Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  There were also several programs of Folk Singing for children. The Children's programs generally sounded interesting, such as ‘How to Be a Werewolf’. Well, how do you be a werewolf? Except that I am no longer a child, I would have attended this program and learned how to be a werewolf, and I would be one now.

  The Art Show was huge and splendid. Just as Science Fiction is the only real fiction being written these years, so is Fantasy Art the only real art being painted these years. People who get nostalgic for real art should go to Science Fiction conventions where real and living art is still to be found.

  The Masquerade Ball seemed ‘Renaissance’ in its costuming and presentation. The ‘Fan Cabaret’ was amateur-night-every-night in the most imaginative (but not otherwise the best) cabaret this side of the pearly gates.

  The Films were still another beating heart of the Convention. They did not run twenty-four hours a day as at some conventions. They ran only sixteen hours out of twenty-four, in two different theatre halls, and there were forty different feature films. But there were also the amateur films in two smaller video rooms. People made their own fantasy films, some of them very good and brought them to the Convention to show to their friends and to everybody. For at the Convention everybody was their friends.

  The Daily Newspaper at the Convention was named Lobster Tales. It appeared, hot off the press, every midmorning at about a dozen places around the Convention, but I never saw anybody bring it. It was full of quips and information and timely announcements.

  The friendly places around the Convention were to me the huge arcades of the shopping center between the Sheraton-Boston Hotel and the Prudential Tower, the view of the Charles River from any hilltop, the gushing fountains I seemed to run into within two blocks whichever way I walked, St. Cecelia's old brick Church just one block from the Hotel, the open-all-night Ice Cream Restaurant, Shelly's Bar on the third floor of our hotel, the Kon Tiki Ports Restaurant and Bar.

  When I was a boy and was reading a very good book or seeing a very good motion picture, I would sometimes panic when it came too near the end. “What, only eleven more pages!” I'd cry to myself, “and then the wonderful stuff will be finished.” Or “What, only nine minutes of the film left and then no more of it to see!” — for time was one of my fetishes and I always knew what time it was and how much time was left on whatever was going on. Coming to the finish of these things there was always a terminal sadness mixed with the joy.

  And, just the other day, I cried loudly into my own ear “What, only twenty hours left and then this wonderful convention will be only a memory!” It was sad, and it was inexorably true. After twenty hours, the Convention did indeed come to its end.

  Only not quite.

  There were still the Dead Dogs and the Dead Dog Parties. On the evening of September 1 it was finished. There was no more programming. The Art Show and the big book-and-magazine-dealers' cavern were closed to the conventioneers. The dealers and displayers were packing up their merchandise and would be doing so all night. It was like a Circus taking down its tents and moving away in its wagons.

  Most of the thousands of conventioneers left that evening and night to go home. But many of us would not leave until the next day or later. We were the Dead Dogs left behind, so we would have Dead Dog Parties to keep us from feeling let down. All the remnants from the private and public parties flowed into several big Dead Dog Parties, wines and vodkas and whiskeys and rums and gins, all the blessed mixes and varieties, all the beers and ales, all the junk food that was left. Most of the Europeans and especially the Scandinavians stayed over, and the Australians. The Scandinavians and Australians still kept their rivalry up. Not till the next year do we vote on whether to go to Australia or Copenhagen in 1983, but it will be pleasant either way. Most of the Californians stayed over. The Dead Dog Parties were not as crowded as the Convention Parties had been, but they were lively enough. And they went on, with diminishing attendance, till after dawn.

  I did not leave until late afternoon of the next day, September 2. That day I met a dozen or so friends who had been at the Convention all its days but whom I had not encountered in all the thousands of persons. I also made a dozen or so new friends that day, and I hope they will be friends forever. It was a very pleasant day, not so crowded nor so pressing. There was space to move around. There was room in the restaurants. There were pleasant and enchanting conversations. And there were the leave takings.

  And there were still many who remained after I left. And even they would not be bereft of fellowship and partying. That night there would be the ‘Really Dead Dog Parties’ for the remnant of the remnant.

  I have never been to a ‘Really Dead Dog Party’.

  September 6, 1980

  The Day After The World Ended

  (Notes for Speech for DeepSouthCon '79,

  New Orleans, July 21, 1979)

  I'm going to talk about the peculiar science-fictionish circumstance and condition in which we are living. It is, unfortunately, an overworked theme and situation that has been used hundreds of times and has never been well-handled even once. It is the ‘After The World Ended’ situation, subtitled ‘Grubbing in the Rubble’. It is the business of making out, a little bit, after a total catastrophe has hit. There are possibilities for several good stories in this situation, and I puzzled for a long time as to why no good ones had ever been written. I even myself tried and failed to write some good ones based on this set-up. And only recently have I discovered why plausible fiction cannot be based on this situation.

  The reason here is that fact precludes fiction. Being inside the situation, we are a little too close to it to see it clearly. Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds, but it has all been displaced babble. SF has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past, that today is ‘The Day After The World Ended’. Science Fiction is not alone in failing to understand what has happened. There is an almost impenetrable amnesia that obstructs the examination of the actual catastrophe.

  I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till 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. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all ‘ends of worlds’. Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went.

  Plato once said or wrote “Man is declared to be that creature who is constantly in search of himself. He is a being in search of meaning.” But Platonic Declarations don't seem to apply on ‘The Day After The World Ended’. Man is not now a being in search of meaning. He does not recollect and he does not reflect. All the looking-glasses were broken in the catastrophe that ended the world.

  There is a vague memory that this late world had a large and intricate superstructure on it, and that this came crashing down. There is some dispute as to whether we gained by the sweeping away of the trashy construction, or whether we lost a true and valid dimension in the unstructuring of our Old World, and whether we do not now live in ‘Flatland’. There is no way to settle this dispute since the old structure cannot be recaptured or analysed.

  There is even some evidence that ‘Flatlands’ are the more usual conditions, and that the worlds with heights and structures are the exceptions. Even if we could go back there, a time machine from Flatland and eyes from Flatland would not be able to see dimension not contained in Flatland.

/>   Now we come to the phenomenon or consensus named ‘Science Fiction’. When trying to identify an object, the first question used to be ‘What's it good for?’ But that is a value question, and values are banned under the present condition of things. Other questions that might be asked in trying to determine the function of Science Fiction are ‘How does it work?’, and ‘What does it do?’. An answer to ‘What does it do?’ might be ‘Sometimes it designs new worlds’. This trait of SF may be timely because our previous world is destroyed and there is presently a vacuum that can only be filled by a new world.

  Science Fiction is an awkward survivor in the present environment because there is no fiction possible in this present environment, and that shoots half of it. The curious thing known as prose fiction was one of the things that was completely lost in the shipwreck of the old world.

  Sometimes we hear about a contractor building a house on a wrong lot. Sometimes we hear about a man plowing a wrong field. Both these things are hard to do. How do you unplow a field? But we ourselves have been trying to plow a field that isn't there any more, and hasn't been there for between two and seven decades.

  Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the Americas and other colonies), and for only about three hundred years, from Don Quixote in 1605 to the various ‘last novels’ of the twentieth century. The last British novel may have been Arnold Bennett's ‘Old Wives' Tale’ in 1908 or Maugham's ‘Of Human Bondage’ in 1915. Both of them have strong post-fictional elements mixed in. The last Russian novel was probably Gorki's ‘The Bystander’ in the 1920's, and the last Irish novel may have been O'Flaherty's ‘The Informer’ about the same time. In Germany, Remarque's ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, published in 1929, was plainly a post-novel in a post-fictional form. But the structured world did not end everywhere at quite the same time. In the United States there was a brilliant ‘last hurrah’ of novels for several decades after the fictional form had disappeared in Europe, and Cozzen's ‘By Love Possessed’, published in 1957, might still be considered as a valid fictional work.

  That special form of fiction, the Short Story, was of even shorter duration, beginning with Hoffmann in Germany and Washington Irving in the United States, both writing real short stories from about 1819, and continuing to the ‘Last Tales’ of Isak Dinesen in 1955.

  There are apparent exceptions to all this, but they are only apparent.

  The thesis is that prose fiction was a structured form and that it became impossible in a society that had become unstructured, that prose fiction was a reflection of an intricate construct and that it ceased when it no longer had anything to reflect. A shadow simply can't last long after the object that has cast it has disappeared.

  Well, if a thing is clearly dead and yet it seems to walk about, what is it? Maybe it's a zombie. And we do presently have quite a bit of stuff that might be called zombie-fiction. This is personal posing and peacock posturing, this is pornography and gadgetry, this is charades and set-scene formalities. There are pretty good things in the ‘new journalism’ and in the ‘non-fiction novels’. There is plain truculence. But there isn't any fiction any more. There is the lingering smell of fiction in some of the branches of nostalgia. But fiction itself is gone.

  —except mis-named Science Fiction, the exception that proves only the exception. And it was never a properly fashioned fiction. It didn't reflect the world it lived in. It has always been more of a pre-world or a post-world camp-fire story than a defined fiction. But it still walks a little, and it isn't a zombie in the regular sense.

  The ghost of some other fiction might say in truth to Science Fiction: “You're not very good, are you?” But Science Fiction can answer “Maybe not, but I'm alive and you're dead.”

  We are now in an unstructured era of post-musical music, post-artistic art, post-fictional fiction, and post-experiential experience. We are, partly at least, in a post-conscious world. Most of the 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.

  We really are marooned. The world really has been chopped off behind us. Just how the old world ended isn't clear. There is a group amnesia that blocks us out from the details. It didn't end in Armageddon. The two world wars were only side lights to a powerful main catastrophe. The so-called revolutionary movements did not bring anything to an end. The world had already ended. Those things were only the grubbiest of brainless grubbings in the ruins.

  There is nothing analogous or allegorical about what I'm saying. I'm talking about the real conditions that prevail in the real present. At the worst, we've lost our last world. At the best, we're between worlds. We're living in Flatland, and we're not even curious about the paradoxes to be found here. Life here in ‘Flatland’ is like life in a photographic negative. Or it is life in the cellar of a world that has blown away. It is life in a limbo that has taken the irrational form of a Collective Unconscious. And we do not even know whether there is to be found somewhere the clear picture in whose negative we are living, or whether the negative is all there is.

  But for technical reasons we can't stay here. Somebody had better be remembering fragments of either a past or a future. We can't stay here because the ground we are standing on is sinking.

  Well then, does Science Fiction have any place in this post-world world? It seems to be a semi-secret society so confused that it can't even remember its own passwords. And yet it does have cryptic memories and elements that extend back through several worlds. It is a club of antiquarians, and it contains a lot of old lore in buried form. It is a pleasant and non-restrictive club to belong to. It provides varied entertainment for its members. It offers real fun now and then; and fun in the post-world period seems to be more scarce than it was when we still had a world.

  With the rest of the marooned persons-and-things, Science Fiction today is trapped in a dismal science-fictionish situation. It is right in the middle of the ‘Day After The World Ended’ plot. But SF turns this into the dullest of themes, and it never applies it to the present time when it is really happening. Someday people might want to travel back to this era by some device to see just what it was like between worlds, to see what it was really like in a ‘dark age’. We do not have detailed eye-witness accounts of life in any other of the dark ages. Doubt has even been thrown on the existence of dark ages in the past. And we ourselves today do not consider the present hiatus (or the present death, if it proves to be that) as worthy of the attention of Science Fiction.

  ‘Science Fiction As Survivor’ does carry, in a few sealed ritual jars, some sparks that may kindle fires again, but it is unaware that it is carrying any such things. There is some amnesia or taboo that prevents SF (and the rest of the post-world also) from looking at the present state of things generally.

  And the present state of things generally is that we are in the condition of creatures who have just made a traumatic passage out of an old life form, out of a tadpole state, out of a chrysalis stage. Such creatures are dopey. They are half-asleep and less than half-conscious.

  Well, what does happen after the death of a world or a civilization? The historian Toynbee in grubbing into the depths of twenty-four separate civilizations or worlds that he studied, kept running into the ‘Phoenix Syndrome’, into the ‘Fire in the Ashes Phenomenon’. So far, the Phoenix, the fire-bird that is born out of its own ashes, has been a bigger bird after each rebirth, but maybe not a better one. It may have been as big as it could get during its latest manifestation, and there's the dim memory that it crashed at the end of that life because it had become so large and unwieldy that it could only flop and could no longer fly.

  If the world is reborn Phoenix-like (and it isn't certain or automatic that it will be reborn at all), what form will it take next? No dead form is ever revived. But something entirely unexpected has, so far, been born on each site of an old world after a decent interva
l of time. Some of these intervals have been several centuries. But others have been only a few decades, and they have been getting shorter. There are no long-lived vacuums in this arena of happenings, but there has never been as wide and deep a vacuum as there is right now.

  Of one thing there is plenty: there is almost total freedom for anyone to do whatever he wishes. There is almost complete liberty of both action and thought. We live in a wide-open ‘people's-republic’ to end all ‘people's-republics’, and it probably will. But at the same time we are living in rubble and remnant. We are living in a series of cluttered non-governments, but the clutter isn't attached to anything. It is easily moved out of the way.

  By every definition, this is Utopia. Of course some of us have always regarded Utopia as a calamity, but most of you have not. In its flexibility and in its wide-open opportunities, this is the total Utopia. Anything that you can conceive of, you can do in this non-world. Nothing can stop you except a total bankruptcy of creativity. The seedbed is waiting. All the circumstances stand ready. The fructifying minerals are literally jumping out of the ground.

  And nothing grows. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. Well, why doesn't it?

  Back to Science Fiction. The ‘If only’ premise is at the beginning of every Science Fiction flight of fancy. But in actuality we are at the ‘If only’ nexus right now. All the conditions have come together. All the ‘If onlies’ are more than possible now: they are wide open. They are fulfilled. There are no manacles on anybody or anything; or else they are as easily broken as pieces of thread. But people still hobble about as if they were fettered in hand and foot and mind.