Original Sin

The first offense was the taking of the forbidden fruit. The second offense (which I believe is more grievous than the first) is the refusing of the bidden fruit. It is even the hacking down of the tree of the fruit.

Advanced Lafferty today, and undoubtedly too brief. I’ve been rereading Serpent’s Egg, trying to understand how the Kangaroo connects to Inneall’s ocean, and throughout that novel one fact kept coming up.

Once again, Lafferty is thinking about original sin, maybe the most important theme in his work that gets underdiscussed by his readers, considering how important it was to him. I’ll be posting a Serpent’s Egg series soon.

Let’s start with “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks,” one of the neglected Lafferty masterpieces. Professor Thomas Cromwell finds out that people scarcely inhabit the world. They live in a handful of narrow bands of perception, then ignore what lies between them.

Here is a snapshot of so much in Lafferty: the neglected but enormous intervals that have been lost. Throughout his work, Lafferty keeps saying there is a much larger life. Cromwell is one of the Lafferty protagonists who intends to enter that zone of anti-amnesia.

His colleagues at Hamelin College know more about this than they have let on. The people responsible for keeping Cromwell confined can explain what he has only found out. They understand the narrowness of ordinary experience. They know what Flatland excludes. When one professor asks why they shouldn’t enter the wider world, Dean Anwalt answers:

Our fallen nature tells us that we don't want the wideness, that the narrowness is a superior thing. And our exult-in-its-fallenness nature tells us that the wide ways are the extreme danger: It tells us to ban or interdict them when we cannot imprison them.

Exult-in-its-fallenness.

That is the slogan that Lafferty is always railing against. A person can suffer a limitation. He can develop a second nature that has a good opinion of it. Eventually, he will say that everyone else should live under it.

The college authorities in the story are at the terminal stage. They understand what they are keeping out, which puts them on the side of everything Lafferty opposes as an artist.

Lafferty’s starting point here, as I think it so often is, is the Catholic account of the Fall. In the first book of In a Green Tree, the children’s catechism lesson describes Adam and Eve’s loss of innocence and holiness, their subjection to sickness and death, and the consequences for their descendants:

Our nature was corrupted, our understanding was darkened, our will was weakened, and a strong inclination to evil was left in us.

The lesson then turns to what Catholics call actual sin: the willful thought, word, deed, or omission contrary to God’s law. Those conditions we inherit are also bound to the wrongs we commit. Lafferty’s fiction brings the two together.

People whose understanding is damaged will usually make choices that damage it further. But maybe they can use what they understand quite well to prevent others from seeing. They can become willful embracers of noetic darkening.

That is what happens at Hamelin College. We could imagine that education would cure the trouble if only the faculty knew enough, but intelligence isn’t the answer, as Lafferty makes clear in one of his best takedowns of artificial intelligence, “I Don’t Care Who Keeps the Cows.”

In “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks,” the dean knows that the best way to avoid original sin is to naturalize it. Cromwell threatens a way of life the authorities want to keep up as consensus reality. On the surface it is a critique of academia, but deeper than that, it is Lafferty’s epistemology, which takes original sin as the fundamental fact of situated human knowing.

If one wants to see how important this is for Lafferty, one has to read the essay “Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus.” He argues that science fiction and fantasy keep returning to the Fall, often without recognizing it.

Ruined worlds, lost powers, forgotten origins, vanished civilizations: they are all masked versions of a catastrophe near the beginning of human existence. They are ways of coping imaginatively with original sin.

Most agree that there is an amnesia about the Fall, that it has been forced out of our conventional memory and thus has become the most enigmatic part of the life riddle.

Then the forgetting compounds the loss, time and time again in Lafferty. We have difficulty recognizing how much has gone missing because our present condition gives us faulty standards by which we judge what is possible.

Humanity, he believed, was once more intricate, more capable, and more closely joined to the rest of creation. People could stop time, walk through walls, move mountains. His view of the preternatural state and original justice is profoundly original. Animals and spirits belonged to a human world far more inclusive than the one we presently know. Man is a flawed zoon anthropikon.

He writes:

All these things remain as normal but occluded powers of mankind.

Humanity has entered an abnormal condition in which its full powers are inhibited.

How did we get onto the isthmus? We fell onto it.

Lafferty says that his essay may itself be a science-fiction story disguised as an article. He is giving a fantastic expression to the conviction that our present limitations cannot tell us the whole truth about human nature. We are trans-empirical creatures. The people who tell us what humanity could never do have mistaken a damaged condition for permanent boundaries.

“The Most Forgettable Story in the World” is one of those little-read stories. In it, the failure of self-knowledge becomes a thesis statement for his artistic agenda. Its opening asks how an unbeliever can dispose of the puzzle that the Fall explains:

Who and what are we really? And what is the age and nature of the amnesia that is our ambience?

The quotation gets attributed to:

name of author forgotten

The people who meet to discuss “The Insufficiency of Mere Perfection” cannot hold on to the knowledge that would free them from their bounded condition. It is one of his pessimistic stories.

In “Name of the Snake,” forgetting is just a matter of public language. The Analoi assure a visiting priest that they have progressed beyond sin. They have corrected the malfunctions that produce vice. The priest figures out that their false and self-styled perfection includes killing unwanted people and cultivating new forms of cruelty and appetite. They have given these practices reassuring names.

Lafferty writes:

It was here everywhere. But it had changed its name.

The Analoi are smart. They can justify themselves, or think that they can.

Other stories approach the Fall through the gifts that draw a clear line between fallen and unfallen life. “Adam Had Three Brothers” gives us descendants outside Adam’s line, exempt from his curse of labor and possessed of unusual abilities. Their exemption doesn’t make them virtuous: they’re more of Lafferty’s swindlers.

“In the Garden” gives us a counterfeit Eden whose version of Adam claims freedom from death and possession of a preternatural intellect. The visitors say that spoiling the place would be a terrible crime, then get ready to sell it.

Lafferty keeps exposing the desires people bring to their pictures of paradise. In Serpent’s Egg, Axel Grindstone dies of some kind of epistemological or spiritual grief because he can’t accept that the Unfallen People look like apes. Other men immediately see the apes’ value as zoo exhibits. Fallen people can’t help but do what they do: they reveal their original sin.

Recovering what was lost is dangerous in Lafferty. It can easily go wrong. In “The All-At-Once Man,” John Penandrew wants the simultaneity supposedly enjoyed by Adam in his preternatural state. He wants to live all his ages together and live indefinitely. He believes the gift is available, just a little bit under the deprivation.

Cris Benedetti tells him that he now lacks integrity. Penandrew responds by listing his decent qualities. He loves his wife, gives money, and does not grind the faces of the poor. Cris gives the full formula of original justice:

unified totality and scope

Penandrew’s project to wrest this from God outside of grace results in his grotesque disintegration. The self-centered enlargement of life becomes more damage. That has an earlier counterpart in Lafferty in “The Six Fingers of Time,” where Charles Vincent’s acceleration gives him powers he uses to exploit other people.

Now consider Lafferty’s review of Joan Kahn’s anthology Some Things Dark and Dangerous and how he brings grace into his critique. He describes two great changes in the human experience of suspense.

One occurs at the Fall, which he also calls the Hiatus or the Amnesia. The other occurs at Redemption, which he calls anamnesis, the recovery of memory, tied to the Mass and the name of the last Argo story, one about recognition.

The suspense was not abolished; perhaps it was sanctified. Some of the dread was removed, but the bow itself was not unstrung. The tension was likely increased, but tension in grace became more possible.