IIp "I believe in the Devil."

For months, I have wanted to write about some remarks Lafferty made to Robert Sirignano concerning the Devil. They’re plainly important for understanding the nature of antagonistic forces in his fiction. I started thinking about them again when I happened to read Harlan Ellison’s short story “Grail” (1981). It’s a fun, straightforward moral fable, written by someone who doesn’t believe in real devils. So we get a devil like this:

It slouched and dragged its arms behind as it came out of the darkness. When the flickering illumination from the candles struck it, Chris felt sick to his stomach. He clutched the paper with Siri’s words as if it would save him. Surgat came and stood with the point of one goat-hoof almost touching Siri’s blood. Chris could smell where it had been and what it had been doing when he had interrupted its dining. He felt faint and could not breathe deeply because of the smell Surgat had carried from its mess hall. The head of the demon changed. Toad to goat to worm to spider to dog to ape to man to a thing that had no name.

Ellison wants to say something about the sacrifices people make in pursuit of idealized, perfect fulfillment. His main character ends up with a disappointing trophy whose real power lies in revealing the futility of the quest itself. The story wants the reader to think about the tragic, bittersweet nature of chasing an abstract ideal as if it could be won like a prize. Thanks, Harlan.

Lafferty did believe in devils, so he didn’t treat them as monsters, but as devils. That’s one reason I don’t take Ouden seriously as a character. I read Past Master as a novel in which the Nine Programmed Persons manipulate the people of Astrobe with Ouden, much in the manner the Great and Powerful Oz tries to manipulate Dorothy. Now seems like the right moment to bring it in, especially because it opens onto the oceanic, Lafferty’s master trope for the unconscious.

The following is from “Introduction to Ringing Changes” by Robert Whitaker Sirignano, published in Feast of Laughter, Volume 5 (2020).

“I believe in the Devil,” said Lafferty at a convention. “He’s right here in this room.” When some of the laughs died down, he continued, “I’m serious!” I asked him a number of months later to write it out, and he wrote: “Sure, I consider the Devil-Satan as a real person or presence or species. I don’t know to what extent individuality is a quality of that species. “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. And the physicist-astronomer would realize this necessity for such a moon from its influence on the earth. The biologist-psychologist should arrive at the necessity of the Devil-Satan, of such a power and location and activation-pattern, because of his influence on human persons. “Well, there is something rampant in the collective unconscious, and if we ask “What is it?” we’re naming one of its names. As God several times in scripture gives Himself the name of the ‘I am’ or the ‘I am who I am’, so the Devil-Satan species is given the name in many languages of something like the ‘What is it?’ or the ‘Who is it?’ An African tale begins ‘The Who-Is-It came and killed a man and cut him open.’ This particular who-is-it seemed to kill and cut open a man every morning to read him as if reading a morning newspaper. As to whether the diabolical species has individuality, that’s a problem. Before being cast into Gadarene Swine, one devil or multiplicity of devils told Christ either ‘My name is legion’ or ‘Our name is legion’, seeming a multiplicity of guises for an individual, or a multiplicity of individuals in the species. “Well, this diabolical species-person cannot read human minds and cannot invade the human individual, except in a few doubtful cases. But he can invade the human species, which he does by invading the group unconscious. There is the devil in the cellar of the mind. He-they-it does have some influence on persons, or all persons. “There are likely other unbodied beings and mentalities, some of them more good than bad, if the qualities good and bad pertain to them, and some of them neutral spirits in a direct sense.“Yes, I did let the answer to that be a long one, and I did say anything I wanted to say either.” What does this mean? Lafferty tells me that there is a part of his mind that says there is a conflict with the Devil-Satan (or devils) in all the stories he writes, be it very directly implied, as it is in The Argo Cycle, or somewhat off the scene, lurking behind in the shadows, as in “Eurema’s Dam.” It is a significant part of the totality of Lafferty. (p. 164–166).

In the Oceanic Novels, the diabolical often appears within the Core Conflict box, meaning it is confronted directly rather than left implicit.

Continued.

Here is a worked example, drawn from Past Master (1968). It differs from the Past Master diagram in the Oceanic section of this blog by addressing diabolical elements that the general model leaves unspecified.