Reading the Argo Cycle

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As he opens the second canto of Paradiso, Dante warns his readers that only those prepared for the mysteries ahead should continue the journey. He likens his ascent through the heavens to a voyage into uncharted seas, far beyond the safe, familiar shores of ordinary understanding:

"O you who are within your little bark, / eager to listen, following behind / my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas, / turn back to see your shores again: / do notattempt to sail the seas I sail; / you may, by losing sight of me, be left astray." Paradiso II.1–6, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

This image of the little boat adrift upon the vast divine ocean sets the tone for Paradiso. It is undoubtedly among the most memorable images in Catholic literature: a journey that demands courage and profound trust in the guide who has already glimpsed the eternal shores. Lafferty understood this imagery well, embedding his masterwork within the same powerful metaphor.

There are at least three exceptional pieces of writing that survey the Argo cycle’s overall shape: R. A. Lafferty’s postscript to More Than Melchisedech, whose importance can hardly be overstated because it distills the aesthetic strategies that run through all his fiction; Gregorio Montejo’s brilliant essay in Feast of Laughter; and Andrew Ferguson’s unpublished introduction to the cycle, available on his blog. Reading all three provides an indispensable foundation for anyone seeking to make sense of ARGO.

I read Lafferty as anartist who uses anti-foundationalism as a narrative tactic while remaining neither anti-foundationalist nor anti-realist. Attempts to square him with postmodernism or to reconcile his fiction with Consilium-style theological buccaneering strike me as dead ends. Yet because he uses what appear to be postmodern strategies, he can seem to flirt with epistemological claims that would undo even moderate foundationalism. His clearest statement that this isn’t his aI’m appears in the essay “More Worlds Than One,” a piece far less discussed than it deserves to be. There, weighing the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Lafferty defends Earth’s singularity:

“There is a great and powerful lobby advocating the existence of great numbers of superior civilizations. One reason for this is that the secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction of scientists cannot allow the uniqueness of anything: not of Earth, not of Life, certainly not of Human Life, most certainly not of existing Human Civilization. To allow the uniqueness of any of these things, they would have to cease to be secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic persons. And the shock of changing their style would kill all of them.”

This sober side of Lafferty, his conviction of human uniqueness and his mordant skepticism toward the “secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction,” bears directly on his world-making and shapes his most ambitious creation, the ARGO cycle.

That passage clarifies something essential. You will often hear it said that Lafferty disliked endings, avoided them, or wrote fiction that defies them. True, but that observation should be set alongside the fact that he is one of the most eschatologically minded writers who ever wrote. He insists that there are no final endings, and the absence of an ending is fully compatible with teleology and the perspective of eternity. After all, God, in classical theology, possesses a telos, actus purus, yet has no goal outside Himself. I suspect that Lafferty's rejection of endings but his interest in teleology is something other readers have picked up on, but recognizing why there is no contradiction is important.

I would go further. Until readers see the centrality of teleology in the work, and its thoroughly Catholic cast, they will misread the scale and aims of his most ambitious writing. It is not enough to say he urges us to make new worlds because the old one has ended and we enjoy radical freedom to do so; we must also reckon with the ends toward which he writes. Lafferty’s imagination is teleological through and through. So any broad statement about the totality of his fiction ought to take that fact seriously. If you have followed this blog, you have heard me say so before.

Accordingly, what I want to do here is set out some ideas about the ARGO cycle.. The difficulty in recognizing ARGO as the masterwork stems partly from the fact that it is the clearest instantiation of his "Ghost Story," the sprawling, forward-surging narrative that includes all of his literature: stories, novels, and poetry alike. ARGO can seem like the vanishing point into which all his work disappears: the man pulling the hole in after himself. But it is better understood through another of Lafferty’s favorite images: the thing that is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. Set the ARGO texts on a table, step inside, and you will find yourself in a universe with hundreds of stories, dozens of novels, and a vast fictional cosmos. If you are anything like me, you will ask yourself: how can this place be so immense?

The main argument I would advance about the Argo materials relative to The Ghost Story is that they form the royal road through Lafferty’s body of work and are constructed according to the classical, Catholic doctrine of the Four Causes. Their seemingly fragmented, nonlinear form (Formal Cause) shapes language, myth, and lived experience (Material Cause); that shaping is a sacramental, participatory act shared by Lafferty and the reader under the ultimate agency of God (Universal Efficient Cause); and the narrative strains unceasingly toward an eschatological telos of reunion and cosmic renewal in the Laughing Christ (Final Cause), culminating in the regeneration of humanity. Perhaps this is the most succinct description of Lafferty's sacramental poesis.

That formulation is dense, so I’ll explain how a teleological vision guides Lafferty’s seemingly anti-foundational method. His fragments cohere in odd ways not because they are a patchwork, but because each serves as a sacramental sign, a visible, tangible disclosure of invisible grace, whose seeming evanescence points beyond itself to ultimate consummation. He gives an image of this himself in the mosaic at the beginning of The Fall of Rome. Absent a Final Cause and its eschatological horizon, those fragments would revert to provisional debris, dissolving into the relativism of historicism or the void of nihilism he often complains about. Because Lafferty’s imagination is teleological, the ghostly fragment is analogically from the start, intrinsically directed toward fulfillment and final coherence. However, the possibility of failure and final imperfection is always a threat.

Think of the Material Cause in ARGO as the rubble from which Lafferty builds: fragments of legend and myth, familiar city streets, idiosyncratic human behavior, scraps of history, and strands of theology. It is “that out of which a thing comes to be, and which persists”; e.g., bronze or silver are the causes of a statue or bowl, potential that must wait for form and maker to act. Lafferty addresses this in the “Promantia” of The Devil is Dead, telling readeds to “build things with this as with an old Structo set. ”Recall that he says one can put it together wrong

When Space Chantey and Past Master appeared in 1968 those blocks were still inert, because Finnegan, the figure who will fuse Roadstrum, Jason, Brendan, and Finn McCool into one voyager, had not yet sailed into print; his first big outing came in The Devil Is Dead (1971) and his deeper history only in Archipelago (1979). So the myths, jokes, street detritus, and floating names that litter Lafferty’s early stories novels are exactly Aristotle’s “ur-stuff”: raw matter whose actuality arrives only when Lafferty later supplies the narrative form and makes the reader snaps together the Structo pieces.

As a Catholic, Lafferty believes the Universal Efficient Cause of everything is God, but, very significantly, it encompasses Lafferty and the reader working collaboratively through secondary causality. Lafferty gives narrative pieces (the recurring elements I have called monads) and demands the reader’s active, co-creative participation. While this method may superficially resemble postmodernism or post-post-modernism, it fundamentally adheres to the logic of Catholic sacramental art: a collaborative process between creator and audience, guided by grace, intended to bring out the shape of a concealed but pre-existing order. I think that misunderstanding this collaborative dynamic misrepresents Lafferty, who seems to have rejected its alternative, writing:

“As to Science Fiction, I am not a ‘True Believer’. As to Fantasy, I am no more than ten percent true believer. I respect only ‘True Believers’ on the real things, in the eschatologies, in the ultimates, in the basics. I do not respect the ‘True Believers’ in toys. And the ‘True Believers’ in toys hate me completely, when they really know what I am. Though more than half of mankind does not believe in the ultimates and basics, surely less than five percent of the Science Fiction People have any belief at all in what is real. Science Fiction is, for ninety-five percent of the people who indulge in it, a surrogate ‘True Belief’, in things from which the truth has been carefully removed. It is a ‘True Belief’ in a false religion, one without dimension.”

And the Final Cause? It is nearly always represented in Lafferty as the leap, a movement from an old order toward a new creation, a transformative moment. In The Elliptical Grave, it is the ark; in Fourth Mansions, it is an ascent to a higher mansion; in Not to Mention Camels, it is a plunge downward into damnation; in Past Master, it is the birth of a renewed world; and in ARGO, it involves Duffey's eschatological passage through the seven contingencies toward a regenerated humanity.

Lafferty describes an important aspect of this dynamic in “Some Things Dark and Dangerous”:

"At the time of the Fall, man went into a state of Suspended Animation. Or perhaps it was a state of Animated Suspense."

If Lafferty sees the current human condition as one of animated suspense, it is another reason for there not being endings. His worlds are suspended between fallenness and redemption. Someone once wrote that, unlike in Gene Wolfe, there is no new sun in Laffferty. This gets it wrong, but it is understandable. It's more accurate to say Lafferty leaves the reader in the grave, but it is a Christian grave, with body's head in the west, the feet pointing to the east, and the hope of resurrection. The nature of his fiction, centered in the Argo legend, is ordered toward the renewal of man and the recovery of preternatural gifts.

I want to go a little deeper into how the four causes apply as a narratological device in the Lafferty canon. The Argo texts will be in the corner of my eye. What follows will not be exhaustive, but it should show why the four causes are not an analytical overlay but rhetorical elements that Lafferty builds into his worlds, and suggest why his sacramental poesis would fall apart without the teleological logic of final causes.

1. Material Cause: The Substance of the World

At the most immediate level, Lafferty’s material is the stuff of language, folklore, ancient myths, specific places, his modular pieces (e.g., Willy McGilly): the streets of Tulsa, the islands of Greece, the pubs of New Orleans, Galveston, and so forth. The Argo cycle is shot through with real and imagined histories. Many of Lafferty's characters are composites: neither purely human nor purely something else, but beings stitched together from multiple bloodlines, mythologies, and spiritual states. They explode into different realities, as he put it.

Human Language as Fallen: Lafferty’s informationally dense but strangely light use of language is not decorative. It is a vision of language as revelatory but broken. Language participates in the divine Logos, but after the Fall, it runs up against the Babel event. To explore this in Lafferty, reread the passages in Sandaliotis about Babel. And look closer until you begin to see that  is, in fact, Hell, a theme that shows up repeatedly in Lafferty.  Consider the state of language on Astrobe in Past Master and Lafferty's strong assertion that Astrobe is current day America.

Myth as Typology: Lafferty’s repurposing of myths is not random syncretism or mere bricolage. This strikes me as important: it is typology disguised as bricolage. Pagan myths are echoes, distortions, or anticipations of the Christian story. The Argo is a type of the visible Church, the vessel bearing fallen humanity toward renewal.

Sacramental Materiality: Concrete details—real streets, real foods, named beers anchor the narrative in the goodness of creation. This is behind Lafferty’s Rabelaisian copia. Extreme informational density prevents the story from floating into Gnosticism or mere abstraction. Even in its fallenness, the material world remains the necessary vehicle through which grace works.

Characters as Composite Beings: Figures like Finnegan, Roadstrum, and the "other blood" descendants embody the post-Fall condition: fractured, contradictory, still bearing traces of divine image and mortal wound.

Theology as Substance: Concepts like grace, sin, redemption, and damnation are not abstract in Lafferty. They instantiate and participate in the narrative world.

2. Formal Cause: The Shape of the Narrative

At the surface, Lafferty’s form is famously fragmented: nonlinear, episodic, dreamlike. Stories flicker into being, cohere briefly, then break apart.

But seen metaphysically:

Fragmented Form as Postlapsarian Reality: The broken, jigsaw structure reflects a world fractured by the Fall. Knowledge is partial, time is fraught, perception is darkened. The reader experiences fallenness formally.

Sacramental Logic: Seemingly absurd events function as visible signs of invisible realities. A beer-drinking contest becomes a sacrament of loyalty and identity. Amnesia signifies not just memory loss, but spiritual alienation. Signs gesture toward an invisible grace or the lack thereof.

Liturgical and Cyclical Time: Lafferty’s disjointed chronology echoes liturgical time, where past, present, and future fold into each other. Like the Church calendar, his stories operate outside linear time, in sacred recurrences. One of Lafferty’s master tricks is to use the word “ghost” when he means “spiritual.” One could create a code book that systematically shows how he does this in his work.

Anagogical Structure: Literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical levels are present simultaneously. Lafferty’s works require layered reading. Literal events point beyond themselves, toward moral transformation and eschatological fulfillment. Like the teleological, the anagogical is likely to be ignored, distorting reception.

3. Efficient Cause: The Makers

Lafferty seems to have accepted the standard Catholic view of efficient causation, which views God as the primary and universal efficient cause. Authors and readers are secondary, or instrumental, efficient causes because God preserves the existence of agents, their powers, and their actions.

Lafferty as Sub-Creator: Like Duffey in More Than Melchisedech, Lafferty plays the demiurge within his fiction, shaping fallen matter into partial forms. His eccentricities (digressions, linguistic wildness) reflect the freedom and limits of any human sub-creator working within divine creation. This is a source of exhilaration and anxiety for him. Snuffles and Duffey are closer than one might at first think. 

Reader as Co-Creator: Lafferty’s do-it-yourself structure demands active engagement. Readers must assemble scattered clues, discern hidden patterns, andinterpret signs. Reading becomes a sacramental act, a small participation in divine creativity.

God as First Cause: The ultimate Source stands behind both author and reader. God grants being to the narrative material, sustains the sacramental order, and infuses even the most obscure moments with hidden grace. The resistance to easy comprehension gestures toward the unfathomable Mystery of the divine.

Metafiction as Theological Inquiry: When More Than Melchisedech examines Duffey’s authorship, it asks directly: who creates? Lafferty? Duffey? Or the First Cause? The fiction becomes a theological investigation of origins and agency.

4. Final Cause: The Purpose and End

On the surface, Lafferty’s stories end inconclusively or elliptically. But in truth, they strain toward a definite telos: reunion, renewal, regeneration.

The Telos of Communion: Despite fragmentation, characters are drawn back together—across continents, lifetimes, even realities. The "Dirty Five," the Argonauts, and the sprawling nets of families and friends are images of the Communion of Saints.

Longing for Renewal: Lafferty’s universe aches for restoration. Lost Edens and golden ages haunt his stories. Finnegan’s yearning for the unattainable "it," the hidden Seven Years, the dream of the perfected ship—all point to a lost wholenessyet to be restored.

The Legend as Pre-History: The "Legend" is a prehistory of the Beatific Vision, the final perfected reality, the Logos made manifest. It is not fully achieved within the narratives, because it cannot be, in fallen time. The stories are animated by their orientation toward it.

Christ as Center: Lafferty is very careful not to be preachy. The Laughing Christ he sometimes writes about can be thought of as the Christ who is present in the humor: it is the Christ that readers might not recognize, just as the people in Past Master fail to know who the stranger is who visits More on the scaffold. Even when not named, Christ remains the gravitational center. The sacramental form, the longing for renewal, the communal bonds: all find their source and fulfillment in the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection.

This is why the Argo cycle is not merely an experimental oddity. It is a profound theological artifact, intended to help readers recognize what is most alive in artistic creation. To aestheticize its theology would reduce its author to someone merely playing with toys, overlooking who he truly is.