Forza [force] and froda [fraud] being the two essential elements of sin, it follows that they must be the two cardinal virtues of human life as such. Machiavelli personified them as the lion and the fox, the force and cunning which together make up the strong prince. So it is not surprising that European literature should begin with the celebration of these two mighty powers of humanity—of forza in the Iliad, the story of the wrath (menis) of Achilles, of froda in the Odyssey, the story of the guile (dolos) of Ulysses. The Secular Scripture
Today I want to look at the revisions Lafferty made to “Old Halloweens on the Guna Slopes,” changes that rendered the short story significantly less dark than in its original publication in Fantastic (August 1975). The revised version, which appears in the collection Ringing Changes (1984), is, in my view, inferior. But setting that kind of assessment aside, the shift in plot and tone, and in three instances, sharpens our view of two of Lafferty’s recurring themes: violence and fraud. I’ve elsewhere called attention to the bloodsmell that permeates his work. Alongside this runs his inexhaustible fund of conmen and fraudsters. One cannot fail to recognize the centrality of violence and fraud in almost everything the man wrote.
To get at this, a small detour. In the mid-1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye published The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). The book imagined literature as an “order of words” and presented all literary works as participating in one grand structure. It’s a remarkable book—if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Even someone as radical as my old methods teacher Cary Wolfe, a major critical voice in posthumanism and animal studies, praised it effusively, as did his PhD advisor, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. This is just to say that while there’s much to argue with in The Anatomy of Criticism, even readers one might expect to be oppositional have found it compelling in innumerable ways.
The problem was that in writing Anatomy, Frye had also written himself into a corner. The book became the most cited work of literary criticism for the next two decades, but it locked Frye brand. He was the guy who thought of literature as a system of cyclical modes and genres where literary history is a static order. For the rest of his critical career, Frye tried to find something dialectical, something in motion, within what he called the order of words. It was the thing that he needed to exclude to write the Anatomy.
His most successful early attempt at this became The Secular Scripture (1976). The book was drawn from his Norton Lectures at Harvard in the mid-1970s, a series on romance. By this time, however, the taste in literary criticism had shifted. Frye's intellectual stock was about to decline with the rise of high theory. For the rest of his life, he would increasingly dismissed as either a naïve structuralist or a dogmatic schematizer. As a result, The Secular Scripture has not received the attention it deserves.
In the early 2000s, the University of Toronto Press began publishing The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, a thirty-volume project that culminated with an index. One of the real treasures of that series is the inclusion of Frye’s notebooks, where he worked out his ideas, often in strangely coded or abbreviated forms. Volume 15, Notebooks on Romance (2004), shows the workshop where he developed the Norton Lectures. Among the many ideas that appear there, some in embryonic form, others more fully worked out, is a concept that appears less fully in The Secular Scripture but is useful for reading Lafferty: the distinction between forza and froda, and their centrality in romance, whether we’re speaking of the Greek second-century romances, the medieval chivalric tales, or the modern genres of the western and science fiction.
Michael Dolzani summarizes Frye’s dialectical idea like this:
In the notebooks and typed notes towards The Secular Scripture, we see Frye constructing a whole new history for romance, one that is dialectical and progressive rather than cyclical. There are two human impulses, forza and froda, violence and fraud, and two types of literature that result from them. The literature of forza is tragic and ironic; its violence is that of humanity hurling itself against the limitations of the fallen world, which ultimately destroy it. The literature of froda is comic and romantic; its fraud is the inventive imagination that outwits those limitations. The Secular Scripture argues for an evolution of Western literature from forza increasingly towards froda. It may be useful to suggest, however, that this is not a simple, straightforward progress but a dialectical one. In each of the five historical modes in the Anatomy, romance is born anew; but in each mode it struggles with its opposite, which is also reborn: forza and froda are contraries, versions of Wallace Stevens’s reality and imagination. This would explain the epic-romance tension in the second mode, and also cast light on The Secular Scripture’s description of the tension between modern popular romance and the “great tradition.” We seem to be led towards an ultimate yin-yang conception of genre, whereby a mode of literature wrestles with some categorical other that is at the same time contained within it.
Because the amount of summary required to work through the full plots and mark every change would be excessive, I’ll take a shortcut and present the key alterations as a table:
Major Plot Differences: Original vs. Revised
Plot Element | Original Version | Revised Version | Key Changes & Notes |
Opening & Tone | Begins on a spooky, sardonic note. Early emphasis that Mary and Loretta are spook-likeish. Overall: Lafferty mixing dark humor and eerie supernaturalism from the start. | Mary Mondo’s spook nature is still clear, but references to Loretta Sheen’s half-spook condition appear later (and more briefly). Whimsical, but some spookiness is condensed. | Loretta’s presence as a haunted doll is moved further along. The premise is still that they’re all retelling past Halloween pranks with a nostalgic ghostly twist, but the revised story softens the dread. |
Mary Mondo & Loretta Sheen | Mary Mondo is said to be “seldom either visible or audible.” Loretta Sheen is introduced early: half spook, half sawdust-filled doll, the “one-time daughter” of Barnaby Sheen. | Mary Mondo is introduced almost the same way—“wasn’t anything at all”—but in fewer lines. Loretta Sheen’s status as an “undead body” or “big, not-so-very-lifelike sawdust doll” is mentioned later and more succinctly. Some earlier references to Loretta’s spook nature are omitted. | Placement shift: In the original, both Mary and Loretta appear together as spooks from the outset. In the revision, Loretta is brought in more briefly and later. |
Halloween Pranks (Kalbfleish, Bittle McLittle, Streetcar) | Three big pranks anchor the middle part of the story: 1. Kalbfleish’s pit (mud, kerosene, exploded pumpkin). 2. Bittle McLittle (the “paternity suit” con). 3. Dumbarton’s streetcar fiasco (Orcutt streetcar driven onto a porch, “Clang! Clang!”). | The same three pranks appear with mostly the same comedic details, though the narrative is streamlined. Kalbfleish’s porch accident, Bittle McLittle’s scam, and the runaway streetcar are still told by Harry, George, and Barnaby, respectively. Minor rewording and some cuts, but the basic arcs are unchanged. | No major plot differences in these central prank anecdotes. They remain comedic set pieces in both versions. The revised compresses some of the dialogue and background details but preserves the story events. |
Forza Subplot: Drowned Boy & Mary’s Rescue | Original features a dark anecdote: Mary Mondo recalls how she rescued the ghost of a little boy who was drowned by two cruel girls at a wading pool, while a caretaker deliberately looked away. This subplot is key to the story’s horror. | Completely omitted from the revised text. | Significant omission: The revised version cuts this backstory. The original uses it to show Mary’s rescue of a murdered child’s spirit and to heighten the sinister aspects of Halloween. |
Guna Slopes & “Monkey Wrench” | Austro describes brutal Guna Slopes Halloween traditions (catapulted doors, mamba snakes, “Dumb Cluck Stuck” test). Emphasis on the “monkey wrench”: a supernatural tool that twists one’s “interior monkey,” dooming them to become “common clay” or a “homo sapiens.” The story foreshadows that one friend will be singled out. | Mostly the same: talk of doorbells, booby traps, and advanced “cave technology.” The “monkey wrench” concept remains but is overshadowed at the end by a playful resolution. The threat that someone might be turned into a sapiens is still stated, yet it never happens in the revised. | Core idea stays: Guna Slopes invented Halloween, punishing slow kids. The revised version retains talk of the “monkey wrench,” but it no longer culminates in someone’s transformation. The heightened fear is not fulfilled in the ending when the monkey wrench is presumably used on “Laff.” |
Climactic Arrival of “Paracelsus” (Roy) & “Morgana” (Chiara) | FRODA → FORZA Roy Mega and Chiara Benedetti show up in costumes: the conical-hatted alchemist (real white beard) and Morgana with sparks. They also have a Judas-goat and a white monkey. They fling sparks so that one of the old gang is “chosen” (the spark hits him), presumably turning him into an ordinary human (“common clay”). The final line is bleak: “They make them a lot rougher.” | FRODA and THREAT OF FORZA → FRODA METAMORPHOSEDRoy Mega (still with real white beard) and Chiara (still Morgana) appear, but they bring a third figure (Heavenly Days McGee) who pours chili over Austro’s head. This is revealed to be a birthday prank for Austro. Nobody is truly singled out or transformed into a sapiens. The tension deflates into a party. | Massive tonal change: In the original, the arrival signals genuine supernatural doom for one person. In the revised, it’s surprise. Austro “dies” dramatically only to discover it’s chili, not cursed blood. |
Ending Tone | Ends with an ominous twist: “Which one had died as he stood there? … They make them a lot rougher now.” Suggests that one friend did lose their special knowledge and turned into a normal homo sapiens. | Ends with lighthearted relief: “Happy birthday, Austro!” Snail cake and chili reveal. No one is turned into a sapiens or “loses knowledge.” The group enjoys the joke. | Completely different conclusion: Original retains a dark horror-fantasy vibe. Someone is irreversibly changed. Revised resolves everything as a birthday party prank, leaving the group intact. |
In this way, the two versions of “Old Halloweens on the Guna Slopes” present Lafferty working through the dialectic of forza and froda.
In the original version of “Old Halloweens,” forza dominates: the story ends in ironic tragedy, with the strong implication that the authorial stand-in is the victim. Here, romantic mode is dominated by the tragic mode. In the revised version, however, the narrative pivots decisively toward froda, culminating in a theatrical birthday trick in which Austro is doused with chili. Froda becomes the dominant note. This time, romance and comedy contain the irony and tragedy.
To make this drastic tonal and structural shift work, Lafferty seems to have decided to excise the overpowering elements of forza that the new ending could not accommodate. Chief among these is one of the most disturbing passages he ever wrote, which is entirely absent from the revised version:
It was a year ago tonight. Several of us got the feeling that the little boy was going to be killed. On this portal-night we are able to rescue one who has been unjustly handled. He will still be killed, yes: but, when he is killed, he will go with us; he will not go where dead people go. It was at that little wading pool for kids down in Honey Locust Park. It was just at sundown. There were two middle-sized girls there (six or seven years old), and they had decided to drown the little boy. A lady was on duty there, and she watched it and pretended not to see it. She had been overtaken by that special evil that can enter only into homo saps. She didn’t want anyone to see it; she didn’t want anyone to know it: but she wanted those two middle-sized girls to drown that little boy, and she wanted him to suffer that black strangulation that is the worst suffering of all.
The black strangulation epitomizes forza at its darkest.
Also lost are two other narrative strands: the “dumb cluck stuck” motif, the sacrificial victim element, and the uncanny encounter with the familiars, a dark trio of Halloween beings who speak in riddles and threats:
They had a black cat with them. They had a white monkey. They had a Judas-goat. All just plain Halloween props. Chiara-Morgana blew on her fingers and they lighted up like blue candles . . . . “Oh go duck for apples somewhere,” Mary Mondo said crossly. Mary was scared though. There was something about a sonder-effect ghost-trap in the sparks that came from the Morgana fingers . . . . “Your symbiosis blows like rack—Your inside monkey’s on your back,” the white monkey simpered in that monkey-mouthed way they have of talking . . . . “We bet you wish that you were dead—You hole-in-mind and hole-in-head,” the black cat wauled in that gross way they have . . . “For one of you, things to and fro—From this day on you will not know,” the Judas-goat bleated. What, no longer be one of the guys who knew everything? Judas-goat, the goat-butcher’s knife is hungry for your throat.
These deletions reverse the trajectory of the original version. What had been a descent from froda into forza becomes, in the revision, a movement from froda to froda, where force was trickery all along—the extent of the forza being only the wild pranks themselves.
Why did Lafferty make these changes? We can only speculate. Some possibilities:
An editor may have asked him to tone it down.
He may have felt uneasy about casting a day from the liturgical calendar in such a sinister light. Perhaps this is part of the meaning behind his choice to introduce “Heavenly Days McGee.”
He may have believed it was misleading to suggest that past Halloweens were truly so rough.
He may have worried the ending came off as self-pitying and wanted to avoid overemphasizing the Laff character.
He just changed his mind about what the story should be about.
One final note: when froda is neutralized, it often metaphorizes into the virtue of prudence, something Frye points out in his notebooks. When forza is overturned, it tends to metamorphose into the virtue of fortitude. Here is the original forza ending:
Roy and Chiara ran whooping down the street and left one of us there with a hole in his head (where the know-everything cortical had been), and with a ghost-monkey (wrenched from its interior and rightful den) on his back forever. No, they don’t make Halloweens like they used to. They make them a lot rougher.
In the revised version, forza has been metamorphosed. There is no black strangulation. Instead of malevolence, we are given an image of a birthday trick (froda) resulting in fortitude: Austro, chili on his head, endures the prank, keeping up with what really matters, the continuation of the Rocky McCrocky strip:
“Hammer and chisel ringing out the great epic of Rocky McCrocky on the comic-strip stone blocks. Chili still on his head, and his mouth full of snail cake. Sunshine shining there at midnight, and the rock dust flying!”
As a writer who usually works within romance, forza and froda exert constant pressure on each other throughout Lafferty’s work. Watching how these forces interact reveals patterns that can help readers make sense of his recurring juxtaposition of violence and fraud.
This, to my mind, exemplifies what Dolzani is identifying when he writes that Frye shows romance to be “a mode of literature wrestles with some categorical other that is at the same time contained within it.” Going forward, I’ll be watching for forza when I see froda in Lafferty, and for froda when I see forza.
Current notes:
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
———. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
———. Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance. Edited by Michael Dolzani. Vol. 15 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, edited by Alvin A. Lee. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Lafferty, R.A. "Old Halloweens on the Guna Slopes." Fantastic, August 1975.
———. "Old Halloweens on the Guna Slopes." In Ringing Changes, 97–119. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
Dolzani, Michael. Introduction to Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance, by Northrop
Frye, 1–44. Vol. 15 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, edited by Alvin A. Lee. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
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