Hermeneutic Thoughts

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.

1. 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 connoisseurs, making a high culture point about Western fragmentation or social and psychological complexity. So if a story is confusing, the first question to ask is: Why would someone do it this way? What is Lafferty’s aim in this performance?

   
   

2. Lafferty has two very important rhetorical strategies. The first is his use of pragmatic markers, which make his stories seem as if they are partaking in oracy. This means that even when Lafferty is obscure, it feels at the same time that he is being plainspoken. So track pragmatic markers. The second strategy is counterfiguration. If something seems incredibly weird, work out what its opposite would be and why that would not be weird; then ask yourself: why is Lafferty choosing to counterfigure in this instance? More than most genre writers, Lafferty is architectonic in his figuration.

   
   

3. All Lafferty stories have weird shapes. To maintain their weird shapes, they create subshapes that prop up the larger weird shapes. I call this iconographic insetting. Look for the sub-incident or incidents that map onto the larger pattern. Once one sees it, one can start asking how interior—what one might call content—creates exterior—what we can call form.

   
   

4. Lafferty is never a realist in the sense that anyone ever thought of realism as a representational strategy, so the question is: how ambitious is he being? In prenucleation stories? Not very. In early science fiction, he is getting rolling. In the post-1968 stuff, you never know, but watch out. Is he writing allegories, or are they also anagogies? As he goes on, he moves increasingly toward the second of that pair as he goes deeper into questions about the schizo-gash.

   
   

5. Lafferty was telling the truth when he said he wrote an hour or so a day, and sometimes more on weekends. What he doesn’t say is important. He spent much of his life reading books, and when he wasn’t writing (after he took up writing), he was thinking about it much of the time. So even when he wasn’t writing, he was reading and thinking about what he was going to write in that hour; he piled up huge amounts of contingent information that would go into those breakneck drafting and typing periods. There is no way to avoid the informational density in Lafferty. All one can do is track it, make it available, and recognize that its details are often the smaller tumblers you need to turn to unlock his stories. This blog aims to make as much of that information available as I can find.

   
   

6. A Lafferty story is more like a complementary set than a straightforward deliverance. Through his associations (the palimphanic bypaths he takes) and his moral statement (the didactic core, which is invariably there), he produces the antisecret. You won’t see it unless you look for negative space in his more esoteric stories.

   
   

7. The hundreds of divided selves in Lafferty are a coefficient of how he views eternity. There are thousands of you: in the minds of others, and in your own exploded self—those parts of you that you cannot see from within this moment in time, but you will see them in eternity. Those are your ghosts.

   
   

8. The you that you think is you is really a person who has had a governor put on your engine. The real you(s)—and the real everyone in Lafferty—are constrained, and do not look dazzling because of the Fall. The praeternatural gifts of Eden were the person’s original endowment and will again be reclaimed in eternity, and possibly in time, through leaps. But there are gnostic forces that want to prevent this. They show up all over the place: false coordination and the machinations of devils, returnees, and so forth. Everyone in Lafferty is earth-sick. Be a doctor and try to give a prognosis.

   
   

9. This last point is odd, but it seems to be key to much of Lafferty. You are already dead. Shocking, I know, but he believes it with a profound intensity that always makes him hard for those who want to domesticate him. The way it works in his fiction is that all eternity is present (and we can’t even talk about this without temporal language). The Second Coming has “already happened.” Eternity is real. This means that death is not death as it is for other writers. It shows up in the fiction as strategies of definalization that point to simultaneous eternal creation and eschaton. He gets this from early patrology, especially Origen, and anyone interested in this aspect of him should learn about how Origen thinks about creation and the eternal.