Reflecting on Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh
This past week I read Otessa Moshfegh's Lapvona (link opens to bookshop.org), a surrealist novel set in the titular petty, pre-modern, European fiefdom of Lapvona. It's a quick, horrifying, beautiful and deeply affecting read that I would only recommend to someone with a strong stomach.
Historically, feudalism is a family of modes of production, cultural and religious practices, and legal and political systems. Specifically, the manor system in western Europe organized society into peasants farming land that was owned by the lord of the manor. Farmers were taxed on their agricultural output to generate wealth for the lord who then provided some form of military protection to the farmer populations. This schema for organizing society basically goes back to the Bronze Age as it's the clearest way to facilitate urbanization, and the manor system itself even dates back to the iron age in republican Rome.
Like all social configurations that take this form, this is a raw deal for working people (peasants and household staff) and a great deal for the head of the manor household. The value proposition for the working people is the system of social and moral obligations mediated by cult practice or a priest class. In medieval western Europe, this was fulfilled by the Catholic Church.
Lapvona is a meditation on the degradation and decay that takes root in a society when the forms of these social obligations and relationships outlast their substance. Every possible social relationship in the novel: familial, tenant, religious, and manorial, is inverted, perverted, and strictly enforced. The lord of the manor is a stupid, empty man who does not protect his tenants from bandits, he hires the bandits to punish his tenants for social unrest and production of surplus. The priest in the church is a failed seminarian who can't read the Latin in his Bible and just tells the community to fear the Devil. Every familial relationship is physically, emotionally, and sexually violent. Eventually, the Eden-like land (we are frequently reminded that Lapvona has good dirt) itself turns on the peasantry. The only connective tissue in the community is a blind witch on the outskirts of town.
If this sounds horrible and unpleasant, it is! The book is an exploration of an entire town experiencing what Walter Bruggemann describes from the book of Psalms as the experiences of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Throughout the novel, the reader gets an uncomfortable look into the perspective of almost every named character, and each character presents their own relationship to God and their personal view on how their own behavior will bring them God's favor. This is a fascinating choice for a novel set in an unreformed Catholic community! One of the basic premises of Catholic salvation theology is that the Church as a whole is accountable for the salvation of everyone in it, and in a community within which every relationship has been inverted, of course that would leave individuals to desperately reach for their own self-justifying conclusions.
I would hope not to take almost anything from this novel for my own tabletop games, but it provides a model to the reader of how the inversion of load-bearing relationships drives an intense disorientation and quest for meaning. Would Lapvona be a better place if the lord of the manor weren't a stupid, venal man in a case of arrested development? Almost certainly, but that wouldn't change the base exploitative structure in which he thrived and was rewarded. Would Lapvona be a better place if the priest weren't using his congregants' confessions to punish them? Obviously!
I don't think it's a particularly interesting thought exercise to imagine Lapvona as, say, a location in an adventuring game because it presents such a rotten tumorous community. Players could either gawk at it as tourists or they could intervene and try to remediate one of the social ills affecting the town, but it would take such a fundamental reconstruction effort that it would become the rest of the game to heal the various moral injuries present.
I rate this book incredibly highly but I cannot imagine ever reading it again and I felt like I needed to run my brain under cool water afterward. Thankfully, I had Thomas Pynchon's collection of short stories, Slow Learner, on my bedside table.