"Pleasures and Palaces" (1974/1983)

“A superior smile is the sovereign wonder-worker,” Griggles Swing said to Belinda Greenglow on a Monday evening. “One smiles superiorly at God and is one-up on him. But if God would smile superiorly at man, he must do so anthropomorphically, on man's own terms. The morning stars snickered and the little hills melted like wax when this was first discovered.

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Job 38:7

The hills melted like wax at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth. Psalm 97:5

In today's post, I’m going to sketch the plot of “Pleasures and Palaces” twice, because for much of the story, there isn't one, and it’s easy to lose track of its shape, which has the pattern of eating and excreting. Dwight MacDonald once said that Hemingway novels pretty much come down to getting in and out of cabs and drinking at bars. We spend 4/5ths of "Pleasures and Palaces" fixated on food, hanging out in restaurants, then we make a hasty interplanetary trip to a cave full of ordure.

This is also one of Lafferty’s anti-evolution stories. More than that, it is perhaps the directed cut at the consequences of Darwin in the published fiction, with the savagest blow being the unpublished and abandoned "Claudius and Charles" in the Tulsa archive.

Online, there is no critical discussion (that I can find) of “Pleasures and Palaces." It was published late. Even set alongside Lafferty stories, it looks quirky. The story is a satire intended to hold a mirror up to the reader. The reflection is meant to be recognized as one’s own, and one is interpellated to be chastened unless already in agreement with Lafferty’s satirical norm, which is that evolution is vile. What Lafferty places in the mirror for the reader to see is the cocky, smiling mug of a primate. Since most readers are untroubled by the idea of phylogenetic descent from early hominids, they are unlikely to recoil.

However, the theory that he descended from a primitive hominid deeply repulsed Lafferty, so in “Pleasures and Palaces” he burlesques the Darwinists while artistically mining his own disgust at evolution through images of gluttony and execreta. When reading this story, it is helpful to remember just how total Lafferty’s hatred of evolution was. He told Ed Babinski that evolution was, like the word gay, a poisoned word:

"Evolution" as an unfolding was a splendid concept. "Evolution" as a metamorphosis is squalid. The idea of one species changing into another has something disgusting about it. Intellectually the idea is far lower even than the ‘metempsychosis’ of some Orientals, the ‘transmigration of souls’ by which each person receives at death another kind of soul of another kind of creature, and does it again and again.

He wants the reader to be both amused and repulsed by the squalidness, which Lafferty meant to be rough, dirty, and filthy.

Two other story elements probably get in the way of this story's reception. It is a wee bit coy in how it is written backwards. What Lafferty does with the food pageant is blurry until seen in retrospect. This is an example of Lafferty’s technique of iconographic insetting. Characters discuss building down, but the story builds down. We descend to de Chardin’s Alpha Point, eating the primal soup, rewinding the regime of genetically engineered special persons in the story:

They ate the hotchpotch stew which has a long lineage of things living in it, in that incomparably rich and scaling hot liquid milieu where life first rose. The hotchpotch was of the oldest unbroken line. Mary Irish dredged a limey residue up on the edge of her bowl to examine it before eating it. Fossils, a world of fossils, that's what she dredged up! And sometimes she swallowed the livelier portions of the stew with a nervous queasiness. Living fossils, that's what the livelier portions of the hotchpotch were!

The second is that it is high-culture satire, with Lafferty using social class and urbanity to make a point. That is not one of his strengths as a satirist.

Griggles Swing, our main character, is a primate-turned-superscientist from the planet Apateon, though the reader learns this only at the end of the story. Griggles is a snapshot of what Lafferty believed Darwinism had made of contemporary man. He denies the imago Dei, forgets his origins, swells with technocratic pride, fancies himself a demiurge, and puts all four hooves in the through of self-satisfied hedonism. Griggles’s self-image, and by extension his civilization (he is a metonym), culminates in the pursuit of physical pleasure and smug congratulation over its cultural urbanity.

There is no satire here on the mechanisms of genetic variation and environmental filtration. There is nothing on selective pressure. Darwin is not named. The target is primal: you think you are a monkey, and I will make you own it while laughing at you.

Throughout much of “Pleasures and Palaces,” Griggles eats, bloviates, flaunts his munificence, and blasphemes. At the end, he returns to his home world, Apateon. (In Annals of Klepsis, Lafferty describes Apateon as a trading planet without ethics—probably with Darwin and Griggles in mind.) This return is both a literal homecoming and a symbolic phylogenetic regression, punctuated by a series of philosophical jokes. Griggles goes deep back into Planet Africa, so to speak, to humanity’s supposed ancestor: a female primate wielding one of the earliest tools.

That tool? An anthropologist might tell you it is a hoe, but they are wrong. It was no agricultural implement; it’s a shit scraper. Humanity’s primitive forebears, Lafferty tells us, “lived knee-deep in their own ordure.” Their caves are full of the stuff. When Griggles returns, shit is flying through the air because there was so much of it in his home cave that you’d knock your head against the roof. His mom is working the scraper, literally shoveling it. Lafferty spins this idea from second line of the second verse of the old American standard “Home, Sweet Home.”

An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain, Oh, give me my low, thatched cottage again, The birds singing gaily that come at my call, Give me them with that peace of mind, dearer than all. Home! Home! sweet, sweet Home! |: There's no place like Home! :| — John Howard “Home, Sweet Home” (1823)

Which means that after pages of watching Griggles gorge himself and glorify his own stomach and intellect, he arrives home to a cave full of excrement. It is from the first line of “Home, Sweet Home” that Lafferty titled the story:

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble there's no place like home! A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere.

And there are other references to the lyrics.

Now let’s go through “Pleasures and Palaces” slower and keep in mind that this is a story about an arrogant, self-righteous, nostalgic simian, with the satirical target being readers who accept any form of human evolution.

When we meet Griggles Swing, Lafferty puffs him up as if he was Louis Pasteur crossed with Andrew Mellon. He is cosmopolitan and enigmatic. He is a swinger, the story's term for a rare, complete person in a society that now favors specialization. Griggles is "vivid and powerful, high-spirited and vigorous." He is also a master genetic engineer who pioneers the system of fractured and specialized persons that made his own type of complete person obsolete for reasons of economy.

As I said, most of the story is about eating, so has Philippians 3:19 hanging over it:

Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.

Think stomach worship.

Over several evenings, Swing dines with his four closest friends (the dining is the “Pleasures” part of the title, the story breaking into uneven halves). Each friend is a brilliant specialized person of Swing’s own making: Belinda Greenglow, Victor Hornspoon, Abel Riordan, and Mary Irish. The joke seems to be that their fields of expertise are hyper-civilized refinements of tricks you could teach a super chimp to perform for a camera.

We see this in the following character introductions:

“There are some roles that no person can act out unless he owns them, though Abel Riordan could fill almost any role that you could imagine. The best actor can fill roles a little bit above his living station, but not much above it. Abel was not an actor though; he was one of the specialized doers.”

“There are some physical gestures that not everyone can make; but there was not any gesture that Mary Irish could not execute. She found cameras turned on her constantly to record her gestures for instruction films to show to the young.”

“There are some jokes that not everyone can tell, but find one that Victor Hornspoon couldn't!”

“There are some clothes that not everyone can wear, but Belinda Greenglow could wear anything.”

During his first dinner, with Belinda Greenglow in Singapore, Swing's origins become the central topic. While flawlessly consuming satay directly off its red-hot skewer (you hold a lot of drool on your tongue to pull this off), he deflects her questions, only saying that his home is a place of overweening pride and that its people possess a unique ability. “We flew,” Swing states simply. “We flew through the air.” The evening ends, as is his custom, with Swing making a public appearance and donating a million local dollars to a people-improvement hospital. Griggles considers this a basic requirement of a civilized man.

The eating pattern continues in more meetings across the globe. Dining with Victor Hornspoon on the impossibly tough falsoa-ma-malie, which they both tear apart with their own teeth, Swing discusses his genetic methods. He says that he does not build upon existing traits but rather refines them: "We build down... We carve out. We sculpt." The raw material for this work, he says, is a primal genetic stock he calls the "Magnificent Blanks." In another meeting, he acknowledges having been voted the most civilized person on earth, a contest whose sophisticated rules he himself engineered.

In his last dinner before a long-planned journey, Swing meets with Mary Irish in Flanders. This is the most brilliant part of the story: eating the primordial stew from which life originated if one believes in abiogenesis, which of course Lafferty didn’t (“More Worlds Than One?”). Swing tells Mary he is going home for the first time in years because "I feel the need of renewal," and confirms that the ability to fly is a physical trait requiring extraordinary power in the arms and shoulders. His cosmic self-assurance is on full display this night. He challenges the axiom that pride leads to a fall. "Pride goes before an ascent, I know," Swing says. "Pride is what fuels an ascent." After his final public speech and customary million-dollar donation, he gets ready to leave.

With the eating done, Griggles Swing travels to the remote trader planet Apateon and ventures deep into its back country, Joseph Conrad-style. This requires a multi-day journey through swamps and thorn barriers. At last, he arrives at a cliff formation known as The Palaces. There, he finds his people: magnificent, large-brained, ape-like beings who are swinging and leaping through the tops of giant trees with incredible power and grace. The story ends as Griggles Swing approaches a motherly ape vigorously cleaning ordure from a cave with the stone tool. She chimps out at him and utters what was presumably the first real word:

"Grik—gri—Griggles!" she cried in recognition. "Hi mom," Swing said. The Swinger was home.

This story draws on a long line of satirists who use food as a vehicle for exposing human vice. Lafferty uses this to great effect in Not to Mention Camels (1976) and in “Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!” (1977). The textbook example of the tradition is Petronius’s Satyricon, where Petronius satirizes Trimalchio and the Roman ideal of luxuria, taking aim at the urban vulgarity and pretentiousness of the nouveau riche. Trimalchio is a freedman who flaunts his immense wealth with ostentatious banquets and absurd displays of extravagance, and he becomes Petronius’s vehicle for mocking the moral decay and lack of culture among those who mistake excess for refinement.

One of my favorite passages from Petronius (because it is just so damn gross) catches this food-fault dynamic:

Turning his head, Trimalchio saw what was going on. "Friends," he remarked, "I ordered pea-hen's eggs set under the hen, but I'm afraid they're addled, by Hercules I am; let's try them anyhow, and see if they're still fit to suck." We picked up our spoons, each of which weighed not less than half a pound, and punctured the shells, which were made of flour and dough, and as a matter of fact, I very nearly threw mine away for it seemed to me that a chick had formed already, but upon hearing an old experienced guest vow, "There must be something good here," I broke open the shell with my hand and discovered a fine fat fig-pecker, imbedded in a yolk seasoned with pepper.

And Lafferty gives us his version of this same kind of scene several times in "Pleasures and Palaces," swapping out Trimalchio’s luxuria for Griggles’s Darwinian superbia.

Could even Swing and Abel Riordan eat beef bawlie splendidly? It hadn't the challenge of some foods, and a challenge is always an element in splendor. It wasn't as dangerous to the tongue as was the satay... It wasn't as iron-flesh tough as was the falsoa-ma-malie. But it had a life of its own. It bawled in a loud and disconcerting fashion. Some people said that it was the jokers in the Mule Box Kitchen who made the bawling sound with bullroarers whenever a customer cut into or bit into the ‘beef bawlie’. This is not true. The beef moved of itself and it sounded of itself. Nothing that has ever lived can ever be completely dead, and the ‘beef bawlie’ at the Mule Box in K.C. is a testament of this. But, yes, Swing and Riordan did eat it splendidly. All things great and small are done splendidly by truly urbane persons.”

One of the most interesting aspects of all this is how Lafferty desacralizes the zoon anthropikon in Griggles’s Magnificent Blanks. As I have written several times on this blog, Lafferty is fascinated by man’s praeternatural graces in Eden, and he floats the idea that man once had all the animals within him. After the fall, this changed. Man shrank and incurred the schizo-gash. I think that in “Pleasures and Palaces,” Lafferty refigures his typical way of depicting the Fall, making it a technocratic feat. One way to say this is that Griggles imposes the Fall onto others through the engineering of the special persons. Unlike Adam, Griggles left the "paradise" of Apateon voluntarily and can go back.

For example, consider how we get the two states of being: the original "complete person" (the Edenic state Darwin-correlate) and the new "fractured and specialized persons" (the post-Fall state Darwin-correlate).

Griggles Swing was called the ‘swinger,’ and not merely from the consonance of his name. It was an old term. A complete person, vivid and powerful, high-spirited and vigorous, multi-talented and of a many-dimensioned intelligence . . . had once been called a ‘swinger’. With the coming into favor of more fractured and specialized persons, the old swinger-type of the complete person had nearly disappeared . . .

Here, Lafferty makes it clear that what appears to us as a metaphysical event is, within the Griggles story world, a calculated technological choice made by the complete persons themselves for reasons of efficiency.

It was the swingers themselves who had done the most to extinguish their own type. In no field had the complete swinger been stronger than in that of genetic engineering. And, as genetic engineers, they had seen the advantage of developing specialized persons. This was a necessity for the advancement of the human condition. "Nine specialized persons can do almost anything that one complete person can do," was one of the sayings of the genetic engineers, ‘and it is much easier to obtain nine specialized persons than one complete person.’ It was really a question of economy.”

Instead of the zoon anthropikon, we are given the Darwinian substitute, the Magnificent Blanks.

“From what stones do we sculpt, Swing? Is it from the ‘Magnificent Blanks’ that you sometimes speak of?” “Yes, and there are such things . . . The essence of the ‘Magnificents’ is that they should be large-brained and long-lived and vigorous; and that they should have a certain style, which is the same thing as grace, or as power-in-balance. And the essence of the ‘Blanks’ is a sort of hairy invisibility, a condition in which nobody will look at them twice, in which nobody will—”

And finally, there is the whole carving-down business—the technocratic act of imposing the schizo-gash. Griggles Swing explains that he doesn't add to people; he subtracts from the wholeness of the Magnificent Blanks to create the specialists.

“When we build excellences into human persons, Victor, we do not build up or upon. We build down, which is another way of saying that we refine. We cut down. We carve out. We sculpt.”

With all this in mind, “Pleasures and Palaces” stands as another of Lafferty’s satirical responses to what he saw as the excesses of the humanists’ appropriation of Darwin. It’s a strange story. It isn’t exactly advanced Lafferty, but you’d need to know Lafferty pretty well to get what’s happening.

Pleasures and Palaces Notes.pdf

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