The Smiling Christ of St Francis Xavier Gregorio Montejo's essay, "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door: R. A. Lafferty's Bricolage...

A brief update today. My preliminary map of the sources Lafferty mined for Okla Hannali is now live under Resources. Exploring Choctaw...

I’ve been working on Okla Hannali and thinking about Lafferty's first draft in ‘63. It’s usually said, based on what Lafferty himself...

Picking up on how Lafferty likes to leave his readers in a state of Christian burial, I want to hammer out some thoughts on The Elliptical Grave . It is not an easy book, not even by Lafferty's most demanding standards. Ironically, and it was published in a layout that can sap you dead in your tracks, with wickedly small print and text-jammed pages. Dan Knight, who printed it, knew from the outset that it would demand a lot from readers. When he decided to publish more of Laf

As he opens the second canto of Paradiso , Dante warns his readers that only those prepared for the mysteries ahead should continue the...

Clone of RAL's Voice

“The Forty-Seventh Island” is one of Lafferty’s weaker stories. It isn’t short on invention; what it lacks is the theotropic dissonance that gives his best work a prophetic intensity. That dissonance, where a sense of the divine and a refusal to collapse spiritual meaning into continuous allegory, is what I call theotropic. When it works, it keeps satire and mystery coiled together. But here, as in the “Horns on Their Heads,” Lafferty stays too close to his own ideological co

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

This post is prickly and polemical. Deliberately so. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia and its online iteration are important resources...

Several million evolvate computers, computers who said that they were the only true born-again humans, accompanied the pilgrimage or tour instrumentally. Entities of races closely related to the humans were on the pilgrimage also, and fortunately most of these entities had the quality of ‘being present but not occupying space.’ And there were representatives of quite a few animal species, barons and dukes of bears and apes and asses and dolphins and most of the other intellig

Lafferty had a soft spot for Neanderthals and every kind of ape-man. My favorite instance of this appears at the end of Arrive at Easterwine (1971), his most spiritual novel, where Epikt adopts his walking ape extension, holding a tin plate in one hand and a giant knife in the other. Lafferty’s fascination with prehistoric hominids has made me wonder what he knew about them. Had his library survived, it might have revealed something about his reading on the subject. In its

The question then arises, what poverty is required by the practice of this counsel or, in other words, what poverty suffices for the state of perfection? The renunciation which is essential and strictly required is the abandonment of all that is superfluous, not that it is absolutely necessary to give up the ownership of all property, but a man must be contented with what is necessary for his own use. Then only is there a real detachment which sufficiently mortifies the love

Picking up on yesterday’s post and the theme of Gnosticism, I want to look at its presence in Lafferty’s work a little further. Lafferty often extracts elements of Gnostic thought and builds spectacularly upon them, shaping strange new conceptual structures all his own. Sometimes, this is as straightforward as in his short story "Snuffles" (1960), where being acts as a demiurge; other times, it is a complex interplay of Gnostic and Kabbalistic ideas, as in Not to Mention Ca

Five more centuries were to pass before the structure of human relations had so changed that the use of this instrument met a more general need. From the sixteenth century on, at least among the upper classes, the fork comes into use as an eating instrument, arriving by way of Italy first in France and then in England and Germany, after having served for a time only for taking solid foods from the dish.— Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1., The History of Manners “

Stanley Elkin once said that he did shtick upon shtick until he got carpentry. In the same vein, there’s a maneuver so core to Lafferty’s fiction that it’s hard to imagine one of his stories without plenty of it. It’s deeper than what is sometimes called mood whiplash. Yesterday, I wrote about the ending of "Maleficent Morning," with its shifts from breeziness to black comedy to an existential gut punch—a woman finding her husband’s bloody corpse in her marital bed. This kind

When Does Originality Cease to Be a Literary Virtue? Few writers test this boundary as thoroughly as R.A. Lafferty. His sentences are...

Today, I want to think about the metaphysics of time in "Selenium Ghosts." Before turning to that issue, let’s take stock of some of what else is at play in the story. There is the interplay of television, fiction, and hoaxing. There’s the relationship between Clarinda (Claire de lune/moonshine) and her lover Apollo—or is he just another of her performances, an actor pretending to be another actor pretending to be a character? There is s also the psychological significance of

I’ve been reading "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies." 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

From a reproduction of the wonderful Hereford Mappa Mundi (ca. 1300 AD). The inscription on Sardinia: Sardinia Grece Sandaliotes dicta a similitudine pedis humani Corsica, ab oriente patet CLXXXVIII passuum, ab occidente CLXXXV , a meridie LXXVII, a septentrione CXX . [Sardinia is called Sandaliotis by the Greeks due to its resemblance to a human foot. It lies 188 miles from the east, 185 miles from the west, 77 miles from the south, and 120 miles from the north.] This room

The ethos of this blog can be found in Lafferty’s Serpent’s Egg (1987). It’s something he has characters say about mysteries, my favorite genre: "The trouble with mysteries is that the mystery-giver doesn't play fair," Inneall complained. "He doesn't give us all the clues." "Yes he does, Inneall. He gives all the clues." That might be my favorite moment in Lafferty's work. Although he experimented with mysteries, his grea