"The Cliff Climbers" (1970)
- Jon Nelson
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
We will not record what he carved, as he has already done so, and besides, as we said, it was too stilted and stylish. But yet like all the other marks it was capable of variant and fuller translation.
Lafferty’s short story “The Cliff Climbers” seems to have been inspired by El Morro National Monument in western New Mexico. It is a massive sandstone bluff, rising some two hundred feet from the high desert floor like a spire. Because of a reliable waterhole at its base, it was an important stopping place for centuries. One of its names is Inscription Rock. Its sheer cliff face is as a kind of guestbook, bearing more than two thousand carvings. These range from ancient Ancestral Puebloan petroglyphs to the 1605 signature of the Spanish governor Don Juan de Oñate, the oldest European inscription in the Southwest, and on through the names of later American explorers and settlers. Taken together, the inscriptions form an archive, which is relevant to “The Cliff Climbers,” where Lafferty uses one of his oddest and most overdetermined words, one that recurs from time to time in his fiction: recension.
A recension is simply a revised edition of a text. That is not unusual. What is unusual are the meanings Lafferty pressgangs. At different moments in his work, recension refers to lineages of creation (Adamic and pre-Adamite in “Adam Had Three Brothers”); ontological categories (human vs alien in “Name of the Snake”; human vs. robot in “Mad Man” and “Last Laugh”); versions of reality (“The Hole on the Corner”); mythological traditions (“Anamnesis”); divine dispensations (old covenant vs new order in “Maybe Jones and the City”; pre-robot vs. robot philosophy in “Last Laugh”); and competing creation accounts (“The Six Fingers of Time”). As Lafferty went deeper into his novel writing, the entire set of problems and ideas that cluster around his idea of recension move even closer to the center of his work, though he didn’t use that word for it. Another way to put it is that the ghostliness of the Ghost Story is recensional.
In “The Cliff Climbers,” the word is used in a dispensational way, as when Little Fish-Head is described as “the last of the horse thieves under the old recension.” At the same time, the story itself is mainly about the retrofitting of history, and about the way the past can come to us through writing. That, too, bears on the idea of recession.
The story tells us about a sheer, solitary cliff. For millennia, climbers have tested themselves against it, wanting to see how high they can ascend and leave a mark. Much of the humor in the story contrasts the academic interpretations of Professor Potter with the “true” stories behind the inscriptions. Potter attributes the lowest mark on the cliff to someone he calls “Little Fish-Head.” Potter interprets the mark as a pre-historical religious symbol. The narrator says this is nonsense. Little Fish-Head was really the last horse thief in a world where horses had been regulated into extinction. He killed all the last of the horses but one, and rode the last stallion to its death at the base of the cliff. Then he climbed up to carve a stylized image of the dead animal, and he wrote a poem about how "all the swiftness is now gone out of the world." This is rather moving stuff, and the story will circle back to it at the end, when it is recapitulated by the highest mark.
Later climbers also left marks, trying themselves in turn, leaving a record of struggles and their eras. Nine thousand years after the first climber, we are told that a traveler dying of thirst scaled the rock to look for water; he left a despairing wavy line when he realized he could not reach the river and would die. In the Age of Exploration, a Spanish conquistador in 1519 left one. A group of high school seniors in 1919 bragged about being the tops in their mark. A hobo named Bo McCoy in 1925 climbed impressively high without equipment. He was the real Bo, or so he said. Professor Potter goes from being an interpreter to deciding that he wants to make the highest mark. Unlike the others, he approaches the task with scientific rigor.
Potter spends weeks preparing the cliff with drills, ropes, and camps. Accompanied by his patient wife, Aurora, he makes the ascent, wanting to surpass the height achieved by Bo McCoy. The two of them reach a high ledge where Potter stands upon Aurora's shoulders to carve his inscription. Potter carves something pedantic, but it is later translated as a hymn to the dawn. Mundane realities like standing on his wife’s shoulders become “This is a red-haired goddess, a strongslight amazon, a magic anemonead with hair like a red sea and shoulders soft and sweet as the night itself. She sways beneath me but will not break.”
“The Cliff Climbers” is a minor Lafferty classic. It is also one of the clearest fictional statements of something puzzling about Lafferty as a thinker. The same Lafferty who will argue vigorously from the historical archive in letters also plays with thought experiments that threaten to crack the foundation of historical transmission. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Lafferty did not take history seriously. He clearly did. I have mentioned before the roughly nine hundred sources he consulted in writing The Fall of Rome. The research behind the Coscuin stories and Okla Hannali was extensive. “The Cliff Climbers” wraps the two impulses of historical inflation and deflation together very tightly.
One way to read the story is to take the narrator at face value. On this view, we are dealing with someone who has epistemic access to what has happened, presumably through historical reconstruction, including the real meaning of the first mark made by Little Fish-Head. Call this Narrator 1. From this perspective, “The Cliff Climbers” is corrective historiography. It says something both about human nature and the limits of academic interpretation. Narrator 1 bypasses the confusing archaeological debris that flummoxes Professor Potter. He knows that history is not composed of vague religious archetypes but bottoms out in concrete political realities. Narrator 1 does history from below, pointing out the thirteenth-period horse regulations and the demise of the Horse Fly Totem (set aside the satire). That is historical information. If we go with Narrator 1, the story’s marks are decodable as recensions; acts of historical recovery and meaning preservation are possible. There is little reason not to be optimistic about historiography.
On the other hand, we may be dealing with something like a Narrator 2. At the beginning of the story, the narrator offers a pathos-filled and supposedly true account of the meaning of Little Fish-Head’s mark. But what if this is the same kind of interpretive overinflation that appears at the end of the story in the treatment of Professor Potter’s mark? What if the entire history of the early horses, and the mark itself, is simply imagination? Under Narrator 2, mythological truth and historical truth blur, and it becomes harder to see the contents of the recensions, if we can see them at all.
One of the useful effects of the word recension is that it makes us aware that something has changed without telling us exactly what. It is more like noticing a difference in strata. In a palimpsest, spotting the differences between scripto inferior and scripo superior. The appearance of recension draws attention while leaving the content underspecified, and it leaves access to that content open to dispute.
“The Cliff Climbers” is a story I really like. It hooks up with complicated ideas in Lafferty, including the way it both admires the human desire to make a mark and sees something juvenile in that desire at the same time. One thinks of the interview where Lafferty said he took up writing like a box of crayons because he wanted to leave a mark. Again, we have the ambiguity of both achievement and childishness. Perhaps it connects to something else Lafferty’s said several times in differing ways: people have never had an adult world.
