Ouden

“We will show you the back of the tapestry. What you see now is not the true face of Astrobe, not all of it. The other side of the tapestry is shaggier, but it is a real picture also, and a much more meaningful one than the world you look at now. […] Have you never had the feeling, Thomas, that you were looking at everything from the wrong side? You have been.”

Thibking again about Ouden and wanted to put together some thoughts about how it works in Past Master. It seems helpful to have those notes in one place alongside a map of the novel, so I’m including my condensed outline with named episodes at the end of this post. The episodes are how I parse them. Chapters in a Lafferty novel are always half misleading because he thinks in subchapters, episodes that cross-ramify, and he is usually on the look out for novel ways to glue chapters together, the poem pattern in Reefs of Earth and Iron Tongue being an example of this. To make the outline more useful for others, it minimizes interpretation and approaches the novel as if all were transparent.

Let’s start with the political-philosophical structure of Astrobe. One reason people bounce off the novel is because they don’t know that this is not a book with a main character in the way The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Stranger in a Strange Land have main characters like Huckleberry and Valentine Michael Smith. Past Master is, in many ways, a book closer to an anchoring device like the main character in an early Dickens novel but with fewer of the novelistic satisfactions. The main character is incident, ensemble, and social structure. In fact, it is very much like Thomas More’s Utopia. For every fifty people who can tell you the name of that book, you might find one who can tell you its “main character, the Portuguese traveler and philosopher Thomas, is Raphael Hythloday. More and Ouden are like Hythloday, litmus paper, and depending on how we want to spin this, we can call them vehicles for the novel’s theology or semiotic functions that articulate the novel’s ideological structure.

So who or what is Ouden? If we trust what the Nine say at face value, Ouden is a deity. He is sovereign of the Programmed—not only a being, but some kind of person in the expansive sense that we find elsewhere in Lafferty. After all, Nine call Ouden both “god and king.” This comes from Northprophet himself, who says that Ouden appeared to The Nine and proclaimed: “I am your god and your king.” This appearance is a parody of God’s theophany to Moses in the burning bush, given what Ouden is as a maw that enunciates anti-truth “I am who I am,” says the God of Moses. That Ouden cannot say. The Ouden formula would be, “I am who I not am,” maybe the “hevel hevalim” of Ecclesiastices. From that anti-theophanic moment, we are told, all Programmed beings treated Ouden as their supreme authority.

Whatever Ouden is in Past Master, every reader of the book will knkws that he is not a peripheral symbol. He is somehow an axis of what is going on. He is the spectral mast to which the Nine pin their worldview and governance. Every aspect of the Nine’s ideology is organized around obedience to, and fulfillment of, this figure they treat as ultimate (or so they say). Having a view on what Ouden is will thus be determinative for how one understands the novel. A good way to test how Past Master is understood as a novel, whatever one’s take on its totality, is to keep putting pressure on how the reader thinks about Ouden, and how those choices inform one’s perception of every other episode in the book.

The Astrobe Dream is, as the novel puts it, the front of the tapestry. The novel is the front of the tapestry. The dream is a o ignoble lie purporting yo be noble, only ostensibly the guiding principle of the planet’s engineered social order—the propaganda shibboleth. We are told it leads directly toward Ouden. Pottscamp says that the Dream’s premise is “Nothing Beyond,” and its conclusion is “Holy Ouden, Nothing Here Either, Nothing Ever.” The novel This makes the Dream a pathway toward metaphysical negation. Because the Programmed Masters administer and enforce this Dream across Astrobe, they act as agents driving society toward the realization of the Ouden ideal: eliminate meaningful being. Ouden is the terminus of their project for social control and coordination.

Then there is the technological and philosophical synthesis designed by the Machines. They culminate in annihilation. One way to think of a precis machine is as an Ouden box. If you recall, the precis machine summarizes the goal of the Merging Singularity as a point where humanity is “devoured by Holy Nothingness, the Big O, the Ultimate Point for all us ultimates.” This Singularity is a parody of the beatific vision, the merging of human and Programmed. It is an Omega that cannot contain the Alpha despite its lie that is the outermost ambient. This Omega wants to swap out man’s final cause with a final state in which individuality, existence, and distinction vanish into non-being, reversing the Thomistic idea that man’s final cause is his full actualization.

I should probably add that this is not the actualization of humanistic psychology, the Carl Rogers or Abraham Maslow vocabulary that we are likely to hear today. You probably know this, but I’m going to beat the drum again. In scholastic metaphysics, actualization for man means the fulfillment of his God-given potentials, especially the realization of his rational, moral, and spiritual capacities so that his life conforms to his true nature and final end in God. Ouden anesthetizes this through a golden dream. Doctors sometimes call it FTE: failure to emerge. Since the Nine and their control-and-coordinate project attempt to orchestrate a negation of ousia, they are programming a path toward Ouden: to reduce existence to a single terminal void.

What are the Nine? They are devils—but devils in Lafferty are tricky things. Will say that his artistic representation of them tends to go in one of three ways. First, he might hide them. There is only their evil in the text, like a magnet field seen through iron filings. This approach reflects a view that Lafferty put in the following way:

“Leaving aside all testimony of religion and revelation, I believe that a competent interdisciplinary biologist, working without prejudices, would come onto substantial evidence for the existence of unbodied beings or mentalities, from the effect they have on human persons; just as a competent interdisciplinary physicist-astronomer would arrive at the necessity of there being a moon of such a size and gravity and location and distance, even though, for some reason, the moon lacked the quality of visibility. And the physicist-astronomer would realize this necessity for such a moon from its influence on the earth. The biologist-psychologist should arrive at the necessity of the Devil-Satan, of such a power and location and activation-pattern, because of his influence on human persons.”

Secondly, there are the person-devils we find in Coscuin and Argo. They cut the shape of characters. Think Ifreann.

Thirdly, there is a zone of demonology in Lafferty’s work that hovers between the invisible and the not-quite-characterological. Lafferty gets at this when he says underscores the problem of person and character, relevant to both fiction and theology:

“As God several times in scripture gives Himself the name of the ‘I am’ or the ‘I am who I am’, so the Devil-Satan species is given the name in many languages of something like the ‘What is it?’ or the ‘Who is it?’ An African tale begins ‘The Who-Is-It came and killed a man and cut him open.’ This particular who-is-it seemed to kill and cut open a man every morning to read him as if reading a morning newspaper. As to whether the diabolical species has individuality, that’s a problem. Before being cast into Gadarene Swine, one devil or multiplicity of devils told Christ either ‘My name is legion’ or ‘Our name is legion’, seeming a multiplicity of guises for an individual, or a multiplicity of individuals in the species.”

The devils in Past Master look to me like beings in the zone between devil type 2 and devil type 3. They are very slippery things, speaking as one in Pottscamp but also as legion, like the type 3 devils. We can get some purchase on them, the way we can with devils of type 2. After all, they have names in Past Master. Lafferty even defines their three functions, which is under-discussed. One of them is a major character in the novel. Yet they work in groups of three in a way the novel intentionally obscures, like type 2’s.

Whatever the case here, their intention is to extinguish existence—at least if we believe that is a possibility. Ouden’s displeasure at any form of being is most fully expressed amongst them in Holygee’s line: “It displeased Ouden that any be.” So the Nine say that they are fulfilling the will of Ouden by eliminating humans, themselves, and the universe—which, for them, is not a cosmos. It is ananonymous, imperfectly empty universe. This goes beyond nihilism. It is anti-existential.

But do they really worship Ouden, or serve Ouden? Are these the kind of beings who could bend to a deity, even an anti-existential one? I think they aren’t, and that Ouden is, for them, an ideological instrument.

Consider Thomas More’s vision on Electric Mountain. It shows how The Nine operationalize ideology through control. During the electrical disturbances, More sees the vast, empty, grinning faces in the sky. Spooked, Maxwell calls the manifestations “the many faces of Ouden, their great Nothingness and King.” These images appear only at peak activity of the mountain’s power systems. To me, this suggests that they are projection. It looks to me like a technologically mediated image that just reinforces the dominance of The Nine. Does that sound fanciful? We are tikd that The Nine haver their hands in the lightening:

“The high lightning here (which you will be amazed at very soon) is treated as a commodity like any other commodity. It is packaged and shipped down to golden Astrobe . . . That is all it is—from your viewpoint, not from mine—but it does come in a flashy package."

We know that The Nine are manipulating Thomas, and because Thomas is our focalization, we should keep this in mind. Pottscamp says, “I am the theater in which their little show is played out.” He says he is a medium through which the will of The Nine manifests itself. Then there is the matter that they can insert “snakes in your brain,” spiritual tendrils that invade and override Thomas’s thoughts and speech. Once this happens, Thomas finds himself parroting their ideology, including praising Ouden—despite his own intentions. To me, this shows that Ouden’s doctrine is not naturally adopted but imposed through sophisticated spiritual and technological coercion in Past Master.

One of the big puzzles is that the Masters say they “are not conscious,” calling themselves machines executing instructions without subjective awareness. I agree with More that this is just a lie. They want More to believe that they revere Ouden as king, but it seems unlikely that their devotion is legitimate. From this, I infer that Ouden is not a transcendent intelligence, not anything like a supertranscendental. He is more like a conceptual structure embedded into their systems, a philosophical directive, not a supernatural ruler. Nor do I see him as being a symptom of a shift in representational mode, as when, for instance, Milton in Paradise Lost becomes Spenserian and gives us Sin and Death as allegorical characters.

“Before the Gates there sat On either side a formidable shape; The one seem’d Woman to the waste, and fair, But ended foul in many a scaly fould Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm’d With mortal sting: about her middle round A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d […] Out of thy head I sprung; amazement seis’d All th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoild affraid At first, and call’d me Sin, and for a Sign Portentous held me; but familiar grown, I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing — II.648–680

That shift in representational mode in Paradise Lost is significant. For centuries, critics have gnashed their teeth at what Milton does in moving from the demonic characters the Parliament in Hell in the city of Pandemonium to the hypostatized emblem book figured of Sin and Death who are like Vice than Milton’s Mammon, Moloch, or Belial. Lafferty refuses to do this. Instead, he steps back. Lafferty know this is anaesthetic trap says we must accommodate what happens because what happens is mystic. This is Ouden's major appearance in the novel, and it occurs outside Hopp-Equation Space ("It had been a passage dream, one that was somehow leftover"), in the same chapter (Chapter 3: “At the Naked Sailor”) where we learn the Nine are mentally manipulating the characters through the false Ansel. Is this the appearance of a God of Nothingness, a passage dream that was "somehow left over"—or is it manipulation?

The short account that follows is necessarily mystic. We cannot be sure that Paul and Thomas held the same congress with Ouden. We cannot hear at all the exchange between Ouden and Rimrock, but we can sense it. We cannot be sure whether it was Paul or Thomas forming the words in the man-Ouden conversation. It was a confrontation and a presence.

“And I had to settle with another—a false ansel who spoke in the Paul’s mind and tried to lure you to your death. It’s fresh blood on me. I hope you don’t mind.”

What does necessarily mystic mean when Ouden appears? A reader should consider it because mystical is a two-edged word in Past Master, as when Rimrock says,

“To the Convocation Hall, as you yourself have decided, good Thomas; to take it all swiftly while the tide is running for us. You will be the Sudden Apparition. You will accept the accolade and the mystic station of Past Master.”

Mysticism is part of the manipulation of the Past Master role, but it is also what allows that role to be, finally, unmanipulable.

I’ll wrap up by saying that Thomas seems to understand this himself. He knows the entire ideological framework underpinning Astrobe, including the tabescent Dream that feeds Ouden, originates from his own satirical work, Utopia, the “sour joke” and “bitter joke.” Northprophet says that Ouden appeared only after early mechanical beings sought a mythos to fill the void in their programming. Ouden appears as an invented concept born from human ideological residue in the machine and the devilish, later disseminated by the Programmed Masters as part of their operating doctrine.

There are many small ways this view of Ouden opens up textual puzzles. It provides a strong hermeneutic for understanding passages that might otherwise seem strange just for the sake of being strange such as the great allegorical set piece about Sour John and, later, the toy. It has the virtue of creating a thematic continuity that can be tracked, tick by tick, through the episodes, making the novel far less a picaresque or loose-romance chain of events, and showing its subtending logic. As one goes deeper into Astrobe, one sees how the conspiracy works. Without this, “Chapter 10” seems far less powerful to me. It makes Pottscamp and the others of the Nine pop out near the end of the book like compressed snakes in a can.