Ghostliness in the Ghost Story

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was “A Ghost Story.” The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people: that they are ghostly, and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself.

Daniel Otto Petersen has a forthcoming article that everyone should read called "Good Weather for Gory Doppelgänger: Ecomonstrous Doubles, Eidolons, and Fetches in Three Tales by R. A. Lafferty." He was kind enough to let me read it, and I'll do my best to summarize its big picture, but fair warning: it's theoretically dense, and it doesn't pull its punches.

Petersen builds on Steven Swarbrick's arguments in The Environmental Unconscious (2023) that early-modern poetry (and this goes for material life as well) is "pierced by lack," a Lucretian minus that at once wounds and energizes ecological desire. Adopting that premise, he argues that R. A. Lafferty's doppelgängers demonstrate how the same void shapes contemporary fiction.

For Petersen, Lacan's Real, re-read through Lucretius, acts like this:

	Ontological State	Functional Experience
Lacanian Real	Full Presence	A traumatic gap in meaning; a psychic minus.
Lucretian Void	Empty Absence	A generative gap in matter; a physical minus.

The bold step is putting the Lacanian Real itself with this minus of the Lucretian void; that identification lets him treat Lafferty's doubles, fetches, and splits not as mere negations but as "shadowy subtractions of the Real," sub-material holes that make meaning possible by exposing its limits and granting "the jouissance of more truly un-centring ourselves in the radically open-ended semiosis and asemiosis of planetary existence."

In short, Petersen transposes Swarbrick's eco-psychoanalytic Lucretian template from Renaissance verse to Lafferty's landscapes, presenting the ghost story as an art of circling the unknown: learning, again and again, to dwell beside the void at the center of the world.

His essay is richer than this sketch can show, and, true to form, he keeps Lafferty unmistakably weird. By treating the doubles as "environmental unconscious," a crowded field of weather, animals, and wrecked terrains, Petersen does what many of us think needs to be done: take Lafferty's work very seriously as thought. And once you understand how Petersen's take on all this works, a wide range of Lafferty's stories look different: each split psyche cracks open an eco-poetic hole where the non-human speaks. This is a smart contribution to understanding the ghost story. When it appears in print, I'll write about its interpretations of the three stories it addresses.

Reading it also had me thinking again about the shape of the ghost story. What Lafferty meant by it will always be up for debate, and one hopes it will continue to inspire work like the kind Petersen is doing. He and I seem to agree that one can enter into its fullness only by recognizing one’s own environed ghostliness. Petersen understands this better than just about anyone, even if he and I disagree on the nature of that ghostliness. What follows is not intended primarily as an assessment of his application of Swarbrick to Lafferty, but as an exploration of an alternative I find helpful.

It is such a big question that, a while back, I started keeping a little notebook to understand what Lafferty means by "ghost." Why does he use that word, along with all the doublets and variations his readers will recognize, from spooks to fetches and back again?

My view is that Lafferty chose the word "ghost" because he wanted to discuss the spiritual realm without being sententious. He did this well, especially considering how unlikely most readers are to equate "ghost" with "spiritual" in his well-known lines about what he was doing. You might ask, "If that's what he meant, why not say so?"

There are likely many reasons. One, I think, is this: he used "ghost" because it generated the kinds of stories he liked to spin. And because he believed most modern people had suffered a type of amnesia. They no longer understood the word "spiritual." But they still had just enough left in them to recognize a ghost.

This means that his complete statement amounts to something like this in its expanded form:

"It seemed, until I thought about it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Then I understood, by some sort of intuition, that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that its name was A [Spirit/Spiritual] Story. The name comes from the only thing I have learned about all people: that they are [spirits/spiritual] and that they are sometimes split-off [spirits]. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself."

If one could work out what he meant by spiritual being, one would have a pretty good sense of what he meant by being a ghost.

He was wise not to use the word "spiritual" here because he recognized that the spiritual is much stranger and larger than most people will concede. It is full of mystery, like a ghost story. This is a clear example of what I've called counterfiguration in his thought. The best-developed instance of what this ghostliness amounts to is the image of inside-out people, souls, and balloons in Arrive at Easterwine. These are complicated discursive images. The pages they appear on are some of the hardest in his work.

With that in mind, I think Charles Taylor's ideas may be helpful, and they also mark a place where I part ways with Petersen. Taylor's book A Secular Age (2007) has shaped much of the contemporary conversation on secularity, and I've been using one of its core distinctions to think about Lafferty for some time: the contrast between the porous self and the buffered self. keeping in mind that it is just a means to an end.

The porous self is Taylor's term for the kind of identity that dominated the pre-modern, enchanted world, a cosmos alive with spirits, demons, and meaningful forces. The boundaries of the self were permeable. The outside world could flow into a person's inner life.

Meanings, emotions, and moral states were not seen as generated from within but as imposed by external agents through what Taylor calls influence. A person could be possessed by a demon, transformed by a magic potion, or filled with divine grace.

This same openness meant there was no firm line between the spiritual and the physical. A holy relic could heal the sick, and a curse could ruin a harvest because meaning itself had causal power.

Charles Taylor's Porous Self

The porous self was thus exposed and vulnerable, living in a world where the borders between mind and cosmos, self and other, were fluid and in constant exchange. Lafferty's characters seem to live in this kind of world.

Let's consider several examples of the porous self in Lafferty’s fiction. Such instances abound to the extent that one can begin virtually anywhere. In “Dream,” a voice in a “noisome dream” informs the dreamer: “You are not dreaming . . . This is the real world. But when you wake you will be dreaming.” The statement exemplifies an external force that destabilizes the boundary between dream and reality. Similarly, the phenomenon of recurring “wart-hog-people dreams” experienced by the populace, and the question of whether “the wart-hogs were real and the people a dream,” suggests a shared external influence acting upon collective consciousness.

In “Snuffles,” the eponymous creature addresses Brian Carroll with the claim: “How could there be anything in your mind if I did not put it there?” This scene portrays a telepathic intrusion, rendering the boundary between Snuffles’ external consciousness and Carroll’s internal thought as permeable. A related dynamic appears in “Adam Had Three Brothers.” The “Wreckville bunch,” or Rrequesenians, constitute an external group determined that they “cannot have uncontrolled talent running loose in the commonalty of mankind.” Here, an effort to restrict individual potential and freedom reveals a collective mechanism of external control.

This pattern can be found in “Seven-Day Terror.” Clarissa, a young girl, casually causes objects to “disappear” and “come back.” Her response, “Why, of course I can. Anybody can. Can't you?” signals a porousness between human will and physical reality, one that is portrayed not as an extraordinary gift but as a latent capacity that should be accessible.

The motif is at the heart of “Seven Story Dream.” George Handle, described as “easily led,” is subjected to conditioning by Gilford Gadberry, who employs a “compelling voice” that plays night after night during Handle’s sleep. As a result, Handle confesses to a murder committed only in a dream. The episode shows the extent to which external manipulation can infiltrate and reshape the internal world of the self, eroding the distinctions between memory, dream, self, and reality.

Together, these stores should show aspects of the porous self. They dramatize the ease with which external forces can pervade thought, will, and perception, exposing the split in the boundaries that are denied in modern individual identity.

This contrasts with what Taylor calls the buffered self, the characteristic identity of the modern, disenchanted age. It is marked by a firm, "buffered" boundary that separates the inner world of thought, feeling, and purpose from the outer world, which is understood as neutral and mechanistic. This boundary shields the self, making it feel secure from the spiritual forces that once haunted the porous self.

Within this protected interior, the self becomes the primary source of meaning and order. It no longer discovers purpose in the cosmos but imposes it through disengaged reason and instrumental control. While this shift grants a new sense of freedom, power, and self-possession, it also introduces the central dilemma of modernity.

Charles Taylor's Buffered Self

The same buffer that ensures safety may also cut the self off from deeper meaning. The result is a condition of malaise. It gives us a sense of flatness, disconnection, and a world emptied of the transcendent. Lafferty's art appears to be specifically designed to attack this condition.

Like the porous self, the buffered self appears in Lafferty everywhere, often through societies or individuals who create barriers to shield themselves from chaos, unpredictability, nature, the numinous, or existential vulnerability.

His Camiroi exemplify this tendency. They prize a life “governed by reason” and are “incapable of” producing “bad Earth music, bad Earth painting and sculpture and drama,” instead needing to “import” such imperfections. This reflects a deliberate cultural effort to buffer themselves from disorder, passion, or “incompetence” that could disrupt their pursuit of the “good life.”

While they acknowledge a “religion,” it is distinct from Earth’s and seems a more rationalized, less “revelatory” system. Their state of “Golden Mediocrity” and life on a “serene plateau” imply a conscious rejection of the “great heights and depths” that characterize a more porous existence. This reflects the concept of “sterility through refinement”—a process of excising “unruly elements” as a form of mental buffering, much like Michael Fountain’s ideal of the golden bowl in Fourth Mansions, which I will examine shortly.

A similar dynamic appears in one of Lafferty’s lightest and most forgettable stories, “Try to Remember,” but one that hits close to home. Professor Diller’s use of a “small black book prepared by his wife” to hold “all the unessential details of his regime” and “save him time” offers a perfect illustration of individual buffering.

By externalizing the inflow of “unessential” information, Diller allows his “busy and thoughtful” mind to focus on “great things.” Predictably, this reliance leaves him vulnerable. When he loses the device that helps regulate his cognitive environment, he experiences a profound disorientation, questioning his own identity: “If he is Professor Diller, then who in multicolor blazes am I?” His crisis reveals the fragility that can result when a buffered self confronts an unmediated reality.

“The Polite People of Pudibundia” gives one of the clearest examples of societal buffering in Lafferty’s work. The extreme politeness of the Pudibundians, including their use of “deferential balls” and avoidance of direct address, functions as a “ritual shield” designed to prevent “too intimate an encounter of our persons [which] may be fatal.” The literal danger of unmediated contact (“the direct gaze of the Puds kills,” even themselves) explains why their eyes are “always shielded.”

This is a society that has constructed elaborate social and physical buffers to defend against a potentially lethal existential vulnerability. Their refusal to lie, even when doing so might protect others, further reinforces the rigid, buffered structure of their lives.

Finally, “The Pani Planet” explores the buffering of narrative and reality. The Pani’s control over storytelling is suggested in Ieska’s remark that “Stories of bamboozle may not be told,” signaling a conscious effort to manage societal narratives and maintain a particular version of reality. This buffering serves to preserve stability and prevent chaos. The story dramatizes the Pani’s porous understanding of life and death and the humans’ buffered, scientific worldview. General Raddle’s resurrection and transformation, contrasted with Doctor Mobley’s descent into madness, illustrate what happens when a buffered mind encounters phenomena it cannot assimilate. The Pani’s apparent ability to “fix” dead bodies disrupts the human belief in a firm boundary between life and death, shattering the buffered framework that once sustained the characters’ understanding of the world.

Taylor develops these ideas about the porous and buffered self further in a way that is especially useful for readers of Lafferty. Without going too deep into the whole argument, two terms are key: influence and causal power. They are the two fundamental principles that structure the porous self's existence in an enchanted world. These are not merely beliefs. They are experienced as active, external forces that shape the self's reality.

The idea is that meanings are not generated from within. They are imposed from without, often by spiritual agents or charged substances. This makes the self vulnerable. A person might be possessed by a demon, filled with divine grace, or overtaken by black bile understood as an external force.

Similarly, causal power marks the collapse of any hard boundary between the moral and the physical. A holy relic does not symbolize healing. It enacts it. Its power is real and direct, capable of curing disease or warding off storms.

For the porous self, these two powers often worked together. A single sacred act could bring both physical healing and spiritual renewal. Influence and causal power were fused. The self was not separate from the world. It was an integrated participant in a cosmos where meaning and force were inseparable.

Conversely, the buffered self is formed through the systematic dismantling and denial of the world in which influence and causal power operate hand in hand. The modern, disenchanted worldview establishes a firm boundary between the inner mind and a neutral, mechanistic outer world.

Influence is negated because feelings and meanings are now seen as subjective responses generated from within. They are no longer understood as things that can be imposed by spirits or magical forces. The self is sealed off and protected from such psychic intrusion.

Causal power is also denied by a scientific view of the universe, which runs according to impersonal, value-neutral laws. The spiritual or moral significance of an object does not affect its physical properties. A relic may carry symbolic meaning, but it cannot heal.

The buffered self does not experience these powers. It observes them from a distance, explaining them through reason as cultural beliefs or psychological states. Its identity is shaped not through vulnerable participation but through control and mastery over a world emptied of these deeper, enchanted connections.

With all this in mind, I'd like to walk through how I think about the ghost story by breaking down Lafferty's statement and moving through it slowly, with Charles Taylor's work in mind. As always, the goal is not to impose an external model onto Lafferty. The aim is to see whether the model can help bring us closer to his work. And if it cannot, it should be chucked aside.

"I understood by some sort of intuition..."

Here, I would point to the limits of disengaged reason and the reality of what Taylor calls influence. Lafferty's understanding does not come from logical deduction or scientific analysis, the usual tools of the buffered self. It comes as an intuition. This is precisely what Taylor means by influence: a deeper meaning about the world presses itself onto the self. It breaks through the ordinary, disenchanted immanent frame. The way Lafferty comes to this insight is not the result of buffered thinking. It belongs to the porous world.

"...that they are ghostly..."

Lafferty recreates the experience of the porous self through art because he is spiritually attuned to it himself. The Laffertian ghost is a poetic figure that re-embodies the porous self. What is a ghost? It is a being whose boundaries are not solid. It passes through walls, something that appears often in Lafferty's work. It is present but not entirely material, no matter how we define that. It belongs to an enchanted world.

If this is right, then to say that people are "ghostly" is to say they are inherently porous, whether or not they have withdrawn into buffered individualism. Their inner lives are not sealed off from the world. They remain open and vulnerable to external meanings, spiritual forces, the transcendent, and the feelings of others. Things beyond their control can haunt them. This is the human condition that the modern buffered identity tries hardest to deny.

A brief example to make this clearer and set up the question of doppelgängers. Let's consider one of the most important doublets in Lafferty, Miguel Fuentes and Michael Fountain. Chapter XI of Fourth Mansions has the following epigraph from Ecclesiastes 12:5-6: "— and one fears heights, and he shall be afraid in the road … before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is shattered at the fountain . . . " This sets up Michael Fountain to learn the limits of the buffered self the hard way. Lafferty is clear to show the reader that Michael Fountain, the lecturing humanist, thinks he supports the bowl:

“What we are talking about are the world and the lives which we are given to fashion as our tasks. These are in the form, as I see it, of a large, fine, precious, crystal bowl, the Golden Glass Bowl, which we hold in our hands. True, it is not nearly so large a bowl as we once wished to fashion, but now we have come to understand that it is as large and as heavy a bowl as we are able to lift and hold.”

To follow what happens, one should understand the image from Ecclesiastes: a silver cord from which a golden bowl of oil hangs. When the cord snaps, the bowl falls away from the vertical dimension of existence that had sustained it; metaphorically, this is the silver cord of life and self. The image appears in other Biblical scriptures as well. Michael Fountain, the buffered half of the doublet, sees only the bowl. His blind to the silver cord and its opening upward into transcendence.

In Past Master, the golden bowl is Golden Astrobe itself, along with its world-age, both wanting to cut the cord that supports them, but in Fourth Mansions, the porous self of Miguel Fuentes destroys the buffered self of his double, Michael Fountain. The climax reveals how the doubling of selves is bound to the dynamic between the porous and the buffered.

It is tempting to quote the entire lead-up, but here is the relevant passage:

Michael Fountain, dictating privately in his own rooms thirteen hundred miles away, had become highly nervous but he still composed brave words for his lecture: “We come to apex, and it is no way elevated or outstanding; we come to perfection, and to perfect simply means to finish; we come to climax, and it is beautifully flat and undistinguished. We have completed the world. Behold it!” And in some manner Michael Fountain was holding a large, fine, precious, crystal bowl—The Golden Glass Bowl—in his two hands. It was pretty. It was almost substantial. “This is the world,” Michael intoned in a self-induced trance. “This is our lives, this is our final achievement. Worry not that it is small: it is the largest world ever, if we will not allow a larger one. Worry not that it is flawed: we ourselves are the flaws: and if we say that we are not flaws, then who is there to contradict us? Worry not that it is fragile, so long as we are very careful not to drop it.” “Drop it!!” the thunder-clap voice of Miguel Fuentes exploded. Everybody in the entire communication jumped at the cannon-barking violence of that command. And Michael Fountain dropped his world. It tinkled into a thousand tinny pieces. It shattered and all the light flickered out of it. The face of Michael Fountain also broke and shattered and the light went out of it also. He cast himself down and was racked by dry sobs. “How did we go wrong? What did we forget?” Michael moaned.

The epigraph tells us what they forgot. They forgot the silver cord. This is to say that what Fountain forgot was not that there is a minus, but that there is, and always was, something more: a presence to which he was tethered, and which stood above him all along.

"...and that they are sometimes split-off."

Now we come to the schizo-gash, the slice in the doubles, the cleaving off of the fetches and the doppelgängers, the full implication of what we see in the Miguel Fuentes/Michael Fountain doublet. These are signs of the split. The buffered self is what remains after that split. It marks the loss of enchantment. It is the modern condition. To be split off is the buffered self’s defining feature. With one of the engineers of the buffered self, Ludwig Feuerbach, Michael Fountain says: "There are no exterior monsters who trouble the world either in attacking it or in defending it. They are not real."

In this way, the buffered self draws a firm line between the inner mind and the outer world. It relies on disengaged reason, which separates mind from body and reason from passion. It sees the world as emptied of spirits, gods, and moral force. It is, to quote Michael Fountain again, the "apex" that is "no way elevated or outstanding." Lafferty does not treat this as our complete nature; he shows us the entanglement of Fountain and Fuentes. He sees it as something we sometimes become when we look at the world and see it as Michael Fountain does: "and it is beautifully flat and undistinguished. We have completed the world." This is the perfectly buffered plane of Flatland.

"But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself."

Here is the central dilemma and cross-pressure of the secular age. It is also a key part of Lafferty's statement. He names the predicament. We are not simply porous or simply buffered. We live in the tension of the split. We build a "split-off" buffered identity to gain safety, control, and freedom. We tell ourselves that this is the authentic, mature version of ourselves. But our "ghostly" porous nature keeps coming back, in our hunger for meaning, our experience of love, our awe before beauty, our fear of death, and our sense of something beyond. This is what Carmody Overlark’s Studies in the Imagination is getting at in The Devil is Dead.

"Could we understand that world, we would understand ourselves better; for we also are part of that back-brain world to some degree. It was the ‘other people,’ the ‘Ugly’ people who gave to us whatever ghostliness we have, and whatever imagination. We gave only forebrain consciousness."

As a novel, The Devil is Dead suspends the reader in the region of the back brain and the porous self until, almost out of nowhere, it drops the rationalizing explanation of the Neandertal conspiracy, giving the reader Carmody Overlark’s concept of the forebrain to rationalize away what has happened.

The Miguel Fuentes (back brain/porous) and Michael Fountain (forebrain/buffered) difference appears in many places across Lafferty’s work. Sometimes it’s ontological, sometimes psychological, sometimes political, and sometimes theological. Usually, it’s several of these at once. The Devil is Dead stages this difference in its own way, and its doppelgängers are not reducible to those in Fourth Mansions. For instance, it matters that it is none other than Carmody Overlark, that enemy of the fourth mansion, who writes the quoted passage in The Devil is Dead.

Lafferty suggests that we can never know for sure which side of the split carries the cross-pressure. We are caught between two strong ways of being. Is my true self the rational, self-controlled agent, skeptical of revelation? Or is it the open, vulnerable being who still longs for the transcendent and the revelatory? Am I betraying my grown-up, scientific self when I feel that longing, or am I betraying my deeper self when I suppress it? That is what makes this the never-ending story for us.

The porous and non-porous selves are useful analytic tools for getting at Lafferty’s strangeness and wonder without installing a void, the Lacanian Real, as an ineffable centre or condition of possibility. This isn't for any apologetic reason, but simply because it takes into account more of what is going on in Lafferty’s work.

The Real is the Lacanian order that lacks a signifier, so the moment you name it, you draw it into the Symbolic Order and erase what it was. It therefore shows itself only as a rupture or blank in discourse. Because a sacrament is a sign that grants access to real presence and communicates efficacious grace through it, the Lacanian Real is, by definition, non-sacramental. Of course, this is an ontological critique of Petersen's way of reading Lafferty, but Petersen is making an ontological argument about Lafferty.

Petersen might argue that I overlook the radical, materialist, and non-human core of his argument. I would say that I don't. It's that I agree with Lafferty who wrote in "Notes on the Golden Age," "Consider three trash or pulp fields of the hard and soft sciences: Darwinism, Marxism, Freudism. These three things were real pulp theories, but transmuting nostalgia has kept them working like grist mills."

As a final note, Petersen, as I’ve said, sees a minus in Lafferty’s ghostliness because of the minus in matter. His explanation is ontological and psychological, but not historical. He writes: “The more these doubles press into space and physicality, the more they exemplify the minus encountered in matter. They are not immaterial but submaterial, shot through with the holes of Lucretian materialism, shadowy subtractions of the Real.”

An ontological explanation of Lafferty’s doppelgängers can only be partial. Why? Because of human fallenness, which Lafferty returns to in nearly every text. This fallenness is a transhistorical condition, but it takes a particular form in modernity, assuming, as Lafferty does, that human history begins with the Fall. Alienation from the transcendent today is not what it was in the past. It looks different. It is shaped by what Charles Taylor calls the secular age, a time when the religious and the non-religious coexist, and where the background conditions for belief have undergone significant shifts.

Any account of the doppelgänger motif, ontological or otherwise, must be grounded in both the anthropology of the Fall and the cultural experience of late modernity. This is not because the reader must believe the Fall is real, but because Lafferty did, and he was unusually consistent in the coherence of the beliefs that inform his art. For him, it all hung together. “Now I understood,” he wrote, “by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was ‘A Ghost Story.’”

Let me end, then, with Aloysius Shiplap, who speaks at the close of Arrive at Easterwine. His words will mean very different things, depending on how we weigh the issue of plus and minus.

“This, Cogsworth, is the limbus lautumiae of which the Sons will write when they understand it more. This is no lost or furtive limbo. It is the quarrying limbo in all its agony and estrus. This is the mother quarry itself. All the grand worlds—which we have never seen, which we can’t imagine—have been sculpted out of it. They are the holes in it, they are what gives it its wild and riven shape. But look how much else new space is left. And look also that the holes do not remain holes. We have gazed at it all wrong: we’ve seen only the dark afterimages, not the bright fire itself. Here in limbo we already have intimation of these creating worlds. The spherical answer wasn’t entirely wrong, nor was the saddle-shaped answer, nor the torus-shaped. From this young quarry may not great worlds still be called?” “We should have guessed it,” said Glasser. “It isn’t as if each of us hadn’t been in one before. We all have been, except Epikt.” “And have I not been,” I demanded.

notes:

Definitions:

• P: Lafferty’s doubles/ghosts primarily express a fundamental lack (minus), based on Lacanian Real + Lucretian matter.

• S: Sacramental presence = a sign that communicates real presence (a core feature of Lafferty’s Catholic vision).

• L: Lafferty’s fiction presupposes sacramental presence, something like porous selfhood, enchanted ontology.

• R: Lacanian Real = that which cannot be signified or made present through a sign (non-sacramental by definition).

• F: A faithful reading of Lafferty’s ghostliness must account for the possibility of sacramental presence.

Premises:

1. (P1) Doubles, splits, ghosts are expressions of ontological lack (minus).

2. (P2) The Lacanian Real is non-sacramental: it cannot be communicated through a sign (R).

3. (P3) Sacramental presence requires that signs can communicate real presence (S ≠ R).

4. (P4) Lafferty’s fiction, via its Catholic imagination, language, and narrative play, presupposes sacramental presence (L).

5. (P5) Therefore, any model that treats ghostliness solely as lack (P) is structurally incapable of fully accounting for L (S ≠ R, P excludes S).

Intermediate conclusion:

6. (C1) (P), grounded in R, cannot account for the sacramental dimensions of Lafferty’s ghostliness (F is violated).

Further premises about interpretive fidelity:

7. (P6) A faithful interpretation of an author’s work should strive to account for the author’s core metaphysical vision, where it is textually supported. Anyone is welcome to reject this principle.

8. (P7) Ignoring or negating the sacramental dimension of Lafferty’s fiction contradicts this interpretive fidelity to Lafferty's artistic aims (violates P6).

Final conclusion:

9. (C2) Therefore, P, however sophisticated or interesting, is structurally unable to account for Lafferty’s ghostliness because it is ontologically closed to the possibility of sacramental presence.

Forced Trilemma:

Option	Result
Deny that Lafferty gestures toward sacramental presence (deny P4)	Contradicts abundant textual evidence and Lafferty’s known worldview
Claim that the Lacanian Real allows for sacramental presence (deny P2 or P3)	Contradicts Lacanian theory itself and breaks the model, though some postmodern non-Catholic theologians have tried to place the Lacanian Real within the tradition of apophatic theology
Admit that the reading is an external theoretical imposition (deny P6/P7)	Concedes that the reading is not faithful to Lafferty’s vision