Noetic Darkening

"We've reached the place I told thee to expect, / Where thou shouldst see the miserable race, / Those who have lost the good of intellect." Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto III

Those of us who spend time with Lafferty's fiction know that conventional interpretive methods fall short. His work is intellectually intense, filled with surprising connections that make its literary magic resistant to ordinary analysis. Really discovering him comes with the recognition that here is an artist who wants to rewire our brains. The big challenge is to keep up.

This led me to the idea of "Thinking With Lafferty," a tag I took from a terrific work on Alfred North Whitehead, another thinker who charted unconventional intellectual territories. Whitehead isn’t one of my cynosures, but the book Thinking With Whitehead showed me just how powerful the approach can be. I hope that Lafferty readers eventually build a conceptual toolkit, a "bric-a-brac" for reading him.

When Lafferty stopped writing, he offered a sad, self-deprecating reason: he said he was writing drivel and it had stopped being fun. Given the health problems in the last years before his major stroke, perhaps he had a clearer insight into his waning powers than I see from the outside. What I can see is that works like Sindbad: The 13th Voyage or Serpent’s Egg, especially for readers not yet familiar with the complicated symbolic and narrative callbacks he created over decades, would be hardgoing for anyone not initiated into his symbol system. Without some familiarity with his earlier thought, such novels are dazzling but deeply challenging fever dreams. My own immersion in these two novels, followed by Not to Mention Camels, proved to be a fortunate, if arbitrary, introduction to his long-form fiction.

By the time I read Not to Mention Camels, I knew Lafferty was working at an exceptional level of artistic accomplishment. I have come to see Camels as Lafferty’s Inferno, the first movement in an unfinished Divine Comedy, with its predecessor, Arrive at Easterwine, serving as Purgatorio. The Paradiso, fittingly for an author wary of endings, remained unwritten, unless you were one of those lucky ducks who knew where to look in the Argo cycle.

Camels did teach me one thing about reading 1970s Lafferty: how much he wanted to make sense of the hellish media ecology that had erased the world he loved. We seem to be living through another act of that history today. I’ve found myself looking for a concept to explain how Lafferty portrays media as a driving force in many of his stories from the late 1960s onward. For now, I’m calling it noetic darkening. It is a technique he uses in many ways, but it shows up often when he writes about media.

It names the paradoxical state in which the nous, the intellect oriented toward truth, is obscured even as immediate experience takes on a sharp, crystalline clarity. It is the lucidity of the crystal. Its canonical moment comes from counterfiguration in Not to Mention Camels: the darkness hiding itself as light and vision:

Something had happened to Pilgrim, something a little bit more than his weakness. There had been a change in his eyes. It was as if they were really opened for the first time. Much brighter, but much more fractured; light poured in by them now. Waking with new eyes was almost the same thing as waking in a new world.