The Oceanic Novels

New section added to the blog for the oceanic novels. Some diagrams for how I think they work. The diagrams isolate what I take to be their three big questions: What is this seemingly flawed world I’m in? Who am I in this world? What will remake me?

Laurence M. Janifer intuited that Lafferty’s oceanic novels are about the third question, and he wrestled with how they relate to genre in "He Saw Another Mountain " (1974). He called the piece a rave for the next book Lafferty would write. Janifer wrote that the highest request made of fiction (any art at its peak, he said) is this: “Create me.”

Janifer nailed it, but he didn’t recognize that Lafferty had already decided not to give the kind of answer that would have satisfied someone like Janifer. This is ironic because Lafferty also wrote in the piece, “He has what every man has, a theology, but—a requirement for any artist above a certain fairly high level—he knows what his theology is.”

The imperative “Create me” is an aestheticist ideology, an idiotic false hope for autotelic completion displaced onto things—one of the heresies of the Modernism he reviled—and something to be rejected at all costs. Perfection, he said, was just another word for completion. It would not happen in the temporal order, but it was necessarily sacramental and participatory. So, his oceanic novels answer the third question with another: “Through the grace of God, you will have to create yourself. But here is a vision, so you will know you are not alone. What will you do now?”