Concepts | The Reefs of Earth

"Put out into the deep, and lower your nets for a catch."

3700 Angstroms: This term, drawn from a private note by Lafferty, refers to a symbolic threshold based on E. I. Watkin’s metaphysical system in The Bow in the Clouds. In Watkin’s model, which maps human experience onto the electromagnetic spectrum, 3700 Å can be said to mark the physical boundary where invisible ultraviolet light becomes visible violet light. Conceptually, it represents the liminal point where the unknowable substratum of reality (pure matter) becomes just barely accessible to human perception and inquiry. Lafferty’s scribbled note describing his novel Archipelago as “a fantasy at 3700 angstroms” identifies the novel’s central theme as the interplay between the perceived and the unperceived, central to most of his best work. A significant amount of what is found in Lafferty happens at this boundary, illustrated by characters with dual identities and realities that shift as if crossing a perceptual line.

Adduction and Monstration: Daniel Otto Petersen describes adduction as a mode of reasoning that resists rigid demonstration. It depends on feeling and intuition, not proof. Rather than solving anomalies, adduction lingers with them, letting their strangeness shape perception. It values resonance over resolution. Petersen pairs this with monstration, a term for how monsters appear—not by explanation, but by sheer presence. They show up. They demand attention. In that moment, they become legible not through analysis, but through the imagination they stir. Lafferty’s stories, Petersen argues, operate in this register. They are not built to explain. They are made to provoke. The reader does not decode them like a scientist with a specimen. The reader responds, intuitively and playfully, to their excess. These are narratives that behave like monsters themselves: disruptive, strange, and oddly generative.

Aeviternal Chrononaut: In his essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle," Gregorio Montejo introduces the concept of "Aeviternal Chrononauts." These beings exist both in time and beyond it. They live within a threshold, suspended between the flux of temporal change and the stillness of eternity. Their journeys, as Montejo describes them, pass through what he calls a "narrow interval of unreality." This is not ordinary time. It is a charged, unstable zone. Here, the present threatens to consume, and the future looms, unresolved. Moving through this interval, characters face real danger. They risk splintering their sense of self. They risk unraveling the fabric of reality itself.

Anti-Secret: A recurrent structural principle in Lafferty’s fiction, describing a story that exposes concealment rather than hoards mystery. The anti-secret is not a revelation in the ordinary sense; it is a counterforce to suppression. Most Lafferty stories reveal that something askew in the surface of reality, pointing toward a corresponding secret in Prime, the true order of being. In “The Only Tune That He Could Play,” the final line defines the rule: “If you suppress a secret, you must suppress the anti-secret also.” The anti-secret is thus the story’s act of rebellion against amnesia and censorship, an eruption of the hidden into the visible. Where conspiracies, distortions, and ideological fog obscure the real, Lafferty’s anti-secrets push back with broken transparency: they say what must not be said. To read a Lafferty story is to follow the trail of an anti-secret calling back to its other in Prime.

Apophatic Intervals: Gregorio Montejo’s essay, "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," explores what he calls "apophatic intervals." These are not just pauses or empty spaces. They are metaphysical thresholds. In Lafferty’s Argo cycle, they appear between the immanent and the transcendent. Montejo describes them as moments where the fabric of reality thins. Something more becomes visible. In these gaps, Forms rise to perception. They are not grasped through definition, but through encounter. Lafferty uses these intervals to stage revelations. They are scenes of contact, of meaning felt rather than explained. What emerges is more than information. It is an invitation to wonder.

Bloodsmell: In Lafferty’s fiction, spilled blood is never just for effect. It always means something. Violence is not random or empty. It signals justice, mercy, punishment, sacrifice, judgment, or redemption. Blood calls for interpretation. It connects to biblical and sacramental traditions, where suffering carries weight. Sometimes the suffering is deserved and leads to redemption. Sometimes it is not deserved and points to judgment. In both cases, it matters. The bloodsmell, as Lafferty calls it, is not just a sensory detail. It signals something deeper. It marks the link between violence and meaning, between physical harm and moral consequence.

Bricolage and the Bricoleur: In his essay "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door," Gregorio Montejo presents bricolage as a key feature of Lafferty’s art. A bricoleur works with what is already available, assembling meaning from existing materials. This approach is not about creating from nothing. It is about using what is at hand with imagination and care. Montejo sees Lafferty as a bricoleur. His fiction brings together elements from myth, history, science, theology, and folklore. These sources are not blended into a system. They are placed in conversation. The result is not a unified explanation, but a new way of seeing. Montejo suggests that this method gives Lafferty’s work its distinctive tone. It is serious without being solemn, and strange without losing coherence. My view is that this should be modified into something like the concept of bricospolia.

Bricospolia: In Lafferty’s fiction, fragments matter. They are not just pieces to be rearranged. They carry meaning. His method combines bricolage, the creative reuse of cultural materials, with spolia, the practice of placing sacred remnants from older works into new forms. This combination becomes what we might call bricospolia. It is not merely a technique. It is a way of thinking. Unlike structuralist bricolage, which treats fragments as interchangeable, bricospolia honors their origin. The past is not erased. It is remembered. The sacred weight of the fragment is preserved. Its presence in a new setting does not cancel its former life. Instead, it reveals a deeper pattern.

Caves: Foundational and polyvalent in Lafferty’s fiction. They usually map onto four levels of being, moving from the surface world down to the deep self. The cave is a way of thinking about what is seen and what is hidden, what is ordinary and what is beyond it. The first level is the Surface World (Stratum mundanus), the everyday social world of appearances, which often hides what lies beneath. Lafferty’s fiction usually starts here. There is often the Physical Cave (Stratum materialis) made up of real spaces like natural caves, basements, and dugouts, literal underworlds that act as physical entry points to another kind of reality. Deeper still is the Conceptual Cave (Stratum metaphoricus), which represents the shared myths, stories, and beliefs that shape a society’s view of the world, as seen in the Pan-Therion in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. This is the space of collective imagination. The final and deepest layer is the Primal Cave (Stratum primordialis), the interior world of the self—memory, the unconscious, the soul, the Oceanic itself.

Claritas (Radiant Intelligibility): In his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo defines claritas as the quality of radiant intelligibility. Drawing from Aquinas and Balthasar, he explains it as the ability of a thing to make its inner nature perceptible. It is not just a matter of looking closely. It depends on the object’s capacity to show itself and the observer’s readiness to see. Montejo finds this idea central to Lafferty’s aesthetic in the Argo cycle. For him, Lafferty’s prose often reveals more than it states. Descriptions of ordinary objects or events are charged with a quiet intensity. They suggest that something more is present. Montejo argues that this is claritas in action. The writing does not reduce things to symbols or signs. Instead, it allows them to be seen more fully, as they are.

Cognitional Reciprocity: In his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo describes cognitional reciprocity as a key feature of Lafferty’s Argo cycle. The term refers to the relationship between subject and object in the act of knowing. Montejo explains that an object’s full reality is not complete on its own. It becomes fully itself only when it is perceived. The knowing subject plays a role in bringing the object’s essence into view. In Lafferty’s fiction, this idea shapes the way events unfold. Characters and things are not simply described. They reveal and are revealed. Their meaning depends on the encounter.

Counterfiguration: It involves taking images or ideas that usually suggest harm, or sometimes order and health, and placing them in unfamiliar settings that shift their meaning. What seems negative at first is often turned toward affirmation. But the movement can go the other way, too. Higher things can be mocked, reversed, or brought low. This transformation does not reject the original meaning; it reorients it. Through estrangement, familiar symbols lose their usual associations and begin to point toward deeper theological or metaphysical truths—or toward their distortions. This is not subversion for its own sake. It is a way of asking what meaning really is. Lafferty uses counterfiguration to question surface-level symbolism. He asks the reader to look again. Stories like "Horns On Their Heads" and "The Forty-Seventh Island" offer examples of this approach in action.

Compensatory Fabulation: Lafferty often uses flat characters in his fiction. These figures are usually seen as a weakness in storytelling. He turns them into a strength. Instead of focusing on inner psychology, Lafferty shifts complexity outward His stories build depth through structure, theme, and voice. The interest lies in the plot, the language, and the strange patterns that emerge. Allusion, genre play, and narrative puzzles take the place of psychological realism. This approach allows Lafferty to explore theological and philosophical ideas in ways that more conventional character work might not allow.

Dazzling Darkness: In his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo uses the term "dazzling darkness" to describe a key feature of Lafferty’s Argo cycle. It refers to a kind of beauty that overwhelms the senses. Montejo explains that when clarity becomes too full, it can no longer be taken in directly. It shines so strongly that it appears dark. This is not confusion or absence. It is excess. The darkness is bright, but blinding. For Montejo, this paradox points to the depth of being in Lafferty’s world. The more clearly something reveals itself, the more it shows that it cannot be fully grasped.

Difficulty vs. Excess: Lafferty wrote so his readers could have fun. At the same time, he often built puzzles into his stories. These puzzles are not easy. They take work to solve. Still, the stories remain enjoyable even for readers who do not try to solve them. This is because of a technique sometimes called depth camouflage. It lets meaning stay hidden without making the surface dull.

Deflected Attention: Lafferty often explores the problem of misplaced focus. His characters, and sometimes his readers, pay attention to the wrong things. They fixate on surface details, spectacle, or clever analysis, and miss the deeper truth. This is not just a quirk of plot. It is part of his critique. Lafferty’s stories ask readers to shift their attention.

Depth Camouflage: Lafferty’s stories often hide serious ideas under playful surfaces. What first appears as humor, satire, or exaggeration is doing more than it seems. Beneath the style, there are deep structures at work. These include metaphysical, theological, and philosophical ideas. Readers who look beyond the surface find more. The stories reward careful attention.

Didactic and Palimphanic: In Lafferty’s fiction, the didactic and the palimphanic are not opposites but parallel modes that often operate within the same story. The didactic is tightly referential and structural, inviting decoding; it builds arguments, allegories, and anagogies that resolve into meaning. The palimphanic moves by kinetic association, generating aesthetic effects through layered, overwritten texts. It does not ask to be solved but associated. Many stories shift between these modes, creating a charged interplay between explanation and the re-enacted experience of following Lafferty’s associative thinking in motion.

Ecomonstrous Poetics: In "Ecomonstrous Poetics and the Fiction of R.A. Lafferty," Petersen defines the ecomonstrous as "any object, force, figure, vision, or experience that induces some sense of vertiginous, category-defying excess—without inherent moral valence." For Petersen, the monstrous is fundamentally characterized by "exorbitance, excess, or surplus" and represents encounters with the nonhuman through imagery that destabilizes and challenges conventional categorization

Effective Arcanum: Don Webb, in his essay "R. A. Lafferty: Effective Arcanum," introduces "effective arcanum" as the central aesthetic technique in Lafferty’s fiction, describing it as the deliberate creation of a "mythic effect" that leaves an ongoing impact on the reader's psyche. Webb asserts that Lafferty’s stories continue to "work the soul once read," producing an enduring sense of wonder and psychic displacement, thereby distinguishing his fiction sharply from conventional genre paradigms.

Entelechy (Inner Dynamism): Montejo, in his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," applies Aristotle’s concept of "entelechy" to Lafferty’s depiction of beings within the Argo cycle. Montejo defines entelechy as an inherent dynamic principle within each object, driving it toward its ultimate fulfillment. He argues that Lafferty’s narratives reveal this inner dynamism explicitly, portraying a universe where each object’s intrinsic purpose unfolds relationally, contributing meaningfully to a larger teleological drama.

Expressive Fragmentation: Lafferty’s prose relies on syntactic symbolism, where short, declarative sentences and pragmatic markers. This is one reason Lafferty seems "oral," but he uses it to explore thematic concerns such as uncertainty, identity shifts, and temporal instability. He uses this to control pacing, direct reader focus, and intensify philosophical or poetic moments. Rather than merely "telling," his syntax enacts meaning, making his style both economical and symbolically charged.

Fantasia: The primal imaginative faculty of the back-brain—the original, bodily mode of knowing that precedes reason and reunites perception, creation, and spirit. It is not fantasy as invention but “making imagination,” the Viconian power through which early humanity shaped reality by embodying it in mythic images. Fantasia is the remnant of that prelapsarian consciousness, the Oceanic source where human, animal, and divine still coincide. For Lafferty, to awaken fantasia is to recover some of the lost fullness of mind: to see as the first makers of story saw, when story and world were one, and imagination was a sacrament of being.

Form as Communicating Instrument: In "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo uses the concept "Form as Communicating Instrument" to interpret Lafferty’s aesthetic method in the Argo cycle. Montejo emphasizes that in Lafferty’s world, the form of objects serves not merely as spectacle or illusion but as genuine instruments that actively reveal hidden existential realities. These forms, vividly described, allow readers to apprehend deeper ontological truths beyond superficial appearances, communicating the relational nature of all being.

Forza and Froda: The two dominant impulses in Lafferty’s fiction, forza (force/violence) and froda (fraud/conning). Forza is wrath, aggression, metaphysical violence; when redeemed, it is fortitude. Froda is trickery, guile, evasion, con games; its corresponding virtue is prudence. Lafferty makes them clash as a recurring dialectic: tragedy moves by forza, comedy by froda. Neither is neutral. Forza unredeemed yields unmerited bloodsmell; froda unrestricted consumes itself. Their cross-pressure creates his signature Janusian peripeteia, which is deeper than mood whiplash. The terms are taken from Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture, where romance depends on them as co-constitutive forces. Lafferty makes them fictional constants that animate his compensatory fabulation.

Fracturing of Reality: Gregorio Montejo uses the phrase "Fracturing of Reality" in his essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle" to describe the existential break occurring when characters in Lafferty’s Argo cycle prematurely enter the future, crossing the thin boundary separating present actuality from future potentiality. Montejo explains that this fracturing leads individuals into "the shattering state of contingency," where both personal identity and objective reality become dangerously unstable.

Ghost Story: Lafferty wrote that his total production is “one very very long novel … a ghost story that is also a jigsaw puzzle. And the mark of my ghost story is that there is a deep underlay that has never attained clear visibility, never attained clear publication.”

Gold of Story: Lafferty refines myth, history, and philosophy into a higher form, what he calls the “Christ gold.” Like Augustine’s “plundering the gold of Egypt,” his work extracts truth from tradition while warning against mistaking mere glitter for the real thing. His stories demand discernment: to see what is true, what is dross, and what risks becoming an idol. His nonfiction insists that readers seek the gold of story.

Heroic Tedium: In "More Tedious Than Dragons," Lafferty coins the term "Heroic Tedium" to call out a mode of tedious writing in science fiction. This is not simply dullness born of incompetence, but a militant and pompous style that presents itself as being important. Lafferty argues that its practitioners are talented writers who waste their "life-elan" to produce a powerful narcotic for those who dislike life. Heroic Tedium seeks to make itself compulsory, turning the observation of decay—like watching an apple turn brown—into a false and self-important drama. The fundamental disagreement between Lafferty and the practitioners of heroic tedium lies in their dulled responsiveness to the world that actually is.

Iconographic Insetting: Lafferty's inclusion of short anecdotes or images early in a story, not as decoration but as a compacted key to the narrative’s architecture. Beginning as static description, this icon expands in significance as the story progresses, moving from motif to organizing principle. Somewhat like a blend of metonymy and iconicity, iconographic insetting condenses crucial information within a single moment, only to reveal its meaning on close re-reading. This technique works not only within individual works but across Lafferty’s larger body of fiction, forming hidden intertextual ties that hold together the underlying cohesion of his Ghost Story.

Ideologized Erasure: A methodological lens for reading formal devices of forgetting and absence when external evidence shows an author’s historical negationism. Given Lafferty’s Holocaust denial, mechanisms like “Forgetting Feedback Loops” are not merely clever devices in his work; they can function as ideological work. What earlier reads as hermeneutic comedy—figures missing clues—shifts toward hermeneutic tragedy, because failure of recognition mirrors a willed nonrecognition in the historical register. The claim is limited: it does not impute intent in any single text, but it treats recurrent erasures as symptomatic until counterevidence shows otherwise. Practically, this frame asks critics to test formal accounts against archival/biographical record, distinguishing technical ingenuity from commitments that govern omission, and to mark where aesthetic absence bears ethical weight.

Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas (Three Qualities of Beauty): Gregorio Montejo, in "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," employs Aquinas’s triadic definition of beauty—"integritas (wholeness)," "consonantia (harmonious proportion)," and "claritas (radiant intelligibility)"—to explain Lafferty’s depiction of objects in the Argo cycle. Montejo argues that Lafferty consistently represents objects as whole and proportionate within their relational contexts, communicating their inner truth clearly and vividly to the perceptive observer, thereby affirming beauty’s ontological significance.

Janusian Peripeteia: Lafferty’s signature narrative reversal, where a story’s emotional tenor shifts abruptly between comedy and horror, or vice versa, in a series of decisive moments. This is not a simple tonal contrast (mood whiplash) but an architectonic principle in his construction of stories, a two-faced movement that disorients, amuses, and disturbs. Named for Janus, the Roman god of transitions, Janusian Peripeteia is not a gradual change. It is a hard narrative pivot, laughter snapping into existential horror, horror snapping into metaphysical order.

Law of Intellectual Constancy: Lafferty describes the Law of Intellectual Constancy as the principle that every human being, unless damaged, is roughly the same in terms of intellectual capacity. Though Lafferty credits Havelock Ellis, the concept comes from Remy de Gourmont. Lafferty's version of the law is historicized and idiosyncratic.

Logogriphic Play: Lafferty’s prose crackles with linguistic mischief and etymological play, inventing, reviving, and twisting words into strange delights.

Low Mimetic (Frye): The mode of literature in which characters are “one of us,” ordinary people living within the limits of common human experience and probability. It is the structural ground of the realistic novel and comedy, but not identical with realism, which is a historical style devoted to surface fidelity and psychological detail.

Metaxological Temporality: In "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle," Gregorio Montejo identifies "Metaxological Temporality" as Lafferty’s conceptual fusion of Plato’s metaxy—humanity's existential condition of "in-betweenness"—with Thomistic aeviternity. According to Montejo, within Lafferty’s Argo cycle, humanity inhabits a uniquely dualistic position, bridging temporal change and eternal immutability, creating a perpetual tension where characters must navigate the boundary between the contingent and the divine.

Monads: Lafferty’s fiction is a vast, interconnected whole, with recurring elements that subtly reveal an underlying structure—what he called the “underlay.” We can think of his primary units of composition as monads, reflecting different degrees of perception and awareness. Some merely hint at the hidden order, while others actively reveal it. This ghostly circulation and transposition of ideas across his works suggest a coherent, yet elusive, deeper reality beneath his storytelling.

Mythopoeic Recombination and Recursive Creation: In "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door," Montejo introduces the concept of "mythopoeic recombination and recursive creation" as fundamental to Lafferty’s creative approach. Montejo describes Lafferty’s art as continuously engaged in the reassembling and transformation of myths, wherein each iteration produces new interpretive possibilities. This ongoing myth-making reflects Lévi-Strauss’s view of myths as inherently combinational and recursively creative, perpetually reshaping cultural and narrative meaning.

Noetic Darkening: This term describes a recurring pattern in Lafferty’s fiction where the mind loses its ability to understand, even as the world appears clearer and more intense. It is a kind of false illumination; things seem bright and meaningful, and descent is confused for ascent. In Not to Mention Camels, this happens to the main character, Pilgrim, who wakes with “new eyes” that see more light but less truth. The idea comes close to what Dante meant by “those who have lost the good of intellect.” Noetic darkening helps explain how Lafferty shows the modern mind getting lost, not only by seeing too little, but by mistaking noise for meaning.

Half Horrors: Condition in which the aspects of the dreadful or holy are heightened and appear differently, depending on where one stands in relation to Lafferty's metaphysics It is horror divided by perspective: for those outside the tradition, his violence, blood, and grotesque scenes can seem cruel; for those within it, they manifest grace through suffering and the mystery of redemption. The “half-horror” world is therefore not moral ambiguity but a perspectival conflict Lafferty forces on the reader. Stories in this mode include "Fog In My Throat" and "Berryhill."

Ontological Plenitude: Gregorio Montejo introduces "ontological plenitude" in his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," as key to understanding Lafferty’s imaginative cosmos, especially within the Argo cycle. Montejo contrasts this plenitude with Object-Oriented Ontology’s conceptual limits, emphasizing instead Thomism’s dynamic view, where every entity actively communicates its "plenitude of being." Montejo thus highlights Lafferty’s depiction of reality as overflowing with existential meaning, endlessly communicating itself through relationships.

Phantasmetaxis: A narrative mode in Lafferty’s fiction where surface coherence gives way to a deeper, often hidden structure. Characters appear to anchor the story, but over time their identities blur, collapse, or merge, revealing a world that was there all along, waiting to be seen. What first seems like strangeness or disorder becomes the means through which a concealed logic is disclosed. This process is not random. It reflects Lafferty’s commitment to anagogy, the idea that narrative events can point beyond themselves toward ultimate things. In phantasmetaxis, the strategic breakdown of conventional storytelling becomes a way of uncovering the metaphysical shape of a world.

The Phoenix and the Turtle Factor: A term for the boundary where personhood cannot be reduced to any mechanical or probabilistic process. Named for the moment in “Been a Long Long Time” when the cosmic typewriter jams on Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” it marks the failure of mechanism at the threshold of the soul. The story’s stuck key signifies that the human person—like Shakespeare within his “locked casket,” as Chesterton called it—cannot be replicated by a random sequence or causal mimicry. Lafferty uses this point of breakdown to demonstrate that consciousness and creativity belong to a teleological order that transcends material processes.

The Principle of Keeping Count: Lafferty’s work is meticulously structured, with numerical patterns forming a crucial part of his storytelling architecture. Seemingly minor numerical details—such as the patterns of threes and nine in Past Master—are not arbitrary but reinforce deeper thematic and structural connections. Overlooking these patterns distorts the meaning of his work and risks reducing him to a whimsical storyteller rather than the literary architect he truly is.

PRIME: The conceptual bedrock of the Lafferty literary universe. It should be understood not as the setting of his stories, but as the reality his fiction tries to examine and bring to light. PRIME refers to the “real world” as Lafferty saw it, ruled by metaphysical and theological meaning. While the settings of his stories might sometimes resemble PRIME, depending on how closely they follow the mimetic conventions of prose genres, they do not take place in it. Instead, they are displacements of it. They point toward PRIME through the full force of Lafferty’s storytelling. One of the clearest ways to see how the strange logic of his different works connects is to ask how each one relates to his idea of PRIME.

Prose Foot (Rhythmic Displacement): Webb identifies Lafferty’s unique rhythmic technique as a "prose foot," adapting Yevgeny Zamyatin’s concept. In his essay "R. A. Lafferty: Effective Arcanum," Webb describes this as a deliberate internal pacing that rhythmically recalls earlier narrative elements, creating a cohesive, chant-like effect within the reader’s mind. He emphasizes that this technique serves as the "postmodern equivalent of the Homeric epithet," subtly reinforcing narrative coherence and intensifying the reader’s sense of displacement and estrangement.

Rationalized Mystery: Lafferty frequently highlights the human tendency to impose rational explanations on the inexplicable. When faced with the supernatural, many of his characters want neat, materialist answers—even if they don’t hold up. His work texposes this impulse as both comic and tragic, showing that that Mystery cannot be tamed by logic.

Relational Form of Being: In "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo argues that Lafferty’s Argo cycle exemplifies a "relational form of being," drawing from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Thomistic ontology. In this view, all objects inherently exist as "substance-in-relation," actively communicating their unique acts of existence to other entities. For Montejo, Lafferty’s catalogic and descriptive style reflects this relational ontology by vividly showing how even the simplest objects actively participate in "the intra-cosmic dialogue," revealing their existential depths through interaction and self-communication.

Redemptive World-Building: Lafferty insists that true creation must acknowledge the Incarnation as its foundation. For him, leaving out Redemption doesn’t just weaken a world—it renders it hollow. His vision rejects neutral storytelling; instead, all meaningful subcreation must align with the “real shape of history” to avoid becoming a “screaming void.”

Repeated Memes: Kevin Cheek, in his essay "Cookies and Eyes: Character and Plot Development Through Repeated Memes," identifies "repeated memes" as a narrative technique central to R.A. Lafferty’s novel Fourth Mansions. Cheek defines repeated memes as visual images or metaphorical epithets recurrently associated with specific characters or themes, progressively accumulating depth and complexity. Through such motifs—Biddy Bencher’s evolving epithet from "cinnamon cookie" to "cookie for Cerberus," Freddy Foley’s developing visionary "eyes," and the insidious metaphorical spiderweb symbolizing antagonistic control—Lafferty economically tracks character evolution and plot progression.

The Retreat from Humanity: In "More Tedious Than Dragons," Lafferty describes the "Retreat from Humanity" as the underlying philosophical movement that gives rise to Heroic Tedium. He defines this retreat as a surrender to a "black hole," a worldview that has "discarded the real magic from person and world" in favor of "false and grubby magics." It is a profound spiritual exhaustion that turns its adherents—both writers and readers—into "machineswriting for readers who are also machines." For Lafferty, this is not a stylistic choice but a deep-seated rejection of life itself, the foundational impulse behind the genre’s turn toward a celebrated lifelessness.

Sacramental Poesis: Lafferty’s fiction is anchored in a deeply ordered vision of reality, rooted in Scholastic metaphysics. Creation follows a divine pattern (distinction, adornment, and fulfillment) where everything participates in being according to its ontological weight. His characters and worlds are not psychological constructs but pictures of hierarchy. Storytelling, for Lafferty, is joyous invention but also participation in divine creativity, moving toward an ultimate end.

Secular Quarantine: A strategically secular reading claims Lafferty’s views “turned” late: the later self breaks from the earlier one. It draws a bright line between a Catholic-intellectual strain of “traditional” antisemitism and the virulence of Holocaust revisionism, emphasizing three points: (a) the absence of explicit antisemitic content in early correspondence; (b) the year Lafferty repeatedly cited as the point he “stopped writing”; (c) the fact that his most troubling statements appear only after that date. By minimizing continuity, this approach lets the Holocaust-denying admission in a letter to Dan Knight be absorbed gradually into the record rather than read back into the fiction. In shorthand: Nasty Lafferty is Late Lafferty. The prescription is methodological—quarantine the problem for Lafferty Studies.

Self-Communicating Being: Gregorio Montejo, in his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," identifies "self-communicating being" as central to Lafferty’s fictional metaphysics, particularly evident within the Argo cycle. Montejo quotes a passage emphasizing how even stones "shine and shout their presence," recording and transmitting sensory histories. This self-communicating dimension demonstrates Lafferty’s belief that every object continually discloses itself, thus embedding all reality in a profound relational interplay.

Sliding Scale of Allegory: Lafferty employs a dynamic range of allegorical techniques, from structured continuous allegory—where symbols directly shape plot logic—to freer, more elusive forms that resist fixed interpretation. This sliding scale allows him to encode propositional truths while simultaneously gesturing toward deeper, anagogical realities. His allegories are neither rigid nor haphazard but deliberately calibrated to challenge, misdirect, and ultimately reveal hidden dimensions of meaning within his fiction.

Spill-back (Temporal): Gregorio Montejo, in "Aeviternity: RThe Trashed-Life Premise: In his unpublished essay "More Tedious Than Dragons," R.A. Lafferty introduces "the trashed-life premise" as the core assumption that justifies the Retreat from Humanity. Lafferty presents this as the foundational belief that life itself is fundamentally broken, meaningless, or "trashed." Heroic Tedium, in his analysis, is the "logical next step" of this premise. If one accepts that life is without value, one will naturally gravitate toward an art that serves as a "narcotic to dull the effect of life." The premise is the philosophical starting point that makes the embrace of a deliberately tedious aesthetic not just tolerable, but necessar. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio, "explains "Spill-back" as Lafferty’s concept describing how future possibilities "drift into reality," negatively or positively influencing the present within the Argo cycle. Montejo quotes the character Melchisedech Duffey: "Almost all of the worst effects of the present come from the future," emphasizing the necessity of actively confronting these future-born threats to prevent their realization.

Supernatural Remainder: Some truths resist explanation. Lafferty’s storytelling often leaves behind an irreducible element—a presence that lingers beyond resolution. This remainder invites contemplation rather than closure, challenging readers to see beyond the limits of reason.

Tardemah: In Biblical Hebrew, this is a word tied to creation, madness, vision, and prophecy, all themes that stir Lafferty’s imagination. The tardemah that falls on Adam leads to the creation of Eve from his rib. The one on Abraham marks the covenant. Other mentions in Hebrew Scripture appear in Job 4:13 and 33:15, Daniel 8:18 and 10:9, Psalms 76:7, Proverbs 19:15, and Isaiah 19:15. The dreamlike quality of Lafferty’s mystical passages, and his acts of creation charged with madness and prophecy, might be seen as his own tardemah.

The Tedium Establishment: In"More Tedious Than Dragons," R.A. Lafferty identifies "The Tedium Establishment" as the institutional power structure that promotes and defends Heroic Tedium. He describes it as a "militant alliance" that has taken over a majority of the science fiction field, complete with "self-serving enforcement apparatuses." This Establishment is not merely a trend but an organized force that controls awards and ruthlessly retaliates against critics. Lafferty’s metaphor of needing a bucket to catch his own blood before naming its members illustrates his view of the Establishment as a powerful consensus that enforces its narrow, lifeless aesthetic.

Temporal Topology: Gregorio Montejo’s essay, "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio," uses "Temporal Topology" to describe Lafferty’s visualization of events within the Argo cycle as four-dimensional "geometrical objects." Montejo quotes Lafferty, explaining each event should be perceived simultaneously from "past," "present," "alternative present," and "future" perspectives, all integral to understanding its temporal and metaphysical significance.

Textual Displacement: In "R. A. Lafferty: Effective Arcanum," Don Webb describes "textual displacement" as Lafferty’s practice of defamiliarizing reality before the narrative even begins, frequently by employing invented texts or pseudo-historical references. Webb cites examples like the fictionalized works The Back-Door of History by Arpad Arutinov and The Fall of Rome, noting that Lafferty’s method subverts conventional narrative structures by situating the reader in a world already estranged, where the strange is presumed normative rather than anomalous.

Theological/Continuity Integration: A confessional reading rejects rupture and argues for continuity: the late statements extend long-standing commitments rather than contradict them. It situates Lafferty within Catholic traditionalism—supersessionist motifs (if not full supersessionism), anti-modern polemic, typological portrayals of Jews—reads irony and satire as technique rather than disavowal, and treats scattered early cues as seeds that later surface. On this account, Lafferty’s absolute Holocaust denial—preceding his embrace of IHR-style “revisionism”—expresses a persistent historical skepticism that later acquires institutional vocabulary. The offense is integrated into the unity of the oeuvre and the religion: Lafferty is Always Lafferty; intensity, not essence, shifts. The REALLY BIG critical problem is the denial itself (again: false and antisemitic), which helps explain the Holocaust’s functional absence in the literary work; the IHR talk from the late 1960s–1990s is biographical scaffolding for how the ideas were later voiced in private correspondence. Reject quarantine and integrate the problem for Lafferty Studies.

Theotropic Dissonance: Lafferty’s storytelling pulls readers toward the divine (theotropic) while deliberately troubling allegorical simplicity (its dissonance). At its best, this technique elevates prophecy into eschatology, reshaping typology into active judgment. But when flat historical allegory dominates, the visionary force is constrained, its mystical power flattened by his ideological preoccupations.

Three Easy Steps: Andrew Ferguson, in his essay "R.A. Lafferty’s Escape from Flatland; or, How to Build a World in Three Easy Steps," explores Lafferty's literary strategy of world-building as a response to the "post-conscious," flattened cultural landscape of modernity. Using Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, Ferguson identifies Lafferty’s fiction as a narrative project aiming to restore depth, dimensionality, and meaning. He emphasizes Lafferty's commitment to collaborative storytelling, interpreting it as an effort to reanimate readers' cognitive capacities and participation in an endlessly renewing, open-ended narrative process

The Trashed-Life Premise: In his unpublished essay "More Tedious Than Dragons," R.A. Lafferty introduces "the trashed-life premise" as the core assumption that justifies the Retreat from Humanity. Lafferty presents this as the foundational belief that life itself is fundamentally broken, meaningless, or "trashed." Heroic Tedium, in his analysis, is the "logical next step" of this premise. If one accepts that life is without value, one will naturally gravitate toward an art that serves as a "narcotic to dull the effect of life." The premise is the philosophical starting point that makes the embrace of a deliberately tedious aesthetic not just tolerable, but necessary.

Trial Balloon Country: In the essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio," Gregorio Montejo cites Lafferty’s phrase "Trial Balloon Country" to characterize the uncertain realm of future possibilities constantly emerging within the Argo cycle. Montejo quotes Melchisedech Duffey, who describes these potential futures as "mighty evil" or good, requiring active vigilance in the present to "shoot down" harmful possibilities before they "drift into reality."

Unreality (Interval of): Gregorio Montejo employs Lafferty’s concept "Interval of Unreality" in his essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio," to delineate the perilous zone between the present and the future within the Argo cycle. Montejo describes it as "a chancy though flexible place," a narrow boundary wherein premature entry leads to radical contingency, identity fracture, and existential instability.

Weird Bioregionalism: Petersen introduces "Weird Bioregionalism" as a way to describe stories about making a home in a strange place with strange companions. The phrase comes from Jeffrey Cohen’s idea of “category crisis,” where fiction uses uncanny images to unsettle the reader. Petersen sees this at work in Lafferty’s writing. Lafferty creates places that feel both rooted and unstable. His stories build a sense of setting, then disturb it. The result is a world that never becomes fully familiar. It stays strange, even as it takes shape.

Wonder Child: In his essay "R. A. Lafferty: Effective Arcanum," Don Webb characterizes Lafferty’s depiction of the "wonder child" as a nostalgic displacement, designed to evoke "a past that never was." Unlike typical childhood nostalgia found in other literature, Webb explains that Lafferty’s child characters possess unexplained powers and experiences which align with the "rapid sense of childhood as we remember it," merging nostalgia with an inherent sense of unreality and wonder. This technique effectively estranges readers by eliciting nostalgia for non-existent pasts.

Worlds with a Center: For Lafferty, world-building is not about endless invention. A story-world must be grounded in something real. For him, that ground is the Incarnation. He calls it the “only valid environment.” Without it, a world is not only incomplete but empty. Lafferty does not believe in pure imaginative freedom. He works within a vision of an ordered cosmos. In his view, storytelling must reflect the shape of sacred history. If it does not, it loses its meaning.

Zoon Anthropikon: Lafferty’s fiction often depicts humanity not as a rational or political animal but as something more layered, an entity bound to both the animal world and a higher order of being. He writes as if human nature carries within it remnants of an older and more inclusive state, where animals were not separate from human consciousness but part of it. This lost condition lingers as both loss and possibility, and it surfaces in places where reason alone proves insufficient.