Counterargument

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality." — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny

This will be the last I have to say about Lafferty’s Holocaust denial for a while, unless it becomes directly relevant to an argument about a specific story.

I have thought a great deal about what an intellectually serious counterargument to my work on Lafferty and Holocaust denial would require, as any responsible person would. The first and most significant obstacle is that any pushback cannot begin with my interpretation; it must start with the evidence itself. A counterargument would have to confront the archival record at the University of Tulsa and invalidate it or qualify its significance. This means offering a credible, evidence-based reason to dismiss Lafferty’s January 24, 1990 letter—a detailed document—as something other than what it is: a statement about a history of belief, belief going back to when Lafferty first heard about the Holocaust. You could not simply call the letter provocation on Lafferty’s part without ignoring the context of his personal library, which contained the Holocaust denial literature from the IHR that I documented and others have known about. Any argument that does not, or cannot, neutralize this primary source evidence is not a serious rebuttal about Lafferty’s history of categorical denial. It is evasion.

Second, if you concede the facts of Lafferty’s personal beliefs yet dispute the direction of my reading of his fiction—namely, that the absence of the Jewish Holocaust is both real and meaningful—you must explain why that absence is not a significant element of the work’s meaning. The burden then shifts to your interpretation: it must be strong enough to counter Lafferty’s act of erasure.

With The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, you would need to offer a more compelling and comprehensive account of the novel’s strange architecture than the one I have proposed. You must reckon with the dozen parallel strategies I have identified and explain why they project the denialist arguments Lafferty internalized onto the fragility of historical consensus. Why are historical records called “second-class evidence”? Why is Hitler’s primary role that of an artist? And above all, why is the imagery of cremation furnaces relocated to a street theater? Why does Lafferty deny the Holocaust in prose nearly identical to his novel’s, merely substituting “Jews” for things that were burned up? Your reading must explain these details with greater coherence than the denialist reading does. Simply calling my analysis a “stretch” is not an argument; I am identifying denialist echoes in a work by a man who denied the Holocaust. Lafferty created it to make his vision of the twentieth century legible to intelligent readers. It was a summa of his century; he himself called it a complete history.

Finally, you might resort to damage-control strategies. I have called this secular quarantine—not only because it renders Lafferty more palatable to secular readers by muting his extreme views, but because it distorts the politico-religious ideology that led him to exclude the Holocaust from his art. Damage control strategies are not rebuttals of my central claim. You could try to quarantine Holocaust denial as a late-life failing, a bitterness that took hold only in his final years, but Lafferty’s own words—“I never did accept”—and the 1977 publication date of Three Armageddons make that position historically untenable. You could insist on separating the art from the artist. While I understand the impulse and think we ought to do this in most cases of art, my core argument is that, in this specific case, such a separation is a critical impossibility. The denialism is not a stain on the work; it is in the work’s blueprint. To separate the two is to misunderstand what the art does. The Three Armageddons is Lafferty fully in control of his genius, one of his masterpieces, so this is a critical problem.

To push back, a serious counterargument would need to go to the foundation of what I’ve said. It would need to show that the archival evidence is either biographically or artistically unimportant. Then it would have to offer a stronger, more complete literary reading—one that explains more and does it better. Picking at minor points would miss the mark, because my aim has never been to be unassailable. My aim has been to stay true to the record and to show how serious this issue is for Lafferty’s legacy and for the people who care about that legacy. I am willing—even eager—to change my mind about one of my favorite writers. But so far, no one who thinks seriously about Lafferty has made a good case. In fact, everyone has been silent.