"Narrow Valley" (1966/1966)

“I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible.”

Advanced Lafferty today.

"Narrow Valley" has about three-quarters of a century in its plot. In 1893, after being assigned a 160-acre plot of land subject to taxation, there was a Pawnee Indian named Clarence Big-Saddle. Big-Saddle performs a makeshift spell using substituted ingredients and an incorrect magic word. Yet the ritual alters the property. It compresses the half-mile-wide valley into what appears to outsiders as a five-foot-wide ditch, guided by a spoken condition:

So he burned leaves and bark and made a speech:"That my valley be always wide and flourish and green and such stuff as that!" he orated in Pawnee chant style. "But that it be narrow if an intruder come."

This is deceptive, for it is really a lush, full-sized homestead on the inside. Because intruders and tax collectors are unable to comprehend or cross the anomaly, Clarence has some benefits. He gets to evade taxes for half a century before passing the hidden valley down to his son, Clarence Little-Saddle.

Years later, Lafferty gives us the time of the story's action. A man named Robert Rampart discovers the tract is legally listed as open, so he files a homestead claim, bringing his wife Nina and their five children to occupy the land. With some help, the family finds the ditch, and the children and Nina plunge into it. They shrink to match the valley's hidden internal scale. Robert summons local authorities and a team of scientists who confirm the property's true size but attribute the anomaly to various things, including a psychic nexus. When Nina forces Robert into their camper and aggressively drives down into the property, her actions shatter the illusion, which returns the valley to its normal, fully visible half-mile width.

This is, of course, a disaster for Little-Saddle. Distraught, he confides in one of the visiting scientists, our old friend Willy McGilly. The two decide to recast the spell. They throw random leaves and bark onto a fire and shout another incorrect word. It somehow triggers the magic and rapidly narrows the valley once more. Panic ensues within the property, and the Ramparts drive their camper out just as the land compresses. It causes the vehicle and the family to come out physically flattened into two-dimensional shapes. The paper-thin family drives away, slowly widening back to their normal physical proportions. Clarence and Willy observe it all.

"Narrow Valley" is highly regarded, and it should be. It is one of Lafferty's best. It is funny, strange, theologically powerful, and politically pointed. Anyone who wants to understand it now will need to work through Daniel Otto Jack Petersen's 2020 University of Glasgow dissertation, Ecomonstrous Poetics and Weird Bioregionalism in the Fiction of R.A. Lafferty and its arguments, so that is what I am going to do today, mainly to clarify my own ideas about it. Petersen reads "Narrow Valley" through a concept he originated, which he calls ecomonstrous poetics. If you look under its hood, you will find it is a concept cluster assembled from Monster Studies, New Materialism (NM), and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). My understanding of his argument about "Narrow Valley" can be put fairly plainly: he argues that the valley itself is the story's active subject. It is a nonhuman agent that withdraws from human perception and entangles those who encounter it in its weird dimensionality. The first half of that is OOO; the second half, NM. The reading is serious and smart. I think it is also wrong, and the nature of its wrongness tells us something important about the limits of the Nonhuman Turn as a critical methodology when applied to fiction whose metaphysics are not, in fact, nonhuman. This won't surprise anyone who reads this blog because I do think the metaphysics that most illuminates Lafferty is Catholic metaphysics, often adventurous Catholic metaphysics, but, in brief, the metaphysics he was consciously building into his fiction. That I am not going to argue for here. The entire blog is an argument because most of the blog explores this.

To see what Petersen is doing, one does need to know a little about contemporary debates in theory. He stakes out an area of conflict within contemporary ecophilosophy. I'll lay this out in the way Petersen's arguments do.

New Materialism, as represented by Serenella Iovino, Serpil Oppermann, and Donna Haraway, wants to put an emphasis on the agentive vitality of matter. This is to make a philosophical case that the world is not a passive backdrop to human action but a storied field of more-than-human relations. Petersen makes the case that Haraway's Chthulucene is its most evocative formulation. This can be called an epoch defined by sympoietic entanglement, making-with, the tentacular co-constitution of human and nonhuman. Object-Oriented Ontology, on the other hand, particularly in Graham Harman's formulation, states that objects are never fully present to any relation; they are always withholding a dark interior that exceeds any encounter. Timothy Morton's "strange strangers," entities simultaneously intimate and uncanny, are OOO's most suggestive figure for the nonhuman

Petersen notes that these two positions are generally understood as opposed, and we can use the shorthand for the opposition as entanglement versus withdrawal, or flat relational ontology versus object autonomy. Petersen's primary theoretical claim is that Lafferty's fiction somehow squares the circle here. It holds them together. More specifically, "Narrow Valley" demonstrates how Lafferty does this with greater clarity than perhaps other Lafferty works. Why? Well, because the valley entangles (it draws humans into its weird dimensionality, diminishes them, transforms them, "eats them alive"), and because it is genuinely withdrawn: its real half-mile interior is invisible to human eyes, accessible only to aerial cameras and surveying instruments. This, Petersen argues, is an instance of the ecomonstrous. The narrow valley in the story's title is an instance of a nonhuman being that is monstrously present and monstrously opaque:

"Narrow Valley" is thus ecomonstrous both in its inscription of the exorbitant weirdness of a nonhuman (the valley) and its violently metaphored entanglement of others (human and nonhuman) into this singular weirdness.

From my understanding of his reading, and he may well object to it, I think it makes the valley the story's protagonist, not just its novum.

From this, there follow further arguments. The first is political, turning on the valley's action against Robert Rampart. Rampart is flattened to one dimension. He fails to hold the land. Petersen reads this as the story's critique of settler-colonial modes. Robert uses legal title, governmental authority, scientific explanation, and journalistic attention, the full apparatus of colonial possession, and it doesn't work for him. He gets paralyzed on the rim. The valley shows him to be cardboard because he was already, in some ontological sense, flat. Robert Rampart lacks the inner depth and outer enmeshment that deep ontological dwelling requires. Petersen reads this lack of dimensionality as an indictment of colonial entitlement:

Settler culture lacks the dimensions (monstrous inner depth and monstrous outer enmeshment) that McCarthy’s Delawares displayed above in the face of ursine and topographical devourment. Without such full dimensionality, it is impossible to sustainably dwell in the land’s shining yet withdrawing fullness.

This makes sense, and Lafferty drives this thematic conclusion home in the story's final comedic dialogue:

"Did we overdo it, Clarence?" Willy McGilly asked. "What did one flat-lander say to the other?" "Dimension of us never got around," Clarence said. "No, I don't think we overdid it, Willy. That car must be eighteen inches wide already, and they all ought to be normal by the time they reach the main road."

The second argument concerns the phenomenology of appropriate response to the ecomonstrous. This is an ethical argument. Petersen uses the idea of adduction — a leap of co-participation in the monster's logic — to argue for a form of normativity that is neither simple cognitive recognition nor passive submission. It is more like an embodied willingness to enter the situation on its own terms. Nina Rampart is the story's model for how to do this. She does not explain or wait on the rim like her husband; instead, she yields to the environment:

Robert Rampart was roaring his alarm, and his wife Nina was screaming. Then she stopped. "What am I carrying on so loud about?" she asked herself. "It looks like fun. I'll do it too."She plunged into the gully, diminished in size as the children had done, and ran at a pace to carry her a hundred yards away across a gully only five feet wide.

Petersen contrasts her reaction with her husband's to illustrate the theoretical ideal of adduction:

Hence, a leap of adduction is her response to the valley’s monstration... Robert Rampart, on the other hand, declines enmeshment and instead complains to the authorities that a "ditch had stolen his wife and five children" and "maybe had killed them" (190). He sees only one aspect of the valley’s monstrosity, but note how even in this he is forced to ascribe agency to the inhuman.

The Rampart children are also little, if flawed, adducters. They run in before anyone can stop them. Robert does not adduct. He explains, talks, demands, waits on the rim.

By attributing agency to the environment, however, Petersen minimizes the human origin of the anomaly. He sets up the story's conflict by focusing on the terrain:

When the settler family, the Ramparts, come to the land allotment they have filed on . . . it appears to be a mere ditch or gulley . . . Knowing the trickster nature of the land, the neighbour suggests the Rampart kids throw rocks across the apparent ditch, which they happily do.

One problem with thinking of the narrow valley as a metaphysical protagonist and attributing a "trickster nature" to the land is the spell. I'm going to focus on that.

The valley is narrow because Clarence Big-Saddle made it narrow, which is to say that the narrow valley is not a person, and Lafferty's metaphysics, on my view, is largely a metaphysics of personhood. Clarence, acting as a person, burned leaves and bark. He spoke in Pawnee chant style. He used the wrong ingredients, saying a word he wasn't certain about, and lightning answered. His son Clarence Little-Saddle inherited the narrowness along with the land, maintained it for decades without apparent effort, and, with Willy McGilly's assistance, restored it when the Ramparts briefly broke through. For that reason, I do not think the valley is an independent agent expressing its own weird ontology. It is an instrument of persons in the story, responding to address, being instrumentalized within a relationship that was built, inherited, and kept up.

Is this a peripheral feature of the story? I think it is the story's basic causal structure. And Petersen's ecomonstrous framework, by making the valley the active subject, creates a dilemma: either ignore or substantially reinterpret the most important thing that happens in the narrative.

Consider what the spell is in "Narrow Valley." It is botched from the start: wrong bark, wrong leaves, wrong word, spoken with deliberate confidence that Clarence Big-Saddle doubts:

He didn't have any balsam bark to burn. He threw on a little cedar bark instead. He didn't have any elder leaves. He used a handful of jack-oak leaves. And he forgot the word. How you going to work it if you forget the word?"Petahauerat!" he howled out with the confidence he hoped would fool the fates."That's the same long of a word," he said in a low aside to himself. But he was doubtful. "What am I, a White Man, a burr-tailed jack, a new kind of nut to think it will work?" he asked.

The booster spell at the end of the story is also nonsense, yet both work. What the story shows here is that the personal nature of the world answers the person who acts seriously on insufficient grounds, who commits to the address in full acknowledgment of its inadequacy and acts anyway. It is not quite sacramental theology in any orthodox sense, because it plays with myth. But it does share the sacramental structure in which efficacy operates through form and intention. It imagines a universe that recognizes audacious good faith.

Before pressing the ideological implications of this, I probably need to address an obvious objection. Petersen could reply that his framework doesn't downplay Clarence; it expands the category of agent to include nonhumans, which is a more generous ontology, not a less generous one. The decentering of the human subject is politically progressive precisely because it makes room for a wider range of agency. The problem, from my perspective, is that the metaphysics Petersen argues for does not extend the notion of person but does what New Materialism and OOO usually do: it looks to the radically non-personal, the non-human, as something that deconstructs the person.

One can see why this is appealing when reading "Narrow Valley." The story's political logic requires expanding the category of agent laterally, to persons whose agency has been historically denied and legally abused, specifically, indigenous persons whose relationship to land was treated as ontologically invisible by the settler-colonial state. The Nonhuman Turn expands downward instead: to matter, to objects, to landscape. By combining these moves, we fill the available interpretive space with the valley's nonhuman vitality and leave Clarence at the margins of his own story. Somehow, we have made room for more agents but left less room for the specific agent the story is about.

The myth held that the American West was unoccupied, available, ontologically inert until settlers arrived to make it mean something. Petersen's model does something genuinely different: it doesn't make the land empty. But it makes it so agentively full of its own nonhuman vitality that the Pawnee person who has a claim to it becomes merely its occasion. The land was always already weird and withdrawn and entangling; Clarence just happened to be the person there. That contrasts with Catholic metaphysics, where the world was made for persons. Of course, this view will seem hopelessly naïve, humanistically centered, and Anthropocene to many readers. I just happen to think it was Lafferty's and that it makes the story most intelligible.

There are two features of the story that Petersen's reading relies on that are worth examining directly. First, Petersen treats the valley's spatial illusions as evidence for OOO withdrawal, where a nonhuman object fundamentally conceals its true dimensions:

In the wry ecomonstrous poetics of this weird scenario, a "resistant landscape" (Buell 1995: 61) hides in plain sight, withdrawing from human occupancy, perception, and comprehension.

From this, Petersen reads the aerial cameras as registering a real interior that withholds itself from ordinary human perception. But this is already a misreading of the story: the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan says the exact opposite about the cameras and the human eye:

"Of course it is meteorological! Everything including dreams is meteorological. It is the animals and cameras which are fooled, as lacking a true dimension; it is only humans who see the true duality."

This is not Harman's withdrawal, which would be inaccessible to cameras and humans alike (if I understand Harman correctly). Withdrawal is a universal ontological condition prior to any act of perception. More importantly, the scientists' competing explanations are really just comic performances of systematic incomprehension, confidence, and mutual exclusivity. Vonk explains the valley and relaxes. Arkabaranan explains the valley and relaxes. The joke is that the explanation is misguided. For that reason, treating the camera detail as ontological evidence misconstrues what I take to be the satire, one that parallels the story's satire of land offices, sheriffs, and National Guard colonels.

The second concerns the withdrawal argument directly. In OOO, withdrawal is universal and constitutive; every object withdraws from every relation, all the time, as a condition of its being an object at all. The valley's narrowness is none of these things. It is particular, contingent, reversible, and person-caused. It does not narrow for Clarence, because the spell was designed to narrow for intruders. Applying OOO withdrawal to a deliberately engineered magical concealment is a misfit between what Harman describes and what Lafferty depicts. The valley is not withholding itself from Robert Rampart. The valley doesn't withdraw itself. The two Clarences withdraw it.

The entanglement argument fares better but fails at another point, I think. Genuine NM entanglement changes you: sympoiesis produces new kinds of being through relation, and the change is not simply reversible, if I understand it. But as Clarence explicitly notes in the final scene, he expects the Ramparts to "be normal by the time they reach the main road." The valley has temporarily deformed them and will release them back into exactly what they were, and the comedy of this is not a peripheral detail. What happens to the Ramparts is more like eviction than sympoiesis.

Again, the valley is narrow because Clarence Big-Saddle chose to make it so. He did that in response to a human injustice brought about by other persons, the 1893 allotment act, which reduced Pawnee landholdings to 160 acres per person and imposed tax obligations they had never agreed to. The Big-Saddle spell is a tactic: make the land appear valueless to outsiders while remaining habitable for those who belong there. The spell is passed down as part of the inheritance, held through Clarence Little-Saddle's continued habitation, and is restored when threatened. This is a story about human custodianship, the living, inherited, personal relationship to a particular place that constitutes genuine dwelling rather than legal possession.

This makes the contrast with Robert Rampart political rather than ontological. Robert gets the satirical treatment not because he lacks the right attitude toward nonhuman agents, but because he comes as a bureaucracy-parsing, rules-exploiting claimant rather than an inhabitant, and he tries to steamroll an inhabitant. He has a piece of paper and has never been to the land. He deploys all the instruments of the colonial apparatus (law, government, science, media) to stake a claim that has no relational basis. If the valley rejects him, it is because Clarence made it reject intruders, and Robert is an intruder. The fundamental relationship in the story is between persons.

Willy McGilly is an interesting test case. He has no Pawnee ancestry, no family history with the valley. Yet he participates in the booster shot, and it works. Why? Not because Willy has achieved some form of sympoietic entanglement with the valley as a nonhuman agent. It is because Clarence invites him, and he follows Clarence's lead without demanding to understand the mechanism first. This, again, is a relation between persons. And it is significant precisely because "Narrow Valley" gives the reader a universe of responsive persons and addressable places, one in which the right word, imperfectly spoken in the right form toward the right interlocutor, is answered by lightning. This is closer to the universe of Lafferty's Catholicism, in which sacramental efficacy operates through form and intention toward a personal God who genuinely answers. Catholics believe the cosmos is persons all the way down, and so, I think, did Lafferty.

To put it in a nutshell, I think the story’s causal chain is driven not by OOO withdrawal or NM entanglement, which would be grounded in the object’s own ontological nature, but by Pawnee magic. The magic produces something that exists, not in cognitively ungraspable dimensions rooted in its metaphysical nature, but at two scales, or two “dimensions.” It is as if there were an injective function. We have a “wide valley” expression of an ontological object and a “narrow valley” expression of that selfsame object. The two expressions stand in a fixed relation to each other, being somehow the same valley at different scales. That fits with neither OOO nor NM, because it is too knowably present for the former and too discretely determinate and identarian for the latter.

Petersen’s is the most theoretically ambitious reading of Lafferty in the critical literature, and his instinct that “Narrow Valley” does something that standard readings cannot account for is right. We differ over what that something is. I read Lafferty as writing from within a tradition that holds Divine Personhood to be the hinge of creation, with other persons as its images. For me, “Narrow Valley” is a story about what persons can do to land and to one another, and about what I have called audacious good faith. The valley would not seem to have agency if it were presented the way T. S. Eliot presents the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes and licks its tongue into the corners of the evening. I do not think the valley has agency, nor do I see evidence of such agency in the story. The Nonhuman Turn, by leveling the ontological hierarchy between persons and objects, strips away the ontological verticality that the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the entire Catholic drama of salvation require for even minimal coherence. So, in the end, I think it is the wrong tool for understanding a writer who believed that the universe was made for persons.

Narrow Valley Notes.pdf

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