The Prince of Time-Tables

That the Prince of the World was following a time-table relentlessly was clear. But it was also clear that nobody cared very much about that. The Writing of Fiction ceased everywhere in the world with the unstructuring of the world. Fiction required a structured world. Without consensus fact and happening for background, there could not be fiction. When the structure was gone, people lived partly in the framework of fact and partly in the framework of fiction. But with one foot in its bucket, they could not discern contemporary fiction at all. It was the same color and texture as the unstructured world. Contrast, and with it visibility, was gone. — In a Green Tree

This linked essay addresses some of the questions I have been raising on the blog. I recommend it. The response seems sincere, but it also falls into what I call secular quarantine:

Therefore, if I am correct in connecting Lafferty’s Holocaust denial to his general conspiratorialism, I don’t think I need to worry about his Holocaust denial contaminating or influencing me through reading his books: I can already recognise when he’s going wrong and reject it.

The blogger, a Jewish reader, admires Lafferty’s originality and writes about what the work has meant to him. He tries to reconcile that attachment with the discovery of Lafferty’s antisemitism and Holocaust denial, including their presence in the fiction. Like me, he connects the denial to Lafferty’s conspiratorial outlook. He still values some of the shorter work but feels betrayed by what he sees as concealed ideological content. He now reads with greater suspicion and can no longer enjoy the conspiracy stories or novels.

I agree with one observation in particular: “It may well be, then, that having an author with such wrongheaded opinions was simply the price we had to pay for having an author with such creativity.”

Lafferty’s artistic genius, which turns on anti-secrets, seems inseparable from his conspiratorial imagination. Much depends on how widely one draws the circle of conspiracy. For me, Laffertian secrets are conspiratorial because religion itself is a kind of good conspiracy. The pneumatological pun in -spiracy would not have escaped Lafferty. In his work, conspiracy could be another word for communion. Its moral character depends on who conspires and to what end.

In In a Green Tree, Julius Brass accuses the Roman Catholics of the Old Neighborhood of believing in a devilish conspiracy. I hear Lafferty giving voice to an objection to his own imaginative project. Because devils are everywhere in Lafferty, conspiracy is everywhere. Both Past Master and Fourth Mansions seem major achievements, full of weird wisdom and pathology.

Lafferty gives the devil many names. One of my favorites is the Prince of Time-Tables. The devil has a timetable, but events fail to follow it. This is a major theme in both Dark Shine and In a Green Tree.

For about a year, I have been working on a long essay about devils, time, and temporal conspiracy in Lafferty’s three long masterpieces. It traces the connections among his devils, particularly Ifreann in the Coscuin Chronicles and Strategos in In a Green Tree. I may post it soon.

I doubt that you can grab Lafferty by the ears and shake devilish conspiracy out of him. Recognizing its presence is only the beginning of understanding what it accomplishes artistically.

“I never really knew any of them, not any of the Old Gang,” Julius was saying, “and yet I know more details about them than they know about themselves or about each other. I have been a Roman-watcher in the neighborhood almost forever, and I know the superficial characteristics of every species and and subspecies of them that grow around here. “And yet I don’t know the big things about them. I don’t know for sure when they’re kidding and when they’re not, although I do know all their jokes and ploys. I could write a Wooden Irishman Joke Book on them to be on par with Tom Bluestem’s Wooden Indian Joke Book. By the way, there were wooden Irishmen, rough-carved wood statues of exaggerated Irish appearance standing outside of some cigar stores in the middle and late nineteenth century. The authentic ones are rarer and much more expensive than the Wooden Cigar Store Indians of the same period. I have been dealing for a good one that stood outside of Van Porto’s Cigar store in Philadelphia a little over a century ago. I have offered twelve thousand dollars for it. A good Wooden Indian of the same period can be had for about two thousand dollars, but I have two of those.” “Why is that recorder turned on, Julius? What are you up to?” General Stringtown asked. “The recorder is turned on to record, of course. It is recording because my monologs are so comprehensive and valuable, and because they would be so totally lost to posterity if I didn’t record them. I think I’ll buy the Wooden Irishman if I don’t have to go up too much higher [. . .] “And I could never figure out whether they were intelligent. On any given encounter, they’re either quite a bit smarter or quite a bit dumber than expected. They’re not constantly fast-witted. But they’re several times made me feel like the Hare who took a quick nap in the sun shade, and then finished his course only to find those damned turtles were not only already finished with their run, but were tubbed and scrubbed and wined and dined and were sitting on the patio in evening leisure attire drinking cold duck. And yet there are a lot of blanks in them. There are things they not only don’t know but never even heard of, things that every intelligent person should know. “There are very many things that they believe they’re right on, and they can’t be right on them, not unless all the rest of the world is wrong on them. What things? Oh, all of it. All the things in the world. There is no one thing in the world on which they don’t believe they’re right. And there is not a thing in the world on which they can be right without the world itself being wrong. “I know how they make their money. They just shove coins into the slot marked ‘bread upon the waters’, pull the lever, and their coins return to them a hundred fold. But it wouldn’t work for me. They have faith in the process, and I haven’t. They really intend to cast their coins away, and I wouldn’t. “I have heard of them, the bloody Romans of this and other neighborhoods, described seriously as a ‘highly spiritual people.’ They aren’t. They’re a lowly spiritual people, they’re a trashy spiritual people. Some people use the word spiritual in several different senses, but it has only one sense: pertaining to detachable, non-material phenomena containing human or other animate residue . . ."