"Great Day in the Morning" (1974/1975)

Jackson Square, New Orleans

In space, as in duration, the peduncle (or, which comes to the same thing, the bud) of a living branch corresponds to a minimum of differentiation, expansion, and resistance. What, then, will be the effect of time on this area of weakness? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 120–21.

The holy figure of the demiurge Teilhard had come down on the altar. With him appeared McLuhan on his right hand and McGonigal on his left. They were transfigured with light. “Lord, it is good that we be here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.” “Peduncle, peduncle, Point Edhead, cosmogenization, valorization, obfuscation. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed them. “Lord, let us build three tents here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.” “Peduncle, neo-anthropocentrism, corpusculization, nookonos, peduncle. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed again.

Lafferty completed “Great Day in the Morning” on March 24, 1973, and the story appeared a year later in Damon Knight’s Orbit 13. One wonders what readers made of it because its design becomes visible only when you know its intellectual background. Like several other short works that serve as pendants to the Argo legend, it also stands in a complicated relation to Lafferty’s metaphysics of time in the Argo legend, for the Great Day is one of the Seven Roads, those seven possible “endings” of the Argo cycle. I want to set the Seven Roads aside because the background is so important. There is no reason not to. After all, Lafferty published “Great Day in the Morning” as a freestanding work, and it can be read on its own. Read this way, one thing pops out. Here, Lafferty launches his strongest attack on Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who often preoccupied him. This alone makes “Great Day in the Morning” a particularly interesting story.

Teilhard recurs throughout Lafferty’s fiction, showing up in places ranging from Fourth Mansions to “How Many Miles to Babylon.” He isn’t a major generative source of ideas. This contrasts him with someone like Charles Fort. When it comes to Teilhard, Lafferty usually gives him no more than a sharp elbow. He seldom works specifically with Teilhardian ideas. So, in “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne,” readers are given funny asides. An impoverished world honors Teilhard as one of its few thinkers. In contrast, a richer alternate world recognizes Teilhard as “a talented science fiction writer with a talent for outre burlesque,” and Lafferty writes, “What a shaggy comic extravaganza he did make of it!” Teilhard is, however, essential to “Old Foot Forgot.” Sometimes he is just a name, as in Clement Chardin in “The Transcendent Tigers”; sometimes, he is one of his idea, as he is the “noospheric fault” in “Narrow Valley.” One finds him showing up in the unpublished “Ahoy the Whale.” And in “The Forty-Seventh Island” and “Along the San Pennatus Fault,” he represents much of what Lafferty most dislikes: theological modernism linked to an ideology of science. Unlike Marx, however, Teilhard is an enemy within Lafferty’s own camp. He is a Catholic, and his Catholicism connects him with Marshall McLuhan in “Great Day in the Morning,” since McLuhan was also a Roman Catholic.

I enjoy very little about Teilhard, but he is significant for understanding Lafferty. It is less about what he thought than what he gives Lafferty: an anti-image of eschatological fiction, which is to say that Lafferty fashioned elements of his own anagogical fiction in opposition to principal elements of Teilhardism. Not for Lafferty are Teilhard’s immance and the coat of paint put on physicalism. As Lafferty wrote in his essay “The World’s Narration”:

“Tracing the symptoms back to the ‘disease’ does indicate that the disease is multiple, that it has such names as Hard Science Fiction, Soft Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Non-Conforming Adventure Fiction. And sometimes it bears such non-consensus names as Biological Fiction, Ontological Fiction, Eschatological Fiction (did Teilhard, for instance, know that he was writing Eschatological Fiction?), Theological Fiction, or Psychological or Philosophical or Technological or Geological or Historical Fiction. These things and many others share the same complex of symptoms.”

What is Lafferty if not a writer of Eschatological Fiction? What is Lafferty if not “a talented science fiction writer with a talent for outre burlesque” who often makes “a shaggy comic extravanza” out of it?

Teilhard’s big idea was a nutty theory about cosmic evolution, brilliantly taken apart by Peter Medawar, something Teilhard himself called cosmogenesis. It is nothing short of the galaxy-brain process by which everything drives toward an increasingly organized cosmos. Teilhard describes humanity’s eventual gathering as “the natural culmination of a cosmic processus of organisation,” and identifies noogenesis as that “in which cosmogenesis, as regards our experience, culminates” (The Phenomenon of Man, 243, 297). This cosmic development follows a supposed law of complexity-consciousness: as matter undergoes greater complexification, its interior dimension rises toward consciousness. More complexity equals more consciousness. Teilhard condenses the principle into two equations: “Evolution = Rise of consciousness” and “Rise of consciousness = Union effected” (243).

Along the way, evolution crosses successive thresholds. At the material level is what is often called the geosphere, object of geogenesis and the “rocky lithosphere.” Above it appears the biosphere, “the living membrane composed of the fauna and flora of the globe” (180). Then comes the Teilhardian leap: psychogenesis gives way to noogenesis, producing the planetary “thinking layer,” for “outside and above the biosphere there is the noosphere” (181). Teilhard uses hominization to describe this transition, first as “the individual and instantaneous leap from instinct to thought,” and more broadly as “the progressive phyletic spiritualisation in human civilisation” of forces inherited from animal life (180). Within the noosphere, technological communication and human interdependence produce what Teilhard calls “human Planetisation,” or elsewhere socialization, drawing peoples into “a movement of convergence” (243).

This convergence is accompanied by interiorization, for Teilhard says that making room for thought requires him to “interiorise matter” (290). Crucial for Lafferty’s parody of Teilhard, his theory of convergence does not dissolve individuality. As persons approach Omega, Teilhard says that “each particular consciousness” becomes “still more itself and thus more clearly distinct from others” (261). He has a slong for this: “union differentiates”: unification leads to greater personalization, since “we can only find our person by uniting together” (262). The whole evolutionary process is directed toward the Omega Point, the transcendent and already-active center that attracts evolution forward and gathers differentiated persons into perfected unity. Teilhard imagines his Omega to possess “autonomy, actuality, irreversibility” and “transcendence.” He even calls it “a divine focus of mind which draws it onward” (270). The eschatological completion of cosmogenesis is Christogenesis: “If the world is convergent and if Christ occupies its centre,” Teilhard writes, then Christogenesis is the extension of noogenesis and the culmination of cosmogenesis (297). This final fullness is the Pleroma, which The Phenomenon of Man describes as “perfect unity,” in which “each element will reach its consummation at the same time as the universe” and “God shall be all in all” (294).

Lafferty thinks all this is nonsense, and he rejects in full the notion that Teilhardian union would really differentiate. Poking fun at this fantasy of cosmic fusion that contrasts so vividly with something like Lafferty’s view of the Body of Christ underlies much of what “Great Day in the Morning” does. Where Teilhard goes cosmically big, Lafferty goes into reverse, winding everything down to a parody of the Omega Point. In the story, it takes the form of devolution down to a single cell.

A wonderful diagram in The Phenomenon of Man makes Teilhard’s vision clear. It shows anthropogenesis, and it must have caught Lafferty’s attention. In addition to being necessary context for “Great Day in the Morning,” the diagram has a fun connection Austro. One can imagine the line going off at the bottom from Australopith leading directly to “Barnaby’s Clock.” The diagram sticks in my mind because it is like a strange attractor for so much in Lafferty. One could use it to talk about all three of his major cycles.

Before getting any deeper into what Lafferty is doing with Teilhard, let’s rehearse the plot of “Great Day in the Morning.”

The story opens with Melchisedech Duffey taking a walk in New Orleans before dawn. He is stopped by three men who declare that the “Great Day” has arrived. To demonstrate this new era, they hold him down and remove the minute hand from his watch, explaining that “even you must realize that time is not overly particularized on the Great Day.” Duffey keeps his routine and visits a coffee shop, where the waitress and customers are drinking coffee without cups. They rely on blind faith to contain the liquid because “It isn’t right that anything should be contained by anything else.” Duffey can't go along with this and asks for a pour of hot coffee, which spills directly onto his bare hand and scalds it. This, in turn, breaks everyone's “faith,” causing the other customers’ cupless coffee to splash down their arms just as they take a drink.

Duffey next goes to a newspaper office to complain about the morning edition. The paper lacks a date, page numbers, and standard articles. An editorial assistant says that names and titles have been abolished because “Names are enslaving,” adding that they now only work when they feel like it in the name of “job enrichment.” Walking back through the city, Duffey sees traffic signals flashing subjective phrases like “To stop is to die” instead of colors and observes vehicles moving without wheels. Citizens physically dismantle building walls and remove their clothing, acting on the new societal rule that “Faith maintains better than walls” and that individuals must “be unenclosed, be emancipated, be unstructured.”

Seeking a familiar place, Duffey visits the Pelican Press, a publishing office where he knows the staff. He discovers his colleagues are also participating in the Great Day, tearing down the office walls with axes and preparing to shed their skins. They show Duffey that these worldwide events match a comic article he wrote for their magazine a year prior, which ended with the warning: “If ever the world forgets to laugh, these things and others will come to pass.” Duffey declines their invitation to take his clothes off and leaves to check on St. Michael’s Church. He finds the building being unstructured by a congregation using new jargon. At the same time, a living stone statue of St. Michael complains that “the Unfaithful Assembled will not notice any difference” and wishes for a way “to put a good double edge on a stone sword.”

Duffey goes to a local bar but finds that it serves only a drink called “The New Day Dawner.” Outside, he watches the city’s inhabitants merge witlessly into large, rolling spheres of flesh, losing their individual forms entirely. He sits on a bench in Jackson Square and speaks with Morpheus, the god of sleep, who explains that the universe is the dream of a single-celled organism and that “A waking world would be a shapeless and formless monstrosity.” Morpheus reveals that the eons-long dream is now shrinking back to its beginning and that they will “end as two submicroscopic snakes... and then one of us must swallow the other.” Duffey and Morpheus wrestle until Duffey collapses in on himself, shrinking into a single cell and swallowing himself as the rest of the world is obliterated.

To see what Lafferty has done to Teilhard, one only has to flip de Chardin’s diagram and see that what Teilhard imagines as an upward-moving process of differentiation into unity, Lafferty parodies as a downward-moving process of dissolution into enclosed monadic imprisonment.

This explains what Lafferty is doing, but why is he doing it? What is it about Teilhard that Lafferty objects to? As should be obvious, Teilhard is careful to say that he thinks union differentiates, yet it is the premise that Lafferty rejects in lampooning him. Had Lafferty granted it to Teilhard, the story could not take place because barriers would not have been broken down. Instead, complexification would occur. Teilhard’s “science fiction” depends on the idea that greater complexity brings greater consciousness.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, whom Lafferty no doubt read, is helpful here. In his well-known objections to de Chardin, he pointed out something at the center of the concerns of “Great Day in the Morning” and the destruction of the Pelican Press, namely that a genuine community presupposes distinct, free, and irreducible persons. In contrast, Teilhard’s “collective consciousness” and “totalization” threaten to replace communion in love with absorption into an impersonal whole. In Lafferty, this is figured in the disappearance of walls, containers, names, clothes, skins, minds, and personal boundaries. No one becomes more differentiated or more intensely personal; instead, they become “blank” and “witless.” In the end, they are indistinguishable masses of “people-substance.” This concretizes Hildebrand’s view that a fusion modeled on material processes cannot create spiritual communion. Thinking it can denies that people spiritual and physical beings who enter into communion. Like Hildebrand, Lafferty thinks that Teilhard (despite what he says regarding the Within and the Without, his version of spiritual and physical) confuses matter and spirit, nature and grace, cosmic energy and personal love, technological progress and sanctity, and earthly development and transcendent salvation. It is ultimately an immanent cosmos.

For readers unfamiliar with Teilhard, Duffey’s wrestling match with Morpheus at the end of the story will seem strange, especially the meaning of the false etymology that connects dream to shape. Readers of The Phenomenon of Man, however, will recognize its sources. Towards the end of the work, Teilhard writes, “Among those who have attempted to read this book to the end, many will close it, dissatisfied and thoughtful, wondering whether I have been leading them through facts, through metaphysics or through dreams.” Lafferty connects this to Teilhard’s obsessive use of metamorphosis and words formed from morph-, which occur dozens of times in Teilhard’s work. For Teilhard, metamorphosis denotes a change of evolutionary state. When life crosses the threshold of “reflection,” inherited animal powers such as perception, aggression, love, invention, and social behavior continue, but consciousness gives them a new dimension. The result is, in Teilhard’s phrase, “discontinuity superimposed upon continuity.”

The Neolithic metamorphosis is the collective form of this change, what he calls the deployment of the noosphere. Agriculture, settlement, population growth, and accumulated knowledge transform scattered human groups into an increasingly connected noosphere. Endomorphosis provides the corresponding geological metaphor. Just as rocks alter one another internally through contact, peoples and cultures transform one another through migration, exchange, intermarriage, conflict, conquest, and assimilation. Even a conquered or partially absorbed people modifies its conquerors.

Metamorphosis is therefore a master category in Teilhard’s thought. Through metamorphosis, humanity passes into a new mode of existence. Endomorphosis names the reciprocal inward transformation through which distinct human branches enter that common development. Together, the terms are supposed to explain noogenesis, the process by which human differences interpenetrate, reshape one another, and become incorporated into an increasingly unified planetary consciousness.

This is what Lafferty calls eschatological science fiction and mocks. Lafferty rejects every form of evolutionary human speciation. For him, noogenesis is an idolatrous fantasy closed to transcendence, figured by the single cell as a prison house.

Why, finally, does the story take place in the morning? I think the answer to that question lies in one of Teilhard’s most important works, “The Mass on the World,” written at Ordos in 1923 and set at dawn. Lafferty constructs his Great Day as a response to Teilhard’s purple meditation. Teilhard begins “The Mass on the World” without bread, wine, or altar. I imagine Lafferty saw this as Teilhard taking it upon himself to rewrite the Mass by projecting it on a cosmic scale. In any case, Teilhard makes the whole earth his altar and offers God labor, suffering, growth, decline, and death of creation. In Lafferty’s parody, this cosmic extension becomes the claim that skins, barriers, and boundaries are unnecessary. Teilhard asks the divine Word to pronounce “This is my Body” over the forces that bring life and increase, and “This is my Blood” over those that bring dissolution and death. The Eucharistic pattern thus encompasses the whole course of cosmic becoming, as though all creation were evolving into Christ and the Incarnation could attain its fullness only at the Omega Point. In “Great Day in the Morning,” Omega becomes “Point Edhead,” the pointed head of a dunce. At St. Michael’s, however, no Mass is held that morning. The church is “unstructured,” and the zodiac, the sun, and the moon replace the Stations of the Cross.

At this point, Teilhard himself enters the story. He appears on the altar as “the holy demiurge,” flanked by McLuhan and McGonigal and “transfigured with light.” In place of the words of the actual consecration, he recites a pseudo-Teilhardian litany: “Peduncle, peduncle, Point Edhead, cosmogenization, valorization, obfuscation” and “Peduncle, neo-anthropocentrism, corpusculization, nookonos, peduncle.” The “Unfaithful Assembled” answer, “Great Day.” Lafferty then puns on Mass, making it the physical meaning of mass. The people remove their skins, surrender their minds and boundaries, “interiorize” themselves, and merge into “great balls of people-substance,” then into “one big fleshy sphere,” and finally into a single cell swallowing itself. Teilhard’s cosmic Mass is travestied. We are far from the Omega Point and the differentiated Body of Christogenesis.

Much else ought to be said about Lafferty’s use of Scripture in the story, particularly the problem of world destruction and the wineskin and old wine. It is a very rich story, with many Easter eggs. For example, the "Bitter End" at the end of the story is a joke about anchors, tying back to The Back as a figure of the church and the name of the Pelikan Press publication:

“Ah me,” Melchisedech said. “I had always regarded the Pelican as a refuge, as an anchor to hold fast in the great storms of the world.” “Both the sea ships and the river boats are cutting loose their anchors and letting them sink forever,” Zabotski said. “With faith, who needs anchors?”

I’ll wrap up by saying something about poor Marshall McLuhan, who in 1967 had a brain tumor the size of a lemon removed. Many of his quirks have long seemed tied to his health, which makes Lafferty’s treatment of him seem especially unfair. Yet Lafferty was not wrong to detect Teilhard’s influence. It is hard to overlook how indebted McLuhan was to Teilhard in developing his account of the Electric Age. Years before Lafferty wrote “Great Day in the Morning,” this was already on people’s radar. Someone had even written a dissertation on Teilhard’s influence on McLuhan in the 1960s. Lafferty could smell the Teilhard stink. But intellectual influence is not religious identity, and McLuhan tended to downplay his Catholicism in his work and public appearances.

How amusing, then, that McLuhan was, like Lafferty, an archconservative who drew heavily on the ideas of Wyndham Lewis, a daily communicant, and a man deeply angered by the vernacular Mass after Vatican II. In many ways, McLuhan’s Catholicism looks like Lafferty’s and stands far apart from what Lafferty regarded as Teilhard’s creation of a new religion. Teilhard, of course, denied that his was a new religion. For instance, in Let Me Explain, he wrote, “It is still Christianity, I repeat, and Christianity it will always be: but it is a re-born Christianity” (105). The irony is that Lafferty could hardly have known how much religious ground he shared with McLuhan. The full picture came out only with the publication of McLuhan’s letters in the 1980s. In those letters one reads, for instance, how disastrous McLuhan thought the introduction of the microphone into the Mass had been. Lafferty and McLuhan were on the same page about the Mass.