tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381454689166649574.post3100644015310429790..comments2024-01-27T13:41:46.815-08:00Comments on Yet Another Lafferty Blog: The Heresy of PlotKevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04415345283350861149noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381454689166649574.post-50134213686107219332022-05-23T04:34:55.798-07:002022-05-23T04:34:55.798-07:00Lafferty is retelling actual historical fact.Lafferty is retelling actual historical fact.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381454689166649574.post-17672123990662154032013-07-22T11:21:10.251-07:002013-07-22T11:21:10.251-07:00OK, I typed a response to this a few days ago and ...OK, I typed a response to this a few days ago and I guess the commenting system ate it, so taking another swing.<br /><br />I think that you're absolutely right that the book has a plot, though Lafferty's notion of plotting (especially for novels) was obviously never traditional. Part of that of course is a determination bordering on mania never to give a "sense of an ending." Another complicating factor for Devil Is Dead is its existence alongside Archipelago; Lafferty even referred to it once as only seeming to be an SF action piece, when it is actually "a psychological fantasy, a split-off life" of Finnegan's.<br /><br />So the split in the novel between recensions parallels the split in Finnegan himself, and in Lafferty's telling—all of which is further complicated by later works in the Argo cycle (not to mention other parallels like the Coscuin Chronicles); even there, with the picture of multiple ends of history, there is by design never any sense of utter finality, for such would kill the whole project.<br /><br />All of which is to say, yes, there is a plot, but only if you aren't defining plot in the limited way it's often used today, of a story having a beginning, rising action, climax, denouement, so on. What I think you're hitting on here is that Lafferty forces us to rethink plot, or maybe in a broader sense narrative cohesion, so that it's not just about what happened and in what order; it's also about perception and resonance and schizoid gaps that cannot be accounted for by any of our more familiar narrative rhythms.<br /><br />Or, maybe another way to look at it: plotting is something human beings are constantly doing because it's impossible to make sense of the world, or of time, or any of the basic categories of life and our relations to them otherwise. Human existence is narrative, and we are constantly re-narrating it. But Lafferty messes with those uncertainties. He messes with the basic categories of existence too, but that is ultimately a by-product of his meddling with the narrative sense on which we are so reliant.<br /><br />When the likes of Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick talk of Lafferty's work as possibly the most original written, ever, I think it's this sort of thing they're getting at—it's the deep underlay beneath the puzzle of the work as a whole, the haunting of our stories by the infinite other stories that could have been, but which we foreclose on through the words "the end." Lafferty doesn't do that, and that's a huge and continual struggle for many people (myself included) to come to grips with.Andrewhttp://ralafferty.tumblr.comnoreply@blogger.com