Lafferty’s postscript to More Than Melchisedech, whose importance can hardly be overstated because it I read Lafferty as an artist who uses anti-foundationalism as a narrative tactic while remaining neither are exactly Aristotle’s “ur-stuff”: raw matter whose actuality arrives only when Lafferty later supplies Lafferty as Sub-Creator: Like Duffey in More Than Melchisedech, Lafferty plays the demiurge within his the unattainable "it," the hidden Seven Years, the dream of the perfected ship—all point to a lost wholeness

Lafferty wrote the unpublished “Pomponia” in 1958, when he was trying to break into different markets , and, like some of the stories he wrote for that purpose, it is both unmistakably Lafferty and somewhat askew from the Lafferty we know. Others have noted that it demonstrates Lafferty's formal inventiveness. Lafferty at his lightest and least demanding.

Rather, it closely parallels Lafferty’s thinking about amnesia. That is all Fort, but it sure sounds like Lafferty. Can there be any doubt that Lafferty noticed this in Fort? On the whole, it is a characteristic example of early-twentieth-century English Catholic intellectual Lafferty couldn't be counterfiguring harder.

Picking up on yesterday’s post and the theme of Gnosticism, I want to look at its presence in Lafferty Lafferty often extracts elements of Gnostic thought and builds spectacularly upon them, shaping strange "The All-At-Once Man" belongs to Lafferty’s Men Who Knew Everything cycle. Lafferty plays with Aeonic concepts, blurring Sophia (Wisdom) and Zoe (Life). unique couple taking their pleasures together all at once forever, and so violently as to drive the whole

. — Letter So one question that may occur to a Lafferty reader is this: with all the Antichrist fever I thought I would set down a few thoughts on the way Lafferty handles the Antichrist theme, because it There are at least five ways Lafferty spins all this: the Antichrist as an in-family genetic creation He assembles the whole operation without letting any member know. At the destruction of Spacious City in the novel, when the whole antichrist rehearsal falls apart, Lafferty

Unlike some other unpublished Lafferty stories, “Whittle Come Back” does not work. Lafferty does not seem to know what he wanted to write here. readers how to think about Lafferty's revision process. For whatever reason, Lafferty muscled through with Snowball. One wishes Lafferty had brought it to a more finished state.

—Martin Heidegger A passing comment on the Lafferty Facebook group East of Laughter has me thinking about Returning to Coldturkey’s “garish orange eyes,” they may also explain Lafferty’s repeated use of the And then there is its final, doubled appearance, Lafferty banging the drum twice to get our attention He saw the whole world with garish orange eyes. Behind this image, we see Lafferty’s Augustinian formation.

Lafferty readers will recognize that laughter from “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” (1966), and they can hear Lafferty uses it to shape his version of the theology of the body. Lafferty adds his voice to that long tradition. This is the third post on the Law of Intellectual Constancy in Lafferty, so I’ll keep the focus narrow This reflects Lafferty’s idea that the law of intellectual constancy in modernity often comes with a

of the Lafferty-to-Sirignano letters I have read. Lafferty draws a fun metaphysical inference. Lafferty has enormous fun with this. Lafferty turns the scheme back on him. But enough is now visible to show that Lafferty is not simply making things up out of whole cloth.

But I am not sure his correction responds to what Lafferty actually wrote. Lafferty does not say that Eugenius put an image of Christ on the coins. This is another instance of Lafferty’s love of doubling and doppelgängers. to the whole. Place and river names are included when Lafferty mentions them.

“Chombo” is a cunning boxing story, done Lafferty style. ,” from before Lafferty had built the ingenious narrative machinery he would later engineer to handle I wonder if Lafferty worked out the limits of that approach by writing stories like “Chombo” and “Other On another level, the fighter isn’t a simple person because he’s a true Lafferty hero, part McGilly, It’s early Lafferty, but it has sharp dialogue and plays out as a taut thriller.

Lafferty’s metaphysical position on the nature of truth can look tricky. had the considerable effect of being a battering ram against the whole classical tradition. Lafferty can be tangled when he says things like this. Where some thinking about Lafferty gets over its skis is by thinking Lafferty is making a metaphysical how factum, on Lafferty's view, is normatively ordered to ens.