"Something Rich and Strange" (1985/1986)

“I see now that she is not quite a Cloud-Nine person yet,” the space-traveler mused. “But she is a metamorphic, and she is turning into a Cloud-Nine person. If one isn't already a Cloud-Nine person, one will become such after a bit of trafficking with the Cloud-Niners. The Cloud-Niners are real, but they destroy the reality of every world they infest.”

“Who are you really?” he asked them. “What is your name?” “Our name is Multitude because there are many of us,” they answered him.

“As God several times in scripture gives Himself the name of the ‘I am’ or the ‘I am who I am’, so the Devil-Satan species is given the name in many languages of something like the ‘What is it?’ or the ‘Who is it?’ An African tale begins ‘The Who-Is-It came and killed a man and cut him open.’ This particular who-is-it seemed to kill and cut open a man every morning toread him as if reading a morning newspaper. As to whether the diabolical species has individuality, that’s a problem. Before being cast into Gadarene Swine, one devil or multiplicity of devils told Christ either ‘My name is legion’ or ‘Our name is legion,’ seeming a multiplicity of guises for an individual, or a multiplicity of individuals in the species.” — Lafferty, interview

Lafferty repeatedly said that he swore off writing on his seventieth birthday in 1984, and he gave three reasons. First, arthritis made typing difficult on his old Mexican typewriter. I would add that the typewriter itself was beginning to fail him; one of the funny points of the later letters is his cursing it when it misbehaves and then letting the errors stand. He was certainly not going to rewrite an entire letter with his cramped hands, so in they went, along with everything else he had to say. Second, writing was no longer as much fun as it had been. For years, he said it was one hundred percent fun, but that percentage had dropped. Third, he said he stopped when he started writing drivel. He was being hard on himself here, but “Something Rich and Strange” is the kind of story he may have had in mind. It was finished in October 1985, almost a year after he retired.

Its main character is a guy named George Dander. George has huge buck teeth that act as radio receptors for extraterrestrial voices. Before the start of the story, George has a conditional engagement to Mary Deare, another of Lafferty’s gold diggers. Mary says that for them to marry two things must happen. George must amass a million dollars and get rid of the buck teeth. One day, the alien voices identify themselves as a collective entity called "Multitude" from Cloud-Nine Planet. They tell George that they will predict the winners of horse races. They can do this because they live backwards through time. George agrees. The voices do indeed predict winners. Mary somehow learns about George’s win and takes over. Through her management of stock market investments, George soon becomes a millionaire. Now all that has to happen for George and Mary to wed is for George to have the buck teeth removed surgically. George reluctantly agrees.

Teeth gone, Mary and George go on their short honeymoon, which is cut short because Mary needs a medical procedure. It turns out she has implanted George’s extracted teeth into her own mouth. It is all part of the aliens’ plan. The aliens need a buck-toothed host with both good receptors and an opportunistic brain. With a gap in his own teeth, George both misses his teeth is physically repulsed by Mary. He leaves. During his absence, Mary uses the alien guidance to become the wealthiest woman on Earth. She initiates global fashion trends that mimic the physiology of the approaching aliens. Soon the world population thinks that large prosthetic buck teeth and multifaceted insect eyes are the height of beauty. The voices say that these physiological changes are necessary to upgrade humanity's aesthetic standards.

Then the inhabitants of Cloud-Nine Planet arrive on Earth. A delegation of humans greets them. Everyone in this earth delegation has prosthetic teeth, insect eyes, and five asymmetric legs. The aliens react to the sight of the modified humans by pointing at them and retreating into a private padded room. There, they laugh uncontrollably, thunderous laughter. After a brief period of this hysteria, the aliens leave. They depart without giving any specific message or wisdom. The story ends with Mary Deare leading a project to decode the aliens' laughter recording.

That is “Something Rich and Strange,” which is certainly minor Lafferty. I do not have much to say about it, except that, like much of Lafferty’s work, it contains an anti-secret—one that is not even especially hard to see. For that reason, I am a little puzzled by online commentary that treats the story straightforwardly as a prank exposing human vanity. One superfan writes, “It’s about a very fine prank.” There is, to be sure, a satire here of media manipulation and beauty standards, but Lafferty is doing something else as well.

What he’s trying to do doesn’t quite work: the intended theotropic dissonance never breaks the reader’s skin or really stings, because the buck-teeth premise is too silly, and because the target—media-driven beauty standards—is too low-hanging and handled too crudely. Then again, Lafferty is making surface silliness the point, and there are things to like in doing it this way. I can imagine "Something Rich and Strange" being the sort of story that readers uninterested in the deeper waters of Lafferty might genuinely enjoy. Lafferty is called cartoonish. "Something Rich and Strange" would make a terrific seven-minute cartoon. It smuggles a lot of Lafferty's obsessions.

So what, then, is the not-so-secret anti-secret?

You know you know. The aliens are devils, and they degrade humans because that is what devils in Lafferty do, because it is what devils in the Christian tradition do. The creatures from Cloud Nine are cousins of the devils in Past Master, the nine-programmed persons, and of the legion of other devils that recur throughout Lafferty’s work. None of this is esoteric. But it is a side of Lafferty that many of his readers do not appreciate: his real belief in real devils and the significance of “supernatural” evil. Here, the devils are up to their old joukery-pawkery. George Dander’s decision to trade his “manhood” and his “trademark” for wealth replays the biblical story of Esau selling his birthright. The teeth aren't just radio receivers. The teeth tie George to his family history. They are also instruments of anamnesis that bind him to history, which seems to be the point of the long, mock-pedantic digression linking the Dander family history to the history of languages and the Indo-Aryan migration. The story encodes George's selling of his birthright all in the name of one of the winning horses, “Red Beans.”

One day while Jacob was cooking some bean soup, Esau came in from hunting. He was hungry and said to Jacob, ‘I'm starving; give me some of that red stuff.’ (That is why he was called Edom.) Jacob answered, ‘I will give it to you if you give me your rights as the firstborn son.’ — Genesis 25:29–31

All the winning horses at Blue Ribbon Downs have sinister names.

Blue Ribbon Downs, Sallisaw, Oklahoma

Now something about the alien home world. The aliens’ origin is Synnephon-Ennea, which translates as Cloud-Nine. This is one of Lafferty’s characteristic counterfigurations: the depth of the nine circles of Dante’s Hell elevated by self-definition. Cloud-Nine became a popular phrase in the 1950s from the cloud classification system of the U. S. Weather Bureau. Clouds numbered 9 were those huge, powerful, towering, fluffy, white-beyond-white cumulonimbus clouds. Lafferty does not want us to miss the point of his counterfiguraiton, so he reinforces it by specifying that planet Cloud-Nine lies in the celestial north.

The north, of course, is the seat of Lucifer’s throne in Isaiah 14: 12–14, surely one of the best known verses in the Christian tradition:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.”

The association of the North with diabolic or hostile powers is all over English literature. This is why, in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale, when the summoner meets the yeoman who proves to be a devil, the devil replies, “Brother … fer in the north contree / Where, as I hope, som tyme I shal thee see.” It is why Shakespeare has Joan of Arc say “you speedy helpers, that are substitutes / Under the lordly monarch of the north.” William Blake—working by deliberate counterfiguration—flips the tradition by making the North the seat of energy and imagination, just as C. S. Lewis preserves it by sending witches and giants from the North while Aslan comes from the East or South-East.

The aliens:

“We are not in this world at all,” they said. “The Name of our world is Synnephon-Ennea or Cloud-Nine Planet. Its direction from here is celestial north.” “Why do you send your voices here?” “Because we're friendly. We like to talk to all sorts of people. And we like to upgrade the ideas of all sorts of people.”

All this gets linked into an idolatry motif when Lafferty quotes Rupert Brooke’s poem “Heaven,” appropriating Brooke's line to describe the beings as “squamous, omnipotent, and kind.” The lines in that poem after that line are the following:

And under that Almighty Fin, The littlest fish may enter in.

The aliens look like flies (Matthew 12:24, Mark 3:22, Luke 11:15), which speaks for itself. They do not create; they distort, tricking humanity into adopting “thousand-facet insect-type eyes” and walking on stilts. This is another instance of Lafferty's fascination with the transformation of eyes ("Jack Bang's Eyes," Not to Mention Camels, etc.) and is related to his technique of noetic darkening. Far from pranking humanity, the aliens are playing the role of St. Augustine's Simius Dei, the Ape of God. The Ape of God imitates because he cannot create. He produces knockoffs, like the fake buck teeth sold in the story. He is a counterfeiter who depends on resemblance rather than originality. The Ape parodies.

Mary Deare has a fascinating role in the story. She is another of Lafferty's Whores of Babylon. As the “richest woman in the world” and a “metamorphic creature,” she hosts the invasion and leads the world into an upside-down order in which ugliness becomes beauty. Here is a table showing how that works, with the parallels to passages in Revelation:

And while all this is very light and amusing in the story, we get sugary black comedy like this:

Indeed, Marcel Buffon, the greatest beauty expert in the world, writing in the French fashion magazine Lendemain Elegant, wrote "The new Dente Sporgente Look is like nothing ever seen before. It is something new in beauty, it is something new in excitement, it is something new in bla." It is true that this was the last thing Marcus Buffon ever wrote, for immediately after writing he opened his veins and died. He had always been a puzzling man.

Finally, the aliens leave humanity with the sound of “milk cans banging down . . . a celestial stairway” and the sound of donkeys laughing—mocking humanity for destroying itself for their amusement. All of this is poisonously barbed, just beneath the silliness. And Lafferty makes it nearly impossible to miss the whole point of it by placing the word hell in the very last sentence of the story, in the lines he writes for the “Buck Tooth Boogie,” so that the reader has to think about it:

The ‘Niners’ were pleasant and squamous and stout, But what in the hell were they laughing about?

I read the story as being another one about the anti-creative noise of mocking life, yet another example of the trashed-life principle in Lafferty's late work.

“Something Rich and Strange” is not Lafferty at his best, but it is Lafferty at the very end of his writing life, still as stringent, savage, and monitory as ever. I have kept my reading monochromatic to show how much seriousness sits beneath this very silly story. Readers don’t have to care about this seriousness, even if it seems to me the story’s obvious center of gravity and Lafferty’s intent. But there is a difference between setting it aside and being buck-tooth oblivious to how important it is. I say this not to be hermeneutically dogmatic, but to show that the evidence in the story points to something more than an alien prank.

It will never stop being weird to me how often Lafferty’s readers try to domesticate him by ignoring him. Above I mentioned literary encoding. Stuart Hall famously argued that media reception can be dominant, oppositional, or negotiated. Hall used "dominant" to describe a mode of reception open to what the sender intends to communicate; he chose the term because he was criticizing hegemonic media messaging. Of course, Lafferty is not a hegemonic ideological media apparatus. He is hostile to that down to his toenails. So dominant is not quite the right word, but there is, nevertheless, a didactic throughline in his work that one is either receptive to or not receptive to. And it is entirely understandable that many readers adopt a highly negotiated stance toward that didacticism. It is inexplicable to approach it with color blindness.

I try to be maximally receptive to what Lafferty encodes, both because I find that approach aesthetically rewarding, because I often agree with Lafferty, and because it is always a good idea to work out the dominant/sender-encoded reading so that I can know where to be oppositional or negotiated to avoid failures of stasis.

In thinking about “Something Rich and Strange,” I was struck again by how often Lafferty is read unthinkingly against his grain. Tactless inattention forecloses the possibility of serious oppositional or negotiated reading; as a result, much of Lafferty’s conceptual artistry, even in a trifle like this, becomes invisible. What else can the story be about than aliens pwning humans?

I see this readerly inattention as a deformation: a refusal to attend to major thematic elements in a writer who is manifestly invested in them and who uses art to communicate them. More ironically, it plays out the cultural deformation Lafferty lampoons, which is about cultural decline and defacement, made literal in this case. In the story, it takes the form of a voluntary transformation into a freak (bug-eyed, five-legged, sporting imitation buck teeth, and “hard on the case”), a grotesque image of choosing distortion over perception. Lafferty writes,

Of course the laughter of the Cloud-Niners had all been recorded. And of course an attempt at decoding it was made. There would surely be treasures of information to begot from it when it was properly interpreted. And of course Mary Deare Dander was in charge of the great project. Well, who would you put in charge of it? Who else had sufficient prestige to head such a worldwide project? But as yet the ‘Project Decode Laugh’ has not borne significant fruit.

If anyone needs help decoding the laughter, the laughing of the devils in Past Master is a good crib:

Then they sealed it all into him with searing laughter so that his mind shrank and closed. Boggle, Skybol, and Swampers! Jackal’s laughter, barking derisive laughter. Tearing, wounding laughter. Northprophet, Knobnoster, Beebonnet! Howling-dog laughter, laughter that will make a man lie low in his skin and hide. Pottscamp, Holygee, and Gandy! Wilderness-Wolf laughter, ghost laughter. Laughter that opens the bleeding inside. This was insane stuff. Thomas bolted out of the door . . .

Here is the insane stuff moment in "Something Rich and Strange":

They leapt and tumbled and beat their heads on the padded floor and walls. They laughed and laughed and laughed with a whooping rowdiness which is a little bit beyond the capacity of humans. What an orchestration of laughter! It was like ten million of those old milk cans banging down ten million steps of a celestial stairway. It was like a million donkeys laughing at one of the seven outrageous donkey jokes.

In "Something Rich and Strange," the laughing of the devils reenacts the fall of the angels, like banging milk cans. It is scorching stuff. Or it should be. It is the enemy laughter of the enemies of Lafferty’s Laughing Christ. That some of Lafferty’s most devoted readers have taken “Something Rich and Strange” to be nothing more (I emphasize the nothing more) than a silly alien prank story bewilders me, until I remind myself that some people are blinded by lollipops, which are there as well. There are always many fun and funny things in Lafferty. Now I’ll dismount the soapbox.

Something Rich and Strange Notes.pdf

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