The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is my favorite longer Lafferty work. One of its major ideas is silent radio, the drama that goes on inside us without being spoken or shown, yet somehow passes between us and enters the world we all share. Silent radio carries the ordinary richness of life, its pleasures, loves, and possibilities, but it also plays horrors that no one seems able to stop. Sweeny thinks he composes his own inward programs. He finds other people receiv

Bernard Baruch with JFK The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly. There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting Laf

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” — Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904) I'm under the weather, taking a sick day, and thinking about The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. This will be a response to a great Thomas Flight video I watched on YouTube. In my professional life, I push for colleagues to embrace new technologies, a stance that can be quite polarizing. Many of my colleagues take a “burn-it-with-fir

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality." — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny This will be the last I have to say about Lafferty’s Holocaust denial for a while, unless it becomes directly relevant to an argument about a specific story. I have thought a great deal about what an intellectually serious counterargument to my work on Lafferty and Holocaust denial would require, as any responsible person would. The first and most significant obstacle is

Oh, as to details, the music of the opera, though rotten, is superbly rotten. The costuming and staging is splendid. And all the singing is powerful. The plot has all the unhinged unity of any shipwreck. And there is movement and force and power. Power above all! This is Destruction as pageant and presentation. One has the feeling that something very large will come out of all of this. Yes, like the destruction of the world. . . . The story lines, although the world is confor

“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 Ge

“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 Ge

“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 “

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) ​​​R. A. Lafferty unequivocally, categorically denied the Jewish Holocaust. This is sad, and inevitably complicates any discussion of his work, though the fact itself is not complicated. I used to be annoyed by Robert Silverberg’s comment that people knew there was great sadness in R.A.L. It was patronizing, and it didn’t make sense, but it is coming into focus for me. The Holocaust materials should be documented in the Tulsa archive in the McFarlin

From Salvador Dali's The Elephants (1948) When a topos has acquired sufficient ornamentation, it is blessed, or it is cursed. If it is blessed, it becomes one of the Holy Lands. If it is cursed, we don’t know what it becomes. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny About that time, the mad cartoonist J. P. Dordogne invented just such an animal in his comic strip. It was a big, comical, rock-eating animal. It struck the popular fancy and humor at once, though it di

“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. Between 1966 and 1972, he was nominated for seven Nebula Awards, and this was the first. 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

Saying these novellas are about consensus reality doesn't say much, so can we do better? Here is my attempt. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny and Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? present opposing secular heresies regarding creation, providence, human freedom, and social meaning. On one hand, we see consensus reality as the result of absolutizing determinism in Armageddons. On the other hand, we see it as pure social constructivism in Sandaliotis. By placing two e

In The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, consensus reality appears as a centralized construct, and Lafferty’s main concern is the diachronic process, the way that consensus forms and transforms over time. In Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?, the focus shifts to the synchronic: the structure of consensus as it stands at a given moment. A central philosophical conflict in both works arises between Platonic realism and philosophical nominalism. I think Enniscorthy Sweeny

"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 Apocalypses, 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

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 se

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 great