A late-night thought. The readers I think of most often when working on Lafferty are Andrew Ferguson, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, and Gregorio Montejo. Ferguson’s archival work is essential. His chief readerly contribution, so far, is to ask how fiction makes worlds. I think his main philosophical argument cuts off Lafferty from Catholic ontology. A subsidiary question, important to SF scholars and fans, concerns genre history; that is often where Ferguson’s readings come to r

"No, no, you are no child of mine" Originally titled "The Multitudinous Grandmothers," "Nine Hundred Grandmothers" was a Lafferty favorite. Many of his longtime readers hold it in especially high regard. Most come to it early for at least two reasons: its title is unforgettable, and it gives its name to Lafferty’s most successful short-story collection. It might as well be the Jaffa Gate to his canon. Yet, contrarian that I am, I question its reception and am less smitten wit

“I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible.” Advanced Lafferty today. I will first run through the plot so that those who want only that can stop. "Narrow Valley" has about three-quarters of a century in it. In 1893, after being assigned a 160-acre plot of land subject to taxation, there was a Pawnee Indian named Clarence Big-Saddle. Big-Saddle performs a makeshift spell using substituted ingredients and an incorrect magic word. Yet the ritual alters

“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987 I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quick

A while back, I put together a broad programmatic statement for the blog, and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts that help me read Lafferty. The “you” in these thoughts is really me. Lafferty, in interviews and correspondence, said he never meant to confuse readers, but he did so at times while trying to do something difficult. I believe him. This is one of the ways in which Lafferty is not a modernist who throws out contingent difficulty for the aesthetic pleasure of conn

A Past Master exam for the hardcore Lafferty reader. All gnawing questions I keep going back to. Why does Pottscamp stutter? What is the structural role of the boy with the toy? Who is the false ansel? Why is the Ouden passage dream delayed? What is the relation of Adam to Athens and Jerusalem? Why did Cathead only appear twenty years ago? Who is the stranger at the end of the novel? Who are the time travelers who visited Thomas More before Paul, and why did they do it? What

Lafferty’s ontological distinction between characters and persons is underappreciated in part because modern ideas of personhood have been shaped by mass-mediated character and by the categories of modern psychology. The modern person thinks nothing of bumping into the Narcissist or the Borderline, but would be taken aback by bumping into Vice. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has pointed out that an interesting parallel to Lafferty’s work is the medieval dream vision. This strikes

With this hobby blog approaching three hundred posts, it is time to codify the assumptions that have been guiding it. If you are here mainly for commentary on specific Lafferty stories, this post serves as a blueprint for how the blog approaches his work. Understanding Science Fiction and Lafferty's Unique Perspective A helpful way to define science fiction is as a shared set of expectations—what writers tend to assume is possible in the genre, and what readers have been trai

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. — Henry Reed, "Naming of Parts" (1942) An opinion. It is unhelpful critically, as a matter of Lafferty-talk, to call him reactionary, and I mean to make a case for that. No one needs to be told that the word reactionary is a political insult. That is beside the point. The problem is that it fails to touch on wh

“In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order n (with respect to the incidents in the conditions precedent) there must be invented a following incident n + 1 involving threads A and C; an incident n + 2 involving threads A and D; an incident n + 3 involving threads A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least n + 4 or n +

Over the last year of reading Lafferty, I’ve repeatedly found myself adjusting my assumptions about what he is actually saying. I thought I’d post something brief on three areas where my thinking has changed. What has me thinking about this is the Catholic American writer Donna Tartt. Someone once said that she liked Tartt more than O'Connor because O'Connor finds her artistic solutions in the catechism in a way that Tartt doesn't. Lafferty (he was, weirdly, O’Connor’s senior

“The concept of the ‘immanent Trinity’ (alternatively called the ‘ontological Trinity’) and the ‘economic Trinity’ is the result both of the distinctions of the tradition and of the unique pressures exerted by modernity. The terms ‘immanent Trinity’ and ‘economic Trinity’ themselves are modifications of the early distinction of theology and economy, in that they refer to trinitarian persons and their relations immanently in God’s being (immanent Trinity) and these persons and

“Oh sure, you're loaded with weird stuff. You couldn't function otherwise. It's an essential enzyme in you. It will replace itself as rapidly as it's used, and it's meant to be used. The whole world is there in caricature, and something is busy there solving the problems and fictions of the world. Or else it is the prime stuff in there, and it is the world that is the caricature of it.” — “It’s Down the Slippery Stairs” A few quick notes on being totalizing: I believe readers

A Lafferty story is almost always told-not-shown. His characters are ridiculous larger-than-life personalities who say exactly what they are doing and why, stumbling through other-wheres and never-weres in prose that is abuzz with puns and paradoxes and enough said-bookisms to… but that is the point. He’s telling you a story minus the sly, aiming to please something deeper than the unconscious, deeper even than story-sense, trying to tickle something so fundamental you don’t

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

I added a new section to the blog on oceanic novels. Some diagrams for how I think they work. The diagrams isolate what I take to be their three big questions: What is this seemingly flawed world I’m in? Who am I in this world? What will remake me, and what will I pay for it? Laurence M. Janifer intuited that Lafferty’s oceanic novels are about the third question, and he wrestled with how they relate to genre in "He Saw Another Mountain " (1974). He called the piece a rave fo

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 is

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 oceanic because the low mimetic cannot carry the eschatological intensity that Lafferty wan

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 Russian n