Totalizing

“Oh sure, you're loaded with weird stuff. You couldn't function otherwise. It's an essential enzyme in you. It will replace itself as rapidly as it's used, and it's meant to be used. The whole world is there in caricature, and something is busy there solving the problems and fictions of the world. Or else it is the prime stuff in there, and it is the world that is the caricature of it.” — “It’s Down the Slippery Stairs”

A few quick notes on being totalizing: I believe readers need a total Lafferty, if only to argue with it. They hardly have a partial one.

Let’s say you think totalization is a problem, even a dead end. Fair enough. But in Lafferty’s case, you lose something essential by ignoring it outright. You might also think Freud was wrong—a dead end in his own way. To a large extent, I agree with critics like Frederick Crews who said as much for decades. Yet I don’t think we can stop reading Freud anytime soon. Too many artists took him seriously for us to ever ignore him; he’s baked into our literature in a way Jung never will be. If you don’t know how to totalize the world—at least like a second-rate Freudian—most of Modernism and what followed will simply pass you by. Good luck to you.

In the same way, Lafferty totalized because he was an old-fashioned Catholic—and Catholic means universal, which is to say, total. The irony is that people haven’t yet assembled enough of the logocentric Lafferty even to deconstruct him well.

Frederic Jameson was one of my favorite literary critics. Two of his credos are invaluable: always historicize and always look for the totality.

Jameson championed totalization as a Marxist critical method, arguing that to understand any social, economic, or cultural phenomenon, one must situate it within the broader, interconnected totality of the social system. Since ours is a capitalist system, he argued that we must place any art produced under its regime in that context.

What Jameson says about totality is something I take to be apodictic about totality, if not about capitalism. It is the reader’s task to discern how disparate elements interact to form unified (if contradictory) wholes. Jameson acknowledged that late capitalism makes the project of totalization profoundly difficult. Everything makes it difficult.

Lafferty, as we know, disliked Marxists. For him, the difficulty of totalization lay not in late capitalism, reification, commodity fetishism, or any of the Marxisant candidates, but in spiritual and cultural amnesia, which had become an enabling condition of our social system and its mores. He seemed to recognize that Marxists on this side of Adorno, at least, possessed a desire for totality. It was an enemy image—that idolatrous totality—but one that mirrored his own relentless drive to historicize and to comprehend the whole.