Oceanic Lafferty

There is a great and deep oceanic mind behind all this, a mind shimmering with intelligence and intuition. There is a soul brimming full of adventure and daring. There is intrigue that boggles belief. Most of all there is a personage who is sometimes a leaping and sounding spirit, and sometimes the Foremost Secret is— The Foremost Secret What? Ah, that too, for the moment, is a secret. — Fair Hills of Ocean, Oh!

In the Whole Lafferty are the Oceanic novels, I’ve updated the Oceanic section of this blog, a snapshot of those eighteen Lafferty works. These run from Space Chantey and The Reefs of Earth (1968) to The Elliptical Grave and Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage (1989). Below each is a list of themes, a connection to a diagnostic reading, and a cloud of oceanic phrases drawn from the novel.

These works are Lafferty’s repeated attempts to think through a related set of problems; hence the Oceanic diagnostic. It asks three questions of each novel: what kind of world it is (Reality), what kind of people live in it (Being), and what forces act on that world (Change). Each question has four typical Lafferty answers. A world may be an illusion, a dream, a narrative, or a multiverse. The people in the novel may be any combination of split, hybrid, archetypal, or subordinate. The force of world change may tend toward apocalypse, creation, mutation, or succession. The diagnostic tries to show how the variables in each pair relate to one another and defines the book's core conflict in a sentence or two. It’s messy, but it tries to limn the architectonic logic that runs through Oceanic Lafferty.

Lafferty makes clear that his oceanic imagery tracks the unconscious, understood as the Logos's fluid manifestation, consistent with his description of Christ as the Lord of the archetypes. I have left that reading out of the diagnostic.

The second part of the resource, the Oceanic Layer, is just for fun. It indexes more than a thousand short phrases of water imagery taken from the eighteen works. This water imagery is obviously connected to the unconscious in Lafferty and binds the Oceanic novels together thematically.