of this Countess and that she would be his close friend. – More than Melchisedech
“They never take very long to make things anymore,” Oread was continuing, “not since that time, you know, when Godg ot a little bit testy with them on Sinai when there was a little delay. They first made the tablets out of iron entirely, and they wouldn't do. They had to make them out of slate-stone with the iron letters inset in it, and the iron had to be that alloy known as command iron. Since then they are all pretty prompt with everyone, and they follow instructions exactly. You never know who it really is who places an order.”
Myth and discomfort are inseparable because myth both marks and manages lines of transgression. Many would say it rationalizes them. Without myth, one is left with something like the response Captain Cook received when he asked why certain things were not done by the Polynesians. The answer was simply that they were tabu. Why? They just were.
The Greeks were not like this, whether in their etiological myths or in their later search for the archai of the cosmos. For them, a taboo cried out for an explanation. And the myth-making impulse has its counterpart in the explanatorily need satisfied by modern demythologizing. The form of this most relevant to Lafferty is probably the twentieth-century idea that the order of myth will open the donjon or oubliette of the unconscious. For Freud, this takes the form of complexes; for Jung, of constellations; for Lafferty, of the oceanic.
Real mythic thinking is probably always a little dangerous. Sometimes it is really dangerous. The best example in the Western canon of a person getting into trouble with myth is the Roman poet Ovid. His versions of traditional stories—such as that of Myrrha—can still shock. The Metamorphoses is full of provocative material. In it one finds a slaughtering bench of violence. There are transformations that dwarf what a therapist nowadays calls trauma, a word stretched thin by concept creep. Trauma in Ovid’s is mythically real, even if Ovid did not himself believe in the gods. It wounds, it hurts, and it often comes at the hands of the morally ambiguous Greek gods.
An interest in desire and power made Ovid influential and controversial in Rome, and it led to his sudden exile in 8 CE. Ovid himself blamed “a poem and a mistake.” He did not say which poem or what mistake, but most believe the straw that broke the camel’s back was his Ars Amatoria. Whatever the reason, the emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea. But without the sketchy side of Ovid, there is no English Renaissance. There is no Christopher Marlowe. Almost all of Shakespeare’s Greek mythology comes through his deep internalization of Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses.
I started thinking about getting burned by myth in connection with my last two posts, which looked at Lafferty’s early pig-in-a-pokey technique of rewriting classical myth, and then at Lafferty’s parthens: those Lafferty girls who only appear young or who really are young but who are always a little bit more complicated that. Here, Lafferty, I think, does get himself into some trouble, though I do not weigh it is as serious as the trouble he gets himself into elsewhere. The question is how far the outward appearance of his parthens conceals the other elements that interest him, such as how precocious youth and a blurry moral culpability relate to one another, a philosophical problem that appealed to Lafferty’s Augustinian side and his own giftedness, or whether there is something ineliminably troubling about his intensely charged parthens themselves. The answer must be that the two questions cannot be disentangled. That is a significant critical problem for the Argo legend.
His early “pig-in-a-poke” technique lets irony undercut the mythic, and there is always some irony when he writes about a parthenon-like girl like Carnadine Thompson or Helen Dulanty. It occurred to me that his short story "Funnyfingers" is one of his most successful stories about the parthen, and one in which he handles Greek myth with far more sophistication than he does in the great example of the pig-in-a-pokey Lafferty narrative, Space Chantey (1968). Here, irony doesn't strangle the mythic.
He creates the character Oread Funnyfingers, who lives with her parents in a house that backs into a steep foothill at the edge of what appears to be Tula, Oklahoma. Her father, Henry, runs a shop that looks like a typewriter repair business, but his real inventory lies in a “dimly lit parts room” that stretches into the earth and into the myths of the dactyls. Both Henry and Oread belong to this ancient lineage. They are Funnyfingers—those who can navigate the underworld where three ancient uncles, Kelmis, Acmon, and Damnae, forge the first things from iron. When Henry needs a part for any machine, he sings a comical little song into the tunnels, then disappears into the mountain and returns with the part, still hot in his hand.
At the center of the story is Oread’s development. She differs from human children. Her aging is slow and strange: she looks four when she is nine, and still appears ten well into college. She completes her schoolwork by retrieving “hot iron answers” from pots in the mountain and stamping them onto her papers. Her human mother, Frances, worries. Oread seems to her an “exasperating and precocious little girl,” more like a “little iron owl” than a child. We learn that Oread is adopted, though the story does not explain how. Presumably, she was born of the mountain, not in the same way as the machine parts, but not quite in the human way either.
During her schooling, Oread meets Selim Elia, a Syrian boy who is unfazed by her strangeness. He falls in love with her. They grow up together and go on to university. In one of their classes, a frustrated instructor named Mr. Zhelezovitch calls for a “new system of concepts and symbols” to move human thought forward. Oread takes Selim into the deep tunnels to meet the uncles, where “all hills and mountains of the world connect down in their roots.” There, they forge the abstract concept out of white-hot iron. Oread brings it back to class and places it before the astonished students.
After this, Selim proposes marriage. Oread hesitates. She is troubled by the implications of her slow aging and runs home to her mother. Frances admits that Henry is “delightfully boyish” and will likely come of age only long after she is gone. Oread then turns to Sister Mary Dactyl, an art teacher and fellow Funnyfingers who moves with “triple-jointed fast-as-vision toes.” The nun tells her the truth: she is 358 years old.
Oread returns to Selim beneath the stars to deliver her answer. He begs her to “make a different answer out of iron.” She says only, “the answer is no,” and goes back into the mountain. There, in the dark, she weeps. These are not human tears. They are drops of “the aromatic flux of salt and rosin,” the tears of those who work wrought iron.
The idea of looking young while acting older recurs throughout Lafferty’s work. In "Funnyfingers," Selim and Oread are the same age in one sense, yet Oread ages slowly in another. Her father, Henry, is likewise far older than his wife, Frances. From the outside, both relationships would raise eyebrows. Within the mythic story world, however, all makes sense. Lafferty returns to this pattern several times, and develops it most fully in the relationship between Melchisedech Duffy and the slow-aging Countess Margaret Hochfelsen—one of his teras, a special category first introduced in Archipelago. It is the oreads, another group of teras, who immediately recognize Finnegan as one of their own in the second volume of Argo.
One of the central challenges in interpreting the blackmail in More Than Melchisedech is understanding the role of age, sex, and artistic creativity within Lafferty’s Argo mythology. The girls Duffey plays the funny uncle with are connected to the demiurgery of the animated marvels. Charlotte Mullens and the Countess Margaret are not children but look like children. In “Funnyfingers,” Oread is not a child but looks like one. It takes a long time for dactyloi to develop physically, so embodiment is separated from psychosexual development. Nonetheless, they are playful like children, and they are children in their own species, in a way. Oread’ s father has Henry that boyish playfulness.
Stepping back, this is a story about primal creativity, the near demiurgic, about being able to shape and perceive the prima materia. Lafferty had touchesd on a variation of this elsewhere in the same year. He completed “Funnyfingers” in February. He completed his treatment of implicit clay in “Smoe and the Implict Clay” in December. Different mythic traditions, the Greek and the Native American, but the notion of prima materia was on his mind. It is usually associated in his mind with caves.
One of the imaginatively powerful moments in “Funnyfingers” centers on this and on bridging mythic traditions. Lafferty ties the iron used by the triple-jointed dactyloi to the moving finger of Jehovah in Exodus 31:8 and Deuteronomy 9:10:
“And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”
“And the LORD delivered unto me two tables of stone written with the finger of God; and on them was written according to all the words, which the LORD spake with you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly.”
Lafferty doesn’t mention God’s finger. He expects us to know, or to feel the connection is right, even if unconsciously.
If one looks at the three passages Lafferty includes in Part II of “Funnyfingers” to set out the deep mythic backdrop, only one is his invention. It is the fictional quote from Groff Crocker’s Mear-Maoine: “It is also said of the Dactyls (the Finger-Folk inside the hills) that they live very long lives and retain their youthful appearance for very many years.” In Argo, there isn't Greek scaffolding. There isn’t Native American scaffolding. We get Lafferty’s own mature take on prima materia and his favorite creations, the talismans.
