William Blake and R. A. Lafferty

There are few direct personal statements on this blog, although everything here probably reveals something about me. About Lafferty’s Holocaust denial, I want to be on record 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 need to face the issue directly. If they do not, they are just talented fans. That is not necessarily a problem. But fandom is not the same as scholarship. Academic writing imposes constraints on how one engages with a subject. Those constraints do not apply to publicists, or to what people in public relations call flacks.

This site is my hobby blog. It includes elements of both fandom and flack. I understand why someone might see my approach to Lafferty’s traditionalism as being flackish, but I try to call it as I see it. I also have some academic training, and that training carries a particular ethos, even in informal settings. It is poor judgment, weak ethics, and intellectual vanity to think that major facts about a subject such as Holocaust denial should be withheld until the right frame is in place. The honest move is to state the fact clearly. The interpretations will follow. That is the correct order.

The Modern Language Organization puts it this way: "As a community valuing free inquiry, we must be able to rely on the integrity and the good judgment of our members." Knowing that a writer you specialize in was a Holocaust denier, and choosing not to say so for a decade, or a half decade, or just years, is not good judgment. It does not support free inquiry. It means in this important area you have failed your subject, your colleagues, and your profession.

In seeking to understand Lafferty and Holocaust denial, I inevitably situate my reflections within my own experience as a reader. This process is personal and associative—something that offers me a small point of purchase. One of the writers I think about most when reading Lafferty is the nonconforming Protestant and visionary William Blake, with whom I have long thought about as an eighteenth-centuryist.

Like Blake, Lafferty has a cosmological imagination. There are aspects of Blake’s character I find deeply off-putting. He was a celebrant of the French Revolution, which I regard as a cultural catastrophe; yet he was such a visionary genius that it would be madness not to recognize the vastness of his artistic and religious imagination.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 not so complicated 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. His sacramental imagination allowed him to see everything above Ulro in endlessly transformative ways. I think of Lafferty as a kind of folk classicist, yet one infused with a distinctly Catholic Romanticism unlike anything else in literature. That, more than anything, is why I find him so compelling. It elevates him from being a figure in science fiction history to a writer who deserves to be read as literature. What he did not see is that the Holocaust was one of the triumphs of what Blake called Ulro, an extension of the instrumental logic of the factory system, which reduced persons to units of production and, in its darkest turn, to units of destruction.