Post 400

It has been busy around here, with the purchasing of a new house, the packing, and the end of the academic semester and angry students, one of my jobs being to pour bureaucratic oil onto troubled water. Hence, the unusual silence on the blog. It all just happened to correspond to post 400.

By my heterodox count (it includes pieces such as “Claudius and Charles”), there are 265 Lafferty short stories. At this point, I have written something about all but three of them, which means that, for all its flaws, this blog-as-an-open notebook is one of the more comprehensive Lafferty resources online. Anyone interested in Lafferty can, I hope, come here and learn more about the stories, fragments, and unpublished works, albeit through the screen of my own tendentious biases. Even with the biases, my approach to writing about Lafferty has had two ongoing aims: to make arguments about Lafferty that might be wrong because they say something, even if that means being polemical, and to provide as many informational shortcuts as I can, so that people who want to go deeper can piggyback on resources and build better because Lafferty is an important writer.

Coming to the end of my first pass through organizing the short stories, I have been thinking about what it means to know a writer’s work, as well as all the locked doors to the Land of Lafferty. First, there is the overwhelming importance of compositional order, which has been disastrously obscured by Lafferty’s publication dates and lack of interest in them. The first person to see this clearly was Andrew Ferguson, who did important work a decade ago in clarifying the compositional order of Lafferty’s first ten years of writing. Compositional order does not matter if one wants disconnected stories, or if one does not believe that Lafferty was engineering something large across hundreds of short stories and dozens of novels. But if one is confused by a story, the flanking stories matter immensely. So does the novel he was working on at the time. These things are essential, etc.

Then there is the unavailability of the work; the modal difficulty created by Lafferty’s voracious intellectual interests; and his extreme Menippean informational compression, which is not ornamental but structural: allusions, etymologies, references, in-canon levels of reality, reduplicated characters, recurring locations, and recurring tropes. There is also the disarming orality of all those pragmatic markers, people! Yes, those are among the ways Lafferty hides his deepest thought and most intense feeling. Finally, there are the larger emergent patterns: ghost story, the Oceanic, the Fall, Flatland, prose fiction, consensus reality, and control. And there is his pervasive use of unusual techniques such as counterfiguration, along with extreme didacticism joined to equally extreme authorial secrecy.

One of the reasons I started this blog was strong disagreement with a line in the SFE entry on Lafferty. It reads, “It could almost be said that his entire unknowable corpus constitutes, in the mind’s eye, either an aleph (see Jorge Luis Borges), or a basilisk, or both at once. He and Gene Wolfe have more than a shared faith in common.” Lafferty would call that dog dirt. His corpus is not unknowable. It only seems so because of neglect and the accidents of publication history. One of the pleasures of this hobby project has been getting to know the whole shebang. At this point, I have read all of the stories and novels, published and unpublished, more than once. Much still puzzles me, but this is not an unknowable corpus. The unmapped is not unknowable but unmapped, so get out your clinometer.

My plan is to wrap up the remaining stories and then move on to another phase. I know I want to do a full reading of East of Laughter in a series of posts, because the novel is not well understood and is one of Lafferty’s great esoteric works. It also contains one of his final large ideas: the search for a world metaphor, and the computer as a counter-fact-making machine whose inner secret is metaphor. Over the last week, I reread Rabelais with that in mind. In both writers, one finds the problem of foreground and background. Readers of Lafferty’s novels who expect the small satisfactions of foreground closure or character development will be disappointed. Background logics are essential for grasping Lafferty’s larger blueprints.

I’ll add that both Rabelais and Lafferty quarrel with literary convention in a way that bears on backgrounded form at the expense of conventionalized but foregrounded forms. For Rabelais, the exhausted culture, or dead form, appeared in a double shape: heroic romance and scholastic sclerosis. Both crashed against the printing press and the new humanist education of men such as Erasmus and Thomas More. For Lafferty, the exhausted form was long-form fiction. People in a post-literate, unstructured culture still read things that looked like novels, but those things were like philosophical zombies.

So that is the status quo: three more stories, then East of Laughter. After that, I want to do something larger, perhaps a chapter-by-chapter reading of In a Green Tree or the Coscuin Chronicles. Ferguson has done a good but in my view sanitized intro to Argo, which needs to take into account the funny uncle as part of Lafferty’s demiurge theme. Montejo may have things to teach me about Green Tree. I try to learn all I can from him. So it will probably be Coscuin unless by some miracle Green Tree is released before I wrap up East of Laughter. I look forward to the publication of Green Tree and have much to say about it. I have come to see it as Lafferty’s lost-in-the-wilderness work.