A brief update today. My preliminary map of the sources Lafferty mined for Okla Hannali  is now live under Resources. Exploring Choctaw history has proved fascinating and humbling. I've also expanded the Serpent's Egg  glossary and will continue refining it. With that housekeeping done, I want to revisit Past Master  within the context of our AlphaFold era, a moment when, according to recent analyses, AI capability doubles roughly every five months. Past Master  touches many themes, but it increasingly reads as a prescient Catholic meditation on transhumanism, the lure of what the novel calls "Utopia," or, in Eric Voegelin's notorious phrase, the attempt to "immanentize the eschaton." In discussing The Elliptical Grave  as a Lost Race novel, I focused on Lafferty's recurring exploration of humanity's exile from Eden: cut off from grace and the preternatural gifts that once completed our nature. When Past Master  first appeared, it baffled readers. Today's Lafferty enthusiasts find it more approachable, yet a quick survey of YouTube reviews still reflects confusion. One camp views the novel as an eccentric rollercoaster ride; another interprets it as a reactionary jab at post-WWII politics. Both are correct, but you won't find anyone calling it prophetic on YouTube. This is a mistake. Lafferty's intuition about artificial intelligence's moral and spiritual dilemmas is remarkable. Although "AI" never appears in Past Master, the programmed persons, machine men, and "precis machines" raise questions we now confront directly: radical bodily augmentation, governance by algorithms, and technophilic aspirations of enhancing humanity through reason alone. As our society edges toward the twin futures of Cosmopolis and Catshead, the rise of pervasive surveillance, CRISPR-based genetic editing, and neural implants forces us to confront urgent questions about power, economics, personal freedom, and the our understanding of humanity and its potentials, themes at the heart of R. A. Lafferty’s Past Master . Many futurists anticipate a clash between biological neo-puritans who reject enhancements and technophiles who embrace them. Capital and authority could concentrate inside fortified enclaves that echo Lafferty’s Cosmopolis, while dissenters are left to pursue simpler, poorer lives beyond their walls if they opt out. I feel the gravity of this prospect most because of my only child, Henry, who is profoundly autistic and non-verbal. Much of my life is spent caring for him. If I live long enough, I know I will one day have to decide whether to allow emerging technologies to be used on him, and that prospect both compels and bothers me. Whatever happens, I know Catshead will be on my mind. Though Lafferty said that  Past Master  depicted the era in which he wrote, his era was continuous with our post-industrial, digitally dominated epoch. Like Jonathan Swift, a similarly keen-eyed, politically skeptical, and personally flawed moralist who witnessed seismic societal transformations, Lafferty anticipated the far-reaching consequences of our technological ambitions. His novel is shatteringly relevant: can a species largely estranged from grace trust its creations to perfect itself? Do we still have the resources to respond responsibly, and does the transhumanist desire conceal other desires?

As he opens the second canto of Paradiso , Dante warns his readers that only those prepared for the mysteries ahead should continue the journey. He likens his ascent through the heavens to a voyage into uncharted seas, far beyond the safe, familiar shores of ordinary understanding: "O you who are within your little bark, / eager to listen, following behind / my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas, / turn back to see your shores again: / do notattempt to sail the seas I sail; / you may, by losing sight of me, be left astray." Paradiso  II.1–6, trans. Allen Mandelbaum This image of the little boat adrift upon the vast divine ocean sets the tone for Paradiso . It is undoubtedly among the most memorable images in Catholic literature: a journey that demands courage and profound trust in the guide who has already glimpsed the eternal shores. Lafferty understood this imagery well, embedding his masterwork within the same powerful metaphor. There are at least three exceptional pieces of writing that survey the Argo  cycle’s overall shape: R. A. Lafferty’s postscript to More Than Melchisedech , whose importance can hardly be overstated because it distills the aesthetic strategies that run through all his fiction; Gregorio Montejo’s brilliant essay in Feast of Laughter ; and Andrew Ferguson’s unpublished introduction to the cycle, available on his blog. Reading all three provides an indispensable foundation for anyone seeking to make sense of ARGO . I read Lafferty as anartist who uses anti-foundationalism as a narrative tactic while remaining neither anti-foundationalist nor anti-realist. Attempts to square him with postmodernism or to reconcile his fiction with Consilium -style theological buccaneering strike me as dead ends. Yet because he uses what appear to be postmodern strategies, he can seem to flirt with epistemological claims that would undo even moderate foundationalism. His clearest statement that this isn’t his aI’m appears in the essay “More Worlds Than One,” a piece far less discussed than it deserves to be. There, weighing the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Lafferty defends Earth’s singularity: “There is a great and powerful lobby advocating the existence of great numbers of superior civilizations. One reason for this is that the secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction of scientists cannot allow the uniqueness of anything: not of Earth, not of Life, certainly not of Human Life, most certainly not of existing Human Civilization. To allow the uniqueness of any of these things, they would have to cease to be secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic persons. And the shock of changing their style would kill all of them.” This sober side of Lafferty, his conviction of human uniqueness and his mordant skepticism toward the “secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction,” bears directly on his world-making and shapes his most ambitious creation, the ARGO  cycle. That passage clarifies something essential. You will often hear it said that Lafferty disliked endings, avoided them, or wrote fiction that defies them. True, but that observation should be set alongside the fact that he is one of the most eschatologically minded writers who ever wrote. He insists that there are no final endings, and the absence of an ending is fully compatible with teleology and the perspective of eternity. After all, God, in classical theology, possesses a telos, actus purus , yet has no goal outside Himself. I suspect that Lafferty's rejection of endings but his interest in teleology is something other readers have picked up on, but recognizing why there is no contradiction is important. I would go further. Until readers see the centrality of teleology in the work, and its thoroughly Catholic cast, they will misread the scale and aims of his most ambitious writing. It is not enough to say he urges us to make new worlds because the old one has ended and we enjoy radical freedom to do so; we must also reckon with the ends toward which he writes. Lafferty’s imagination is teleological through and through. So any broad statement about the totality of his fiction ought to take that fact seriously. If you have followed this blog, you have heard me say so before. Accordingly, what I want to do here is set out some ideas about the ARGO  cycle.. The difficulty in recognizing ARGO as the masterwork stems partly from the fact that it is the clearest instantiation of his "Ghost Story," the sprawling, forward-surging narrative that includes all of his literature: stories, novels, and poetry alike. ARGO  can seem like the vanishing point into which all his work disappears: the man pulling the hole in after himself. But it is better understood through another of Lafferty’s favorite images: the thing that is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. Set the ARGO  texts on a table, step inside, and you will find yourself in a universe with hundreds of stories, dozens of novels, and a vast fictional cosmos. If you are anything like me, you will ask yourself: how can this place be so immense? The main argument I would advance about the Argo  materials relative to The Ghost Story is that they form the royal road through Lafferty’s body of work and are constructed according to the classical, Catholic doctrine of the Four Causes. Their seemingly fragmented, nonlinear form (Formal Cause) shapes language, myth, and lived experience (Material Cause); that shaping is a sacramental, participatory act shared by Lafferty and the reader under the ultimate agency of God (Universal Efficient Cause); and the narrative strains unceasingly toward an eschatological telos of reunion and cosmic renewal in the Laughing Christ (Final Cause), culminating in the regeneration of humanity. Perhaps this is the most succinct description of Lafferty's sacramental poesis. That formulation is dense, so I’ll explain how a teleological vision guides Lafferty’s seemingly anti-foundational method. His fragments cohere in odd ways not because they are a patchwork, but because each serves as a sacramental sign, a visible, tangible disclosure of invisible grace, whose seeming evanescence points beyond itself to ultimate consummation. He gives an image of this himself in the mosaic at the beginning of The Fall of Rome.  Absent a Final Cause and its eschatological horizon, those fragments would revert to provisional debris, dissolving into the relativism of historicism or the void of nihilism he often complains about. Because Lafferty’s imagination is teleological, the ghostly fragment is analogically from the start, intrinsically directed toward fulfillment and final coherence. However, the possibility of failure and final imperfection is always a threat. Think of the Material Cause in ARGO  as the rubble from which Lafferty builds: fragments of legend and myth, familiar city streets, idiosyncratic human behavior, scraps of history, and strands of theology. It is “that out of which a thing comes to be, and which persists”; e.g., bronze or silver are the causes of a statue or bowl, potential that must wait for form and maker to act. Lafferty addresses this in the “Promantia” of The Devil is Dead , telling readeds to “build things with this as with an old Structo set. ”Recall that he says one can put it together wrong When Space Chantey  and Past Master  appeared in 1968 those blocks were still inert, because Finnegan, the figure who will fuse Roadstrum, Jason, Brendan, and Finn McCool into one voyager, had not yet sailed into print; his first big outing came in The Devil Is Dead  (1971) and his deeper history only in Archipelago  (1979). So the myths, jokes, street detritus, and floating names that litter Lafferty’s early stories novels are exactly Aristotle’s “ur-stuff”: raw matter whose actuality arrives only when Lafferty later supplies the narrative form and makes the reader snaps together the Structo pieces. As a Catholic, Lafferty believes the Universal Efficient Cause of everything is God, but, very significantly, it encompasses Lafferty and the reader working collaboratively through secondary causality. Lafferty gives narrative pieces (the recurring elements I have called monads) and demands the reader’s active, co-creative participation. While this method may superficially resemble postmodernism or post-post-modernism, it fundamentally adheres to the logic of Catholic sacramental art: a collaborative process between creator and audience, guided by grace, intended to bring out the shape of a concealed but pre-existing order. I think that misunderstanding this collaborative dynamic misrepresents Lafferty, who seems to have rejected its alternative, writing: “As to Science Fiction, I am not a ‘True Believer’. As to Fantasy, I am no more than ten percent true believer. I respect only ‘True Believers’ on the real things, in the eschatologies, in the ultimates, in the basics. I do not respect the ‘True Believers’ in toys. And the ‘True Believers’ in toys hate me completely, when they really know what I am. 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.” And the Final Cause? It is nearly always represented in Lafferty as the leap , a movement from an old order toward a new creation, a transformative moment. In The Elliptical Grave , it is the ark; in Fourth Mansions , it is an ascent to a higher mansion; in Not to Mention Camels , it is a plunge downward into damnation; in Past Master , it is the birth of a renewed world; and in ARGO , it involves Duffey's eschatological passage through the seven contingencies toward a regenerated humanity. Lafferty describes an important aspect of this dynamic in “Some Things Dark and Dangerous”: "At the time of the Fall, man went into a state of Suspended Animation. Or perhaps it was a state of Animated Suspense." If Lafferty sees the current human condition as one of animated suspense, it is another reason for there not being endings. His worlds are suspended between fallenness and redemption. Someone once wrote that, unlike in Gene Wolfe, there is no new sun in Laffferty. This gets it wrong, but it is understandable. It's more accurate to say Lafferty leaves the reader in the grave, but it is a Christian grave, with body's head in the west, the feet pointing to the east, and the hope of resurrection. The nature of his fiction, centered in the Argo  legend, is ordered toward the renewal of man and the recovery of preternatural gifts. I want to go a little deeper into how the four causes apply as a narratological device in the Lafferty canon. The Argo texts will be in the corner of my eye. What follows will not be exhaustive, but it should show why the four causes are not an analytical overlay but rhetorical elements that Lafferty builds into his worlds, and suggest why his sacramental poesis would fall apart without the teleological logic of final causes. 1. Material Cause: The Substance of the World At the most immediate level, Lafferty’s material is the stuff of language, folklore, ancient myths, specific places, his modular pieces (e.g., Willy McGilly): the streets of Tulsa, the islands of Greece, the pubs of New Orleans, Galveston, and so forth. The Argo  cycle is shot through with real and imagined histories. Many of Lafferty's characters are composites: neither purely human nor purely something else, but beings stitched together from multiple bloodlines, mythologies, and spiritual states. They explode into different realities, as he put it. Human Language as Fallen:  Lafferty’s informationally dense but strangely light use of language is not decorative. It is a vision of language as revelatory but broken. Language participates in the divine Logos , but after the Fall, it runs up against the Babel event. To explore this in Lafferty, reread the passages in Sandaliotis  about Babel. And look closer until you begin to see that   is, in fact, Hell, a theme that shows up repeatedly in Lafferty.  Consider the state of language on Astrobe in Past Master and Lafferty's strong assertion that Astrobe is current day America. Myth as Typology:  Lafferty’s repurposing of myths is not random syncretism or mere bricolage. This strikes me as important: it is typology disguised as bricolage. Pagan myths are echoes, distortions, or anticipations of the Christian story. The  Argo  is a type of the visible Church, the vessel bearing fallen humanity toward renewal. Sacramental Materiality:  Concrete details—real streets, real foods, named beers anchor the narrative in the goodness of creation. This is behind Lafferty’s Rabelaisian copia . Extreme informational density prevents the story from floating into Gnosticism or mere abstraction. Even in its fallenness, the material world remains the necessary vehicle through which grace works. Characters as Composite Beings:  Figures like Finnegan, Roadstrum, and the "other blood" descendants embody the post-Fall condition: fractured, contradictory, still bearing traces of divine image and mortal wound. Theology as Substance:  Concepts like grace, sin, redemption, and damnation are not abstract in Lafferty. They instantiate and participate in the narrative world. 2. Formal Cause: The Shape of the Narrative At the surface, Lafferty’s form is famously fragmented: nonlinear, episodic, dreamlike. Stories flicker into being, cohere briefly, then break apart. But seen metaphysically: Fragmented Form as Postlapsarian Reality:  The broken, jigsaw structure reflects a world fractured by the Fall. Knowledge is partial, time is fraught, perception is darkened. The reader experiences fallenness formally. Sacramental Logic:  Seemingly absurd events function as visible signs of invisible realities. A beer-drinking contest becomes a sacrament of loyalty and identity. Amnesia signifies not just memory loss, but spiritual alienation. Signs gesture toward an invisible grace or the lack thereof. Liturgical and Cyclical Time:  Lafferty’s disjointed chronology echoes liturgical time, where past, present, and future fold into each other. Like the Church calendar, his stories operate outside linear time, in sacred recurrences. One of Lafferty’s master tricks is to use the word “ghost” when he means “spiritual.” One could create a code book that systematically shows how he does this in his work. Anagogical Structure:  Literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical levels are present simultaneously. Lafferty’s works require layered reading. Literal events point beyond themselves, toward moral transformation and eschatological fulfillment. Like the teleological, the anagogical is likely to be ignored, distorting reception. 3. Efficient Cause: The Makers Lafferty seems to have accepted the standard Catholic view of efficient causation, which views God as the primary and universal efficient cause. Authors and readers are secondary, or instrumental, efficient causes because God preserves the existence of agents, their powers, and their actions. Lafferty as Sub-Creator:  Like Duffey in More Than Melchisedech , Lafferty plays the demiurge within his fiction, shaping fallen matter into partial forms. His eccentricities (digressions, linguistic wildness) reflect the freedom and limits of any human sub-creator working within divine creation. This is a source of exhilaration and anxiety for him. Snuffles and Duffey are closer than one might at first think.  Reader as Co-Creator:  Lafferty’s do-it-yourself structure demands active engagement. Readers must assemble scattered clues, discern hidden patterns, andinterpret signs. Reading becomes a sacramental act, a small participation in divine creativity. God as First Cause:  The ultimate Source stands behind both author and reader. God grants being to the narrative material, sustains the sacramental order, and infuses even the most obscure moments with hidden grace. The resistance to easy comprehension gestures toward the unfathomable Mystery of the divine. Metafiction as Theological Inquiry:  When More Than Melchisedech  examines Duffey’s authorship, it asks directly: who creates? Lafferty? Duffey? Or the First Cause? The fiction becomes a theological investigation of origins and agency. 4. Final Cause: The Purpose and End On the surface, Lafferty’s stories end inconclusively or elliptically. But in truth, they strain toward a definite telos: reunion, renewal, regeneration. The Telos of Communion:  Despite fragmentation, characters are drawn back together—across continents, lifetimes, even realities. The "Dirty Five," the Argonauts, and the sprawling nets of families and friends are images of the Communion of Saints. Longing for Renewal:  Lafferty’s universe aches for restoration. Lost Edens and golden ages haunt his stories. Finnegan’s yearning for the unattainable "it," the hidden Seven Years, the dream of the perfected ship—all point to a lost wholenessyet to be restored. The Legend as Pre-History:  The "Legend" is a prehistory of the Beatific Vision, the final perfected reality, the Logos made manifest. It is not fully achieved within the narratives, because it cannot be, in fallen time. The stories are animated by their orientation toward it. Christ as Center:  Lafferty is very careful not to be preachy. The Laughing Christ he sometimes writes about can be thought of as the Christ who is present in the humor: it is the Christ that readers might not recognize, just as the people in Past Master fail to know who the stranger is who visits More on the scaffold. Even when not named, Christ remains the gravitational center. The sacramental form, the longing for renewal, the communal bonds: all find their source and fulfillment in the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection. This is why the Argo cycle is not merely an experimental oddity. It is a profound theological artifact, intended to help readers recognize what is most alive in artistic creation. To aestheticize its theology would reduce its author to someone merely playing with toys, overlooking who he truly is.

Current Notes:

Clone of RAL's Voice

Current notes:

This post is prickly and polemical. Deliberately so. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia  and its online iteration are important resources that I have relied on for years. The entry on R. A. Lafferty falls short. For many readers, it will be their first critical encounter with Lafferty’s legacy. And because the Encyclopedia is bounded by science fiction as a genre, it imposes limits that cannot account for him. Even on its own terms, however, it trips over itself. Below are five statements from the entry that I find to be unclear or mistaken. “He has fairly been described as a writer of tall tales, as a cartoonist, as an author whose tone was fundamentally oral.” Fairly?  This line exemplifies a familiar critical misstep: overemphasizing the oral quality of Lafferty’s style. While he obviously draws on oral traditions, especially the tall tale, his “orality” is a literate, highly stylized second orality: fully conscious of rhetorical and prosodic form, and rooted in classical prose traditions that treat language as a presentationally transparent, even mystical, medium. To fixate on the surface features of speech is to miss the real stylistic innovations. The oral mode is only one layer in a densely constructed literary performance. I’ll add: I’ve yet to read anyone who’s said anything especially interesting about Lafferty’s textual orality, likely because it’s so often flattened into “speech” rather than seen for what it is: a hyper-stylized hybrid unique to him, whose registers haven’t yet been mapped. “his conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he wrote (or has been ignored); he has been seen as a ransacker of old Mythologies, and as a flippant generator of new ones; he clearly delighted in a vision of the world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish, but at times paid scant attention to the niceties of plotting” There are several problems here. First, Lafferty’s Catholicism is not ambient or incidental; it is foundational. Second, he is not a “ransacker” of myth but a deliberate, often reverent, re-integrator of the Native American and Western traditions. Third, the phrase “niceties of plotting” is misleading. It smuggles in a whole set of assumptions about what constitutes proper narrative form, as if the reader should simply know and accept them. But Lafferty’s plots are not lapses in craft; they are alternative architectures. To imply that this is compositional inattention on his part is to read him with critical inattention. “he was technically inventive, but lunged constantly into a slapdash sublime only skittishly evocative, and only occasionally, of anything like the traditional Sense of Wonder” This sentence collapses under its own metaphors. “Technically inventive” is at odds with “slapdash.” Does a technician lunge? And what exactly is a “slapdash sublime”? The phrase “skittishly evocative” looks like critique but it is a tonal sneer rather than argument. The contrast between “sublime” and “Sense of Wonder” is likewise underdeveloped. What kind of sublime is meant? Longinus? Burke? Kant? Is this saying that Lafferty moves too rapidly to earn sublimity? Of all verbal shortcuts in the entry, I have to say that "a slapdash sublime only skittishly evocative" annoys me most because it uses word magic to hide its laziness. “Throughout his writing career, these various affects and effects were used by Lafferty to construct stories and novels that nestled within larger (but often untold) tales and universes, and were often to be understood as epigonal offshoots of those larger, earlier, linguistically more complex, mysteriously governed worlds. In the end, his corpus as a whole gave off a sense of teasing incompletion and of secrecy: almost as though it was only the entire story (to which his numerous unpublished manuscripts added almost mythic stature) that made sense, that commanded the rest.” This confuses two distinct registers in Lafferty’s fiction. One is fragmentary and personal, his “ghost story,” in his own words. The other is religious and fixed—an expression of Roman Catholic orthodoxy as cosmic order. These levels are interpenetrating but not identical. To conflate them is a mistake. It would be like calling James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon secretive because they put demands on their readers. To read him attentively is to perceive both levels and not confuse them. “For his career's sake, it was certainly unfortunate that his response to renown seems to have been an intensification of the oddness of his product; final judgement on the effect of this failure to observe normal canons of writing still awaits a coherent presentation of his work as a whole.” There is some truth here. The mismanagement of his literary estate has undeniably impeded the reception of his work, and the deck in a secular age was already stacked against him. But the reference to “normal canons of writing” likely refers to marketing norms, not literary virtues, and Lafferty was never going to conform to marketing norms. The real problem is that an assessment like this, sloppy, partial, and genre-bound, blocks the “coherent presentation” it claims to await while trying to look measured. It blocks the door, then acts like it’s a damn shame no one’s walked through it. Clute, John. "Lafferty, R.A." In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. 3rd ed. London: Gollancz, updated December 16, 2024. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lafferty_r_a

When Does Originality Cease to Be a Literary Virtue? Few writers test this boundary as thoroughly as R.A. Lafferty. His sentences are unmistakably his own, his plots dizzying. He conceals key information, and he asks other writers to invent new worlds in response to the one lost in the first half of the twentieth century. Innovation exerts pressure on every level of his art, making his body of work a radical experiment. The most important writing tends to be either innovative or thematically significant, often both at once. In his best work, Lafferty achieves this. But as his career develops, do the losses pile up? Does his relentless originality begin to eclipse artistic significance? "Firstest with the Mostest" The narrator in "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies" (1978) has something to say on this topic. While we can’t assume a character speaks for the author, the passage raises an interesting question: how much did Lafferty himself share this view? Lafferty writes: “The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic poetry. Whatever cave man did the first painting, it remains among the freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.” Lafferty’s commitment to originality runs deep, and some of his most insightful readers have questioned whether this has been positive for his reputation or his art. Michael Swanwick once argued that focusing too much on Lafferty’s originality can cause us to overlook his influences. It’s a sharp observation. Gene Wolfe raised a different concern: whether Lafferty sometimes prized originality at the expense of his art. In an unpublished letter, he wrote: Ray (I think) values originality too highly. Suppose that I invent a new kind of poetry, in which the first word of each line rhymes instead of the last . . . . I doubt anyone has done that before, but it isn’t good. It doesn’t make us see anything more clearly. Wolfe’s point is sound. Originality, in itself, is not a virtue unless it creates artistic clarity, even when this is clarifying what it means to be disoriented or stuck in the dark. I do think this gets Lafferty backward. The problem is often the reverse—it is that his originality itself is not seen clearly enough. Because he is so entertaining and deceptively light in the short form, the depth of his work is easy to underestimate. In failing to see the shape of that difficult originality, we risk missing what the work is contending with, the aspects of reality it is helping us see. If Lafferty is obscure, it is not because he is an obscurantist. As he himself said: “Down with Obfuscation! Up with Clarity.” When Originality Turns Against Itself Lafferty pursued originality because he was an original but also because he had important things to say and knew that radical new forms were necessary to express them, along with all the mysterious factors that make an artist. The innovation was counterbalanced by a formalist tendency, which I think of as being his way of constructing stories as writerly problems to be solved, where the act of telling resolves both their narratives and the formal problems they create. Often, the solution forestalls complete closure. This brings me to his early short story "Maleficent Morning"   (1960/1990), a case study in the dangers of originality. As others have pointed out, it belongs to the three-wish story family, specifically the Monkey’s Paw subcategory. Here, just as he was beginning to break out as a storyteller, Lafferty looks at what happens when the drive to be unique self-destructs. The protagonist, Isidore (Izzie) Isom, tries to make each day unique but finds himself trapped in fatal, recurring scenarios. Each morning, he wakes up, bounces on his wife, Irene, and adds new wrinkles to the day. On this particular morning, he flirts with an elevator girl named Cornelia, rushes through his commute, and stumbles into situations, each leading to disaster. When catastrophe strikes, he wishes it “unhappened,” resetting the morning—but each version leaves a trace. Over the course of the story, he swerves to avoid hitting a dog but strikes a woman and gets arrested. He forces a kiss on Cornelia, who threatens to frame him for assault, and in panic, he strangles her. He follows a strange couple into a taxi and gets himself shot. After his final wish, he is returned to bed. Irene wakes and finds him dead beside her in the blood-soaked sheets. The Mechanics of the Story A key moment of iconographic insetting occurs when Cornelia tells Izzie: “I am going to put you in a very costly frame. Don't worry about how I will do it; we have it all set up. The elevator starter is in on it, and you never will know who else. I hope you have a lot of money, because we like a lot of money. Now I will just begin to scream, and I will claim that you assaulted me. And you'll be so flustered that you'll be perfect for the set-up. Here we are at the bottom, and wasn't that a nice ride you had on my lap? But this is where you get off, in more ways than one.” Izzie’s descent in the elevator is a katabasis —a descent into hell. In classic Lafferty fashion, Cornelia’s threat to scream doesn’t just drive the immediate scene. It expands, shaping the wider plot, which peaks in the final moment of the story when Irene discovers Izzie's bloody corpse beside her and lets out a scream of pure horror: Irene woke to the shot and to the blood. ‘Isadore!’ And then she began. Did you ever hear a woman who knew how to do it really scream? Fake scream, Cornelia. Real scream, Irene. The other significant piece of insetting occurs early in the story. It, too, shapes the plot while also serving as an artistic commentary on originality. There, Lafferty writes of Izzie: He got his car and was on his way. He was a good driver, he had to be, the way he drove. Only a good driver can drive like a maniac and live through it. There are not too many different ways you can drive a car. There are only two sides of the street you can drive on, and only so many patterns you can follow in weaving back and forth. Considering Lafferty’s originality, it’s fascinating that, even at the onset of his career, he was so aware of the artistic issues Swanwick and Wolfe later identify. This awareness is reflected in the contrast between maniac driving and the two lanes. The question of his originality can be thought of as both the driver and the lanes: his inventive power in motion and being bound by constraints. Is Past Master  (1968) more lanes than maniac, and The Elliptical Grave  (1989) more maniac than lanes? I read "Maleficent Morning" as one of his weaker stories—ironically, because it grapples so directly and crudely with these artistic concerns, as if he were trying too hard to stay within the lanes, still resisting the maniac just a little too much. He had a story to place. Of course, science fiction would free him from much of this, and he would come to think of it as Story  with a capital “S.” In that sense, "Maleficent Morning" may have been a necessary and productive failure at that stage in his writing. Current Notes:

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “It is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to a mere ceremony, apart from the meaning of the ceremony.” These words from The Superstition of Divorce  (1920) shed light on an interpretive crux in Lafferty’s "Holy Woman," one that hinges on the difference between the outward form of a commitment and its sacredness, and how both relate to human will. The distinction matters because it shapes how readers interpret one of Lafferty’s trickiest Sour John stories, the first he wrote. In "Holy Woman," Sour John recounts how he was briefly kidnapped in the free port of Jebel Shah by Jack McCabe, a “charming” but shiftless bum. Jack’s devoted wife, Martha, was raised in an orphanage and later won by Jack in a card game. She stands by her difficult marriage despite Jack's failures, lack of character, and harebrained schemes. When Jack one day mistakes Sour John for a millionaire, he abducts and tries to ransom him. Martha loyally goes along with the plan; she doesn’t want Jack to look like a fool. The story has a cute ending, and Sour John deems Martha a “holy woman” who suffers her fool of a husband but never abandons him. In his invaluable blog Continued on Next Rock , Andrew Ferguson writes: “Framed within Sour John’s narration is the story of a desperate woman surviving by whatever means are at her disposal. Given the Arabian Nights  setting (and with it the narrative occasion of the original Scheherazade), a euphemistic reading of ‘gin rummy’ seems encouraged by the text, though not explicit within it. Whether or not she is forced to prostitute herself, though, the virtue of this holy woman is such that she is never debased by her surroundings, never brought down to the level of any of the rogues around her.” This reading initially appeals because it acknowledges the harsh realities Martha faces, grounding Lafferty’s story in human vulnerability and social critique. But it breaks down under scrutiny. If Martha’s survival depends on prostitution, she is debased, and the story’s internal logic collapses. Lafferty explicitly frames her as a holy woman , not a tragic figure. The Laffertian logic of "Holy Woman"—from the Little Sisters’ role in shaping Martha’s character to Martha's unyielding belief in sacramental marriage—undercuts the euphemistic reading and, I think, makes it unsupportable. If Martha sells herself, even under duress, she has been brought down by her circumstances. This collapses the very idea of grace in Jebel Shah. Lafferty’s story leaves no room for ambiguity. Either Martha is debased, or she is saved by something improbable, absurd, and ultimately graceful. It cannot be both. This raises the central interpretive issue: Is gin rummy a veiled euphemism for sex? I’m going to make the case that it isn’t; this is a moment when we should read Lafferty literally. Dante’s distinction between conditioned and unconditioned vows clarifies Martha’s virtue. In Paradiso  (Canto V), Dante argues that breaking an unconditioned vow—one freely made, without coercion—is a real spiritual failure. A conditioned vow, made under duress, carries less moral culpability due to compromised free will. Medieval scholasticism 101. Had Martha entered marriage under coercion, her endurance might be merely necessity, leaving her holiness intact, as Augustine argued regarding Lucretia: “We maintain that when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not hers, but his who violates her.”— Augustine, City of God , Book I, Chapter 19 But nothing in the story suggests Martha was forced into marriage. We are told: “This odd little man married her honorably.” The unconditioned vow binds her absolutely. Her sanctity, then, is not a product of mere endurance. She chooses to uphold the marriage as a sacred obligation, not as a fate imposed upon her. Sacramental marriage anchors the story’s moral structure, just beneath the hijinks of Jack and Sour John. The Catholic Church defines sacramental marriage as a lifelong, exclusive, and indissoluble covenant between one man and one woman, instituted by God and elevated by Christ to a sacrament. It is a sacred bond reflecting Christ’s love for the Church, rooted in fidelity, permanence, and openness to life. A valid sacramental marriage requires free and full consent; this is a crucial distinction in Martha’s case. Had she been coerced, her marriage would be merely circumstantial. But her unconditioned vow, freely made, deepens the moral weight of her faithfulness. A more coherent reading, then, is that gin rummy is precisely the means by which Martha avoids debasement. Her skill at cards is not a euphemism but the literal means through which she upholds her virtue. This interpretation preserves both the sanctity of her sacramental commitments and the spiritual integrity of the story’s inner logic. It carries forward the grace she received from the Little Sisters in childhood into the grace she sustains within her difficult marriage. Lafferty’s humor and paradox often reveal deeper truths, and here, the absurdity of Martha’s situation is not a veiled tragedy but a testament to improbable grace. One of the story’s recurring devices is Jack gambling Martha away at poker, only for her to reclaim herself through gin rummy. Martha, as it turns out, is the best gin rummy player in Jebel Shah. In one pivotal scene, when a “purple-faced plutocrat” wins her, the text reads: “He wanted to possess her at once, but fortunately she kept her presence of mind. ‘As long as the cards are out, we might just go one hand of gin rummy,’ she said.” The story loses too much if this is a sexual transaction, though such a reading might deepen it as a social critique. The problem is that this would not be the kind of social critique Lafferty was making. The story is set in a world of vice, and in such a real-world scenario, a woman in Martha’s position might have no real recourse other than trading her body for freedom. The plutocrat’s intent is clear; he wants to possess Martha. In a more cynical reading, the card game becomes a sly way of describing what actually happens. But this reading fails on multiple levels because Jebel Shah is not the real world. It is a Sour John story. Lafferty resolves a dire situation with an improbable solution. Just as Jack’s kidnapping scheme collapses into a laughable thirteen-dollar ransom, Martha’s card-playing gambit fits with tall-tale logic. If the gin rummy games were a euphemism, the entire story would shift in tone from comedy to something grimly ironic. Martha wins these games, and the story draws attention to her skill rather than implying any underlying compromise. The humor hinges on the absurdity of a woman in her situation repeatedly outplaying men who cannot resist another bet. At one point, Jack even complains that she quits mid-hot streak: “Billah, she quit in the middle of a hot streak!” So, let’s make a case for the other side. One could argue that this is the comedy of a truncated sexual encounter or that Holy  in the title really means Holey ; but to do so would be a tonal violation. If Martha’s survival depended on anything other than her wits and loyalty, the title of the story would be a cruel irony. One's critical assessment of all this will profoundly shape how one interprets the story's closing phrase: Sha‘ Allah. It is a variation of In shā’ Allāh  (إن شاء الله), the Arabic phrase meaning “If God wills”  or “God willing.”   It conveys trust in divine providence—a belief that all events unfold according to God’s sovereign and permissive will, even games of gin rummy. Current notes:

A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter  in response to a discussion about certain obiter dicta  on pornography in an essay Lafferty wrote. Though it didn’t generate any discussion, I stand by the idea that Lafferty’s most profound fictional engagement with human sexuality appears in The Flame is Green  (1971). To ensure these thoughts aren’t lost, I’m preserving them here. Lafferty rarely engages with eros  explicitly or in a sustained way, but in The Flame is Green , he explores it more deeply than anywhere else in his work. Through three key passages, I will show how he rejects pornographic eros  in favor of something sacramental. --- The most striking instances of the erotic in Lafferty’s work occur in The Flame is Green , where he explores eros as a theme in Dana's life. He also addresses it in Dotty , which contains moments that verge on the pornographic—such as the disturbing incident involving pre-teen Dotty and the grown men in Galveston—but these moments feel more like isolated events rather than a structured examination of eros itself. The second half of Dotty  speaks more explicitly about sex than anywhere else in Lafferty’s work, but it does so through the matrix of sexual fallenness, shame, and restoration. In The Flame is Green , however, Lafferty goes further in setting out a dialectic of eros. Two erotic passages stand out. Their close proximity, the way the married characters in the first passage warn Dana about the woman in the second, and the interplay of boundaries, blood, violence, playfulness, and sadism all suggest that Lafferty is making a statement about eros. My contention is that the pornography-adjacent elements in the novel are sublated in Dana’s marriage to Catherine at the end of the novel and in the erotic blood-rapiers scenes—the topless fencing, the slashed breasts, the instances of sexual bloodplay. But I’m not entirely sure what Lafferty means by "with any other couple "  in this passage: "With any other couple there would be something a little wrong about this. With them, in their private passion, there was not. But I do see a pattern. Lafferty seems to set up a three-stage progression of eros: one-sided play, corrupted conquest, and sacramental realization. Passage 1: Eros as One-Sided Play (Magdelena & Bloodplay) Dana lay down on top of the sleeping Magdelena and kissed her strongly upon the face and mouth. She partially returned his kisses, but she did not waken. He lay upon her and soaked her hair and head and face and neck and breasts and entire upper body with his blood. Ah, what a sticky red joke he was playing on the sleeping beauty! He laughed then, and his own pain became a sort of rending pleasure upon her. He loved this as an elaborate jest; and Magdelena would love it in the morning, after she had seen what had happened in the night and that it was not Dana who was dead, and after she had realized with blue-eyed delight what outrageous calling card he had left upon her. He kissed her bloodied mouth with great passion; then he rose from her. Turning to her husband, Dana cuffed Malandrino Brume and thumped him upon his mighty chest. “Good-bye, old man,” he said. “I leave you now.” And Malandrino Brume was still sleeping deeply and powerfully. Dana gave Brume a resounding slap on the haunch. “Sleep, you two saints, sleep till the sun gets in your eyes,” he said. This passage makes eros an act of inscription. It fuses play, pain, and pleasure in a way that reaffirms life and intimacy. Yet, the scene is complicated by Magdelena’s marriage to another saint-like figure. Is this Lafferty’s prefigurement of eros as sacrament? Dana’s gesture is both outrageous and oddly sacred. His blood is not just spilled but transferred, marking her in an almost liturgical way. Yet this is eros as an excess of life, not yet ordered. This is not sacramental love but a prefiguration of it, its raw material, awaiting transfiguration. Passage 2: Eros as Conquest (Dana & the Witch) [Her gown was of the dark brown color that the Carmelites wear, but it wasstuff too fine for poor Carmelites.] Then a thing happened that is completely without explanation. Dana Coscuin, always so courteous to ladies of whatever sort, committed a series of acts so startling and so removed from his regular character that there is no accounting for them. He was seized either by total madness or by sanity on a plane that is canted in regard to our own. In some way, the lady had the aspect of a snake or of some thing worse than a snake. And all the while she was one of the genuinely pretty ladies of the world. Dana caught the lady by the hair of her head and began to drag her about the road by it. “The hair at least is real,” he said loudly, “even if the girl is not.” But he continued to drag her. With gleeful fury he flung her on her back in the roadway there. There was no fear in the lady's eyes: only defiance and — what? — yes, a touch of amusement. Have snakes alway responded so disconcertingly? Dana stood upon the girl with one foot on her mound and the other on her throat. ‘Nobody has ever conquered her,’ Magdelena Brume had once said of this very nameless lady. ‘It may not be,’ Dana said to himself now, ‘but I have scored first discomfit on her.’ There was murderous glee in Dana, and momentarily it was the false snake itself that he ground under his heels. “You will really injure me,” the lady spoke with some strain, since her throat was still under Dana's heel. It couldn't be that the lady in her extreme straits was laughing at Dana with her eyes. No, it must be that the eyes of Spanish ladies and Spanish snakes differ from other eyes. “Stand off me, man,” the lady said in a small voice now, “and I will do anything you say.” “Get up then, and disrobe,” Dana told her. The lady, the girl, disrobed smoothly and quietly, letting her clothing fall in the dust of the road, and stepping clear of them. Dana began to wonder who had really scored discomfit here. The girl was slim and brown, muscled smoothly like a boy, and yet quite breasty, and boned like a young woman. She still wore her gloves, a supreme elegance by which she already partly defeated Dana. ‘She is no lady, she is a cheap boney jade,’ rough Brume had once said of this very girl here. It may have been so. Or it may have been that rough Brume had never seen this girl in her bones. ‘She is death-danger to you, Dana my love,’ Magdelena had once said of this same girl. And Magdelena of the Mountain was to be trusted such as are no more than three saints in Heaven. The girl's back was empurpled with old scars. She had been whipped, scourged almost to death at some time. “Take off your gloves,” Dana said, and the girl dropped her gloves in the dust. Aye, she had once been hanged up by the thumbs and beaten. But where was the death-danger from this bare girl? Dana went through the clothes in the dust of the road. He looked at the girl. “You have nothing hidden?” he asked. “What would I hide?” “Robe yourself again then.” But the girl found combs with her clothes and was fixing her hair first. “Dana Coscuin,” she said, “dine with me one month from this evening.” Here, Dana's eros   has become disordered. It is conquest and also failed self-mastery. He wants to unmask the Condesa Elena Prado y Bosca, to strip away illusion, but the harder he presses, the weaker he becomes. When she is unfazed, calmly fixing her hair—sheer pornographic impudicitia —the power dynamic has flipped. Dana, once the would-be dominator, is now servant to his own eros . He set out to break her. It is he who is undone. Force reveals spiritual impotence. The witch does not resist; she has no need to. Dana’s eros  is laid bare, incapable of the reciprocity that could redeem it. In the end, it is he who is stripped. By the time he reaches Catherine, he will have been nursed back to health by Brume and will have shed his need for disordered conquest. No longer attempting to wield eros as a weapon, he will be ready to receive it as a gift. Passage 3: Fully Realized Eros "With any other couple there would be something a little wrong about this. With them, in their private passion, there was not." Here, eros is finally legitimized—beyond both transgressive jest (Magdelena) and abortive conquest (the witch). Dana and Catherine’s fencing scene represents eros in its true form—fully realized, neither transgressive nor dominated. Blood and inscription return, but unlike in the first two scenes, here, there is no collapse. Catherine’s body is marked, but she is not wounded. Lafferty’s narrative illustrates how Dana matures beyond the counterfeit eros characteristic of pornography—an eros that mimics intimacy while lacking the mutual recognition that makes love real. The counterfeit form treats desire as consumption rather than communion. In the union with Catherine, eros attains its sacramental perfection: an ordered, mutual fulfillment and grace that can be both playful and wise at once. Here is the progression that I see in the novel: Eros as Innocent Play (Magdelena) This stage Dana's eros is a spontaneous, transgressive expression of desire. It is uninhibited, playful passion that affirms life. But it is ephemeral and driven by impulsivity rather than the mutual commitment required for enduring intimacy. While it disrupts conventional norms and affirms life, its lack of reciprocity and sacramentality makes it unsustainable over time. Eros as Conquest (The Condesa Elena Prado y Bosca) At this stage, Dana's eros  transforms into an attempt at domination. Yet this effort backfires, becoming a failed conquest in which the drive for erotic control ultimately destroys desire. A recurring motif in the novel is the witch’s face, which will end up burned and scarred by fire. This reaches its horrifying peak in the following lines: It was a years-after dream of Dana, when he had come to his grayness, meeting again with Elena Prado, who was one-eyed and bent and her face entirely of scar tissue. That was not the shaking part of it. The spooky part was that Elena was as stubborn and lustful and snaky-triumphant as ever. Dana’s forced domination over her exposes his vulnerability to appetitus  and the threat that concupiscence could destroy his soul. It will show that when burning eros is pursued through coercion rather than recognition, it scars not only the coerced but also the coercer. Eros as Sacramental Fulfillment (Catherine) The final stage culminates in a balanced and sacred union, where eros is realized as a sacramental commitment. This form of eros transcends fleeting play and destructive conquest, transforming desire into a shared, sacramental bond. It is a sustainable, legitimate expression of intimacy, marked by both symbolic and tangible signs of mutual recognition. This is not an expenditure of spirit in a waste of shame, but a sacrament. Lafferty’s treatment of eros in The Flame is Green  is a map, charting both the disorder of partially fulfilled eros and its fulfillment when directed toward its proper end. It’s also unexpectedly and deeply countercultural. The sacramental marriage is neither repressive nor indulgent, which is why Lafferty chooses graceful fencing to depict it: "Win with whom, Catherine?" But she slashed him, and they were at it again. Dana drew blood on Catherine. She was statuesque, scarlet on ivory now. Her throat, her bosom were statued perfection, firm beyond believing, and Dana added deep, rich color to them. That man the other night was not the greatest sculptor in the world: he, Dana Coscuin, was the greatest, and he added incredibly deft touches to the greatest living statue. With any other couple, there would be something a little wrong about this. With them, in their private passion, there was not. Catherine stuck her tongue out impishly, and Dana flicked it with his rapier's point, starting a fine red ribbon. "My initials are on you there," Catherine said when they were finished. She spoke a little slurred from her nicked tongue. This is the way Dana would remember her voice. "On your thorax," she said. "They will scar and be there forever." It is a shockingly Laffertian metaphor for rightly ordered eros in a sacramental marriage, where eros is an instrument of grace.

Lafferty’s short sentences fascinate me. For several weeks, I've tried to understand how they work, especially those sentences that carry significant thematic weight. There is a smart essay online that argues Lafferty breaks the rules by telling instead of showing. But this is only half right. Lafferty shows by telling: he uses what Virginia Tufte, in Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style , calls “syntactic symbolism.” Tufte writes, "Prose is linear. It is read and said to move… the movement may resemble accumulation or attrition, progress or other process, even stasis, or any of these interrupted, turned, reversed. In space or time or both, it can go in any direction as continuous or repetitive, accelerated or retarded, smooth, halting, or halted. The variety is enormous . . . Here syntax as style has moved beyond the arbitrary, the sufficient, and is made so appropriate to content that, sharing the very qualities of the content, it is carried to that point where it seems not only right but inevitable." One of Lafferty’s signature moves as a writer is to build short sentences using expressive fragmentation. To note this when reading, I use a virgule (/) to mark the fractures. When the entire sentence stands alone, two virgules flank the sentence. To show what I mean, I’ve labeled each fragment below (F#) where I would place the virgule, along with short explanations of why I'd place it there. The next step would be to spell out the connection between the syntactic symbolism with the specifics of sentence grammar. The sentences are from "Days of Grass, Days of Straw." //Gray day / broken and bleeding red.// [Noun phrase modified by participial adjectives] F1: Gray day—simple noun phrase establishing mundane scene. F2: broken and bleeding red—violent imagery abruptly juxtaposed, instantly subverting normalcy. //Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. / No, it was a city road. / It was really a city trail or path.// [Series of corrected declarative sentences] F1: city street—initial, conventional description. F2: city road—corrective narrowing. F3: city trail or path—further narrowing; mirrors mental uncertainty. //Oh, / oh, / what else?// [Interjections followed by interrogative fragment] F1: Oh,—hesitation interjection. F2: oh,—deepening uncertainty. F3: what else?—anxious fragment signaling incomplete memory. //A strange coin.// [Noun phrase fragment] Single fragment emphasizes surprise and strangeness. //Things hardly remembered: / echoes and shadows, / or were they the strong sounds and things themselves?// [Fragment followed by interrogative compound sentence] F1: Things hardly remembered:—introduces ambiguity. F2: echoes and shadows—metaphorical fragment; uncertain memories. F3: or were they the strong sounds and things themselves?—corrective fragment deepening uncertainty. //Wait, / your change.// [Imperative followed by noun phrase fragment] F1: Wait,—sharp imperative fragment creating abruptness .F2: your change.—explanatory fragment sharply juxtaposed. //Ah, / they'd curl and bend, / but they wouldn't break.// [Exclamation with compound declarative sentence] F1: Ah,—fragmentary exclamation. F2: they'd curl and bend,—partial impression. F3: but they wouldn't break.—antithetical completion, draws attention. //No two alike, / really, / no two alike.// [Repeated elliptical sentence fragments] Symmetrical fragments expressing the uncanny, with virgules before and after "really." //But is it wrong to feel unsatisfied, / which is unsated?// [Interrogative complex sentence with relative clause] F1: But is it wrong to feel unsatisfied,—poses moral ambiguity. F2: which is unsated?—deepens conceptual uncertainty. //Something was mighty odd here.// [Declarative sentence with predicate adjective] Single fragment succinctly captures intuition of abnormality.   //Something was mighty even here, / mighty neat.// [Declarative with repetition and predicate adjectives] F1: Something was mighty even here,—unexpected smoothness. Punning. F2: mighty neat.—expresses artificiality abruptly. //Straw-Men! / Straw-Men!// [Repeated exclamatory noun fragments] Repeated exclamations rupturing narrative normality.   //Christopher Foxx said softly, 'I remember the word now / and I couldn't remember it before.'// [Declarative embedding compound declarative clauses] F1: I remember the word now—recovered memory fragment. F2: and I couldn't remember it before.—loss fragment juxtaposed. //Drool and be happy.// [Compound imperative sentence] Humorously abrupt imperative; satirizes passive consumerism. //Dragons' sauce, / said the waiter.// [Noun fragment with dialogue attribution] F1: Dragons' sauce,—surreal culinary imagery. F2: said the waiter.—mundane juxtaposition. //Days out of the Count.// [Capitalized elliptical noun fragment] Isolated symbolic expression of temporal fragmentation. //Make room for me! / Oh, / make room for me!// [Repeated imperative sentences with interjection] Emotionally charged imperative mirroring narrative fragmentation.   //The head, / the head! / Don't let them forget the head!// [Repeated noun fragment with imperative] Urgency dramatically emphasized through repetition. //He was revealed as a straw-man / filled with bloody straw, / and no more.// [Passive declarative with participial phrase] Identity dissolution intensified by sharp fragment. //It smashed itself / like a bursting pumpkin / on the broken floor.// [Declarative sentence with simile] Violent concrete imagery heightened by fragmented syntax. Some conclusions: These breaks are never random; they enact syntactic symbolism. They function as sentence-level controls on narrative pacing and reader focus. They symbolically mirror thematic elements such as psychological disorientation, identity dissolution, temporal instability, and procedural uncertainty. They serve as isolating maneuvers that Lafferty uses to build linguistically charged moments of intense concentration. They employ juxtaposed fragments to achieve paradoxical, poetic, and philosophical intensity. Without this expressive fragmentation and syntactic symbolism, Lafferty would have to rely far more heavily on conventional methods of “showing” rather than “telling.” In his hands, the precise sentence fractures show more vividly and economically than most traditional forms of telling can.

I love to sail the ocean quaint, I love the waves that rush-o. I love to paint with sightless paint, I love to whack my brush-o. "Ballad of Invisible Alfred" Today, I was thinking about Lafferty’s image of pulling the hole in after yourself and its connection, in his imagination, to the mouth. The phrase recurs across his writings, often looking lighthearted, but it rarely is. It usually indexes metaphysical terror. But what kind of metaphysical terror? Not materialism. It is not the Lucretian void—a passive emptiness that allows atoms to swerve through space. It is stranger, closer to a quantum vacuum— being shot through with holes that, like so many hellmouths, worm their way through all of postlapsarian creation, never reaching total negation. Lafferty shows us what this looks like at the end of Arrive at Easterwine (1971) The universe, new seen, grew in power and clarity, and ghastliness. “It’s still a sphere,” Gregory growled stubbornly. “A little bit rough, but a sphere.” But Gregory had slipped and shrunken. For the moment he was no giant. He had reached his limit, and perhaps his minutes as director were numbered. “It’s still a rotten apple?” Glasser gasped with a passion unusual to him. “Oh, oh, why have apples been the symbol both of the loss and the search? Oh, God of the gutted glob! The holes in it, the holes in it, the unfathomable abysses, the searing absences. What thing cries out of its absences? How will it be fulfilled?” “It’s a sponge,” said Cogsworth through closed teeth. “How sponges must suffer!” "It’s a cheese,” Valery offered hysterically, “rotted cheese and full of holes. A whole cosmos of maggotty cheese, turned green in its taint and rot.” Food. Holes. Mouths. If you ask me, the most frightening “nothingness” villain in Lafferty’s novels is not the well-known one, Ouden. It is Invisible Alfred in Serpent's Egg (1987). Ouden is an idol, but Invisible Alfred is something far more insidious. Recall that Invisible Alfred was not born invisible. He claims to have spent a thousand years in a one-hundred-gallon drum of invisible paint, which granted him near-invisibility. This, of course, links him with the other imprisoned devils in Lafferty’s fiction who are eventually released. It is practically a Law of Lafferty that “The Earth had had endemic devils for many millennia and had built up a certain resistance to them. But the devil-invasions would be epidemics as they came to the worlds that did not have the devil experience.” It is also a Law of Lafferty that we should not trust what devils tell us about themselves. Like the masterminding devil Pottscamp in Past Master (1968), Invisible Alfred is at first mistaken for a potential friend. Only gradually does the reader understand how sinister he is. Poor Invisible Alfred, the guy who got trapped in a barrel. On a first reading of Serpent’s Egg , it is almost impossible to recognize that Alfred’s invisibility ties him to the Catholic idea of evil as privation. Unlike Ouden, Alfred’s arrival doesn’t begin with big, booming postures—though he builds up to them, eventually claiming to be a prophet. The important part is that he does not announce himself as a terror. Real terrors in Lafferty usually don't. And unlike Ouden, you cannot laugh Invisible Alfred away. “We laugh you off the scene,” says Paul-Thomas to Ouden. Of Invisible Alfred, Lafferty writes, “[he] made three more numinous and prophetic speeches to three other multitudes of people that day, but they weren't successes. More and more people were laughing at him, and he was completely discredited. He didn't seem discouraged though. He just closed his eyes and mouth and went away. Or else he did not go away.” The only visible parts of Invisible Alfred are his eyes and mouth—until he shuts them both, at which point he blinks out of existence. Or else he doesn’t. I think he can’t. He isn’t Ouden, because Ouden is pure nothingness, and pure nothingness cannot exist. Invisible Alfred’s mouth does exist. At first, the reader might think Alfred is just another of Lafferty’s grotesques, but it turns out that he is the Supreme Head of Lafferty’s most chilling Gnostic secret society, The Kangaroo. He will slaughter the children whom Lafferty has positioned the reader to care about. They are a version of the Dulanty children from The Reefs of Earth (1968) who will not get to remake the world—"And opposed to them, only the defenseless World!"—because they will be dead and because the world of Serpent’s Egg  is on the offense. Now I will say what gets said a lot about Lafferty because it is true. While Lafferty’s deaths are often violent, they are just as often exuberant—joyful, even. But Invisible Alfred’s murders are not like this at all. There is zero joy here. (Watch for the word joy  in the upcoming passage and how devastating it is.). Alfred's killing of the supergenius golden ape Axel and the supergenius little Lord Randal is about as nightmarish as Lafferty gets: “Axel woke up in total joy and sprung to his feet. He had nearly a second of happy realization, and he opened his mouth to shout. But no shout came from his mouth. One of those short, sharp-bladed Dolophonoi knives, seeming to move by itself, buried itself in Axel's throat, and the ten-year-old Golden Ape fell dead. But the short knife, still seeming to move by itself, withdrew from the red-running throat of Axel and hovered in the air seeking further prey. "I know you now, I'll have you now!" Lord Randal cried and went fearlessly after the dancing knife. Lord Randal's own knife had flicked out and stabbed at an unseen something. But the dancing knife found Lord Randal's throat just as it had found Axel's. And Lord Randal fell dead.” This dialectic—laughter and privation—is the hole you pull in after you. It's the conceptual knot. From a Catholic eschatological perspective, the image is troubling. Catholic teaching envisions an eschatological fulfillment in which creation is renewed in the resurrection—a reordering, not an erasure, of existence. The destiny of the world is transformation and reconciliation with God, not dissolution into absolute nothingness. And yet, here is Invisible Alfred in full mania, speaking with the devilish voice of Pottscamp who I think ventriloquizes Ouden: “. . . all voices on Earth and in the Ocean praise me whenever they sound, whether they intend it or not. All of them rebound to my glory.” The sightless paint in Alfred’s ballad— “I love to paint with sightless paint, I love to whack my brush-o” —opens the hole that you pull in after yourself. And the final “o”  in brush-o  is the O  in Ouden. And we know what holds the brush. Returning to Arrive at Easterwine , it is perhaps surprising that—of all the members of the Institute for Impure Science—it is Glasser, the man without genius, who delivers the novel’s most profound line: "What thing cries out of its absences? How will it be fulfilled?” Here is a chart that compiles every example of the phrase I know of in Lafferty’s work: Title Circumstances Quote Implication “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire" A faction called the “Unstructured Scriveners” (or Unmakers) celebrates humanity’s collapse as a masterwork of self-negation. “The second greatest masterwork of man was the unstructuring of man himself… the going into the hole and pulling the hole in after him.” Total self-annihilation, erasing not only identity but the void left behind.    Humanity’s achievement is nihilistic unmaking. “What’s the Name of That Town?” Gregory Smirnov the Tele-Pantographic Distorter to erase a city’s destruction from collective memory—then he erases his own memory of doing so. “He does not recognize or remember it even now. It was his job to pull in the hole after them all.” Absolute cover-up: not just the event but the memory of erasure itself is erased. Aurelia Talking about the “Big Bang” and God, Cousin Clootie says that all existence will revert to nothingness. “It all begins at zero, and it all returns to zero… They will disappear into the hole… and pull the hole in after one.” Cosmic scale of obliteration: the universe erasing itself. Dotty, Chapter 5 Dotty watches small crabs and sand-dwellers sealing their burrow holes behind them as they retreat underground. “They scoot sideways into holes and pull the holes in after them… They close it after them.” Innocent reflection on erasure of trace. This is perhaps the origin of the image for Lafferty, perhaps something he saw on family vacation in Galveston. The vortex of sand seems to fit the way the image works in his writing more than an Acme-style portable hole. Past Master,   Chapter 10 Thomas More discovers that powerful “Programmed Persons” plan to annihilate all life—and even the memory that life ever existed. “We will pull the hole in after us… What is not known to be is not. And what is not has never been.” Ultimate, universe-wide negation.- Erasure so absolute that it nullifies the very fact that anything once existed.- Apocalyptic and diabolical finality. Sindbad: The 13th Voyage , Chapter 3 Sindbad’s former student boasts of being a “perfect spy” who can leave no trace behind, surpassing even Sindbad’s teachings. “…then I left; and I pulled in the hole after me. For I am the perfect spy, and you are not.” - Espionage-level self-erasure: removing all memory or evidence of one’s presence.- Elevates disappearing into an art form of total negation. Spance Chantey,   Chapter 3 Captain Roadstrum and crew encounter a black sun that “swallows” everything, sealing off even time and memory. “It drew in whole and pulled the hole in after it… Use but a thumb to gull the gulping glutton there!” Cosmic devouring: the sun not only consumes matter/time but closes the void behind it

I recently saw someone online say, “There is always a snake in a Lafferty book,” and that is pretty much right. I like the snakes in Lafferty. For example, I really like the first line of " The Forty-Seventh Island": “Quincy, we will have to do something about the snakes in the girls' room,” Europa Phelan said. No one can doubt that Lafferty gets a lot of mileage out of his snakes. Sometimes they’re cartoons, like Sammy and Horace the Snake in Space Chantey . Sometimes they’re two-legged, like the Pythons in Fourth Mansions  or Snake-Oil Sam in "In the Garden. "  Sometimes they’re just plain old snakes. But when Lafferty gets really serious about a snake, he usually has a trick up his sleeve. That trick is the Protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15, where God declares enmity between the serpent and the woman, between her offspring and the serpent’s offspring: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” This verse is foundational in Catholic typology and Marian devotion. It is the first promise of a Redeemer and of the triumph of Christ over Satan. Mary, as the New Eve, is seen as the one who opposes the serpent, mirroring Christ’s opposition to sin and death. As with many Catholics, Lafferty links this to Noah’s Ark—which, typologically, is the womb of Mary. The earliest example of this idea that I know of comes from St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (c. 213–c. 270): "Let us chant the melody that has been taught us by the inspired harp of David, and say, 'Arise, O Lord, into thy rest; thou, and the ark of thy sanctuary. 'For the Holy Virgin is in truth an ark, wrought with gold both within and without, that has received the whole treasury of the sanctuary." The woman-snake-ark complex is a workhorse in R.A. Lafferty’s fiction. In Arrive at Easterwine , for example, the generation of the Snake within Epiktistes is followed by the appearance of Mary Sawdust inside him. There is immediate enmity between the two. And things begin to go badly for Snake: And Snake, who has been smashed near to death on the flinty littoral of the pungent pool cannot now get out of this morass. He is knocked back in, he is pushed down into the bottomless sludge by a stick named virga in hands I can’t see. His head is bruised and burst, his eyes are torn and hanging. He is drowning in the foulness. (One does not usually think of snakes as drowning, or as bothered by foulness.) Spotting the woman bruising the head of the serpent in a Lafferty novel is like spotting Hitchcock in a Hitchcock film. G.K. Chesterton saw this kind of Marian devotion as a badge of honor, putting it like this: "I do not want to be in a religion in which I am allowed to have a crucifix. I feel the same about the much more controversial question of the honour paid to the Blessed Virgin. If people do not like that cult, they are quite right not to be Catholics. But in people who are Catholics, or call themselves Catholics, I want the idea not only liked but loved and loved ardently, and above all proudly proclaimed. I want it to be what the Protestants are perfectly right in calling it; the badge and sign of a Papist. I want to be allowed to be enthusiastic about the existence of the enthusiasm; not to have my chief enthusiasm coldly tolerated as an eccentricity of myself. And that is why, with all the goodwill in the world, I cannot feel the crucifix at one end of the town as a substitute for the little Roman Catholic Church at the other." The way Lafferty uses this complex of ideas can be subtle, or it can have supreme structural importance. In Arrive at Easterwine , it is both, while in Past Master , it is subtle. Early in Past Master , we learn that Evita is “a female creature who was at the same time Succubus, Eve, Lilith, Judith, Mary, and Valkyrie.” When Lafferty calls a woman both Eve and Mary, a snake is going to get hurt. As the novel reaches its apocalyptic conclusion, Lafferty writes, There was one wave of fury, a minute thing as to the bulk of it, but incomparably savage. There is always one such small mad wave, rising to foaming and furious height all out of proportion to its bulk, that rises and strikes a very few moments before a true tidal wave or world-wave strikes. It is called the forerunner wave. So we have the flood. Where is the ark? Where is Mary bruising the head of the snake? Here is the death of Fabian Foreman: “No, no, woman!” Foreman gasped as the blood pulsed out of his torn throat. “I’m the master of it all. It has to be this way. The furious reaction, the transcendent yeast will set humanity back into its proper place again and let a new world be born.” “I know it!” Evita sang. “I’m a bunch of that transcendent yeast. I’m the heart of that furious reaction! I revel in it. And we’ve had a dog for puppeteer all this late time. No wonder it’s been a time of trouble.” She broke his face completely with a lioness blow.