I’ve needed to update the concepts section of this blog for a while, and I’ve made a first pass to better reflect my current understanding of how Lafferty works. I'll be working on this in the next few weeks. At some point, I want to work into it what I take to be Lafferty’s own critical language. Until then, here are his own key concepts, as I can isolate them at this point:

And there is a sort of unreality-compounded in it, and that simply will not do in a mystery story, and every story at the heart of it is a mystery story. Real things and persons can do things in a real world, and real things and persons can do things in an unreal world: but unreal things and persons can't do things in an unreal world. There is no way that an illusion (and every story is an illusion) can be maintained without clarity in either its setting or its movement. Some

A short post on a few essential works for a Lafferty reader. 1532–1564 — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel, five comic novels first published between 1532 and 1564. The Penguin Screech is the one I would recommend. Screech takes a scholarly stance against the view of Bakhtin and others (going back to the early 20th century) that Rabelais was a crypto-atheist. A comic, earthy Renaissance satire centered on the giants Garg

That photo is of Knight with his friends Terry Bisson and R. A. Lafferty. In my office at the college, I keep it pinned to a corkboard. Someone once said, "Is that your dad?" Then I got to talk about Dan and RAL. Dan Knight is one of the heroes of Lafferty's publication history and one of my favorite people. I count him a dear friend. Without him, we would not have Dotty. We would not have More Than Melchisedech. We would not have many important Lafferty pieces. Knight was bu

We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes in the box. Arrange it as you will. — "Promantia," The Devil is Dead (1971) This post is meant as a shortcut into the heart of Lafferty's work if you are new to Lafferty. To begin, I want to distinguish between two very different things: canonical Lafferty and your Lafferty. Everyone who reads Lafferty has to assemble their own sense of him. Obviously, all writer

I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about how I understand Lafferty’s career as a writer of novels. The best thematic interpretation along developmental lines is Daniel Otto Jack Petersen’s idea that we move from pre-apocalyptic to apocalyptic, then end with post-apocalyptic, but this shades into exceptions. Another view is Andrew Ferguson’s idea that Lafferty gets a second wind after his break following the publication of Annals of Klepsis. He has a dual-track account that e

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

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

Over the Christmas break, I have been considering teaching Past Master next summer and posting the lecture recordings. I would probably begin with Heideggerian categories and work backward, letting the novel’s Thomistic and other Christian elements come into clearer focus by contrast. I would also likely assign Paul Kingsnorth’s recent Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity as a supplementary text, given how directly it speaks to the questions Past Master raises for

Some notes on Lafferty's planets, especially for those new to Lafferty. As a kid, I loved the idea of Heinlein’s Future History, Poul Anderson’s Technic Civilization, and Niven’s Known Space. Lafferty won't give you anything like that. More often than not, his planets are hyper-concentrated ideas taken to their logical and hyperbolic extremes, a kind of planetary monomania. Each world is its central concept: Pudibundia is Politeness so absolute it becomes dangerous; Skandia i

Lafferty drew on ideas from Gnosticism for many of his most important short stories, from "Snuffles" to "The All At-Once Man" to "In the Turpenine Trees." Gaps in historians' knowledge of Gnosticism became grist for his metaphysical imagination throughout his writing career. I’d like to have a post on this blog where I can keep updating my understanding of this side of Lafferty’s work. That’s the purpose of this space. It will include a timeline of how the West has understood

“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” — Francis Bacon, “Of Truth,” Essays, 3rd ed. (1625) “But is your information and discoveries correct?” Judy asked. “What is correct?” Austro asked, looking like an owl. “What do you think of the ethics of wearing such a face, Austro?” “What is right?” asked Austro, looking like an owl. “What is not-quite-right? What, on the face of it, is a face?” “What's behind this funny false face caper anyhow?” “What

“Well, it is. When the soul is pulled out of the body it is just like the body only smaller. The same four limbs and all, but only the size of a cabrito, for the soul is the body in miniature.” A colleague has invited me to give a talk on narrative. I’m looking forward to showing his students how semiotic squares are used to analyze stories, which connects well with what they have been studying in class. But there is something else. What a fine pretext to teach some Lafferty

Notes on The Coscuin Chronicles. Like everything in the Resources section, it is a work in progress, but it may also be useful to others. It distills the series’s central dialectic: a metaphysical struggle between the Green Revolution, a vital and chaotic force rooted in earth and tradition, and the Red Revolution, an ideological, sterile, and nihilistic current. 306 pages.

On my reading, Prime in the Oceanic Novels will always be perceptually complicated, so I spent some time in the last few days thinking about how I see the deep structure and playing around with modeling it. These diagrams should speak for themselves. First, I will outline the model that I see as active in the Oceanic Novels, and then provide a worked example using Fourth Mansions.