Literary Lafferty

“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987

I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quickly. If you aren’t interested in the question of Lafferty and literary value, then this post isn’t for you. I'm going to think through a few things.

If you read this blog, you will notice a specific methodology running through my posts: I take Lafferty seriously as a literary artist. I wanted to say a little about that. My thinking about how to read literature over the last decade has been heavily informed by Peter Lamarque’s Philosophy of Literature (2009). There are books that clear a lot of rubbish that builds up in one’s mind like a controlled burn, and Lamarque did that for me on the issue of literary value. For a long time, talking about literary value was off the table. In the doctoral program I attended, a leading postcolonialist with several University of Chicago publications behind her was leading a small seminar with four of us, and something happened that has stuck with me. We were a small cohort of six, and one of us, a female graduate student, had received news that her mother had committed suicide the day before. For whatever reason, the student decided not to skip or excuse herself from the seminar that week. We were reading several hundred pages of 18th-century economic ephemera, all of it with little literary value. When we discussed a brief fantasy about a coin's journey through England, the professor turned to the student and asked for her thoughts. The student, clearly not thinking clearly, made a terrible mistake. She said, “It isn’t very good.” Of course, none of us were reading the material because it was good, but because we were trying to understand the fictional representation of economics. The professor decided it was a moment to eviscerate her. The professor said, “What is good?” After about 10 minutes of horsewhipping, the female student excused herself, dropped out of the program, and blocked all contact with everyone in it. At that moment, I knew I would have an answer to the question, even if it was contentious, and Lamarque has helped me here.

According to Lamarque, literary value is best understood from within a practice of reading works as literature (as art). You assume there is value. This is a bit like Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, refusing to start with skepticism and saying that it leads to despair. Start arguing with Sextus Empiricus, and you are not going to get anywhere. Lamarque then argues that value judgments are guided by shared expectations about what such literary works are like and what kinds of attention they reward.

In this account, value is not a detachable property. He says it “resides in the quality of the experience a work yields,” especially along two broad dimensions. These are what I want to look at in regard to Lafferty’s extremely odd literary project. The first dimension is the “imaginativeness or creativity evident in the design of the work.” The second is “the richness of its content at both subject and thematic levels.” In other words, a work’s value is inextricably connected to (i) how its form is made—its organization, structure, and craft—and (ii) how its content develops toward themes that support reflection well beyond the immediate subject matter.

On the thematic side, I rely on Lamarque's distinction between a theme as a bare proposition and a theme as something enacted through a work’s particulars. That is why you see on the blog many diagrams and tables meant to make navigating Lafferty’s extraordinary informational density much easier. The “triviality” problem—the idea that themes look banal once abstracted into slogans—arises when we treat themes as worldly generalizations detachable from the work. No one should need to read To Kill a Mockingbird to know that racism is bad or Crime and Punishment to know that murder, if you are a normal person, is going to take a toll on your psychology. For my purposes, the relevant value question is usually how a theme is “worked,” how it develops through immense detail. That goes beyond the standalone proposition one might extract from it. I sometimes put a Lafferty theme in country-simple terms, but I would never say that Lafferty’s literary value depends on the propositional encapsulation of didactic material. I just think Lafferty is didactic. He cannot help himself. Put differently, the theme’s contribution to value is not that it supplies a maxim, but that it organizes attention, binds disparate elements, and promotes reflection as the reader tracks the theme’s transformations across the work. I think Lafferty is exceptionally interesting because of how what I call the Whole Lafferty rewards this kind of approach.

It also places interpretation at the center of value. Lamarque has a pretty basic description of interpretation. He calls it a practice of “construal” in which readers assign significance to details that might otherwise look incidental. That assignment of significance provides reasons to attend to the text, and the value of a work depends on whether such attention is rewarded rather than frustrated. In other words, read a post and see if the details have been marshalled in a way that reorganizes your attention in a way that rewards it. Evaluation will then become inseparable from interpretation. What I try to evaluate when reading Lafferty is features as they act under a construal—for example, tracking a motif to see how its development contributes to an overall vision, which, in Lafferty’s case, if we are reading him on his own terms, is his quaint Catholic vision, which is always exploring the unfilled-out parts of the Magisterium. The other day, I read a scribble of his on a page where he wrote to himself, “It is all happening at once,” as if to remind himself of this, or as if he was shocked, once again, by how estranging that is and how he wants to capture it in his experiments with metaphysics.

On the side of form, I treat design, form, and structure as more than optional ornaments, which is (obviously) not at all unusual for readers who enjoy writing as literature. In some of the posts here on Wittgenstein and attention, I’ve talked about the importance of seeing aspects. These design, form, and structure elements are central to reading literature as art that brings out ground and figure. Appreciating a work as literature, in my view, involves appreciating it as an artifact, as a linguistic structure. That puts me in the formalist camp. I am always asking how elements hang together to produce effects, acting on an assumption—a “Principle of Functionality”—that aspects of the design are not arbitrary. For this reason, the blog is likely to annoy the hell out of anyone who thinks, “Who are you to ascribe intention to Lafferty?” All I can say is that I think reading as an analytic institution necessitates this way of reading. This is an institutional/works-based notion of intention, not one of psychological ascription. If we accept something like the intentional fallacy or the death of the author, we create the problem of being self-sealing formalists or people who have lost the category of literature as something that is value-laden and normative. This holds true even when the surface seems disorderly, whimsical, or weird, as in works that deliberately play with apparent disorganization. But that is just where I land as a reader.

Lafferty’s novels of the 1970s went (arguably) too far in this direction, especially some of the unpublished ones and The Elliptical Grave. What Lafferty ended up doing, I think, was coming out of that and seeing that he would use what he had learned by binding what he learned from them tightly to genre constraints, as if he was circling back to the early work, but this time as a wiser writer. So he no longer writes Iron Tongue of Midnight or Dark Shine, and he writes space operas like Annals of Klepsis or Arabian fantasies like Sindbad: The 13th Voyage. That is a formalist conclusion, but despite how it might look, formal analysis is not my final aim. It is a necessary stage toward assessing interest and value, what in a conversation with Daniel Otto Jack Petersen I have called the importance of having a logocentric Lafferty even if one wants to qualify or reject much of it: macrostructure or canon structure will always matter because it contributes to our perception of what the piecework work achieves, and because literary works are treated as “structured designs” when read as literature rather than mere sequences of events or statements. I believe Lafferty when he said he was writing one work, the Ghost Story.

At the same time, this type of thinking rejects the idea that literariness can be reduced to a single formal-linguistic marker (such as foregrounding, semantic density, tall-tale panache, humor, or stylistic oddity). Such properties occur both inside and outside literature, and some highly valued literary works are completely transparent in style. The upshot is that form cannot be reduced to a checklist of linguistic features that automatically confer literary status. Lafferty’s relentless innovation of form shows that he appreciated this with unusual intensity. What is required is an account of how the writing—broadly conceived to include narrative technique and structural invention—becomes salient and supports “a search for layers of meaning.”

I think all this is relevant to Lafferty. His reputation is so often managed through genre categories. Lamarque's 2009 book talks about this boundary issue by asking why “literature as art” would exclude “genre novels like murder mysteries or sci-fi.” It’s one of the reasons I think it’s probably a bad idea to try to get Lafferty appreciated as a science fiction writer, or genre artist, of importance, versus a literary artist of importance. The mere fact that a work is marketed or shelved as science fiction does not, by itself, settle whether it rewards literary expectations about design and theme. But you know this already because you like Lafferty. On the institutional account summarized above, the question is whether the work merits the kinds of interpretive attention characteristic of literary appreciation, and whether its value is realized through creativity of form and richness of thematic development. The only way to show that is to produce interpretations that go far beyond appreciation or celebration.

That is really this hobby blog in a nutshell: just an ongoing collection of evidence that Lafferty can and should be read in exactly that way. I try to show how his work is a designed total artifact whose details repay construal, and how his body of writing is organized by serious thematic concerns rather than by disposable plot premises, and how he is driven by a mania for formal innovation.

In the recent “Building Blocks” post, I thought it might be useful to stake out some methodological commitments, so I spelled out that I approach Lafferty as “fundamentally a metaphysical writer” who uses fiction to make claims about reality. I treat his humor and excess as serious games rather than ends, and I read his stories as ontological thought-experiments and tests a reader is meant to undergo. The point is what follows when a particular view of reality is allowed to run until it breaks. This is already a thematically serious picture in the sense relevant to Lamarque's framework, because Lafferty’s metaphysical content aims at “broad human interest” and at deep reflection on what is real, what is counterfeit, what kinds of beings exist, and how worlds can be metaphysically sealed or open.

In that same post, I argued that Lafferty writes against the constraining megatext of science fiction by trying to bypass its habits. That seems to me one of the reasons that he gets harder as he develops as a writer. It is one reason I make the tactical decision to not treat him as a genre artist or to read his career through SF, as important as that is as a secondary operation. His escape route is a countervailing inherited structure of meanings (the Christian tradition, including marginal gnostic strands) and, centrally, eschatology. Whether or not a reader accepts every element of this view, the important point is that where most people seem to see a discrete series of brilliant performances (I would make an exception for a few Lafferty critics here), I see a stable set of organizing thematic preoccupations that are not reducible to single propositions. Instead, they are the Ghost Story motifs of his works: time, personhood, counterfeit worlds, the status of a shared reality, and the intrusion of the eternal into the present. That is the kind of thematic “unity and value” beyond immediacy that we find when we read works as literature.

I also probably fail at this most of the time, but I try to give concrete instances regarding how Lafferty explores surrendering language and agency to control and to controlling machines. I see rereading as a process by which Lafferty’s Gnostic satire becomes even clearer on repeated reading, and one of my private tests of a Lafferty story world is how fully the “archons have already won” (the archons can be government, media, any number of things) and how characters have surrendered the logos to omnipresent, impersonal systems. I do not present this as a detachable, bumper-sticker message like “technology is bad” or “machines dehumanize us.” Lafferty clearly had a very complicated view of persons and machines, especially AI. I try to show how this configures how details are seen: who controls meaning, what it would mean for a machine to lie, what happens when language detaches from forms of life, what machines should count as persons, and what machines should not. That means the blog has a lot of pattern spotting. As with any piece of literature, a story’s value lies in how the theme is developed through particulars. What appears as a plot device becomes, under interpretation, a center of gravity that orders the reader’s attention and sustains rereading.

Some examples. My post “Some Thoughts about ‘Through Other Eyes’” makes the relation between form and theme overt. I argue that Lafferty uses a rare stretch of limited third-person not just to make a general claim about people having private worlds, but also as a critique of the technologically mediated invasion of subjectivity, the misuse of personal data, and a warning against the mechanical attempt to bypass the mystery of other persons. I support this by pointing to the story’s own language about the shock of sudden perfect understanding. This is an example of a thematic interest that invites deeper, more far-reaching reflection, with the narrative perspective itself being part of the work’s design rather than a neutral delivery system. It is also an example of how evaluation depends on interpretation: the value of the limited third-person passage goes beyond a bare narratological fact. It is a feature whose effectiveness is assessed under a construal that links it to the theme of perspective and personhood.

Similarly, in trying to think a little about Space Chantey, I argue Lafferty is not just decorating prose with couplets. He is using the couplet to generate the novel as he goes. I try to show how he throws the couplet form at the reader (especially the classical couplet tradition as parody) as an intellectual knife whose balance, antithesis, and satirical shape can control pacing, juxtaposition, and narrative energy. That is the power of the couplet, with its fierce powers of closure. This is an instance of the imposition of form on subject in the strong sense of that idea. Lafferty makes an eccentric design choice that organizes the work and alters which effects and meanings are available. The Space Chantey couplets are not arbitrary eccentricities, but purposive components whose role must be tracked if the work is to be appreciated as a whole.

My post on “Marsilia V” develops a different kind of formal claim. There, I argue that Lafferty introduces one or two images in a story that will be a compacted map of the story. Andrew Ferguson has also recognized this feature in Lafferty. This is a description of a repeatable structural device (what I call “iconographic insetting”) that is not reducible to style at the sentence level. It is a claim about how meaning is distributed and constrained, shaping interpretation. Readers need to notice it if they are going to track innovation and the theme's significance. It makes certain elements salient. It invites the reader to assign significance. It produces unity by letting later details be read as developments of a formally planted key. In Lafferty, this can be simple. In the novels, it becomes incredibly complicated, something I have not written much about yet because I am trying to cover the short stories first.

A major part of the blog is the Medieval understanding of allegory, crossed with ideas I take from Northrop Frye, because he seems to me the most helpful person for understanding what Lafferty is doing. In “Lafferty and the Sliding Scale of Allegory,” I take Frye’s idea that allegory ranges from overt and continuous to elusive and anti-allegorical, and I emphasize a category where allegory appears and disappears at the author’s pleasure rather than being continuous. In "Building Blocks," I connect this directly to an interpretive stance on Lafferty: his allegory is meant to be wobbly, because in its most ambitious forms, it aims at the highest form of Catholic allegory, anagogy.

“Reading The Elliptical Grave” connects Lafferty’s formal invention to thematic significance without reducing either to surface weirdness. I think Lafferty is weird, but we need ways of talking about that weirdness, so I point out that after the opening chapter, Lafferty refuses any further hand-holding. The novel’s core belief (humanity’s decline from primordial magnificence) defines the terms of the expedition narrative. I argue that the ellipse is both a metaphysical concept (projection, viewpoint, time linkage) and a principle shaping the reader’s experience. Lafferty writes like a mad engineer. He loves engineering our reading experience to reflect the confusion of being inside the elliptical grave. This instantiates the idea that disorder in Lafferty can be systematically cashed out, relying on devices that connect narrative episodes to a broader metaphysical frame—again, a case of theme as an organizing principle.

Finally, one thing I often try to do is supply methodological evidence that Lafferty’s oddness is not just a private taste for eccentricity. It is a developing set of craft features that can be tracked and evaluated. That led me to write the “Hermeneutic Thoughts” post, in which I argue that when Lafferty is confusing, the first critical question is not “why is this hard?” but “why would someone do it this way?” There, I set out the two important rhetorical strategies I have found in thinking with Lafferty: pragmatic markers (producing an effect of oracy and plainspokenness even when the content is obscure) and counterfiguration (where the reader must ask what the opposite would be and why Lafferty chooses the counter-figure). I also argue that Lafferty is architectonic in his figuration. When we pay attention to these features, we are not thinking in a narrow, stylistic sense, but are looking for an organized set of techniques that guide the search for meaning, techniques which can be critically assessed for how well they focus the reader's attention, explain the work being read, and unify that work’s effects.

Taken together, the evidence I have presented on the blog is meant to support the basic claim that Lafferty satisfies the two core dimensions of literary value. I could answer the postcolonialist professor why I think Lafferty is good. On the content side, Lafferty was pursuing persistent, serious thematic concerns—the metaphysics of reality and counterfeit worlds, personhood, time, the status of a shared world, and language as logos and social ground. On the form side, he innovated the structure of his narratives to a level that should be recognized as genius. Literary value? It begins with those two dimensions of innovation and the significance of theme. Of course, other writers have long recognized that Lafferty scores high on both dimensions.