Go Inside

And there is a sort of unreality-compounded in it, and that simply will not do in a mystery story, and every story at the heart of it is a mystery story. Real things and persons can do things in a real world, and real things and persons can do things in an unreal world: but unreal things and persons can't do things in an unreal world. There is no way that an illusion (and every story is an illusion) can be maintained without clarity in either its setting or its movement.

Some blog posts are ones I really look forward to writing. This is one of those.

Small subgroups of Lafferty stories can teach you a lot about how Lafferty works. They might not make him less weird, but they do show you how to get a handle on the method in the madness. One can imagine an arrangement of these groupings in an anthology that would help new readers get their eye in, so that Lafferty seems like what he really is: not just a quirky fantasist, not just a teller of tall tales.

One such grouping would be the Fortean stories, which will teach you the typical games Lafferty plays with space and counterfiguration. Then there are the gnostic stories, which, to use a chess analogy, teach the reader that some of his stories are about dubious lines or fatal losses of tempo. I see about half a dozen of these groups in my reading of the Whole Lafferty. Those who have put his posthumous collections together seem not to understand him, but one can so easily imagine an assemblage that brings forth his techniques. Today I'm going to label a batch of them. I'm going to call them the Inhabited Space stories, for lack of anything catchier.

Each story I have in mind complicates iconographic insetting because Lafferty sets himself an unusual writing challenge, then meets it in what amounts to a private game, since his strategy goes unnoticed. In each of the Inhabited Space stories, a line of development (the chess analogy again) takes place inside something that is given the extent of an entire world. Sometimes we are inside somebody. Sometimes we are inside a reproductive tract, a failing human body, a dissociated mind, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, a wallpaper pattern, and a few other instances I'll set aside because they get convoluted, though you will find them here. The characters inside this set of stories usually mistake their surroundings for an independent world. They are dreamers who cannot recognize their inner space. The reader usually makes the same mistake because Lafferty manages the story's perspectivism so radically. The grandmaster won't compromise on how the game is played.

"Snake in His Bosom" gives us a bodily version of the Inhabited Interior. Emil Fuerst (a payback to Lafferty's first conman of an agent?) has a fortress-house whose security apparatus keeps him abreast of what is happening around him. As I argued in my earlier post, the house acts like a human anatomy becoming unreliable to its person. Its receptors deliver contradictory information. Sensations flash danger that the instrumental monitoring misses. The intruder, it turns out, has been inside all along. It’s Emil’s own body betraying him. On one level, the betrayal plot is just a betrayal plot. But when you see it as a drama about one’s body failing one, the pieces lock into place. Emil is both the man in the house and the man whose body the house represents. His confidence in its defenses is misplaced. He doesn’t want to die, but we all die. He doesn’t know how to distinguish being secure from just feeling secure, and the psychological sense of security becomes decoupled from security in one’s physical embodiment as the body fails the ensouled person.

In “Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread,” the female reproductive tract becomes urban geography. The Institute people find themselves stuck inside a post-pill world. The steamboats move through moisture and become stranded when it disappears. Guttmacher’s account of sperm traveling through channels, currents, bays, and coves supplies the physical relations, which Lafferty transcodes into streets and riverboats. The stranded vessel on Fourteenth Street fits in here. We are walking through a displaced anatomy. Miss that this is an Inhabited Interior, and you’re left being confused about why Lafferty is spending so much time lingering on traffic problems. The blocked passage of the steamboats (spermatozoa) expresses sexual activity dissevered from its procreative end.

In “In the Turpentine Trees,” we have another variant of the Inhabited Interior. Spiritual and cosmological structures parody what Lafferty took to be Jewish mysticism’s attempt to intrude on the Trinity's inner mystery. My argument there is that Lafferty turns the Kabbalistic Tree of Life into Shamus Eagnach’s weird tramway system. The paths of ascent in Kabbalah are turned into routes on which one can buy transportation. Shamus wants to discover how God became God so that he can repeat the achievement with improvements. He wants mystical ascent minus grace.

“The World as Will and Wallpaper” gives the game away in the title. Will inhabits a decorative pattern. What he experiences as the variety of the motleyed City is, from another position, a version of the bad infinity.

“Junkyard Thoughts” is an Inhabited Interior of the dissociated mind. On my reading, the detective, pawnbroker, swindler, and dog belong to one shattered mind. The Kress mental fragment thinks he is investigating people who exist independently of him.

Here are five stories that show how Lafferty sets a challenge for himself and then tackles it in ways others wouldn't.