Lafferty’s Use of “Worlds”
Updated: 4 days ago
Mimesis 1 (Prefiguration): Our prior understanding of action, symbols, and time makes narrative possible.
Mimesis 2 (Configuration): Emplotment gathers events, agents, motives, and circumstances into a story that can be followed.
Mimesis 3 (Refiguration): Reading brings the world of the text into contact with the reader’s world and can change how the reader understands and acts.
Today I want to share some thoughts on Andrew Ferguson’s 2014 article in Science Fiction Studies. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis, Ferguson offers a philosophically grounded reading of Lafferty’s work. I’m reluctant to adopt his argument in full. My hesitation concerns ontological sacramentality, which, in my view, his initial sequence does not adequately accommodate.
For Ricoeur, mimesis is about how humans make sense of time, action, and identity through narrative, the real stuff of our lives. Fiction is one way of doing this, but mimesis underlies all forms of meaningful storytelling, including history, autobiography, the routines of daily life, religion, myth, law, medicine, and so on. It’s an ontological and epistemological process, not just an artistic one. The stakes for getting it right are high.
So, what does Ferguson argue? He writes that Lafferty’s fiction stages a radical “day-after” moment in which the old symbolic order has collapsed and only the “bones and stones” of culture remain. The relics retain information, but the earlier worlds that produced them have become inscrutable through amnesia (550). In his initial sequence, narrative cannot open with Ricoeur’s mimesis 1 (pre-figuration). It must begin in mimesis 2, where an act of fictive declaration reconfigures the debris, posits narrative anchors, and configures a provisional plot. Only after that reconstruction can mimesis 1 emerge, giving readers a usable horizon that they complete in mimesis 3 through a fusion of horizons with the text. World-building proceeds in a kind of Ricoeurian retrograde, m₂ → (re-create) m₁ → m₃, and, on my reading of this initial sequence, its footing risks being treated as immanent, constructed from the speech-act of storytelling itself.
Ferguson’s conclusion complicates that account: he describes world and story as continuously available through recollection and closes with sacramental remembrance (558). My objection concerns the tension between that conclusion and the initial suspension of prefiguration on page 549.
For that very reason, taking Ferguson’s initial sequence in isolation has consequences for how we understand Lafferty’s theological imagination. If our current reality and every story Lafferty tells have to begin in mimesis 2 (on a ground conjured by sheer fictional declaration), then the model risks leaving the sacramental chain that normally links creation, history, and eschaton unexplained.
On this point, one should remember that in the 1979 talk “The Day After the World Ended,” Lafferty keeps the theological largely offstage: “I’m not even pushing transcendence over gosh-awful secularism,” he says. At the same time, the “gosh-awful” tips his hand. Ferguson’s retrograde sequence (again, m₂ → re-created m₁ → m₃) risks turning Lafferty's courteous half-restraint into another version of the secularist hermeneutic Lafferty disparages. Why is this the case?
By starting Lafferty's Ghost Story in mimesis 2, Ferguson's initial sequence risks confining the first phase of world-building to a purely semiotic fiat and postponing any return to prefiguration until the narrative has rebuilt a horizon from the ground up. As a logical possibility, mimesis 1 could later flag transcendence, but this would be like painting a window on a wall and trying to look through it.
The central issue is that, in Ferguson’s initial sequence, the pre-figurative horizon in Lafferty becomes operative only after a human act of re-signification. Its depth, then, risks appearing derivative of human declaration, falling far short of the ontological continuity that Lafferty assumes, even when he leaves it mostly unspoken. The risk, in my view, is the “gosh-awful” secularism he mentions.
There is another theoretical snag: in Ricoeur’s own scheme mimesis 2 presupposes the competencies, temporal intuitions, actions, and symbolic networks of mimesis 1, so "beginning" the three mimetic moments without an already functioning pre-figuration (mimesis 1) hobbles the coherence of the model itself.
If you want to look into it, a good place to begin is Ricoeur’s claim in Time and Narrative, Vol 1, that "Whatever the innovative force of poetic composition within the field of our temporal experience may be, the composition of the plot is grounded in a pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character. These features are described rather than deduced" (54). In other words:
"the composition of the plot": This clearly refers to Mimesis 2, the configurational act of emplotment.
"is grounded in": This phrase directly indicates presupposition and dependency. Mimesis 2 cannot exist or function meaningfully without Mimesis 1.
"a pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character": This is a comprehensive list of the core components of Mimesis 1.
Ricoeur writes in Time and Narrative:
Hermeneutics, however, is concerned with reconstructing the entire arc of operations by which practical experience provides itself with works, authors, and readers. It does not confine itself to setting mimesis 2 between mimesis 1 and mimesis 3. It wants to characterize mimesis 2 by its mediating function. What is at stake, therefore, is the concrete process by which the textual configuration mediates between the prefiguration of the practical field and its refiguration through the reception of the work. (53)
Mimesis 2 is defined by its mediating function.
That Ferguson’s initial sequence risks trapping Lafferty in mimesis 2 is ironic since Ricoeur opposed isolating configuration from lived experience. He thought the French structuralists had lost the phenomenological by focusing too much on mimesis 2: everything became the relation of signs.
For Ricoeur’s type of hermeneutical mediation to occur, a prefiguration (mimesis 1) must still be minimally present, even if damaged, because there must be something for configuration to mediate from and something for refiguration to mediate to. Ferguson sees mimesis 1 flattened and unable to be enacted until after a fictive declaration in mimesis 2. This fiat removes the very pole that mimesis 2 is meant to mediate from, contradicting Ricoeur’s claim that hermeneutics must “reconstruct the entire arc of operations.” It seems that a functioning, though exhausted or abruptly transformed, mimesis 1 is non-negotiable, whereas Ferguson initially seals off mimesis 1 and thereby breaks the dialectic Ricoeur insists must already be in place.
Setting that theoretical problem aside for now, here is the theological problem with Ferguson's proposed model, as I see it:
From F2 and F3, the chain of sacramental poesis risks becoming unintelligible within the model at the start. From F4 and F5, any later recovery of its intelligibility appears to depend on a human act of re-signification. Therefore, read in isolation, Ferguson’s retrograde sequence risks making the narrative’s initial stance post-Christian in practice; the model does not yet account for transcendence’s ontological continuity with creation until the text "fabricates" a new horizon.
How can this be modified? The first step would be to identify each propositional sense of “world” in "The Day After the World Ended." Once those senses are clarified, we can set Lafferty’s full argument alongside Ricoeur’s three-moment sequence and ask, case by case, whether mimesis 1 is truly absent or merely dormant and still readable.
Lafferty’s own cues, such as “remembering fragments of either a past or a future” and “There are fine building stones all around us,” suggest that some of the debris becomes intelligible the moment it is recalled and sparked. Ferguson’s initial sequence, by contrast, requires narrative anchors to be posited before mimetic capacity can be reinstilled.
The comparison below distinguishes the senses of “world” used in this reading. The question is whether Lafferty describes a complete loss of prefiguration or leaves remnants that people can still understand and use.
When Lafferty says the “world” is lost, I take him to mean that the cultural world has collapsed, not that every pre-figurative condition has vanished. He still speaks of the physical cosmos (world₁) and addresses his listeners as choice-making, situated subjects. This is evidence that world₇—the immediate Lebenswelt—endures, even if attenuated, after the intermediate worlds have ended.
Recall that Ferguson initially argues that Flatlanders share a flattened horizon and “cannot enact even the first stage of mimesis, or mimesis 1.” Lafferty must therefore “begin instead with mimesis 2 … and then build backwards,” calling every anchor “into being by fictive declaration” before any mimetic capacity can be re-instilled.
A good way to get at this is through the historical novels. If I apply Ferguson’s initial sequence to The Fall of Rome and Okla Hannali, they become laboratories. Lafferty scavenges inherited debris whose earlier worlds have become inscrutable, reworking it in configuration (mimesis 2). This bricolage first restores a usable mimesis 1, after which readers can, in refiguration (mimesis 3), fuse their own horizon with the text. My concern is that this risks making the ground appear humanly fabricated rather than a recovered sacramental continuum. On this application, the historical worlds the author fashions risk appearing initially immanent, since their narrative anchors must be declared in mimesis 2.
I would want to avoid these consequences. The physical cosmos and its metaphysical structure (world₁), along with the Lebenswelt (world₇), would remain sufficiently ontologically intact for mimesis 1 to be badly damaged but not erased. Flatland (world₄) names the unstructured condition in which people negotiate this loss, not a complete estrangement from mimesis 1. A total rupture that blocked subjects from mimesis 1 would, paradoxically, eliminate even the awareness that people have that anything had been unstructured in the first place. It is hard to see how they would still be people at all because consciousness of lack presupposes a horizon of fullness that can be conceptually re-presented, which is already a rudiment of mimesis 1.
On my reading of Ricoeur, Lafferty salvages fragments of the collapsed West (world₂) and other civilizations (world₃), sets them beside the abiding cosmic and experiential substrates (world₁ and world₇), and gestures toward a prospective world₆ that remains in continuity with its sacramental past because mimesis isn't completely inaccessible. It's what he's doing when he writes The Fall of Rome and Okla Hannali. He opens new futures through acts of imaginative remembrance.
Through this “construction after destruction,” the narratives reignite a damaged mimesis 1 and show via recovery that grace can still traverse history’s breaks. Transcendence is not manufactured this way in mimesis 2 or mimesis 3. Lafferty rekindles it from the pre-figurative depth that Flatland never fully levels. To quote Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Or, as Lafferty says, there are no endings. It can’t end.
I think that Ferguson’s initial retrograde Ricoeurian sequence, read in isolation, risks making Lafferty a virtuoso of post-Christian world-creation and domesticating him for a highly educated secular audience. This is fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your own commitments. If prefigurative grounding is treated as wholly unavailable, the sacramental horizon is functionally silent, and the story must begin in mimesis 2 on an immanent footing. Sacramental symbols can be recognized as conveying revelation only when they are decipherable; on this reading, the opening mimesis 2 stage risks accounting only for their aesthetic evocation of transcendence.
And it's not necessary. In Ricoeur’s own model, mimesis 2 presupposes the competencies and symbolic networks of mimesis 1. Starting the hermeneutic spiral without a functioning prefiguration strains both Catholic sacramental logic and Ricoeur’s theory itself.
A latent-mimesis reading like the one outlined here keeps Ricoeur’s three moments of mimesis in their original logical order. It also keeps Lafferty a metaphysically realist Christian fabulist whose world-making shows that shattered cultures can still mediate grace. This also rests on creatio continua (conservatio in esse), whereby God continually sustains both the cosmos (world₁) and each person’s Lebenswelt (world₇).
The diagram and comparison tables below set my reading of the implications of Ferguson’s initial sequence alongside the latent-mimesis alternative. The theological consequences shown are my deductions from that sequence.
Two Ways to Read Lafferty Through Ricoeur
Seven Senses of “World” in “The Day After the World Ended”
Table A | From Surviving Remnants to a New World
Table B | Agreement & Divergence with Ferguson (2014)
Table C | Passages from the Speech and the Reading Proposed Here
Table sources: R. A. Lafferty, “The Day After the World Ended,” Challenger 1 (Fall 1993), 25–29; Andrew Ferguson, “R. A. Lafferty’s Escape from Flatland; or, How to Build a World in Three Easy Steps,” Science Fiction Studies 41 (2014), 543–561, especially 549–550 and 558; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (1984), 54.
