Source: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/RALafferty/conversations/messages/85 ========================================================================== Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 16:45:38 -0400 From: Bryan Cholfin To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: [RALafferty] help I'm working on a new essay about Lafferty, somewhat different from the one I wrote for Readercon. This one is for a select group of mainstream literary readers who I am assuming know nothing about Lafferty. The goal is to get them to want to read Lafferty. I'd like to know if anyone could read this and see what you think. It's not going to be posted on the web, so I'm just inserting the text here. In particular, I hope someone will let me know if I've said anything really dumb about Catholicism or St. Augustine; my knowledge of these is fairly rudimentary. In fact, Lafferty is the only reason I know anything about Augustine. But I'm assuming that at least some of the audience for this will be Catholics and might be interested in Lafferty for that reason, so I don't want to offend anybody. And this is still a little rough. ************************ All right, all right, I've been sitting and staring and this damn screen for hours and hours trying to answer the unanswerable: How do you explain R. A. Lafferty to someone who has never read any of his work? I've been reading Lafferty for years, I published two of his books, and I can't even explain him to me. One could begin with jacket-copy clichés, "neglected genius," "a distinctive and unique American voice," "a visionary plumbing the depths of the human soul," but this is a cheap trick and gets you nowhere fast. There is no easy category or label to stick on the work. The labels slide off, get lost on the floor. Sure, there are other writers sufficiently original to be called sui generis, but usually it is not so hard a task to trace lineages, evolutionary steps, groups of literary compatriots, and so on; Lafferty is downright anomalous. Attempting to shoehorn the anomalous into a literary spectrum, I have seen Lafferty compared to Flann O'Brien, Franz Kafka, Flannery O'Connor, Philip K. Dick, G. K. Chesterton, James Joyce, Gabriel García Márquez, and more (to borrow a quote from Don Webb: "The astute observer will note that all the names on the list are Irish, saving those which are not."). I am responsible for some of these myself. But here I would like to emphasize Lafferty's distinctions rather than his resemblences to others. Because of Lafferty's unusual literary position, there isn't very much in the way of critical writing about him; what follows is little more than a few signposts into relatively uncharted territory. Yes, most of his stories appeared in science fiction markets, and were often called such, but they were not products of the genre. If this were the case, if Lafferty had simply written amusing stories about weird things, myself and my colleagues would not have struggled so hard and at such cost to keep him from being forgotten. Perhaps we should begin with the superficial facts of the matter, so that they may be dismissed. R. A. Lafferty's stories began to appear in 1959, when Lafferty was forty-five years old. At the time, he was working for the Clark Electrical Supply company of Tulsa, Oklahoma. But heavy drinking was starting affect his health, and in order to cut down, he looked for something to fill the time. He turned to writing, trying his hand at writing a variety of different types of short stories, and found that the science fiction magazines would buy what he sent. Most sf writers start young and read extensively within the field; Lafferty started in middle age and knew almost nothing about it. The writers he would cite as influences—Chesterton, Belloc, Twain, Melville, Stevenson, Dickens, Balzac—were mostly of the nineteenth century. He was not the least bit modern by inclination or outlook. This would seem to be a handicap for an sf writer, but Ray turned it to great advantage. He did have a few other resources to draw on, and the one that influenced his style and method the most was the rich tradition of tall-tale storytelling that was still vibrant and strong in Oklahoma at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1890s, the Cherokee Outlet of Oklahoma was the last frontier, the last large tract of land made available for homesteading by federal grant. Settlers poured into it and made towns and farms and businesses literally overnight. As a boy, Ray spent many nights listening to stories being spun out by men he considered master storytellers. His uncle, Ed Burke, worked as a stenographer at the Wichita Indian Agency, and Ray learned a good bit of Native American folklore from him. Lafferty relates in an interview that while working as a buyer for Clark, his job brought him into contact with dozens of salesmen, and that he picked up many good stories from them. "Salesmen," he said, "are the best storytellers." And indeed there is a quality to Lafferty's tone that could be described as hucksterish, the voice of the fast-talking carnival barker trying to get the rubes to take a peek into the tent with promises of wonders and miracles. But Lafferty views his marks not with disdain but with great sympathy, and while he is dazzling you with wonders and miracles the real prize has been quietly slipped into your back pocket to be discovered later. Lafferty makes extensive use of the breezy, colloquial feel of the oral style, the high humor and the piling up of whoppers one after another. In fact, the best way to appreciate Lafferty's voice is to read the story out loud to somebody else. Lafferty used the techniques of the tall-tale storyteller, but the content came from inside Lafferty's own head. In particular, his dreams. In an interview, Lafferty said he would "get a lot of ideas out of dreams. . . . It seems useless to try to analyze them. But I've some odd dreams, and when I embody them into a story, I don't have them anymore." In a dream, you may see someone you know, but they look different from their waking appearance. In a dream, you may see someone who looks like someone you know, but is someone else. In a dream, perspectives shift suddenly, objects become larger or smaller, sequences of events are nonlinear and not necessarily causally connected. Things and people project emotional resonances not visibly apparent. All of this and more may occur in a Lafferty story, simultaneously with the waking reality, to the confusion of the characters, and often the reader as well. This might lead one to call Lafferty a surrealist, though Lafferty himself shied away from this tag: "I don't regard myself as a Surrealist in the sense of the Surrealist Manifesto published by Andre Breton in 1924. To me, that Manifesto is somewhat dated, being a recoil from World War One, and being too heavily Freudian. My own unconscious is more Jungian than Freudian. . . . I suppose I believe in another sort of surreality or super-reality, but it would have to be on a wider basis than the encounters of myself and me. As often as not, it is my subconscious that supplies the rational element, and the exterior world that supplies the dream and fantasy feeling." Lafferty frequently presents the exterior world of his stories as being superficially like our consensus reality, with an intrusion of some anomalous event. But upon investigation, it is shown that the strange event is not so unique, that it has happened in the past and may happen again in the future. And so the world is transformed from a place where these events are impossible to one where the events are possible, but the possibility is hidden from normal view. Now we come closer to the heart of the matter. What was all this for? Ray Lafferty was a devout, conservative Roman Catholic. Humans, in Lafferty's view, had a privileged position in the world, but it was a position that could be lost, or taken away, or usurped by another. Quite a few of his stories involve characters caught between alternating views of reality, one of which is approximately like our waking reality and one which is more surreal, or more primal, and ending up on the right side depends on making a choice about what's necessary for our essential humanity. As a boy in Tulsa, Lafferty was sent to the Cascia Hall Preparatory School, a private Catholic school. The central text of the religious education at Cascia Hall was St. Augustine's City of God (Cascia Hall still bills itself as "an Augustinian School"). Augustine's vision of two societies, one of which was ruled by God and made up of the faithful (and other entities) who accepted God, and the other an earthly society, concerned with secular things, ruled by Satan, clearly affected Lafferty deeply. Visions of the conflict between these two societies recur frequently in many forms (both overt and hidden) in Lafferty's stories and novels. In a speech given in 1981, Lafferty explained his view that the world was not coming to an end, but that it already had ended. "I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived until fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as 'Western Civilization' or 'Modern civilization', happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was 'the World' for a few centuries, is gone." He then goes on to state that structured prose fiction is dead, and that "we are now in an unstructured era of post-musical music, post-fictional fiction, and post-experiential experience. We are, partly at least, in a post-conscious world. Most people seem to prefer to live in this world that has lost a dimension. I don't know whether the condition is permanent or transitory." And indeed, there were a lot of big changes in the early decades of the 20th century, in art, music, science (relativity and quantum mechanics), psychology (Freudian theory), and politics (the unraveling of the old imperial order of Europe). What Ray says in his essay is that in our new structureless time we're free to do whatever we want, but that most people prefer grubbing about in the rubble to using their creativity to build new structures for a new world. Given Ray's Augustinian vision, his distaste (to put it mildly) of secular humanism, and his view of the world as having become without values or direction, I think it is fair to say that Lafferty saw his writing as a means to help people find their way to a new society, a society ruled by moral principles. Lafferty had a strong, traditional moral vision, and he largely rejected the liberalism and modernism that he perceived as eroding necessary distinctions. But it wasn't particularly strict--his characters like to drink, gamble, and carouse, in a very Old West, frontier way. There are things that are true, and things that are false, and if sometimes it is unclear which is which, it is because those of us who think we are awake and perceiving reality as it is are actually asleep, stumbling around in the dark and missing half the show. The other half of the show is often what goes on inside of us when we're not looking. External appearance is unimportant to Lafferty, only the mind and soul really count. In Lafferty stories, machines, dolphins, elephants, bears, monkeys, australopithecines, and dolls stuffed with sawdust may all be moral actors. Truth may be revealed in the smallest and seemingly irrelevant detail, because nothing is in truth too small or irrelevant. If Lafferty's stories seem at times irrational and surreal, it is not because he disdained rationality as such, but the impulse of 'rational' people to try to deny the great and powerful processes that went on underneath, the processes that connect us to our souls. The worst sin is to not care. This, to Lafferty, was the ultimate evil, a suppression of our real human natures, and a kind of slavery and greying of the world. --Bryan G. Cholfin 40.6773148 N 73.9811859 W ========================================================================== Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2003 03:36:13 -0000 From: "st_prez" To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: help This looks solid so far. I've printed off a copy to look at in more detail, just so my neck and eyeballs don't freeze in place from trying to read serious copy on the monitor! Fortunately, I have to go in for office hours tomorrow. Since students almost never show up for these before the snow starts to fly, that gives me a couple of uninterrupted hours to look at it. Just for a start, the Flann O'Brien thing really works. There's even a similar progression from the brighter comedies like At Swim-Two- Birds, to the darker ones like The Third Policeman. RAL would probably have liked the dedication of The Dalkey Archive. ========================================================================== Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 10:33:37 -0400 From: Bryan Cholfin To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [RALafferty] Re: help On Tuesday, Sep 30, 2003, at 23:36 America/New_York, st_prez wrote: > Just for a start, the Flann O'Brien thing really works. This is true; there are significant similarities on several levels. And I didn't want to make it sound like Lafferty was so unlike these others as to be incomprehensible. But I also think saying things like "Lafferty is like a cross between Twain and O'Brien made to write science fiction in the 1960s" is not necessarily helpful, either. On the other hand, The Third Policeman is one of my favorite novels. --Bryan G. Cholfin 40.6773148 N 73.9811859 W ========================================================================== Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 03:24:12 -0000 From: "st_prez" To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: help Sorry this took longer than expected, but since the Fall, everything seems to. This is a persuasive essay, but I'm already a convert. I didn't know some of this information before. So how do we get people to read RAL? I teach More's Utopia, so every year I get 1 or 2 people to read Past Master. Beyond that, I don't know. Many years ago, I spent a couple of weeks reading Fourth Mansions aloud to my girlfriend. We broke up shortly thereafter, but I've never blamed Lafferty for that. Maybe we could reprint some of the short stories and leave them around in bus stations like religious tracts? (Which, of course, a lot of them are.) This really made me think. The way you read RAL, he's a lot like William Burroughs, except on the side of the angels, and I think you're right. I'm not a Burroughs fan at all, but they both have the same take on contemporary society, that the world has already ended. But Burroughs's solution is to try and destroy his own humanity and see what happens next. Lafferty really looks at God as the Ultimate Hipster, but it's easy to miss this because he was never really happy with any of the versions of Organized Hip that he ran into. Interesting, also, that both of them were deeply influenced by big theories of history -- Burroughs by Spengler, Lafferty by St. Augustine. Both of them also came from great early, Kansas City- style jazz country (St. Louis and Oklahoma, respectively). Ralph Ellison came from the same part of the world, and his Invisible Man is another book that doesn't quite fit into anyone's official view of the world. ========================================================================== Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 10:06:06 -0400 From: Bryan Cholfin To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [RALafferty] Re: help On Sunday, Oct 5, 2003, at 23:24 America/New_York, st_prez wrote: > Maybe we could reprint some of the short stories and leave them > around in bus stations like religious tracts? (Which, of course, a > lot of them are.) I've actually done that with spare copies of the books. > > Interesting, also, that both of them were deeply influenced by big > theories of history -- Burroughs by Spengler, Lafferty by St. > Augustine. Lafferty was pretty well read in history--had thousands of history books in his house--and also read Decline of the West. He said, "Once you've read that, everything in the world has a different color to it." The parallel to Burroughs hadn't occurred to me, but I can sort of see it. Like they're on parallel lines but heading in opposite directions. Probably some interesting fodder for some future academic there. Thanks for your feedback. --Bryan G. Cholfin 40.6773148 N 73.9811859 W ========================================================================== Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 03:12:21 -0000 From: "st_prez" To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: help Another Lafferty parallel might be Dostoyevski. I'm thinking of Raskolnikov's dream at the end of Crime & Punishment: "Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered, looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good." This is also the major premise of D's later novel The Possessed. RAL often says similar things, as in Fourth Mansions. BTW, did he ever write a follow-up to The Flame Is Green? ========================================================================== Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 20:23:11 -0700 (PDT) From: Anthony Ferrara To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [RALafferty] Re: help Actually, _The Flame of Green_ is the first volume of Lafferty's tetralogy "The Coscuin Chronicles". The second volume, _Half a Sky_, was also published. However, they are both out of print. The last two, _Sardinian Summer_ and _First and Last Island_, have never been published, but there are manuscripts for both. Hopefully the second half of the tetralogy will one day be published. If the last two volumes are anything like the first two, I believe this tetralogy will go down as R. A. Lafferty's magnum opus. Anthony ========================================================================== Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 12:44:44 -0400 From: Bryan Cholfin To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [RALafferty] Re: help On Wednesday, Oct 8, 2003, at 23:12 America/New_York, st_prez wrote: > Another Lafferty parallel might be Dostoyevski. I'm thinking of > Raskolnikov's dream at the end of Crime & Punishment: > I'm not expert on Dostoyevski (and It's been a long time since I read any of it), but as I understand it, some of the religious/philosophical issues in his books were indeed similar to Lafferty's. I believe he was a big influence for a number of 20th century Catholic writers, though how directly he influenced Lafferty I don't know. When I said he was 'anomalous' I didn't really mean that he was completely incomprehensible or without precedent. Clearly he had his influences, and other writers explored similar philosophical paths. What I meant was that the particular path of his life and literary career were so unusual that he can be hard to understand from a conventional literary categorical perspective. To 'get' Lafferty, you have to be able to let a lot of different things come at you at once, and not let biases and preconceived notions filter out essential pieces. > > BTW, did he ever write a follow-up to The Flame Is Green? > There's four volumes in the series, two of which have been published (the second is Half a Sky). The other two may someday see the light of day, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it. --Bryan G. Cholfin Brooklyn ========================================================================== Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 04:56:35 -0000 To: RALafferty@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: help From: "st_prez" Point definitely taken. Lafferty is out to outrage the Official Culture and the Official Counter-Culture, the hippies and the straights, at the same time. Which is probably why he still rings true and doesn't get reprinted. You might also enjoy Leon Bloy, who was another major-league goof, and who was the godfather of Jacques and Raissa Maritain. I will be keeping an eye out for the other volumes in the Flame series. The present occupant of the Chair of Peter also seems to be talking like RAL: when we lived in Toronto, I remember a homily at the Oratorian parish where the priest asked, "If we don't value human life, then what kind of revolution could we possibly make?"