Lafferty’s Use of “Worlds”

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005)

Mimesis 1 (Prefiguration): Mimesis 1 is the pre-narrative, lived understanding of human action, encompassing its structural, symbolic, and aporetic temporal dimensions, which generate a demand for narrative configuration.

Mimesis 2 (Configuration): Mimesis 2 is the pivotal, poetic act of emplotment that, by "grasping together" diverse elements, creatively forges a followable, discordant concordance from succession, offering a poetic resolution to the aporias of lived temporality (Mimesis1).

Mimesis 3 (Refiguration): Mimesis 3 is the refiguration of the reader's world through the act of reading, where the text's configured world, via poetic reference and iconic augmentation, intersects with and reshapes lived experience and temporality, with the reader actively completing the narrative and potentially having future action remade.

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Today I want to share some thoughts on Andrew Ferguson’s 2014 article in Science Fiction Studies, which, as far as I know, is the first peer-reviewed piece devoted entirely to R. A. Lafferty. It’s a significant and thoughtful contribution. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis, Ferguson offers a focused and philosophically grounded reading of Lafferty’s work. Ricoeur’s ideas are not easy to work with, and Ferguson brings them into the conversation well. That said, I’m reluctant to adopt his argument in full. My hesitation concerns preserving what I would call ontological sacramentality—something that, in my view, Ferguson’s reading does not accommodate. While his account is brilliant and fascinating, it leaves limited room for this dimension of Lafferty’s project.

Before getting started, I want to point out that 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. Because these remnants are, in his words, “informationally dense yet symbolically undecipherable,” narrative cannot open with Ricoeur’s mimesis 1 (pre-figuration). It must begin in mimesis 2, where an act of fictive declaration renames the debris, posits new anchors, and configures a provisional plot. Only after that reboot can mimesis 1 emerge, giving readers a usable horizon that they complete in mimesis 3 through a fusion of horizons with the text. In short, world-building proceeds in a kind of Ricouerian retrograde, m₂ → (re-create) m₁ → m₃, and its footing is initially immanent, constructed from the speech-act of storytelling itself.

For that very reason, adopting Ferguson’s model wholesale has big knock-on effects for how we understand Lafferty’s theological imagination. If our current reality and every story Lafferty tells has to begin in mimesis 2 (on a ground conjured by sheer fictional declaration), then the sacramental chain that normally links creation, history, and eschaton is, at least functionally, cut.

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 reading confines the first phase of world-building to a purely semiotic fiat and postpones any return to pre-figurative until the narrative has rebuilt a horizon from the ground up. As a logical possibility, mimesis 1 could later flag transcendence, but this (for reasons that I will explain in a moment) would be like painting a window on a wall and trying to look through it.

The central issue is that, for Ferguson, the pre-figurative horizon in Lafferty becomes operative only after a human act of re-signification. Its depth, then, is derivative of human declaration, falling far short of the ontological continuity that Lafferty assumes, even when he leaves it mostly unspoken. The alternative, as he puts it, is “gosh-awful.”

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. Making that case would require more patience than I can expect of anyone here, so I just suggest it as something to consider. If you want to look into it, a good place to begin is Ricouer 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 preunderstanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character. These features are described rather than deduced" (67). In other words:

1. "the composition of the plot": This clearly refers to Mimesis 2, the configurational act of emplotment.

2. "is grounded in": This phrase directly indicates presupposition and dependency. Mimesis 2 cannot exist or function meaningfully without Mimesis1.

3. "a preunderstanding 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

Setting that theoretical problem aside for now, here is the theological problem with Ferguson's proposed model, as I see it:

ID	Proposition drawn from Ferguson
F1	The “day-after” debris is ontically present (“bones and stones” retain informational density).
F2	That debris is symbolically undecipherable until a fictive act in mimesis 2 renames it.
F3	Because nothing is decipherable, mimesis 1 is functionally collapsed; narrative must open in mimesis 2.
F4	Mimesis 2 performs a declarative bricolage: it calls anchors “into being,” re-plots the ruins, and thereby re-creates a usable mimesis 1.
F5	Only after this re-created mimesis 1 is in place can mimesis 3 occur and any deeper horizon (including sacramental meaning) potentially re-enter.
F6	During the opening phase, symbols can evoke transcendence only aesthetically; they cannot mediate grace efficaciously because sacramental mediation presupposes an already-operative mimesis 1. This means there is a point where people are cut off from it.

From F2 and F3, the chain of sacramental poesis is non-functional at the start. From F4 and F5, any later recovery of that chain depends entirely on a human act of re-signification. Therefore, in Ferguson’s retrograde sequence, the narrative’s initial stance is post-Christian in practice; transcendence lacks 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 “Somebody had better be remembering fragments” and “Fine building stones all around us,” suggest that some of the debris becomes intelligible the moment it is recalled and sparked. Ferguson, by contrast, describes the same fragments as “symbolically undecipherable” until a declarative act in mimesis 2 renames them.

Let's create a clarified table of “world senses” to serve as a diagnostic. The question we need to ask is whether Lafferty ever writes from a point where the pre-figurative horizon is completely erased, or whether a readable remnant persists in every world he creates.

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, by contrast, argues that this pre-figurative horizon has been “flattened” and “cannot even enact 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. In Ferguson’s scheme, The Fall of Rome and Okla Hannali become laboratories. Lafferty scavenges “bones and stones” that remain “inscrutable” until re-named in configuration (mimesis 2). Only after this bricolage can readers, in refiguration (mimesis 3), fuse their own horizon with the text and install a substitute mimesis 1—a humanly fabricated ground rather than a recovered sacramental continuum. The historical worlds the author fashions are initially immanent, since every symbolic anchor 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 Ricouer, 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 real historical destruction of those actual historical worlds, 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 rindkeld it from the pre-figurative depth that Flatland never fully levels. To twist a famous Faulkner quote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Or to quote Lafferty, there are no endings. It can’t end.

I think that Ferguson’s retrograde Ricouerian sequence has the consequence of 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 the fragments are “informationally dense yet symbolically undecipherable,” the sacramental horizon is functionally silent, and the story must begin in mimesis 2 on an immanent footing. Sacramental symbols transmit revelation only when they are decipherable; at the mimesis 2 stage, they can only imagine transcendence aesthetically.

And, as I have said, it's not necessary. In Ricoeur’s own model, mimesis 2 presupposes the competencies and symbolic networks of mimesis 1. Starting the hermeneutic reduplicating spiral without a functioning pre-figuration strains both Catholic sacramental logic and Ricoeur’s theory itself. Ricourer argues that hermeneutics 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, which is just to say that mimesis 2 is defined by its mediating function. That Ferguson traps Lafferty in an initial mimesis 2 is ironic since Ricouer created his theory out of intellectual frustration. 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.

A latent-mimesis reading like the one I have outlined here keeps Ricoeur’s three moments of mimesis in its original logical order. It also keeps Lafferty a metaphysically realist Christian fabulist whose world-making shows that shattered cultures can still mediate grace. I would add that this rests on creatio continua (conservatio in esse), whereby God continually sustains both the cosmos (world₁) and each person’s Lebenswelt (world₇).

"Lightning, a billion times as bright as that on Electric Mountain, a billion times as short in duration — does it lace the things together with its instantaneous fire, or sunder them forever? "

Two Ways to Read Lafferty Through Ricoeur

question	Ferguson’s retrograde reading	Latent-mimesis reading
Where does the story begin?	In mimesis 2 on a ground created by a fictive declaration that must rename the “bones and stones.”	In a wounded mimesis 1; debris is already meaningful though dormant. Configuration ignites what survives.
Status of mimesis 1 at the start	Collapsed and non-functional. It must be rebuilt after m₂.	Latent but present (world₁ and world₇ still carry sacramental depth).
Order of the spiral	m₂ → re-created m₁ → m₃.	m₁ (latent) → m₂ (world-building) → m₃.
How are fragments described?	“Informationally dense yet symbolically undecipherable” until renamed.	“Fine building stones” that are already readable once remembered and sparked.
Footing of early world-building	Initially immanent, purely semiotic.	Immediately open to sacramentality through surviving cosmic and experiential layers.
When can transcendence re-enter?	Only after the rebuilt m₁ is installed; optional, not guaranteed.	Always latent; grace can flash through the rubble from the first moment.
Theological consequence	Functional break in the chain creation–history–eschaton; risk of a secularist hermeneutic.	Chain is stretched but unbroken; Lafferty remains a Christian fabulist who shows grace mediating through ruins.
Ricoeur coherence test	Starts the spiral without the competencies of m₁, creating a tension in Ricoeur’s own model.	Keeps Ricoeur’s precedence of m₁ over m₂ and m₃ intact.

The Seven Worlds of “The Day After the World Ended”

label	compressed definition	key passage
world₁ – physical-cosmic	Material cosmos that can suffer “cosmic destructions.”	“Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds.”
world₂ – structured Western world	“Western/Modern Civilization,” ‘The World’ for a few centuries, ending somewhere between 1912 and 1962.	“…the end of the world in which we lived … still sometimes referred to as ‘Western Civilization’ or ‘Modern Civilization’.”
world₃ – any civilization-unit	A Toynbee-style culture that can burn and phoenix-rebirth.	“the historian Toynbee … grubbing into the depths of twenty-four separate civilizations or worlds.”
world₄ – post-world / Flatland	Unstructured, half-conscious limbo after world₂’s collapse—scarcely a world, yet the setting of the crisis.	“We are now in an unstructured era … in a post-conscious world … We’re living in Flatland.”
world₅ – literary / imagined world	Any internally coherent reality invented by prose, especially SF “world-building.”	“‘Sometimes [science fiction] designs new worlds.’ ”
world₆ – future world-to-come	A not-yet-realised civilization that sparks might kindle from present rubble.	“There will be … a new world, a new civilization-culture to follow …”
world₇ – personal experiential world	The individual Lebenswelt.	“I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made.”

Table A | From Residual Latency to World-Creation

mimetic moment	creation-oriented reading
Residual pre-figuration (m₁)	world₁ endures; world₇ survives though “half-conscious.” Ruins of world₂ and myths of world₃ lie dormant—material potential awaiting ignition.
Re-configuration (m₂)	Crisis: collapse of world₂ into world₄. Creative act: audience is exhorted to strike sparks that can invent world₆ from the dormant debris. SF conventions (world₅) supply cannibalised design tools.
Re-figuration (m₃)	Commissioning line—“If you are not right now making a world, why aren’t you?”—hands the creative work to readers. Appropriation succeeds because m₁, though latent, can be activated to support brand-new world-creation, not mere restoration.

Table B | Agreement & Divergence with Ferguson (2014)

#	analytic point	Ferguson	latent-creation view	relation
1	Status of m₁	Flatlanders lack any functional m₁	m₁ survives ontically but is dormant until sparked	disagree  (degree)
2	Symbolic debris	Ruins are “bones and stones,” undecipherable until renamed	Same debris is already readable once remembered and sparked	disagree  (function)
3	Mode of world-making	Anchors are called into being by fictive declaration cobbled from ruins	New world emerges by activating latent structures—creation through debris, not from nothing	partial disagree
4	SF conventions	Must be dissected and reincorporated	Same cannibal logic	agree
5	Reader collaboration	Fusion needs rebuilt horizons	Fusion works once dormant m₁ is stirred; collaboration builds world₆	agree + nuance
6	Spiral direction	Begins in m₂, reverses to m₁, then proceeds m₁ → m₂ → m₃	Canonical forward flow once latent m₁ sparks; local back-mapping only for decoding	mixed
7	Temporal grounding	Calendar stuck in an “infinitely indivisible present”; time objects persist but mean nothing	Damaged yet countable time becomes raw material for new chronology	partial
8	Ethical task	Violent interpretation clears space	Violent world-creation from leftover matter	agree

Table C | Speech Touchstones and “Latent-Creation” Reading

#	speech line	what it shows in the text	Ferguson’s spin	latent-creation spin
1	“Somebody had better be remembering fragments…”	Fragments undeniably exist.	Undeciphered until declared.	They’re potential creative stock.
2	“We are, partly at least, in a post-conscious world.”	Cognitive impairment, not total erasure (“partly at least”).	Treats this as a functional blackout of mimesis 1.	Calls it dormant awareness that can flare.
3	running jokes, quotations, exhortations	Shared symbols still work in live performance.	A paradox until a new ground is rebuilt.	Performance itself is the ignition act.
4	“Fine building stones all around us”	Ruins are already perceived as usable.	Bones & stones remain undeciphered.	They are proto-materials for new construction.
5	Stuck calendar reference	Time is distorted but still countable.	Evidence of a temporal void.	Raw chrono-material for a new era.
6	“Ideas to germinate and sparks to kindle”	The situation needs ignition.	Implies an almost ex nihilo fiat.	Spark = catalyst on latent debris.
7	Meta-title “Notes for a Speech Delivered the Day After…”	A dual vantage: Lafferty addresses fans from within Flatland’s day-after and from an outer rhetorical frame.	Highlights the in-story zero ground; outer frame only underscores how deep the loss is.	Two horizons: the rhetorical layer sparks diegetic creation; the speaker is simultaneously “in” Flatland and able to point beyond it.

value-added =	deeper readings of Lafferty’s corpus
Textual fidelity	Thinking of Flatland’s wreckage not as an absence but as latent energy helps explain how Lafferty’s blend of folklore, patristics, and tall-tale humor still resonates in his bleakest settings. This view extends to his stories where ruin and absurdity do not halt the symbolic interplay but instead drive it into deeper, stranger forms.
Theoretical coherence with Ricoeur	By letting mimesis₂ presuppose a wounded yet present mimesis₁, we gain a systematic way to track how Lafferty’s plots repeatedly jump from broken worlds to exuberant invention. It supplies a stable hermeneutic spine for reading the whole oeuvre, not just one speech.
Middle-way synthesis	Casting the “bones and stones” as sparks-in-waiting reconciles Lafferty’s apocalyptic rhetoric with his stubborn hopefulness.
Transferable heuristic (“latent scaffolding → ignition → new world-building”)	This three-step pattern leads readers to ask direct questions about the latent elements it brings to light. It serves as a tool for tracing thematic arcs throughout the full span of Lafferty’s work.