The Whole Lafferty

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 postfictional 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. "The Day After the World Ended" (1979)

Lafferty hand-drew a map showing how his novels fit together, including the short stories that directly connect to the Argo legend. At the top of the drawing is Argo, from which three branches extend: In a Green Tree, the Coscuin Chronicles, and the Oceanic Novels. The drawing is very sketchy.

I thought it would be fun to sketch out how I see his body of work fitting together, at least for now: a high-level map of the geography of the Ghost Story. Something structural, not developmental.

In one specific and unambiguous sense, Lafferty stated plainly that he does not write novels. He writes prose fiction after the last novels, and there is no analytic category for the kind of long-form work he produced—prose that resembles the novel in shape, but not in kind. This is because the background conditions of belief formation had shifted.

At the center of my map is what I will call PRIME, using Lafferty’s term from Not to Mention Camels, where people who die go to heaven or hell, the real world he consistently draws attention to in his essays and other writings, including “Tell It Funny, Og,” “More Worlds Than One?,” “The Day After the World Ended,” and “Great Awkward Gold.”

Most of my blog posts are raids on what Lafferty does in relation to PRIME, because it is the ground his writing continually comments on. Everything in Lafferty bears on this, our reality, which is why all his fiction stands self-consciously and performatively at a deliberate remove from it. He believed that most people in the West once had a structured relation to PRIME, which made the old form of the novel possible. This congruence was lost in the twentieth century. His argument seems to have been this: new worlds would have to be built from the contingent rubble of collapsed cultural forms (bricospolia), but always in accordance with the metaphysical laws that govern the only possible World. In this sense, there are many worlds—socially contingent constructions—but only one World. So when Lafferty gets something wrong, such as the Jewish Holocaust, it sends aftershocks through the fiction. When he gets something right, the ripples are profound.

This can be put simply as, humans make worlds; God made the World. PRIME is the World, the extradiegetic common denominator of his fiction, and no demiurge could create PRIME. Only the God of ethical monotheism could have done that.

This is why his “True Believers” statement is one of the most precise distillations of his stance, not just toward genre, but toward prose fiction itself. It points at the fault line between entertainment and metaphysical commitment, between storytelling as diversion and storytelling as moral-responsiveness to PRIME. He demanded that fiction answer to the real. It's what made the Cranky Old Man from Tulsa cranky.

As to Science Fiction, I am not a ‘True Believer.’ As to Fantasy, I am no more than ten percent true believer. I respect only ‘True Believers’ on the real things — in the eschatologies, in the ultimates, in the basics. I do not respect the ‘True Believers’ in toys. And the ‘True Believers’ in toys hate me completely, when they really know what I am.

And he is brutal about other writers not being sufficiently concerned with it. As he puts it in “Tell It Funny, Og,”

"And somebody wants to know who are the really good writers, and how many of them there are. There aren't any. Most of the writers are likeable frauds. Some are unlikable frauds. There are stumblers, there are strident screamers, there are righteous drones. A lot of them write passable stuff a lot of the time. But the number of really good writers is always an irrational number less than one."

After the always-present background of PRIME comes the historically mimetic layer; some of his works lean more heavily into this mode than others. Esteban, Okla Hannali, and The Fall of Rome fictionalize history. At the same time, quasi-historical works set in the twentieth century (Dotty, Civil Blood, and In a Green Tree) offer mostly low-mimetic depictions of what, for Lafferty, was living history.

This low-mimetic layer also raises its own metaphysical questions. Flatland, for instance, is metaphysically significant. It forms a central episode in the Green Tree chronicle when Barnaby Sheen notes its appearance one day. Here, metaphysical events are understood through a historicizing matrix.

The Argo legend begins in a low-mimetic mode in Archipelago, though with fantastical twists (Private Gregory, the goat herder, etc.) that complicate it. Then Argo becomes phantasmagoric in The Devil is Dead and turns to metaphysical comedy in More Than Melchisedech. These shifts raise the question: what is the metaphysical meaning of contemporary history? For Lafferty, it turns out to be the metaphysical meaning of all history. For him, the final hermeneutic horizon is metaphysical, not historical. That distinction lies at the core of his project, and it makes Argo the core of his project.

The Coscuin Chronicles serve both as a prelude—in the literary mode of Romance and the high mimetic—to the Argo legend, and as an ideological fantasy that introduces major themes developed in In a Green Tree. It also shares much of the historical framework found in Lafferty’s historical novels, but, again, in the register of Romance, with frequent dips into the low mimetic of picaresque. For example, the history of the devils in Argo cannot be understood without the Coscuin series. At the same time, the motif of the Red Revolution is directly connected to the critique of Communism in low-mimetic works, such as Civil Blood and In a Green Tree, with the “green” in that title echoing not only the Gospel of Luke but the green of the Green Revolution. Complicating matters, the Coscuin Chronicles explore a form of storytelling that twentieth-century markets largely abandoned, closer in spirit to Stanley J. Weyman’s Under the Red Rose than to anything in modern fantasy.

I would repurpose Lafferty’s term Oceanic Novels to encompass all of his generically unstable genre novels, though Lafferty may have meant this himself in his original note. This is unclear to me. “Oceanic” would then refer less to water, as in the aquatic settings of Fair Hills of Ocean, Oh!  and Serpent’s Egg, than to the unconscious. It pinpoints the oceanic quality of Hopp Equation Space and Rimrock’s water world in Past Master; the “water from an ancient ocean, one with less salt than today’s seas” that Freddy encounters when facing Carmody Overlark in Fourth Mansions; and the “ocean of forms” in Not to Mention Camels. These novels also employ crossover techniques: Space Chantey rewrites Homer, just as Civil Blood reworks Romeo and Juliet, with a small measure of Dante thrown in.

A handful of pre-nucleation—or induction period—novels (Mantis, Loup Garou, and arguably others) were written before the Ghost Story began to precipitate into the form readers can now recognize in hindsight. While these works don’t contribute directly to its architecture, they anticipate its underlying themes in ways that become visible once the broader topography comes into view.

The short stories, widely regarded as the true center of Lafferty’s lifework, form both a moving center and the ambient. Ambient is a word Lafferty often used, and we can use it diagnostically as well. These stories are excursions that illuminate the deeper structures linking the novels and stories when taken together. Yet they remain freestanding, brilliant works for readers who prefer not to venture into the longer prose experiments.

The Short Stories: the ambient production, addressing whatever concerns captivated Lafferty.

The Historicals: Esteban, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome.

The Argo Legend: Archipelago, The Devil is Dead, More Than Melchisedech, and related stories.

The Coscuin Chronicles: The Flame is Green, Half a Sky, Sardinian Summer, First and Last Island.

In a Green Tree and Paratexts: including The Men Who Knew Everything stories.

The Oceanic Novels: Space Chantey, Arrive at Easterwine, The Reefs of Earth, Past Master, Serpent’s Egg, and others.

The Historicals are case studies that demonstrate how the laws of PRIME are applied across cultures and epochs.

The Argo Legend is the epic conflict, the direct, fantastic depiction of the war for the soul of PRIME. Coscuin is this in the mode of Romance.

The Oceanic Novels are the internal journeys, the psychological and spiritual deep-dives by way of compensatory fabulation, compositions that comment on PRIME.

The Short Stories are the ambient phenomena, the brilliant flashes of lightning that illuminate the landscape of PRIME from different angles.