"Name of the Snake" (1962/1964)

Now, the art of rhetoric being available for the enforcing either of truth or falsehood, who will dare to say that truth in the person of its defenders is to take its stand unarmed against falsehood? — Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (De doctrina christiana), Book IV, Chapter 2, §3 

There are the ultimate in evil who keep the venom and change the Name of the Snake.

Pope Francis had a knack for getting headlines. He once remarked that he would baptize an extraterrestrial who asked. Francis added, "Who are we to close doors?" Lafferty imagined a variant of the scenario in his short story “Name of the Snake.” In the future, a papal encyclical goes forth from a weak pope, Pius XV, expanding the Church’s mission. The gospel will now be preached to every sentient being in the universe. A Catholic priest, Padreco Barnaby, takes up the evangelium and travels to the planet of Analos to convert its inhabitants.

The Analoi are strange: they have humanlike skeletons, Gothic upswept ears, stunted tails, urbane manners, and chameleon complexions. They are also prototypes of Medieval gargoyles:

The oddly formed ears—not really as large as they seemed—somewhat Gothic in their steepled upsweep, their slight caudal appendage, their remarkable facial mobility and chameleon-like complexions, these could not have been read from their bone remains . . . “They are gargoyles,” said an early visitor from Earth. Of course they were.

Cathedral of Bayeux in Normandy, France

On Analos, Barnaby meets a local leader known as Landmaster, but when Barnaby preaches baptism and the forgiveness of sins, he is rebuffed. It turns out the Analoi are casuists. They say they have evolved beyond sin. Sin belongs to phases like humanity's guilt-ridden childhood. Landmaster even says that the Analoi society has eliminated the seven capital sins through biological regulation and social engineering.

A few Analoi encounters later, Father Barnaby (not the smartest priest in Lafferty; he is no Father Briton) works it out. The Analoi have institutionalized infanticide and state-mandated suicide, which are, of course, grave matters in the eyes of Father Barnaby. The Analoi call these acts "Judicious Selection" and "Gentle Termination," having bureaucratized sin and baptized it euphemism. Barnaby sees that far from eliminating sin, the Analoi have kept their predatory nature intact under conditions that one often finds in Lafferty: dystopia pretending to be utopia. Analogs is one of Lafferty’s hellscapes.

Predictably, the Analoi grow impatient with Father Barnaby. They fall back on the old solution for missionaries. You see, when Barnaby arrived on the planet, he noticed something odd:

To the Padreco it seemed as though he had been talking under water and that he had not been heard. "What is the meaning of that giant kettle in the center of your main plaza, Landmaster?” he finally asked. "It seems quite old." "It is a relic of our old race, and we keep it. We have acertain reverence for the past—even the obsoleted past. Inminds as great as ours there is room even for relics."

The story ends with the Analoi stuffing Barnaby inside this kettle (shoes still on) and boiling him alive. He dies, the Analoi mocking his screams. They even trade kettle jokes, jape about the history of cartooning and missionary martyrdom, and amuse themselves. The story ends with a communal feast and black comedy. We are told that Father Barnaby "had good stuff in him.

First, "Name of the Snake" is another prenucleation story. But it shows something instructive about Lafferty’s development. Consider how Lafferty returns repeatedly to the trope of aliens as devils. One sees it much later in “Something Rich and Strange,” where a thin facing and some smart ambiguity barely hide the real plot.

In "Name of the Snake," a literal reading would need to stop with the Analoi being extraterrestrials. The Analoi visited Earth. They are the real source of both the gargoyle and the stories and cartoons about natives boiling missionaries. We see the alien Analoi faces on our cathedrals. Yet the story’s logic nudges the reader to the non-literal and spiritual because the Analoi are just so devilish-looking.

Not that a literal reading is wrong. On the literal plane, that is the story. The Analoi are cultural progenitors. They are aliens, not devils. But one only has to push a little bit to see that the literal reading is tropologically vacuous in a story so exercised by the nature and concealment of sin. To see this is the case, imagine a pie-eyed literal reading that says: “It’s just a Lafferty story about a priest who gets boiled alive by natives on an alien planet after trying to convert them.” No, it is light fare, but also more than that. To use the Analoi word, it is "unbalanced."

So here is something odd. This is an early Lafferty story that does not set up its allegorical trapdoor the way Lafferty usually does. There is a real disjunction between the literal and the allegorical levels. As contrapositives, they clash. Ordinarily, Lafferty works along a sliding scale of allegory that protects against this. Here, that scale is somewhat truncated. Yet the story is easier to see through than much of his later work dealing with similar material because, as an instance of prenucleation Lafferty, it does not support an anagogical reading.

The absence of an anagogical level is, I think, one reason Lafferty opts for the knowingly, winkingly, yuk-yuk ending, which he heavily foreshadows at the outset of the story with the foreboding presence of the big kettle. Where anagogy opens outward and into the future, this story is closed by design, like a Brett Hart or O. Henry loop pulling itself shut.

Lafferty locks down the ending with the priest being boiled alive for any number of reasons. For one, it is a perfectly serviceable ending: it’s clever not because its idea is clever but because Lafferty’s language is so razorish, and it fits the themes. He makes his didactic point and then shows he isn't preachy. We get a cannibalism joke about a dead priest. Catholic priest is for dinner. (To be fair, the priest, as a seminarian, appreciated this variety of humor.) One can read it as comeuppance, though that would be wrong.

He also does it because he has not yet developed the technique of writing anagogical stories. He has not broken through to nucleation, which is when he combines his style of analogical mysticism with the eschatological present. So he goes with the cartoon gimmick. Now, Lafferty never gives up using the cartoon gimmicks as a generative idea (think of how he later handles Austro's cartooning or the role of cartooning in The Three Armageddons), but they are used much more powerfully. With Austro, cartooning breathes the lowliness of good, salt-of-the-earth humor and wisdom, and with Enniscorthy, it electrifies power of low-cultural imagination; Enniscorthy writes operas, and he loves cartooning, his demiurgy exploding like a rhizome to contaminate his century. The strongest case for the developmental argument “Name of the Snake” is that Lafferty mostly stops writing in this pulled-tight, looping way once he has other tools to work with. In his language, he is going to either rain high hilarity eschaton-style or pull the hole in after him.

As I have said before on the blog, allegory is nothing if it is not a scale. Northrop Frye was the first modern critic to work on this in an organized way, and he influenced Angus Fletcher, who treated allegory as a mode rather than as a genre. Decades after Fletcher's work, Frye and Fletcher are still probably the most sophisticated general purpose treatments of allegory, with Frederic Jameson behind them, and he attributed his understanding of allegory to them.

Allegory wants to speak the ineffable or cognitively opaque. I certainly read allegory this way, because all but the most unimaginative, most stultifying forms of continuous allegory (there is a lot of it in my period, the eighteenth century) are always trying to say something that cannot be said otherwise. Truth is told slant. At one end is a belabored continuous, systematic form of allegory where there is a 1:1 correspondence; sometimes this is found in masterpieces such as The Pilgrim’s Progress. At the other end is a freer, more flexible form (what Frye calls freistimmige). Moby Dick is clearly some kind of extremely discontinuous adjacent allegory with moments of apocalyptic eschatology, but try to get a consensus on it.

In Lafferty’s "Name of the Snake," continuous allegory overlays the literal level in the theological exchange between Padreco Barnaby and Landmaster. Catholic doctrine is laid out propositionally. Literally, a man from earth speaks to an alien from Analos; allegorically, a priest function speaks to a devil function. When Lafferty writes that the Analoi have kept the venom of sin while changing the snake’s name, they have bureaucratized and euphemized evil. Literally, this is science-fiction costumery for an alien government that uses "corrective semantics"; allegorically, it places the story within the long tradition of devils imagined as rhetoricians and logicians, from earlier theological sources to secular devils such as Shakespeare’s Iago through religious ones such as, who is probably the best-known modern instance.

"There are the evil who are evil openly. There are the evil who hide their evil and deny that they are venomous. There are the ultimate in evil who keep the venom and change the Name of the Snake." "I'm happy that we're the ultimate," said Landmaster. "We would be affronted by a lesser classification."

At the culmination of the continuous allegory is the the hunk of literal ironwork, the giant kettle itself. Literally? The “missionary in a pot” trope, but allegorically a commentary on the savage nature that lies just beneath the surface of Pandemonium, right below the Analoi’s feigned enlightenment that disguises devilish ambition. Literally, the Analoi are racialized savages beneath the mechanical and civilizational polish of extraterrestrial Analoi. Allegorically, they are theological monsters. Lafferty plays with it in exactly those terms when the child Analoi explain the etymology of monster. Lafferty’s choice to depict the Analoi this way will be sticky for those bright sparks who see how it leverages ideological and ethnic othering, but some such idea must be at play if the continuous allegory is to cohere, and for “Name of the Snake” to not be just a story about a damn fool missionary who ends up in a pot.

1872

Moving to the less continuous side of allegory, the story is a freistimmige in which symbolic elements appear without following a 1:1 correspondence. This freer allegory shows itself in the shimmering underwater atmosphere, the leering plants, the taxi cab, the alien architecture, the strange flora that transmutes into being fauna, the scent shops, and other mysterious shops that crowd the city.

The earlier explorer had been mistaken: the plants of Analos did not resemble the undersea plants of Earth; they resembled the undersea animals. They leered like devilfish and grinned like sharks. It was here everywhere. But it had changed its name.

We can wrest some of these elements back into a continuous allegory if we choose. For example, the strange, underwater-like environment—except that the atmosphere is lighter than Earth’s and offers no resistance to movement—can be read as counterfiguration, allowing the story to resolve again into continuous allegory. When Lafferty says that being on Analos is like living beneath the shadows of waves, he places us not under land, the traditional image of Hell, but underwater instead. Earth and fire are counterfigured into water and wind. By dipping in and out of freistimmige allegory at the level of setting, Lafferty creates a heraldic effect.

The rest of this post will linger over intriguing aspects of the story that merit attention, though they are primarily genealogical. The name Analos derives from the Greek analos (“saltless”), an allusion to Matthew 5:13’s warning that salt that has lost its savor is fit only to be discarded. A second connection is more speculative, but I think it is both palimphanic and crucial to how the story weaves together gargoyles, devils, and cannibals. Lafferty appears to associate Analos with the annular cerchi of Dante’s Inferno, with the Analoi resembling the Malebranche of Cantos XXI–XXIII.

These devils wield forked polearms and billhooks and punish the condemned in the fifth bolgia of the eighth circle. Those sinners are submerged in boiling pitch. In "Name of the Snake," Lafferty gives us an Analoi who looks an awful lot like one of malebranche:

Shareshuffler had a great two-tined fork, and he stuck it into Padreco Barnaby to see if he was done yet. The Padreco was far from done, and the clamor he set up made it impossible to hear Shareshuffler's own favorite of the folk jokes. This is a loss, for it was one of the best of them all.

The compounding of the name Shareshuffler also has a whiff of Malebranche. Dante's Malebranche are Malacoda (“Evil Tail”), Scarmiglione (“Scratcher”), Alichino (“Trickster” or Harlequin-like schemer), Calcabrina (“Heel-crusher”), Cagnazzo (“Big ugly dog”), Barbariccia (“Savage beard”), Libicocco (“Hot-headed” or wild rooster), Draghignazzo (“Dragon-snout”), Farfarello (“Little goblin”), Graffiacane (“Dog-scratcher”), Rubicante (“Burning red one”), and Ciriatto (“Boar-tusked”).

And here is Dante on the boiling:

Canto XXI.37–39

On every side along the livid stone I saw horned devils with great scourges, who Smote cruelly the spirits from behind.

Canto XXI.42–43

Here is no place for swimming otherwise Than in the Serchio!” thus they shouted loud.

Canto XXI.55–57

Their hooks were ready, all of them outstretched, To seize the sinners and tear them limb from limb Beneath the pitch.

This is a phalimphanic association because Father Barnaby is not a damned soul, yet Lafferty has grafted his alien natives onto part of the Catholic imagination. That tradition goes back to the New Testament, but the most important non-biblical text is probably the Apocalypse of Paul, a work Dante seems to have known. It tells of St. Paul being guided through Heaven and Hell and being shown both the rewards of the righteous and the punishments of sinners.

By around 1100–1200, the Hell tradition had matured into something most people would recognize. The cauldron as a form of punishment begins to appear in church art around this period, often near the hellmouth. Devils move about the cauldron. One example that reminds me of Lafferty's Analoi is the so-called Doomstone at York. Note that these devils do not have horns, horns having become an ineludible part of the small devil tradition around the time the Doomstone was created. They have prominent ears like Lafferty's Analoi.

Lafferty pulls these traditions together into a single image that draws on Hell imagery and the missionary-in-a-pot trope. Again, palimphanic Lafferty. It is strange and deeply associative, but it can usually be reconstructed. We tend to think of the boiled-missionary image as modern, a product of the last few centuries, but it is older than that. The motif reaches back to hagiography, to the legend that the Apostle John survived being boiled alive. Lafferty compresses these dimensions (hagiography, medieval iconography, Dante, the one-panel cartoon tradition of natives boiling missionaries) into Father Barnaby's mission to the Analoi. Lafferty's trick is to write a hagiography that ends in a cannibalism joke, because Father Barnaby is a Christian martyr, though there are reasons for being skeptical of how he approaches proselytization.

Finally, the story’s didactic center is the Analoi claim to have transcended sin—a claim that is, in fact, a composite of heresies, as Lafferty knows. Their official doctrine holds that sin is “only a form of unbalance,” correctable through metabolic regulation and social engineering. It is arrantly Pelagian: sinlessness achieved by natural means, without grace. Landmaster—whose name most likely puns on 2 Corinthians 4:4—waves away each capital sin. Pride? It is misunderstanding. Covetousness? It magically goes away once all that was desirable had been acquired. Lust is irrelevant. It was part of an arrangement that no longer has a counterpart in the Analoi. This is the diabolical rhetoric that Lafferty always associates with puffing up utopia. We are a few years before Past Master, but Landmaster speaks like a Programmed Person when he reduces the fontes peccatorum to a mechanical malfunction. And there is something Programmed Person is how the Analoi see themselves as the summation of humanity ("You are of a species which as yet has no adult form. Vicariously we may be the adult form of yourselves."):

"Pride is only a misunderstanding of the nature of achievement; covetousness disappears when all that could be coveted has been acquired; lust is an adjunct of an arrangement that no longer has a counterpart in ourselves. Anger, gluttony, envy, sloth are only malfunctions. All malfunctions are subject to adjustment and correction, and we have corrected them."

As Barnaby makes his way through Analos, he senses the disorder of the place, of so many disordered, perhaps the way Dotty in Lafferty's novel Dotty senses people who are not in grace. He realizes that he did not notice it at first because it was like water to a fish. "It was here everywhere. But it had changed its name."

Barnaby’s second list of sins (presumption, establishment, ruthlessness, selfishness, satiety, monopoly, despair) maps the seven capital sins onto their Analoi shadows. Lafferty concentrates most of his attention in the story on pride and despair: pride as the father of sins, and despair as the great sin against the Holy Spirit. “Name of the Snake” is minor Lafferty, but it is fully on-program. He imagines a civilization that has achieved everything humanist ideology promises. It eliminates poverty and secures near universal sufficiency, and it arrives at a cultural arrangement in which every capital sin flourishes.

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