Desperate causes. A polemic on a topic that bothers me. Bothers me a lot. I hate when people fret and hedge about Lafferty’s conservatism. He is a dead author. I have even heard it said that Lafferty doesn’t fit within American conservatism. He didn't want to be part of what we now call movement conservatism. This is true to the extent that Lafferty’s largest circle was Catholic, a fact that is also acknowledged by his fretters and hedgers. And most Republican Catholics will

New section added to the blog for the oceanic novels. Some diagrams for how I think they work. The diagrams isolate what I take to be...

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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