“The World as Will and Wallpaper” (1973)
- Jon Nelson
- Mar 5, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: May 25, 2025
“So long as a man was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring consciousness that the chestnut color of his hair was relieved against the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he were a piece of exquisitely colored cardboard." —G. K. Chesterton, “William Morris and His School,” Twelve Types: A Book of Essays
“The spirit of William Morris has not seized hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. And this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not the supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from the Beast and the fairy tale had a different ending.” Ibid.
“There is even some evidence that ‘Flatlands’ are the more usual conditions, and that the worlds with heights and structures are the exceptions. Even if we could go back there, a time machine from Flatland and eyes from Flatland would not be able to see dimensions not contained in Flatland.”—Lafferty, “The Day the World Ended” (1979)
Yesterday’s post looked at Lafferty’s genius for making flat characters work in his fiction. Today, I want to think about a character who is literally flat—Will, from Lafferty’s 1973 masterpiece, "The World As Will and Wallpaper." If you know the story, you know it’s a kaleidoscopic satire of utopia—a tour de force of manic verbal energy and decoration, even for R. A. Lafferty.
Lafferty’s wordplay on “Will” and Schopenhauer’s concept of Vorstellung deserves a few moments of attention because of how Lafferty plays with both meanings: Will is the name of the story’s main character, and it is the force Schopenhauer saw as driving all existence.
To understand Lafferty’s use of ‘Will,’ it helps to revisit Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation—a work that builds on Kant’s distinction between phenomena (what appears to us) and noumena (things-in-themselves). Kant argued that while objects exist independently of us, we can only experience them as they appear, since our perception is shaped by the innate structures of the mind—the pure forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of understanding. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer contended that noumena is not wholly unknowable; rather, its true nature is Will, a single, restless force that underlies all appearances. (Kantian scholars, from Jacobi to the present, have debated how Kant himself conceptualized noumena.)
For most of us, our whole world is Vorstellung—a representation shaped by the structures of our minds, which makes it a kind of illusion. Schopenhauer simplified Kant’s complex categories into his fourfold principle of reason and made a big claim: noumena is not many but one—Will, the restless force behind all existence and suffering
The philosopher tries to tear away the wallpaper to find peace with noumena. One way to do this is through aesthetic contemplation, which allows us to escape from the tyranny of Will. Here is Schopenhauer:
"When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from the thralldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively, as mere objects of contemplation, not of will. Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on the path of the desires, comes of its own accord and we are, for that moment, happy."
In "The World as Will and Wallpaper," all this matters. There is the character Will, the historical figure William Morris, the Schopenhauerian Will, and the nature of aesthetic contemplation. A fierce critique of Morris—brilliant wallpaper artist among many other things—and his aesthetic theory takes shape. Lafferty smashes Morris (the maker of wallpaper) against Schopenhauer (the critic of wallpaper, Vorstellung). The result? A rupture—Lafferty punching straight through the wallpaper, tearing it open from the inside.
Complicating matters further, William Morris was himself the author of The Wood Beyond the World (1894), the very place Lafferty’s character Will is seeking. Just as Morris’s Golden Walter in The Wood Beyond the World is driven forth by a cacoëthes, so too is Lafferty’s Will—though in this case, by the Will.
Where Morris’s novel imagines a kind of medieval utopia, Lafferty sees utopia as entrapment. In his story, the utopian ideal collapses into decorative sameness. The Will does not lead to transcendence but to repetition—a mechanized cycle in which aesthetic play dissolves into mindless pattern.
The other half of this is Lafferty’s favorite writer, G.K. Chesterton, whose thoughts on Morris helped shape Lafferty’s own ideas—and, in turn, the story itself. In a letter reflecting on the many Chestertons who made up the great big Chesterton (cartoonist, speaker, Latinist, reporter, fiction writer, poet, and so forth), Lafferty wrote:
"Many of the strange and fascinating passages and puzzles in the stories are Chesterton arguing with himself . . .”
The same, surely, could be said of Lafferty in this story.
"The World as Will and Wallpaper
“ draws on Chesterton’s critique of William Morris in Twelve Types—and I strongly suspect the story idea originated from a line in that essay.:
"He [William Morris] seemed really to believe that men could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity.”
Chesterton’s assessment of Morris was complicated. He admired Morris’s achievements as an artist and praised him for reviving the fairy tale. But he also saw him as a figure strangely out of step with his time—someone who did not merely create beauty but sought to impose it on every utilitarian aspect of modern life.
As Chesterton puts it, Morris wanted even the most banal objects—from nails to everyday clothes—to be aesthetically pleasing, and he pursued this ambition relentlessly through the ceaseless work of the Arts & Crafts Movement.
In Lafferty, the planet-wide City is a grotesque literalization of this aspect of William Morris. It is a colossal act of “Will” that has ironically ended up as a cheap, mass-produced stencil—the way kitsch hollows out fresh artistic forms and fills them with the vacuous, for instance, turning French Impressionism to knockoffs hanging on the wall of Denny’s. The City is a wallpaper pattern repeating endlessly. The scheme that might have started as an Arts-and-Crafts paradise but winds up a mechanized sprawl.
Morris asks, “Why shouldn’t we make the daily objects of life as artistic as possible?” Chesterton answers:
"It may surely be maintained that any real advance in the beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of the life we lead.”
As much as Morris brought beauty into the world, something Chesterton writes about beautifully, Morris was not a man of his time. Morris sought to wrest beauty from the past, while Chesterton believed true beauty must arise naturally from the present. Again,
"Morris’s disadvantage was that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he could not understand its fascination, and consequently he could not really develop its beauty.”
Chesterton is saying that Morris’s beauty was imperfect because it lacked the completion of having arisen from authentic forms of life and a living tradition.
In Lafferty’s hands, this becomes the City—a funhouse nightmare, a global exercise in self-defeating aestheticist design, grotesquely and artificially alive. The City literalizes Chesterton’s warning that a comprehensive aesthetic overlay detached from living tradition will flatten human complexity into something repetitive and stenciled.
Lafferty takes all these elements—Morris’s utopian vision and aesthetic practice, Chesterton’s critique of Morris, and Schopenhauer’s Will—and does something magical with them. He shows how, instead of leading to escape through the aesthetic (Schopenhauer’s contemplation or Morris’s utopian escapism), the City’s all-consuming Will turns life into repetition.
Of this sort of thing, Schopenhauer writes:
It is really incredible how meaningless and insignificant when seen from without, and how dull and senseless when felt from within, is the course of life of the great majority of men. It is weary longing and worrying, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts. They are like clockwork that is wound up and goes without knowing why. Every time a man is begotten and born the clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.
Lafferty captures this in "The World As Will and Wallpaper":
Ah, it was not the same 3rd Street [Will] had once visited before; almost the same but not exactly.
He deepens it:
. . . and thereat William went into a sort of panic. But why should he? It was not the same stencil number at all. The World City might still be everywhere different.
Finally, he lays it bare:
“Does it all repeat itself again and again and again?” William asked this man in great anguish. “Are the sections of it the same over and over again?” “Not quite,” the man said. “The grease marks on it are sometimes a little different.” “My name is William Morris,” William began once more bravely. “Oh, sure. A William Morris is the easiest type of all to spot,” the man said.
Lafferty would no doubt agree with Chesterton that Morris awakened people to the need for beauty in daily life but failed to account for the deep 'wildness' in humanity—and that beauty, when it arises from a breathing tradition, expands into dimensions beyond the decorative.
Chesterton's essay on William Morris:
Current notes:
