Reading The Elliptical Grave

Picking up on how Lafferty likes to leave his readers in states of Christian burial, I want to hammer out some thoughts about The Elliptical Grave. It's not an easy book, not even by Lafferty's most demanding standards. Ironically, it was published in a layout that can sap you dead in your tracks. Dan Knight, who printed it, knew from the outset that it would demand a lot from readers. When he decided to publish more of Lafferty's work, he asked the man what his least publishable unpublished novel was. Lafferty's answer was—you guessed it—The Elliptical Grave.

Here, Lafferty writes for himself more than he usually does, and in his post-1968 novels, at least, he always writes first for himself. That accounts for its density and it’s wild disregard for narrative conventions he typically uses, such as his minimal character character follow-through. Though short, the book sprawls into wildly strange territories. Suppose you're energized by the opening Eddington epigraph about the "next great mutating of mankind," expecting the transmutational theatrics of Fourth Mansions and Past Master. In that case, you may find the ending anticlimactic, bewilderingly quiet, even.

Lafferty also pushes ideas hard in this one. I like this, He leaves them hermetic, forcing the reader to sit with contradictions and offering no simple resolution. But writing The Elliptical Grave seems to have taught Lafferty something important: how to manage a large cast of characters in a novel (he had already mastered how to do this in the short story form), each carrying forward parts of the plot they do not grasp. He wields the technique to brilliant effect in East of Laughter and Serpent's Egg. Here, Lafferty learns to juggle in a new way. It's not just about having a lot of characters—something he enjoys—but about distributing narrative momentum across an improbable network of characters. This is the key difference between the active ensemble in East of Laughter and the static crowd drinking at the Old Wooden Ship in The Devil is Dead, a faux Homeric catalogue.

And while The Elliptical Grave is inscrutable in some ways, it is pretty straightforward in others. It's Lafferty's Lost Race novel. It is his H. Rider Haggard adventure, his Edgar Rice Burroughs romance. Imagine a strange and exotic landscape and characters like Professor Challenger. It is much easier to read once you catch on to the The Elliptical Grave being a Lost Race novel. I won't belabor the point, but its narrative opens within the context of a Prometheus Club lecture among "passionate learning people," with a Challenger-type, Professor Reventlo, lecturing about Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthals. We travel with him to the Valley of the White Goat, a place name as Haggard-esque as one can imagine, and when we get there, we find the lost race, the twist being that the lost race is . . . us. Its trajectory is toward what our race lost through the Fall.

Lafferty neatly sets it all up with Professor Reventlo's opening lecture. Delivered, as Joseph Abramswell notes, with a slow gravity, as if engraving his words on stone, Reventlo attacks the notion of human progress as the big story of humanity. Take that, H. G. Wells. This inverts the classic Lost Race plot in which members of a modern civilization view themselves as superior to the primitives. Reventlo challenges this, saying, "our almost universally accepted idea concerning the early state and the gradual development of mankind as going from the basic and the simple to the intricate and compounded." He adds, "the facts are presently held in almost totally reversed fashion." Here lies the foundation for what follows. By rejecting linear progress, Lafferty will introduce paradoxes about time, with humanity being an echo of a "lost race." Fitting into his larger program, this opens the possibility of restoration. In Reventlo's words, "man really did make his appearance in high-styled and richly-gifted complexity, and that he fell from there. We began in golden wealth, and we have come down to bare poverty."

If you haven't read the book, the entire opening chapter merits careful reading because, once it wraps up, Lafferty refuses any further hand-holding. you are on your own. Reventlo's core belief, presented clearly, declaratively, defines the novel's terms: the story will be an expedition toward our lost state. Here it tells you what was lost: "This is man in the beginning when he still had the full light inside him. This is man when he possessed all his gifts, before his deterioration began." And when Reventlo presents the skull, later revealed to be an artwork made of Reventlo by Catherine January, in one of the book's most powerful images, Lafferty does something very sly. It’s a test. Will you pass it? Do you see a memento mori in Reventlo's hand? Lafferty wants you to see a memento vivere.

So, what happens in this complicated little book? No Lafferty novel is easy to summarize, but here is the minimum you should know. Driven by Reventlo's theory that humanity has declined from a state of primordial magnificence rather than risen from primordial slime, a university expedition travels to the "Valley of the White Goat Illusion," a suspected portal to this lost origin manifested as a vast, time-altering ellipse, the valley itself. This region is paradoxical in many ways, proving to be both an archive and perhaps a trap. The explorers get stuck inside the valley's central White Pavilion, which enters a state of "Time Stasis," the "Elliptical Grave" of the title. The book ends without resolution, uncertain of the expedition's fate within the elliptical grave.

A brief detour.

Why call it an elliptical grave? Lafferty takes the image from a grave with its depression of soil above the positioning of the underground coffin. Although not his first use of the metaphysics of the ellipse (it appears, for instance, in Arrive at Easterwine), The Elliptical Grave offers his fullest development. And getting a handle on it is important if you want to make much headway.

Hold up a coin (a true circle) so its face is perpendicular to your line of sight. You see a circle. Now tilt the coin: its orthographic or perspective projection onto your retina (or a sheet of glass) becomes an ellipse. Nothing has happened to the coin itself; only your viewpoint moved.

Descriptive geometry formalizes this by showing that any parallel or central projection of a plane circle unless the circle's plane is parallel to the projection plane, is an ellipse, which leads to the artists' rule of thumb: every time you draw a circular rim that's leaned away from you, the top of a mug, a wheel, the pupil of an eye, you had better draw an ellipse, because that's what the circle looks like when "in motion" relative to your eye.

Now, imagine you have a circle that fits perfectly inside another circle exactly twice its size. If you let the smaller circle roll around the inner edge of the larger circle without sliding (just smoothly rolling) and you follow a single point on its edge, you'll see that point move along an oval-shaped path, an ellipse.

Lafferty does a lot with this idea in the novel. The ellipse will be motion and change, transition and transformation, like turning the coin in your hand. It is also a zone of altered reality, creating temporal and spatial paradoxes exemplified by the White Goat Valley (where time moves slower) and the White Pavilion, a time machine. And is a metaphase cross-cut of stratified time that extends into the air. I read that this temporal capability arises because the ellipse's two foci link two distinct points in time, allowing the elliptical grave to be a pathway between origin and destination. In contrast, the circle has one focus and indicates eternity, as expected.

Late in the novel, Dr. Otto explains the deeper meaning behind the ellipse: "The ellipse, having two foci, is a circle in motion or change... It is the shape of the grave after it has settled, of an ark, of a whale, of certain valleys." This idea builds on Reventlo's earlier insight about valleys ("'Valleys,' Joseph. 'Valleys' is the word... it is always 'valleys' that comes into the association," valleys that are elliptical. The Ark (Noah) and the whale (Jonah) are typological figures of Christ's burial and resurrection. The ellipse's two focal points are then, explicitly, the start and end, past and present, time and eternity, alpha and omega.

One reason the novel can be so disorienting is the ontological instability and illusion created by this elliptical zone. This plays on the other meaning of elliptical: writing and speech that is difficult to understand. Lafferty gives us a lot of that. He engineers our reading experience to reflect the confusion of being within the elliptical grave as soon as we enter the valley. Rosa Caprobianco, whose surname means "White Goat," describes her home: "The Valley that is named the 'White Goat Illusion' has such notes of preceding resonance. There is a compulsion... and a person can get killed by it all." This transitional zone, characterized by illusion, danger, and compulsion, eventually moves the reader inside the White Pavilion because approaching humanity's restoration means confronting—and passing through—deceptive realities. The Goat becomes the novel's primary symbol for this instability. "'The lines are drawn for the final battle, and only one question remains: whose side are the goats on?'"

What are the features of this Lost Race that is us? These are the "treasures the lost-race expedition seeks. Lafferty starts with language. Reventlo says that humanity did not climb upward from grunts and gestural fragments. It descended from a baroque and commanding tongue of immense power. He cites evidence. Look at ancient languages such as Chinese and Greek, offering examples like Russian 'aspects,' Portuguese conjugated infinitives, Icelandic numbers, and the multiple tenses and middle voice of Greek, and observe how even those tongues show signs of decay. Chinese once possessed a lexicon vibrant with inflection and rich morphology. There were dozens of cases and scores of tenses. Today, people see ruins. From these traces, Reventlo wants his students to know the power of the original language: words capable of doing real work. The decay of language, for Lafferty, is part of the Fall, an indicator of collapse and the loss of the cognitive and spiritual, even a subtraction of the human being itself.

Leading from this, the novel tosses out another idea: modern consciousness itself is a cage. Rosa Caprobianco asserts as much. Trepanning, she says, was originally performed not to release demons but to remove what she calls the "literacy nodule." Literacy obstructs pathways of lightning intuition and mental expansion. We read, and thus we forget how to see. Elsewhere, in the book, Lafferty will show other modes of perception. Bioscopic vision, for instance, offers shared cinematic dream experiences, and then there is Dr. Otto's quiet miracle of projected thought. The body once carried meanings: fingernails as almanacs, hands as calendars, skin as a navigational chart. Each person was a living archive of cosmic and personal significance. Getting to that again means passing through the elliptical grave to recover this embodied, intuitive knowledge.

Even then, it won't be easy. There will be enemies. Our old friend, Arpad Arutinov, names them in a fragment: Stoicheio and Lemures, jealous beings determined to sabotage the quest. They prepare false graves, set snares, and obscure the narrow path with illusions. Chief among their agents is Leon Yuri, like many of Lafferty's devils, a mechanism, here called a "device," identified by his mechanical curse—"12-121-212." He wants to obstruct, deceive, and annihilate.

Into this chaos, Lafferty throws in some acrobats, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald. We know they are guides, but where are they guiding the characters? They can contort across the ellipse, balanced on the boundary between time and eternity. Their knowledge is dangerous, making their deaths nearly certain. They communicate through signs: bee-dances, blood-letters, suffering. Their bioscopic returns are vaudeville with real agony, psychic Stations of the Cross wrapping up in torture and martyrdom. On the other hand, they are playful and radiant, and in The Elliptical Grave, this contrasts with the inertia threatening everyone else.

All of this sets the stage for the mutation jump, the leap into what was once humanity's original birthright, the preternatural gifts. If the book's opening epigraph hints that this jump is overdue, it will be irregular, prodigious, maybe catastrophic. Lucille Creighton says it plain: we don't know what it means, we don't know what it requires (18). But the time comes when the throw must be made. Il Trol names gives the big moment a name: the "White Billygoat." The big gamble.

I think of the novel's ending as Lafferty's private postscript to Past Master. You will remember that in the closing lines of that novel, he writes, "The spirit came down once on water and clay. Could it not come down on gell-cells and flux-fix? The sterile wood, whether of human or programmed tree, shall it fruit after all?" There, he left us with hope, awaiting the descent of the spirit, in the Christian grave.  In The Elliptical Grave, it finally happens: "Then the spirit came and moved over them." We are on the other side, but barely, and it's indeterminate.

So if you want to see Lafferty get as close as he can to that timeless, paradoxical non-moment, where circle meets ellipse between death and rebirth, "where there is no time to measure time by," read The Elliptical Grave. You will find it inside the White Pavilion.

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