Phantasmetaxis

" . . . just as Atrox devised one hundred and one tests by which one might know whether one was in a dream or in reality."

In an interview, Michael Swanwick says something really interesting about Lafferty's novels. They are obscure not because of what they are, but because readers don’t yet have the reading protocols to decode them. The novels he has in mind often feature numerous characters (books like Arrive at Easterwine, The Elliptical Grave, and East of Laughter). As a provisional sort of label, Swanwick calls them "religious allegories." I agree with him, but I don’t like that classification for a few reasons.

First, Lafferty is so singularly different from others in how he plays with layers of allegory that it isn’t helpful to make religious allegory carry the weight, because everyone already knows what religious allegory looks like, and Lafferty doesn’t look like it.

Second, the religious power under the hood of his fiction is not allegory but anagogy, the practice of reading temporal events as foreshadowings of the four final things.

Again and again, Lafferty complicates the tropological level of narrative (the moral meaning) and heightens the anagogical level (the eschatological). Those currents electrify the allegorical.

Consider “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun” from the other day. You can’t really get at Ginny with an allegorical reading, partly because of the tropological wildness of her culpability in Krios’s suicide and her brokenly allegorical tie to the Virgin Mary. But anagogically she matters a lot. Lafferty is uses to say something about what it means to be a person: you and I will only understand what it means to be people when our transitional human personhood is either perfected or annihilated.

Over time, I have begun to suspect that what Swanwick describes is not a genre at all but a mode of writing tied to a compositional method, one that Lafferty consciously set out to invent. He could spin off brilliant stories effortlessly. He said in an interview that they wrote themselves. What seems to have driven him, and what he developed in private, was the mode Swanwick points to, even though Lafferty knew the novels that most exemplified it were the ones least likely to find commercial success. I've been using the working term phantasmetaxis as mental shorthand to get at this aspect of Lafferty.

Phantasmetaxis names the emergent arrangement of a world-structure that arises through Lafferty’s games with conventional narrative coherence. As character-centered anchoring gives way, what first appears concrete reveals itself to be phantasmic and gives rise to a concealed order (taxis), making the latent architecture of a deeper reality perceptible. In Lafferty, the phenomenon is inherently anagogic: it moves us, step by step, toward final things. But other forms of phantasmetaxis do not have to follow that path. What they tend to share, as a kind of family resemblance, is the sense that world precedes the truth of the self.

We begin, narratively, with a person, but as we get more story, that person dissolves. In the act of dissolution, a hidden structural logic is revealed, the skeleton showing through. In Lafferty’s fiction, the rejection of conventional character anchoring becomes more pronounced over time. Early on, he discovers that one way to show the structure of a world is to tear apart a character. This is his version of sparagmos.

If we look at the novels from 1968, we find that he sometimes centers the narrative on a single figure, such as Thomas More or Freddy Foley. At other times, he distributes consciousness among a group, like the Dulanty children. Each tactic addresses a different side of the same problem. On one side, characters lose themselves, either through martyrdom or transformation into something wildly different. On the other side, character boundaries weaken, and the group becomes more cohesive, the cluster more integral. In each, world disclosure is tied to character de-anchoring.

With this in mind, we can begin to understand how Lafferty will construct a novel to address the challenge within the mode. In Serpent's Egg, for instance, he attempts to balance accessibility with a large and diverse cast. He solves this with a threefold strategy. First, he introduces three characters who function as a single unit, a “megaperson.” It updates the Dulanty strategy where the kids are unit. Second, he focuses on a relational fragment within that megaperson—Inneall—which updates the More/Foley approach. Third, he fills the novel's periphery with memorable animal characters: it is easier to track a python from an elephant than to track two human characters. These three techniques lighten the reader’s cognitive load while sharpening the collective eschatology that the phantasmetaxis is meant to reveal.

Lafferty is hyper-aware of how character-driven narratives relativize worlds to the protagonists. In the Apocalypses novels, he makes this threat to his mode a formal asset, using the kind of disintegration it poses as a structural feature. More playfully, in Annals of Klepsis, he externalizes and genrifies the threat to his new mode by making it a cosmic MacGuffin:

“The third focus of the humanly inhabited universe has been determined to be both a point and a person on the Planet Klepsis, on the surface of the planet, which is extraordinary in itself. Of the person—the human element of the anthropo-mathematical function—little is known except the code name: the ‘Horseshoe Nail,’ and the fact that the person is more than two hundred years old.”

If I understand him, Swanwick would probably not put Apocalypses and Annals of Klepsis in the genre he identifies, but I think they are another aspect of a mode. The "religious allegories" invert the Apocalypses paradigm by dispersing character across a structure capacious enough to sustain worlds that recapitulate the metaphysical profile of the one universe Lafferty believed to be real.