Iron Tongue of Midnight (1975)

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. I fear we shall outstep the coming morn as much as we this night overwatch'd. — William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I

“ . . . the sun really is darkened and the moon really does not give its light. The time has almost all run out. The iron tongue of midnight is already swinging, and when it will clash and sound, the angular velocity of psychic accumulation is seen to gather to a breaking point after three million years of . . . and it breaks . . .”

Lafferty thought The Elliptical Grave was his least publishable book—and he was right—but there is one close contender, the unpublished half-mad novel Iron Tongue of Midnight. Extravagantly baroque and spectacularly untethered for most of its narrative sequence, it is a challenging novel, one for the hardest for hardcore Lafferty readers. No surprise then that it defeats a concise synopsis, even when compared to some of the other Lafferty radical experiments. My theory is that Lafferty knew this and decided to try it again, making some of its big ideas far easier in East of Laughter (1988).

Part of the difficulty is structure. There is a deep structure. On one's first reading of it, however, the pattern will be a march through the hours of a hard single pass around the sun. Iron Tongue compresses an aggressive chain of dazzlingly set pieces into one extraordinary day, demanding the reader’s full attention to keep a lock on its mind-bending totality.

In this post, I want to do two things: first, to sketch out what the novel is and share some thoughts on how it works; and second, to consider two of its elements that are relevant to Lafferty’s fiction, namely, the book’s conception of the Prize World (another version of Prime and perhaps Lafferty's clearest statement about it) and the Schausergeschtenbaum. I'll unfold the map and point out several ways in.

Taking its title from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Iron Tongue can be read as a world-dream—“these visions did appear,” says Puck—with Lafferty himself in the role of Puck. The setting, Woomago, is a world (more on this) where overlapping and extreme subjectivities operating on different magnitudes seem to portend the end of the world before subsiding into a modicum of sanity. It will all end with a mass confession, and one of the novel's great themes is how one moves from paranoia to metanoia, as one character puts it.

Iron Tongue is also a found-document novel. In its outermost frame narrative, we learn that the text we are about to read is part of a Planetary Psychosis Investigation conducted by an alien junior high school student. The world he studies is a bedlam of spiritual, psychological, and cosmic upheaval. As mentioned earlier, the book is so sprawling that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Lafferty is meticulously keeping time through the delirium: the single day and night are essential, as Lafferty conjures his apocalyptic visions on the way to a midnight clang at a pan-tribal hall. Here the world will end or it won't. Will the assembled be burned away like straw, or will there be a future?

The novel begins with an apocalyptic storm. It strikes Woomago like God's hand in the Old Testament or the blast of the New Testament's divine judgment; an angel of visitation or angel of death slaughters the firstborn of seven families (these firstborn are often middle-aged or older, and there will be many complications in this murder mystery), but we are off to the races. Social disintegration ensues among the groups at the center of the set pieces: the conservative Omates, the pentecostal and vile Hot Tongues, the moronic Green Gangers, and the decadent Bannial Poor. Along the way, self-styled saints darken the sun by thought, prophets preach to mobs of liars, homunculi harvest human tongues for experiments (one of my favorite moments in all of Lafferty). A half-dead patriarch speaks from deep freeze in a scene that feels out of Philip K. Dick; fiction is weaponized as the three Scenarists (writers of reality, like the scribbling giants in East of Laughter) are confronted by their own creation, whose moral collapse is just a plot element to them.

There are mind-projected expeditions where people leap from idiocy or madness into space, giving birth to dragons and dragon combat on Venus-Noga. Identities dissolve, doubles duel, lovers mutate under divine parody. And when the iron tongue tolls at midnight, every tribe (mad saints, liar-giants, cannibal intellectuals, contrite maybe-murderers) faces judgment. All the chaos and psychosis have, somehow, tipped the world toward a strange sanity, perhaps because of the prophet Jonah, who, reflecting on the long years that have followed Nineveh’s repentance, says,

“I sure have run on bad luck since. I haven’t done it since that day a way back then, and it isn’t that I haven’t tried. Now I am an old man remembering past glories. But I will hit again. I will call other great cities to repentance also. Believe so, when a man goes out to it faithfully every morning for more than twenty-five hundred years and works hard at it all the day and most of the night, he is going to hit it again.”

It’s a wild novel—Lafferty’s wildest.

So how does it work?

A brief attempt at a summary. The novel is presented as a report by an under-student named Kolimar, framed again by an attachment from his professor. What follows takes place on planet codenamed Woomago that is suffering from a collective planetary psychosis. This society is partitioned into distinct and antagonistic groups. The Omate Squares are the stolid, tradition-bound majority. They constitute the world's foundation, and they are the source of members of the other groups. In opposition to the Omates are the Hot Tongues, a self-designated spiritual elite; the Bannial Poor, a parasitic class; the Green Gangers, a primitive and violent underclass; and the Unassigneds, who are essentially countercultural, from both the right and the left. Overseeing and perhaps creating this conflictual reality are the Scenarists, three writers who craft the world’s continuing scenario. Each of them has a distinct personality and an approach to writing the world.

The novel’s inciting incident takes place on Midsummer's Eve with a violent storm and a series of murders that may not be murders at all if the Angel of Death was the executioner. The first-born children of seven prominent Omate families are brutally in an event that becomes known over the course of the day as the Egyptian Plague Murders. On the same night, the Hot Tongues pronounce the end of a three-million-year cosmic cycle. Today is the day they perceive as being their divine election and an impending doom is to be passed on all non-elect people. This cataclysmic event upturns the Omates' stable reality. It sets a cast of characters on a search for answers, justice, or revenge, further deepening the societal conflicts on Woomago.

Lafferty gives the reader several key figures for threading through this complicated world. Among the Unassigneds is Kolimar. He is a charismatic Boy Giant and alien lecturer who claims that everything he says is a lie; he also says these lies point toward a deeper corresponding truth. He is a catalyst for changing the established order. From the Omates, the mild-mannered Scotsdale Boland becomes nearly insane (and possibility fully insane): he wants vengeance for the death of his brother Wallace, Egyptian Plague Victim. Then there is the fey Cletus Shatwell who discovers he has strange powers, including the ability to resurrect his father from a subjective, reality-bending attack. These characters, along with others from every social faction, will converge as they struggle with the murders and the nature of their existence on Woomago.

As the novel progresses, the world’s psychosis manifests as a fundamental breakdown of objective reality, but things have been becoming increasingly subjective for a long while. Characters experience double vision, witnessing alternate, ghostly versions of events and people. Lafferty’s book becomes less about physical action and more about a war of competing subjectivities, where belief and perception do alter the world, and, at the same time, people are responsible for choosing the various subjectivities and consensuses they occupy. This is exemplified by the practice of "skylarking," a form of subjective travel that allows individuals, particularly the Green Gangers, to travel to other worlds like the fantastical Venus-Noga. The All throughout this, the Scenarists are writing these bizarre and contradictory events into the world’s script, often moments before they happen.

The novel reaches it climax at Midsummer Night. There is widespread panic that the world will end when the great bell, the Iron Tongue of Midnight, strikes. Representatives from all factions gather at a park to consult an oracle, leading to a series of contradictory confessions to the murders from different groups, revealing the crime as a shared, multi-layered phenomenon. At the final moment, the bell booms not for destruction but for celebration. The ringing of the iron tongue scatters the nonsense of the impending apocalypse. It resolves the collective madness. It signals a shift in the cosmic order, and it ushers the world into a new and "barely workable level of sanity."

This summary makes it all seem far less disorienting than it is. Like The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (1977) and East of Laughter (1988), Iron Tongue is a take-no-prisoners exploration of consensus reality. The novel portrays a world shattered like a plate—one of its own metaphors—into subjective realities that overlap, compete, and distort one another. Significantly, this fragmentation plays out at both the individual and social levels, and it's helpful to take one's bearings relative to the character or social group at hand in the set piece. At the end of this post, I have listed each set piece.

An example of the games Lafferty plays with individual superimposition can be seen in the following scene, a urphanomen of this aspect of the book:

And also, in a reverse fashion, this "double vision phenomenon" had not completely engulfed Patrick Shatwell more than one time that morning, and it still hovered over him, faintly to the eyes of some of them, and with an immediate and horrible intensity to the eyes of others. This doubled or superimposed vision was that of Shatwell himself lying stricken and contorted and dead. The red-eyed and dazed, but living and vital, Shatwell who talked to the others there, was at the same time wrapped in a death cloud of another way of seeing him. This cloud showed Shatwell killed with an iron dart of idiotic size, a dart three meters long and half a meter thick, that went through his chest and body and absolutely destroyed his chest with the very size and power of it. It showed Shatwell surprised by the sudden death but still tortured with the pain that did not cease with the death.

On the social scale, each consensus reality is a consent-based subjective reality, and each is inhabited and defended by a distinct faction of humanity—the Omates, Hot Tongues, Green Gangers, and the Bannial Poor—while some, the “unassigneds,” remain outside any camp, having once been out of the Potter's Shed of the Omate faction.

An example of the social dimension of this projected reality business can be seen in the following passage, which depicts a massive Omate car crash created by the Hot Tongues, who are using a small set of Omates sacrificial lambs:

“Nor did everyone notice it now. In the streets of the city, about a third of the automobile lights came on, and the rest of them did not. Two-thirds of the drivers did not know that it had gotten dark, that they were driving in the darkness, for it had not gotten dark to them. This was something that the Hot Tongues themselves did not know. They had decreed darkness, and they had seen the darkness come. It was below their comprehension that there might be people so gross and blind that they could not see this imposed darkness when it came.”

The result of so much individual and social projection is a philosophical war of projection itself, where the stakes appear to be the power to define what is real.

I say “appear to be” because Lafferty eventually exposes this illusion. The book’s intellectual foundation emerges very late in the novel (after many readers may have flagged) and it comes through a character named Savant Ben, whose name links him to both Sauls of the Bible. Lafferty weaves this theme throughout, noting that Scotsdale Boland is also of the Tribe of Benjamin. Savant Ben is a former scientist persecuted by the government for refusing to subordinate science to astrology. Following a series of deranged legislative acts, he was ordered to cast horoscopes for children, and he refused.

In a secret meeting of fellow outcasts, Ben lays out what I take to be the book's central thesis: that Prime matters. He describes a universe of multiple "Woomago-type worlds," subjective realities that can be entered and experienced, but he says they are all measured against a single, foundational "Prize World." As he puts it, “On the flesh-reality of the world. On the incarnational reality. It’s the only one; for reality is singular.”

This leads to one of the great speeches in the novel: one can bet on ideological, phenomenal, or process realities—the "hay horses, or the grays, or the tans, or the reds"—but these are all losing wagers. The only true bet is on the "black horse" of incarnational reality, the tangible, flesh-and-blood world. At the same time, we can share space in a room with many people in different consensus realities, people who have become unaware of Prime or Prize World:

“England itself is stuffed with the shirts of those who lost them in thinking that it didn’t matter what color of horse they bet on. Do not bet on the hay horses, or the grays, or the tans, or the reds, friends. Bet only on the black horse to win, and then the only way your horse can lose is to another black horse. Ideational England is stuffed with the shirts of those who lost them in thinking that it didn’t matter what sort of reality they bet on. Do not bet on the existential reality, or on the phenomenal reality, friends. Do not bet on process reality, or on situational reality. Do not bet on pragmatic reality, nor on hypostatic reality. Do not bet on empirical or axial or dialectic or naturalistic or positiv-al or ontological or autonomous reality. These horses won’t run!”

Without this scene, the novel would lack an anchor; with it, we gain a point of orientation from which to approach its maelstrom of chaos.

The madness in Iron Tongue has many causes—just as its murder mystery ends with many confessions, a mass metanoia—but the primary one is clear. It arises from humanity’s flight from a singular, incarnational truth into ever more attenuated realms of subjective creation, culminating in what the novel calls Skylarking, wan-witted daydreaming. At the same time, the work remains sympathetic to the subjective powers of imagination, striving to bind them back to the incarnational so that they do not descend into hermetic decadence.

Savant Ben comes late in the book, so it takes the reader a long while to reach the philosophical bedrock. This is typical of Lafferty’s novels, where fog becomes glass late when narrative is tied off. His short stories work this way, but the novels lose readers. To know Lafferty’s novels, one should reread their last quarters. Here, one is thrown into a sea of competing realities, with set piece upon set piece, many of them astonishingly memorable. The upshot is that the book moves on several tracks at once, surging forward as the single day on Woomago ticks along. One has to trust the author. These tracks interact through accretion and superimposition, creating a disorienting yet thematically coherent whole that can only be understood retrospectively.

At a minimum, the main threads to follow are the following (a diagram at the end of this post suggests one possible way to do so):

a. The Alien Boy Giant's Notes

Iron Tongue is framed as a collection of notes by Kolimar, an alien under-student tasked with studying a case of extensive planetary psychosis. I take this as a metafictional reading tip from Lafferty. No matter how wild things get, remember that this world is an object of clinical, external analysis, even if it’s fun. The disagreement between Kolimar, who sees his work as "An Entertainment," and his professor, who insists on its seriousness, will be the reader's own experience. Be entertained by the weirdness, but know that you are being pushed to recognize the profound and serious exploration of madness taking place.

b. A Post-Electronic Earth Gone Mad

Andrew Ferguson has described the novel in the following way:

Iron Tongue of Midnight (6/27/75) — Offworld novel, styled an “exercise in alien psychology.” Densely packed with symbolism, thoroughly metafictional, apocalyptic, mystic, and visionary. An investigation into other possible worlds that, like the best Lafferty tales, spills over into those worlds and into our own.

I don't interpret the novel as an inquiry into other possible worlds, except in the broadest sense that all narratives about the future are modal fictions, as, indeed, are all fictional representations of the past. Everyone in the novel stays physically on Woomago, which is what Earth has become. The alien psychology seems far more like a Lafferty joke than a statement about actual aliens: it comments on how self-alienated these humans are in the post-Electronic Age. Those of us reading his novels will perceive them as aliens. The alien-psychology styling comes from the Krangdapula and Koimar framing material, and they may well be the only aliens in the book. We look through the wrong end of the telescope.

Although there are alien-sounding words such as Woomago (again, a code name) and Venus-Noga, the setting is unmistakably a future or alternate Earth. The prophet Jonah appears and asserts his ties to our Earth's history. There are references to our Fall of Rome and to our Ireland—specifically Lafferty’s Knockmealdown Mountains known from Ishmael Into the Barrens—as well as to London, Illyria, Athens, the Atlantic Ocean, Covent Garden, Granada, and the Alpujarra range. It matters because the novel is not only about apocalypse but about prophecy and judgment, and one of its jokes is that Jonah is right again, after millennia, and gets another anti-climax, one that affirms God's mercy: the world is spared and returns to barely workable sanity.

1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. 2 And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. 3 Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live. 4 Then said the Lord, Doest thou well to be angry?

As Jonah in the novel says,

“Now this was not the Tharsis that had been in Cilicia in more ancient times than mine. It was the colony Tharsis (in some places of Scripture it is called Tarshish) which is in Atlantic Spain. It was in the Atlantic that I was thrown into the sea, and the fish that swallowed me was a Right Whale which is sometimes called the Jonah Whale.”

All this is somewhat obscure because the novel takes place in the post-Electronic Age, when the power of mass media to project realities has been internalized. “Projective cerebralism” has replaced the old electronic scatter-casting, allowing individuals and groups to generate and inhabit their own subjective worlds. This practice has become both a flawed science and a perilous art. Iron Tongue is not concerned with alternative worlds in the sense that Not to Mention Camels (1976) is—that is, as an evasion of the responsibilities owed to incarnational Prime. Rather, it is a study of how far consensus reality can drift from the Prime (or Prize) World.

c. The Madness of a Single Day

Again, this is the throughline. The novel's timeline is intensely compressed, taking place almost entirely on Midsummer's Eve and Day. The frame story gives the reader a science-fictional cause for the crisis: the planet may have drifted, for a brief period, through a psychotic cloud. This device provides a catalyst, explaining why the world's latent madness has erupted into a full-blown, world-altering event on this specific day, making the book a feverish, real-time account of a planet having a nervous breakdown, though the reader will learn that there has been a history of planetary insanity going back at least to the mid-1990s.

d. An Ethnography of Competing Factions

The planetary psychosis is embodied by the world's factions, each representing a different consensus reality:

• The Omates: These are the conservative, stuffy, and unimaginative majority who value family, tradition, and brick-and-mortar stability. They are the biological base from which all other, more progressive, groups defect.

• The Hot Tongues: Spiritually insane fanatics who believe themselves to be vessels of pure spirit and wield immense subjective power, capable of killing with subjective darts and altering perception. They’re one of Lafferty’s most savage depictions of extreme Protestantism.

• The Bannial Poor: An opulent class that has transformed poverty into a powerful, parasitic aesthetic of aggressive consumption. They are part of Lafferty’s satire of extreme distinctions in spiritual and material poverty, most memorably (to me at least) set out in “Calamities of the Last Pauper” (1982).

• The Green Gangers: Primal, violent, and intellectually stunted, yet paradoxically the masters of "skylarking," a form of subjective space travel via daydreaming. The dragon fighting on Venus-Noga is one of the strangest pieces of writing in Lafferty. A Lafferty chrestomathy would include it.

• The Unassigneds: A group of dropouts and individualists who exist between the other factions, standing at the crossroads of one million signposts. In many ways, they are the most sympathetic characters in the book, as one would expect. But most of them are profoundly flawed.

  
  

e. The Egyptian Plague Murders

The book’s primary plot engine is a murder mystery, but this is a MacGuffin and a half. On the night the novel begins, the first-born child of seven prominent Omate families is mysteriously killed, an event that comes to be known over the course of the day as the Egyptian Plague Murders. This violation of the Omates' ordered world drives the revenge plot, led by Scotsdale Boland, a woefully riven man whose psyche is so fractured that he has a demonic doppelgänger, Lemuel Bang, who proves somewhat pitiable. Scotsdale's quest to avenge his brother Wallace is a desperate attempt to impose a traditional story of justice onto a world that no longer adheres to such logic. One of the great moments in the novel is Scotsdale’s confrontation with a scenarist who explains that when it comes to writing, the murder can come before the murderer. Lafferty leaves the reader with many ways of understanding Scotsdale Boland.

f. The Metanovel and the Scenarists

That takes us into the metafictional. Here, we encounter it in two forms: first, through the technique of Skylarking; and second, through the three metafictional scenarists—Harry Halfstopper, Rondelay Silberman, and Sean McDonalds. These figures serve as the authors of the world’s continuity, capable of writing events into existence and retroactively altering the plot. A character’s death proving inconvenient? Write him back to life. This device turns the novel into a story that is actively writing and rewriting itself as it proceeds (at one point even burning its own pages), revealing that this world’s reality is not fixed but a fluid, editable text. Of the most complete version of the plot, we are told only that it is “a little rough” and “will need to be worked on":

"Just a minute," Rondelay Silberman cut in. "That was all pretty rough. Will you let me work it over a little bit before we back-set it into the continuity of last night?’ "Go ahead, lady," the wrong Prophet said. "You will know how to fix things up. Next question please."

g. A Series of "Busted" Set Pieces

The novel is designed to appear to be a series of seemingly disjointed set pieces. This is explained as the result of the scenarist Rondelay's sleepwriting, which produces "busted episodes" that are then incorporated into the world's scenario. These episodes give Iron Tongue its lurching, dream-like quality, as if it were assembled from the fragmented pieces of a shattered plot:

"What dangerous things are you writing in your sleep, Rondelay?" Sean McDonalds asked her. "It has to do with the world named Woomago, possibly, and I think so. It isn’t one of those recurring dreams, for I no longer dream, and I have no memory of my sleep writing. And I notice that Woomago is entering the common vocabularies sometimes derived and sometimes from us from the world, so I guess that some of my impressions and night-writings are slopping over into the popular consciousness. These Woomago incidents are unreal excursions and they happen to someone else, but I chronicle them. It is a series of recurring busted episodes is what it is, and I have to discard them. But who can really discard anything from the world scenario? Oh, busted, busted, though—"

h. The Prophet Jonah and the Mercy of God

Wandering through all this madness is the Prophet Jonah, who is the actual biblical figure himself. While the world is drowning in convoluted philosophies and subjective truths, Jonah carries a sign with a single, two-word message: "Repent! Repent!" He is the voice of metanoia (a change of mind, conversion, repentance; St. Mark, the first of the gospels, begins with metanoia, and it is, of course, central to the ministry of St. Paul), cutting through the paranoia of a psychotic world. His mission, a direct retelling of God's call to Nineveh, is the novel's moral and spiritual bedrock, offering the path out of the chaos: a return to the incarnational reality that Savant Ben describes.

To describe how this incarnational reality relates to storytelling, Lafferty devises one of his most remarkable pieces of iconographic insetting—the Schausergeschtenbaum, or “show-stories tree” (Schau = “look/show,” Geschichten = “stories,” Baum = “tree”). The many seemingly wild branches of Iron Tongue are themselves extensions of this tree, with the novel’s entire structure descending ever further into the incarnational and upward into skylarking.

“Let me tell you about the tree whose seed appears the last thing of all,” Rondelay said. “This tree is named the Schausergeschtenbaum. It is a conifer that grows even only in Transylvania. This tree begins to grow from its great fork which will be about ten meters above the ground. It grows up from there and it grows up from there, and finally it will reach a great height up in the air, and finally it will reach all the way down to the ground and will enter even into the ground. Finally, when it is ninety-more years old, it will have reached its greatest height above the Earth and its greatest depth within the Earth. Then it will produce its original seed, on the deepest tendril of the deepest root. And that is the end of the tree. It dies immediately, at its age of one hundred and eighty years. This is the problem tree; and its solution, which is the seed, comes last. And that’s a common enough configuration among the murder mysteries. One cannot have answers until the question has grown to its extent.”

It seems clear to me that the Schausergeschtenbaum is a hermeneutic for the logic of Iron Tongue of Midnight, in which the problem tree grows to its full extent before the solution seed appears at the end. The Egyptian Plague Murders provide the primary example: the crime occurs at the story's outset, but the origin and identity of the killer are only revealed at the very end in the contradictory confessions, after the consequences of the act have fully developed. This pattern is again reflected in the overarching planetary psychosis, a condition that is already present and expands simultaneously upward into the spiritual mania of the Hot Tongues and downward into the primitive chaos of the Green Gangers; its resolution arrives at the novel's climax once the madness has reached its height. Similarly, individual character arcs (such as the mystery of Kolimar's origin or the divided identity of Scotsdale Boland) are introduced as fictional problems whose seeds of explanation appear only at the end. Finally, the cosmic narrative follows the same structure, as the sun’s delayed transition from one celestial house to another lingers as an unresolved problem until the story’s final moments, demonstrating that in every case the answer does not and cannot appear until the question has reached its complete and final form.

As an image, I find it as compelling as the ghost story for what it reveals about Lafferty’s method: he begins writing seriously in 1958, not knowing what the stories are building towards, and over the years, he sees that each of his works is part of the Schausergeschtenbaum. It is one of Lafferty’s richest incarnational symbols because the growth becomes a metaphor for the fusion of the transcendent and the terrestrial, a counterpoint to the dimension of loss and fragmentation in the schizo-gash and ghost story. This is a tree that does not spring from the earth but begins suspended between heaven and earth, growing at once upward toward the sky and downward into the ground. It both ascends and takes root, participating in both the spiritual and the physical. It is perhaps his most powerful conceit for how his fiction relates to Prime.

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