01 “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” (1978)
Updated: 4 days ago
Advanced Lafferty.
“Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” is the only short story by Lafferty with the complexity of his most difficult novels. In the coming days, I’ll write several posts about it and share my notes. Today, I’ll look at its narrative technique. To get a grip on the story, I think we need to X-ray it. I’ll begin with its narrative levels, using these terms:
Diegetic: The primary narrative level. In “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” this is the world in which Bentley invents his television system, produces his dramas, and dies. His invention and its effects belong to this world.
Intradiegetic: Events and characters within the main story world. Bentley’s direction of Clarinda, his jealousy of Apollo, and his promises to his actresses are intradiegetic. These actions belong to the lives of the people making the dramas. Selenium transmits their private words into the recorded performances.
Extradiegetic: The act of telling the primary narrative. The unnamed narrator recounts Bentley’s career and his own efforts to preserve the receiver.
Metadiegetic: A narrative within the narrative, such as one of Bentley’s performed fictions. The Perils of Patience is one such narrative: its heroine and flaming wagon belong to a drama produced within Bentley’s world.
1. The Frame: The Modern Narrator and the Chestnut Roaster
Lafferty begins in the narrator’s present. The unnamed “I” who purchased the old ‘receiver’ for $18 intermittently comments on Bentley’s story. This narrator describes:
At the beginning of the frame story, Bentley’s short-lived ‘television’ system of 1873, which preceded Nipkow’s.
At the end of the story, the predicament of trying to raise funds to keep the device.
Lafferty gives us little information about the narrator. From outside Bentley’s dramas, the narrator describes Bentley’s precedence over Nipkow, his million-dollar-a-day income, and the crazy problems of the hot checks and the chestnut orchard inheritance.
The outer frame does not give us a fixed record of Bentley’s dramas. They change with each replay, and the narrator describes what has become visible and audible in them.
The narrator is extradiegetic in telling the story and homodiegetic in participating in it as the receiver’s owner. Bentley’s directorial control weakens through the “trough” dramas, most clearly when the unknown hand changes the casting in The Vampires of Varuma, Drama #10.
2. The Metadiegetic Dramas: Fiction Within Bentley’s Story
A. Thirteen Dramas Within the Story
The matrices below show how the thirteen dramas overlap. The performed dramas are stories within the story of Bentley’s television enterprise. The twelfth survives as an unproduced libretto; the thirteenth records the probate proceedings.
The performed fictions have their own settings (the Barrens of New Jersey for #1, the Tri-County Fair for #3, the Crimean War for #5), casts (including Clarinda Calliope, Leslie Whitemansion, and Kirbac Fouet), and genres (chase thriller, murder mystery, pastoral, gothic horror, western).
B. Selenium: “Slow Light” and “Ghostliness”
Bentley’s selenium device preserves private conversations among the people making the plays and transmits them into the recorded performances:
Private Conversations. Clarinda and Bentley’s arguments about money, trust funds, and murder intrude on the performances. What ought to be backstage becomes audible to the narrator watching the replay. The dramas expose dealings Bentley would prefer to control.
The Changing Replay. Each thirty-minute live drama is recorded in a single frame: “that picture took on a life and growth of its own”. Replays alter what the narrator can see and hear. The time of the performance merges with the time of its replay.
In The Great Bicycle Race, the fiction mixes with Bentley’s finances and sexual manipulations.
3. Disguises, Private Voices, and Recurring Images
Selenium records the performances and deceptions within the plays as well as those among the actors making them.
Clarinda’s Multiple Roles: In Drama #3 (The Bicycle Race), Clarinda plays both Rakesly Rivertown and the masked alternate rider without Bentley recognizing her. Her deception helps turn his own drama against his betting scheme.
Double-Exposure Scenes: In Drama #5 (Crimean Days), Clarinda claims to play Apollo as well as her other roles. Bentley protests that he has seen them together, kissing; she invokes illusion and double exposure. The story leaves her claim doubtful. Later, the narrator identifies Apollo only as Bentley’s possible murderer.
The Returning Hay Wagon: The flaming hay wagon from #1 appears in #13’s hearing. This is metalepsis: an image from a performed fiction enters the proceedings over its maker’s estate. The wagon terrifies the witnesses but does them no harm.
Private life enters the plays, while an image from a play enters the probate hearing.
4. The Probate Hearing: Pettifoggers of Philadelphia (#13)
A. The Superimposed Meetings
Drama #13 records the aftermath of Bentley’s murder:
A probate hearing in the world of Bentley and his actors after his death.
This hearing is “recorded” or “superimposed” by the same selenium device in Bentley’s private den.
Ghosts and images return: Bentley’s ghost restates his promises, and the flaming hay wagon from #1 breaks into the hearing.
At the probate hearing, the living claimants and the recorded figures occupy the same room. Lafferty writes, “there seemed to be several meetings in this room superimposed on one another.”
B. Metalepsis at the Hearing
Bentley’s recorded promises become evidence about his estate, and the hay wagon from The Perils of Patience interrupts the proceedings. The scene includes:
Extradiegetic: The narrator is telling us about Drama #13.
Intradiegetic: The probate hearing after Bentley’s death.
Recorded figures: Bentley’s words and image, followed by the wagon from his first drama.
The hearing is itself preserved as the apocryphal thirteenth drama. The narrator says the meetings cannot be sorted out without destroying their effect: together they form a theatrical meeting that never took place as a single event.
5. What the Recordings Reveal
The narrator learns about the productions from private voices and recurring images, which:
Show the reader that the “official show” is incomplete or illusory.
Expose the money deals, manipulation, and threats behind the performances.
Bring the makers’ lives into the plays.
The later dramas show more of the struggle between Clarinda and Bentley. The probate hearing settles the estate, but the outer story leaves the receiver’s future in doubt.
6. Bentley’s Death and Posthumous Performance
Bentley is stabbed in his opera box during Drama #11. His later appearance in #13 is a projection or re-creation preserved by the wired walls. Lafferty turns the maker of the dramas into a figure in one he did not formally produce.
7. The Dramas and Their Frame
The story repeatedly moves between the people making the dramas, their performances, and the narrator’s changing view of them:
The extradiegetic narrator supplies historical details and comic commentary.
The series contains eleven produced dramas, an unproduced libretto, and a posthumous hearing preserved as a thirteenth drama.
Clarinda doubles roles, private voices interrupt performances, and scenes recur in later dramas.
Pettifoggers brings Bentley’s recorded promises and the first drama’s hay wagon into the hearing over his estate.
The recordings expose what the performances half hide, but they also change with use. The narrator’s account of the past depends on a record that keeps acquiring things its creators did not intend.
The story ends with an appeal for $3.52 to keep the battered receiver.
The narrative levels:
The next post examines the story's metaphysics of time.
These PNG tables map the thirteen dramas and the frame story. The first records each drama’s plot, cast, overheard voices, selenium effects, and motifs; the second follows the motifs across the series. Open a panel to enlarge it.
Bibliographical Note
Completed April 14, 1975. First published in Universe 8, edited by Terry Carr (Doubleday, 1978); collected in Iron Tears (Edgewood Press, 1992).
Lafferty’s work-history card records submission to Virginia Kidd on April 14, 1975, and sale to Terry Carr for Universe on March 5, 1976.
Sources: R. A. Lafferty, work-history card for “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” R. A. Lafferty papers, 1979-002, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” Internet Speculative Fiction Database, accessed October 24, 2026, https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?67513=.
