The Man Who More Than Talled Tales

There were two hundred and forty men in our battery. Not all of them could tell such stories as these that were deep folklore incarnate. But at least two hundred of them could. I have always believed that this element of genuine folklore, this giantism, this unbounded joy, was always to be found in the talk of traveling men and of soldiers, those especially. And they are genuine folklore by the only valid test: they sound like genuine folklore. I make this contribution on the subject and I hope that the professional folklorists will find it meaningful. "The Roots of Folklore"

As a piece of writing, Lafferty’s unpublished “The Roots of Folklore” is a flanking maneuver, but it may be the place to start if one wants to get at the tall tale side of Lafferty. It is not what draws me most in his work, but if it draws you, the essay is prime Laffertiana. It is a place where Lafferty both performs tall tales and talks explicitly about what he is performing. It also shows a clear split between what he says about tall tales, the half of the picture readers get in interviews, and what he actually does with them. In “The Roots of Folklore,” Lafferty casts himself as his own unreliable narrator, the sarge from the 200th, one half real Lafferty, one half confection.

What do we get on the surface? Lafferty says that the men in the 200th could tell you folklore—real folklore. He uses this to show that folklore has a dual essence: it combines gigantism and unbounded joy. The talk of traveling men and soldiers, he says, contains both, and so it is full of folklore. One consequence is that folklore is a living art form. How can we know this? The proof is in the pudding, so Lafferty offers four remarkable servings, drawn from four privates first class in the 200th: Lonnie Sweetwater, Robert Graygoslin, Benedict Boudreau, and Adolf Martin.

What’s most interesting is how unstraightforward it all turns out to be. Each example complicates the simple picture of gigantism and joy.

Here are the stories:

PFC Lonnie Sweetwater (The Brass Band)

Lonnie Sweetwater’s dialogue about the brass band greeting him when he gets home after the war is whimsical, but it also expresses a fantasy of control shaped by a soldier’s anxiety. The joy of his homecoming is too important to leave to chance. It becomes a demand, enforced by his decision to imprison the entire town by taking away its only bridge. The moment becomes less about community celebration than about one man’s need to matter, turning the welcoming fanfare into a coerced performance. The lesson? Folklore for Lafferty isn’t purely joyful; it uses the pretense of unbounded joy to mask anxiety and control.

PFC Robert Graygoslin (The Rifle-Shot Messengers)

Robert Graygoslin’s account of communicating through rifle fire is a good test case for the “Roots of Folklore” argument. It complicates the idea of folklore as light entertainment by doing something right up Lafferty Lane: wedding ingenuity to violence. The three-mile ravine becomes an image of human isolation, and the fantastical solution, carving messages on bullets, transforms human aggression into a form of human connection. The line about shooting a neighbor in the "right round," and the joke that he "walked a little bit tender," root the tall tale in pain. The lesson? Folklore for Lafferty enlarges violence to make sense of human factors that are more complicated than the violence itself.

PFC Benedict Boudreau (The Prophetic Rash)

Benedict Boudreau’s wife and her prophetic rash offer the reader a miracle as a chronic illness. Is it a gift, or is it a personal affliction? The ability to read news from the future seems powerful, but it appears as an uncontrollable “rash” that turns her body into public text, violating her “extreme modesty.” This piece of folklore is about how little control we have over our bodies—and over the future. The “giant” solution of making the future legible comes at the cost of autonomy, dignity, and privacy. The lesson? Folklore for Lafferty mercilessly exposes our anxieties—and the horror of being seen to have them.

PFC Adolf Marin (The Literate Elephant)

Adolf Marin's tells the sarge about Aunt Emma, a writing elephant. This story appears to be the most joyful, but it is rooted in a sense of human inadequacy and longing. The elephant’s miraculous literacy turns out to be a compensation for the wife’s inability to write and her shortcomings as a mother. If it has a center, it might be the detail that Adolf finds an authentic connection—he can "hear my wife's voice"—through the inauthentic medium of an animal. Is this simple, joyous exaggeration? Lesson: Folklore for Lafferty is a response to the gaps between people and the nature of human limitation itself.