Problematic Lafferty

"How about Plutarch’s Lives for the one book. No, it isn’t affectation to reach that far back. It is my belief that Plutarch invented the Novel as well as the biography in this. There were fifty short or medium-length novels here (the degree of fiction in them can’t be determined now) and they are good. He invented narration as distinguished from rhetoric and a few other things. He was the world’s best novelist (Balzac comes in second) and nineteen hundred years haven’t done him any harm at all. Part of him may be slipping away: he invented the concept of the Great Man, the Hero, and that erodes a little bit now. But nothing takes its place but a vacancy." — Interview with R. J. Whitaker, MAYBE THEY NEEDED KILLING & THE IMPORTANCE OF HAPPINESS

Today while working through something I noticed in Lafferty (Julius Brass’s involvement in what looks like the Bretton Woods System in Green Tree), I ran into the question of antisemitism again. I started thinking about Roadstrum, and then I thought of Plutarch's Gryllus, who argued with Odysseus that it was better to be an ensorcelled pig than a man. Gryllus is Plutarch’s version of John Stuart Mills’s pig satisfied. Gryllus saw his pleasures as if they were an indefesiable transcendental limit. If you know Lafferty, you know from interviews and his fiction that Plutarch was one of his favorite writers.

Someone said about problematic Lafferty, “What I enjoy transcends the problematic elements.” To that, what can one say? I, too, enjoy Lafferty. It is a matter of measure. It is your ice cream cone. No one asks you to know what went into making your treat. Enjoyment is not understanding, and no one asked you to understand anything at all. Others can use the antisemitism tag on the blogn read about the archival record and how the issues have been addressed by Lafferty academics, and work toward having an informed opinion.