William Blake and R. A. Lafferty

I rarely make personal posts on this blog, though I suppose everything I write here reveals something about me. Still, I think it’s worth setting out something with maximum clarity. I read Lafferty with a kind of double vision, and I believe two things about him are equally true:

1. R.A. Lafferty was a literary genius of unparalleled imagination and insight.

2. R.A. Lafferty was a crank on aspects of conspiratorial history who embraced a grotesque and evil lie.

Critics who write about him will either have to face this directly or risk confining themselves to the realm of fandom. For my part, I think the best way to read any writer is clear-eyed, so that the fannish enthusiasm is grounded rather than evasive.

One of the writers I think about most when reading Lafferty is non-conforming Protestant and crank William Blake, someone I’ve spent thousands of hours reading and thinking about. There are many aspects of Blake’s character I find off-putting, but he was such a visionary genius that it would be madness not to appreciate the scope of his artistic and religious powers. Blake spoke of fourfold vision, a complicated scheme when put into practice in works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, but, in essence, a way of understanding how our perception of reality falls into four aspects: Jerusalem, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro.

These can be summarized as follows:

Jerusalem

• Represents the divine city of imagination and vision.

• A symbol of unity, spiritual freedom, and creativity.

• Often personified as a female figure (the emanation of Albion, Blake’s archetypal human).

• The opposite of slavery, materialism, and division.

Beulah

• A state of dreamlike repose and mutual forgiveness.

• A peaceful, imaginative realm where contraries can coexist without conflict.

• Not the highest state (it remains a dream world), but a gentle resting place of the soul.

• In biblical terms, “Beulah” (from Isaiah) means “married,” signifying harmony and union.

Generation

• The world of physical existence: sex, birth, and death.

• Bound to time, cycles, and material nature.

• For Blake, this is the fallen condition of humanity, trapped in mortality’s repetition.

• In sharp contrast to the eternal imaginative states (like Jerusalem).

Ulro

• The lowest state: hellish materialism, mechanization, and spiritual death.

• A world of despair, where imagination is denied and only cold reason or material gain remains.

• Associated with Blake’s figure Urizen, the tyrant of law and sterile rationality.

• In Ulro, humans are enslaved to selfhood and blindness.

Once one has a grip on this scheme, Blake becomes legible in ways otherwise impossible. One begins to see why he detested Locke as a demon straight out of Ulro.

Like Blake, Lafferty was an enemy of Ulro. But his sacramental imagination meant he saw everything above it in ways that were endlessly transformative. I tend to think of Lafferty as a folk classicist, yet with a distinctly Catholic Romanticism unlike anything else in literature. That, more than anything, is why I find him so fascinating—not merely as a figure in science fiction history, but as a writer worth reading as literature.