Petersen, Daniel Otto Jack
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Petersen, Daniel Otto Jack (2020) ‘You Are the Old Entrapped Dreams of the Coyote’s Brains Oozing Liquid Through the Broken Eye Socket’: Ecomonstrous poetics and weird bioregionalism in the fiction of R. A. Lafferty (with a comparative reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/81615/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] PhD Thesis ‘You Are the Old Entrapped Dreams of the Coyote’s Brains Oozing Liquid Through the Broken Eye Socket’: Ecomonstrous Poetics and Weird Bioregionalism in the Fiction of R. A. Lafferty (With a Comparative Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian) Daniel Otto Jack Petersen Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow 2 Abstract The fiction of R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) is at once deeply ecological and deeply strange. Its incessant narrative inclusion of the nonhuman beings, places, and forces of Lafferty’s Oklahoman and otherwise (south)western bioregion evinces an imagination profoundly porous to the local specificities and abundance of one’s more-than-human context. In this way it is deeply ecological. Lafferty’s fiction is also known (among his small devoted readership, which includes such luminaries as Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison) as one of the most uniquely off-kilter, wildly imaginative, and arcanely erudite bodies of work in U.S. literature. In this way it is deeply strange. While it is often acknowledged that Lafferty transcends the genre of science fiction (the industry in which most of his early work was published) and that his work is sui generis, little has been done to place him as either a U.S. author generally or an author of regional place more specifically. This thesis attempts to initiate the placement of Lafferty as a bioregional writer of the Great Plains and Southwest, whilst placing equal emphasis on Lafferty’s literary mode as not so much science-fictional as weird, or monstrous (in what we will call a horror-comic or monstro- ludic key). The fusion of these concerns leads this thesis to declare Lafferty a purveyor of American Weird Bioregionalism. Toward this end, we herein assemble insights from regional western U.S. narrative traditions (the frontier tall tale and Native American storytelling) together with recent ecocritical and ecophilosophical discourses (New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology) to reconfigure contemporary Monsters Studies toward a more-than-human construal of monsters and the monstrous that reads Lafferty’s weird bioregional fiction through the lens of what this thesis terms an Ecomonstrous Poetics. A chapter devoted to an ecomonstrous reading of Cormac McCarthy’s southwestern novel Blood Meridian provides a canonical comparison to Lafferty with surprising overlap. A final chapter on Lafferty’s implicit ecotheology rounds out the thesis and opens it up to further research. 3 Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................... 2 Preface ....................................................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 8 Brief Biography of R. A. Lafferty ........................................................................................................... 10 Goals and Parameters of the Thesis ....................................................................................................... 11 Overview of Chapters ............................................................................................................................ 13 Chapter 1: ‘You are a Double-Decked, Seven-Stranded, Copper-Bottomed, Four-Dimension Liar!’: Weird Bioregionalism and a ‘Mixing Bowl’ of Storytelling Influences .................................................. 16 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 16 Lafferty’s Bioregional Imagination ........................................................................................................ 17 The Dizzying, Swirled, Environmental Eccentricity of the West ........................................................ 18 Ecomonstrous Poetics, Tall Lies, and Weird Bioregionalism ............................................................. 23 ‘Damn You, Ginger, Why Didn't You Tell Me You Weren't People?’................................................ 27 Tall Tale Headquarters: Lafferty and the Ironic-Heroic Frontier ........................................................... 29 Formal Features and Formal Innovations ........................................................................................... 32 Hilarity, Precarity, Tentacularity: Huck Finn Fishing On a Cloud With a Sentient Computer .............. 35 Lafferty and His Native American Neighbours ....................................................................................... 40 Lafferty and Native American Storytelling ............................................................................................. 44 Gagoga: Cherokee ‘Liars’ ................................................................................................................ 45 Shukha Anumpa: Choctaw Hogwash ................................................................................................. 46 Hannali’s Hogwash ............................................................................................................................... 48 With a Big Red Heart I Exaggerate ................................................................................................... 48 The Grisly Demise of Pickens the Green Indian—Until the Next Story .............................................. 51 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 53 Ecotone: Cabrito: Isn't That A Good Story? Give Me A Peso ............................................................... 54 Chapter 2: ‘We Take the Place of the Monsters They Have Lost’: Lafferty’s Ecomonstrous Poetics and Monster Theory ....................................................................................................................................... 60 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 60 Feeling Our Way to the More-Than-Human Monster ............................................................................. 62 The Monster is More-Than ............................................................................................................... 62 The Shaggy Giant Made of Birds and Bugs (and Other De-anthropocentrisms) .................................. 64 The Monster is Not (Necessarily) Evil............................................................................................... 66 Monstrum Tremendum .......................................................................................................................... 66 Return of the Ecologically Repressed: ‘We Take The Place Of The Monsters They Have Lost’ ......... 70 Monsters Will Monstrate: PhenOMENology And The Monstrosity Of Adduction .................................... 73 The Ghost-Elk Will Whistle and Birds Will Eat Men’s Souls for the Journey..................................... 75 Shuddering Before the Opacity of Monsters ...................................................................................... 77 Unclosure and Non-Demonstrative Ecstasy: Playing Along with Monsters ........................................ 77 Ulvsgedi: Wondrous Mixes in the Middle World .................................................................................... 82 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 87 Chapter 3: ‘The Experience of Planet-Fall is a Daily Thing’: Lafferty’s Ecomonstrous Poetics and the Nonhuman Turn ...................................................................................................................................... 88 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 88 4 The Valley Pretending to Be a Ditch ...................................................................................................... 89 Entangled Flows vs./and Weird Withdrawals ......................................................................................... 90 The Monsters of New