"The Hand of the Potter: An Idyll" (1984/2020)

Jon Nelson
5 hours ago
14 min read

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2

"Certainly we have heard of Trenton. Every reader of esoterica will have heard of it and the murky quotation 'But thou, Trenton Ephratah, though you be small out of the Cities of New Jersey, out of you shall come an impetus and an infection that will rock the Earth.' This place has become the Roma and Mecca of the cult of Devil-worshippers on our Earth. Tell us everything about this high-priced deal that you made, Patrick."

Advanced Laffery today. Somewhat polemical because we need better arguments about Lafferty.

“The Hand of the Potter: An Idyll” is concerned with authentication, interpretation, and expertise. Despite being the best in the world at what they do, its characters get the truth backward. It is a wonderful Lafferty story, but I would bet that very few people understand it—an irony, given the story’s history. For decades it went unpublished, and then it appeared in the fifth volume of Feast of Laughter, the Lafferty fan publication. Lafferty readers must have been excited for a new Lafferty. It is one measure of Lafferty’s recent reception that very little in the preceding volumes of Feast of Laughter had prepared readers to understand what they were getting. This is, in its way, perfectly fine, because Feast of Laughter is celebratory, although there are a few essays in the five volumes that do work to understand Lafferty. Most of those articles have received attention on this blog. But this uneven critical topography—of a few serious forays into understanding Lafferty and a huge amount of Lafferty lovefest—is where things stalled out half a decade ago.

Because the story is so packed, I’m going to forgo a long summary and include a facts-forward apparatus at the end of this post. It will make it easier for people to see where they may disagree with my reading. In brief, a specialized dealer named Patrick T. K. acquires a rare autograph from a young boy, which he identifies as the sixth authentic signature of God. Hence, the pun on hand as hand of the creator and hand as handwriting. To market the discovery, Patrick initiates a global "Autograph Bash" that attracts collectors, fake celebrities, and a sinister figure named Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man. Many people believe Jim Jam to be the Devil. During the convention, it is revealed that the paper contains another autograph on the reverse side—that of Jim Jam himself. Patrick sells the document for nearly 100 million dollars to a group of buyers from Trenton, New Jersey, who prize the signature of Jim Jam over that of God. The story ends with the arrival of an asylum attendant seeking an escaped inmate named George Gregory. He has legally changed his name to "God-the-Father" and matches the physical description of the individual who originally signed the boy's autograph book.

The first point to make is that this story reconfigures earlier Lafferty. When I was writing about “Golden Trabant,” a decision had to be made about Patrick T. K. Should I point out that the story is openly anti-Semitic if we read it in the context of the entire Lafferty canon, or does one restrict oneself to a formalist reading about its internal logic? I chose the latter, knowing that I would be writing about this story soon. The main character in “The Hand of the Potter: An Idyll” is the gold launderer Patrick T. K. from “Golden Trabant.” One of Lafferty’s techniques is to hide his virtuous anti-Semitism behind Irish names. One sees this in various stories, such as “In the Turpentine Trees.” Intelligent readers of “Golden Trabant” should immediately be suspicious of the name Patrick T. K. because of the Jewish fug around the character, but it is probably the sort of thing that many good Lafferty readers choose to ignore. In “Hand of the Potter,” Lafferty gives us the missing information. Patrick T. K. was a Jew who changed his name to an Irish one. Retroactively, this confirms quite a lot that is going on in “Golden Trabant” as an allegory. In "Hand of the Potter," we read,

"I asked the lad in what language Himself had spoken, and he said ‘In English, but with a touch of Jewish accent that went back to the grandfather days.’ ‘I don't understand,’ I told the lad. ‘Just what was the accent like?’ ‘Like yours,’ the lad said, ‘very like yours.’ Like mine! But I had been cured of my accent forty years ago, by the foremost remedial-speech man in England. That was at the time when I had my old name changed to an Irish name. I had no idea that I still had an accent."*

To state the obvious, “Hand of the Potter” is a hard story, one for readers who want to get to the bottom of Lafferty. But if you have read much Lafferty, it is not impossible to understand. Yet people choke when they shouldn't. The story isn't half as hard as, say, "The Funny Face Murders" or "Junkyard Thoughts." It is constructed so that the two supernatural figures—the pleasant, tweedy Person who self-identifies as God the Father, and the sinister, disease-riddled Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man, identified in the story as Satan—each carry the complete scriptural and iconographic attributes of the other’s identity, for his is a story built on extreme counterfiguration. To understand it, all one has to do is know what Lafferty does in hundreds of other stories: he counterfigures attributes and explores what happens. The man who walks above ground is Lucifer. Let’s call him The Person. Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man is Jesus. What makes this story so extraordinary (and one reason I think it gathered dust) is how he treats Jesus. This is one of the few places in Lafferty where Jesus appears as a character (another is "And Name My Name"). Lafferty does nothing blasphemous, but the treatment is extraordinary in its aggressive flamboyance. He had nothing to worry about, though. No one was going to read Lafferty closely enough to work out what he was up to.

Lafferty is subtle in two ways in this story. He is very clever in how he gives The Person the marks of Satan, and he is sneaky in giving the “Satanic” Jim Jam the marks of Christ. No character in the story understands this. No Lafferty readers seem to understand it. I think it is because this is about as far as Lafferty’s anagogical counterfiguration goes. It is not a simple reversal, parody, or allegory, but a double inhabitation where each figure is fully legible as both what the story says he is and what it does not say he is. The internal clues in the text do not give stable ground for adjudication because the attributes of Christ and Satan, at the points Lafferty selects them, are formally identical: levitation can be divine or demonic, light on a mountain can be the Transfiguration or Lucifer, and perpetual dying can be damnation or the Passion. The only way to understand it is to know Lafferty’s tradition and his techniques.

The nearest scriptural analogue to this is 2 Corinthians 11:14, which warns that Satan transforms himself into an angel of light. Counterfiguration in “Hand of the Potter” applies this principle in both directions; if Satan can look like an angel of light, then an angel of light can look like Satan to a fallen observer. Patrick and his friends are fooled because of what they know; they have seen five prior examples of "God's" handwriting, but under counterfiguration, every one of those examples is actually Satan’s hand. This is a story about people who collect the autographs of Satan. There is something funny here when one thinks of how impatient Lafferty was with genre worshippers and how many times he had to sign books.

Jim Jam, the figure they believe to be the Devil, is introduced as "The Man Nobody Knows." This is where Lafferty shoots his flare gun. That title is taken from Bruce Barton’s 1925 book about Jesus Christ. It was a controversial, ridiculous book that told the story of Christ to argue that Christ was the ultimate businessman who created an amazing startup with twelve people who had potential. Management schlock at its worst. While a quick reading of “Hand of the Potter” might read this as the Devil’s trick of remaining anonymous, the counterfiguration reading decodes it: Jim Jam is Christ, the most famous figure in history, whom nobody knows because they are looking for a man in tweeds. The man in tweeds is Satan.

Lafferty goes deep into his private symbol system in the story. You will find a wonderful slice of advanced Lafferty in Jim Jam’s performance with the snake, which further identifies him as Christ through the "protoevangelium" of Genesis 3:15. When the snake bites Jim Jam’s leg and dies from his blood, there is a slight echo of the woman whose heel is bruised but who crushes the serpent’s head. There is also the importance of the leg of Christ, where Revelation 19:16 says the "King of Kings" has his name written. In a story about autographs, Christ’s body is the authenticated document, his blood is the ink, and the thigh is the page. What does Jim Jam do? He resurrects the snake seven times because Christ’s power is resurrection, and, as anyone with any knowledge of the tradition knows, the number seven marks completion and victory.

“This live snake that had been a walking-stick now bit Jim Jam savagely on the leg. Then the snake went into convulsions and died. ... ‘That's once, snake,’ Jim said. Then he brought the snake back to life. But after a moment it went into convulsions of another sort and died again. And Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man brought the snake back to life again.”

Jim Jam carries seven diseases, including "Glotz Disease," which he retains until his "hour is come." That is the language of the Fourth Gospel. These diseases are "borne" by him, as Isaiah 53 describes the Suffering Servant bearing the sins and griefs of the world. "Dying, and dying, and dying" echoes the Trisagion and the Agnus Dei, identifying him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. His self-description as "quasi-human" uses the Latin quasi ("in the manner of"), pointing to the hypostatic union (fully divine and fully human" which the characters misinterpret as "less than human."

"HTL-3 Virus, Hepatitis B Virus, Epstein-Barr Virus, Sickle Cell Anemia, die Syph, die Lepra, and Glotz Disease,” Jim Jam answered with seven-fold pride . . . "I am the only human or quasi-human who carries it yet,” the sinister Jim Jam said. “Elsewhere it is to be found only in the flowing serum in the quartz-crystal veins of the devils of Hell . . . It is an ‘exclusive’ that I wish to retain until my hour is come."

This also explains why his autograph number is "fewer than one"; as part of the Trinity, his signature cannot be counted as a single human integer. The three imitators at the Bash who slash their left earlobes are a parody of the Godhead or, like the three Christs of Ypsilanti, the "false Christs" of Matthew 24, faking the Passion.

Conversely, the figure known as the Person carries the marks of the Adversary. Here, one should understand that Lafferty is digging deep into the ghost story. This is Private Gregory from Archipelago, the devil associated with the line of Ifreann Noonan Columkill Gregorovitch. He has escaped, just as the devil is released from his prison in More than Melchisedech. His original name, George Light-on-the-Mountain Gregory, encodes Lucifer (the light-bearer) and Lucifer’s throne on the mountain in the north mentioned in Isaiah 14, that passage that Lafferty keeps using. His legal name change to "God-the-Father" is a bureaucratic record of the Fall—the original satanic act of claiming to be like the Most High. The surname Gregory, like many of the Gregories in Lafferty, points to the Grigori, the Watchers of 1 Enoch who fell to earth and were imprisoned. His escape from "St. Audrey’s Insane Asylum"—named for St. Æthelthryth, whose fair gave us the word "tawdry"—is a Watcher breaking his chains of darkness. The Person is left-handed, or sinister, the side associated with the goats and damnation in Matthew 25. His handwriting is "beautiful and proud." That pride is the primary sin of Satan, whereas divine revelation is associated with humility. He is seen "walking His favorite Earth," mirroring Satan’s activity in the Book of Job and 1 Peter 5:8, as I have already pointed out. He is the "prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2) who hovers because he cannot fully contact the created world from which he is exiled. His "British Countryside Garb" marks the gentleman-devil (as Shakespeare put it, the devil is a gentleman), and the Scarlet Tanagers on his shoulders wear the color of the Beast and the dragon.

"The Person did not seem to be British, and yet he was in contemporary British Countryside Garb, tweeds, walking shoes, walking hat with a feather in it, with a walking stick, and with a British pipe in his mouth... Birds and squirrels were scampering and twittering over the shoulders of the Pleasant Person. Two of the birds were Scarlet Tanagers.'But the Scarlet Tanager is a United States bird only,' said the lad . . . ‘What are tanagers doing in England?’”

When viewed through the "moon trick" of looking between one's legs, Gregory appears as a "veritable giant," representing the monstrosity of satanic pride and inflation rather than divine transcendence. Laffery writes:

"He turned around, bent over, and looked at the Person backwards between his legs. And by that viewing, the Person Himself was a veritable giant, taller than the trees, taller than the distance between here and a full moon. Then the lad straightened up and turned around and looked at the Person frontwards; and the illusion returned (Oh, this is all backwards!), and the Person was again only a rather large and altogether pleasant man . . ."

The narrative consequences of this transposition are total. If the story’s counterfiguration holds, then the five verified hands against which the dealers authenticate Patrick’s new specimen are not satanic ones: the world’s supreme authorities have been venerating the Adversary’s handwriting as God’s for generations. That gives Jim Jam’s line its meaning. “The slickest trick of the Devil is to convince people that he does not exist.”

The “Dirty Deal” completes the catastrophe. Patrick sells what the story has taught us (if we are paying attention) to read as Christ’s autograph (Jim Jam’s) to a Trenton consortium for $99,999,999. The buyers imagine they are acquiring their master’s signature; by the logic of counterfiguration, they are buying the opposite, an unrecognized Christ smuggled into their cult as “impetus” and “infection.” Meanwhile, the tweedy Person’s autograph (the one that, on this reading, actually belongs to Satan) has become a worthless attachment, tossed in as a “not-very-important” extra precisely because it is labeled “God the Father.” The irony is that they admit Christ into their economy from misrecognition:

"I gave the signature of Himself as a something else on the deal; the buyers weren't very interested in the signature of Himself. I threw it in on the deal because it was inseparable with it . . . The autograph on the other side of the paper, the autograph behind God's back on the deal behind God's back . . . It was the autograph of Jim Jam the Crackerjack Man, of course."

There is a more generous reading, I should add. On this reading, Patrick T. K.'s Treton Devil Worshippers are like the Mad Undancing Bears. They are counterfigured Christians, and Patrick T. K. has made a deal that infects him and might lead to his own salvation.

One could go on about this story for a very long time. I have had to set aside what Lafferty is doing with Jakob Böhme and signatura rerum, the comedy around John the Baptist, and eschatology, but there is always too much to say. It really is a graduate course in how advanced Lafferty works. It is also a sad story, because it is unlikely that many readers will ever learn to read Lafferty this way. Stories like “Golden Trabant,” for instance, fail to be understood because selective scholarship has obscured the Ghost Story's larger shape and artistic importance. That is inseparable from its moral failures. Until these interpretive “dopants” (the small distortions introduced by omission, bias, and overemphasis) are identified and traced, readers will keep struggling to make sense of characters such as Patrick T. K., who seems to have been a crypto-Jew from the beginning. I have wondered if T. K. stands for the kike.

*Here, I am going to be polemical. One cannot understand Lafferty extrinsically—by charting his publication dates and compositional history against small units such as the short stories. That is a necessary condition, but it will never be sufficient; what is needed is a strong internal understanding of his symbol systems, not extrinsic documentation with belletrist polish and illustration, because Lafferty is an esoteric writer. When I hear it said that Lafferty creates strange logic in his novels, and then the speaker does not explain what those logics are, or when someone disagrees with something I have said on this blog but does not explain the point of disagreement, I find it frustrating, because this is not how understanding advances. I suspect that there is no there there.

Lafferty readers need to take more risks, move beyond the gosh-wow, he’s-so-funny appreciation, and work out how Lafferty’s storytelling works. Not knowing the full facts about the antisemitism has made Lafferty harder to read. There has been one deep attempt to read Lafferty internally with ambition, itself by Andrew Ferguson, who apparently chose (for whatever reason) not to tell readers about the antisemitism, and it is, on my reading, incredibly flawed. The idea itself was brilliant. My primary objection is that it misunderstands Lafferty, and that misunderstanding is significant for my reading of him. My secondary objection ought to concern anyone: it uses a phenomenological theory in a way that strips it of its explanatory force. Moreover, it remains external to Lafferty and does not inhabit his mind with critical imagination. It is a theory-heavy argument grounded too one-sidedly in a single Lafferty performance. It is aimed at journal readers who neither care enough about the theorist at hand to see that the theory is being used incoherently nor know enough about R. A. Lafferty to see that the cash-out makes him less interesting as a writer. More seriously, if one were being rigorous, it effectively allows Lafferty to rewrite things like the Holocaust out of existence on his own terms, because the prefigurative horizon has been blown away in the blast of the world ending. Understand the argument philosophically, and you will see this to be true:

"Deprived of the grounding components of mimesis1, Lafferty must begininstead with mimesis2, 'the kingdom of the as if' (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative I.64), and then build backwards from configuration towards prefiguration. Since none of the traditional anchors of narrative can beaccepted as given, they must all be called into being by fictive declaration before mimesis can be established in relation to any of them . . ."

This is a fancy way of saying something simple. The world we live in is a shared structure of meaning, and when that structure vanishes, you cannot simply “describe reality,” because the usual ground-of-meaning has disappeared. Lafferty’s solution is to use science fiction’s “as if” to declare the basic coordinates a story needs, so a world becomes thinkable again, a kind of “let there be.”

Why should we be careful in accepting this as an account of world-making in Lafferty? This formulation of the “world-ended, Flatland” setup is epistemically dangerous; it breaks the usual truth tests for history. If the shared horizon that lets words latch onto a common reality is gone, then you cannot begin by “reporting the past.” Even the basic anchors that make reports intelligible must be put in place first. That is why the argument says Lafferty has to begin in the “as if.” He then has to build backward. The anchors are “called into being by fictive declaration” before mimesis can relate to anything at all. Ferguson writes, “any history we might undertake to write is, of necessity, an alternate history, a uchronia . . .” He says this is because “the past is already flattened” and cannot return as a secure foundation.

Now think about the Holocaust, which Lafferty denied. If what counts as evidence, cause, or event (what I am here calling a basic anchor) depends on an act of fictive declaration, then rival fictive declarations can generate rival pasts. There is no fully external safeguard that forces one account to win, only whatever becomes collectively adopted or enforced as the new fictive horizon. Ferguson does mention constraints. He says interpretation has a “limited field of possible constructions,” and that there are “bones and stones” with real “informational density.” But he also says that, under amnesia, those remnants are “inscrutable,” and that we can only “speculate” from what is left, so the “constraints” do not protect the past from being rewritten. What would make Auschwitz scrutable in this argument? Do we merely speculate about it? Why would this question about Auschwitz not extend to so many historical particulars that Ferguson’s claim about the nature of fictive declaration in world creation becomes unworkable? To me, it looks like “declaration” is provisional and corrigible under constraint, in which case the argument does not explain what it wants to explain, or the argument must bite the bullet and embrace voluntarism about the past.

That this argument seems not to recognize theseimplications of its own logic for Lafferty (who wrote historical novels and held conspiratorial views) is particularly galling to me. Andrew Ferguson was the only person (presumably) who knew about the Holocaust denial. After all, our world is not so epistemologically gone that one can't visit Auschwitz or Lafferty's archive, and no one can fictively declare it away. That sounds harsh, but look at the facts for yourself. Consider what the argument asks us to believe about Lafferty's fiction. The most charitable thing I can say is that it is a fine example of “good intentions” doing what they do best.