"Groaning Hinges of the World" (1968/1971)

“We all say the same things, we all think the same thoughts, we all have the same feelings and pleasures,” the precis machine played. “Both love and hate disappear, for they were two aspects of the same thing—a mantle that was worn by our species in its childhood. We stand unencumbered before the grian-sun. We are the sun. We are everything. We merge. We lose both being and non-being, for both are particulars. We become the extensible and many-dimensioned sphere that has neither beginning nor end, nor being. We enter the calm intensity where peace and strife cancel each other out, where consciousness follows unconsciousness into oblivion. We are devoured by Holy Nothingness, the Big O, the Ultimate Point for all us ultimates.” — Past Master (1968)

Today I’m going to start with the plot summary.

In “Groaning Hinges of the World,” Lafferty builds a story world on mythological foundations. Certain regions rest on great Hinges of the World that, in a Revolution, can turn over. The narrator recounts old claims: iron hinges in the Germanies, bronze in the Caucasus, and rock-crystal in the Pyrenees. When the turnover happens, “that which rises out of the Earth has the same appearance in mountains and rivers and towns and people as the land that it replaces.” Crucially, the people do not know they have changed, though they are no longer the same.

After dismissing these legends, the narrator insists that the only true hinges lie in the western Moluccas. They are made of hard kapok-wood and are well-oiled.

That is where the story begins. It centers on an Obi fisherman who bullies the gentle people of nearby Jilolo. One day at sea, he hears “a short, deep groaning” and feels a shockwave. Pulling in his net, he finds evidence of a turnover: a tear he had mended with his usual pendek knot is now tied with a panjang knot—“which he had never tied in his life, but which the people under the earth tie.” Soon after, canoes of Jilolo men approach. Forgetting his fear, the fisherman calls out his usual taunt: “Hello, Jilolo men, give me fish, give me fruits.”

The Jilolos' reply is icily polite: "Hello, our friend." They board his boat and cut off his head. And there is something interesting about all this. These are men of the same names and appearances, "and yet they were different." Mounting the Obi fisherman’s still-living head on their prow, they force it to guide them to Obi, where they trick the islanders into disarming. A year-long reign of abomination then follows. The turned-up Jilolos are demons, torturing and slaughtering their neighbors. They gnaw meat from men’s ribs. They tear skin from their victims alive. They even roast some, saying, “People are best that way... How have we missed this fine thing so long?”

Then the Jilolos demand the Obis surrender their resident Dutchman. Instead, the Dutchman, a loose old rounder, says, “A thing that is done can be undone.” He works out a plan to reverse the turnover by hand. Using the windlass winches from twelve fishing boats and coordinating with the help of two giant, talking sea-eagles, the men gather at the hinges. At a synchronized signal, the Dutchman cries, “Heave! For our lives, it is now or it is nevermore with us!” The Earth shakes. The Earth bawls as the men force the hinges back in an unnatural violation, accompanied by a groaning more horrible than could be believed.

The Obi men next sail to Jilolo. They find the gentle people have returned, smiling sadly as they are robbed and pushed down. They reclaim their stolen women and go home, believing peace has been restored. But it isn’t going to be that simple. The rescued women, having been on Jilolo when the world turned back, are no longer the women they were. They had become “their own counterparts from under the world, the meanest, most troublesome women ever found anywhere.” These women return home and raise hell from one end of Obi to the other, keeping it up for the rest of their lives.

This is one of Lafferty’s great moral fables and a brilliant example of his art, as well as of challenges people still haven’t learned to discuss. To get into it, I’m going to take a detour.

One of the most powerful experiences of art I’ve had was in Madrid at the Prado, and it was really two experiences. I was seventeen or so, on a geological trip to Spain, and I convinced my fieldwork partner to go to the museum with me. While we were looking around, we discovered someone had left a door open that shouldn’t have been, and we stepped inside. The room held what must have been a hundred Roman busts done in the verism style that became popular in Rome. There was no flattery in those busts—just real now dead men looking out of stone. We hurried out and went to the part of the museum with the magnificently large Goya paintings. For some reason, the historical reality of the busts and Goya’s genius for depicting inhumanity came together for me, and it left me feeling a little shaken about history. It also made me a lifelong lover of Goya.

Goya’s really great work on inhumanity is The Disasters of War (1810–1820), a brutal series of 82 etchings depicting the Peninsular War between Spain and Napoleonic France. He made them in secret; they were published only after his death. The series rejects all notions of glory and heroism, showing war as chaos, cruelty, and moral decay. Goya organizes the work into three parts: the first depicts the immediate violence of battle—massacres, executions, mutilations; the second shows the starvation and suffering of civilians; and the third turns to political and religious corruption, ending in a bleak allegory of Truth lying dead. That Truth is a casualty of revolution and war is something the 20th century beat into us. Works that celebrate the nobility of just war have become endangered outside the WWII genre. Even that, it seems, is changing as American political influence fades internationally. I recently read a book on how the consensus on Hitler is breaking down. It wasn’t a good book, but I found that at least to be true: there is a shift in the under 30s on the rightwing crowd.

Someone asked me about “Groaning Hinges” and noted that Holocaust denial often comes with apologetic rhetoric about the Germans. That’s what this post will think about.

If you’re a Lafferty fan, you know “Groaning Hinges of the World,” one of his best-known and, frankly, best short stories. It’s also a story complicated by his denial of the Holocaust. This is because the story condemns Nazism as demonic, and most people who condemn Nazism believe the Holocaust was the most demonic thing about it. That was not the case for Lafferty, who said there was, of course, a lot of unnecessary cruelty at the German work camps.

On one hand, Lafferty loved the German language and translated some of the greatest poetry in its tradition, though he never published any of that work. It was just one of the ways he gained competency in a language as a man who loved poetry. On the other hand, he both loathed the Nazi regime and denied that regime's greatest set of atrocities. For this reason, “Groaning Hinges of the World” poses what I have called the test for strategies of the secular quarantine versus religious continuity sort.

One way to address the difficulty is to suggest that it was written before Lafferty fully embraced Holocaust denial. Lafferty wrote “The Groaning Hinges” before becoming committed to Holocaust denial. He was 54 at the time, and the story's manuscript dates from the year preceding the Noontide Press publication of The Myth of the Six Million (1969). According to Lafferty, that was the only piece of Holocaust denial literature he encountered before the 1980s. It is therefore entirely correct to conclude that he had not yet studied Holocaust revisionism when he wrote the story, and this is a warrant for secular quarantine.

Then again, Lafferty himself denied the Jewish Holocaust as a historical event in the sense of the “six million,” and “Groaning Hinges” undeniably makes some statement about the Nazis. Instead of cordoning off that issue and saying, “Well, this story is safe,” we should switch gears. The story’s date gives us a rare critical vantage point: why did Lafferty dislike the Nazis—and what, precisely, is he saying about them here?

I bet Lafferty hated the Nazis for a lot of the same reasons most Americans did: their conquest of Europe and destruction of democracy; their suppression of speech and religion; their cult of the Führer; their brutality toward civilians and prisoners; their glorification of war and race; their alliance with fascist Italy and imperial Japan; and their assault on individuality, conscience, and the spiritual freedom that Americans take (used to take?) to define civilization itself. Yet once we’ve recognized that moral groundwork, we can ask a harder question: did much of Lafferty’s hatred focus on the Nazis’ use of forced labor rather than their extermination of peoples? In other words, how did he understand the hierarchy of Nazi evil—and where, for him, would the work camps have stood?

In Lafferty’s view, I think the camps were symptoms of something deeper—and it was that deeper thing he hated: “There was fire under the islands, of course, and volcanoes on them; and the people under the earth were said to be themselves brands of fire.” To see what he means, one ought to see how he conceives of the nineteenth century, which is one reason the Coscuin works should exist as a complete set. There he writes of Frederick William and Metternich and lays out his most developed view of political revolutions. It is worth noting that the first Coscuin volume appeared the same year as “Groaning Hinges,” and all the ideas we are discussing are bound to the intense creative energy of that period when he was thinking about all things revolutionary.

Lafferty wrote historical allegories—and, more deeply, anagogies—about devils because he believed history itself was crowded with them. This will embarrass some readers, but only because he meant it literally: not symbolic devils, not literary constructs like Norman Mailer’s in The Castle in the Forest, but real intelligences of evil at work in the human story. Most people who speak this way know little of history; Lafferty knew a great deal. And yet he still thought and spoke this way.

The devils were also mucking about in the visible Church, according to him. Recall the great Chapter VI of The Flame is Green:

“If you would understand spiders,” Ashley said, “you must first understand that they are counterpoints of people. I have named a great number of my spiders—aptly, of course. The parallelism between spiders and people is so strong that there must be a paranatural force at work here. See that very large and fleshy-appearing spider there! I take him to be Mastai Ferretti, the new Pope, Pius the Ninth, Pio Nono. He has been spinning very rapidly, but he has been at it for only seven weeks. I have always loved these papal tapestries that my Pope-Spiders spin. They all have the basic design that is ordained for them. But each one superimposes his own signature-motif on this. See the glint of gold in his spin! Is it not magnificent?”

I quote this because I am nearly sure that Lafferty saw Nazi Germany as part of a single vast web, a descendant of the same nineteenth-century web from which the strictly Modernist elements of Vatican II’s reception also sprang. As far as I know, Lafferty never had a good word about the Nazis (see the January 1990 letter for his view of the camps themselves). The bigger question, then, is this: if Lafferty did not hate Nazism for the great reason the post-War consensus learned to—its dehumanizing crimes against the Jews and others, the Final Solution, the moment when the Nazi ethos reached its terminus rationis—what, exactly, did he hate? What was the groaning of the hinge?

Well, it is what Lafferty always hated. It is what he hated about Astrobe’s Golden Dream, about Coscuin’s Red Revolution, and about the dozens of other utopian nightmares he imagined: centralizing, web-like, human snuffing-out power. What in The Flame Is Green is Ashley’s web becomes, in Serpent’s Egg, the Global Village.

The Global Village that was the World was ruled by a Kangaroo Court of Compassionate Aldermen who ordered assassinations when it was deemed to be for the common good.

In 1789, it was liberté, égalité, fraternité.

In 1917, it was на благо народа (na blago naroda), for the good of the people.

And Nazis had a word for how to do it: Gleichschaltung. Theological dark matter.

In other words, devils influencing human history, while humans believe they are acting on their own. Lafferty is clear on this point.

Pope Paul VI observed the year after “Groaning Hinges” was published:

“It is a departure from the picture provided by biblical Church teaching to refuse to acknowledge the Devil’s existence; to regard him as a self-sustaining principle . . . or to explain the Devil as a pseudo-reality, a conceptual, fanciful personification of the unknown causes of our misfortunes.”

Thomas More observes in Past Master:

“Someone else is thinking with my mind, someone else is talking with my voice, and now someone else is signing bills with my hand.”

Lafferty observed to Robert Sirignano:

“Leaving aside all testimony of religion and revelation, I believe that a competent interdisciplinary biologist, working without prejudices, would come onto substantial evidence for the existence of unbodied beings or mentalities, from the effect they have on human persons; just as a competent interdisciplinary physicist-astronomer would arrive at the necessity of there being a moon of such a size and gravity and location and distance, even though, for some reason, the moon lacked the quality of visibility.”

That’s what Lafferty is talking about: not genocide, but Gleichschaltung. I understand why many people find this too unspeakably absurd and prefer to retreat into other kinds of historical allegory.

Recall that Adolf Hitler called his movement the National Socialist Party, but he did not socialize the economy in any meaningful sense. Under Nazi rule, private property and big business remained intact. What he did instead was socialize society itself, the process of Gleichschaltung, or “coordination.” We call it totalitarianism. Lafferty thought the Jewish Holocaust was coordinated international Jewish propaganda. That didn’t make the Nazis good. It made some powerful Jews liars.

Recall also that through its coordination policy, the Nazi regime brought every institution and aspect of daily life under state control: schools, media, labor unions, youth groups, and cultural organizations. Independent institutions were abolished and replaced with Nazi-run bodies that promoted obedience, nationalism, and racial ideology. The aim was not to redistribute wealth but to reshape minds and loyalties, binding the German people into a single totalitarian community devoted to the goals of the Nazi state.

The subtitle of the act, I Have As Much Right In Your Mind As You Have, expressed the beautiful new concept. Now mind-scanners were available for everyone, and recalcitrants who resented having their minds invaded could be cited for it and haled into court for antisocial acts. “We are all the same thing. We are identical,” ran part of the wording of the act. “How can all minds become alike and merge into one if each aspect of that ultimate mind is not free to examine every other aspect of itself?”

Yes. Past Master again. This is the kind of thing the Programmed Persons want to accomplish. To do it, they create Programmed Killers. That, I think, is how Lafferty saw the Germans’ part in it. In this sense, Hitler was really just another figure in the line of Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck and the 19th-century Germanic Polizestaat, not something uniquely diabolical because of the Schutzstaffel or their role in the extermination camps. The Schutzstaffel were uniquely diabolical for other reasons.

There’s much to debate in this story. It offers an ideal point of departure for a critical discussion of Lafferty’s archive and for evaluating his ideas, a testing ground for how to read the pieces of the ghost story. There are sound reasons to regard his Holocaust denial as irrelevant to “Groaning Hinges”: the story itself powerfully explores a perennial human struggle and contains no trace of anti-Semitic coding. Yet there are also compelling reasons to see it as relevant, for it may reveal that the story’s central condemnation targets the violence inherent in any attempt to impose a new coordination—any new Gleichschaltung. For Lafferty, one flaw in the postwar consensus would probably be that so many readers would instinctively (because they had been conditioned and coordinated by Jewish propaganda) equate Gleichschaltung with what he believed were the non-existent atrocities of the Holocaust. That would have been for him a pons asinorum.

To me, however, the Nazi atrocities against the Jews only confirm the depth of what happened the last time the German hinge groaned. His art is wiser than he is. For reasons I have written about elsewhere, Lafferty just did not see it that way.