The Book of Sands

A Lafferty story is almost always told-not-shown. His characters are ridiculous larger-than-life personalities who say exactly what they are doing and why, stumbling through other-wheres and never-weres in prose that is abuzz with puns and paradoxes and enough said-bookisms to… but that is the point. He’s telling you a story minus the sly, aiming to please something deeper than the unconscious, deeper even than story-sense, trying to tickle something so fundamental you don’t even know it’s there until it giggles. You’d not call his stories deconstructions — that’s just more sense-pap — but more a stripping, an undressing, a decrutching, an honesting. They do not make sense but oh do they fascinate, and that is what makes them true.— The Man Who Talled Tales

The Book of Sands people did Lafferty readers a solid by making available so much of Lafferty’s unpublished materials, even if it earned them a reviled reputation in Tulsa. I’ve wanted to write something for a while now about the introduction that can be found in its 5.0 edition (2017), specifically about where I agree and disagree, and where I think the predominant way of receiving Lafferty gets wrong-footed.

The introduction leans into storytelling voice. Nothing new here. How many introducers and commentators stress how unique and hard-to-classify his tales are? If you read the introduction, you will see that the focus is squarely on the experience of his stories: they’re boisterous, unpredictable tall tales, con games, full of energy, twinkle, and imagination. The introduction sets up a contrast between story and con that is interesting, but the overall take is that Lafferty electrifies readers. His best stories shock one's preconceptions as if a direct current has zapped through the imagination. Lafferty is, as we know him, a genial storyteller whose fantastical stories are unprecedented in style and impact; however, there is very little said that would open their strangeness beyond admiring their originality and humor. There is even the phrase “sense pap” as if Lafferty was somehow beyond sense or deeper than sense, which I think is nonsensical and doesn’t match my experience of reading him. It's pretty much the opposite of my view.

You see, I’m interested in how Lafferty’s storytelling works on a structural level, and I think the best stuff on Lafferty digs into this. Daniel Petersen is correct to recognize that there is something monstrous about Lafferty and to struggle with it critically. I think he goes a little wrong by perhaps thinking that Lafferty’s art isn’t built to explain, but to provoke, inviting an intuitive, playful reader response. I see Lafferty as being emphatically didactic.

The Book of Sands introduction stays too far in the firmament of pure story where something can be true because it fascinates. I get this, but I see Lafferty’s work as an ontological battle between reality and illusion. Illusions intrigued Lafferty, but they also pissed him off. Fascination is double-valenced. There is the fascination of Cagliostro and Barnum, which has nothing to do with truth. What look to be bizarre premises are both Fiji-Mermaid imaginative flair and pieces of a truth-oriented metaphysical puzzle. In 1980's "Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus," Lafferty defined this puzzle-solving as one of the “tall labors assigned to us,” namely, “reading the riddle of the world and of ourselves.” The Book of Sands introduction plays up the flair at the expense of the tall metaphysical puzzle. There is nothing in the introduction to thousands of pages of Lafferty that suggests all these strange story worlds are connected to a philosophy of reality. In fact, there isn't much about meaning at all, as if the stories invite one to question if there’s a deeper point, something beyond not getting taken in. "Sense pap" the introduction says. Lafferty was all about it, I say.

At this stage in his reception—with a graying readership, small print runs, and failures of ethical scholarship—Lafferty would benefit from an unapologetically philosophical interpretation on all sides: an admission that he may have been a crank in some respects, but he was fundamentally preoccupied with the nature of Reality, with a capital R. His stories explore the occulted connections between underlying truths and false or subjective worlds piled atop it. Because people are historical beings, a lot of this sediment is historical. Lafferty gets important parts of that wrong. At the same time, I don’t see how one gets far beyond the entertainment factor without asking hard questions about how Lafferty always works from a cosmic hierarchy: there is a “Prime Reality” (the genuine created order, sustained by the divine Logos) and then a proliferation of derivative or counterfeit worlds he imagines. He even gave this hierarchy a name: The Only True History of the World and of the Lords of the World.

Most Lafferty plots implicitly ask, “What is real, and who gets to decide?” There are often malleable realities, such as dream realms, hoaxes, or pocket universes. Reality vs. illusion drives the oeuvre: for example, Enniscorthy Sweeny literally rewrites history. In story after story, Lafferty sets up experiments in ontology. East of Laughter imagines the world as a written narrative that can unravel, while Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? imagines a fake new continent as a reality hoax. The fragility of consensus reality increasingly obsessed Lafferty because he was so alienated from the consensus: he was thus fascinated by how people can be easily fooled en masse, dramatizing reality as a text that storytellers or tyrants can manipulate. And, I think, Lafferty went too far in that he fooled himself in specific ways. This is a pointed philosophical claim, and there isn’t anything like it in the introduction essay. He isn’t taken this seriously.

One does find a sense that Lafferty cares about something other than con games, that his inventions aren’t just for absurd fun, but there isn’t much more than that. I have read the essay several times, and it seems to bottom out there. There is not much awareness that the short fictions subserve a metaphysical purpose of testing what is real and showing how illusory worlds can deceive or spiritually impoverish. That he often said have fun but that his sense of fun was bounded by a sense of virtue.

Whenever a Lafferty narrative gets really upside-down, an implicit reference point of truth hovers in the background, a secret. The largest circle of Lafferty’s reality-game is that it is calculatedlatedly anagogical: surface fun conceals final struggling between authentic creation and false worlds. That doesn’t mean that reality less fun, but more fun because it's more critical to get right. The Book of Sands introduction takes a casual approach to Lafferty. I see a consistent reality-versus-unreality philosophy running through all Lafferty fiction.

That takes me to my next point. The introduction reveals a limited or strategic understanding of Lafferty’s philosophical stance on identity. I know this is somewhat unfair because it is a textual performance for newbies, but nothing is said about human nature as human nature, unless I’ve missed something beyond humans being storytelling animals and story being a simplifying heuristic that we human animals use to navigate reality. There is certainly no mention of concepts like a fallen nature or the division of the self coming through in the stories. In short, the essay’s interpretation doesn’t ask questions about identity. There isn't much on personhood. Think of all the people in Lafferty.

This matters because Lafferty's fiction is so preoccupied with a wounded spiritual human identity and the nature of fallen personhood. Much of my analysis centers on how his characters are not whole but rather splintered selves, doubles, hybrids, or archetypes, reflecting a philosophical view of humanity. Where I see this explored most profoundly in his work is in the Oceanic Novels. It’s my “Variable B” for the “Nature of BEING.” It was part of the Argo Legend, and that began to affect everything else. The question is always, “What does it mean to be a person in a certain world?” The answer Lafferty gives, in my view, is invariably twofold: persons are wounded and divided (due to a primordial Fall or disaster), a disaster Lafferty himself saw as the core of human history, stating that all true “riddle-writers” agree “that there was a Fall from a higher and more pleasant place to a lower and less pleasant.” He called modern humanity “The Fallen Creature,” confined to an “isthmus of a middle state,” yet also capable of transformation or transcendence through unexpected grace

One of the most valuable terms for getting at this is the schizo-gash. It’s Lafferty’s concept of personhood, a split rooted in the metaphysical Fall of Man and mirrored by personal psychological damage chalked up to life choices and one’s place in history. In other words, characters in Lafferty stories inherit a deep cosmic wound from the start. This explains why his stories are full of duplicated characters, hybrids, and archetypal personae. It’s why, at times, his characters can seem to be less individual people than embodiments of virtues or vices, as in the case of Not to Mention Camels. This is so common in his work that it feels like shooting fish in a barrel to point out instances, but why not? In East of Laughter, two men literally share one body; in Fourth Mansions, people participate in the four archetypal creatures (Toad, Falcon, etc.). They’re unique, but their uniqueness is derivative of a higher purpose; in Serpent’s Egg, a Magic Dozen of hybrid children (part-human, part-animal/machine) are part of some kind of leap. All these instances dramatize Lafferty’s view that human nature is an adventure, but one scarred by an original loss of unity. We are groping toward something greater and more integrated. This is a mythic-psychological stance, and I’m unsure of how one can miss it in the short fiction or not recognize its colossal significance.

I like that the introduction is celebratory and appreciative, but I dislike that it doesn’t critically dissect Lafferty’s moral or metaphysical intentions in detail. Yes, Lafferty was a Catholic, and this faith informed his worldview, often lending a moral playfulness to his writing. However, that doesn’t quite prepare one to read him. Lafferty’s fiction is powerfully unified by an obsessive moral mission. The introductory essay separates the art from the artist to the extent that Lafferty’s fiction is treated as a brilliant, idiosyncratic body of work that can be admired without probing the author’s own moral attitudes or asking what the artist might be asking of the reader.

And this leads to something that also puzzles me. Why would anyone want to read Lafferty without grasping the moral and metaphysical architecture underpinning his stories? Lafferty wrote a form of moral fiction – not moralistic in a preachy sense, but deeply concerned with ultimate truths, the destiny of souls, and the cosmic contest between good and evil (or truth and falsehood). The storytelling serves a metaphysical vision: a Catholic perspective on creation. Conflicts in his stories often reduce to authentic creation and moral order versus counterfeit realities and false gods, essentially, the age-old battle of truth vs. deception, played out on sci-fi and mythic stages. I try to illustrate how this scenario plays out repeatedly.

It's symptomatic of many Lafferty fans that The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, a work that bizarrely removes the Holocaust and World Wars into an alternate history, has been so bamboozling. When one knows that Lafferty’s storytelling is historical and anagogical, that they use symbolic or alternate worlds to illuminate truths and lies about our own world, one is forced to take the absence of the Holocaust seriously. The flip side of not taking Lafferty seriously as a moral artist is not holding him morally accountable. Lafferty’s personal moral failings should shock his fans, and they should have to think about his antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and integrate that into the interpretation of his fiction.

When I read the introduction, I see a path into the canon that isn't going to take one far enough into the center unless one is pretty smitten with the Lafferty style. It says, marvel at Lafferty’s originality and humor, here is a sui generis genius, enjoy the wild ride, even if you can’t explain it. To this, I'd say, of course, you should enjoy the wild ride, but you aren’t being the reader Lafferty wanted if you aren’t tackling Lafferty philosophically. Maybe you don't want to be. But if you do, you will need some tools, including a sense of Christian cosmology with more than a few Catholic-specific details to understand what kind of sense pap Lafferty was all about; he wanted his work to be meaningful. To be meaningful is to make sense. To make sense is to have a purpose. And, frankly, one kind of pap is what he wanted to deliver: something the sick could digest. That is to say, I part ways with the Book of Sands on the issue of coherence versus enigma: it seems to prime a reader to treat Lafferty’s work as enigmatic and extraordinary, not to be over-analyzed, while I think his work is a logical, interconnected cosmology of ideas when examined closely. Hence, all the diagrams, charts, chronologies, and concept entries to navigate Lafferty’s whirlwind imagination.

The introduction is entirely correct in seeing Lafferty as an eccentric virtuoso of fiction. Where it misses an opportunity is in spelling out how he is a visionary thinker in a fictional guise, whose outlandish stories are metaphysical gambits. It goes wrong in asserting his stories don’t make sense but are somehow true because they fascinate. This fascination is meant to lead somewhere, and in "Riddle-Writers," Lafferty was about as clear as he ever was on the destination. He sets it out as a final, personal confrontation with the riddle he believed was both the first and the last, the one question that can win all the prizes there are: “What is your own name?” He wasn’t just spinning great yarns for our astonishment; he was being apocalyptic, unveiling how the moral world really works, if you know where to look.