Lafferty Readers and Room to Disagree

"R.A. Lafferty's Escape from Flatland; or, How to Build a World in Three Easy Steps" (Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, November 2014, pp. 543-561).

Andrew Ferguson's take on Lafferty is both brilliant and ingenious. Having read more Lafferty than anyone else, he brings an unparalleled knowledge of the Lafferty archive and a depth of understanding that will be especially inspiring to writers and other artists who turn to Lafferty for creative fuel. His insights have been instrumental in sharpening my own thinking, and I hold his work in great admiration, having read everything of his I can. But I fundamentally disagree with him on something important.

I'll walk through it on the non-theory level. (In the unlikely event that anyone cares about where we disagree in terms of Ricoeur, I'll put that at the end.) I should add that this has nothing to do with whether Lafferty was correct in his religious beliefs; it's about what kind of hermeneutic will make his densest work more legible to readers.

1. On “Total Creative Freedom"

Lafferty does not abandon his normative commitments to world-creation when he calls for creativity. His critique of Tolkien—on the grounds that he deliberately omitted Christ—makes clear that for Lafferty, any act of 'world-creation' must remain anchored in the Redemption to avoid what he calls screaming emptiness. This is not contradicted by his statement, 'I'm not proposing right choices or wrong choices. I'm not even pushing transcendence over gosh-awful secularism.' This says little more than that people have free will. Though he does not propose right or wrong choices in building worlds, he believes they exist. A strong argument about how he sees escaping Flatland must take that into account.

2. On the Tension Between Two Lafferty Essays

Ferguson’s reading does not recognize or address the tension between “The Day After the World Ended” (seemingly advocating limitless invention) and “Tolkien as Christian” (which demands the Incarnation be present). If Lafferty can severely condemn Tolkien’s subcreation for lacking Christ (and Tolkien was a guy who could build a world), then his call to create new worlds cannot be as unconstrained as Ferguson implies. (This has no relevance to the merit of Lafferty’s assessment of Tolkien; I think he is wrong, but he was being strategically wrong because he wanted to say something about his own art.)

3. On Omitting the “Only Valid Environment”

Ferguson’s discussion of Lafferty underplays Lafferty’s insistence that “the Redemption is the only valid environment.” For Lafferty, leaving out the Incarnation is not merely an oversight but a non-starter—one that renders the secondary world structurally defective. This contradicts any suggestion that Lafferty promotes pure imaginative license.

4. On the Difference Between Superstructure and Substrate

Ferguson’s argument tends to treat all “accumulation and superstructure” as if it were swept away in Lafferty’s post-apocalyptic vision. But Lafferty distinguishes the Redemption (as substrate) from mere cultural superstructures. Ferguson’s reading does not treat with appropriate seriousness that Lafferty sees the Incarnation as the ground of narrative reality, not a dispensable or optional “add-on.”

5. On “Utopian Sterility” and “Screaming Emptiness”

In focusing on Lafferty’s notion of wide-open opportunities after the world’s end, Ferguson does not sufficiently integrate Lafferty’s critiques of “utopian sterility.” For Lafferty, a so-called utopia that avoids the central “shape of history” collapses into emptiness. Hence Tolkien’s Middle-earth, missing explicit Redemption, becomes Lafferty’s emblem of a “largest church” minus the Cross. Ferguson’s analysis never explores how that stark theological yardstick explodes the carefree “just create” ethos.

6. On Lafferty as the “Toughest Critic”

Ferguson describes Lafferty’s collaborative invitation to fellow creators (in “The Day After the World Ended”) but does not emphasize Lafferty’s readiness to harshly judge any creation lacking the Incarnation. The polemic against Tolkien shows Lafferty’s actual stance: he will indeed “call out” worlds that omit Christ—no matter how impressive their artistry—and label them “screaming voids.”

7. On Reading “The Day After” in Light of Later Novels

Ferguson’s article downplays how Lafferty’s later novels (The Elliptical Grave, Sindbad: The 13th Voyage) press the Christological dimension even harder. This progression indicates to me that Lafferty’s call for “room to be creative” is not neutral. The theological substrate—“the only valid environment”—must be present if a new world is truly to flourish. Ferguson’s reading does not fully foreground this deeply theological crescendo in Lafferty’s later work. If you subtract Christianity from Lafferty, his call for world-making becomes trivially utopian. I think this can be demonstrated through all his novels.

8. On the Alleged “Triviality” Without a Theological Anchor

Finally, I disagree with any reading that treats Lafferty’s invitation (“In this non-world, you can make anything you want!”) as something that can become a secular, aesthetic blank check. If the Incarnation is non-negotiable for Lafferty, then the “utopian freedom” can’t be taken at face value. That you can create whatever you like does not mean there are not standards for your act of creation. Unless we see the demand to incorporate “the central event” into our new subcreations, Lafferty’s claim about creative possibility risks becoming trivial—and that is emphatically not his point.

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Borges once called the Falklands War a fight between two bald men over a comb. I think lit-theory arguments often become that. But here is where we break on the theory. For a full version, read this post.

1. Mimesis 1 as “Prefiguration”: Ricoeur’s View

Ricoeur sees Mimesis 1 as the realm of habits, rules, and symbolic frameworks that exist before any explicit plot is formed (as I understand it). It is where the raw materials of human action and culture are already “meaningful” in seed form, ready to be configured into a narrative.

2. Ferguson's Application of Ricoeur to Lafferty

He follows Ricoeur by saying Lafferty’s “prefigured” background is the rubble of the old, ended world (“bones and stones,” “Flatland,” etc.). Lafferty shows we can “pick up these fragments,” i.e., the leftover symbolic frameworks, myths, or narrative pieces, and then reassemble them creatively in Mimesis 2 (configuration) and Mimesis 3 (refiguration). I would agree with this.

3. Lafferty’s Theological Non-Negotiable

I also think that for Lafferty, the Incarnation (Redemption) is not just one more “fragment” or symbolic resource. It is “the only valid environment,” the very ground or substrate of meaningful reality according to Lafferty. In other words, the Incarnation is already inescapably present in the deepest structure of any true “world”—it is baked into the shape of history. This means, in Lafferty’s perspective, the “pre-narrative” level is not neutral or endlessly flexible; it is theologically anchored by the Christ-event. We can ignore this, but if we do, we will be ignoring Lafferty.

4. Why This Undercuts Ferguson’s Mimesis 1

If Mimesis 1 is supposed to be the stage at which we take stock of “action,” “symbols,” and “cultural frameworks” prior to story, Lafferty’s claim is that one cannot leave out the Incarnation at this first step without producing a “screaming void.” But Ferguson’s reading treats Lafferty’s pre-narrative rubble as a wide-open domain to be re-energized via the act of storytelling. I think this is inspiring, but it is a strong misreading. Lafferty’s criticism of Tolkien (and other writers) shows he thinks the Incarnation is always already the fundamental “background condition.” Leaving it out is not just a missing piece; it is a radical failure to grasp the real shape of time and history.

5. The Implication: Mimesis 1 Is Not Merely “Leftovers”

For this reason, I believe Ferguson underplays how the world-prefiguration stage in Lafferty demands recognition of the Christic shape of history—not just collecting cultural debris or old myths. It is precisely at Mimesis 1 (prefiguration) that Lafferty thinks creators should already acknowledge the Incarnation as the matrix of meaning. Any “scavenging” that excludes it leads to a pseudo-world, a “screaming emptiness.”

6. The Core Reason We Disagree

I see an overstatement in presenting Mimesis 1 as merely the neutral ground of 'whatever leftover materials we have after the apocalypse.' This is the ruined superstructure, not the ontological ground. Lafferty insists that the real ground is the 'valid environment.' From the beginning, even in that first stage of world-making, Christ’s redemption must be acknowledged, however implicitly.

This normative dimension of Lafferty’s world-building may be unpalatable, but no theorization of his ideas about what it means to make a world—without it becoming "gosh awful"—can ignore it, that is, if one wants to understand how Lafferty constructs his fictional realities.