“Ifrit” (1982) and Janusian Peripetia

Stanley Elkin once said that he did shtick upon shtick until he got carpentry. In the same vein, there’s a maneuver so core to Lafferty’s fiction that it’s hard to imagine one of his stories without plenty of it. It’s deeper than what is sometimes called mood whiplash.

Yesterday, I wrote about the ending of "Maleficent Morning," with its shifts from breeziness to black comedy to an existential gut punch—a woman finding her husband’s bloody corpse in her marital bed. This kind of tonal whiplash is a staple of Lafferty’s fiction. He snaps from comedy to gravity in an instant and back again. And he will do it dozens of times until he brings us to the reversal that defines the story, its aim. It’s one of the ways in which he is a magician.

I’d like a term for this. Usually, in a Lafferty short story, it’s what the entire narrative turns on in lieu of complete closure—the shift from comedy to horror or horror to comedy. In the novels, it becomes more complicated because the switchbacks multiply. As a placeholder, I’m going to call this Janusian peripeteia. Lafferty builds his works around dramatic reversals, shifting a story’s emotional tenor from comic to tragic, or vice versa, before landing on a final, decisive flip (peripeteia in the Aristotelian sense).

The term comes from Janus, the Roman god with two faces looking in opposite directions. Just as Janus represents entry and exit, beginning and end, Janusian peripeteia marks how swiftly laughter can yield horror in Lafferty—or how despair can erupt into hilarity.

Not long ago, Andrew Ferguson asked what the funniest Lafferty work is. He put the question to his X followers, and there was silence. Part of that is because Lafferty discussion tends to be quiet, but I think it points to something deeper. And Ferguson is onto something important.

Most Lafferty fans love how often he makes them laugh. He is a very funny writer. But if someone asked me for a really funny Lafferty story, I wouldn’t know what to recommend. The biggest laughs often happen in stories where the social, moral, and intellectual stakes are serious. For me, the laugh often comes from how the decorum of the telling sits askew of the story plane. Movement from sentence to sentence feels light, and the laughs are hard laughs, but there’s a weight to it that makes me reluctant to call it “funny” in the way the classic American humorist is funny.

Even an American humorist as melancholy as James Thurber makes it easier to say, this is funny overall. I could list half a dozen Thurber stories that are just funny. The same goes for someone more recent, like David Sedaris. While I think Lafferty is often funnier than other writers, I struggle to name a single purely funny story of his the way Thurber’s “The Dog That Bit People” is classic and just funny.

To get at why, let’s look at "Ifrit" (1982), Lafferty working in his bagatelle mode.

It centers on a reporter named Henry Inkling. He’s pretentious, but he gets an assignment that will make him slum: covering a wrestling match. The wrinkle in the story is that Inkling gets to watch the so-called Weeping Genie, an actual ifrit named Ifrit, who can shrink and expand at will. Intrigued by the authentic display of magic amid otherwise staged wrestling gimmicks, Henry interviews Ifrit and learns about the hidden world of bottled estates: miniature realms that expand into vast mansions and landscapes once a person is small enough to enter them.

Henry, obsessed with social prestige, acquires his own bottle-based estate, enjoying newfound luxury until a catastrophe involving a cat (“Lions in the Sky”) reveals the peril of his tiny universe. His fiancée and friends, attempting to exit the bottle, are swatted and eaten by the cat’s kittens. The story ends on a cliffhanger.

A lot is happening in "Ifrit." Lafferty sometimes alludes to Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption in his work, and here he satirizes it as social fakery. His contempt for this kind of pretense appears early in Dotty, where he writes

People with no warrant for it had become very vocal; and when the Dudes talked about Henry George they meant not the calf buyer, but the nostrum-peddler; when they spoke of Veblen they meant the straw-splitter and not the wheat farmer. Indeed, the wheat farmer spelled his name Weblein, and his given name was Adalbert. However, Adalbert had as sound a grasp on economics as Thorstein.

Wrestling may be conspicuously fake, but so is the culture of conspicuous consumption that defines itself against it. Inkling’s socially conscious In-Group is no more real than the spectacle they look down upon.

The story also ties into Lafferty’s novel Sinbad: The Thirteenth Voyage (1989) and his fascination with Arabian Nights. My favorite Lafferty wrestling moment is Atlas’s love of country wrastlin’ in Space Chantey (1968), but "Ifrit" also has him going wild, imagining wrestling acts with as much joy as you’d expect. We don’t often get social critique tied so directly to class dynamics, so this is an interesting case where Lafferty skewers both the haves and the have-nots.

What makes the ending of "Ifrit" memorable to me is the way Lafferty delivers his final reversal. Everything is lighthearted: Henry and his friends celebrate in his new estate, proud of the miniature luxury. In an instant, disaster strikes.

Then disaster struck! Oh, it struck only five minutes ago. It was so sudden that I am not yet able to appreciate the magnitude of it. My seven best friends, including my fiancée, went up the ladder to the mouth of the bottle right at dawn after the happiest night we had ever experienced together. Then I looked up to watch them going, and I saw the Lions in the Sky, and I froze with fear and horror. And my friends, as they emerged from the throat of the bottle and began to say the three enlarging words, were slapped to their deaths. A mother cat was there, and she slapped each of my friends (including my fiancée) to one of her seven kittens to eat like bugs.     

This is Lafferty’s Janusian peripeteia at its lightest. When he shifts in the other direction, running from horror to comedy, it tends toward either mockery or metaphysical comedy rather than mere laughter. This, too, is a defining feature of his work. The grotesque shock of watching one’s friends devoured by kittens jolts the reader. It’s a mini-apocalypse. The cat’s paw dipping into a genie’s bottle is lighter than a conte cruel but weightier than casual fantasy because of the social critique.

This isn’t quite sharp enough yet, but it begins to capture how Lafferty’s mastery of the grotesque runs deeper than that of most writers who employ it. He lulls readers with whimsy, but seriousness lurks just off the page. And he makes the leap to it faster than almost anyone.

For now, I’m going to call this flickering, bi-directional shock tactic that defines his work Janusian peripeteia.

Current Notes:

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