Late Night Thought

A late-night thought. The readers I think of most often when working on Lafferty are Andrew Ferguson, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, and Gregorio Montejo. Ferguson’s archival work is essential. His chief readerly contribution, so far, is to ask how fiction makes worlds. I think his main philosophical argument cuts off Lafferty from Catholic ontology. A subsidiary question, important to SF scholars and fans, concerns genre history; that is often where Ferguson’s readings come to rest, with biographical coloring. Petersen asks a different question: what monstrous ecological world is this, and how might we become metaphysically imaginative enough to inhabit it? What does Lafferty teach us about being human in such weird world—and how do we know it is weird since we only have this world—a place where we both find and make ourselves, yet remain cognitively blind? How does he make a brain fizz? Montejo’s question is how can Catholicism help us understand Lafferty, which is near my interests, but he does not seem to see Lafferty as an Augustinian artist who delights in Catholic discomfort. Like Flannery O’Connor, Lafferty is, for me, a savage artist of Catholic discomfort. O’Connor will always have her artificial nigger and her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Milledegville, and Lafferty will always have his Jews and funny uncles. It doesn’t make her less of an artist. Same for him. Her ironies always verge on the Manichaean, his the gnostic. O’Connor makes the reader pass through the Manichaean nightmare. Lafferty makes the reader pass through the gnostic nightmare. One ought to keep both in view. My own question is, what happens when a Catholic artist of counterfeit worlds counterfeits reality at the very moral points where reality matters, and yet still gets so much artistically right? What canons of interpretation did Lafferty hold himself accountable to? Are those the ones that would make him the most intelligible?