What Are You, Sandaliotis?

So does Hell seem an altogether pleasant place, when it comes with its both hands full of enticements. —Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?

Some interpretations on the blog will seem really out there. I would defend most of them with a fairly high degree of certainty, from arguments about being inside a female reproductive system in “Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread” to the reading of “Junkyard Thoughts” as a story about a mental breakdown taking the form of a dissociative episode. The interpretation I am least confident about, but still think is correct, is that Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? is one of Lafferty’s infernal books, belonging on the shelf next to Not to Mention Camels, Lafferty’s parody of occultism, cults, and media, and Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage, his infernal fantasy about Islam, which he took to be full of devils. As I have said before, I think Sandaliotis is about a dead man who doesn’t know he is dead and is making his way deeper and deeper into hell.

That seems counterintuitive. Sandaliotis is one of Lafferty’s brightest books, with its scenic set pieces, but I interpret all that as a veneer. Lafferty uses his technique of counterfiguration. The Italian Steps, with three hundred steps up and three hundred and one down, represent an unnoticed descent into hell. All that brightness is noetically dark, and the real heart of the novel is the Dungeons of Tertullian. Chapter Five ends with Quiche knowing that he is dead, and Chapter Six begins, “And after death, the judgment.”

I didn't know the word Sandaliotis before reading Lafferty, and I think Kevin Cheek pointed out that the location has a history. I came across a post of his saying something like that before reading the novella. Sure enough, Sandaliotis is an ancient name for Sardinia. It refers to the island’s supposed resemblance to a sandal. The oldest use I can find comes from Pliny, who credits the name to the Greek historian Timaeus. It then appears in later ancient writings, shows up on a famous medieval map, and enters Renaissance histories and dictionaries. It sometimes pops up in modern scholarship; at least one academic paper (in French) has been written about it.

Lafferty took this very old land and did something very Lafferty with it: he fed it through Charles Fort’s New Lands and came up with one of his most impenetrable works. People have told me that Sandaliotis is not a hard Lafferty work, but I think they are wrong. It is not as good as The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, its companion in Apocalypses, but it is harder to get a grip on. Most readers of Three Armageddons will pick up on the novel’s basic idea: Ennis is writing hellish operas, each nine times as powerful as the last (this is a 666 joke: 6 plus 60 plus 600). But I haven’t seen anyone suggest that Sandaliotis is about hell.

In terms of the Whole Lafferty, Sandaliotis is the culmination of the Fortean sequence of stories, its most extreme expression. Lafferty builds his version of the place on ideas from Charles Fort’s New Lands, so it helps to know a bit about that work. Lafferty got a lot of mileage out of earlier Fortean formulations such as the Super-Sargasso. This time around, he mines, for all it is worth, the idea that undiscovered lands may lie close above the earth. Fort imagined a whole uncharted geography, filled with islands, continents, seas, and currents in what we take to be empty space. Some of these regions might stay above particular places on earth, ordinarily unseen but occasionally revealed by unusual lighting, reflections, and objects falling from them. Fort is again doing his damned fact thing, challenging the consensus picture of astronomical reality. His alternative is a stationary earth inside a revolving enclosure, with stars as openings admitting light from outside. The lands he describes are hidden neighbors whose existence would force us to reconsider our place in the cosmos.

Fort makes his case from the kind of thing one usually finds in Fort: falling stones, cryptids, weird substances, impossible-to-explain explosions, bewildering fairy lights, and so on. At one point in New Lands, he collects accounts of black stones falling around Birmingham and Wolverhampton over eleven years, then asks whether they evince a persistent source overhead, a point relevant to Lafferty’s “Nor Limestone Islands.” More germane to Sandaliotis is Fort’s discussion of recurring visions of a city above Alaska. The Fortean method is the same in all of Fort’s works: bring together observations scattered among newspapers and scientific publications; ask whether events treated separately by siloed intellectuals might have a shared explanation, even if the aforesaid intellectuals could not accept it. He calls his interpretations “suggestions and gropings and stimuli,” and he sometimes questions evidence that would suit him very well.

I think Lafferty gives all this his religious twist in Sandaliotis. One could read it simply as a Fortean novel, yet that would overlook where Lafferty rewrites Fort. For all Fort’s contempt for people who called themselves scientists, he also had contempt for those who thought of themselves as religious. Whatever the larger, hidden realities of the Fortean universe are, they are not the realities of the Catholic cosmos. For Lafferty, those hidden realities are spiritual. When Lafferty’s version of Forteana irrupts into the mundane order, it indicates truths about Prime.

I know my interpretation of Sandaliotis as a Fortean novel set in hell is so radically different from how others have read the book that it might seem a little crazy. In this reading, the real world is replaced by a Fortean screen that hides what is happening in the book: devils toy with Constantine Quiche using the Fortean torpedo to deceive him. At the end, Quiche risks his own escape for “artistic effect,” taking up the Director’s way of thinking. If you read or reread it, keep this interpretation in mind, and I think you will see that much that otherwise makes no sense falls into place, with Lafferty counterfiguring the depths of hell as sky.

Yes, it now seemed to Constantine very much as if all the people at table with him in Messina’s German Restaurant in Ichnusa of Sandaliotis were simulacra, and that these people here on the Torpedo (for Constantine now, by special dispensation, was both places at once) were the primary people. They were on the dazzling and direct Sky-Island that Constantine knew only by the code name of Thibeau’s Torpedo, and it was joltingly fundamental and material there. These primary people, though they were the same people as those he was dining with in the restaurant at the same time, were incomparably fierce in their sky manifestations. They were Sky-Animals, and they would raid anything up to a million times their size. They were destroyers. They were annihilators.