from East of Laughter Fb archive The way the germ of an idea becomes a published story is always interesting, and enough of the germs survive to make for a great essay on the topic on how Lafferty combined ideas, though, who would read it? Here are a few of the ideas Lafferty had that became published stories (scroll down for the titles): The Easter Island statues are of baboons not of men. Sky-divers, diving and gliding with complete nerve, come all the way to the ground — by self-hypnosis and in defiance of aero-dynamic laws. ~~Develops~~ for part of this effort. A sky-diver laughs on ‘Sky’! Dorian Gray type is alternate universe jumps, reaping the best of everything without payment of balance, dodging death by switching tracks or walking into other world (only in the prime world is dying final). But the most unlikely world of all turns out to be prime, and he dies and goes to real hell. PRIME MANHATTAN [RENAISSANCE?] — [and set / put?] back to use, like a hunting-ground, with all the big hyped [fauna?] — [that?] CIVILIT[Y?] BEDS ~~The mile-long painting of the Mississippi River Shore. Once exhibited in sections in Carnegie and flea-circus [expositions?] these were all sections of one picture that showed the whole length of the river. It was an [instantaneous?] picture, all at one moment, the angles of sun and shade in each section correct for one [instant/moment?] of action. It is [finally?] assembled and as studied the [fundamental?] sections are not really much. [The fundamental?] painting is, in fact, [indistinct?]. [Through?] [someone?] [has?] [tried?] to be [various?] sections [had/been?] [tried?] to be [top?] of it. / [Close?] inspection [shows?] [primitives?] [perhaps?] of historical [Indians?] in its [land?] [animals?] of the [bigger?] [prehistoric?] time. But how was it done, and by whom~~ The world without chemical or electrical science, but still with advanced mechanical technology, with steamships, railroads, and perhaps diesel-type engine aircraft. And the philosophical and religious results of such. Instant Communication lacking. The clock-satanic mills without the transcendent wave base or the electatic spark. The unchanneled towns. Meehaw — Meehaw Corner, Parkins, Lurking Corner, Boomer, Boomer Flats. The non-African, non-Indian people of color. Between the sand-bar thicket and the [?] river: what do they do when the river floods? They close their notepad months and eat with arms, and lie down till the flood is gone. Some of them go to school and they learn, but when they are older they play at home and they forget again. In what language do they talk? Ah, they don’t talk very much, they keep to themselves. They boil ~~rivers~~ in mud-clay pots, they put in wild onions and grease. The pottery thickens them. It gets lumps of meat and clay in it and they eat it. They eat frogs and fish and grubs but they don’t seem to eat very much of anything. And their pelicans. Coming to 12 years old, the young people display their skills and talents. A decision will be given then, or early, whether he is allowed to live or not. MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, MUSIC, ART, WRITING, SPEAKING, POLITICAL ABILITY, ATHLETIC PROWESS, BOXING — a kingdom for those in them. It is set up; they govern and devise and compose. But someone must break the frame, or else the state of things must be kept a surprise. the rejuvenator — Old medicine-wagon man who really has the secret of rejuvenation. Ex-president comes out of retirement. Old baseball players and race horses return to form. But the wolf-root had a totally regressive effect, the pharmacological chief said. “Naturally it would block its use.” Chopped-up pieces of squid are the trigger. Concealed talents of the low-visibility people, potters, gnomes, dryads, etc. The planet where everything changes so fast [that?] one may watch new animals evolved from day to day. Some of them become incomparably [?] of [?] to [fledge?] and [fierce?]. [Below?] the [plants?] — see on. How? Like [are?] the mountains, rivers, oceans — [Earthquakes?] [tidal?] waves, Islands formed and [sunk?]. Then it gets the people, somehow — suddenly developing off its [its?] — {[diagram/triangle?] drawn in margin} [Humans?] in [?] [illeg.] “[listing?]” "Mr Hamadryad" "Sky" Not to Mention Camels : "How They Gave It Back" "All Pieces of a River Shore" "Bright Flightways" "Boomer Flats" Aurelia : "Royal Licorice" "Make Sure the Eyes are Big Enough" "World Abounding"

Monster movies, philosophy, religion, classical art, puns, horror stories, linguistics, science fiction—how does he account for this quirky range of interests? Lafferty said, “I’m kind of a quirky guy.” And here we are . . . at the lake. Swan Lake is so beloved by the City of Tulsa, the water was drained out of it. The old lake was extensively renovated—dug deeper, reshaped, landscaped. When the land was refilled, the lake’s caretakers anchored wooden duck decoys in the water to encourage the return of the waterfowl. One of the attractions of Swan Lake is for people to throw bread to the lake’s population of swans, geese and ducks. What Lafferty likes to do is watch people throwing bits of bread to the duck decoys, unable to tell the difference. He is an Irishman with a story to tell; he couldn’t be happier. “I heard a mother tell her children, ‘Don’t worry,’” Lafferty said. “‘I think maybe that duck will eat when we’re gone.’” — Ron Wolfe Interview with Lafferty Back in Houston after a quick trip to Tulsa, where I had a great time meeting Lafferty people. I knew that Antonino Vescovo , Lafferty’s 1930s novel, was at Tulsa, but it had been misarchived and was not showing up in Tulsa’s system. When I inquired eight months ago, the archivists said they did not have a record of it. A few weeks ago, it occurred to me where it might be, and, sure enough, it was there, a thick folder that had been unlabelled. Had I been mistaken, it would have been a disappointing trip. Antonino Vescovo  is important because Lafferty wrote its hundreds of pages in his early twenties, and they precede his long period without writing fiction, though he was studying languages and translating poetry . I had Tulsa correct the manuscript record, which is now findable here for anyone who wants to research it. (In adding the title yesterday, the friendly grad student on deck misspelled it "Antonio," but maybe that makes the manuscript feel at home. There are quite a few of these errors in the archive.) Maybe a few preliminary thoughts about the book. It’s a biographical novel focusing on the early life of a future bishop in Renaissance Florence, almost certainly informed in part by this entry in The Catholic Encyclopedia . It starts with a legendary prophecy about the city's greatness, then moves to Antoninus's childhood. He is a pious and intellectually gifted boy. We learn about his ascetic practices, immersion in Latin and theology, and his interactions. One of the most memorable of the characters is his artistic peer, Casimirro. A large part of the book centers on philosophical and theological debates among young monks and novices at a monastery in Fiesole. Lafferty covers the nature of faith, doubt, and cosmic infinity. There is a rich folk culture (street ballads, palmistry, and the like) alongside the structured life of the Dominican Order. So it is Lafferty’s take on the life of a scholar-saint in a bright, often humorous, intellectual landscape of medieval Italy, with a lot of playfulness in it.   As for the Whole Lafferty, one interesting character is a Jewish monk. He is a novice in the monastery. Lafferty writes that he was born a Jew and joined the order because of its unparalleled opportunities for study. At one point, in a discussion about the assumptions that make jokes funny, the character brings up the stereotype that "Jews talk funny and like money.” Then he refutes the stereotype. He points out that he speaks well and doesn't have "a penny in the world." This episode connects to other incidents that hint at Lafferty’s early thoughts about Jews, inviting further exploration.   One more example. An old scholar shares an absurd story about how the Jewish custom of stoning scarlet ladies to death was adopted by a town in Spain. This town had no stones within twenty miles, so they had to be imported. After the executions, Jewish push-cart peddlers would gather the stones up and sell them back to the citizens at a high price for the next execution. When one of the Jewish peddlers asked the townspeople why they didn't just hang the women instead, they said it was because they had no trees. What else about the archive this time? There were a bunch of niggling questions that I had that I was able to work out answers to. For instance, I had suspected that “ You Can’t Go Back” began as a Men Who Knew Everything  story, but it turns out to be more interesting than that. The key connection is between Zoe Archikos in TMWKE  (“The All-At-Once-Man,” the story that both begins the sequence and stands apart from both it and the Green Tree  characters in curious ways) and the major figure Helen Penandrew, née Anastasis, in the Green Tree  materials. She is the Helen of “You Can’t Go Back,” so the story concerns the later version of the Green Tree  characters, but it is so fantastical that it fits more naturally with the high-concept TMWKE  sequence. My theory is that it was simply easier to change the characters’ names. The original manuscript uses the Green Tree  characters, so “You Can’t Go Back” would make a wonderful pendant to that major Lafferty work. That changes its significance: rather than being a story of relatively minor interest, it is a piece about the My Heart Leaps Up  period in the characters' lives and the Flatland period, something much more interesting. It is a part of that set of stories depicting the memory/nostalgia and amnesia/anamnesis axes. You can easily work out who Barnaby, Basil ( GT )/George ( TMWKE ), and the others are.* I was able to connect a few more dots about Ifreann. Slightly unrelated because Tulsa doesn't have Sardinian Summer , but if the Feast of Laughter people wanted to do Lafferty fans a real favor, they would publish the chapter from Sardinian Summer on diabolism and the birth of Ifreann, which is told about in The Devil is Dead . Ifreann's childhood. His birth is a dark parody of the nativity, and one won't forget holding a chalkboard to the gravid belly of Katie Noonan, about whom one learns a lot, so that Ifreann can communicate, or Infreann being born and immediately eating his own afterbirth. Tedious, though easy, was compiling the information necessary for a nearly complete timeline of what was composed when, so that one can have a clear snapshot of what Lafferty was writing and when. It will be useful for anyone tracking thematic and formal development in Lafferty's fiction. Expect a resource on that soon. There was a melancholy moment when I saw Lafferty's financial records in two notebooks, where he meticulously tracked his earnings. The last entry in his very unsteady hand from 1995, followed by pages of emptiness. Finally, I visited Swan Lake, near Lafferty’s home, where he used to walk. The wildlife was lovely, with turtles and many waterfowl, kids about, but the decoy ducks were gone. The fountain was back, as I had read. But there was also an unlovely modern sign admonishing the kids not to feed the birds. * I will be overjoyed when In a Green Tree is published, but something has been missed with its cover: We learn at the end of the novel that the green tree is a specific green tree, an oak tree, and this tree looks mysterious forest tree, not an oak. Here is the passage: "I've got a poem in it," she said. "I'm the only fifth-grader who has anything in it. All the other things are by the big seventy and eighth grade kids or by the teachers and priests." It was a good poem. It was this: "I'm a wave breaking Up on a brown shore. Push the old waves, and then Push them some more, Push them until they're No part of the sea, Push them until they Will make room for me. Push till they turn Into pebbles and sand. Rock and clay-soggy, And acres of land. What if they want to? What if they holler? And holler some more? 'Look,' I will tell them, 'Who's running this shore? '"I'm the sap rising Up in the Green Tree, Push the old sap until Bark it will be, Push it until it Will make room for me, Push the leaves out With a bang and a boff, To the ends of the limbs, and then Push them clear off. What if they whimper and Grovel to me? 'Look,' I will tell them 'Who's running this tree?'" "Oh, the verses are wonderful, and they are implicit in you from the beginning," Adriana said. "But you don't really push the old leaves off. That's not the right way to look at it. Even biologically that's not quite the way it is." "Yes, the Green Tree I'm writing about is the Live Oak Tree. I think that's the kind. The old leaves don't fall off until spring when the young ones grow under them and push them off. They're pushing them off of those oak trees right now. I was watching some of them flutter down as I came here." "But on the real tree, we don't push the leaves off." "You're sure we don't? Oh, something has happened! What is it?" "Just one of the leaves. It fell off." "Which one? Oh, I bet I know which one."

Spring Break here in Houston, so I'm off to Tulsa to do some more work on Lafferty. The blog will be quiet for a few days.

The first of a series of posts. For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material: a partially written Camiroi story about a rhino fair, clues to the “Men Who Knew Everything” story sequence, an abandoned sequel to “Slow Tuesday Night,” reasonably worked out stories such as the "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”), how he cross-codes characters, the other Aurelia called To Aurelia with Horns , and sundry projects that never came to pass, such as a plan to rewrite (or revise) "Cabrito” and dozens of unwritten stories. To give a sense of the fun things in it, a little of Lafferty’s busted material: [1 — Glass eye passage:] the glass eye. I used it after I lost one of my baby eyes and before I ~~got~~ [it?] got my permanent eye. [2 — Narrator not real:] the narrator gradually discovers that he is not real, that he is a standing joke made up by a bunch of young people as a ~~catch~~-all for their ~~[?]~~ imaginations. [3 — ‘Browobust’ / witchcraft:] ‘[Pass?] — Browobust. / In contrast to this (witchcraft) it will be noted that the good miracles . . . one always [?] acts of [?] restoration. [4 — Eagle / noble creature:] Where has the eagle been denominated a noble creature? There must be some mistaken identity here. [Note: Past Master , Barry Malzberg poem, “Leptophlebo”] [5 — Certain men / Comets:] {circled:} Certain men return at wide intervals like Comets. And, after a while, the intervals become more irregular, and the men begin to break up [?] [?] falls off him. [Note: “Boomer Flats”] [6 — Biological significance / adolescence:] Is there biological significance, even signs of a mutation, in the greatly lengthened adolescence, the long receptive and nocturne period between thirteen and twenty-five? [7 — Guardian angel / rat:] Like guardian angels, there is a rat for every person in the world. That last is particularly wonderful.

“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987 I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quickly. If you aren’t interested in the question of Lafferty and literary value, then this post isn’t for you. I'm going to think through a few things. If you read this blog, you will notice a specific methodology running through my posts: I take Lafferty seriously as a literary artist. I wanted to say a little about that. My thinking about how to read literature over the last decade has been heavily informed by Peter Lamarque’s Philosophy of Literature (2009). There are books that clear a lot of rubbish that builds up in one’s mind like a controlled burn, and Lamarque did that for me on the issue of literary value. For a long time, talking about literary value was off the table. In the doctoral program I attended, a leading postcolonialist with several University of Chicago publications behind her was leading a small seminar with four of us, and something happened that has stuck with me. We were a small cohort of six, and one of us, a female graduate student, had received news that her mother had committed suicide the day before. For whatever reason, the student decided not to skip or excuse herself from the seminar that week. We were reading several hundred pages of 18th-century economic ephemera, all of it with little literary value. When we discussed a brief fantasy about a coin's journey through England, the professor turned to the student and asked for her thoughts. The student, clearly not thinking clearly, made a terrible mistake. She said, “It isn’t very good.” Of course, none of us were reading the material because it was good, but because we were trying to understand the fictional representation of economics. The professor decided it was a moment to eviscerate her. The professor said, “What is good?” After about 10 minutes of horsewhipping, the female student excused herself, dropped out of the program, and blocked all contact with everyone in it. At that moment, I knew I would have an answer to the question, even if it was contentious, and Lamarque has helped me here. According to Lamarque, literary value is best understood from within a practice of reading works as literature (as art). You assume there is value. This is a bit like Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Spirit , refusing to start with skepticism and saying that it leads to despair. Start arguing with Sextus Empiricus, and you are not going to get anywhere. Lamarque then argues that value judgments are guided by shared expectations about what such literary works are like and what kinds of attention they reward. In this account, value is not a detachable property. He says it “resides in the quality of the experience a work yields,” especially along two broad dimensions. These are what I want to look at in regard to Lafferty’s extremely odd literary project. The first dimension is the “imaginativeness or creativity evident in the design of the work.” The second is “the richness of its content at both subject and thematic levels.” In other words, a work’s value is inextricably connected to (i) how its form is made—its organization, structure, and craft—and (ii) how its content develops toward themes that support reflection well beyond the immediate subject matter. On the thematic side, I rely on Lamarque's distinction between a theme as a bare proposition and a theme as something enacted through a work’s particulars. That is why you see on the blog many diagrams and tables meant to make navigating Lafferty’s extraordinary informational density much easier. The “triviality” problem—the idea that themes look banal once abstracted into slogans—arises when we treat themes as worldly generalizations detachable from the work. No one should need to read To Kill a Mockingbir d to know that racism is bad or Crime and Punishment to know that murder, if you are a normal person, is going to take a toll on your psychology. For my purposes, the relevant value question is usually how a theme is “worked,” how it develops through immense detail. That goes beyond the standalone proposition one might extract from it. I sometimes put a Lafferty theme in country-simple terms, but I would never say that Lafferty’s literary value depends on the propositional encapsulation of didactic material. I just think Lafferty is didactic. He cannot help himself. Put differently, the theme’s contribution to value is not that it supplies a maxim, but that it organizes attention, binds disparate elements, and promotes reflection as the reader tracks the theme’s transformations across the work. I think Lafferty is exceptionally interesting because of how what I call the Whole Lafferty rewards this kind of approach. It also places interpretation at the center of value. Lamarque has a pretty basic description of interpretation. He calls it a practice of “construal” in which readers assign significance to details that might otherwise look incidental. That assignment of significance provides reasons to attend to the text, and the value of a work depends on whether such attention is rewarded rather than frustrated. In other words, read a post and see if the details have been marshalled in a way that reorganizes your attention in a way that rewards it. Evaluation will then become inseparable from interpretation. What I try to evaluate when reading Lafferty is features as they act under a construal—for example, tracking a motif to see how its development contributes to an overall vision, which, in Lafferty’s case, if we are reading him on his own terms, is his quaint Catholic vision, which is always exploring the unfilled-out parts of the Magisterium. The other day, I read a scribble of his on a page where he wrote to himself, “It is all happening at once,” as if to remind himself of this, or as if he was shocked, once again, by how estranging that is and how he wants to capture it in his experiments with metaphysics. On the side of form, I treat design, form, and structure as more than optional ornaments, which is (obviously) not at all unusual for readers who enjoy writing as literature. In some of the posts here on Wittgenstein and attention, I’ve talked about the importance of seeing aspects. These design, form, and structure elements are central to reading literature as art that brings out ground and figure. Appreciating a work as literature, in my view, involves appreciating it as an artifact, as a linguistic structure. That puts me in the formalist camp. I am always asking how elements hang together to produce effects, acting on an assumption—a “Principle of Functionality”—that aspects of the design are not arbitrary. For this reason, the blog is likely to annoy the hell out of anyone who thinks, “Who are you to ascribe intention to Lafferty?” All I can say is that I think reading as an analytic institution necessitates this way of reading. This is an institutional/works-based notion of intention, not one of psychological ascription. If we accept something like the intentional fallacy or the death of the author, we create the problem of being self-sealing formalists or people who have lost the category of literature as something that is value-laden and normative. This holds true even when the surface seems disorderly, whimsical, or weird, as in works that deliberately play with apparent disorganization. But that is just where I land as a reader. Lafferty’s novels of the 1970s went (arguably) too far in this direction, especially some of the unpublished ones and The Elliptical Grave . What Lafferty ended up doing, I think, was coming out of that and seeing that he would use what he had learned by binding what he learned from them tightly to genre constraints, as if he was circling back to the early work, but this time as a wiser writer. So he no longer writes Iron Tongue of Midnight or Dark Shine , and he writes space operas like Annals of Klepsis or Arabian fantasies like Sindbad: The 13th Voyage . That is a formalist conclusion, but despite how it might look, formal analysis is not my final aim. It is a necessary stage toward assessing interest and value, what in a conversation with Daniel Otto Jack Petersen I have called the importance of having a logocentric Lafferty even if one wants to qualify or reject much of it: macrostructure or canon structure will always matter because it contributes to our perception of what the piecework work achieves, and because literary works are treated as “structured designs” when read as literature rather than mere sequences of events or statements. I believe Lafferty when he said he was writing one work, the Ghost Story. At the same time, this type of thinking rejects the idea that literariness can be reduced to a single formal-linguistic marker (such as foregrounding, semantic density, tall-tale panache, humor, or stylistic oddity). Such properties occur both inside and outside literature, and some highly valued literary works are completely transparent in style. The upshot is that form cannot be reduced to a checklist of linguistic features that automatically confer literary status. Lafferty’s relentless innovation of form shows that he appreciated this with unusual intensity. What is required is an account of how the writing—broadly conceived to include narrative technique and structural invention—becomes salient and supports “a search for layers of meaning.” I think all this is relevant to Lafferty. His reputation is so often managed through genre categories. Lamarque's 2009 book talks about this boundary issue by asking why “literature as art” would exclude “genre novels like murder mysteries or sci-fi.” It’s one of the reasons I think it’s probably a bad idea to try to get Lafferty appreciated as a science fiction writer, or genre artist, of importance, versus a literary artist of importance. The mere fact that a work is marketed or shelved as science fiction does not, by itself, settle whether it rewards literary expectations about design and theme. But you know this already because you like Lafferty. On the institutional account summarized above, the question is whether the work merits the kinds of interpretive attention characteristic of literary appreciation, and whether its value is realized through creativity of form and richness of thematic development. The only way to show that is to produce interpretations that go far beyond appreciation or celebration. That is really this hobby blog in a nutshell: just an ongoing collection of evidence that Lafferty can and should be read in exactly that way. I try to show how his work is a designed total artifact whose details repay construal, and how his body of writing is organized by serious thematic concerns rather than by disposable plot premises, and how he is driven by a mania for formal innovation. In the recent “Building Blocks” post, I thought it might be useful to stake out some methodological commitments, so I spelled out that I approach Lafferty as “fundamentally a metaphysical writer” who uses fiction to make claims about reality. I treat his humor and excess as serious games rather than ends, and I read his stories as ontological thought-experiments and tests a reader is meant to undergo. The point is what follows when a particular view of reality is allowed to run until it breaks. This is already a thematically serious picture in the sense relevant to Lamarque's framework, because Lafferty’s metaphysical content aims at “broad human interest” and at deep reflection on what is real, what is counterfeit, what kinds of beings exist, and how worlds can be metaphysically sealed or open. In that same post, I argued that Lafferty writes against the constraining megatext of science fiction by trying to bypass its habits. That seems to me one of the reasons that he gets harder as he develops as a writer. It is one reason I make the tactical decision to not treat him as a genre artist or to read his career through SF, as important as that is as a secondary operation. His escape route is a countervailing inherited structure of meanings (the Christian tradition, including marginal gnostic strands) and, centrally, eschatology. Whether or not a reader accepts every element of this view, the important point is that where most people seem to see a discrete series of brilliant performances (I would make an exception for a few Lafferty critics here), I see a stable set of organizing thematic preoccupations that are not reducible to single propositions. Instead, they are the Ghost Story motifs of his works: time, personhood, counterfeit worlds, the status of a shared reality, and the intrusion of the eternal into the present. That is the kind of thematic “unity and value” beyond immediacy that we find when we read works as literature. I also probably fail at this most of the time, but I try to give concrete instances regarding how Lafferty explores surrendering language and agency to control and to controlling machines. I see rereading as a process by which Lafferty’s Gnostic satire becomes even clearer on repeated reading, and one of my private tests of a Lafferty story world is how fully the “archons have already won” (the archons can be government, media, any number of things) and how characters have surrendered the logos to omnipresent, impersonal systems. I do not present this as a detachable, bumper-sticker message like “technology is bad” or “machines dehumanize us.” Lafferty clearly had a very complicated view of persons and machines, especially AI. I try to show how this configures how details are seen: who controls meaning, what it would mean for a machine to lie, what happens when language detaches from forms of life, what machines should count as persons, and what machines should not. That means the blog has a lot of pattern spotting. As with any piece of literature, a story’s value lies in how the theme is developed through particulars. What appears as a plot device becomes, under interpretation, a center of gravity that orders the reader’s attention and sustains rereading. Some examples. My post “Some Thoughts about ‘Through Other Eyes’” makes the relation between form and theme overt. I argue that Lafferty uses a rare stretch of limited third-person not just to make a general claim about people having private worlds, but also as a critique of the technologically mediated invasion of subjectivity, the misuse of personal data, and a warning against the mechanical attempt to bypass the mystery of other persons. I support this by pointing to the story’s own language about the shock of sudden perfect understanding. This is an example of a thematic interest that invites deeper, more far-reaching reflection, with the narrative perspective itself being part of the work’s design rather than a neutral delivery system. It is also an example of how evaluation depends on interpretation: the value of the limited third-person passage goes beyond a bare narratological fact. It is a feature whose effectiveness is assessed under a construal that links it to the theme of perspective and personhood. Similarly, in trying to think a little about Space Chantey , I argue Lafferty is not just decorating prose with couplets. He is using the couplet to generate the novel as he goes. I try to show how he throws the couplet form at the reader (especially the classical couplet tradition as parody) as an intellectual knife whose balance, antithesis, and satirical shape can control pacing, juxtaposition, and narrative energy. That is the power of the couplet, with its fierce powers of closure. This is an instance of the imposition of form on subject in the strong sense of that idea. Lafferty makes an eccentric design choice that organizes the work and alters which effects and meanings are available. The Space Chantey couplets are not arbitrary eccentricities, but purposive components whose role must be tracked if the work is to be appreciated as a whole. My post on “Marsilia V” develops a different kind of formal claim. There, I argue that Lafferty introduces one or two images in a story that will be a compacted map of the story. Andrew Ferguson has also recognized this feature in Lafferty. This is a description of a repeatable structural device (what I call “iconographic insetting”) that is not reducible to style at the sentence level. It is a claim about how meaning is distributed and constrained, shaping interpretation. Readers need to notice it if they are going to track innovation and the theme's significance. It makes certain elements salient. It invites the reader to assign significance. It produces unity by letting later details be read as developments of a formally planted key. In Lafferty, this can be simple. In the novels, it becomes incredibly complicated, something I have not written much about yet because I am trying to cover the short stories first. A major part of the blog is the Medieval understanding of allegory, crossed with ideas I take from Northrop Frye, because he seems to me the most helpful person for understanding what Lafferty is doing. In “Lafferty and the Sliding Scale of Allegory,” I take Frye’s idea that allegory ranges from overt and continuous to elusive and anti-allegorical, and I emphasize a category where allegory appears and disappears at the author’s pleasure rather than being continuous. In "Building Blocks," I connect this directly to an interpretive stance on Lafferty: his allegory is meant to be wobbly, because in its most ambitious forms, it aims at the highest form of Catholic allegory, anagogy. “Reading The Elliptical Grave ” connects Lafferty’s formal invention to thematic significance without reducing either to surface weirdness. I think Lafferty is weird, but we need ways of talking about that weirdness, so I point out that after the opening chapter, Lafferty refuses any further hand-holding. The novel’s core belief (humanity’s decline from primordial magnificence) defines the terms of the expedition narrative. I argue that the ellipse is both a metaphysical concept (projection, viewpoint, time linkage) and a principle shaping the reader’s experience. Lafferty writes like a mad engineer. He loves engineering our reading experience to reflect the confusion of being inside the elliptical grave. This instantiates the idea that disorder in Lafferty can be systematically cashed out, relying on devices that connect narrative episodes to a broader metaphysical frame—again, a case of theme as an organizing principle. Finally, one thing I often try to do is supply methodological evidence that Lafferty’s oddness is not just a private taste for eccentricity. It is a developing set of craft features that can be tracked and evaluated. That led me to write the “Hermeneutic Thoughts” post, in which I argue that when Lafferty is confusing, the first critical question is not “why is this hard?” but “why would someone do it this way?” There, I set out the two important rhetorical strategies I have found in thinking with Lafferty: pragmatic markers (producing an effect of oracy and plainspokenness even when the content is obscure) and counterfiguration (where the reader must ask what the opposite would be and why Lafferty chooses the counter-figure). I also argue that Lafferty is architectonic in his figuration. When we pay attention to these features, we are not thinking in a narrow, stylistic sense, but are looking for an organized set of techniques that guide the search for meaning, techniques which can be critically assessed for how well they focus the reader's attention, explain the work being read, and unify that work’s effects. Taken together, the evidence I have presented on the blog is meant to support the basic claim that Lafferty satisfies the two core dimensions of literary value. I could answer the postcolonialist professor why I think Lafferty is good. On the content side, Lafferty was pursuing persistent, serious thematic concerns—the metaphysics of reality and counterfeit worlds, personhood, time, the status of a shared world, and language as logos and social ground. On the form side, he innovated the structure of his narratives to a level that should be recognized as genius. Literary value? It begins with those two dimensions of innovation and the significance of theme. Of course, other writers have long recognized that Lafferty scores high on both dimensions.

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was “A Ghost Story.” The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people: that they are ghostly, and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has a forthcoming article that everyone should read called " Good Weather for Gory Doppelgänger: Ecomonstrous Doubles, Eidolons, and Fetches in Three Tales by R. A. Lafferty." He was kind enough to let me read it, and I'll do my best to summarize its big picture, but fair warning: it's theoretically dense, and it doesn't pull its punches. Petersen builds on Steven Swarbrick's arguments in The Environmental Unconscious (2023) that early-modern poetry (and this goes for material life as well) is "pierced by lack," a Lucretian minus that at once wounds and energizes ecological desire. Adopting that premise, he argues that R. A. Lafferty's doppelgängers demonstrate how the same void shapes contemporary fiction. For Petersen, Lacan's Real, re-read through Lucretius, acts like this: Ontological State Functional Experience Lacanian Real Full Presence A traumatic gap in meaning; a psychic minus. Lucretian Void Empty Absence A generative gap in matter; a physical minus. The bold step is putting the Lacanian Real itself with this minus of the Lucretian void; that identification lets him treat Lafferty's doubles, fetches, and splits not as mere negations but as "shadowy subtractions of the Real," sub-material holes that make meaning possible by exposing its limits and granting "the jouissance of more truly un-centring ourselves in the radically open-ended semiosis and asemiosis of planetary existence." In short, Petersen transposes Swarbrick's eco-psychoanalytic Lucretian template from Renaissance verse to Lafferty's landscapes, presenting the ghost story as an art of circling the unknown: learning, again and again, to dwell beside the void at the center of the world. His essay is richer than this sketch can show, and, true to form, he keeps Lafferty unmistakably weird. By treating the doubles as "environmental unconscious," a crowded field of weather, animals, and wrecked terrains, Petersen does what many of us think needs to be done: take Lafferty's work very seriously as thought. And once you understand how Petersen's take on all this works, a wide range of Lafferty's stories look different: each split psyche cracks open an eco-poetic hole where the non-human speaks. This is a smart contribution to understanding the ghost story. When it appears in print, I'll write about its interpretations of the three stories it addresses. Reading it also had me thinking again about the shape of the ghost story. What Lafferty meant by it will always be up for debate, and one hopes it will continue to inspire work like the kind Petersen is doing. He and I seem to agree that one can enter into its fullness only by recognizing one’s own environed ghostliness. Petersen understands this better than just about anyone, even if he and I disagree on the nature of that ghostliness. What follows is not intended primarily as an assessment of his application of Swarbrick to Lafferty, but as an exploration of an alternative I find helpful. It is such a big question that, a while back, I started keeping a little notebook to understand what Lafferty means by "ghost." Why does he use that word, along with all the doublets and variations his readers will recognize, from spooks to fetches and back again? My view is that Lafferty chose the word "ghost" because he wanted to discuss the spiritual realm without being sententious. He did this well, especially considering how unlikely most readers are to equate "ghost" with "spiritual" in his well-known lines about what he was doing. You might ask, "If that's what he meant, why not say so?" There are likely many reasons. One, I think, is this: he used "ghost" because it generated the kinds of stories he liked to spin. And because he believed most modern people had suffered a type of amnesia. They no longer understood the word "spiritual." But they still had just enough left in them to recognize a ghost. This means that his complete statement amounts to something like this in its expanded form: "It seemed, until I thought about it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Then I understood, by some sort of intuition, that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that its name was A [Spirit/Spiritual] Story.  The name comes from the only thing I have learned about all people: that they are [spirits/spiritual] and that they are sometimes split-off [spirits]. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself." If one could work out what he meant by spiritual being, one would have a pretty good sense of what he meant by being a ghost. He was wise not to use the word "spiritual" here because he recognized that the spiritual is much stranger and larger than most people will concede. It is full of mystery, like a ghost story. This is a clear example of what I've called counterfiguration in his thought. The best-developed instance of what this ghostliness amounts to is the image of inside-out people, souls, and balloons in Arrive at Easterwine . These are complicated discursive images. The pages they appear on are some of the hardest in his work. With that in mind, I think Charles Taylor's ideas may be helpful, and they also mark a place where I part ways with Petersen. Taylor's book A Secular Age  (2007) has shaped much of the contemporary conversation on secularity, and I've been using one of its core distinctions to think about Lafferty for some time: the contrast between the porous self and the buffered self. keeping in mind that it is just a means to an end. The porous self is Taylor's term for the kind of identity that dominated the pre-modern, enchanted world, a cosmos alive with spirits, demons, and meaningful forces. The boundaries of the self were permeable. The outside world could flow into a person's inner life. Meanings, emotions, and moral states were not seen as generated from within but as imposed by external agents through what Taylor calls influence. A person could be possessed by a demon, transformed by a magic potion, or filled with divine grace. This same openness meant there was no firm line between the spiritual and the physical. A holy relic could heal the sick, and a curse could ruin a harvest because meaning itself had causal power. Charles Taylor's Porous Self The porous self was thus exposed and vulnerable, living in a world where the borders between mind and cosmos, self and other, were fluid and in constant exchange. Lafferty's characters seem to live in this kind of world. Let's consider several examples of the porous self in Lafferty’s fiction. Such instances abound to the extent that one can begin virtually anywhere. In “Dream,” a voice in a “noisome dream” informs the dreamer: “You are not dreaming . . . This is the real world. But when you wake you will be dreaming.” The statement exemplifies an external force that destabilizes the boundary between dream and reality. Similarly, the phenomenon of recurring “wart-hog-people dreams” experienced by the populace, and the question of whether “the wart-hogs were real and the people a dream,” suggests a shared external influence acting upon collective consciousness. In “Snuffles,” the eponymous creature addresses Brian Carroll with the claim: “How could there be anything in your mind if I did not put it there?” This scene portrays a telepathic intrusion, rendering the boundary between Snuffles’ external consciousness and Carroll’s internal thought as permeable. A related dynamic appears in “Adam Had Three Brothers.” The “Wreckville bunch,” or Rrequesenians, constitute an external group determined that they “cannot have uncontrolled talent running loose in the commonalty of mankind.” Here, an effort to restrict individual potential and freedom reveals a collective mechanism of external control. This pattern can be found in “Seven-Day Terror.” Clarissa, a young girl, casually causes objects to “disappear” and “come back.” Her response, “Why, of course I can. Anybody can. Can't you?” signals a porousness between human will and physical reality, one that is portrayed not as an extraordinary gift but as a latent capacity that should be accessible. The motif is at the heart of “Seven Story Dream.” George Handle, described as “easily led,” is subjected to conditioning by Gilford Gadberry, who employs a “compelling voice” that plays night after night during Handle’s sleep. As a result, Handle confesses to a murder committed only in a dream. The episode shows the extent to which external manipulation can infiltrate and reshape the internal world of the self, eroding the distinctions between memory, dream, self, and reality. Together, these stores should show aspects of the porous self. They dramatize the ease with which external forces can pervade thought, will, and perception, exposing the split in the boundaries that are denied in modern individual identity. This contrasts with what Taylor calls the buffered self, the characteristic identity of the modern, disenchanted age. It is marked by a firm, "buffered" boundary that separates the inner world of thought, feeling, and purpose from the outer world, which is understood as neutral and mechanistic. This boundary shields the self, making it feel secure from the spiritual forces that once haunted the porous self. Within this protected interior, the self becomes the primary source of meaning and order. It no longer discovers purpose in the cosmos but imposes it through disengaged reason and instrumental control. While this shift grants a new sense of freedom, power, and self-possession, it also introduces the central dilemma of modernity. Charles Taylor's Buffered Self The same buffer that ensures safety may also cut the self off from deeper meaning. The result is a condition of malaise. It gives us a sense of flatness, disconnection, and a world emptied of the transcendent. Lafferty's art appears to be specifically designed to attack this condition. Like the porous self, the buffered self appears in Lafferty everywhere, often through societies or individuals who create barriers to shield themselves from chaos, unpredictability, nature, the numinous, or existential vulnerability. His Camiroi exemplify this tendency. They prize a life “governed by reason” and are “incapable of” producing “bad Earth music, bad Earth painting and sculpture and drama,” instead needing to “import” such imperfections. This reflects a deliberate cultural effort to buffer themselves from disorder, passion, or “incompetence” that could disrupt their pursuit of the “good life.” While they acknowledge a “religion,” it is distinct from Earth’s and seems a more rationalized, less “revelatory” system. Their state of “Golden Mediocrity” and life on a “serene plateau” imply a conscious rejection of the “great heights and depths” that characterize a more porous existence. This reflects the concept of “sterility through refinement”—a process of excising “unruly elements” as a form of mental buffering, much like Michael Fountain’s ideal of the golden bowl in Fourth Mansions, which I will examine shortly. A similar dynamic appears in one of Lafferty’s lightest and most forgettable stories, “Try to Remember,” but one that hits close to home. Professor Diller’s use of a “small black book prepared by his wife” to hold “all the unessential details of his regime” and “save him time” offers a perfect illustration of individual buffering. By externalizing the inflow of “unessential” information, Diller allows his “busy and thoughtful” mind to focus on “great things.” Predictably, this reliance leaves him vulnerable. When he loses the device that helps regulate his cognitive environment, he experiences a profound disorientation, questioning his own identity: “If he is Professor Diller, then who in multicolor blazes am I?” His crisis reveals the fragility that can result when a buffered self confronts an unmediated reality. “The Polite People of Pudibundia” gives one of the clearest examples of societal buffering in Lafferty’s work. The extreme politeness of the Pudibundians, including their use of “deferential balls” and avoidance of direct address, functions as a “ritual shield” designed to prevent “too intimate an encounter of our persons [which] may be fatal.” The literal danger of unmediated contact (“the direct gaze of the Puds kills,” even themselves) explains why their eyes are “always shielded.” This is a society that has constructed elaborate social and physical buffers to defend against a potentially lethal existential vulnerability. Their refusal to lie, even when doing so might protect others, further reinforces the rigid, buffered structure of their lives. Finally, “The Pani Planet” explores the buffering of narrative and reality. The Pani’s control over storytelling is suggested in Ieska’s remark that “Stories of bamboozle may not be told,” signaling a conscious effort to manage societal narratives and maintain a particular version of reality. This buffering serves to preserve stability and prevent chaos. The story dramatizes the Pani’s porous understanding of life and death and the humans’ buffered, scientific worldview. General Raddle’s resurrection and transformation, contrasted with Doctor Mobley’s descent into madness, illustrate what happens when a buffered mind encounters phenomena it cannot assimilate. The Pani’s apparent ability to “fix” dead bodies disrupts the human belief in a firm boundary between life and death, shattering the buffered framework that once sustained the characters’ understanding of the world. Taylor develops these ideas about the porous and buffered self further in a way that is especially useful for readers of Lafferty. Without going too deep into the whole argument, two terms are key: influence and causal power. They are the two fundamental principles that structure the porous self's existence in an enchanted world. These are not merely beliefs. They are experienced as active, external forces that shape the self's reality. The idea is that meanings are not generated from within. They are imposed from without, often by spiritual agents or charged substances. This makes the self vulnerable. A person might be possessed by a demon, filled with divine grace, or overtaken by black bile understood as an external force. Similarly, causal powe r marks the collapse of any hard boundary between the moral and the physical. A holy relic does not symbolize healing. It enacts it. Its power is real and direct, capable of curing disease or warding off storms. For the porous self, these two powers often worked together. A single sacred act could bring both physical healing and spiritual renewal. Influence and causal power were fused. The self was not separate from the world. It was an integrated participant in a cosmos where meaning and force were inseparable. Conversely, the buffered self is formed through the systematic dismantling and denial of the world in which influence and causal power operate hand in hand. The modern, disenchanted worldview establishes a firm boundary between the inner mind and a neutral, mechanistic outer world. Influence is negated because feelings and meanings are now seen as subjective responses generated from within. They are no longer understood as things that can be imposed by spirits or magical forces. The self is sealed off and protected from such psychic intrusion. Causal power is also denied by a scientific view of the universe, which runs according to impersonal, value-neutral laws. The spiritual or moral significance of an object does not affect its physical properties. A relic may carry symbolic meaning, but it cannot heal. The buffered self does not experience these powers. It observes them from a distance, explaining them through reason as cultural beliefs or psychological states. Its identity is shaped not through vulnerable participation but through control and mastery over a world emptied of these deeper, enchanted connections. With all this in mind, I'd like to walk through how I think about the ghost story by breaking down Lafferty's statement and moving through it slowly, with Charles Taylor's work in mind. As always, the goal is not to impose an external model onto Lafferty. The aim is to see whether the model can help bring us closer to his work. And if it cannot, it should be chucked aside. " I understood by some sort of intuition . . . " Here, I would point to the limits of disengaged reason and the reality of what Taylor calls influence. Lafferty's understanding does not come from logical deduction or scientific analysis, the usual tools of the buffered self. It comes as an intuition. This is precisely what Taylor means by influence: a deeper meaning about the world presses itself onto the self. It breaks through the ordinary, disenchanted immanent frame. The way Lafferty comes to this insight is not the result of buffered thinking. It belongs to the porous world. ". . . that they are ghostly . . ." Lafferty recreates the experience of the porous self through art because he is spiritually attuned to it himself. The Laffertian ghost is a poetic figure that re-embodies the porous self. What is a ghost? It is a being whose boundaries are not solid. It passes through walls, something that appears often in Lafferty's work. It is present but not entirely material, no matter how we define that. It belongs to an enchanted world. If this is right, then to say that people are "ghostly" is to say they are inherently porous, whether or not they have withdrawn into buffered individualism. Their inner lives are not sealed off from the world. They remain open and vulnerable to external meanings, spiritual forces, the transcendent, and the feelings of others. Things beyond their control can haunt them. This is the human condition that the modern buffered identity tries hardest to deny. A brief example to make this clearer and set up the question of doppelgängers. Let's consider one of the most important doublets in Lafferty, Miguel Fuentes and Michael Fountain. Chapter XI of  Fourth Mansions  has the following epigraph from Ecclesiastes 12:5-6: "— and one fears heights, and he shall be afraid in the road . . . before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is shattered at the fountain . . . " This sets up Michael Fountain to learn the limits of the buffered self the hard way. Lafferty is clear to show the reader that Michael Fountain, the lecturing humanist, thinks he supports the bowl: “What we are talking about are the world and the lives which we are given to fashion as our tasks. These are in the form, as I see it, of a large, fine, precious, crystal bowl, the Golden Glass Bowl, which we hold in our hands. True, it is not nearly so large a bowl as we once wished to fashion, but now we have come to understand that it is as large and as heavy a bowl as we are able to lift and hold.” To follow what happens, one should understand the image from Ecclesiastes : a silver cord from which a golden bowl of oil hangs. When the cord snaps, the bowl falls away from the vertical dimension of existence that had sustained it; metaphorically, this is the silver cord of life and self. The image appears in other Biblical scriptures as well. Michael Fountain, the buffered half of the doublet, sees only the bowl. His blind to the silver cord and its opening upward into transcendence. In Past Master , the golden bowl is Golden Astrobe itself, along with its world-age, both wanting to cut the cord that supports them, but in Fourth Mansions , the porous self of Miguel Fuentes destroys the buffered self of his double, Michael Fountain. The climax reveals how the doubling of selves is bound to the dynamic between the porous and the buffered. It is tempting to quote the entire lead-up, but here is the relevant passage: Michael Fountain, dictating privately in his own rooms thirteen hundred miles away, had become highly nervous but he still composed brave words for his lecture: “We come to apex, and it is no way elevated or outstanding; we come to perfection, and to perfect simply means to finish; we come to climax, and it is beautifully flat and undistinguished. We have completed the world. Behold it!” And in some manner Michael Fountain was holding a large, fine, precious, crystal bowl—The Golden Glass Bowl—in his two hands. It was pretty. It was almost substantial. “This is the world,” Michael intoned in a self-induced trance. “This is our lives, this is our final achievement. Worry not that it is small: it is the largest world ever, if we will not allow a larger one. Worry not that it is flawed: we ourselves are the flaws: and if we say that we are not flaws, then who is there to contradict us? Worry not that it is fragile, so long as we are very careful not to drop it.” “Drop it!!” the thunder-clap voice of Miguel Fuentes exploded. Everybody in the entire communication jumped at the cannon-barking violence of that command. And Michael Fountain dropped his world. It tinkled into a thousand tinny pieces. It shattered and all the light flickered out of it. The face of Michael Fountain also broke and shattered and the light went out of it also. He cast himself down and was racked by dry sobs. “How did we go wrong? What did we forget?” Michael moaned. The epigraph tells us what they forgot. They forgot the silver cord. This is to say that what Fountain forgot was not that there is a minus, but that there is, and always was, something more: a presence to which he was tethered, and which stood above him all along. ". . . and that they are sometimes split-off." Now we come to the schizo-gash, the slice in the doubles, the cleaving off of the fetches and the doppelgängers, the full implication of what we see in the Miguel Fuentes/Michael Fountain doublet. These are signs of the split. The buffered self is what remains after that split. It marks the loss of enchantment. It is the modern condition. To be split off is the buffered self’s defining feature. With one of the engineers of the buffered self, Ludwig Feuerbach, Michael Fountain says: "There are no exterior monsters who trouble the world either in attacking it or in defending it. They are not real." In this way, the buffered self draws a firm line between the inner mind and the outer world. It relies on disengaged reason, which separates mind from body and reason from passion. It sees the world as emptied of spirits, gods, and moral force. It is, to quote Michael Fountain again, the "apex" that is "no way elevated or outstanding." Lafferty does not treat this as our complete nature; he shows us the entanglement of Fountain and Fuentes. He sees it as something we sometimes become when we look at the world and see it as Michael Fountain does: "and it is beautifully flat and undistinguished. We have completed the world." This is the perfectly buffered plane of Flatland. "But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself." Here is the central dilemma and cross-pressure of the secular age. It is also a key part of Lafferty's statement. He names the predicament. We are not simply porous or simply buffered. We live in the tension of the split. We build a "split-off" buffered identity to gain safety, control, and freedom. We tell ourselves that this is the authentic, mature version of ourselves. But our "ghostly" porous nature keeps coming back, in our hunger for meaning, our experience of love, our awe before beauty, our fear of death, and our sense of something beyond. This is what Carmody Overlark’s Studies in the Imagination  is getting at in The Devil is Dead . " Could we understand that world, we would understand ourselves better; for we also are part of that back-brain world to some degree. It was the ‘other people,’ the ‘Ugly’ people who gave to us whatever ghostliness we have, and whatever imagination. We gave only forebrain consciousness. " As a novel, The Devil is Dead  suspends the reader in the region of the back brain and the porous self until, almost out of nowhere, it drops the rationalizing explanation of the Neandertal conspiracy, giving the reader Carmody Overlark’s concept of the forebrain to rationalize away what has happened. The Miguel Fuentes (back brain/porous) and Michael Fountain (forebrain/buffered) difference appears in many places across Lafferty’s work. Sometimes it’s ontological, sometimes psychological, sometimes political, and sometimes theological. Usually, it’s several of these at once. The Devil is Dead  stages this difference in its own way, and its doppelgängers are not reducible to those in Fourth Mansions . For instance, it matters that it is none other than Carmody Overlark, that enemy of the fourth mansion, who writes the quoted passage in The Devil is Dead . Lafferty suggests that we can never know for sure which side of the split carries the cross-pressure. We are caught between two strong ways of being. Is my true self the rational, self-controlled agent, skeptical of revelation? Or is it the open, vulnerable being who still longs for the transcendent and the revelatory? Am I betraying my grown-up, scientific self when I feel that longing, or am I betraying my deeper self when I suppress it? That is what makes this the never-ending story for us. The porous and non-porous selves are useful analytic tools for getting at Lafferty’s strangeness and wonder without installing a void, the Lacanian Real, as an ineffable centre or condition of possibility. This isn't for any apologetic reason, but simply because it takes into account more of what is going on in Lafferty’s work. The Real is the Lacanian order that lacks a signifier, so the moment you name it, you draw it into the Symbolic Order and erase what it was. It therefore shows itself only as a rupture or blank in discourse. Because a sacrament  is a sign that grants access to real presence and communicates efficacious grace through it, the Lacanian Real is, by definition, non-sacramental. Of course, this is an ontological critique of Petersen's way of reading Lafferty, but Petersen is making an ontological argument about Lafferty. Petersen might argue that I overlook the radical, materialist, and non-human core of his argument. I would say that I don't. It's that I agree with Lafferty who wrote in "Notes on the Golden Age," " Consider three trash or pulp fields of the hard and soft sciences: Darwinism, Marxism, Freudism. These three things were real pulp theories, but transmuting nostalgia has kept them working like grist mills. " As a final note, Petersen, as I’ve said, sees a minus in Lafferty’s ghostliness because of the minus in matter. His explanation is ontological and psychological, but not historical. He writes: “The more these doubles press into space and physicality, the more they exemplify the minus encountered in matter. They are not immaterial but submaterial, shot through with the holes of Lucretian materialism, shadowy subtractions of the Real.” An ontological explanation of Lafferty’s doppelgängers can only be partial. Why? Because of human fallenness, which Lafferty returns to in nearly every text. This fallenness is a transhistorical condition, but it takes a particular form in modernity, assuming, as Lafferty does, that human history begins with the Fall. Alienation from the transcendent today is not what it was in the past. It looks different. It is shaped by what Charles Taylor calls the secular age, a time when the religious and the non-religious coexist, and where the background conditions for belief have undergone significant shifts. Any account of the doppelgänger motif, ontological or otherwise, must be grounded in both the anthropology of the Fall and the cultural experience of late modernity. This is not because the reader must believe the Fall is real, but because Lafferty did, and he was unusually consistent in the coherence of the beliefs that inform his art. For him, it all hung together. “Now I understood,” he wrote, “by some sort of intuition that what I ha d been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was ‘A Ghost Story.’” I'll wrap up with Aloysius Shiplap, who speaks at the close of Arrive at Easterwine . His words will mean very different things, depending on how we weigh the issue of plus and minus. “This, Cogsworth, is the limbus lautumiae  of which the Sons will write when they understand it more. This is no lost or furtive limbo. It is the quarrying limbo in all its agony and estrus. This is the mother quarry itself. All the grand worlds—which we have never seen, which we can’t imagine—have been sculpted out of it. They are the holes in it, they are what gives it its wild and riven shape. But look how much else new space is left. And look also that the holes do not remain holes. We have gazed at it all wrong: we’ve seen only the dark afterimages, not the bright fire itself. Here in limbo we already have intimation of these creating worlds. The spherical answer wasn’t entirely wrong, nor was the saddle-shaped answer, nor the torus-shaped. From this young quarry may not great worlds still be called?” “We should have guessed it,” said Glasser. “It isn’t as if each of us hadn’t been in one before. We all have been, except Epikt.” “And have I not been,” I demanded. notes: Definitions: P:  Lafferty’s doubles/ghosts primarily express a fundamental lack  (minus), based on Lacanian Real + Lucretian matter. S:  Sacramental presence = a sign that communicates real presence (a core feature of Lafferty’s Catholic vision). L:  Lafferty’s fiction presupposes sacramental presence , something like porous selfhood, enchanted ontology. R:  Lacanian Real = that which cannot be signified or made present through a sign  (non-sacramental by definition). F:  A faithful reading of Lafferty’s ghostliness must account for the possibility of sacramental presence. Premises: ( P1 ) Doubles, splits, ghosts are expressions of ontological lack (minus). ( P2 ) The Lacanian Real is non-sacramental: it cannot be communicated through a sign (R). ( P3 ) Sacramental presence requires that signs can communicate real presence (S ≠ R). ( P4 ) Lafferty’s fiction, via its Catholic imagination, language, and narrative play, presupposes sacramental presence (L). ( P5 ) Therefore, any model that treats ghostliness solely as lack (P) is structurally incapable of fully accounting for L (S ≠ R, P excludes S). Intermediate conclusion: ( C1 ) (P), grounded in R, cannot account for the sacramental dimensions of Lafferty’s ghostliness (F is violated). Further premises about interpretive fidelity: ( P6 ) A faithful interpretation of an author’s work should strive to account for the author’s core metaphysical vision, where it is textually supported. Anyone is welcome to reject this principle. ( P7 ) Ignoring or negating the sacramental dimension of Lafferty’s fiction contradicts this interpretive fidelity to Lafferty's artistic aims (violates P6). Final conclusion: ( C2 ) Therefore, P, however sophisticated or interesting, is structurally unable to account for Lafferty’s ghostliness because it is ontologically closed to the possibility of sacramental presence.   Forced Trilemma: Option Result Deny that Lafferty gestures toward sacramental presence (deny P4) Contradicts abundant textual evidence and Lafferty’s known worldview Claim that the Lacanian Real allows for sacramental presence (deny P2 or P3) Contradicts Lacanian theory itself and breaks the model, though some postmodern non-Catholic theologians have tried to place the Lacanian Real within the tradition of apophatic theology Admit that the reading is an external theoretical imposition (deny P6/P7) Concedes that the reading is not faithful to Lafferty’s vision

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How much either of them knew the German debates that later shaped questions of Gnosticism, eschatology, and time is hard to say, though both were serious autodidacts who worked with ideas that fascinated Löwith, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Strauss, Voegelin, Taubes, and so forth. The divide, as I see it, is this: Dick makes Gnosticism post-Cartesian; Lafferty keeps it pre-Cartesian. Dick’s versions of the problem are trapped inside the cogito , a self sealed in its own consciousness, not sure there’s a criterion that connects private experience to public reality. Lafferty, by contrast, writes as if the cogito isn’t the center of the universe. Because his imagination is sacramental, the question moves from the hermetic self to the status of the shared world: not “am I  trapped?” but “are we  trapped together in a common, false cosmos?” Dick worries about the prison of the self; Lafferty worries about the prison of consensus reality. One is post-Cartesian; the other, pre-Cartesian. Each writer verges across the epistemic-ontological binary, but it's a thought about how to start contrasting them and to think about centers of narrative gravity.

" . . . whether persistent and inveterate wickedness might be changed, by habit, into a kind of nature, you, reader, must judge, that is, if in any way, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those unseen and eternal ages, that portion will be wholly discordant from that final unity and harmony. In the meantime, however, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those that are unseen and eternal, all those beings are arranged in order, by reason, according to the measure and dignity of their merits, so that some at first, others second, some even in the last times and through heavier and severer punishments endured for long duration and, so to speak, for many ages, are renewed by these harsh correctives and restored, at first by the instruction of the angels, and then by the powers of a higher rank, that, advancing thus through each stage to better things, they arrive even at those things which are unseen and eternal . . ." — Origen, De Principiis  ( On First Principles ), Book 1, Chapter 6, Section 3; as preserved in the Latin translation by Rufinus of Aquileia. "What is it in me that survives?" Maxwell asked . . . . "How can they destroy me in one machine and I survive in another machine? They couldn't even destroy one personality, one that had no right to be in the first place. Well, what is it of Astrobe that will survive, them? You'll never know how I fought against oblivion." The last post was abstract. As a follow-up, let's make it concrete by taking a look at the Maxwell, one of the most interesting characters in Past Master . Maxwell is a member of Thomas More’s retinue on Astrobe. He calls himself quite a few things, and and others call him various things. A spook, an aberration, an avatar. When we first meet Maxwell, his embodiment is that of a swarthy, good-sized being that appears somewhat sinister. It fits him loosely: It was a good-sized, swarthy, almost sinister body that he wore, and it was a sepulchral voice he spoke with. But one had the impression that he had to stand on tiptoes to see out of his own eyes; and that he was piping a small voice into the resounding thing as though it were an independent instrument. Maxwell has holed up inside his embodiment. What makes him so interesting is his metaphysical slipperiness as a rational being. He doesn't play by Thomistic rules. At all. There is a loose attachment to his physical form that allows him to survive the destruction of his body. During the ascent of Electric Mountain, Maxwell's body is smashed and his spirit sundered from it, yet he uses his "trick of turning up again" to survive. He shows up in the form of a "shabby old lady" we meet earlier in the novel, having found her corpse in an alley. He calls this new embodiment a "contingent" or "programmed" body that is poorly made and hardly workable, yet it does have its upside. It’s a good disguise, and he can use it to walk through walls and rejoin the group during the final events in Cosmopolis. Maxwell’s origins are ambiguous. He says that he is partially programmed in his origin, noting this as a shared trait with the character Scrivener. He has been a hunter in at least one of his previous life aspects, and during the journey through the Feral Lands, he participates in eating the Devil's brains. About this, he says he liked them more and more as he ate them. He has a belief in Astrobe, but he also sees his own nature as being a spook. A rationalist society does not believe in spooks. In the novel's climax, he helps with the violent killing of Fabian Foreman. He is captured by programmed guards, martyred, and adds his blood to the "transcendental yeast" to bring about the rebirth of the world. We hope. My reading of Maxwell belongs to a larger reading of Past Master , in which the Programmed Persons are devils inhabiting machines. The spirit has not descended into gel-cells yet; if the Programmed Persons are partly artificial intelligence, the rational being does not belong to the machine component but to the fallen angelic nature that spooks it. When the Nine confess themselves to be devils, I take that moment to be one of the novel’s central ontological disclosures. We know that nine Programmed Persons direct the deepest level of the Astrobe conspiracy, and we know that their origin is somehow tied to the infested bodies of the twelve dead criminals: "According to your ancient belief we are Devils. What we call ourselves is another thing, but we are older than our own manufacture and older than our programming. These are houses, and well-made ones, that we found swept and garnished; and we moved into them." This is relevant to Maxwell because he began as a Programmed Person, which, of course, explains his name. Lafferty almost certainly named him after the famous thought experiment in thermodynamics, Maxwell’s demon. It imagines a small being that controls a door between two gas chambers, admitting fast molecules in one direction and slow ones in the other. The result appears to be a temperature difference produced without work, a seeming violation of the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that entropy should not spontaneously decrease. The resolution lies in information. The demon must measure, store, and erase data, and that process itself increases entropy. The law remains intact. It's a straight line from entropy to the concept of Ouden. Maxwell worries about what, if anything, will survive of him. "How can they destroy me in one machine and I survive in another machine? They couldn't even destroy one personality, one that had no right to be in the first place. Well, what is it of Astrobe that will survive, them? You'll never know how I fought against oblivion." Here we see evidence of Lafferty’s radical soteriology. If the reading holds, Lafferty allows a fallen spirit to martyr itself. Even Pottscamp may be redeemable, given his spiritual agony and his heaping of ashes on his head. That would be Origenist. Rational beings are capable of ascent and descent against the backdrop of a far more developed Thomistic great chain of being. In a more Thomistic scenario, one can get stuck in a Gadarine swine. It is as if we have an Origenist scenario taking place on a Thomistic playset.

A Past Master exam for the hardcore Lafferty reader. All gnawing questions I keep going back to. Why does Pottscamp stutter? What is the structural role of the boy with the toy? Who is the false ansel? Why is the Ouden passage dream delayed? What is the relation of Adam to Athens and Jerusalem? Why did Cathead only appear twenty years ago? Who is the stranger at the end of the novel? Who are the time travelers who visited Thomas More before Paul, and why did they do it? What is the relationship of Astrobe to the Golden Bowl in Fourth Mansions ? How does the surveillance and information economy on Astrobe really work, given the nature of the Nine?

Though more than half of mankind does not believe in the ultimates and basics, surely less than five percent of the Science Fiction People have any belief at all in what is real. Science Fiction is, for ninety-five percent of the people who indulge in it, a surrogate “True Belief,” in things from which the truth has been carefully removed. It is a “True Belief” in a false religion, one without dimension. — “True Belivers” (Prose Statement) The city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built forever. — Tennyson, “Gareth and Lynette” A thinking aloud post. Lafferty’s metaphysical position on the nature of truth can look tricky. On one hand, he is highly invested in exploring the nature-constructed social worlds and the notion of consensus reality. On the other hand, he is a philosophical realist who will say things like one’s ambient is largely subjective, which can seem to push towards near-total constructivism or even solipsism. Pile on Lafferty’s genius for creating paranoid, closed, gnostic universes and demiurgic manipulators of consensus and ambient, and things can get muddy. One way through this is to distinguish between verum est ens  and verum quia factum . Verum est ens  ("the true is being") is a classical realist position. From all that I can see, Lafferty agreed with this, the position one finds in Aristotle, and that was perfected by Aquinas. Truth is a transcendental property of being itself. It is convertible with ens , bonum , and unum . The intellect doesn't construct truth but discovers it by conforming to what is. This leads to a definition of knowledge as being adaequatio intellectus et rei . It is the adequation of mind to thing. The thing has intelligibility prior to and independent of the knower, because all beings participate in the divine intellect that created them. Two sources that Lafferty appreciated are great introductions to this: Chesterton’s St. Thomas Aquinas  and Walter Farrell’s My Way of Life . Verum quia factum  ("the true because made") is Giambattista Vico's counter-principle, one that has had a major effect on modernity, from the Counter Enlightenment to Foucault and beyond. Vico was motivated by his disgust with Cartesian rationalism, and while Vico was a Catholic, his ideas had the considerable effect of being a battering ram against the whole classical tradition. This is not unprecedented. Nominalism, the epistemology behind much of the science of the seventeenth century that set the foundation for much that followed, and that was a battering ram used against Scholastic thought, was itself a product of Catholic Scholastic thought. Vico’s idea can be put simply. He thought that we can only truly know what we ourselves have made — verum et factum convertuntur . God differs because God knows nature perfectly. He made it; humans can possess certain knowledge of their own constructions: history, civil institutions, and language. Natural philosophy gives rise to probable knowledge at best, because we didn't make the natural world. In modern terms, you will never know what it is like to be a bat. This relocates the ground of certitude from being to making, from contemplation to production. The apparent problem is this: Lafferty spends enormous energy saying that what we call “reality” is a collective human construction, consensus reality, and he treats it as a character in his fiction. Now, I think he is incredibly equivocal on this point, which is why I distinguish between Prime and forms of consensus reality. It looks impossible to me to square this with the fact that Lafferty’s metaphysics of truth make him a Thomist who believes truth is a property of being itself, not something humans fabricate. Without something like this, a character like Ouden and the metaphysical plot in Past Master  make little sense to me. On the other hand, Lafferty does not discuss being in Thomistic terms in his most Thomistic work, the novel Aurelia . He said, “it’s true that I’ve spent countless hours on [Aquinas]. But the beginning of it all for me was St. Augustine. I went to prep school to the Augustinian priests at Cascia Hall here in Tulsa . . . and they certainly formed my mind.” The Augustinian way of saying verum est ens  is nam verum mihi videtur esse id quod est  (“for the true seems to me to be that which is”). Augustine did not have a fully technical transcendental convertibility doctrine. On top of this, it can look as if Lafferty is simultaneously claiming that truth is made in Vico’s sense and given in Augustine’s or Aquinas’s sense. This is why I think it’s important, when reading a Lafferty story, to ask whether the storyworld (understood as a thought experiment) is gnostic or not. Gnostic worlds in Lafferty bottom out in consensus reality and demiurges: verum quia factum . Non-gnostic storyworlds do not; they bottom out in verum est ens . On this reading, Lafferty is not claiming that truth itself is a human construction. Rather, he is claiming that our increasingly deformed experience  of reality is a human construction, and a degraded one. This subjective “editing” of communal existence is something Lafferty treats as a fundamental human tendency: I have a theory though that a person constantly edits and updates his memories, and that the updated memories are at least as valid as the original memories. As to the original facts, they have no being except in the cloud of memories that shows approximately where they once were. Lafferty can be tangled when he says things like this. One could read this constructivistically, as the claim that reality itself is nothing but memory. I think that reading mistakes an epistemological claim about facts as available to humans for an ontological claim about being itself. Events can have being even when no one remembers them; what does change is their availability within the memory-cloud. "Valid" here means operative within that cloud, where adequacy can still be judged against what is. Here "no being" means "no continued presence for us except as remembered," not "no existence." In short, I think one has to read Lafferty's asides like this against his programmatic statements, ones like the True Believers one. It would be good to have a real discussion around this issue amongst people who read Lafferty. He made an interesting point once relevant to consensus reality. It was about gun control. He said that regulating guns but not the media is like regulating small guns while leaving the really big guns unregulated. Consensus reality is a filter and something shared. Once the filter breaks, worlds must be remade. The ens  world is always there, but the factum  world is a problem of modernity because of the disintegration of consensus. He described the modern state of this collective construction as a form of intellectual pollution that threatens the very foundations of civilization, writing that The next calamity, when it comes, will be, more than the previous ones, a combination of the natural, of the unnatural, and of the supernatural. I really believe that our Western Civilization . . . was a "City Built to Music," and that it is now very near the point where the music breaks. The pollution of the arts and the attitudes has been serious since the beginning of this century. The intellectual and expressionist pollution is more serious than the physical pollution in our world, though they are interlocked. Lafferty's willingness to make arguments like this means that he uses verum quia factum  diagnostically, not ontologically. It describes what humanity has done to itself in building worlds that are more or less adequate (this shows up in creating open storyworlds such as "The Man Who Lost His Magic") or in (being stuck inside) inadequate ones ("Snuffles"). The moral dimension of his work comes through most clearly through negations and satire. It is most apparent when he critiques the language of modern social movements, which he viewed as a dangerous departure from objective truth: It [the modern movement] operates almost entirely by catchwords. But the Father of Catchwords is the Devil who is also the Father of Lies. Usually the two things are the same. Are you a dupe or a duper or a super-duper, Bill? May God have mercy on you and bring you back to the Truth! Where some thinking about Lafferty gets over its skis is by thinking Lafferty is making a metaphysical claim when he talks about consensus reality when he's making a moral and epistemological one. It seems categorically confused to read Lafferty as saying we need to change the factum  without acknowledging how factum , on Lafferty's view, is normatively ordered to ens. This is understandable because a huge amount of Lafferty's art is about dramatizing the epistemological claim as if it were a metaphysical one. Why does Lafferty do this? There are surely more reasons than two, but two stand out to me. 1. Verum quia factum  is what most moderns believe deep down, or so he thinks; most moderns do not believe in truth as a transcendental. And 2. verum quia factum has become more of an experiential fact because of the air-conditioned nightmare and the pervasiveness of media. He wrote the old tools for contemplating being—such as deep literacy—were being discarded in favor of these more manipulative, transient forms of media: It's too bad . . . [to] be so good a reader just when the Age of Literacy has come to an end. OH, it's all over with. It really was an interesting little quirk in human history, but it will sink without even an eddy. Everything from now on will be audio or video, but legible (reading-and-writing) stuff will be gone forever. The last person able to read English has already been born. He may be hyperbolic, but there is truth in the claim when we consider how human cognition has been rewired as culture shifted from deep reading to ultra-processed reading. The last figures I saw showed leisure reading declining by roughly 40% over the past decade. Johnny Can’t Read has been said for decades, but something different is happening now . This is a problem of factum .

Thinking again about Monego's essay , which I mentioned a few days ago, and it occurred to me that one probable source for the Harvesters in Fourth Mansions  is Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human  (1953), a landmark work of mid-century science fiction. This must have occurred to others, though I haven't seen it discussed. Sturgeon’s novum reimagines evolution acting on the communal mind through Homo Gestalt , a multi-person organism formed by marginalized individuals who learn to blesh into a single superior being. Lafferty said he read several hundred science fiction novel s when he majored in science fiction. Afterwards, he read it intermittently. It is hard to imagine that Sturgeon's novel was not on the Lafferty reading list, given how celebrated it was. At the same time, Fourth Mansions  introduces elements Sturgeon lacks, and it reads as a monitory response to Sturgeon’s humanism. A few other connections. Both writers have primary characters who are blessed simpletons, and both use the simpleton as a catalyst. Sturgeon has Lone, “the Fabulous Idiot,” and Lafferty has Freddy Foley. In Sturgeon, the simpleton leads humanity forward to a benevolent collective mind; in Lafferty, Freddy becomes the center of contending cosmic forces. Where Sturgeon treats collective consciousness as natural and secularly redemptive, Lafferty presents brain-weaving as predatory elitism. If Sturgeon imagines a hidden society of supermen guiding history, Lafferty does something similar with his factions, but his view of history is, as it always is, multiplex and conspiratorial. We get the four factions outside the castle. Everything is set within a Catholic horizon shaped by Teresa of Ávila rather than relative to secular evolution or humanistic progressivism. The ascending spiral of the  Interior Castle  becomes a normed environment by which one can verify whether the leap is a true one, whereas in Sturgeon, the verdict is one grounded in self-sufficient human judgment. A resource for reading the Harvesters alongside Jung's Aion :