The Whole Lafferty

There is a handwritten drawing by Lafferty that maps how his novels fit together, along with the short pieces that connect directly 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 mark 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.

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.” (I've added a definition for this under the "Concepts" section of this blog.) Most of my blog posts are raids on what Lafferty does relative to PRIME because it is the ground his writing comments on. Everything in it shows his sense of this reality, so all his fiction stands at a remove from it. When he gets something wrong like the Jewish Holocaust, it creates major aftershocks that show up in the fiction. When he gets something right, the ripples are profound. PRIME is its common denominator. He often complains that other writers are not 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."

Next 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. 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 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 Robe 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, while Civil Blood reworks Romeo and Juliet, with a 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.

Note:

The Historicals are the case studies, showing how the laws of PRIME play out 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 into the minds of characters, 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. Nothing is random.