"Sex & Sorcery" (1973)

Slowly it wanders, — pauses, — creeps, — Anon it sparkles, — flashes and leaps; And ever as onward it gleaming goes A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws. And those who watch at that midnight hour From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as the wild light passes along, — "The Dong! — the Dong! The wandering Dong through the forest goes! The Dong! the Dong! The Dong with a luminous Nose!" — “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” Edward Lear (1877)

“What about the sex and sorcery. i don’t remember it,” Lafferty wrote in one of his late letters. His old Mexican typewriter was giving him trouble, so he decided to forgo capital letters. In another letter, Lafferty said he hoped “Sex & Sorcery” had not survived. He did not get his wish. “Sex & Sorcery” survived, a story set at the tail end of a hypersexualized twentieth century. It is a story I dislike, though it has its moments. Its protagonist, for instance, is a prominent pornographer named Jeb Porno. Toward the end of the story, Porno gets what he wants and is displayed in effigy as the “Man With the Luminous Dong”:

“I'm proud to say that I do,” I told them, and they put it on. “Hey, you can't fool me with your pretending not to be impressed,” I crowed. “You know that you never saw one like mine. I'm sometimes known as the Butterfly that's hung like a Horse. And there's another thing that you don't seem to have noticed in this bright light. I'm known as ‘The Man With the Luminous Dong.’”

I would rate the unpublished story as Lafferty indulging in some of his weakest tendencies. It is didactic and angry, grotesque in a way that rebounds on him, even if he is right. At the same time, he throws himself into it with his customary energy and linguistic ingenuity. Lafferty was a Budweiser man, and in this story, he says, “Hold mine. I’m going in.”

Its plot is simple enough. Jeb Porno joins a six-person time probe that travels two hundred years into the future. He and five other experts pass through a post-electronic medium of blue smoke. Beyond it, they find a society whose affections are better ordered than those of the late twentieth century. Over the course of the visit, Jeb clashes with his hosts. He is outraged, just outraged, that the future people have abandoned the explicit public obscenity laws that, in his world, make obscenity the law of the land. People in the future prefer private intimacy, and Jeb reads them as a culture full of “sorcery.” Lafferty records the shock:

“Rejoin?” I gasp, for it's as though I had suffered a great body stroke. “Have I heard you right?” I could hear my own bones rattling, and the world was reeling on the verge of collapse. “Rejoin from what? You mean that it is done in private?”

The future people subject the travelers to telepathic dramas, and they eventually take Jeb to a museum that documents historical pathologies. He has his own wax statue, wax being one of Lafferty’s negatively charged symbols. Think of the Putty Dwarf, or other stunted Lafferty images. It is the stuff at the far end from implicit clay. Jeb Porno is proud of it all:

Went to a nice small building with the sign on it: Museum of Jovial Insanities and Putrid Pathologies of the Late Twentieth Century . . . . I have a little space right behind the section devoted to Famous Mass Murderers and right across from the department dedicated to Defamers, Destroyers, and Dismal Demagogues . . . . there is my name on the wall there: JEB PORNO, WHO BEST TYPIFIES A PERIOD AND A PATHOLOGY

On his return to his time, still outraged, he resolves to pass new legislation to preemptively destroy the future.

I read the story as something like the obverse of “Nine-Hundred Grandmothers.” I know I am in the extreme minority in this reading, since I take the story to be (on one level) a sex joke that refuses to deliver its punchline. The joke is that your grandmother had sex with your grandfather, and Lafferty means for us to laugh at the naïveté of assuming that, because one does not turn sex into a show, one must not like it or know about it. Those people in Lafferty who know about sex and have it often, as we see in the Willoughbys, are often what Lafferty calls ordered people. They have the order of their affections rightly ranked. Someone will say that this sex-joke reading of "Nine-Hundred Grandmothers" robs the story of its great mystery. To that I say: you just do not know why the grandmothers are laughing. The point is a mystery. Mystery with a capital M. Don't settle for a toy, true believer.

“Sex & Sorcery,” because it must show sex from the disordered side, is meant to be a take-no-prisoners satire of disordered love. Jeb turns sex into an idol. He builds a quasi-religion of coercive freedom around it (he says, “What is more important than sex?”). He worships his own dong. Voyeurism and compulsory participation are his civic sacraments.

“No, no, no!” I bellow in what I bet is a loud-for-everybody blare. “Don't you know that you're in violation of the Compulsory Participation Law with this set-up? I'm not selfish. I want everyone to hear it all. It's got to be full-blast for everybody all the time. That's the basis of the turned-on society.”

Porno is not a man with even a microfiber of human dignity. What really upsets him is that the future turns out to be a moral counter-witness. The laughter of the people in the future toward him is not the indulgent, amused laughter of the nine-hundred grandmothers, but the blistering laughter of mocking what is worthy of being mocked. In this case, it is a half-wit who does not understand that sex should be life-giving but not a public commodity. It deserves privacy, restraint, and personal integrity. Laffery even gives us his version of the birds-and-the-bees:

“When do they do it, you ask? The people do it all the time, in season and out of season, in color and charm, in grace and in glory, now and tomorrow and yesterday, in the most pleasurable way, in the great artistry that is named tension, and in the great resolution that is named release.”

Lafferty discusses his view of sex across the full span of human life at length in In a Green Tree. To Jeb Porno, though, that view must appear as sorcery, because the story counterfigures what is affirmatively sacramental—so that, from Jeb’s perspective, it can only register as transgression. The reappearance of beauty, art, subtlety, and good-humored laughter looks to him like black magic straight out of Sax Rohmer. When Jeb Porno goes home, he is no longer boastfully nude, but naked and enraged.

The key passage for understanding this aspect of Lafferty comes from an unpublished portion of In a Green Tree:

“And you'd feel funny asking Peggy about sex?” “Yes. I don't think she knows very much about the subject and I'd hate to embarrass her. My main question is ‘What is Explicit Sex?’ And my side questions are ‘Is Explicit Sex better than the regular kind?’ ‘Is it more fun?’ ‘Are the Irish against Explicit Sex?’ And ‘Why are they?’” “Hah, I don't believe that Explicit Sex is better that the regular kind, Irene, and I don't believe that it's any more fun. Etymological speaking, ‘explicit’ and ‘exploit’ are the same word, and that word means to ‘unfold’ or to ‘display.’ Things that are thrown wide open and have no secrets, they might be said to be ‘explicit.’ Things that are publicised and ballyhooed, they might be called ‘explicit.’ There are persons who like to keep a little privacy concerning their private affairs. There are people who like to keep a little mystery in things that are naturally mysterious. So those are not the people who like explicit sex. They like the regular kind, the mysterious and secret and private kind, the joyful-in-itself kind. Devotees of explicit sex always feel the need of the presence of third parties in some form or other, of an audience. And these third parties, on some form or other, they should applaud.” “Ah, that's my bag of oats!” Irene breathed.

That is how it looked from the ordered side. And here is Jeb Porno:

“Don't you know that you're in violation of the Compulsory Participation Law with this set-up? I'm not selfish. I want everyone to hear it all. It's got to be full-blast for everybody all the time. That's the basis of the turned-on society.”

The Catholic view is that the unitive pleasure of sex belongs within the sacrament of marriage. There is nothing unitive about Jeb Porno’s sexual egocentrism. There is only rutting, animal pleasure. The story wins my sympathy, but I do not enjoy it. That comes down to how important the matter was to Lafferty, as I think it should be to anyone in a porned culture. The story will most likely appeal to readers who enjoy sophomoric humor, without recognizing that Lafferty is going over the top to savage that kind of sophomoricism and debased culture out of bilious frustration. Readers whose ears are related to Lafferty's ears will experience some acoustic nociception, like an ice pick being driven down the ear canal. Just how does one write a profane story about the sacred? It is a self-sabotaging performance:

Sex & Sorcery Notes.pdf

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