You will hear it said that Lafferty is a bit like magic realism, but isn’t quite magic realism. For a while, I’ve thought this has to do with what Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism calls the low mimetic mode. The low mimetic mode is the level of literature where the hero is one of us. He isn’t raised above humanity by rank or by power (that is the defining characteristic of the high mimetic). Nor is the hero reduced below it, as in the ironic mode. The low mimetic i

In my understanding of how Lafferty’s fiction fits together, I group his otherwise uncategorizable genre novels under the term "Oceanic Novels," adapting one of Lafferty's terms. They play with the idea of transcending history to explore the exteriorized unconscious—encompassing both the psychological unconscious and what Fredric Jameson called the political unconscious. The novels are ocreanic because the low mimetic cannot carry the eschatological intensity that Lafferty w

There are few direct personal statements on this blog, although everything here probably reveals something about me. About Lafferty’s Holocaust denial, I want to be on record with maximum clarity. I read Lafferty with a kind of double vision, and I believe two things about him are equally true: R.A. Lafferty was a literary genius of unparalleled imagination and insight. R.A. Lafferty was a crank on aspects of conspiratorial history who embraced a grotesque and evil lie. Criti

"The sin of fragmentation of character may be the most deadly sin of all; to allow ones self to scatter like weeds instead of to grow like a man. I am guilty of it. But who has ever taught me differently? O well, I may catch God on one of his good days when everything is going right. It makes a lot of difference the way you catch a Judge." Civil Blood In the early 1960s, Lafferty wrote a novel called Civil Blood . I knew a little about it before reading it. I didn’t know it

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality. If a thing is burned up, then there will be a residue of ashes and gasses. But if there is not such a residue, and the things appears to be unchanged, then it is not acting as if it were burned up.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny , p. 357 “But if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half of the Jews in the World, and more Jews than were in the maximum area ever controlled by the G

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality. If a thing is burned up, then there will be a residue of ashes and gasses. But if there is not such a residue, and the things appears to be unchanged, then it is not acting as if it were burned up.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny , p. 357 “But if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half of the Jews in the World, and more Jews than were in the maximum area ever controlled by the G

“Who’s playing? This is for real.” First published in If in March 1962, “Seven-Day Terror” is one of Lafferty’s better-known stories. It...

“I'm going to invent a cogitational meter later today,” Mary Mystic said, “to demonstrate that people are thinking more and deeper and straighter and with more invention, now that the several ‘Flatland Decades’ are over with and the mountains are generating again.” — In a Green Tree, Part 5 God promised neither the Golden Apes nor the Whales to be successors to Man, nor did He promise Man that he would have no successor. Inneall’s Ocean is only about ten thousand square mil

In thinking about Lafferty's denial of the Jewish Holocaust, one of the more curious items in the Tulsa archive is a letter sent to...

“I am ancient Og who rode the ridgepole of the ark all through the deluge, and who held the umbrella over the ark.”— Not to Mention Camels (1976) [Noah] was a Magician even as I am. Is that scrap of a tale in the folk tales you've examined?” — "The Man Who Lost His Magic" “Og, the giant, was a descendent of one of the fallen angels. He lived for many, many years. At the time of the flood, he came to Noah and asked him to admit him into the ark. One look at his gigantic statu

"Rita, did you know that the Jews believe that the Jews are a handsome people," Cecelia Ching Brass jibed. "Really. And how odd it is. I...

Hatchet Face (1785-1863) In the earliest times to which authentic history extends, the law will be found to have already attained a fixed character, peculiar to the people—like their language, manners, and constitution. Nay, these phenomena have no separate existence; they are but the particular faculties and tendencies of an individual people, inseparably united in nature, and only wearing the semblance of distinct attributes to our view. That which binds them into one whole

There were two hundred and forty men in our battery. Not all of them could tell such stories as these that were deep folklore incarnate. But at least two hundred of them could. I have always believed that this element of genuine folklore, this giantism, this unbounded joy, was always to be found in the talk of traveling men and of soldiers, those especially. And they are genuine folklore by the only valid test: they sound like genuine folklore. I make this contribution on t

"The principal difference is that Lafferty plays them for laughs and sheer absurdity—his mode is the tall tale. If Paul Bunyan had not...

Yesterday I received my copy of The Man Who Lost His Magic . It’s every bit as attractive as you’d expect, and in terms of color and cover design, it may be my favorite volume so far. I began with Gary K. Wolfe’s introduction. It’s lively, and Wolfe makes the smart choice to quote Lafferty often, a decision that always works. The frequent quoting leaves less room for deep analysis, but it gives the intro energy and helps with a difficult assignment: pulling together random sl

Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the Americas and other colonies), and for only about three hundred years, from Don Quixote in 1605 to the various ‘last novels’ of the twentieth century. The last British novel may have been Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale in 1908 or Maugham's Of Human Bondage in 1915. Both of them have strong post-fictional elements mixed in. The last Russi

Lafferty’s In a Green Tree contains the titles of many works and makes allusions to others. Here is a partial Green Tree reading list:...

“The faith to move mountains is not an empty sophistry, not a hollow vessel of speech,” said Joshua.“There is a power, and we live by that power. The weakest of us live onthe accumulation of power, and those of us who are stronger add continually to that power store. I say to you that it is not a great thing to move a mountain. I say that tohold a mountain in being is a much greater thing?" -- — "John Salt" “Be quiet.” Polder spoke softly but carryingly in his powerful

Today, something brief on doggerel, memory, and “What’s the Name of That Town?”—one of Lafferty’s best Institute stories. It’s a farce, yes, but also a meditation on what happens when cultural memory breaks down. Lafferty’s poetry deserves more attention than it gets. Often dismissed as doggerel, it’s something more subtle—work that pretends to be simple but usually isn't. That he cared deeply about poetry is clear from a folder of unpublished translations. He took on these w

“Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! A Catholic tale have I to tell!” — Hilaire Belloc, "Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! "(1910) "I stand by all that I wrote in the ‘TOLKIEN AS CHRISTIAN’ essay, but I don’t understand why Tolkien acted and wrote as he did. One of my friends has insisted that ‘EVERYTHING that Tolkien wrote was in a sort of cipher.’ Well, I haven’t been able to uncipher it, nor to uncipher the effect he has had on so many people." — Lafferty, Letter to Al Doty, September 4, 1993 “