Postfictional Elements

In Germany, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, was plainly a post-novel in a postfictional form. But the structured world did not end everywhere at quite the same time. In the United States there was a brilliant “last hurrah” of novels for several decades after the fictional form had disappeared in Europe, and Cozzen’s By Love Possessed, published in 1957, might still be considered as a valid fictional work. That special form of fiction, the Short Story, was of even shorter duration, beginning with Hoffmann in Germany and Washington Irving in the United States, both writing real short stories from about 1819, and continuing to the Last Tales of Isak Dinesen in 1955. There are apparent exceptions to all this, but they are only apparent. The thesis is that prose fiction was a structured form and that it became impossible in a society that had become unstructured, that prose fiction was a reflection of an intricate construct and that it ceased when it no longer had anything to reflect. A shadow simply can’t last long after the object that has cast it has disappeared.

Spitballing.

It may be too much to say that Lafferty had a complete theory of fiction, but he certainly had a vision of it. One part of that vision concerns postfictional elements. They are my subject today. The distinction between fictional and postfictional elements is not one between truth and falsehood. Postfictional elements can be just as invented as fictional ones. As Lafferty liked to point out, fiction and fact have related etymologies: both are words about making, fictio and factum.

Prose fiction, on Lafferty’s account, is a narrow historical form produced within an intelligible common world. It happened to arise in the West and lasted only a few hundred years. As that world became unstructured, transitory consensus realities replaced the common order that had made fiction possible. The process was not a sudden blowout. Prose fiction went flat like a tire losing air over time, whether through a slow leak, natural permeation, a compromised seal, or some other failure. Looking back, Lafferty said that the change had occurred within two generations.

Virginia Woolf made a similar claim when she wrote that “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” Lafferty would have disagreed about what changed. Human nature did not change; the world collapsed, and people remained stuck being human. The claim may seem naive, but it is Lafferty’s view, and I happen to think he was right. He stated the matter as plainly as he could. He was not trying to be hypersophisticated. His point was basic: the conditions under which fiction could be made had changed because the background conditions of social existence had changed.

What, then, does a structured world require? Several things, all at once. An irreducible complexity, as it were. It requires persons to whom actions can be credited, institutions with recognizable purposes, obligations with public force, and goods and evils that are distinguishable even when characters mistake one for the other. That much minimally, I think. And those conditions must work in concert. Lafferty called their concord music. When he writes of the music breaking, or of youth culture possessing plenty of sound and amplification but no music, this is what he means. He really did dislike electric guitars, but he regarded them as a symptom rather than a cause. For him, the cause was the loss of the structure.

Prose fiction does for the structured world what a composer does for music. It arranges fictional persons, actions, causes, and consequences into a consequential whole. A postfictional element no longer serves this order. The modern memoir is one result. I hate memoirs, but their rise makes sense within Lafferty’s theory. As a replacement for prose fiction, the memoir turns inward because the common music has been lost. Its assertion of the self against that loss is also a cry of despair, since it treats the self as music enough. Yet no whole self can be made from postfictional elements alone. Each substitutes for one of the substantial relations upon which fiction depends. Such substitutions are a major theme in Lafferty. In “Sex and Sorcery,” stimulus takes over from eros; in Past Master, mechanical or programmed motion replaces human action; and in story after story, pose stands in for character, décor trashes social order, publicity or consensus replaces history.

Lafferty named these postfictional substitutions. In one nonce list, he ticked them off as “personal posing and peacock posturing,” “pornography,” “gadgetry,” “charades,” “scene-set formalities,” “new journalism,” “nonfiction novels,” “plain truculence,” and “branches of nostalgia.” Elsewhere, he called them “the seven Ps.” He also had names for what happened when they choked out the healthy air, among them “heroic tedium” and the “trashed-life principle.” These names identify substitutions for the substantial relations that fiction once drew from the common world. Yet one can examine almost any page of late Lafferty and identify its postfictional elements using his own categories. He inundates the reader with them, as if to say, “If this is what you want, I will give it to you in such a thumping wave that you must look through it or drown.”

It seems that a work may contain any number of postfictional elements and still be predominantly fiction if its larger form compensates for their insufficiency. Lafferty certainly seems to have regarded Maugham and Bennett as two such mixed cases, in which fiction buckled under the weight of postfictional elements but stayed fiction. A novel loses its prose fictional ontology when its mimetic elements cease to belong to a total representation and no longer indicate the social whole. At that point, postfictional elements begin to substitute for the substantial relations that once gave the work its unity.

This is what Lafferty meant when he described many novels as mixed forms. Storytelling continued as the structured world weakened, but its materials no longer held together as they once had. A book could retain the appearance of a novel while lacking the common world that had made the novel possible. Notes blared, but the music was gone. By 1962, Lafferty thought, the postfictional had become dominant. Where the structured world had once supplied unity, postfictional forms now attempted to impose it by force of will, by sheer postfictional force.

It helps explain what mimesis meant for Lafferty. Mimesis is the imitation of action within a world already understood to contain agents, purposes, customs, consequences, and possible objects of correct judgment. What Aristotle called plot selects a limited field from that world and arranges its parts into an action that a reader can recognize and judge. The aesthetic is ethical because the question is whether the work’s form preserves the structure of intelligibility within which the society it represents exists.

The old-fashioned fictional world, on this account, was a world in which reality made claims independent of private will. Deeds could be publicly attributed, and the past bore upon the present in a unified way. False accounts could in principle be corrected. The first condition established moral intelligibility. The others established historical publicity. Together they supplied the order within which action could become the subject of fiction. Mimesis held, and the postfictional was held in check.

Enter Og, Lafferty's primal storyteller. Story is infinitely bigger than prose fiction, and it existed before prose fiction and continues after prose fiction ceases to supply affirmations of and reinforcements for an intelligible common world. This must mean that the postfictional is not wholly bad, since it is a cousin to the prefictional insofar as both are simply story. Readers see oral storytelling in Lafferty and liken it, perhaps, to the prefictional. Lafferty himself encouraged this comparison by playing up the image of the caveman as storyteller. His own orality on the page, however, was postfictional rather than prefictional. This is something people tend to get wrong about him.

Lafferty increasingly constructed his work from postfictional elements. Today I read an old review of Annals of Klepsis in which the author predicted it would not be remembered as one of Lafferty’s great works because it gave the reader too much to keep up with. That judgment assumes that Lafferty expected the average reader to keep up with everything. I don't think he did, and I don't think its quality primarily depends on tracking lines of development.

A related mistake is to assume that postfictional means anti-realist. An element is postfictional not because it is unreal but because it no longer belongs to an intelligible common order with anchorage beyond itself. Yet the work may still possess an intelligible total order at another level, an esoteric order concealed beneath apparent disorder. This esoteric order is the ur-ground of storytelling, what, following Lafferty’s usage in Not to Mention Camels, I call Prime.

One example might make this concrete. In Annals of Klepsis, Quasimodo provides one of Lafferty’s best connections to Prime, this after an onslaught of entertaining disorder. Near the end of the novel, which nearly drowns one with postfictional elements, Quasimodo gives figurative expression to the argument that even postfictional elements might have grounding in the following exchange

“Quasimodo, my unusual friend,” Thorn still quizzed him, “are all the people of all the worlds only imaginings in your mind?” “I don’t think so. My mind has become pretty barren ground lately. But, yes, all of them are in my mind in complete detail, the billions of people on Gaea-Earth and on Camiroi and on Astrobe, the millions and hundreds of millions of people on the other fourteen inhabited planets. I know every hair on the head of every one of them, every pore in the skin of every one of them, every bacterium in the entrails of each one of them. I know every cell in every body of them, I know every thought in every brain of them. This is so. I do not imagine these things about my imaginings. They are clear and troublesome facts. But that is not what you asked me. You asked whether they were only so many imaginings in my mind, and I don’t think so. Are the images in a mirror only images in that mirror, or may they not have primary forms outside of the mirror also? For a reflection, may there not be something to be reflected?”

I used to say that Lafferty wrote postfictional novels. By that phrase, I meant to distinguish his work from postmodern fiction. It is better to say that he sometimes wrote long stories in which postfictional elements scatter like iron filings but take their shape from an eschatological field. The discontinuity of those elements cannot give the stories unity. Any unity must come from a final cause, and Lafferty leaves the reader to decide whether such a cause can be found.

In Lafferty’s longer works, the lost, narrow field of prose fiction becomes visible in anagogical endings that point beyond the postfictional condition: Freddy’s leap, the Serpent’s Egg, the lightning in Past Master and at the close of Annals of Klepsis, the spirit moving at the end of The Elliptical Grave, the children’s eyes burning with green fire at the end of The Reefs of Earth, and other final moments in which the scattered elements suddenly disclose a directing cause outside themselves.

Lafferty’s apparent disorder, then, need not mark either the breakdown of literary form or his inability to achieve it. It may be his attempt to invent a form adequate to a world in which the ordinary structures required for fiction have already broken down, one a little too eager to be happy with the pseudo-coherence of postfictional elements. If so, autotelic world-building is not central to his novels. Most genre readers have been trained to look for varieties of subcreation, however, and their desire for worlds that hang together of themselves will therefore be frustrated.

After the fiction/postfiction diagrams, I've included a toy for moving through postfictional elements.