A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter in response to a discussion about certain obiter dicta on pornography in an essay Lafferty wrote. Though it didn’t generate any discussion, I stand by the idea that Lafferty’s most profound fictional engagement with human sexuality appears in The Flame is Green (1971). To ensure these thoughts aren’t lost, I’m preserving them here.
Lafferty rarely engages with eros explicitly or in a sustained way, but in The Flame is Green, he explores it more deeply than anywhere else in his work. Through three key passages, I will show how he rejects pornographic eros in favor of something sacramental.
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The most striking instances of the erotic in Lafferty’s work occur in The Flame is Green, where he explores eros as a theme in Dana's life. He also addresses it in Dotty, which contains moments that verge on the pornographic—such as the disturbing incident involving pre-teen Dotty and the grown men in Galveston—but these moments feel more like isolated events rather than a structured examination of eros itself.
The second half of Dotty speaks more explicitly about sex than anywhere else in Lafferty’s work, but it does so through the matrix of sexual fallenness, shame, and restoration.
In The Flame is Green, however, Lafferty goes further in setting out a dialectic of eros. Two erotic passages stand out. Their close proximity, the way the married characters in the first passage warn Dana about the woman in the second, and the interplay of boundaries, blood, violence, playfulness, and sadism all suggest that Lafferty is making a statement about eros.
My contention is that the pornography-adjacent elements in the novel are sublated in Dana’s sacramental marriage to Catherine at the end of the novel and in the erotic blood-rapiers scenes—the topless fencing, the slashed breasts, the instances of sexual bloodplay.
But I’m not entirely sure what Lafferty means by "with any other couple" in this passage:
"With any other couple there would be something a little wrong about this. With them, in their private passion, there was not. Catherine stuck her tongue out impishly, and Dana flicked it with his rapier's point, starting a fine red ribbon. 'My initials are on you there,' Catherine said when they were finished. She spoke a little slurred from her nicked tongue. This is the way Dana would remember her voice."
Lafferty seems to set up a three-stage progression of eros: innocent transgression, corrupted conquest, and sacramental realization.
Passage 1: Eros as Transgression (Magdelena & Bloodplay)
Dana lay down on top of the sleeping Magdelena and kissed her
strongly upon the face and mouth. She partially returned his
kisses, but she did not waken. He lay upon her and soaked her
hair and head and face and neck and breasts and entire upper
body with his blood. Ah, what a sticky red joke he was playing on
the sleeping beauty! He laughed then, and his own pain became a
sort of rending pleasure upon her. He loved this as an elaborate
jest; and Magdelena would love it in the morning, after she had
seen what had happened in the night and that it was not Dana
who was dead, and after she had realized with blue-eyed delight
what outrageous calling card he had left upon her. He kissed her
bloodied mouth with great passion; then he rose from her.
Turning to her husband, Dana cuffed Malandrino Brume and
thumped him upon his mighty chest. “Good-bye, old man,” he
said. “I leave you now.” And Malandrino Brume was still sleeping
deeply and powerfully. Dana gave Brume a resounding slap on
the haunch.
“Sleep, you two saints, sleep till the sun gets in your eyes,” he
said.
This passage makes eros an act of inscription. It fuses play, pain, and pleasure in a way that reaffirms life and intimacy.
Yet, the scene is complicated by Magdelena’s marriage to another saint-like figure. Is this Lafferty’s prefigurement of eros as sacrament? Dana’s gesture is both outrageous and oddly sacred. His blood is not just spilled but transferred, marking her in an almost liturgical way. Yet this is eros as an excess of life, not yet ordered. This is not sacramental love but a prefiguration of it, its raw material, awaiting transfiguration.
Passage 2: Eros as Conquest (Dana & the Witch)
[Her gown was of the dark brown color that the Carmelites wear,
but it wasstuff too fine for poor Carmelites.]
Then a thing happened that is completely without explanation.
Dana Coscuin, always so courteous to ladies of whatever sort,
committed a series of acts so startling and so removed from his
regular character that there is no accounting for them. He was
seized either by total madness or by sanity on a plane that is
canted in regard to our own. In some way, the lady had the
aspect of a snake or of some thing worse than a snake. And all
the while she was one of the genuinely pretty ladies of the world.
Dana caught the lady by the hair of her head and began to drag
her about the road by it. “The hair at least is real,” he said loudly,
“even if the girl is not.” But he continued to drag her.
With gleeful fury he flung her on her back in the roadway
there. There was no fear in the lady's eyes: only defiance and —
what? — yes, a touch of amusement. Have snakes alway
responded so disconcertingly?
Dana stood upon the girl with one foot on her mound and the
other on her throat.
‘Nobody has ever conquered her,’ Magdelena Brume had once
said of this very nameless lady. ‘It may not be,’ Dana said to
himself now, ‘but I have scored first discomfit on her.’
There was murderous glee in Dana, and momentarily it was
the false snake itself that he ground under his heels.
“You will really injure me,” the lady spoke with some strain,
since her throat was still under Dana's heel. It couldn't be that
the lady in her extreme straits was laughing at Dana with her
eyes. No, it must be that the eyes of Spanish ladies and Spanish
snakes differ from other eyes.
“Stand off me, man,” the lady said in a small voice now, “and I
will do anything you say.”
“Get up then, and disrobe,” Dana told her.
The lady, the girl, disrobed smoothly and quietly, letting her
clothing fall in the dust of the road, and stepping clear of them.
Dana began to wonder who had really scored discomfit here. The
girl was slim and brown, muscled smoothly like a boy, and yet
quite breasty, and boned like a young woman. She still wore her
gloves, a supreme elegance by which she already partly defeated
Dana.
‘She is no lady, she is a cheap boney jade,’ rough Brume had
once said of this very girl here. It may have been so. Or it may
have been that rough Brume had never seen this girl in her
bones.
‘She is death-danger to you, Dana my love,’ Magdelena had once
said of this same girl. And Magdelena of the Mountain was to be
trusted such as are no more than three saints in Heaven.
The girl's back was empurpled with old scars. She had been
whipped, scourged almost to death at some time.
“Take off your gloves,” Dana said, and the girl dropped her
gloves in the dust. Aye, she had once been hanged up by the
thumbs and beaten.
But where was the death-danger from this bare girl? Dana went
through the clothes in the dust of the road. He looked at the girl.
“You have nothing hidden?” he asked.
“What would I hide?”
“Robe yourself again then.” But the girl found combs with her
clothes and was fixing her hair first.
“Dana Coscuin,” she said, “dine with me one month from this
evening.”
Here, Dana's eros has become disordered. It is conquest and also failed self-mastery. He wants to unmask the Condesa Elena Prado y Bosca, to strip away illusion, but the harder he presses, the weaker he becomes. When she is unfazed, calmly fixing her hair—sheer pornographic impudicitia—the power dynamic has flipped. Dana, once the would-be dominator, is now servant to his own eros. He set out to break her. It is he who is undone. Force reveals spiritual impotence. The witch does not resist; she has no need to. Dana’s eros is laid bare, incapable of the reciprocity that could redeem it. In the end, it is he who is stripped.
By the time he reaches Catherine, he will have been nursed back to health by Brume and will have shed his need for disordered conquest. No longer attempting to wield eros as a weapon, he will be ready to receive it as a gift.
Passage 3: Fully Realized Eros
"With any other couple there would be something a little wrong about this. With them, in their private passion, there was not."
Here, eros is finally legitimized—beyond both transgressive jest (Magdelena) and abortive conquest (the witch).
Dana and Catherine’s fencing scene represents eros in its true form—fully realized, neither transgressive nor dominated. Blood and inscription return, but unlike in the first two scenes, here, there is no collapse. Catherine’s body is marked, but she is not wounded.
Lafferty’s narrative illustrates how Dana matures beyond the counterfeit eros characteristic of pornography—an eros that mimics intimacy while lacking the mutual recognition that makes love real. The counterfeit form treats desire as consumption rather than communion. In the union with Catherine, eros attains its sacramental perfection: an ordered, mutual fulfillment and grace that can be both playful and wise at once.
Here is the progression that I see in the novel:
Eros as Innocent Play (Magdelena)
This stage Dana's eros is a spontaneous, transgressive expression of desire. It is uninhibited, playful passion that affirms life. But it is ephemeral and driven by impulsivity rather than the mutual commitment required for enduring intimacy. While it disrupts conventional norms and affirms life, its lack of reciprocity and sacramentality makes it unsustainable over time.
Eros as Conquest (The Condesa Elena Prado y Bosca)
At this stage, Dana's eros transforms into an attempt at domination. Yet this effort backfires, becoming a failed conquest in which the drive for erotic control ultimately destroys desire. A recurring motif in the novel is the witch’s face, which will end up burned and scarred by fire. This reaches its horrifying peak in the following lines:
It was a years-after dream of Dana, when he had come to his grayness, meeting again with Elena Prado, who was one-eyed and bent and her face entirely of scar tissue. That was not the shaking part of it. The spooky part was that Elena was as stubborn and lustful and snaky-triumphant as ever.
Dana’s forced assertion over her exposes his vulnerability to appetitus and the threat that concupiscence will destroy him. It reveals that when eros is pursued through coercion rather than recognition, it scars not only the coerced but also the coercer.
Eros as Sacramental Fulfillment (Catherine)
The final stage culminates in a balanced and sacred union, where eros is realized as a sacramental commitment. This form of eros transcends fleeting play and destructive conquest, transforming desire into a shared, sacramental bond. It is a sustainable, legitimate expression of intimacy, marked by both symbolic and tangible signs of mutual recognition.
This is not an expenditure of spirit in a waste of shame, but a sacrament.
Lafferty’s treatment of eros in The Flame is Green is as an analytical map—charting both the disorder of partially fulfilled eros and its fulfillment when directed toward its proper end.
Lafferty’s depiction of eros is unexpectedly and deeply countercultural. The sacramental marriage is neither repressive nor indulgent, which is why Lafferty chooses the image of graceful fencing as its emblem.
"Win with whom, Catherine?" But she slashed him, and they were at it again. Dana drew blood on Catherine. She was statuesque, scarlet on ivory now. Her throat, her bosom were statued perfection, firm beyond believing, and Dana added deep, rich color to them. That man the other night was not the greatest sculptor in the world: he, Dana Coscuin, was the greatest, and he added incredibly deft touches to the greatest living statue. With any other couple, there would be something a little wrong about this. With them, in their private passion, there was not. Catherine stuck her tongue out impishly, and Dana flicked it with his rapier's point, starting a fine red ribbon. "My initials are on you there," Catherine said when they were finished. She spoke a little slurred from her nicked tongue. This is the way Dana would remember her voice. "On your thorax," she said. "They will scar and be there forever."
It is a shockingly Laffertian metaphor for rightly ordered eros in a sacramental marriage, acting as an instrument of grace.
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