A light post. Space Chantey gets pigeonholed as a sci-fi Odyssey , but that one-liner misses what makes it remarkable. On East of...

“Fully retractable, rhodium-plated. Dort glide. Ramsey swivel. And it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said. “In Our Block” is one of Lafferty’s lighter stories, written in his 1960s amuse-bouche mode. Two men, Art Slick and Jim Boomer, stumble upon a cluster of makeshift shacks, each more improbable than the last. Inside, they find people who can produce, sell, and ship limitless goods from spaces barely large enough to turn around in. One shack operates as

Saying these novellas are about consensus reality doesn't say much, so can we do better? Here is my attempt. The Three Armageddons of...

In The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny , consensus reality appears as a centralized construct, and Lafferty’s main concern is the...

"There's a kind of group amnesia that blocks out the details. But it didn’t end in Armageddon." I have pet theories about how Lafferty handles consensus reality, especially in the two novellas in Apocalyses , where it takes on its most nightmarish shape. What I want to do here is to explain how it works in those works, or at least how I think it works, as plainly and neutrally as I can. I’ll do this in three parts. The first will focus on Enniscorthy Sweeny. The second will t

Earlier today, I shared some thoughts on how Jung’s Aion influenced Lafferty’s Past Master . I must confess I’m no admirer of Jung, and...

The Leviathan, by Charles Dufresne (1876-1938) “Devil, Devil, come in hate! Take the fine Evita bait!” the wild-girl chanted, but her...

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was “A Ghost Story.” The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people: that they are ghostly, and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself. D

"Bubbly, mighty bubbly, Miss Aster," Dr. Izzersted said. "Do you know that some days are very good for blowing soap bubbles (I blow a lot of soap bubbles in my business), and some days are terrible for it? Yes, on a bad day you can add all the glycerin and gloop that you wish to the mixture and you will still not be able to blow decent bubbles. And some fortnights are good for flying eidolons; but most times are very poor for it. This is an excellent fortnight for flying them

"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" "The eyes of it were the last remnant of the real Pilgrim, and now they’re dead." The other day, I posted about noetic darkening. Today, I want to flesh out its details, as it appears frequently in Lafferty's work. The typical pattern looks like this. Lafferty embeds counterfiguration into the plot mechanics of a scene, or he makes epistemological darkening the structural center of the story. Often ingenious, it is usually framed in the dual lan

"Aeon is the measure of the duration of non-material creatures or substances, as time is that of material creatures or substances. Thomas...

"We've reached the place I told thee to expect, / Where thou shouldst see the miserable race, / Those who have lost the good of intellect." Dante Alighieri , The Divine Comedy: Inferno , Canto III Those of us who spend time with Lafferty's fiction know that conventional interpretive methods fall short. His work is intellectually intense, filled with surprising connections that make its literary magic resistant to ordinary analysis. Really discovering him comes with the reco

“The strictly artistic quality in a work of art is the display of significant form or pattern. To this therefore the utilitarian or didactic purpose must be strictly subordinate. If it interferes with the display of form the artistic value of the work is correspondingly diminished.” E. I. Watkin Today I want to think a little about how Lafferty uses E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds (1931) in the Barnaby stories. I’ll focus on one of the most striking examples of this to

I thought it would be fun to build a program that generates visual maps for R. A. Lafferty’s fiction and nonfiction. After a fair bit of...

"For it is desire ( cupiditas ) when the creature is loved for itself. And then it does not help a man through making use of it, but corrupts him in the enjoying it." On the Trinity , Book IX, Chapter 9 I’ve been thinking again about Lafferty’s The Men Who Knew Everything stories. The more I sit with them, the more I see the sequence as one of his clearest takes on what we can know—and where knowing ends. In Austro, who is caught in the strange orbit of those men of unusual

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) Mimesis 1 (Prefiguration): Mimesis 1 is the pre-narrative, lived understanding of human action, encompassing...

" . . . just as Atrox devised one hundred and one tests by which one might know whether one was in a dream or in reality." In an interview, Michael Swanwick says something really interesting about Lafferty's novels. They are obscure not because of what they are, but because readers don’t yet have the reading protocols to decode them. The novels he has in mind often feature numerous characters (books like Arrive at Easterwine , The Elliptical Grave , and East of Laughter ). As

In Western thought, the demiurge took a heel turn. Originally, it was the benevolent craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus , shaping matter in the image of ideal forms and bringing order. Not a god in the usual sense, the demiurge is perhaps better understood as a rational instrument masquerading as a rational agent. Plato introduced it to resolve a thorny metaphysical problem: how do those pesky ideal forms cross the divided line and take root in matter? Of course, for Plato, the for

My Messy Living Room A friend of the blog asked which books have shaped me. It’s not an easy question. The first time I read with real...

William Blake, The Red Dragon and the Woman Wrapped in the Sun, c. 1805 My last post looked at Lafferty's aesthetics and theology in abstract terms, briefly mentioning his short story "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun." Today, I want to descend the ladder of abstraction and look at that story in detail. Its plot is deceptively simple: a long, digressive conversation between Dr. Minden and Dr. Dismas. Gradually, we begin to see that Dismas's daughter, Ginny, is implicated by Minden's