Lafferty and the Sliding Scale of Allegory

Holy Allegory by Giovanni Bellini, Uffizi Galleries

Lafferty’s use of allegory is complicated. One of the most effective critical tools for approaching it is Northrop Frye’s idea that allegory is a sliding scale, a view that profoundly influenced Angus Fletcher’s seminal Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964) and Fredric Jameson's ideas about allegory in science fiction.

In the "Second Essay" of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye writes, "Within the boundaries of literature we find a kind of sliding scale, ranging from the most explicitly allegorical, consistent with being literature at all, at one extreme, to the most elusive, anti-explicit and anti-allegorical at the other."

The following table breaks down Frye's attempt to depict allegory as a sliding scale:

How would this look with a complicated figure like Evita in Laferty's novel Past Master? Perhaps something like this: