"Scorners Seat" (1971/1973)

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. — Psalm 1:1–3

“Scorner’s Seat” is a pungent, funky slice of Lafferty—a story full of algae and sewer stench. It grew out of his correspondence with the poet Sheryl Smith and her interest in myth. The appearance of Grendel, for example, was an inside joke between them: Smith’s cat was named Grendel, and as publication approached, Lafferty told her to tell Grendel to be patient. The story is a send-up of Sir James Frazer’s sacred-king/dying god pattern in The Golden Bough—the ur-myth that a community’s fertility is bound to a ruler whose reign is deliberately limited and whose ritual death is required to renew the land, which had temendous influence on twentieth century literature, best known for its influence on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Shirly Jackson's "The Lottery."

Lafferty reenacts the Frazer pattern in the isolated, postapocalyptic enclave of Kyklopolis, where the Panic Past is preserved through a rigid cycle of appointing an autocratic Scorner. The Scorner reigns (usually for a year and a day, though sometimes a little longer) until his breaking-up, which is required to renew the land.

That is the way it was in Kyklopolis. The count was kept constant. This was rigidly enforced by the Scorner, who had to be such a hard man that in one year he would break topieces, being unable to bend.

This fertility cycle is deeply ironic because Kyklopolis also enforces strict population controls. This links "Scorners Seat" to Lafferty’s other anti-life tales (notably “Ishmael Into the Barrens”): “there may not be a birth till there has been a corresponding death,” a rule administered through the birth blessing. Such is the setting.

Beneath the surface of Kyklopolis, in the sealed underworld of Sewer Seven, we meet Roger Meta and Circle Shannon. They and the other designated heirs throw a party with methane-gas ghosts and navigate waters patrolled by Grendel. As heirs summoned by the dying telepath John Legacy, they come to understand that the town’s purification philosophy is flawed, with Lafferty's narrator filling us in on how Kyklopolis rigs the Frazer cycle. The Scorner's transmuting howl is not a miracle; it is a compounded wave (an audio trick) that turns the self-created pollution into the appearance of annual redemption. Kyklopolis’s cyclic life is thus entirely unnecessary, a religious fossil maintained by a society that has chosen isolation and self-contamination while the rest of the world seems to have moved on.

Another thought experiment about cyclical time, the story treats Frazer's loop as a prison. Lafferty's image for this in the story is the cyclic city of Kyklopolis itself, bounded by Circle Stones and lethal lightning. The townspeople exist to satisfy the ritual; in the story, they drag the terrified balloon-man Harker Skybroom onto the Scorner’s Seat to become the new autocrat, but Circle Shannon and Roger Meta reject the cycle. Roger Meta assumes the role of the Pilgrim and departs during the sanctioned pause in the lightning, but Circle refuses to stay, breaking the prohibition against a second pilgrim, rejecting the future of a "hopeless and empty woman" left behind. Like Ishmael in “Ishmael Into the Barrens,” she chooses what we might think of as linear movement. She defies the lightning death, which freezes and parts for her. Carrying the birth blessing and the quickening, they escape into the Countryside and World, proving the town’s laws permeable and delivering the story’s verdict on the wheel: “Wherever it begins, it ends right here.”

Which brings us back to Frazer. For someone of Lafferty’s generation, The Golden Bough was a monument, immensely influential and widely known. Lafferty was both intrigued by and critical of Frazer’s ideas. It is notable, I think, that the story excludes the Christological, which seems to be part of its critique. Kyklopolis is about compost, not resurrection. In a letter, Lafferty put it this way, "The notion that Christ was a fertility deity and that there were earlier stories about fertility deities and that therefore none of them can be true? But the Christus, the anointed king, is never a fertility figure."

Over two decades, Lafferty wrote a small cluster of stories that tear Frazer’s fertility schema apart, limb from limb. “Scorner’s Seat” is one of the best, and it deserves to be read alongside other forays into Frazer territory, like “The Only Tune He Could Play.”

Scorners Seat Notes.pdf

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