"Nor Limestone Islands" (1971)

“Nor Limestone Islands” is the hit single of the Fortean stories. It has a sticky title, and, out of that group of stories, it is centripetally Fortean because. Like “Fall of Pebble Stones,” it grows directly out of passages in Fort’s The Book of the Damned (1919), as if it were a demonstration of Fort. Lafferty quickly tired of using Fort in this way.

It is unfortunate that the story's critical discussion is so thin. The story appears in the underachievingly assembled The Best of R. A. Lafferty, where it receives appreciative notice from Michael Bishop, a stalwart champion of Lafferty’s reputation. Bishop makes the comparison that many readers seem unable to resist. Whenever the story is mentioned, someone inevitably says: Laputa! There is a floating island here in Lafferty, and there is a floating island in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Readers reach for Swift rather than for the broader Western tradition of floating islands and wonder stories—from Aeolia in Greek myth to Chemmis in stories about Egypt. This habit puzzles me. In “Nor Limestone Islands,” Lafferty is writing a wonder tale. Swift is not. If Lafferty had Swift in mind—and it is far from obvious that he did—he has flipped the script. I want to pause on this point for a moment, to do my small part in keeping the shadow of Laputa from falling too easily across “Nor Limestone Islands.”

Laputa, of course, is ruled by what we would nowadays call intellectuals. Through the Laputans, Swift lampooned the Royal Society, with its style scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, people he thought were absorbed in abstraction and detached from the ordinary, including faith. Hence, the notorious passage about the dog is a parody of a real experiment performed by Robert Hooke (1635-1703). From Hooke's report of opening the thorax of a dog and keeping it alive by using bellows to direct air into its lungs:

Swift's merciless satire:

. . . my conductor led me into a room where a great physician resided, who was famous for curing that disease, by contrary operations from the same instrument. He had a large pair of bellows, with a long slender muzzle of ivory. This he conveyed eight inches up the anus, and drawing in the wind, he affirmed he could make the guts as lank as a dried bladder. But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the muzzle while the bellows were full of wind, which he discharged into the body of the patient; then withdrew the instrument to replenish it, clapping his thumb strongly against the orifice of the fundament; and this being repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it, (like water put into a pump), and the patient recovered. I saw him try both experiments upon a dog, but could not discern any effect from the former. After the latter the animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a discharge as was very offensive to me and my companions. The dog died on the spot, and we left the doctor endeavouring to recover him, by the same operation.

These are Laputans. There is no wonder here. They are so consumed by mathematics, astronomy, and music that servants must physically flap them to draw their attention. Below the island lies unlucky Balnibarbi, where impractical scientific schemes ruin agriculture and daily life. Swift mocks a range of targets in Gulliver’s adventure here, most of them irrelevant to Lafferty’s story, which is to say that Laputa represents an interesting early moment in literature confronting the rationalizing and instrumental tendencies of modernity. Swift thinks that the so-called empirical, rational project is itself a kind of fantasy. By satirizing it as a wonder tale, he parodies the credulity that takes something like Prester John seriously—and he does so to deflate scientific pretension. It is one of the ways in which Swift is a complicated figure who demystifies while cutting the throats of those he dislikes, something that always made certain persons in the Anglican hierarchy squirm. By contrast, Lafferty’s flying island is apocalyptic in the original sense, an unveiling that restores wonder. Or at least it tries to.

"Nor Limestone Islands" is not one of my favorite Lafferty stories, but it is a great example of how Lafferty often deals with disenchantment because it is rudimentary in a way that other later Fortean stories (here, I'm thinking of stories such as "Bequest of Wings") are not. More about this after the summary.

We begin with a city commission hearing where a straight-out-of-Greek-mythology limestone salesman wants to win a contract. He is a “deep-chested” man covered in rock dust and wearing winged sandals.

He was bare-chested (and colossally deep-chested). He had only a little shoulder jacket above, and a folded drape below. On his feet he had the crepida or Hermes-sandals, made of buckskin apparently: a silly affectation. He was darkly burnt in skin and hair, but the roots of his hair and of his skin indicated that he was blond in both. He was golden-bearded, but the beard (and in fact the whole man) was covered with chalk-dust or rock-dust. The man was sweaty, and he smelled. His was a composite smell of limestone and edged bronze and goats and clover and honey and ozone and lentils and sour milk and dung and strong cheese.

from "Hermes," Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquity (1896)

What he offers is too good to be true: he will deliver and set 300 tons of high-quality marble-limestone within an hour for the price of 300 dollars or 300 bushels of cracked corn. His firm’s location is his firm, a place called Stutzamutza. He says the country is currently about three miles away. The mayor and the commissioners reject his bid. They view him as a disreputable saucerian and scoff at his claims of a mobile country. During the same hearing, a photographer named Miss Phosphor McCabe shows that she believes in what the salesman is offering. She butts in because she is present on her own business: to petition the city for a permit to build a 30-acre “Pink Pagoda” on a hill inherited from her grandfather.

McCabe visits the salesman’s country and takes many photos for a photographic article titled “With Camera and Canoe on Sky-High Stutzamutza.” Lafferty uses free indirect narration to lock in her perceptions, and we experience Stutzamutza through her photographic art, being referred to the various plates that would appear in the article, should it be published, which it won’t be. These include the floating limestone island’s intense whiteness, with its Final Falls, a waterfall that drops water up to 60,000 feet into the open air, turning into mist or hail:

But all lesser views are forgotten when one sees the waterfalls tumbling in the sunlight. And the most wonderful of all of them is Final Falls. Oh to watch it fall clear off Stutzamutza (see plate XXII), to see it fall into practically endless space, thirty thousand feet, sixty thousand feet, turning into mist, into sleet or snow or rain or hail depending on the sort of day it is, to see the miles-long rainbow of it extending to the vanishing point so far below your feet!

The Stutzamutzans are deep-breasted and lusty. While they trade quarried stone for soil and grain and use thirteen-foot-long trumpets and thunder-drums, it is paradise itself. At one point, McCabe sees fossilized Zeuglodons in the island's quarries. Despite her documentation, the editor of Heritage Geographical Magazine decides not to publish the article. Such a place is an impossibility.

Yet the islands are corroborated by other fragments that Lafferty stitches into the story. Hank Fairday, a retired weather observer, says that meteorologists use the code name “Whales in the Sky” to track these floating stone landmasses on radar. They’re an open secret. They occasionally settle in unfrequented regions. Cajuns have long traded with and even intermarried with the islanders. The story ends with the completion of Phosphor McCabe’s Pink Pagoda. She says it was built by detaching 300,000-ton blocks of pink limestone from a floating island positioned directly above the hill. The city officials either can’t see or ignore the massive structure, and a skeptical “enemy” places an “egg-of-doubt stone” inscribed with a poem mocking such anomalies atop the pagoda. McCabe plans to remove it once her traveling friends return.

Lafferty spun the story from a page in Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned.

What he liked about it is clear. This is circular reasoning. The Fortean world of possibility, and by extension the miraculous, is sealed off by fiat in a way that is circular. The argument is formally valid, but the truth of the universal negation of its first premise is taken for granted. This apparently caught Lafferty’s attention because it was how he thought so many people err in closing off the extent of the possible. To get at what is going on in this and some of the other Fortean stories, I’m going to introduce a distinction that helps me think about what is going on in Lafferty. It is a way of pulling apart the incredibly difficult and endlessly debated topic of disenchantment in modernity. Rather than thinking in terms of disenchantment and re-enchantment, we can think about figural moments in Lafferty as being de-divinizing/re-divinizing and un-magicking and magicking. To dig into this, let’s set aside the complexity of the current debate about disenchantment and whether current ideological formations are merely alternative forms of enchantment.

The first part first: de-divinization. I take it from Friedrich Schiller’s well-known idea of “de-divinization” (German Entgötterung). Schiller talks about it in various places, but it shows up most clearly in his 1788 poem “Die Götter Griechenlands” (“The Gods of Greece”). There, he writes about a world that has been stripped of gods, a point relevant to the salesman figure in “Nor Limestone Islands” with its Hermes-like figure at the beginning. What Schiller wrote several centuries ago is something almost everyone is familiar with now. Nature used to feel alive, sacred, and meaning-filled, and we can see this across the sea of time by looking at the Greek imagination. Modern life experiences the de-divinized world as a place of dead matter. Schiller calls it “entgötterte Natur” (nature “de-godded” / de-divinized): a world no longer populated by presences that make it emotionally and spiritually deep-chested. In Lafferty’s story, it is the lower world, the expanse beneath Stutzamutza. Lafferty is not Schillerian, however, because Schiller sees Christianity and modern rational/scientific explanation as being problems. Lafferty sees the current de-divinizing as being attendant on the de-Christianizing of the world. Either way, the old mythic, aesthetic intimacy with the world collapses into a colder, more abstract outlook. Schiller’s Flatland-like Entgötterung language is an ancestor to the later sociological talk of “disenchantment,” but—and this is the point I want to emphasize—in Schiller, it is fundamentally a poetic-cultural mourning for the loss of a divinized, enchanted relation to nature and meaning. Lafferty uses this Entgötterung as a Schillerian space to displace his ideas about sacramentality ignored or denied.

The person who is most associated with the disenchantment thesis is of course the German sociologist Max Weber. Weber’s “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) could be translated as un-magicking. It’s essentially a sociological-historical diagnosis: modernity is characterized by rationalization. There is a lot of bureaucracy, calculation, and the belief that, in principle, the world can be mastered through technical means rather than magic or mystery. Enchantment recedes not mainly because people feel less “poetically” connected, but because social institutions and dominant ways of explaining and controlling have changed. To be absolutely crude about it, Schiller is concerned with the loss of a divinized experience of nature (and treats art/poetry as a refuge where something can survive of that), while Weber describes an epochal shift in how societies organize knowledge and power, a “de-magicking” of the world that can leave people spiritually stranded even if they still long for meaning.

With the ideas of de-divinizing (Entgötterung) and de-magicking (Entzauberung) at hand, let’s look at “Nor Limestone Islands.” The story starts on a Weberian note of un-magicking of society. We are in a city meeting where bureaucracy, technical calculation, and rationalized control rule. As the story progresses, we see that the deeper concern is with Lafferty’s version of Schillerian de-divinization. Because the world has been “de-godded,” nature is treated the way it is. Lafferty has a word for Weberian people. They are the city commissioners and the “unfolk” who govern the modern world. They do all they can to further disenchantment because what really matters are formal bids, reputable addresses, economy, and dignity. When the limestone salesman offers a miraculous bargain, it is rejected because he disrupts the city's bureaucratic order. To these officials, the salesman is a “crank,” and his floating country is “disreputable.” Lafferty’s depiction of this “un-magicked” world is primarily comedic; controlling the world through rationalized systems is, in itself, ridiculous and leaves them getting a worse deal on limestone.

The more ambitious side of Lafferty’s project lies in his response to Schillerian Entgötterung. As Lafferty does in the Fortean stories, he uses the cranks to return to a world that feels alive and in-spirited, where the physical and the divine exist in intimate unity. In “Nor Limestone Islands,” this shows up in the contrast between the inert world of geology and the “living stones” of Stutzamutza. The limestone salesman is a re-divinizing presence; he smells of honey, ozone, and dung, embodying a sacramental intersection of the celestial and the earthly. In the Schillerian displaced space, he is a Hermes figure (Hermes being the god of the stone heap, of the herms, and of the hermeneutic understanding of writing on stone). When Lafferty starts the story by quoting his much-loved Harper’s on statuary falling from the sky, he tells the reader what he is up to: it is the vertical passage of the divine into the mortal.

It was regarded as an art imparted to men by the gods; for such is the thought expressed in the assertion that the earliest statues fell from heaven — “Statuaria Ars; Sculpture,” Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities

That verticality is a refiguration of sacramentality, which becomes present when Phosphor McCabe travels to the island and participates in its economy.

All this de-divinizing and un-magicking peaks in the “Unfolk Ballad” and the construction of the Pink Pagoda, and how they are part of the same structure. Although I don’t think it quite works, and that Lafferty will find a way to make it work in other Fortean stories, the ballad is an image of the de-divinized mind, with all its “I will nots.” Why it doesn’t quite work (for me at least) is that we shouldn’t believe in absolute nonsense, and the items in the “Unfolk Ballad” are mostly crackpottery.

Now, I want to be careful here because I see what Lafferty is doing. He gives us two clues for unlocking the “Unfolk Ballad” in the passage by Dr. Johnson, which says that a man is not on his oath when doing lapidary work. In other words, Lafferty is saying: here I speak in a spiritual sense that in a literal sense would break an oath because lapidary is not the thing of oaths. The other is Lafferty telling the reader to look closer:

"Look closely at that little stone ere we leave it. Are you sure that you have correctly noted the shape of it? Then a still smaller stone to be set in, here where there seems to be an empty little gap. It's a mere quotation 'In Lapidary Inscription a Man is not upon Oath.'"

Here is a curious fact. There is only one lapidary inscription in the story, and the rest of the lapilla are metaphors. The actual inscription is on the egg of doubt, the “Unfolk Ballad,” atop the pink pagoda:

"I will not trow two-headed calves," Say never-seens, and also haves. "I'll not believe a hollow earth," Say skepticals of doubtful birth. "I'll not concede Atlantis you, Nor yet Lemuria or Mu, Nor woodsmen in northwestern lands, Nor bandy-legg'd saucerians, Nor ancient technologic myth, Nor charm of timeless megalith. I will not credit Whales that fly, Nor Limestone Islands in in the Sky"

Richard Harlan (1796-1843) and Richard Owen (1804-1892)

Perhaps two additional points. Both digress from the de-divinizing vs demagicking argument.

First, there is an amusing miniature drama within "Nor Limestone Islands" with the Zeuglodon fossil. Zeuglodon is the obsolete name the British anatomist Richard Owen proposed in 1839 after re-examining fossil whale material that the American naturalist Richard Harlan had already described in 1834 as Basilosaurus. It was an academic correction. Harlan had mistaken the animal for a gigantic marine reptile (hence “king lizard”), but Owen figured out from its double-rooted teeth that it was a mammal. This meant it was an early whale. Owen was right about the animal’s identity, but the conventions of scientific priority meant Harlan’s earlier name, Basilosaurus, remained official, and Zeuglodon hung around for decades in popular and semi-technical usage. Lafferty’s joke seems to be that the floating limestone islands drift and drop stone from the sky, seeding the earth with fossils, something appropriate for a wastebasket taxon.

The last point is about the Pink Pagoda itself. It isn’t an argument, just an intuition: beyond being a counterimage of the Black Pagoda, it reads to me like Lafferty literalizing Proverbs 24:3: "Through wisdom is a house built; and by understanding it is established."

Nor Limestone Islands Notes.pdf

Download PDF • 237KB