Harpo Marx and Albert the Alligator

I've been inspired by Bill Rogers' recent artwork. Not inspired to do all of the work needed for something great, but inspired enough to put up a brief poking, plodding blog post in the hopes that someone else will run with the idea and write the essay I want to read, but don't want to write.

Bill's art: https://www.flickr.com/photos/giveawayboy/36831469492/

"I found that there are more mysterious creatures inside of every person than there are persons in the world."

I'm no Greek scholar. Not even a Greek amateur. It's all Greek to me. But I am able to find my way around Greek "study tools" such as dictionaries and concordances.

Lafferty's "ktistec" is an obvious derivation of the greek verb "ktizó" (I'm going to be using transliterations instead of copying and pasting the actual Greek here). Specifically, Ktistec is from the noun "ktístēs": Creator. http://biblehub.com/greek/2936.htm

After his birth, Epikt the machine is immediately baptized in wine and named by Valery (one of Lafferty's greatest characters).

“Epiktistes!” Gregory crackled. “That can not be its name. That means the ‘creative one,’ and it is ourselves who are the creative ones. This thing will be a mere receptacle and reactor.”

In Greek as in English (following the Latin), there is a closeness in the language to describe two very distinct things. Ktistes is the creator. Ktistis is the creation. Lafferty very clearly uses the 'e'. Our favorite machine is indeed the created Creative One.

With this naming begins one of the key themes of Arrive at Easterwine, that of creating, creation, new creation, and creatureliness.

A search for "creat" in the digital text of Easterwine reveals that the root "creat" appears 54 times in the text. It's often Epikt referring to others as creatures. Epikt never forgets that he is a created being, a creature, and he relates to others as such. "Creature" stresses the created reality of each.

Also, from his beginning Epikt is given a fundamentally creative objective:

“It is necessary now that we state our purpose,” Gregory insisted (horrendous blasting and that urbane maniacal laughter at the front door again!), “that the mechanismus should become the paragon of group-man, I have said; and that it will attempt the next steps in man that man himself is incapable of taking. But this fine-honed machine (though you do seem a little rough yet, Epikt) must now be set to three primary tasks. These may be the types of all tasks and problems there are. The three tasks (and I will outline them as briefly as possible, no more than an hour to each) will be to establish or create—” “A Leader,” said Valery. “A Love,” said Aloysius. “And a Liaison,” said Cecil Corn.

Besides the creation talk, there is some related "generation" and "generating" talk throughout the book.

And probably the most obvious connection to all of this creation talk is that Lafferty begins Chapter 1 with the powerfully resonant phrase, "In the beginning," echoing the book of Genesis (and maybe perhaps also an echo of the Gospel of John's own echoing twist on Genesis; Lafferty does also play with the language and idea of Logos as well as the "central terminal" of Easterwine).

That's all I've got. I haven't actually re-read the book or put any work into this idea. I'm just rambling as usual. I'm hoping that maybe my rambling post will lead to new posts from Daniel and Kevin on anything. I know I came late to the blogging party. But I'm here insisting that the party is NOT over!! I've also been eagerly awaiting Andrew's next Archipelago post. Please, Andrew, come back to us! More Archipelago! Even better than hearing from any of those guys, maybe I'll convince someone else to take up the task of blogging about Lafferty. "Hey, if that idiot John can do it, I can do it better!" Yes, you can! Do it!

 I confess that I've been in a dry period of Lafferty reading myself. Besides re-reading a few of the essays a month or so ago, I haven't read any Lafferty since reading Not to Mention Camels (which is a very bad book. I shouldn't have used it). I've been reading Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (my first time tackling more than the first novel, which I read nearly 20 years ago) and the usualy stack of non-fiction (most notably for Lafferty-related thought, I'm re-reading Augustine's Confessions and see plenty of connection between Augustine's descriptions of the dis-integrated self and Lafferty's work). When I'm finished with that, I'm hoping to tackle either More Than Melchisidech or East of Laughter. There's an essay that's long been bubbling inside of me about the Argo trilogy and Lafferty's alcohol use and abuse, so I need to, you know, actually finish the trilogy(!) before I can re-read it and then finally start to intelligently comment on it. But I'm currently leaning towards a first read of East of Laughter. The recent passing of Robert Jenson had me re-reading this essay:
 https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/how-the-world-lost-its-story. The same day had me searching Daniel's blog for something I half-remembered, that the Jenson essay had stirred in me:
 http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.com/2011/08/they-learned-that-quest-for-reality-is.html

They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never touched it at even one point, but that sometimes they came close. They were imbrued, all through their happy suppertime and into the night hours, with an almost-happy philosophy. They hadn’t yet come to the centrality of the philosophy, but they found themselves more and more on the near fringes of it as they discussed and reveled and studied. They learned that a quest for reality is possible.’

Fool's Ranking

I've now read twelve Lafferty novels. (It's been a while since I counted, but I think that my short stories read count is up around 170--out of 220+ published!)

As deep as I am into Lafferty, I still feel like a newbie. So much to read. So much to learn.

Here's how I'd personally rank the novels if someone asked me today. The order would probably change by tomorrow.

1. Archipelago
2. Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage
3. My Heart Leaps Up
4. The Devil is Dead
5. Fourth Mansions
6. Not to Mention Camels
7. Annals of Klepsis
8. Serpent's Egg
9. Arrive at Easterwine
10. Past Master
11. The Reefs of Earth
12. Space Chantey

If someone wanted me to assign star or number ratings, that's easy. Each of these books is a perfect 10/10 or five stars out of five stars. I have not yet met a Lafferty novel which has disappointed me. They have confounded me, but never disappointed. There are some stories that I can take or leave, that I've definitely felt lukewarm towards, but I've never felt that way about any of the novels (except maybe Aurelia--sorry, Gregorio!--which I started and did not finish).

Eleven published novels left to go!:
Dotty
More Than Melchisidech
The Flame is Green
Half a Sky
The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney
Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?
Aurelia
East of Laughter
The Fall of Rome
Okla Hannali
The Elliptical Grave

So, by my count, that's 23 published novels? Right? Am I missing anything?

And then 14 unpublished novels? And six unpublished novel fragments?

I'm planning on reading Aurelia next, then I'm not sure. Maybe More Than Melchisidech and Dotty. It's possible that before this year is over, I'll get serious and write an essay on one specific aspect of the Argo Cycle, an idea that I've been rolling around in my head for a while. I need to read MTM and Dotty before I can feel good about starting this.

"You'll add to it yourself in your death straits, if there is any deformed originality in you."

I read the entirety of Not to Mention Camels over three days while on a family vacation this past weekend. It felt good to relax into a novel, especially one as thrillingly good as this one. I knew Camels only by its reputation as a "very bad, terrible book" and knew that DOJP was hesitant to fully love the novel. I think that Gaiman specifically mentions it as a failed novel in his Coode St episode. I also learned at this year's LaffCon that the book had been astoundingly popular in Spain when it was translated there, going through multiple print runs. (Weirdly, there's no entry for the Spanish edition on isfdb.)

I wrote the following the other day after reading the first four chapters.....


Anyone really love Not to Mention Camels? I think I do.

I'm four chapters in and really enjoying it. It's definitely strongly Laffertarian, but it's also giving me a strong PKD vibe with its immoral protagonist and unstable, uncertain realities. It's funny, but it's a much darker funny. Something about a highly capable male protagonist trying to exert his will over the world makes this novel feel more closely aligned with core sf than many of Lafferty's other texts. It almost feels like a subversion of the Campbellian/Heinleinian self-sufficient man myth.

Reading Camels jolted in me an awareness (I'd already known this but now thought it afresh) of how important community is to Lafferty's work.

In Space Chantey, Roadstrum is captain of an entire crew.

In Past Master, Thomas More joins a small band of misfits.

In Reefs of Earth, the Puca children are a family unit.

In Fourth Mansions, Freddy Foley is in constant contact with almost everyone else in the novel.

In Sindbad, there is, like in Past Master, a small band of weird heroes facing down swamp dragons.

In Serpent's Egg, there are the 12 children.

In Archipelago, there is the core group of friends.

In The Devil is Dead, Finnegan is central, but there are several women orbiting around him, and also the Devil and Mr. X.

Arrive at Easterwine features the Institute.

Annals of Klepsis is another ship's crew.

My Heart Leaps Up features dozens of kids.

Those are examples from the novels that I've read (excluding a few novels that I've dipped into but haven't read in their entirety).

Examples could be multiplied from the stories. (So too could exceptions.)

Multiplied is a good word. Lafferty dealt in multiples and abundance was a regular thing. Including a multiplication of and abundance of characters.

In Not to Mention Camels, though, so far there is no such community. There is the force of will of a man (?) Pilgrim and those who bend to his will. His antagonist, Evenhand, is surrounded by a company of eight, but even then, the are described as extensions of himself.

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician was published in 1981, five years after the publication of Not to Mention Camels. I believe that the opening of Moth-Eaten Magician gives us one clue as to what Lafferty was up to in this hellish novel. Contra Sartre, hell is not other people. It is a complete disregard for anything Other, anything outside of oneself.

Long excerpt from the beginning of Magician:

Well, following the same cleavage, there are two kinds of almost everything. There are two kinds of people in the world, and that's the difficulty.

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone.

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people.

So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons either; but this isn't always the case. These persons of the first sort are often able to transmit their intoxication with themselves to others.

 

“Everybody look at me,

I'm way and out the best there be,”

 

— the persons proclaim, and often groups and clots of folks, loitering and guesting clusters or clumps of people will give them the echo “Amen, Amen, you sure are!” This is mostly inexplicable to me. Many persons of the first sort do become cult figures and have followings. But it seems as though a universe with only one person in it, and a group of shadows, is too small.

These classifications have nothing to do with the artificial categories of introvert and extrovert. A person of the first sort will see and admire himself both from within and from without. He will see himself from a series of exterior vistas set like spotlights to highlight him.

And a person of the second sort will see the world objectively in whatever manner persons do see exterior objects and complexes. And he will also see it in a subjective and personalized way. No one can see things without putting his own personal signature on his seeing.

take it for gift, take it for granted; it was for his openness that a number of amazing worlds happened to him and can happen to you.

Quote:

Ingolf Dalferth thinks we are Creatures of Possibility. By that, he means that “we are creatures in the making whose actual becoming depends on possibilities beyond our control that occur in our lives as opportunities and chances that we can neglect and miss or take up and use” (ix). We are free to choose and act, and we can determine “the mode of our choosing and the way of our acting in moral terms.” Yet this freedom “depends on conditions that are beyond our control: we can choose and act and determine ourselves only against the backdrop of a basic passivity that characterizes our life and cannot be replaced or undone by anything we can do” (x).
This is a fundamental reality of human life: “Most of what we are we do not owe to ourselves.” Our existence (Dasein), our particular way of existence (Sosein), and our truthful existence (Wahrsein) are all “molded by passivity”: “There is so much that happens to us and so little that we make happen. Before I can act as a self, I must become a self, and while I cannot be a self without acting, I cannot become a self by acting.” Before we can even us the nominative “I,” we first experience the dative and the accusative—we are objects and recipients. In short, “A primal passivity precedes all our activity. Before we can give, we must be a given, and before we can act, we must be an actuality” (xi-xii).
Peter Leithart on Ingolf Dalferth's Creatures of Possibility

Quote:

"All his life, people would be giving valuable things to Fred Foley unasked: gifts, powers, lives, worlds, secrets."
-R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

Quote:

"Simply, Freddy will continue to evolve as the four exterior forces give him outright gifts and accidental benefits. His role in life seems to be as recipient and beneficiary of the other forces in the world. This lets him become the first truly integrated person by the end of the novel, able to incorporate the characteristics of all the monsters."
-Kevin Cheek, from an essay to be published in the LaffCon2 booklet (yes, this is a teaser!)

Quote:

“It may be that you will like Fourth Mansions and you may find yourself a little bit like Freddy Foley in it, in youth and openness at least. It was for his openness that a number of amazing worlds happened to him and can happen to you. I have picked out four human aspects or movements in this, out of many, which are deformities and monstrosities in isolation, but which should be strengths when integrated in the person and group personality. At least that is what I have tried to do. Even the Patricks must have their place in the integrated personality and they must have their place in you.”
—R. A. Lafferty, Letter to Guy Lillian, Challenger #16 (1969)