“Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” (1978) I

I’ve been closely reading "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteenth Century." In the coming days, I’ll make several posts about it and post my notes, but today, I want to look at how masterfully it complicates narrative technique. Doing so requires me to discuss diegetic protocols—where diegesis, simply put, refers to levels of narrative. Here are the terms as I will be using them:

Diegetic: The primary narrative level where the story unfolds.

Intradiegetic: Events and characters operating within the main story world.

Extradiegetic: Elements outside the primary story, such as narration or commentary.

Metadiegetic: A narrative within the narrative, like Bentley’s selenium replay—a story told or re-enacted within the diegetic world.

With that in mind, let’s begin.

1. The Extradiegetic Frame: The 1970s/80s Narrator and the Chestnut Roaster

Lafferty begins with contemporaneity, and his unnamed narrator will intermittently comment on what is going on in the story. This is the frame, with our unnamed external narrator (the “I” who purchased the old ‘receiver’ for $18), describing:

At the beginning of the frame story, Bentley’s short-lived 'television' system in 1873 is described as preceding Nipkow's.G
At the end of the story: the predicament of trying to raise funds to keep the device.

Here, the view is extradiegetic and our outermost level. Lafferty doesn’t give us much information about this narrator, but whoever it is addresses us from “outside” Bentley dramas, explaining historical context (Bentley vs. Nipkow), economic data (Bentley’s million-dollar-a-day potential), and the crazy problems (the hot checks, the chestnut orchard inheritance, etc.).

This diegetic level does not stay in a stable extradiegetic frame because Bentley’s TV drama are mercurial things, different on each replay, and so keyed to the frame. The narrator shifts to describing intradiegetic selenium television dramas. What we have is a curator, screening each further diegetic complication. More precisely, this is a hybrid extradiegetic-homodiegetic voice: the narrator has involvement in the ongoing “fate” of the last surviving receiver but also stands outside the 1873 storyline. As dramas shift and progress I. Sequence, Bentley's directorial control in the past passes through the “trough” dramas and is weakened, most notably when the unknown hand changes the casting in The Vampires of Varuma, Drama #10. And there might be hints that it is even more complicated than this.

2. The Intradiegetic Layer: Bentley’s Thirteen Dramas as Self-Contained Fiction

A. Thirteen Dramas Within the Story

Tomorrow, I’m going to post a matrix that clarifies how these thirteen dramas overlap, but for now, suffice it to say that each drama (#1: The Perils of Patience, #2: Thirsty Daggers, etc.) is intradiegetic in the sense that, within the larger story matrix, these are the stories Bentley created and broadcast. We might think of them as embedded micro-narratives. Each has its own setting (The Barrens of New Jersey for #1, The Tri-County Fair for #3, The Crimean War for #5, etc.), its own cast of actors (Clarinda Calliope, Leslie Whitemansion, Kirbac Fouet, and so on), and a genre (chase thriller, murder mystery, pastoral, gothic horror, western, etc.).

B. “Slow Light” & “Ghostliness” as Diegetic Mechanisms

Lafferty being Lafferty, he turns it all up. The intradiegetic dramas are not closed performances. Because of Bentley’s selenium slow-response device, the line between an “official show” and the real behind-the-scenes dimension leaks. How does this work? A few points to keep in mind:

Private Conversations. These are overlaid. They are scenes that should be purely diegetic but are overlapped by Clarinda and Bentley’s real-life arguments about money, trust funds, or even potential murder. This is part of Lafferty’s larger point, I think: what would be pure melodrama—meant to disguise truth—ends up revealing realities Aurelian Bentley wanted to control. We witness these ghostly overlays superimposed on the broadcast, but from the viewpoint of the main intradiegetic drama, they are extraneous.
Temporal & Spatial Freedoms. Each “30-minute live drama” ends up partially adrift in time: “They are one single frame, but it evolves” after repeated replays. So the normal distinction between the drama’s internal time and external real time is unstable. Lafferty is suspending us in a half-finished intradiegetic space.

This means the intradiegetic plane itself is porous in the story: the fiction of, say, The Great Bicycle Race mixes with the finances and sexual manipulations of Bentley, although the narrator experiences them as being two separate diegetic layers.

3. Metadiegetic Phenomena: The Spectral Within the Dramas & Cross-Drama Superimpositions

We can think of metadiegetic storytelling as when a character inside the intradiegetic story starts telling their own tale. "Selenium Ghosts" pushes this further with intra-intradiegetic spectrality that becomes newly embedded sub-levels.

Here are some examples:

Clarinda’s Multiple Roles: In Drama #3 (The Bicycle Race), Clarinda plays both a disguised gambler (Rakesly Rivertown) and the masked alternate rider, without Bentley’s knowledge. Inside the intradiegetic plane, Clarinda “narrates a sub-story” of her own. This is metadiegetic: an embedded layer that the “director” (Bentley) himself does not control. At the end of the story, he will be “captured” by his technology, so this sets up the denouement.
Double-Exposure Scenes: In Drama #5 (Crimean Days), Clarinda claims to appear in two places at once, playing “the Greek Wop kid” and a separate spy, smooching herself from two vantage points. This is so improbable that it amounts to a “fiction within a fiction” playing out inside the bigger story, but sets the groundwork for the biggest mystery here: is Clarinda pretending to be Apollo Mont-de-Marsan. Is it Clarinda or is it Apollo who drives the dagger into Bentley's back?
Ghost Scenes from Old Dramas Reentering New: The unstoppable cameo of the flaming hay wagon from #1 reappearing in, say, #13’s final hearing is an example of metalepsis bridging different intradiegetic sub-stories. In another story, this would seem like an illegitimate intrusion from one diegetic subworld into another. But since the final hearing (#13) itself is a “postmortem drama,” these are fluid. In effect, they are metadiegetic references to earlier spectral layers.

If someone asked me what I think the story is doing here, I’d say it is filled with metadiegetic layering that subverts the hierarchical logic (outer story > embedded story > sub-embedded story). Earlier ghostly layers from a sub-story intrude on and overwrite the main story, creating a recursive diegetic system.

4. Overlapping Diegetic Levels in the Final Drama: Pettifoggers of Philadelphia (#13)

A. Colliding Layers

By TV Drama #13, after Bentley’s murder, we have:

A probate hearing set in the real world of 1874 or so (still intradiegetic relative to the outer narrator), but also post-Bentley.
This hearing is “recorded” or “superimposed” by the same selenium device in Bentley’s private den.
Multiple TV ghosts from earlier dramas (#1–#12) flood in: Bentley’s ghost reappears to restate promises, the flaming hay wagon from #1 breaks in, etc.

Drama #13 really raises the stakes. We have a poly-diegetic meltdown, because we see the “real” participants (Adeline, Clarinda, a judge, pettifoggers) and TV ghosts from old fictional spaces forcibly co-present. Lafferty writes, “there seemed to be several meetings in this room superimposed on one another.”

B. Metalepsis at Full Force

So back to metalepsis—the boundary violation between narrative levels. We now have TV ghosts from an older intradiegetic micro-story (#1, #2, #10) appearing in the new “reality” of the probate. The hearing itself is intradiegetic to the extradiegetic narrator, yet it, in turn, is infiltrated by illusions from a deeper layer. This is a vertical cascade:

Extradiegetic: The narrator telling us about Drama #13.
Intradiegetic: The 1874 probate hearing.
Metadiegetic Specters: The flaming wagon, Bentley’s ghost speech, replayed “post-death.”

But because #13 is also the non-canonical or apocryphal 13th drama, it has a quasi-intradiegetic status in its own right. It bleeds into the illusions it contains. So The Pettifoggers is where Lafferty goes wild: we see him using the textual strategy of layering ghostly layers from all earlier intradiegetic narratives onto a single event that tries (and fails) to keep them separate.

5. Diagnosis via Diegetic Collisions

So what does all this mean? I would say that the story diagnoses its own spectral logic by letting them leak across levels. Each time we see behind-the-scenes talk intrude on a drama, or the flaming hay wagon cameo in a later scene, the story:

Shows the reader that the “official show” is incomplete or illusory.
Exposes the real money deals, manipulations, and conspiracies fueling and deflating the TV dramas.
Challenges any idea that these micro-stories (train robberies, vampires) belong to a stable “inner” domain. Instead, the spectral layers are reactivated, “alive,” and can jump into the world of money deals, sexual manipulation, con games, and so on.

"Selenium Ghosts" is an auto-analysis where each new drama uses cross-level voices or images that point to multiplying subtexts (e.g., Clarinda’s financial extortion of Bentley or Bentley’s paranoia) and receives partial closure before returning to the outermost frame, which receives no closure.

6. Diegetic Crisis: Bentley’s Death and Posthumous Performance

As the architect of the dramas, Bentley becomes trapped within them, an irony that plays out through metaleptic reversal. Stabbed mid-show in Drama #11, he is later resurrected as a selenium ghost in Drama #13, his own invention turning him into melodramatic plot material. Once the demiurge, he is now a metadiegetic captive inside the recursive fiction he initiated.

7. Wrap Up

"Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies" is a wildly stratified narrative system, a real tour de force, in which:

The extradiegetic narrator recounts historical/humorous data.
Each of the 13 Bentley dramas becomes an intradiegetic subworld.
Intra-intradiegetic fantasies break standard forms: cameo replays from older episodes, characters forging sub-scripts, Clarinda doubling roles.
The final Pettifoggers hearing (#13) merges ghostly layers from all prior subworlds, culminating in a multi-level meltdown of metalepsis.

This layering diagnoses the illusions by letting them affect one another; it resists containment, turning all layers into “selenium ghosts,” where narrative elements can walk through walls. But beyond the formal complexity, Lafferty’s recursive diegesis is a comment on how media distorts history, how performance shapes perception, and how media violence is narcissistically self-consummating.

I don’t know of any other story that maximizes cross-level boundary violations quite like this. It’s a maze that keeps the reader invested in its shifting realities. It’s a dazzlingly complex, and it collapses time, narrative, and charcarer agency into its spectral machine.

A table summarizing all this for clarity:

Diegetic Level	Description
1. Extradiegetic Frame: The Outer Narrator (1970s/80s)	The unnamed narrator (who bought the ‘receiver’ for $18) introduces the story and intermittently comments on it. Begins by explaining Bentley’s 1873 “television” invention. Ends with a discussion of funding struggles for the device. Functions as a hybrid extradiegetic-homodiegetic voice—both outside and partly inside the drama.
2. Intradiegetic Layer: Bentley’s 13 Dramas	Bentley’s dramas are embedded micro-narratives, each with distinct settings, characters, and genres.
A. Structure of the 13 Dramas	Each has a unique setting (The Barrens of New Jersey, Crimean War, etc.). Stock actors appear across multiple dramas (Clarinda Calliope, Leslie Whitemansion, Kirbac Fouet). Genres vary (thriller, murder mystery, gothic horror, comedic western).
B. Diegetic Instabilities: "Slow Light" & "Ghostliness"	The selenium system causes narrative leakage between drama and extradiegetic reality. Private conversations (e.g., Bentley and Clarinda’s financial disputes) overlay the drama. Temporal shifts: Scenes evolve with repeated replays, collapsing internal vs. external time. Micro-stories merge with real-world events (e.g., The Great Bicycle Race overlaps with Bentley’s financial troubles).
3. Metadiegetic Phenomena: Stories Within Stories	Lafferty adds further layers by embedding narratives within the intradiegetic dramas.
A. Clarinda’s Multiple Roles	In The Bicycle Race (#3), Clarinda plays both a gambler and a masked alternate rider, creating a hidden subplot unknown to Bentley.
B. Double-Exposure Scenes	In Crimean Days (#5), Clarinda appears in two places at once, making it a “fiction within a fiction.”
C. Recurring Ghost Scenes	Elements from earlier dramas reappear unexpectedly (e.g., the flaming hay wagon from Drama #1 intrudes on The Final Hearing (#13)). This cross-layer leakage disrupts the usual narrative hierarchy.
4. Overlapping Diegetic Levels in *Pettifoggers of Philadelphia* (#13)	The final drama merges real-world legal proceedings with echoes of past dramas.
A. Colliding Layers	A real probate hearing (1874) serves as the intradiegetic reality. Bentley’s selenium device replays ghostly illusions from previous dramas. Metadiegetic elements (Bentley’s ghost, the flaming hay wagon) superimpose onto the hearing.
B. Full Metaleptic Breakdown	Past intradiegetic stories now infiltrate the real-time probate hearing, making it a vertical cascade of narrative levels.
5. Diagnosis via Diegetic Collisions	The story self-diagnoses its own ghostliness by breaking narrative boundaries. Shows how “official dramas” are incomplete, revealing the real money deals and conspiracies behind them. Challenges the stability of fiction—illusions remain “alive” and capable of infiltrating new layers.
6. Bentley’s Death & Posthumous Performance	Bentley builds his melodramas so completely that, in the end, he can’t escape it. Stabbed mid-performance in Drama #11, he returns in Drama #13 as a projection on the selenium walls. His invention doesn’t just outlive him: it preserves but also consumes him.
7. Conclusion: A Recursive Diegetic System	"Selenium Ghosts" maximizes diegetic layering to collapse diegetic boundaries. The extradiegetic narrator recounts history. Bentley’s 13 dramas form the intradiegetic world. Metadiegetic elements destabilize this hierarchy. The final hearing (Pettifoggers) fuses all levels into a recursive system.