Lafferty and Magic Realism

You will hear it said that Lafferty is a bit like magic realism but isn’t quite magic realism. For a while, I’ve thought this has to do with how he handles what Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism called the low mimetic mode. The low mimetic mode is the level of literature where the hero is one of us. He isn’t raised above humanity by rank or by power (this is the defining characteristic high mimetic). Nor is he reduced below it, as in the ironic mode.

The low mimetic is the modal home of comedy and the ordinary novel, where characters live within the limits of common experience and probability. Lafferty thought this has come to an end. He doesn’t usually give us literary criticism, but he did on this point, and it’s instructive:

Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the Americas and other colonies),and for only about three hundred years, from Don Quixote in 1605 to the various ‘last novels’ of the twentieth century. The last British novel may have been Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale in 1908 or Maugham's Of Human Bondage in 1915.Both of them have strong post-fictional elements mixed in. The last Russian novel was probably Gorki's The Bystander in the 1920's, and the last Irish novel may have been O'Flaherty's The Informer about the same time. In Germany, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, was plainly a post-novel in a post-fictional form. But the structured world did not end everywhere at quite the same time. In the United States there was a brilliant ‘last hurrah’ of novels for several decades after the fictional form had disappeared in Europe, and Cozzen's By Love Possessed, published in 1957, might still be considered as a valid fictional work.

What Lafferty means by structured points to how the low mimetic is also the locus of realism, but not identical with realism: realism is a historical style and technique devoted to surface fidelity and psychological detail (a historical and cultural aesthetic effect), while the low mimetic is a structural category based on the hero’s relation to us. While most realist novels are low mimetic, other stylistic forms can also inhabit it, and realism itself may appear across other modes.

This has an interesting relevance to Lafferty’s fiction. As the modal spectrum descends, the low mimetic shades into the ironic, where the hero becomes less capable than we are, the “anti-hero” or victim of circumstance. But irony, by relentlessly reducing its characters, tends to circle back to reveal underlying mythic patterns, so that myth re-emerges through displacement in even the bleakest realism. Here, the low mimetic both grounds the tradition of realistic fiction and provides the threshold by which literature sinks into irony and, paradoxically, reopens onto myth.

This was how Frye explained something like James Joyce. In the Anatomy, he writes,

“Irony descends from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and dispassionate observation.But as it does so, it moves steadily towards myth, anddim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappearin it. Our five modes evidently go around in a circle. This reappearance of myth in the ironic is particularly clear in Kafka and in Joyce.”

This connection to irony explains something about Lafferty and Joyce. Lafferty once said, in a letter, that Joyce was a disgrace to the Irish. Why he thought that is larger than what I’m going to say here, but there are two major reasons. First, Joyce rejected the communion of the Catholic Church. Second, he was willing to hold the low mimetic and the mythic together in ironic suspension. This was anathema to Lafferty’s anagogical vision, which sought to move past wintery irony and toward the springlike humor of the Laughing Christ.

So what does this have to do with magical realism, and how can it explain why Lafferty isn’t a magical realist?

Magical realism operates within the low mimetic mode because its characters are ordinary people bound by the limits of common experience, living in recognizably social and historical settings. Into this realistic framework, mythic and marvelous events (levitating priests, ghosts, prophecies, miracles) show up, not as violations of reality but as extensions of it. In Frye’s terms, the low mimetic displaces myth: the structures of gods and archetypes reappear in everyday life, clothed in the probability of realism. At the same time, magical realism tends to put its characters in ironic situations of powerlessness against history, politics, or fate, so that the mythic gets coded through the ironic, restoring a sense of archetypal wonder within a realist world. Thus magical realism demonstrates how the low mimetic can serve as a ground for the return of myth, its realism opening onto the marvelous.

This is not Lafferty. To see why not, consider his well-known “Land of the Great Horses” (1967), which isn’t realism or magical realism, but it still works partly in the low mimetic mode. It isn’t realism because the premise is openly fantastic, not an attempt to stay within natural probability. It isn’t magical realism either, because the fantastic here is not folded into ordinary life as if it were as natural as brushing one's teeth.

If you haven’t read it, “Land of the Great Horses” is about an incredible event in which a long-lost piece of land, once thought to be only a mirage in the Thar Desert of India, reappears. Two mineral surveyors stumble upon the lush highland. Seruno Smith realizes he is not who he thought he was, but a Romani (Gypsy) whose people’s ancestral homeland had been taken away a thousand years earlier by alien visitors. As the land returns, Gypsies from all over the world feel the pull to go home, abandoning their lives and converging from every continent. It turns out the aliens had removed a sliver of Earth for study, leaving behind a mirage and a homing instinct in the displaced people. Now restored, the Romani return, while elsewhere, another sliver of Earth (Los Angeles) is taken away in the same manner, setting up a few classic Lafferty-style jokes. There’s also a brilliant Easter egg tucked deep into the story: the first Romani name ever recorded in the historical record.

So, "Land of the Great Horses" aggressively throws down a cosmic rupture that everyone recognizes as extraordinary. But the story still has low mimetic features: its first two characters and their job, Gypsy families, mechanics, barmaids, and carny workers. These are all low-mimetic “ones of us,” characters that are not superhuman, who are caught up in events beyond their making. The plot turns not on epic heroism but on ordinary people responding to extraordinary change, and the Romani coming home motif transpires within recognizably human social and psychological terms. In Frye’s sense, this is why the story can borrow the low mimetic perspective (characters as common humanity) without being reducible to either realism or magical realism.

I’ll add that Lafferty has one major low mimetic technique he uses constantly—and that might go unnoticed as such: he writes the presence of the Lafferty storyteller into the fiction itself. This is what people mean when they say his work is “oral.” More specifically, his third-person narration is full of what linguists call pragmatic markers. These markers create the impression that, no matter how wild the story gets, the teller remains on your level—still low mimetic, still just like you. This is what’s going on when Lafferty’s otherwise third-person stance says something like, “And of course Jacob’s pants were back on,” or, “No, no, there was nothing at all not able going on aboard the Argo that morning, except a lot of loud hornpipe music and some carousing and laughter; and Eva and some other girls discovered on the Argo were having lots of fun with fellows of uncertain origin.”

Marker	Function	"Land of the Great Horses"
And	Additive linkage; oral "and-then" pacing	And it had begun to rain, softly but steadily.
But	Contrastive turn; corrective emphasis	But nobody understood them.
Then	Temporal progression; next beat	Then he jerked back as though startled at himself.
Now	Scene shift; stage-setting	Now it was lightning about the heights of the mirage…
And then	Stacked sequencing; oral cadence	And then it was quickly forgotten.
soon	Quick step-on in narrative	And, soon, by something else.
Nowhere . . . but everywhere	Emphatic contrastive frame	Nowhere would the Thar pay off, but everywhere it would almost pay.
really	Soft evaluation; stance-taking	It was simple really, jekvasteskero, Gypsy-simple.
often	Generalizing stance	Often they stopped to survey on foot.
always	Categorical stance	Rain in the desert is always like a bonus.
seldom	Frequency stance	They seldom remain long in one location.
never	Categorical stance/gnomic	It never thundered in the whole country between New Delhi and Bahawalpur.
would	Epistemic/irrealis; hypothetical framing	This would be a homing instinct . . .
It has been said	Reportative evidential	It has been said that a majority of the Angelenos are narcotics users…
It is predicted	Predictive evidential	It is predicted that they will be the last users of this vehicle .. .
Its purpose is not clear	Uncertainty stance	Its purpose is not clear.
we ourselves	Inclusive involvement marker	…as we ourselves sometimes set name or picture tags…
as though	Appearance hedge; interpretive frame	It looked as though the top had been stripped off it . . .
as if	Interpretive gloss	. . . .as if to say, “All ashore that's going ashore.”
You think . . . ?	Direct address; rhetorical question	You think people are crazy to fall for something like that . . . ?
What would . . . ?	Rhetorical question for effect	What would this rainless north India desert have to thunder with?