“Pig in a Pokey" (1964)

What the Eleans call the pillar of Oenomaus is in the direction of the sanctuary of Zeus as you go from the great altar. On the left are four pillars with a roof on them, the whole constructed to protect a wooden pillar which has decayed through age, being for the most part held together by bands. This pillar, so runs the tale, stood in the house of Oenomaus.— Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.20.6

“Which Great God, yours or mine?” Porcellus grunted. “They aren't the same, or they have been described badly. Yes, a human head. I had always wanted one. You notice that I have given it the favored position in the center of the great wall. I now have at least one of the heads of every species that interests me.”

A memorable moment in twentieth-century literary culture: in 1923, T. S. Eliot’s reviewed James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). There, Eliot declared that the novel as a form was dead. Many years later Lafferty agreed that the novel was dead; it is a problem he wanted to solve, how to write post-novelistic long-form fiction. He eventually wrote two thousand-page works, each mostly unpublished: Coscuin and In a Green Tree. Eliot thought Flaubert and James had ended the novel by reaching a terminus ad quem. Lafferty thought the novel became impossible because its circulatory system failed: the society that created it had died. Cultural unstructuring made conventional novel writing look like putting cosmetics on the face of a corpse. Consensus reality had become too pluralistic and amnesiac. Eliot and Lafferty both had a solution: myth. After Eliot's turn to myth, he became intensely but quietly Christian, converting to Anglicanism in 1927. For him, the mythic method took a backseat. In other words, Eliot retreated into the old spiritual order that he hoped hadn’t been unstructured. He wrote The Four Quartets (1943). He set it all out in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1947). Lafferty knew the Eliot strategy simply wasn’t going to fly.

Before his conversion, Eliot suggested that what was needed was a transitional method, one that followed Joyce's lead, with the artist “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.” This mythic method was to be more than a literary device and more than simple “scaffolding”; it was to be a way of “controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” By the time Eliot wrote Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, it must have seemed quaint. Where Eliot ended up approximates where Lafferty began and stayed in one sense: Eliot came to think there was not going to be a substitute for the Logos.

Lafferty’s best-known example of using classical myth to produce a fiction is Space Chantey (1968), where he rejects high cultural seriousness and does exactly what Eliot said the mythic method must not: he makes classical myth transparent, mock-epic scaffolding. Lafferty then uses that machinery for narrow genre purposes. That is why his most overtly “mythological” book is perhaps his least mythic—and why it stands as a profoundly deceptive introduction to his work. It goes back to how Lafferty first learned to transcode classical myth into the science-fiction genre when he broke into the market. Characteristically, its result is farcical black comedy that stays outside the oceanic. I’m glad that he course corrected.

My view is that Lafferty’s mythic method creates a modal problem for him on the plane of representation throughout the first decade of his career. He dazzles, but he isn't as dazzling as he will be, because his mythic method is far better suited to irony than to anagogy. The lower casts an ironic shadow over the higher rather than opening upward toward it. It lowers pegs. Lafferty’s hardcore fans go with him on this journey as far as they can but are perhaps too unwilling delimit transitions. While Lafferty never loses his interest in irony (it is pervasive), he becomes increasingly aware of how irony often enervates the mythic. He recognizes it can be an acid that bites at his own Catholicism, so he learns to tame the wild horse by making the mythic more mythic. He becomes the Whole Lafferty. He rewrites material such as Loup Garou to shore up the mythic against the ruins. The seriousness with which he regarded the cultural turn of the 1960s meant that, moving into the 1970s, he no longer wanted his art to risk diminishing the mystical intensity of the sacramental. This is a big reason why the armaments of science-fiction studies will only take one so far with Lafferty, and certainly not far into the novels or more challenging short stories.

Space Chantey is Lafferty’s funniest novel, though only intermittently a profound one. In his early work, he draws on Greek myth for ideas, motifs, and narrative patterns, especially when writing in an overtly ironic or mock-mythographic mode. It’s timber. But once he begins constructing myths grounded in his own thought about and spiritual commitment to the Logos, creating odd paths back to it, he becomes a mythmaker in his own right, and the classical scaffolding of his mythic method recedes.

What I see is a two-sided, unevern development. One method matures (the oceanic method). This coincides with the diminishing use of the other method (the mythic method Lafferty absorbed from brushing up against high modernism). Lafferty quickly exhausted the range and depth of that first method, at least for the sort of thing he wanted to do. “Pig in a Pokey” belongs to the first-and-ironizing part of his development. It fictionalizes myth instead of mythicizes fiction.

“Pig in the Pokey" is valuable in this regard. It is very much inspired by Greek mythology, but little in it is mythic the way, say, Not to Mention Camels or Dark Shine are mythic; Lafferty’s compositional choices almost erase the mythic origins. The result is a story that demythologizes its source and blends it with a revenge plot, a conte cruel written early for the science fiction market. The floodgates of the oceanic are beginning to open elsewhere in the fiction, and we are moving away from prenucleation. The maturely Lafferty mythic resonance is still low. Lafferty is quirky but not near to being unintelligible to those with ears unrelated to his own.

Our protagonist Netter arrives at an asteroid station on Hippodamia to dispute ownership with the current occupant, Porcellus (“little pig”). Fitting his name, Porcellus is pig-like. Inside the station, Netter is shocked. On the wall is the severed and mounted head of the previous human agent, Captain Kalbfleish (“calf flesh”), mounted on the wall as a trophy. Porcellus says he did not kill Kalbfleish directly. The captain died of a ruptured heart caused by extreme exertion. Netter and he then share a meal, and Porcellus describes it as the meat of a creature that died of "excitement and alarm," the story’s iconographic inset. Netter leaves the station to explore the grounds. Importantly, he ignores Porcellus’s warning to stay away from a specific low dome on the plain. Part of this dome breaks out of the ground, but most of it must be underground.

And Netter makes a mistake. He steps onto the dome, which is a "compensating sphere" that rotates beneath his feet, trapping him at the center top no matter how he moves or runs. Now he knows what killed Kalbfleish, who ran himself to death trying to escape the confinement. Porcellus arrives at the dome to gloat, saying that the sphere is an intelligence test and that Netter has failed.

Earlier in the story, the reader has learned that Netter braids a romal, and knows that like Chekhov’s gun, the romal will be important. From the top of the dome, Netter unlaces the "romal rey." The braided leather becomes a forty-foot lariat. He lassos Porcellus, using the alien's heavy bulk as an anchor to pull himself off the compensating sphere. Netter then hog-ties Porcellus and rolls him onto the dome. The story ends with Netter as the new station-master. He has replaced Kalbfleish’s head on the trophy wall with the cured and polished head of Porcellus.

One of my favorite things about “Pig in a Pokey” is the lie that begins it. It is textbook irony, a key to the story:

This was on Hippodamia. The name isn't important.

The Hippodamia story is one of the great beheading myths in Greek mythology. Hippodamia is the daughter of King Oenomaus of Pisa, and she becomes the center of one of the most dramatic courtships in Western civilization. An oracle foretells that her father will die at the hands of her future husband. Oenomaus then challenges every suitor to a chariot race from Pisa to the Isthmus of Corinth. But he has a secret weapon: divine horses, a gift of Ares, so he easily overtakes and beheads each young man who bids for Hippodamia. These are the heads on the pillars of his home, one pillar that Pausanias says he saw:

Things change for Hippodamia’s father when along comes Pelops, a suitor unlike the others. Handsome, ambitious, and determined, he is a man who will receive a little outside help.

Versions of the myth play with the idea of whether it was a victory through divine aid or both divine aid and treachery. In the best-known version, Pelop's chariot has wings. It hovers over the race course. In another, Pelops convinces a man named Myrtilus, Oenomaus’ own charioteer, to sabotage the king’s chariot by replacing its bronze linchpins with wax. During the race, Oenomaus’ chariot bounces apart in a classical version of Wacky Races. It kills him and leaves Pelops free to marry Hippodamia. And from this will come the tragic house that more than any other in Greek legend is associated with revenge, including members such as Agamemnon.

Mosaic showing beheaded suitors in the Hippodamia myth.

If one overlooks the story’s opening line, one misses not only Lafferty’s early approach to the mythic but also the logic behind the story’s fixation on beheading, revenge, and the asteroid as a mythic bride. The asteroid is a mythic-method character character. With that line in view, the parallel orders the incidents. The big conflict in “Pig in a Pokey” picks up on the deadly chariot race of the myth: in the Greek myth, the suitors receive a head start only to be overtaken by Oenomaus and his divine horses. Lafferty defamiliarizes all this by relocating it to the “compensating dome,” where the victim runs endlessly yet gains no ground. What a cheat! As in the myth, it so patently rigged. At the same time, Lafferty maintains the myth’s kinetic strain and physical exhaustion, transforming its terms with black humor, with Hippodamia who is famously silent in the myth. The asteroid is silent Hippodamia, and Netter becomes Pelops—a suitor who wins not by speed but through cunning.

It also shows why there is a double joke in the following, what we might call the low-brow and the high-brow joke.

Porcellus didn't actually speak like that. He spoke in a series of grunts, some verbal and some ventral. But the Console Translator of Netter had a selector dial. Netter could dial translation in pidgin, in cut and dry, in bombast, in diplomatic pleasantry, in old southern US soft talk or Yiddish dialect if he wished, or in the courtly manner. Whenever he encountered a creature who was repulsive to him as Porcellus was he dialed the courtly manner of speech. This was somehow easier on his ears and his nerves.

The low-brow joke is plain. It is absurd for this piglike station master to speak like a mandarin—it is funny, and sinister, and brilliant. The high-brow joke is that the setting of the Greek myth is a courtly one. Porcellus speaks in a register appropriate to a travesty of classical decorum

Then there is the idea of the "Horse Tamer, which is what Hippodamia means. Even though horses are extinct in "Pig in a Pokey," Netter has that funny object, the braided leather quirt and rein used for horses. Porcellus needles him that his is a vicarious horse (a "hobbyhorse"). Just as Pelops wins his race through the manipulation of equipment (replacing bronze linchpins with wax), Netter wins by manipulating his equipment. That short romal? It is a "romal rey" (King Romal), Lafferty writes. Hippodamia is a princess; her future husband will be a king caught in a family cycle of violence and revenge. He "tames" the beast Porcellus, overcomes the blocking Oenomaus-figure, by hog-tying him and dragging him onto the compensating dome. Like Oenomaus, Porcellus dies on the race track.

We can see Lafferty’s interest in archetypes at work here, yet for all its myth, the story itself isn’t mythic. It is closer a Jacobean pastiche—closer to Jack Vance and the five Demon Princes than to Lafferty’s later oceanic mode. While only Lafferty could have written “Pig in a Pokey,” the story is slyly dependent on repackaging Greek myth in science-fictional terms. Most readers don’t notice the mythic substrate, as far as I can tell; they just see the science fiction plot and assume this is one of Lafferty’s more straightforward SF pieces. Look, an easy Lafferty story. It is in most ways be very easy. How accessible. But Lafferty had myth on his mind as a problem for his fiction.

After Space Chantey, as I said, Lafferty outgrows this pig-in-a-pokey technique. In my view, it will no longer be his way of solving structural problems. Civil Blood (1962) had attempted to resolve its own structure by drawing on the plot of Romeo and Juliet. Civil Blood didn’t work. Space Chantey does, but from Space Chantey on, he tires of this, matures, becomes increasingly comfortable working in the oceanic mode, and it will cost him many readers.

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