The Times and Antitimes of Enniscorthy Sweeny
Two opposite points on the rim of a rolling wheel cannot both be on the top at once: this is taken as an almost reasonable postulate. But they could both be on top at once if one of them were suppressed by Amnesia. —Matthew Woodbine Junior, in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny
The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is difficult to discuss because of its informational density. That density gets too little attention in Lafferty circles but is the subject of this blog. Instead, people say he was smart or erudite. His art partly accounts for this critical escape route: the storyteller persona conceals how much information he compresses into the work. People usually call his tricks oral, but that description misses their more interesting function. They let him pack encyclopedic information and one-of-a-kind perspective beneath a surface full of what linguists call pragmatic markers. It's just your drunk Irish uncle talking.
The novella has two sides, named in its first section, “The Life and Times of Enniscorthy Sweeny.” For first-time readers, here is a cheat code: its overall structure is 1+4+1+4+1. Sorry, Sheryl Smith: no 3+1 here. Funnily enough, Smith didn’t like the work. The two sides, Life and Times, reappear in the titles of the sixth and eleventh sections, “The Chronology of the Life and Times” and “Afterword on the Life and Antitimes.” These three sections frame the two groups of four. Each group begins with a “Short Discussion” and includes “Extracts from the Letters.” The documents in the first group date from about 1907 to 1924; those in the second, from about 1920 to 1983.
Throughout this pattern, the distinction between the Life and the Times matters. The Life is easy enough to record, although Enniscorthy’s later life is full of ambiguity. The Times are where the work becomes fugal. A Life timeline appears at the bottom of this post, but it offers only limited help in mastering the text.
The animation below provides a reference for the posts to come. It takes the form of a volvelle, showing how the Life and the Times cross-ramify as Enniscorthy’s play with time and the Devonian Equations complicate the Life. Devonian’s “General Equation” shows that the time of every era, its “Consensus-Time,” is keyed to a single individual. The “Particular Equation” applies to the new century, and its answer is “a boy named Enniscorthy Sweeny on West Blackwater Street in Chicago.”
A volvelle is a chart made of paper discs that turn on a pin, of the kind bound into early books of astronomy or used to calculate the dumb weapon speed and length rules in AD&D’s first edition. In this one, the column on the left lists the book’s eleven sections in reading order, each with its date. The ring on the right carries the years 1894 to 1984, clockwise from the top, where the first and last years meet. As each section turns, a red thread runs from Sweeny, standing on the pin at the center, out to the document’s date. After all, he is the answer to the Particular Equation. Red ticks mark the years mentioned in its passages.
The Chronology leaves out the world wars, so the volvelle puts them beneath the ring. Three windows cut into it stand for Sweeny’s three Armageddon operas. A ground printed with the battle names he hears on his silent radio shows through these windows and at the center. In the sixth section, teal circles mark the years when the Chronology departs from recorded history, such as Harold Standpipe’s election as president in 1900. The film is silent and runs about thirteen and a half minutes. Most of the cards quote the novella directly, drawing attention to passages worth keeping in mind.
This may all sound crazy. If anyone has a better way of thinking about the nested temporal shapes in 3A, I’m all ears. At bottom, I’m a redneck who wants to understand this material.
