#nongenre

[ralafferty]

81.5 Dotty

A few closing thoughts that I couldn’t quite fit in—there’s an awful lot to this book, and I wish more people got the chance to read it!

• While Dotty is generally considered an Argo novel, one of the more interesting connections is to his unpublished and much-requested novel Esteban, a historical novel tracking the life and travels of the African slave who was the first “white” (i.e., non-Native) man to enter much of what would become the southwestern United States. I’ll cover that novel soon enough, but suffice here to say that Lafferty has Dotty follow Esteban’s trail much as he himself did, speculating about his path and crisscrossing over top of it multiple times; it even occupies a particular part of her grief, as she had daydreamed about following the trail with Charles and their offspring.

• As ever with Lafferty’s works that veer into cultural criticism, there are some moments of ungraciousness, even a viciousness out of step with the compassion and capaciousness of the rest of the book. Dotty has some of Lafferty’s most harrowing pictures of alcoholism, and of a culture organized around the sustenance of alcoholics; it also speculates about “the trade” of prostitution, and how many of the women connected to the Wooden Ship in one way or another practiced it at some point. But the current and former alcoholics, and the former (and in a few cases relapsing) prostitutes all find a place in Lafferty’s society; they all have something to contribute. Compare that against this diatribe linking homosexuals and users of drugs other than alcohol to sadists, child molesters, slave owners, racists, and murderers:

Filth is the only di­ver­sion worth­while. What is de­ceit without truth? What is treason without al­le­gi­ance? What is to be said against the queers and hop-heads — can they be judged without a stand­ard? By what right is the sad­ist denied sat­is­fac­tion? Or the child mo­lester his joy? Who shall abridge the free­dom to own slaves? Why deny the ra­cist the right to rule? What is sub­ver­sion if we are all born sub­ver­ted? What is murder but the ac­tion of mat­ter on mat­ter? What Heaven will avenge the killing of the un­born, since Heaven ended yes­ter­day?

Now, it is always dicey to link an author and their characters—though Lafferty does the same here in some ways, attributing materialist philosophies to Balzac and Joyce, among others, on the basis of their written fictions—and one could certainly make a case for these as the thoughts of a despairing, heartbroken teenager, rather than of the middle-aged electrical salesman who wrote her. But they’re of a piece with his commentary elsewhere, and this uncharitable tendency doesn’t exactly get better with time.

• In connection with this, there is something off-putting about Dotty, an Irish-American Catholic girl, referring repeatedly to the God whom she regards as forsaking her as “the Old Jew,” most especially when speaking about Him in her fury and grief as “a debt-caller who has to be paid with the last drop of blood.” In 1990, readers were far removed from the anti-Semitic Church Militant preaching of Father Coughlin, but in the early 1960s—while still far off his 1930s peak—he was still serving as a parish priest, and his radio show would still have been in the living memory of many Catholics. I would balance this carefully against the other treatments of Jewish individuals in his works, and remind again that these are not the words of the author, but of the character he created, who goes on to issue a mental apology to “all the good Jews” (as opposed to the “bad” ones that God is acting like?). Something to bear in mind.

• There’s a great deal here, as in many of his books, about secular materialism, mostly here though as philosophy rather than organized political force. As usual, it is the only other coherent worldview Lafferty acknowledges (here, anyway, we’ll get to the others in time): either there is God, in which case there is the Church; or there is no God, in which case there is the Party. When Dotty first loses the Faith, she careens toward its antithesis with a speed that one almost might call “dialectic,” were synthesis between the two truly possible. I even wonder if the “plus one” of the book—at least, the aspect of it that appears as the permanent suspension of the third act—is not a structural attempt to forestall such a synthesis, to forbid it from taking place. Certainly there have been attempts to join Catholicism with Marxism, such as in liberation theology, but Lafferty would recognize them only as a uselessly watered-down version of both.

• Finally: the special edition of Dotty released by United Mythologies Press includes the otherwise uncollected (pre-Centipede) story “Holy Woman.” It’s an inspired pairing, not least because the women at the core of each story are so different, but also because both works took about 30 years to break into print.

Next entry: back to short stories after years away, with “All But the Words”

[ralafferty]

81.2 Dotty

Dotty is, in form, a spiritual biography; unlike Lafferty’s first novel of a few decades earlier, however, Dotty’s is not the life of a saint, unless it be an ambiguous one. The course of the novel will see her through advanced juvenile delinquency, multiple family-forsaking crises, several relationships, and state-shifts between grace and perdition so rapid it’ll make your head spin.

All of which by way of saying that Dotty’s spiritual biography is not Ray Lafferty’s. Unlike Archipelago (or the later In a Green Tree books), where Lafferty is drawing on his own life and serves as sort of a present absence throughout, Dotty details a life that is pointedly not his own. Lafferty was never delinquent, never in crisis (at least never to the point of separating the family), never in a relationship, and if he ever felt himself to be out of grace, he never speculated upon it and was never more than a few hours from his next mass, besides.

In the first entry on Dotty, I noted that, as a character, Dotty is not larger than life. But the sheer expansiveness of Lafferty’s conception of life and its size should be taken into account: while there is nothing world-historical about her, nonetheless she is exceedingly precocious, possibly the archetype of all Lafferty’s precocities, model for everyone from Carnadine Thompson in “The Transcendent Tigers” and Clarissa Willoughby in “The Seven-Day Terror” to the entire Rampart and Dulanty clans in “Narrow Valley” and Reefs of Earth, respectively.

But Dotty has neither the joyous household of the Thompsons or Willoughbys, or the sibling solidarity of the Ramparts or Dulantys (or perhaps, for that matter, the Laffertys). Her precocity, in particular her intelligence and her intemperate eagerness to speak her mind (not to mention her predilection for shocking actions), marks her for nothing but trouble. Thus a pattern is set early on: Dotty finds a haven of sorts against the tempests of life, and then catastrophic tempests make that haven unlivable, regardless.

Given this, it’s appropriate that she makes her lifelong home in Galveston, Texas, of all American towns perhaps the most subject to tempest and catastrophe. Lafferty always held Galveston in a special regard; it was the second city of his childhood, one that his family visited multiple times on their summer automotive vacations. Young Raphael would have been far too shy to get up to the shenanigans that Dotty does here (a kiddie version of McSkee’s bacchanal in “One at a Time,” in which an adult Dotty has a cameo), but he shared with her the love for the salt and spray, the “Sea and Island” that serve as “one of life’s spices,” so long as you discover it before nine years of age.

I cannot tell if all their trips were by car or if the Laffertys, like the O’Tooles, ever took the bus. If so, Lafferty would have treasured the time spent listening to others’ stories, perhaps especially those from the Black riders forced to ride in the back. Dotty is one of the few places where Lafferty openly references the segregation he would have grown up within; in Tulsa society Irish Catholics wouldn’t have counted as fully white, especially to the very active Klan contingent that ran Tulsa for several years. But the fully white people of Tulsa wouldn’t have kicked him to the back of a trolley car, and they wouldn’t have burned down his neighborhood, either.

It’s a measure of their comparative comfort that the O’Toole’s have a refuge waiting for them, even amidst the Dust Bowl and Depression. The “farm” on Elm Road is a miniature Eden, an extrapolated version of the Laffertys’ own house on Quincy Road, which was perpetually playing host to various relatives of the greatly extended family. This plenitude is mirrored in what will become Dotty’s second haven, the Galveston grocery store of the Parisis, gathering spot for that island’s Italian immigrant community. But both these havens are acknowledge as temporary respites at best, however utopian they may seem for short periods of time. There is a “curious worsening in the country” at the time, one that infects personal as well as community relations; Dotty will quickly reach a point where she can’t go “home” because that concept no longer exists for her. She will have to build her own home (not just physically, from the studs, but conceptually, from the roots of what “home” means), and constitute what family she can, along the way.

[ralafferty]

81.1 Dotty

I will admit that I never saw such hate in the eyes of a three-day old child before. My other two didn’t show any expression at all at that age. Come to think of it, they still don’t. I dread the day when she has teeth, and words.

Most of Lafferty’s families are happy ones. Harried, perhaps, boisterous and borderline dysfunctional for sure, but nonetheless largely content to share the same roof.

The family in Dotty, on the other hand, is decidedly unhappy, and not even in any uniquely Anna Kareninan way: they are poor, and they (the father in particular) are mean, and they are driven further into their meanness by the extremities of their poverty. But where many of Lafferty’s characters remain vibrant, or even grow more so, under the challenges poverty poses (see “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street” for a characteristically gonzo example), the O’Tooles shrivel up, abandoning first their mutual respect for each other, and then whatever principles they may have had, and finally the “defective county” they had called home.

This shriveling of the spirit is driven home in a scene of marital rape—nearly unparalleled in all the rest of Lafferty’s works; sex in his fiction, while never explicit, is elsewhere always enthusiastically consensual— which leads in turn to Dotty’s conception. The spitefulness of the begetting is fully matched in the spitefulness of the child begot, who immediately sets to work subordinating her older brother and sister: “It was to take her a few years, surprisingly few, to achieve her dominance over them. The first look she cast on them was one of withering contempt, but at that time she had not the means to implement it.”

Many’s the novel that starts with the birth of its protagonist. Fewer are those that start with their conception, and those almost always signal a comic tone: the canonical example is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with Gargantua and Pantagruel lurking not at all subtly in the background. Dotty however turns away from Rabelais and toward Lafferty’s other great fictional inheritance, one that I am more guilty than anyone of minimizing to this point: the multifaceted realism of Honoré de Balzac. Dotty O’Toole (later Peisson) is a character worthy of the French master’s human comedy, probably the most complex in Lafferty’s entire body of work. Yes, including Finnegan, and Hannali, and [insert your own favorite here]; for unlike many of his others, she is not larger than life: she is not out to revolutionize or threaten the world with any great experiments, she is not the embodiment of massive historical forces squaring off against one another, she is not a monster or a sport or a prodigy. She is Dotty, and that is sufficient.

And yet her novel is also as connected to the entire body of work as any other of Lafferty’s tales, or as any of Balzac’s individual volumes is to the rest of the Comedie humaine. Dotty will appear as a background character in most of the Argo volumes, as well as many of the stories set in or around Galveston (Lafferty’s second city, with Dotty as the world’s greatest exponent of the local piano style), or those involving Sour John and nautical adventuring generally, all the way back to Esteban. And her middle name—Theresa, like her mother, like a certain Show Boat—links her to Teresa of Avila, and thus to Fourth Mansions, with its struggles both spiritual and civilizational. Thus it may turn out yet that this intensely personal and private novel, about one soul’s journey toward (and, as often, away from) faith may yet say much about our the wider cultural journey we are all on. One indicator of this latter is another Lafferty rarity: an exact date, in this case Dotty’s birthday: October 15, 1933.

So in all that follows—I’m not doing every chapter individually, both since they’re short and because I want to finish this book and blog eventually—keep this date in mind, first because it places Dotty almost exactly a generation younger than Lafferty himself, and second because of the circumstances of that generational gap: growing up knowing only the Depression and war footing, rather than growing up amid the oil-boom giddiness of 1920s Tulsa and coming to the lean years from the other side. It’s enough to put a little bit of hate in anyone’s eyes.

Composed 1957–58, if not earlier. Rewritten April 1961 and November 1968. Published United Mythologies Press, 1990.

[ralafferty]

80.11 Archipelago (end)

There is an advantage in very old and mutilated writings: they are improved by the mutilation. It is the first and the last sheepskins that are always lost or worn. There is no story that is not improved by having its first and last pages lost.

I tried to figure out how to wrap this up without using that quote, but ironically it's so deeply woven into the text that I think it's impossible to work through this section, or this novel, or Lafferty himself, without recourse to an aesthetic of mutilation.

Lafferty is a bricoleur, no doubt, but he's not always one just to take the pieces he finds around him; he's continually active in creating new pieces by shredding what went before. Archipelago, at least on the surface level, is not possessed of the gleefully grotesque mutilation that marks works like Space Chantey, but that's not because it's absent, it's just because he's kicked it up a layer or two.

So while the bodies of Finnegan, Dotty, and the assassin Niccolo Crotolus are assuredly mutilated in the final gun battle, we are denied the details of how exactly the bullets tore into flesh, where the damage was and how deep: information he rarely stints on elsewhere. This may in part be because of an aversion to combat in this "war novel with the war removed," but it also directs our attention to other aspects of the scene and setting.

Here we are given the elements of a blaze-of-glory shootout: a protagonist, his old flame, and an antagonist after the former who will not hesitate to go through the latter. But Lafferty has already ripped up the script before the action starts. Our hero, Finnegan, is not armed and does not return fire; he goes down from the first shot and stays down. Instead, it is the old flame who retorts, who acts as the protector rather than the protected. Even the antagonist is detached from the encounter: he's a hired gun, but one who is oddly drawn to Finn and who makes every effort to ensure that his murder will be accomplished with the victim in a state of grace. (As a side note, anyone know the source of Lafferty's distinction between the "piccolo vendetta" and the  "grande vendetta," the revenge unto salvation or unto damnation? The latter is one of his more chilling concepts, though then again Lafferty's own ideas of hell were surprising and complex.)

There is, as often in Lafferty, an overload of imagery and association here, heaped up to the point of confusion. We get here an inverted Garden of Eden, with the serpent (played by Nick the Sidewinder) striking to make sure that the man in question is saved rather than damned, while the woman is completely guiltless. And we end also in a sort of frustrated Pietà, with the Christ figure felled, and Mary unable to cradle his body because she is too busy shooting and being shot.

Meanwhile the book, which started on an island on the Thursday of the creation week just prior to the appearance of man, now concludes on an island on the Wednesday, "the same as the Fourth Morning of the World when God had already made the ocean and let it roll all night and now was ready to place the sun in its course. And He hung it fifteen degrees up in the sky and let it start from there, just above the morning cloud bank. ... Now it was just as it had been in the beginning." Thanks to this chronology, Archipelago loops back on itself just like Devil Is Dead and More Than Melchisedech, just in a more subtle way. And it serves as a reminder that to tell stories is to mutilate time, to break a continuity into discrete units and rearrange those pieces into new and sometimes ungainly configurations.

But it's not just the single timeline of Archipelago that is structurally endangered; the barriers between all the fictions are breaking down. Finnegan, as X will say elsewhere, is the funnel between the worlds of Archipelago and The Devil Is Dead; he is also one of the foci of the world created by Melchisedech Duffey, and characters of that world determine their positions within it with respect to him.

Back from Chapter 7: "Was Finnegan a simple schizo in his living several lives? No. He was a complex schizo. His travels ended only with his life, though X (who claimed to have later congress with him) said they did not end even then. The apocryphal of the Finnegan adventures cannot be separated from the canonical. They raise the question: are there simultaneous worlds and simultaneous people?" As his body is mutilated here, so also are the people he knows and the worlds he inhabits; the two timelines only barely kept separated in Archipelago and The Devil Is Dead bleed fully into one another, and their weird mirroring becomes finally apparent. Many of the characters in Devil are already doubles, but here (in a work written earlier, but perhaps substantially revised after? the textual history is very difficult to unravel) they are revealed as parallel selves to people we have already met in Archipelago. And while we can say that all of us are many people at once and lead potentially many lives across many timelines, that doesn't make it any less confusing for the reader or for the characters themselves—or, we might say, for Lafferty as well. It's telling that Finnegan only realizes this when sketching out the people of his acquaintance, making one last use of his prodigious artistic talent. Inasmuch as Lafferty uses Finnegan's artistic talent as a surrogate for his own (and along with that, his anxieties over squandering that talent), it's tempting to read the early years of his career as an attempt to not become a Finnegan, to have something to point to when the Master demanded an account.

But even if that sort of a crisis (in its original sense of "judgment") is in view, the narration explicitly denies this to the characters involved: "In a crisis there should be a change of attitude. The attitudes of none of them were going to be changed by the shooting." Had Finnegan's attitude changed already? Had Lafferty's? Are there simultaneous worlds, and simultaneous people? It's a difficult set of questions, even beyond the basic impossibility of having a definitive answer for any one of them. Certainly the climax here gives way to anticlimax, as so often with this author who delights in the shaggiest of dogs. And whatever validity we grant to the claims of X—a notorious and renowned liar—this is certainly not the last time we will encounter Finnegan in this life, or in the one to come.

So that's Archipelago: possibly the oldest novel of Lafferty's to be published, and certainly one of the best, even if it took several decades and ultimately immense efforts by Rick Norwood to make it happen even in the limited release it got. If you find a print copy, snap it up! And if not, fortunately, digital copies are now readily available.

One last question about this section, before I move on at long last to Dotty: why Cuba? The action of the book, of course, is in the late 1940s and early 1950s, so this is pre-Revolución. And certainly the bulk of the writing is done before that point. But all the revisions for this novel happen after that point, and in particular after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, another happening on a Cuban beach. (Albeit one not walkable from Havana, as the scene of the final showdown here.) For Lafferty, Communism was never a red herring, though it might only be one head of a larger hydra. And the book's most persistent subplot centers around Communism: Casey falling away from the Church into its only coherent ideological rival, and subsequently being restored. Not something I have an answer to yet, but I will loop back to it when taking up the later In a Green Tree volumes. Any other questions must be assumed lost in the mutilation in this manuscript.

[ralafferty]

80.10 Archipelago

"Never get in a distressed egg deal if you can avoid it, Finnegan. It just isn't worth the worry at any price."

We're back with Finnegan, and Finnegan is, however briefly, back with himself. His hold on reality is tenuous, and the state of his soul (if those of the other recensions even have souls) is shaky at best. So it's fitting that he meets in this chapter not just one, but two businessmen who deal in the shaky and tenuous—Hilary Hinton, one of the last pieces of Melchisedech Duffey's World to be moved into place, and "Asking Dan" Askandanakandrian, a theatrical Armenian with unusual insight into Finnegan's disposition. The two of them, respectively, prefer the words "distressed" and "nervous" for the merchandise they traffic in, but either way Finnegan is as risky a prospect as any: hallucinating meetings with his father, beset by Korsakov's psychosis (a form of amnesia peculiar to long-term alcoholics), and promised a violent death for actions carried out possibly in another timeline and certainly in another book.

It may initially seem odd, then, that the chapter focuses on Casey's soul rather than on Finnegan's. But there's much more salvage at stake here than just one banana-nosed painter, though it'll take a detour into Laffertian narrative study to get at it.

For Lafferty is himself a salvage man of no small talent: not for goods or commodities—though we can assume a certain amount of shrewdness thanks to his decades as seller and buyer of electrical parts—but of story forms and elements. Any reasonably well-read person who takes in more than a few lafferties is likely to be struck by how, despite his undoubted originality, he always borrows (sometimes heavily) from sources old and new—a practice of bricolage, as Gregorio Montejo has it, or maybe just "grubbing in the rubble," as Lafferty terms it in his "Day After The World Ended" speech. Here he pulls in the form of the fabliau or bawdy tale, and he's in good company there: Boccaccio's Decameron is filled with them, and several of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales fit the mold as well.

The subsequent redemption of Casey, and his (still-uneasy?) rapprochement to the Church, is told in yet another salvaged form. Archipelago is, like most of Lafferty's novels, a collection of incidents bound together by means other than, as John Clute writes in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, "the niceties of plotting." To give him more credit, we might posit that Lafferty took a look at nice plots and decided they were inadequate for what he had in mind. Different novels offer different means for story binding: the Bagarthach verses in Reefs of Earth, for instance, or the doggerel in Space Chantey, or even the Hopp-Equation passage dreams in Past Master, to take just a few early examples. In Archipelago, Lafferty makes use of one of the oldest tricks: epistolary sections, where the characters write letters to one another. But unlike most epistolary novels, where the main action of the plot is conveyed through these letters, here he has the characters commenting on that action from a distance, trading dispatches about the characters in question.

So Lafferty takes a chapter about distressed or nervous goods, and really about distressed or nervous souls, and tells it via distressed or nervous story forms, taking them and giving them just the twist they need to sell. It's a storehouse, a catalog of such forms, mirrored in the catalog of merchandise. (Asking Dan's soliloquy on the ways to make these goods sell applies at least as much to the writer as it does the salesman.) Ultimately, the story is accomplished in the gaps between chapter sections—something we have come to take for granted in the book as an almost casually deployed device but which is suddenly here carrying all the rise in action up to the sudden climax.

"Like something out of one of the old Crocks," Casey says, and like those fabliaux, these sections push back against the world and pull bits of it back from the brink. "Vincent says we are the last young people ever to believe the Church is perfect," writes Show Boat, and she is as prescient as ever, for the task of the Church is that of the Argo, to set right what can be, one little bit at a time, through whatever means can be found—or, more often, salvaged and put to new use.

[ralafferty]

80.9 Archipelago

If you will only think about it for a moment, you will see that the operation of a small carnival is the only possible occupation for the smartest man in the world.

There's a risk to a character like Hans. Not to Hans himself: though he could be taken as simple, anyone hoping to pull one over on him would run smack into his intelligence, his moral character, his immense physical strength, or his love for humanity. But therein lies the risk: he could come off as too perfect, a prig in spite of himself; worst of all, he could appear boring. Lafferty has the added challenge that, as his own sense of morality and belief structure largely overlaps with Hans', he must take and present him seriously—not for him the luxury of making the good man a hypocrite, a secret connoisseur of depravity. But Lafferty knows as well that just watching Hans go about the routine of being Hans would be about as interesting and edifying as watching paint dry. Wisely therefore he surrounds him with not just one but two groups of colorful characters (three if you count the frame narrative of the Dirty Five), and sets everything into motion.

Those familiar with Lafferty—or, fewer still, those familiar with my own work on the man—will not be surprised to find that one of these settings is a carnival, and as interesting as this particular instance is—and Professor Kirol von Weinsberg Valeni is maybe the greatest of Lafferty's many Rabelaisian barkers—I'll content myself with pointing toward my MA thesis (and by the way, you should download that soon if you want a reference copy, it's coming down as soon as I post the biography manuscript late this year). What's surprising is what comes after the carnival, what Hans graduates into, as it were: the bohemian youth scene of late 20s / early 30s New York. Lafferty has such a reputation for crankiness that one might expect him to hate all expressions of youthfulness, and for signs of that hatred to seep into his narration. And teenagers do give him pause; almost every time there's a conflict between children and teens, it's clear where Lafferty's loyalties lie. But it's a remarkable group he gathers here: young craftsmen figuring out how to harness their considerable talents, while never playing things quite straight—con artists, all of them, but possessed of enough actual talent not to implode from their own pretensions (as with the society in "Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread," etc).

Particularly surprising is the figure of Trinali Peterson, whose presence draws Lafferty to ventriloquize free verse odes through her. Almost everywhere else, Lafferty is a versifier: he loves every jangly form from ballads to limericks to doggerel. Trinali pushes him to places he seldom if ever revisited; she also stands almost out of time in his work, a figure who bridges across American poetry from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to Sylvia Plath and Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur, with more than a few confessionals along the way. Hans can't figure out if there's any real substance to her, and yet she intuits his identity as Orpheus—just like Adam Scanlon, the painter of the bunch, is clued in to the Argo and its meanings in a way that characters who actually ride on the ship can't grasp. Trinali's is not a sustainable life, and she knows it—she intends to die young and does, being buried with her own elegy. In death, as in life, Trinali confounds Hans and reader alike: as she tells a flummoxed Hans, she "can't be scun." Maybe once more people are able to access the book, Trinali will claim the high place she deserves in Lafferty's formidable female pantheon.

In the wider picture, it's tough to know how much of the chapter extrapolates from Lafferty's own New York experiences; as a younger man he spent three weeks on his own there, but the archive is silent on those times; they must be counted among the hidden years of his life, and as the Archipelago narrator reminds us, "Everyone is entitled to a little mystery." But it seems fair to read the section as at least in some ways a fond remembrance of a temporary self, a self living a life separate from the familial and social bonds that otherwise pertained. Certainly even a young Ray would have cut a very different figure from the near-giant Hans, but the nightlife here, the enjoyment of the company of other talented young minds, even the fullness captured in the lists of songs written by Endymion Ellenbogen (much truncated from similar lists in Antonino Vescovo): it all speaks to a nostalgia for the world in that particular Bohemian arrangement, even as that arrangement depends on the knowledge of all involved that it is always just on the verge of ending—and then, it does.

[ralafferty]

80.8 Archipelago

This one is tough.

When I first started this blog, I wanted a space to look into aspects of Lafferty’s work that I probably wouldn’t explore in great depth elsewhere, and also to make sure that every story had at least some commentary on it, somewhere. (As well as a comments section for people to leave their own!) When I started thinking of how to do the novels, especially a novel as densely packed as Archipelago, the only thing that made sense was to go chapter by chapter. But here we have a chapter that includes two of the finest pieces of writing Lafferty ever produced, as well as quite a bit of background crucial to the developing Finnegan mythos, all set into a boom and bust pattern. But rather than focus on any of these—not his identity as the painter van Ghi, not the literal shaggy dog story from Buffalo, not even what is perhaps the darkest emotional abyss in all of Lafferty's work, the blackout bender where Finn simultaneously lives twelve of the happiest years anyone’s ever had in wedded, impossible bliss with Teresa Piccone. (Besides, I talk about that plenty elsewhere.)

Instead, I’ll focus here on the sweeping but seemingly self-contained vignette of Finnegan’s stay with the New Jersey goatherder, Gautier. Here Lafferty provides a remarkable portrait of a stock comic character—the fish so thoroughly out of water that he thinks his herd of goats will find a place in the big city—who adapts to his new circumstances and, to an extent, thrives within them, becoming a different sort of stock character: the self-reliant man who carves out a living for himself from the land. It’s no accident that this latter type is as thoroughly American as the former comic trope is thoroughly outsider: a huge bulk of American literature devotes itself to characters who, from Natty Bumppo to Jay Gatsby to the narrator of Invisible Man (and, for that matter, to Hannali Innominee), fashion lives for themselves in defiance of the odds.

It's remarkable, the skill with which Lafferty both maintains his metaphorical structure—with the self-exile Finnegan literally going to live with the goats, the cast-offs, the creatures of the left-hand path—while also mapping out a life whose details makes the outlandish conceit seem almost believable. The depth of his research is evident that he sets this section in a part of the country, the New Jersey Pine Barrens (near the home of LaffCon, to boot!), that most people never visit, and that he himself probably never went, or if he did was there for mere hours on a family trip—and yet in his hands it appears in a nearly paradisiacal state (if, perhaps, to a certain bent of mind). And he does it all for the sake of just this one toss-off section: the goat-man will never be seen again, nor hide nor hair of his herd, but for the pages in which they feature, they leap off the page.

Lafferty gets stick sometimes for all his characters sounding the same. And there are places where that criticism is not without merit—like the writer he most admired, Honoré de Balzac, most of his creations seem to know each other familiarly, nearly all of them inherit something of his voice, and when they start talking high philosophy or blood-and-thunder action, they can run together on the margins. (In some places, Lafferty knowingly blurs their boundaries, to disturbing effect.) Yet also like Balzac, all throughout his fiction are one-off characters of genius like the goat-man Gautier.

Is it possible that his stay with the goats is yet another alcoholic's hallucination, a step up from the imaginary snakes but nonetheless far less personal and damaging than the years with Teresa and their children that he experiences as real? Could it be another temptation in the wilderness, a life that offers at least the solidity of the herd and its annual circuit instead of ceaseless wandering? Certainly, certainly. On one level, you could pull the episode and the goat-man out of Archipelago and the novel would remain much the same. And on another level, it would be deeply impoverished, and almost immeasurably more bleak. (Not least because it is the goat-song, the tragos, that gives us the basis for what we today understand as tragedy.) Gautier is comic relief, not in the sense of being a buffoon or a clown, but rather by being his deeply odd self, and reminding us of the grand scope of (more Balzac) la comédie humaine that will continue on all around us, whatever our own circumstances. And to Finnegan, whose circumstances are rather more eerie than most, that must be a great relief indeed.

[ralafferty]

80.7 Archipelago

And at last we come to Finnegan. He is a man ever in flux: not just in his whereabouts, his fortunes, or the disposition of his soul, but also in the outline given to readers. He is at once perhaps Lafferty’s most emotionally intense, even raw character, and also his most distant and mysterious: throughout the Argo tales, no sooner are we provided definite info about Finn than it is troubled, or obscured, or snatched away again. So also with this chapter title, which is “Finnegan: Who is Iason” (definite info) “but Who is Also of the Other People” (info that is troubling, obscure, and ultimately snatched away).

One definite thing that is stated of Finnegan, however, is his effects on others: he serves as the salt, the savor, in the lives of those fortunate enough to know him. So let’s approach him instead by turning to his companion for a bit of this chapter: Howland Jerome Howland. Though decidedly a minor character in the book and wider mythology, Howland like many such in Lafferty’s works functions more like a grace note, a little bonus (keeping in mind there the etymology back to bonum: “good”) that brings lightness to the rest and which—to shift metaphors—comes back every so often like a little echo, a reminder that the world is bigger than the bits of it in view at any moment.

Howland is furthermore one of Lafferty’s handful of black characters (and one of the very few who isn’t a seafarer of some sort, either in the Dana Coscuin books or Annals of Klepsis), a fact held back from the reader for several sections but increasingly obvious as we see that he will not enter certain towns, and he only enters coffee shops and cafes with Finn once they cross over the Mississippi; that is, from Missouri to Illinois. Still, they run into trouble trying to register for hotel rooms, and it isn’t until they reach Chicago that the roles of Huck Finn and Jim no longer fit. In a Chicago bar, Finnegan meets Francine, “a pretty, dark girl,” ultimately going on several dates with her—though always, it seems, with an eye to introducing her to Howland, and vice versa. (Again though, even this dabble into interracial dating would have been shocking at the time, before the Civil Rights marches and after decades of Jim Crow law and various enforcements of formal and informal segregation.) Francine and Howland hit it off, and will stay friends with Finnegan for life, providing him a home in Chicago whenever he passes through, and being listed wherever the boon companions of the Argo are named.

But under the influence of Finnegan, Howland learns a lot about himself (how to read better, why he shouldn’t be a boxer) and how to achieve the position he seeks in life. But strange depths also appear: early on, he sings a jingle about “five little gophers” that clearly parallels the Dirty Five, with four of them finding various homes, and the fifth, Finnegan, finding no home at all. And Finn himself has a dream around this time where he is accosted by the Muses, who try to hang the stole of inspiration on him, but succeed in getting it only over one shoulder. He’s a man who is never wholly in any one world, fiction, or state of reality; rather, his is the state of reality according to which others’ existences are defined. (Caveats: Theresa “Show Boat” Piccone may be another such, and Mr. X might be capable of moving between realities, and Melchisedech Duffey may have created them all of them and the worlds they inhabit. Things aren’t nearly done getting weird.) When reports of his death start circulating—not directly, but rather through the indirect sensations of those who knew him, and who can feel his savor going out of the world—even the narrator seems uncertain as to which story is being told: the plot of The Devil Is Dead seeps in, and can only barely be contained with the proviso that “In the transmarine adventures of Finnegan there is wild stuff. It cannot safely be given here.”

But though the narrative loses sight of Howland in all this, he isn’t gone from the novel; he’ll reappear in Chapter Ten to provide a stopover for Finnegan in his wanderings. By that point, five, six, seven years later (Finn and the narrator having no more than a passing idea of the date), Howland and Francine have had a son, Gilbert Finnegan, and also established a social club for Chicago’s newly upwardly mobile black middle class. There’s a hint of their wider involvement in Argo affairs—Francine mentions keeping an eye on Casey’s doings—but mostly they stand apart: one of the shelters that, like Biloxi Brannigan’s beer garden or the island of Basse-Terre in The Devil Is Dead, will serve Finnegan as a haven until it can serve no longer. While it’s true that they would not exist without Finnegan, it’s true also that Finnegan could not continue to exist without them. Given where the series leads up to, this means that the rebuilding of the world depends on them, and thousands more like them.

In this, Howland resembles nothing so much as a Lafferty reader. We all, in reading the books, give Finnegan at least some temporary space in our minds, and we are all enriched by his presence certainly learning to read better, perhaps even discovering new depths to ourselves or new worlds to navigate. While I don’t know of any couples who have come together as a result of reading Lafferty, I’m not about to rule it out—not while the possibility remains that we might all prove companions to those on the Argo, and contributors to the missions they continue, through their readers, to undertake.