The Lay of Road-Storm

In my day job I'm not an Americanist, much less a specialist in science fiction. My background is in eighteenth-century British literature, and Lafferty ended up being just a hobby interest. One of the first things that caught my attention when I started rereading him was how he sometimes uses heroic couplets to generate ideas. It may seem an odd thing to fasten on, but the eighteenth-century mind loved the couplet, with its sharp antitheses and snapping-jaw closure, and I was trained to notice it.

Space Chantey brought this into focus, and I was as interested in what the verse was doing as in the prose. It seemed that Lafferty had worked through the poetic form before he wrote the narrative, rather than doing what might seem the more obvious thing and versifying the prose afterward. That might be the moment when Lafferty really captured my imagination: Space Chantey's own claim that its lay calls its storyworld into existence.

When I started the blog, one of my first posts shared some of my notes on this. Here is my current set of notes on the lay.