The Big Egg Problem: In a Green Tree, Serpent's Egg

“I'm going to invent a cogitational meter later today,” Mary Mystic said,“to demonstrate that people are thinking more and deeper and straighter and with more invention, now that the several ‘Flatland Decades’ are over with and the mountains are generating again.”— In a Green Tree, Part 5

God promised neither the Golden Apes nor the Whales to be successors to Man, nor did He promise Man that he would have no successor. Inneall’s Ocean is only about ten thousand square miles in Eastern Oklahoma, and it was being planned for at least thirty years before Inneall was manufactured. What’s in the Big Egg is still secret, but Dubu guessed it and you may be able to do so also.— "Epilog By A Sea Louse," Serpent's Egg

A previous post sketched how I think the Lafferty canon fits together. This one traces a complication, turning to the unfinished Part 5 of In a Green Tree.

The Green Tree manuscripts exist in several forms. One is a finished, paginated version made up of four parts that span the years 1920 to 1978. In addition to this complete sequence, there is another section in the Tulsa archive labelled Part 5: In the Akrokeraunian Mountains. 1978–1990. The manuscript pages themselves have the title “In the Thunderbolt Mountains,” which is an English translation of the Greek name for the range. This English title brings in Lafferty’s use of mountain and lightning imagery. Think of the ending of Past Master. When read as part of the larger Green Tree project, Part 5 promises a lot. If completed, it would have answered his “The Day After the World Ended.” It would have been a way out of the Flatland describes brilliantly in Part Four of Green Tree. Part 5 was meant to be an escape.

With this in mind, In a Green Tree becomes a very different book when the unfinished Part 5 is read as part of its whole. In it, Lafferty shifts from what I have called his low-mimetic mode (where characters are on the same level of power and status as ordinary people, realistic, human, etc.) into the Oceanic mode, the generically unstable territory of his Oceanic Novels.

As you might expect, the mountains in the Part 5 matter deeply. They are physical formations and master symbols, undergoing constant transformation. They rise; they sink. Historical records describe land lifting by five hundred feet in five months, while parts of Oklahoma have sunk between four and twelve feet, a transformation as radical as Inneall’s ocean. This is "The Return of the Mountains," marking the close of a "Flatland World" and the rise of "mountainous thoughts and urges."

So Part 5 differs from what comes before it. By recalling the school scene that begins “My Heart Leaps Up,” you can imagine how very different. Here is one example. The character Mary Mystic O’Trassy believes the Mountains are about to return. There are illusions, telepathy, chromosomal manipulation, and theories about the universe being swallowed. And the mountains do return. Flatland ends.

Everybody was already out there. You wouldn't catch any of the folks around there waiting for the break of dawn for something like that. And it was a beautiful mountain in the pre-dawn rose light. "It's huge!" Mary Mystic cried. "It must be fifty feet high." "Twenty-two feet eight inches," her father said. "Its slowed down a bit now, after its break-through, but it's still risen more than a foot in the last fifteen minutes."

But it hadn’t, of course, for the author. This is the puzzle, the problem Lafferty as a writer could not solve. If he had, he would not have been Lafferty. He would not be the writer who brings us closer to the edge of transformation than anyone I can think of, but who does not move us past the leap. His inability to solve it makes it all the more generative.

Which brings me to Serpent’s Egg, because Green Tree tries to solve what I’ll call the Big Egg Problem in Lafferty—something the Coscuin Chronicles and Argo Legend also attempt in their own ways. The problem is this: how can the low mimetic transcend its own horizon?

What is the Big Egg? Well, it’s in almost every Lafferty novel in some form. When people talk about Serpent’s Egg, they often point out that it ends with a Sea Louse writing. That’s true. It’s certainly memorable. But what I think they should notice—and talk about—is the Big Egg. It casts its shadow over the novel’s mega-persons. It’s there in the title. The novel never says what’s inside the Big Egg. That part is left for you to figure out.

As odd as Serpent’s Egg is, it is itself a Flatland. One sees this in the depiction of media, with some of its more difficult passages ("The voices usually had the 'all-people throatiness' that had become the consensus voice of the media, now that it had been admitted that everyone was an ethnic and that there were no regular people left.") I hear this in Inneal: "I am not conscious, I am not conscious." And it's clear in what Lafferty writes about a terminal version of the servile state, the novel’s floating world, the Kangaroo.

Green Tree is one of Lafferty’s most difficult masterpieces. But what Lafferty can do in an Oceanic Novel like Serpent’s Egg is beyond the reach of his low-mimetic mode. The difference has to do with history. In the Oceanic Novels, Lafferty moves away from the low mimetic and also breaks with modern ideas of history to create large fantasies about Heilgeschichte. Green Tree is a crowded but small Heilgeschichte in a very different way. The Oceanic Novels take flight—into what is true and false in ways that can’t be reduced to the priorities of historical modes of knowing.

The eruption of the mountains in Part 5 of In a Green Tree was an attempt to crack open the Big Egg in a world that will not permit it. That world lacks the deep anagogical intensity needed to contain it. Put plainly, the Second Coming of Christ would sit more naturally in In a Green Tree than the extraordinary children who arrive in its abandoned culmination.

So, again, what is the Big Egg in Serpent’s Egg, and why can’t In a Green Tree contain it? To jump ahead, readers of Lewis or Tolkien will know why. Middle-earth cannot contain Aslan.

Serpent’s Egg gives us a story about young characters who are both full of promise and doomed. In the Lynn-Randal Experiment, three super-mega-persons are created: Lord Randal, a human boy; Axel, a golden ape; and Inneall, a girl-computer. These three later join nine other engineered children to form a Magic Dozen. Together, they begin to change the world.

The novel toys with the idea that these children must be destroyed early for the world’s safety. But the reader suspects something else. At one point, an assassin calls the experiment children “damnable mixtures of the human and the animal and the machine,” with “roots in hell.” Collectively, they are a late portrait of the zoon anthropikon having passed through human technology, which is to say, a version of human history.

Here, Lafferty’s Catholic themes are already visible. The children are a new kind of humanity—a Second Humanity; and the title Serpent’s Egg cannot help but call to mind the Genesis serpent and original sin. Here we find Lafferty’s signature strategy of counterfiguration.

At the novel’s climax, Lutin, a hybrid pythoness, suddenly lays an enormous glowing egg. Inneall is stunned: “That egg is three meters long and two meters thick!” Lutin explains that the egg is “exactly like me, in every way,” and calls it a “wonderful, blessed, hope-of-the-world thing.” You don’t need to be Thomas Aquinas to recognize the Marian tropes at play.

Inneall examines the egg and reports, “It is artificial… There’s electronic gear inside the shell, and a mechanical pump is pumping in there. But there’s something alive inside this big egg too.” As with the ark in The Elliptical Grave, this is a techno-biological womb. A nurse-whale, Miol-Mor, is assigned to care for the egg and communicates in the click-whistle of the whale language.

Here we find a variation on the spirit descending on gel cells, as described at the end of Past Master. But we have moved beyond hope. We are now given a literal organism, an embryo, encased in a fusion of machinery and mystery. Dubu, the bear, calls it the “Ultimate Egg” and hints that hidden agents created it as part of a cosmic joke. This ties the novel’s plot to the humor and chaos of Lafferty’s other eschatological comedies.

In fact, the novel overflows with biblical prophecy, hermeticism, and eschatology. A faux Book of Jasher is quoted, mocking the humility of Christ’s birth and imagining an absurd version of a “Second Coming.” Lafferty suggests that salvation often arrives in strange forms. Dubu recalls being told by invisible “odd fellows”—likely angels—that the egg is “the joke by which the World will be saved and transformed.” The serpent, Lutin, becomes the unlikely bearer of redemption.

The novel is threaded with verses like “Fear not, little flock…” that distinguish its world as one of divine providence. The whales, who serve as truthful record-keepers, declare that a “Second Humanity,” made from humans, machines, and uplifted animals, is now coming into being in God’s image. Lafferty gathers together Genesis with its serpent, the Gospels with the birth of Christ, and Revelation with its vision of new creation, and wraps them all inside the image of the Big Egg.

The novel never directly tells us what is inside the Big Egg. Readers must piece it together from hints in the dialogue and symbols. Is it a Divine Child? Is it the Universe or a World-Soul? Dubu says, “A universe is always egg-shaped,” and she believes this Serpent’s Egg “is a universe.”

Could it be the New Humanity itself? I think this is the kind of break from Flatland that Lafferty wanted. It would dissolve the historical into the metaphysical. History is a kind of eggshell for Lafferty, which is why it is a grail quest. Lafferty knew this. "The grail-myths," he wrote to Sheryl Smith, "are part of the general quest myths, but grail-myths have built-in failure for the reason of fetishism. The grail quest is always pursuing the box or cup that the thing came in, rather than the thing itself."

In the Argo legend, Lafferty takes his readers as far as he can into eternity. The mountain slopes in Green Tree, though grand, are surfaces. They are sublime exteriors but substitutes for the thing itself, his religious faith. He could not get there through Green Tree’s low-mimetic inertia. Its incompletion dramatizes its central theme. This is a roundabout way of saying that in the Ghost Story, Lafferty created an imaginative universe that contain Green Tree, but did not create a Green Tree that could contain it. How could he?