"The Man Underneath" (1960/1971)

Little c went to visit the Great Zambesi-Chartel in his cell. “It is time we had a talk,” he said. “No, no, it's too late for talk,” said Charles Chartel. “You have disgraced us both, Charles,” said celach. “It goes very deeply when it touches me.” “I never even knew who you were, little c. You are protean and you are not at all plausible.”

Advanced Lafferty.

Charles Chartel is our main character, a professional magician who performs under the name the Great Zambesi. He is known for a flawlessly executed vanishing trick involving a wooden box and his assistant, Veronica. No one quite knows how it works. Chartel says he sends Veronica down into the ocean. During a performance at the Tri-State Fair, Chartel opens the empty box. There is no Veronica, but out comes a ragged, shape-shifting, clown-like man. The clown soon joins Chartel's troupe and demonstrates reality-altering abilities. For instance, he can refill empty cigar cartons and liquor bottles. When questioned by Chartel about this, the clown says that he does it by shifting objects slightly backward or forward in time to the moments of their "plenitude."

“By our own theory that we worked out so long ago, Charles. I shift it only a little in time and it is done. Anything that has once been full can be filled again by taking it back to the time of its plenitude.”

After seeing the clown perform a trick with an old hat, Chartel deduces the mechanics behind the temporal magic. And he begins to abuse it. He uses it to steal and accumulate money. He descends onto meanness. This new wealth triggers even further deterioration in his personality and habits as he grows wealthier. He bankrupts his manager, Finnerty, to take over the show, and then he begins mistreating Veronica and the rest of the performers. Chartel's greed and arrogance lead to his fall, when he is arrested and imprisoned on dozens of charges ranging from wage fraud to petty theft.

Now, Chartel really is in a box, this time a jail cell. Veronica and the clown visit him with the dismantled pieces of the magic box. The clown says who he is: the physical manifestation of Chartel's own subconscious mind, brought into existence through years of subconsciously perfecting the disappearing trick. He passes a judgment on Chartel. Chartel became too serious, and he lost the fun, and the clown explains that a transference must occur, punning on the psychoanalytic category. Overpowering Chartel, Veronica and the clown force him into the reassembled box. When the lid is opened, Chartel has gone. That leaves the clown to take over as the Great Zambesi, but with the spirit of fun. Everyone is happier for it, especially Veronica:

We won't say that Zambesi wasn't the greatest magician inthe world. He may have become the greatest, after he began to treat it lightly. People, he was good! There was never any act with such variety and fun in it. After his strange mid-life hiatus he achieved new heights. “And I'm certainly glad you overcame your personality difficulties,” the loving Veronica told him later. “For a while there—whoof! But I always knew you were a fine man underneath.”

At one point, Lafferty regarded "The Man Underneath" highly enough to want to call a collection of his stories The Man Underneath: Stories out of the “Ocean” called modernly the Subconscious, on the Theme of Fun in Fiction. That never came to be, but the story titles he wanted survived on lists, just as they do in other Lafferty collections that never came to be, such as Purgatorio and Selenium Ghosts.

"The Man Underneath" is a fine story. Lafferty does many ingenious things. But I find it far less interesting than the work he was going to do later on it’s themes when his religious imagination becomes anagogical and his cultural critique more slashing. For all its brilliance, it imagines the unconscious in a way far more typical than the ways he would later develop. He is still working on the box. I have recently written about how Lafferty learns to figure the unconscious topologically in later works. Here, the unconscious is a subterranean ocean. It is imagined as being "down there":

The explanation that Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel gave to his audiences will not be given here. Should we repeat it, we would not be believed; we would be laughed at — and we are sensitive. We have not the magnetism of Zambesi to carry off such an outlandish claim as his even though it should be true — and it was. (Actually he said that he sent Veronica down into the Ocean and that he called her back again from that Ocean.)

That makes the story very much like an early Lafferty piece. All this seems more Freudian than the direction Lafferty would later take, and therefore less exciting, though there is a marvelously inventive schizo-gash. It also seems to me that Lafferty must have read Jung by March of 1960, when he wrote "The Man Underneath," because there are signs that Jung’s ideas about psychic energy are present. He was certainly versed in Jung by the time he revised "The Man Underneath" in February of 1965. Yet the story draws very hard on Freud. The technical term cathexis, from Freudian psychoanalysis, tips it off in the following scene, though there is no need for the Freudian jargon to see the Freudian model at work:

“You've got to get out of here, cnaufer,” Chartel hissed at the little man again and again. “Who are you and how did you get here? Off with you now, cathexis, you're fouling up the act.” But the little man avoided Chartel who would have killed him in all sincerity.

Cathexis becomes one of the names of the character sub-c. Stuffing something into a box is a Freudian image associated with the psychodynamics of repression, not with Jung's analytic psychology toolkit. There is also the Freudian device that holds the story together: displacement and the formation of a substitution.

Substitute formation (Ersatzbildung) is the concept Freud develops most fully in Chapter VI of The Interpretation of Dreams and refines in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926). It is the replacement that results when an idea, object, or wish is too incompatible with the ego to appear directly, so it is repressed and returns in another form through unconscious associations. The psychical intensity of the repressed idea detaches and attaches to something associatively linked but less threatening. The substitute shows up as another thought, image, symptom, obsessional idea, or dream element. The many names of sub-c often obey this logic. The comedy in the story is amplified because the ego-identity called “Chartel” fails to recognize what c is. The c is sub-c, which is three things, at minimum: a pun on the word "sea" and the under-ocean of both thought and being; the individual subconscious of the analysand; and little Chantel himself, one part of a schizo gash. Most of the post will be given to working this out.

It is tempting to get very deep in the weeds on what this story is doing with psychoanalysis and bring in some Lacanian lit-crit tools, but my hunch is that it would yield quickly diminishing returns, so what I want to do instead is focus on how the many names of the clown work in the story. This story would be a chocolate bar for anyone wanting to write about signifying chains and the unconscious being structures like a language.

Since that isn’t the route being taken consider the word association test. Many people associate the word it with Freud and psychoanalysis, but it was in fact Jung who introduced it to Freud. It had its roots in experimental psychology going back to Galton (1879) and Wundt's laboratory work. Jung learned about it at the Burghölzli clinic, where Bleuler's research environment emphasized empirical methods. Jung thought it was just what he needed to produce something quantitative, so he took the existing technique and developed it into something he believed was more clinically powerful, using precise reaction-time measurements to detect unconscious complexes. It would be over the nature of libido and the nature of complexes that Freud broke with Jung. Basically, Freud was tyrannically confident that libido was fundamentally sexual energy. Old news, I know. Jung reconceived it as a broader life force or psychic energy not reducible to sexuality alone. Lafferty was indicating this when he said he was more of a Jungian than a Freudian. Jung’s ideas about psychic energy had a consequence for the theory of complexes. Where Freud saw complexes through an individual's lived history of repressed sexuality in the history of the person’s drives, Jung understood complexes as autonomous clusters of psychic energy organized around archetypal cores. That view threatened the centrality of Freud's sexual theory and made the Freud-Jung break inevitable.

But all that would be in the future. Before the break up came the word association test. It was Jung's published results from word-association experiments (particularly his 1906 Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien) that drew Freud's interest. Jung sent Freud a copy of his work, and Freud recognized that Jung's experimental findings offered the kind of laboratory evidence that psychoanalysis lacked. Thus began their famous correspondence and collaboration.

By the time Lafferty writes "The Man Underneath," this history is widely known. It is potted in books. We know that Lafferty had read Jung very deeply by the time he wrote Past Master and Fourth Mansions, but how much did he know when he wrote "The Man Underneath"? Again, impossible to say, but I suspect we’ll enough, and I would not be surprised if he had already read Archetypes of the Unconscious, which Princeton had published in translation before he wrote the story. And Lafferty always could have read Jung's work in German, though there is no record of him doing so, as far as I know. In the story, when Chartel is put in the box at the end, are we to read it as a Freudian return of the repressed or a form of Jungian enantiodromia? Is it both, or something else? It shows evidence of being both. Unlike Hopp Equation Space in Past Master, which is a twist on enantiodromia, this looks to me like an inter one. That is the first bit of useful background information.

The second piece of background information pertains to Lafferty's theology of seriousness and fun, which will find its fullest expression in the novel Aurelia. At play in "The Man Underneath" is the notion of the clown (sub-c) being a version of the homo interior. It was a central motif in medieval spiritual theology, describing a hidden, interior self oriented toward God and capable of spiritual transformation distinct from the outer, bodily person. The idea has Pauline roots (Romans 7:22, 2 Corinthians 4:16), but it was Origen in the third century who gave it its most influential early elaboration, so this is another Lafferty connection to that father. Origen developed an allegorical anthropology in which every feature of the outer, physical person—the senses, the limbs, even the capacity for eating and generation—had a spiritual counterpart in the inner man. For Origen, the homo interior has spiritual senses that can perceive divine realities: an inner eye for contemplating God, inner ears for hearing the Word, an inner taste for savoring Scripture. I am not going to dwell too much on this beyond noting the tradition.

Why? Because the clown is not just the return of the repressed or an instance of enantiodromia. Those two ideas are supposed to be scientific explanations of the psyche. Regardless of how we think about them, both Freud and Jung insisted that their work was scientific. In contrast, the homo interior is a normative concept. It is the higher part of the person. And clown in “The Man Underneath” as Chantel’s schizo-gashed sub-c is a better person than Chartel. He is less serious (read this as less avaricious, wrathful, prideful than Chartel as Big C), and he has a sense of fun, a theme Lafferty will return to obsessively for his entire writing life. Fun is relative to joy in Lafferty. Big C Chartel is thus the homo exterior gone wrong. As Lafferty might have later put it, Chartel is homo exterior as trashed life principle. Sub-c is the revenge of the homo interior. He gives Big C a theraupeuc re-immersion in the under ocean, home of the archetypes. As Lafferty later says, Christ is the Lord of the archetypes.

“Our difficulty, Charles, is that one of us became too serious,” carnefice tried to explain. “To be serious is the only capital crime. For that, one of us will have to die—but it isn't as though it were a serious matter. Every man is at least two men, but ordinarily the two are not at the same time bodied and apparent.”

Capital here carries the weight of the capital sins.

Yet the entire story relies on a mix of Freud's concept of repression and Jung's concept of complexes. To see that, one has only to look at the logic behind the many names of the clown.

Let's go through it slowly, breaking apart the entire set of names. The coming arrangement is somewhat arbitrary on my part, but there is enough pattern to know that it is not being projected onto the text. Laffery’s design is present.

“Stay a bit, cyfaill. In my patter that is the way I make the girl disappear. How could it make you appear?” [ . . . ] “There's a lacuna in your logic, clunis,” Chartel said. “Hey, how can you turn into a Hottentot so easily? And not into a real Hottentot either, coya — but into what I would call an old burlesque-stage idea of a Hottentot.” “You always did have a good imagination, Charles,” said chabiari. He took up an empty glass, shook it, and it was filled again.

With this in our ears, the names of sub-c fit into sets, even if we can debate how to define those sets.

The first set is what I'm going to call Logic A. This set relates to the idea of substitute formation in Freudian theory. Freudian swap-outs occur when psychic energy that cannot reach its true (cathexed) object attaches instead to a proximate one. It can be a nearby sensation, an object at hand, or an action in progress. Freud thinks it is what makes displacement in dreams so weird. It's why when you turned the key in the lock, you were thinking about your mother. It is why girls dream about horses.

The nineteen names in Logic A work like this: a speaker in the story cannot name the subconscious directly as sub-Chantel, so the naming energy displaces onto other things. We get thematic patchwork. It happens with the cup on the table, the sound in the air, the costume being worn, the emotion filling the room. Three of them carry theological content that surfaces through the same displacement mechanism and are marked [X].

Second set, what I am going to call Logic B. Freud thought that when displacement turns inward, it shows the subject's own emotional state rather than the object's nature. Jung's account of the anima and shadow holds that our names for unconscious figures are projections of our relationship to them (need, tenderness, dismissal, fear). These fourteen names tell us nothing about c; they tell us about the speaker. Chartel's names deflate (chester, collard) or plead (cicerone, cyfaill); the Lemon sisters domesticate (claud, clarence); Veronica loves (chiot, chadwick dear). Logic B is a mirror held up to the namer.

Third set, Logic C. These are more Jungian than Freudian. Jung says that the unconscious is not merely reactive but purposive. It has its own self-knowledge and seeks expression. At one point he wrote that the archetype “appears as its reflection” and stages “its own manifestations spontaneously.” These sixteen sub-c names are like self-staging: the subconscious names itself, whether through c's own mouth or through a speaker whose tongue it commandeers. Some are clinical (cathexis), some in-frame jokes (cistugurium, “box-dweller”), some theological [X]. The common feature is that the name describes what c objectively is, not what the scene contains or what the speaker feels.

Fourth set, what I am going to call Register Y. Not every substitute formation carries weight. This is my cop out category. Freud acknowledged that some dream elements are what he called "indifferent." He had his own cop out. I think of them as being the white noise of the protean, though they might have significance that I haven't discerned.

At least that is one way into “The Man Underneath.” It is ingenious. It marks one peak of early Lafferty’s thinking about the major issues he would continue to develop. For all its brilliance, I do not love it as much as I love what is still to come. In the work that follows, Lafferty would reshape its ideas and create stories unlike anything anyone else would ever write. There is so much in “The Man Underneath” that only Lafferty could have written, but its plot is one others might have managed. To me, it is one of the bold first steps into a much wider ocean.

The Man Underneath Notes.pdf

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