Concepts | Arrive at Easterwine

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Source: Lafferty

This term, drawn from a private note by Lafferty, refers to a symbolic threshold based on E. I. Watkin's metaphysical system in The Bow in the Clouds. In Watkin's model, which maps human experience onto the electromagnetic spectrum, 3700 Å marks the physical boundary where invisible ultraviolet light becomes visible violet light. Conceptually, it represents the liminal point where the unknowable substratum of reality (pure matter) becomes just barely accessible to human perception and inquiry. Lafferty's scribbled note describing his novel Archipelago as "a fantasy at 3700 angstroms" identifies the novel's central theme as the interplay between the perceived and the unperceived, central to most of his best work. A significant amount of what is found in Lafferty happens at this boundary, illustrated by characters with dual identities and realities that shift as if crossing a perceptual line.

Works: Archipelago

A

Reading: Daniel Otto Jack Petersen

Daniel Otto Jack Petersen describes adduction as a mode of reasoning that resists rigid demonstration. It depends on feeling and intuition, not proof. Rather than solving anomalies, adduction lingers with them, letting their strangeness shape perception. It values resonance over resolution. Petersen pairs this with monstration, a term for how monsters appear—not by explanation, but by sheer presence. They show up. They demand attention. In that moment, they become legible not through analysis, but through the imagination they stir. Lafferty's stories, Petersen argues, operate in this register. They are not built to explain. They are made to provoke. The reader does not decode them like a scientist with a specimen. The reader responds, intuitively and playfully, to their excess. These are narratives that behave like monsters themselves: disruptive, strange, and oddly generative.

Latin for arrival or coming. Here it names a fulfillment given by God that exceeds what the present order can produce by its own powers. God may bring it about through created persons and things, as he gives grace through the sacraments. Their participation is real, but the power to bestow the gift comes from God. In Fourth Mansions, Freddy Foley is called to a transformation the Harvesters cannot produce through their weave. In Serpent’s Egg, the Big Egg can be read as a promise of the world’s redemption. Adventus can sanctify the machinery and other created things already present in the story. Anagogy directs the reader toward that fulfillment.

Vocabulary borrowed from Jürgen Moltmann and adapted here in a Thomistic sense.

Works: Fourth Mansions; Serpent’s Egg

Read further: Lafferty’s Endings: Futurum, Adventus, Anagogy; Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I–II, q. 112, a. 1

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In his essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty's Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle," Gregorio Montejo introduces the concept of "Aeviternal Chrononauts." These beings exist both in time and beyond it. They live within a threshold, suspended between the flux of temporal change and the stillness of eternity. Their journeys, as Montejo describes them, pass through what he calls a "narrow interval of unreality." This is not ordinary time. It is a charged, unstable zone. Here, the present threatens to consume, and the future looms, unresolved. Moving through this interval, characters face real danger. They risk splintering their sense of self. They risk unraveling the fabric of reality itself.

Works: The Argo cycle

Read further: Notes: Duffey and Time

Vocabulary: Aquinas

The Thomistic mode of duration distinguished from both time and divine eternity. Time measures change through before and after; eternity belongs to God’s immutable life. Aevum measures a created being whose existence is stable while change may be associated with its operations. Aquinas does not define it simply as very long time. This vocabulary provides a starting point for reading the unusual durations of the Argo cycle, but its fictional applications remain matters of interpretation. Montejo’s account of multiple aeviternal manifolds differs from the account of participation proposed here. Aeon also needs care, since its meanings in other traditions do not coincide with Thomistic aevum.

Thomistic vocabulary; distinguish its later critical applications.

Works: The Argo cycle

Read further: Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 10; Notes: Duffey and Time

An event or image through which a story opens toward an order exceeding the apparent limits of its world. I use the term for endings and transformations whose significance lies in what they make possible for a person, rather than in the completion of an ordinary sequence of actions. Freddy’s leap in Fourth Mansions is a central example. Such a moment may disclose the direction of the whole story while leaving its final outcome beyond narration. The leap must be distinguished from every spectacular change of state: increased power, altered perception, and escape can also take distorted or destructive forms in Lafferty.

Works: Fourth Mansions; Past Master; The Reefs of Earth; Serpent’s Egg

Read further: Postfictional Elements; Hermeneutic Thoughts

Interpretation directed toward ultimate things: judgment, resurrection, beatitude, and the final end of the person. In these readings of Lafferty, anagogy concerns the relation between a story’s represented events and the eschatological order toward which they point. An allegorical identification may help a reader begin this movement, but naming a correspondence does not exhaust it. The question becomes what the story permits its persons and worlds finally to become. Anagogy therefore requires a more precise account than calling a passage mysterious, symbolically rich, or profound. It names a direction of meaning, and a story may keep that direction open without depicting its consummation.

Inherited theological and interpretive vocabulary.

Works: Fourth Mansions; Past Master; Serpent’s Egg

Read further: Decoding the Lafferty Megatext

Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

Inoue’s term for Lafferty’s exposure of fraudulent mystery. He extends Hitchcock’s MacGuffin to the promise of hidden significance used to hold attention, mislead a victim, or conceal an emptiness. In his reading of “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” the mystery of beginnings becomes such a lure. The story exposes the means by which its protagonist is deceived. Inoue distinguishes these frauds from genuine mysteries and ends his essay by reopening the question of Duffey’s supposedly hollow creation. The anti-MacGuffin concerns the exposure of spurious significance; the Anti-Secret concerns the disclosure of suppressed truth.

Inoue’s term, extending the MacGuffin he attributes to Alfred Hitchcock.

Works: “Nine Hundred Grandmothers”; More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” § 13; English translation, pp. 17–18.

A recurrent structural principle in Lafferty's fiction, describing a story that exposes concealment rather than hoards mystery. The anti-secret is not a revelation in the ordinary sense; it is a counterforce to suppression. Most Lafferty stories reveal that something is askew in the surface of reality, pointing toward a corresponding secret in Prime, the true order of being. In "The Only Tune That He Could Play," the final line defines the rule: "If you suppress a secret, you must suppress the anti-secret also." The anti-secret is thus the story's act of rebellion against amnesia and censorship, an eruption of the hidden into the visible. Where conspiracies, distortions, and ideological fog obscure the real, Lafferty's anti-secrets push back with broken transparency: they say what must not be said. To read a Lafferty story is to follow the trail of an anti-secret calling back to its other in Prime.

Lafferty’s phrase, developed here as a structural principle.

Works: “The Only Tune That He Could Play”

Read further: Hermeneutic Thoughts

Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

Inoue’s account of endings and narrative fragments that reach readers separately from a novel’s principal text. He treats the supplementary account of Finnegan’s last day as a means of placing The Devil Is Dead within the larger Argo sequence, then proposes a similar function for the alternative endings of More Than Melchisedech. Their separate presentation allows a book’s ending to stand while other possibilities and connections remain available elsewhere. The interest lies in how each version changes the relations among lives and works. Inoue’s proposal gives the circumstances of publication a place in the interpretation of narrative form.

Descriptive heading for Inoue’s use of “apocryphal” in discussing alternative endings.

Works: The Devil Is Dead; More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” § 8; English translation, pp. 8–9.

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Gregorio Montejo's essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument" explores what he calls "apophatic intervals." These are not just pauses or empty spaces. They are metaphysical thresholds. In Lafferty's Argo cycle, they appear between the immanent and the transcendent. Montejo describes them as moments where the fabric of reality thins. Something more becomes visible. In these gaps, Forms rise to perception. They are not grasped through definition, but through encounter. Lafferty uses these intervals to stage revelations. They are scenes of contact, of meaning felt rather than explained. What emerges is more than information. It is an invitation to wonder.

Works: The Argo cycle

B

A name for the difficulty of giving transcendence a fictional form. A story must use scenes, persons, images, and temporal events to approach an end that those means cannot simply contain. My comparison of In a Green Tree and Serpent’s Egg makes this a question of Lafferty’s development: how can the historical scope of an earlier project accommodate the metaphysical demands of the Ghost Story? The enormous egg supplies an image of possibility whose full contents remain undisclosed. The problem extends beyond that particular image to the way the Oceanic fiction carries an eschatological direction through forms that remain finite.

Works: In a Green Tree; Serpent’s Egg; “Configuration of the North Shore”

Read further: The Big Egg Problem; “Configuration of the North Shore” and the Oceanic Novels

In The Flame Is Green, Lafferty uses the term "Black Revolution" to name the most principled outright rejection of liberalism available to his protagonist, Dana Coscuin. The historical referent is Carlism, the traditionalist, legitimist movement rooted in a dynastic dispute over the Spanish throne after 1833. Carlism defended a Catholic monarchist order, regional liberties, and the sovereignty of Christ the King against the centralizing liberal state. Lafferty respects the Black Revolution. The sermon of the Black Pope makes this plain: "the Carlist Thing is the King Thing, the Bold Thing, the Sky Thing." But The Flame Is Green says goodbye to it. Lafferty depicts Carlist reaction as quixotic—principled but inflexible, unsuited to the times. Dana must choose among three forces: the Black of tradition, the parasitic Red, and the as-yet unformulated Green Revolution. That he moves toward the Green is one of the strongest reasons not to label Lafferty a reactionary. The Black Revolution matters in Lafferty's fiction because it establishes the dignity of what is being left behind. Reaction is not vilified. It is honored and surpassed.

Works: The Flame Is Green

Blood and bodily injury give many of Lafferty’s scenes a moral and religious pressure that their comic manner can obscure. Bloodsmell names the demand to attend to that pressure: who suffers, who inflicts the injury, how it is narrated, and what judgment the story permits. Biblical and sacramental associations can make sacrifice, punishment, mercy, and redemption available to a reading. They do not determine the meaning of every wound in advance. Comic violence can remain cruel, and a character’s claim that suffering serves a good end requires examination. The term is useful when it keeps physical harm and its consequences present within an account of Lafferty’s elaborate forms.

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In his essay "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door," Gregorio Montejo presents bricolage as a key feature of Lafferty's art. A bricoleur works with what is already available, assembling meaning from existing materials. This approach is not about creating from nothing. It is about using what is at hand with imagination and care. Montejo sees Lafferty as a bricoleur. His fiction brings together elements from myth, history, science, theology, and folklore. These sources are not blended into a system. They are placed in conversation. The result is not a unified explanation, but a new way of seeing. Montejo suggests that this method gives Lafferty's work its distinctive tone. It is serious without being solemn, and strange without losing coherence. My view is that this should be modified into something like the concept of bricospolia.

Established critical vocabulary, applied to Lafferty by Gregorio Montejo.

A proposed combination of bricolage, the reuse of available materials, and spolia, the incorporation of remnants from earlier works into a new construction. The emphasis falls on what a borrowed fragment carries with it: its prior setting, associations, and claims can remain active in the new work. An allusion or inherited image may thus connect Lafferty’s immediate story with an older historical or sacred order. The term is useful when a reading can show that continuing relation. It should not depend on treating all other forms of bricolage as indifferent to origins, or on assuming that every reused fragment is sacred.

Read further: Reading the Argo Cycle

C

Caves, dugouts, basements, and other enclosed depths recur as places of concealment, encounter, and discovery. I propose four levels for reading some of these spaces: the surface social world; the material cave; the shared imaginative world formed by stories and beliefs; and the interior depth of the person. The levels are a critical model whose applicability has to be tested against each work. In The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, the Pan-Therion connects physical enclosure with an imaginative life larger than its apparent setting. A cave can therefore organize relations among worlds without representing a fixed stage in every Lafferty story.

Works: The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo defines claritas as the quality of radiant intelligibility. Drawing from Aquinas and Balthasar, he explains it as the ability of a thing to make its inner nature perceptible. It is not just a matter of looking closely. It depends on the object's capacity to show itself and the observer's readiness to see. Montejo finds this idea central to Lafferty's aesthetic in the Argo cycle. For him, Lafferty's prose often reveals more than it states. Descriptions of ordinary objects or events are charged with a quiet intensity. They suggest that something more is present. Montejo argues that this is claritas in action. The writing does not reduce things to symbols or signs. Instead, it allows them to be seen more fully, as they are.

Inherited theological and aesthetic vocabulary, applied by Gregorio Montejo.

Works: The Argo cycle

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Montejo’s account of knowing in the Argo cycle places emphasis on an encounter between a knowing subject and a thing capable of disclosing itself. This entry concerns the relation through which an object’s nature becomes intelligible to a perceiver. It should be distinguished from the stronger claim that a thing acquires its existence or ontological completeness only when a human being perceives it. The distinction matters to readings of Lafferty’s forms as communicating instruments: disclosure changes what is apprehended without making the act of apprehension the source of the thing’s being.

Works: The Argo cycle

A term for the way Lafferty distributes character complexity through a story’s voice, naming, allusions, situations, and formal relations. A character with little narrated interior psychology can acquire considerable specificity through these means. Type is therefore part of an artistic construction whose capacities should be examined in their own right. The term retains a useful question about the relation between characterization and the surrounding story: what work is being performed elsewhere when interior analysis is sparse? In some stories that distribution is effective; in others it leaves the character inadequate to the demands of the action.

Read further: “No Valid Characters in SF”

In his interview with R. J. Whitaker, Lafferty explains perfection as completion and distinguishes the perfectibility of particular persons from projects for perfecting society or humanity in the abstract. I use this distinction to read the possibility of healing in stories of damaged or divided selves. A person’s completion does not abolish creaturely limits or turn the person into pure actuality. Nor does continued activity necessarily prove an incurable lack. This supplies a point of disagreement with readings that make incompletion constitutive of all existence. Whether a particular story reaches completion, anticipates it, or dramatizes its failure still has to be established from that story.

Lafferty’s account of perfection, applied here to the fiction.

Works: “The All-At-Once Man”; Fourth Mansions

Read further: Dan, Doubles, and Doppelgängers

A term for fictional worlds whose organization claims an authority it cannot sustain. Such a world can possess regular procedures, striking inventions, and an appearance of coherence while excluding the reality that could judge or transform it. Its failures become evidence about the assumptions governing it. The distinction from an open world concerns this relation to what exceeds the system, rather than the setting’s attractiveness or the ingenuity of its rules. Read alongside PRIME, the concept asks where a story locates authority, what it prevents its inhabitants from recognizing, and whether its apparent completeness depends on suppression or impaired perception.

Works: Not to Mention Camels

Read further: Decoding the Lafferty Megatext

It involves taking images or ideas that usually suggest harm, or sometimes order and health, and placing them in unfamiliar settings that shift their meaning. What seems negative at first is often turned toward affirmation. But the movement can go the other way, too. Higher things can be mocked, reversed, or brought low. This transformation does not reject the original meaning; it reorients it. Through estrangement, familiar symbols lose their usual associations and begin to point toward deeper theological or metaphysical truths—or toward their distortions. This is not subversion for its own sake. It is a way of asking what meaning really is. Lafferty uses counterfiguration to question surface-level symbolism. He asks the reader to look again.

Works: “Horns On Their Heads”; “The Forty-Seventh Island”

D

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo uses the term "dazzling darkness" to describe a key feature of Lafferty's Argo cycle. It refers to a kind of beauty that overwhelms the senses. Montejo explains that when clarity becomes too full, it can no longer be taken in directly. It shines so strongly that it appears dark. This is not confusion or absence. It is excess. The darkness is bright, but blinding. For Montejo, this paradox points to the depth of being in Lafferty's world. The more clearly something reveals itself, the more it shows that it cannot be fully grasped.

A traditional expression in apophatic theology, applied by Gregorio Montejo.

Works: The Argo cycle

The term comes from Friedrich Schiller's 1788 poem "Die Götter Griechenlands," where he mourns a world stripped of gods. Nature, once alive and meaning-filled, becomes dead matter—what Schiller calls entgötterte Natur, nature "de-godded." Lafferty is not Schillerian. Schiller sees Christianity and modern rationalism alike as part of the problem. Lafferty sees de-divinizing as attendant on the de-Christianizing of the world. But he uses Schiller's displaced space—the poetic-cultural mourning for a lost intimacy with the sacred—to stage his own arguments about sacramentality ignored or denied. In "Nor Limestone Islands," the limestone salesman is a re-divinizing presence, a Hermes figure who smells of honey, ozone, and dung, embodying a sacramental intersection of the celestial and the earthly. De-divinizing names the deeper loss beneath the surface comedy of Lafferty's Fortean stories: not merely that wonder has been explained away, but that the world has been emptied of presences.

Works: “Nor Limestone Islands”

Read further: “Nor Limestone Islands”

In most fiction, death enforces closure: a character exits narrative space, and the story moves toward terminus. Lafferty displaces that closure. Death is the most dramatic instance, but definalization is broader—it names the loosening of endings of every kind. Lafferty puts the final moment at the center of attention, then strips it of finality and presses on. His enabling strategies include resurrection, ghostly persistence, bent time, parts that outlive wholes, and lost states that return. In "The Emperor's Shoestrings," the thin red line at the throats of the murdered little folk is a badge of definalization: they are "murdered but active," released from the lethal rules of a settled world. Death in Lafferty does not organize the reader's attention toward summation. It indexes the deeper principle that no comprehensive vision—narrative, institutional, or philosophical—can seal the world shut. The suspension of narrative closure should be distinguished from the absence of a final cause: a story can resist termination while remaining directed toward an ultimate end.

Works: “The Emperor's Shoestrings”

Read further: “Assault on Fat Mountain”

Lafferty often explores the problem of misplaced focus. His characters, and sometimes his readers, pay attention to the wrong things. They fixate on surface details, spectacle, or clever analysis, and miss the deeper truth. This is not just a quirk of plot. It is part of his critique. Lafferty's stories ask readers to shift their attention.

Lafferty's stories often hide serious ideas under playful surfaces. What first appears as humor, satire, or exaggeration is doing more than it seems. Beneath the style, there are deep structures at work. These include metaphysical, theological, and philosophical ideas. Readers who look beyond the surface find more. The stories reward careful attention.

In Lafferty's fiction, the didactic and the palimphanic are not opposites but parallel modes that often operate within the same story. The didactic is tightly referential and structural, inviting decoding; it builds arguments, allegories, and anagogies that resolve into meaning. The palimphanic moves by kinetic association, generating aesthetic effects through layered, overwritten texts. It does not ask to be solved but associated. Many stories shift between these modes, creating a charged interplay between explanation and the re-enacted experience of following Lafferty's associative thinking in motion.

A distinction between the demands of following a story and the abundance of what it offers. A Lafferty story can contain many allusions, jokes, images, or implied relations while leaving its immediate action perfectly clear. Conversely, uncertainty about a person, place, or sequence may make a relatively spare passage difficult. “Assault on Fat Mountain” offers an example: a highly unconventional construction can be easy to understand. The distinction helps a reader ask which details are necessary for a first reading, which reward further inquiry, and where an actual obstacle to comprehension needs explanation.

Works: “Assault on Fat Mountain”

Read further: “Assault on Fat Mountain”; Hermeneutic Thoughts

Lafferty’s divided and duplicated persons take several forms: a self appears beside another self, a body is exchanged, an identity persists through several manifestations, or a person discovers a division that had gone unrecognized. These mechanisms should be distinguished before they receive a common explanation. I read many such divisions through fallen personhood and the possibility of completion. Petersen’s account connects doubling with material relations and constitutive lack. The disagreement concerns what the divisions reveal about being, as well as what a particular character experiences. An instance of doubling therefore needs attention to its agency, consequences, and possible resolution, including the harm one manifestation can do to another.

A recurring fictional device interpreted through competing critical accounts.

Works: “Camels and Dromedaries, Clem”; “Splinters”; “Cabrito”; “The All-At-Once Man”

Read further: Dan, Doubles, and Doppelgängers

E

Reading: Daniel Otto Jack Petersen

In "Ecomonstrous Poetics and the Fiction of R. A. Lafferty," Petersen defines the ecomonstrous as "any object, force, figure, vision, or experience that induces some sense of vertiginous, category-defying excess—without inherent moral valence." For Petersen, the monstrous is fundamentally characterized by "exorbitance, excess, or surplus" and represents encounters with the nonhuman through imagery that destabilizes and challenges conventional categorization.

Reading: Don Webb

Don Webb, in his essay "R. A. Lafferty: Effective Arcanum," introduces "effective arcanum" as the central aesthetic technique in Lafferty's fiction, describing it as the deliberate creation of a "mythic effect" that leaves an ongoing impact on the reader's psyche. Webb asserts that Lafferty's stories continue to "work the soul once read," producing an enduring sense of wonder and psychic displacement, thereby distinguishing his fiction sharply from conventional genre paradigms.

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Montejo, in his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," applies Aristotle's concept of entelechy to Lafferty's depiction of beings within the Argo cycle. Montejo defines entelechy as an inherent dynamic principle within each object, driving it toward its ultimate fulfillment. He argues that Lafferty's narratives reveal this inner dynamism explicitly, portraying a universe where each object's intrinsic purpose unfolds relationally, contributing meaningfully to a larger teleological drama.

Aristotelian vocabulary, applied to Lafferty by Gregorio Montejo.

Works: The Argo cycle

F

Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

A reading in which an event’s metaphorical meaning leaves its literal occurrence intact. Inoue begins with Duffey’s reply that Stranahan was “only putting into metaphor what was literal fact.” Duffey’s magic can represent the storyteller’s imagination while also acting as a real power within his world. Recognizing what the magic signifies does not dispose of what it does. Inoue follows the argument further, asking whether imaginative creation itself possesses the power attributed to magic. The same event can sustain a literal account and a figurative one, and their relation remains part of the work to be understood.

Descriptive heading for Inoue’s reading of Lafferty’s distinction between literal fact and metaphor.

Works: More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” §§ 4–5; English translation, pp. 3–5.

The primal imaginative faculty of the back-brain—the original, bodily mode of knowing that precedes reason and reunites perception, creation, and spirit. It is not fantasy as invention but "making imagination," the Viconian power through which early humanity shaped reality by embodying it in mythic images. Fantasia is the remnant of that prelapsarian consciousness, the Oceanic source where human, animal, and divine still coincide. For Lafferty, to awaken fantasia is to recover some of the lost fullness of mind: to see as the first makers of story saw, when story and world were one, and imagination was a sacrament of being.

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo uses the concept "Form as Communicating Instrument" to interpret Lafferty's aesthetic method in the Argo cycle. Montejo emphasizes that in Lafferty's world, the form of objects serves not merely as spectacle or illusion but as genuine instruments that actively reveal hidden existential realities. These forms, vividly described, allow readers to apprehend deeper ontological truths beyond superficial appearances, communicating the relational nature of all being.

Works: The Argo cycle

Charles Fort’s collections of anomalous reports challenge the exclusions and classifications through which an accepted world is maintained. Lafferty draws on both the reports and their imaginative possibilities. Some stories remain close to particular Fortean materials; others transform unstable boundaries, inhabited skies, and unexpected intrusions into their own methods of construction. The grouping includes “Nor Limestone Islands,” “Fall of Pebble-Stones,” Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?, and East of Laughter. Forteanism here identifies a source and a family of fictional procedures. It does not require a reader to accept each reported anomaly as fact or to assign Fort and Lafferty an identical philosophy.

Charles Fort’s work, adapted by Lafferty.

Works: “Nor Limestone Islands”; “Fall of Pebble-Stones”; Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?; East of Laughter

Read further: Charles Fort, Damon Knight, and the Fortean Stories; “Nor Limestone Islands”

The two dominant impulses in Lafferty's fiction, forza (force/violence) and froda (fraud/conning). Forza is wrath, aggression, metaphysical violence; when redeemed, it is fortitude. Froda is trickery, guile, evasion, con games; its corresponding virtue is prudence. Lafferty makes them clash as a recurring dialectic: tragedy moves by forza, comedy by froda. Neither is neutral. Forza unredeemed yields unmerited bloodsmell; froda unrestricted consumes itself. Their cross-pressure creates his signature Janusian peripeteia, which is deeper than mood whiplash. The terms are taken from Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture, where romance depends on them as co-constitutive forces. Lafferty makes them fictional constants that animate his compensatory fabulation.

Vocabulary drawn from Northrop Frye.

The material, formal, efficient, and final causes distinguish what something is made from, the form it possesses, the agency producing it, and the end toward which it is directed. I apply these distinctions to Lafferty’s story construction: inherited materials receive a form through acts of making and reading, while a final cause supplies their direction. This is a critical application of an Aristotelian and Thomistic framework. Final cause is especially important because it need not coincide with the last event narrated. A story can leave actions unfinished while giving its materials an intelligible orientation toward judgment, restoration, or completion.

Aristotelian and Thomistic framework, applied here to literary form.

Works: The Argo cycle; The Devil Is Dead; The Fall of Rome

Read further: Reading the Argo Cycle

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Gregorio Montejo uses the phrase "Fracturing of Reality" in his essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty's Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle" to describe the existential break occurring when characters in Lafferty's Argo cycle prematurely enter the future, crossing the thin boundary separating present actuality from future potentiality. Montejo explains that this fracturing leads individuals into "the shattering state of contingency," where both personal identity and objective reality become dangerously unstable.

Works: The Argo cycle

Read further: Notes: Duffey and Time

The future that develops from the causes and possibilities of the present. It includes deliberate plans and consequences nobody foresees. It can bring real goods, and God already works through its created causes. Unpredictability alone does not turn futurum into adventus. Inneall’s ocean in Serpent’s Egg, the Harvesters’ weave in Fourth Mansions, and the engineered society of Astrobe in Past Master are attempts to control futurum. Lafferty exposes the limits of that control when his characters try to secure a fulfillment beyond their powers. Their actions can prepare for what they cannot themselves bestow.

Vocabulary borrowed from Jürgen Moltmann and adapted here in a Thomistic sense.

Works: Serpent’s Egg; Fourth Mansions; Past Master

Read further: Lafferty’s Endings: Futurum, Adventus, Anagogy

G

Source: Lafferty

Lafferty wrote that his total production is "one very very long novel … a ghost story that is also a jigsaw puzzle. And the mark of my ghost story is that there is a deep underlay that has never attained clear visibility, never attained clear publication."

Read further: Reading the Argo Cycle; Decoding the Lafferty Megatext

A group of religious traditions and cosmological schemes whose images Lafferty adapts, parodies, and contests. Demiurges, archons, divided emanations, imprisoning worlds, and promises of privileged knowledge provide material for particular stories. Their appearance does not give every story the same doctrinal structure. I read “The All-At-Once Man,” for example, through a specific use of Valentinian patterns. The critical task is to identify what the story takes from a tradition and what it does with that material. A failed attempt at self-transcendence within a gnostic scheme need not settle what grace could accomplish within the Christian order against which I read it.

Historical religious vocabulary; particular fictional applications require distinction.

Works: “The All-At-Once Man”; Not to Mention Camels; “Snuffles”

Read further: “The All-At-Once Man”

Lafferty refines myth, history, and philosophy into a higher form, what he calls the "Christ gold." Like Augustine's "plundering the gold of Egypt," his work extracts truth from tradition while warning against mistaking mere glitter for the real thing. His stories demand discernment: to see what is true, what is dross, and what risks becoming an idol. His nonfiction tells readers to seek the gold of story.

H

A horror whose significance changes with the perspective from which it is apprehended. In this reading of Lafferty, a scene can bring dread into contact with religious possibilities such as judgment, sacrifice, or redemption, leaving a reader to confront their uneasy relation. The term describes that divided apprehension. It does not guarantee that a sympathetic Catholic reading will vindicate the violence, or that an objection to cruelty results from a failure to understand the religious framework. Each case requires attention to what happens, who bears its cost, and how the story supports or unsettles the meanings assigned to it.

Works: “Fog In My Throat”; “Berryhill”

Source: Lafferty

In "More Tedious Than Dragons," Lafferty coins the term "Heroic Tedium" to call out a mode of tedious writing in science fiction. This is not simply dullness born of incompetence, but a militant and pompous style that presents itself as being important. Lafferty argues that its practitioners are talented writers who waste their "life-elan" to produce a powerful narcotic for those who dislike life. Heroic Tedium seeks to make itself compulsory, turning the observation of decay—like watching an apple turn brown—into a false and self-important drama. The fundamental disagreement between Lafferty and the practitioners of heroic tedium lies in their dulled responsiveness to the world that actually is.

Works: “More Tedious Than Dragons”

Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

Inoue’s description of the community through which persons receive and sustain their identities. Duffey’s companions are distinct people whose friendships, dependencies, and shared adventures make them parts of one another’s lives. His account of doubles includes a neighbor who has an independent existence yet can also embody another person’s possible self. The archipelago gives this personal connectedness a geographical image. Inoue also reads the earthly company of Archipelago as the place where the voyagers of Argo replenish their strength. Ordinary friendship supplies both a means of enduring the adventure and an anticipation of the life toward which it tends.

Inoue’s phrase for personal formation through companionship.

Works: Archipelago; More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” §§ 6, 11; English translation, pp. 6–7, 14.

I

Lafferty's inclusion of short anecdotes or images early in a story, not as decoration but as a compacted key to the narrative's architecture. Beginning as static description, this icon expands in significance as the story progresses, moving from motif to organizing principle. Somewhat like a blend of metonymy and iconicity, iconographic insetting condenses crucial information within a single moment, only to reveal its meaning on close re-reading. This technique works not only within individual works but across Lafferty's larger body of fiction, forming hidden intertextual ties that hold together the underlying cohesion of his Ghost Story.

Read further: Go Inside; Hermeneutic Thoughts

An approach to formal forgetting and historical absence that asks whether a story’s exclusions are connected to an author’s documented commitments. I apply this question to Lafferty’s antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The connection has to be established through particular narrative evidence and dated external evidence; an omission alone does not establish its cause or intention. The method distinguishes what the story suppresses, what its characters fail to recognize, what the author demonstrably believed, and what the critic infers from their relation. Its purpose is to make the ethical implications of formal devices available to examination without presuming that every instance of forgetting has the same explanation.

Read further: R. A. Lafferty’s Antisemitism: A Guide to the Fiction; Belloc and Current Thoughts

The treatment of a finite image, object, or arrangement as if it possessed the authority of the reality toward which it points. I apply this problem to Lafferty’s narrative forms as well as to his represented worlds. A convention becomes restrictive when its usefulness is taken to establish the limits of legitimate storytelling. The distinction also bears on quests that attach themselves to an object while losing sight of what makes it worth seeking. In this reading, attention to an image should disclose its relations and purposes. The image becomes an obstruction when it claims to contain or replace their source.

Theological vocabulary applied here to literary form.

Works: “Assault on Fat Mountain”; Serpent’s Egg

Read further: “Assault on Fat Mountain”; The Big Egg Problem

A grouping of stories in which an interior structure acquires the apparent extent of an independent world. A body, mind, or symbolic arrangement becomes a place through which characters move, while the relation between inhabitant and enclosure supplies the story’s action. In my reading of “Snake in His Bosom,” the secured house gives form to a body whose capacities are failing. Other examples use displaced anatomy or a represented cosmological scheme. The enclosure may remain unrecognized by both characters and readers. Its discovery therefore changes the meaning of apparently incidental streets, passages, obstructions, and instruments without cancelling their role in the narrated events.

Works: “Snake in His Bosom”; “Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread”; “In the Turpentine Trees”; “The World as Will and Wallpaper”

Read further: Go Inside

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Gregorio Montejo, in "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," employs Aquinas's triadic definition of beauty—integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmonious proportion), and claritas (radiant intelligibility)—to explain Lafferty's depiction of objects in the Argo cycle. Montejo argues that Lafferty consistently represents objects as whole and proportionate within their relational contexts, communicating their inner truth clearly and vividly to the perceptive observer, thereby affirming beauty's ontological significance.

Aquinas’s vocabulary of beauty, applied by Gregorio Montejo.

Works: The Argo cycle

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Gregorio Montejo employs Lafferty's concept "Interval of Unreality" in his essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty's Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle" to delineate the perilous zone between the present and the future within the Argo cycle. Montejo describes it as "a chancy though flexible place," a narrow boundary wherein premature entry leads to radical contingency, identity fracture, and existential instability.

Lafferty’s phrase, interpreted by Gregorio Montejo.

Works: The Argo cycle

Read further: Notes: Duffey and Time

J

Lafferty's signature narrative reversal, where a story's emotional tenor shifts abruptly between comedy and horror, or vice versa, in a series of decisive moments. This is not a simple tonal contrast (mood whiplash) but an architectonic principle in his construction of stories, a two-faced movement that disorients, amuses, and disturbs. Named for Janus, the Roman god of transitions, Janusian Peripeteia is not a gradual change. It is a hard narrative pivot, laughter snapping into existential horror, horror snapping into metaphysical order.

L

Source: Lafferty

Lafferty describes the Law of Intellectual Constancy as the principle that every human being, unless damaged, is roughly the same in terms of intellectual capacity. Though Lafferty credits Havelock Ellis, the concept comes from Remy de Gourmont. Lafferty's version of the law is historicized and idiosyncratic.

Lists can organize the movement of a Lafferty story by accumulating particulars rather than advancing a single sequence of action. Their effects depend on their construction. An ordered series establishes a direction or scale; enumeration articulates parts of a larger whole; itemization distinguishes particulars; congeries brings overlapping expressions together for force or abundance. In “Assault on Fat Mountain,” such lists make wealth, deprivation, appetite, and historical possibility available as rhetorical objects. A catalogue can also characterize its speaker and invite a judgment the speaker does not intend. Its length alone does not explain its function.

Established rhetorical vocabulary.

Works: “Assault on Fat Mountain”

Read further: “Assault on Fat Mountain”

Lafferty's prose crackles with linguistic mischief and etymological play, inventing, reviving, and twisting words into strange delights.

The mode of literature in which characters are "one of us," ordinary people living within the limits of common human experience and probability. It is the structural ground of the realistic novel and comedy, but not identical with realism, which is a historical style devoted to surface fidelity and psychological detail.

Northrop Frye’s critical vocabulary.

Read further: Historical Lafferty; “Configuration of the North Shore” and the Oceanic Novels

M

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty's Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle," Gregorio Montejo identifies "Metaxological Temporality" as Lafferty's conceptual fusion of Plato's metaxy—humanity's existential condition of "in-betweenness"—with Thomistic aeviternity. According to Montejo, within Lafferty's Argo cycle, humanity inhabits a uniquely dualistic position, bridging temporal change and eternal immutability, creating a perpetual tension where characters must navigate the boundary between the contingent and the divine.

Works: The Argo cycle

Read further: Notes: Duffey and Time

Lafferty's fiction is a vast, interconnected whole, with recurring elements that subtly reveal an underlying structure—what he called the "underlay." We can think of his primary units of composition as monads, reflecting different degrees of perception and awareness. Some merely hint at the hidden order, while others actively reveal it. This ghostly circulation and transposition of ideas across his works suggest a coherent, yet elusive, deeper reality beneath his storytelling.

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door," Montejo introduces the concept of "mythopoeic recombination and recursive creation" as fundamental to Lafferty's creative approach. Montejo describes Lafferty's art as continuously engaged in the reassembling and transformation of myths, wherein each iteration produces new interpretive possibilities. This ongoing myth-making reflects Lévi-Strauss's view of myths as inherently combinational and recursively creative, perpetually reshaping cultural and narrative meaning.

N

This term describes a recurring pattern in Lafferty's fiction where the mind loses its ability to understand, even as the world appears clearer and more intense. It is a kind of false illumination; things seem bright and meaningful, and descent is confused for ascent. In Not to Mention Camels, this happens to the main character, Pilgrim, who wakes with "new eyes" that see more light but less truth. The idea comes close to what Dante meant by "those who have lost the good of intellect." Noetic darkening helps explain how Lafferty shows the modern mind getting lost, not only by seeing too little, but by mistaking noise for meaning.

Works: Not to Mention Camels

Read further: “Thou Whited Wall”

O

The imaginative mode in which the depths of mental, historical, and spiritual life take on the extent of a world. Characters can travel through what might otherwise remain an image, memory, dream, or unconscious disposition. Seas, submerged places, islands, and passages provide recurring forms for this experience, though water alone does not make a story Oceanic. I adapt Lafferty’s vocabulary to describe both this mode and a group of novels whose representations of personhood and world loss press toward an eschatological end. “Configuration of the North Shore” gives a compact instance: the dream becomes a journey with consequences for the dreamer and his interpreter.

Lafferty’s vocabulary, developed here as a critical category.

Works: “Configuration of the North Shore”; The Elliptical Grave; Serpent’s Egg

Read further: “Configuration of the North Shore” and the Oceanic Novels

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Gregorio Montejo introduces "ontological plenitude" in his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument" as key to understanding Lafferty's imaginative cosmos, especially within the Argo cycle. Montejo contrasts this plenitude with Object-Oriented Ontology's conceptual limits, emphasizing instead Thomism's dynamic view, where every entity actively communicates its "plenitude of being." Montejo thus highlights Lafferty's depiction of reality as overflowing with existential meaning, endlessly communicating itself through relationships.

Works: The Argo cycle

P

The framing materials through which a story announces, qualifies, or alters the terms of its reading. Epigraphs, prefaces, notes, headings, and attributed authorities can establish a historical or intellectual setting before the main narration develops it. Lafferty often gives these materials active work: they propose a rule, introduce a competing account, or place the reader inside an already altered history. The attributed Arutinov passage in “Assault on Fat Mountain” supplies a theory that the succeeding particulars elaborate. This framing function differs from iconographic insetting, where an incident or image within the story gives a compact form to its larger construction.

Literary-critical vocabulary applied to Lafferty’s framing devices.

Works: “Assault on Fat Mountain”; The Devil Is Dead

Read further: “Assault on Fat Mountain”

Lafferty's recurring mother–daughter figure in which woman and girl appear as near-aspectual doubles. The Parthen collapses age distinctions into a single radiant, precocious type. This palimphanic pattern recurs in Dotty, In a Green Tree, and More than Melchisedech, all of which use Lafferty's characteristic superimposition of the big girl and little girl as participating in one form.

Works: Dotty; In a Green Tree; More Than Melchisedech

A proposed way of interpreting Lafferty’s many aeons as participations in a common aevum. The model distinguishes public clock-time (T), a personal participation (aₚ), a relational participation (aᵣ), and divine eternity (E). Personal participation concerns the career of a particular spirit; relational participation concerns a bond such as the covenant among Argo, her crew, and associated objects. Both participations are treated as non-metric in this model. Their use is to distinguish kinds of narrative relation that ordinary calendar succession cannot describe. Assigning a participated duration to a relation is a speculative extension for interpreting the fiction, rather than a formulation supplied by Aquinas.

Works: The Argo cycle; More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Notes: Duffey and Time

A narrative mode in Lafferty's fiction where surface coherence gives way to a deeper, often hidden structure. Characters appear to anchor the story, but over time their identities blur, collapse, or merge, revealing a world that was there all along, waiting to be seen. What first seems like strangeness or disorder becomes the means through which a concealed logic is disclosed. This process is not random. It reflects Lafferty's commitment to anagogy, the idea that narrative events can point beyond themselves toward ultimate things. In phantasmetaxis, the strategic breakdown of conventional storytelling becomes a way of uncovering the metaphysical shape of a world.

A term for the boundary where personhood cannot be reduced to any mechanical or probabilistic process. Named for the moment in "Been a Long Long Time" when the cosmic typewriter jams on Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle," it marks the failure of mechanism at the threshold of the soul. The story's stuck key signifies that the human person—like Shakespeare within his "locked casket," as Chesterton called it—cannot be replicated by a random sequence or causal mimicry. Lafferty uses this point of breakdown to demonstrate that consciousness and creativity belong to a teleological order that transcends material processes.

Works: “Been a Long Long Time”

Lafferty's use of myth as scaffolding, drawing on antecedent myth to build fiction rather than using fiction to fabricate myth, is one of his early techniques, and it is characteristically ironic. He moves away from it as he becomes more interested in the oceanic.

Lafferty’s name for materials that persist as the common order supporting prose fiction breaks down. Posing, gadgetry, publicity, and spectacle can take the place of character, action, and consequential relations. A work may retain the furniture of a novel while its parts no longer disclose a shared world. I read Lafferty’s own profusion of such materials as a formal problem whose solution may lie in a final cause disclosed through the whole story. In this reading, an eschatological ending can give direction to apparent disorder. The category is distinct from postmodernism and does not turn every unconventional passage into evidence that fiction has ceased.

Lafferty’s critical vocabulary, applied here to his fiction.

Works: Annals of Klepsis; “Rare Earths and Pigweeds”; Past Master

Read further: Postfictional Elements

Lafferty gives written narration the feel of speech through qualifications, repetitions, asides, corrections, direct address, and other signals of a speaker’s relation to an audience. These devices manage attention and establish a manner of telling, even when the events remain difficult to follow. The result combines apparent plain speech with unusual conceptual density. Fragmented syntax can contribute to this effect, but fragmentation and oracy are not identical: a complete sentence can be strongly conversational, while a fragment can serve another purpose. The useful question is what a particular turn of speech makes the reader notice, accept, doubt, or remember.

Established linguistic vocabulary.

Works: “Get Off the World”

Read further: Hermeneutic Thoughts; “Get Off the World”

Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Where they split is the location of the prison. Dick makes Gnosticism post-Cartesian. His characters are trapped inside the cogito, a self sealed in its own consciousness, unable to verify that private experience connects to public reality. The question is epistemological: am I trapped? Lafferty keeps Gnosticism pre-Cartesian. Because his imagination is sacramental, the cogito is not the center of the universe. The question moves from the hermetic self to the status of the shared world: 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. Each writer verges across the epistemic-ontological divide, but the distinction marks their different centers of narrative gravity. It also helps explain why Lafferty's fiction feels communal where Dick's feels solitary, and why Lafferty's Gnostic scenarios resolve toward sacrament rather than paranoia.

Terms used here to describe Lafferty’s development as a writer. Prenucleation names the period and manner in which many of his later concerns were already present in historical fiction, mysteries, and other relatively conventional forms. Nucleation describes their gathering into the distinctive fantasy of the mature work, as historical world loss, Catholic thought, and interests such as Fort and Jung become parts of a common imaginative practice. The distinction follows composition and revision rather than publication order. It allows for overlap: an early story can acquire later features, and a later story can retain a prenucleation manner. It does not make the early work a period without substantial ideas.

Works: Okla Hannali; The Fall of Rome; Esteban; “Company in the Wings”

Read further: Historical Lafferty; “Company in the Wings”

The conceptual bedrock of the Lafferty literary universe. It should be understood not as the setting of his stories, but as the reality his fiction tries to examine and bring to light. PRIME refers to the "real world" as Lafferty saw it, ruled by metaphysical and theological meaning. While the settings of his stories might sometimes resemble PRIME, depending on how closely they follow the mimetic conventions of prose genres, they do not take place in it. Instead, they are displacements of it. They point toward PRIME through the full force of Lafferty's storytelling. One of the clearest ways to see how the strange logic of his different works connects is to ask how each one relates to his idea of PRIME.

A term from Not to Mention Camels, extended here as a critical concept.

Read further: Postfictional Elements; Decoding the Lafferty Megatext

Lafferty's work is meticulously structured, with numerical patterns forming a crucial part of his storytelling architecture. Seemingly minor numerical details—such as the patterns of threes and nine in Past Master—are not arbitrary but reinforce deeper thematic and structural connections. Overlooking these patterns distorts the meaning of his work and risks reducing him to a whimsical storyteller rather than the literary architect he truly is.

Works: Past Master

The absence of a good or capacity proper to a being. Blindness is a privation in an animal that should be able to see; a stone’s inability to see is not. This distinction separates damage from the ordinary limits of a creature. In this reading of Lafferty, privation helps explain damaged intellects, diminished persons, and forms of evil that depend upon a good they impair. Ouden in Past Master poses a particularly difficult fictional problem because the story gives presence and agency to a figure read as negation or privation. That difficulty should remain visible rather than be settled by treating nothingness as another substance.

Aristotelian and Thomistic distinction.

Works: Past Master; Not to Mention Camels; “Thieving Bear Planet”; “The Fishhooks of Hesebon”

Read further: “Thieving Bear Planet” and “The Fishhooks of Hesebon”; Ouden as Supertranscendental; Dan, Doubles, and Doppelgängers

Reading: Don Webb

Webb identifies Lafferty's unique rhythmic technique as a "prose foot," adapting Yevgeny Zamyatin's concept. In his essay "R. A. Lafferty: Effective Arcanum," Webb describes this as a deliberate internal pacing that rhythmically recalls earlier narrative elements, creating a cohesive, chant-like effect within the reader's mind. He emphasizes that this technique serves as the "postmodern equivalent of the Homeric epithet," subtly reinforcing narrative coherence and intensifying the reader's sense of displacement and estrangement.

R

The explanation of an apparently supernatural event through ordinary causes. In an early con story such as “Get Off the World,” the explanation can belong to the actual mechanism of the plot. Elsewhere, Lafferty stages a character’s attempt to impose an explanation that the story leaves inadequate. These are distinct procedures. One discloses a trick; the other exposes a limit in the proposed account. Their relation is useful in reading Lafferty’s development, but neither warrants treating reason itself as hostile to mystery. What matters is the adequacy of the explanation to the evidence the story supplies.

Works: “Get Off the World”

Read further: “Get Off the World”

Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

The mutual formation of a maker and the beings he makes. Inoue reads Duffey’s relation to the creatures of his talisman stick in both directions: Duffey may have called his companions into life, yet his companions may also have brought Duffey into being. He connects this uncertainty with a storyteller’s experience of characters acquiring independence and helping determine the work. The same account extends to friendship, through which a person receives much of his identity from others. Creation becomes a shared undertaking whose participants cannot always be assigned fixed places as originator and product.

Descriptive heading for Inoue’s account of creating and being created.

Works: More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” § 6; English translation, pp. 6–7.

An account of artistic practice that asks how a made world acknowledges the possibility and meaning of redemption. I read Lafferty’s insistence on the Incarnation as a claim about the conditions under which fictional making can possess an ultimate orientation. The practical question concerns what the story gives its persons to hope for, how their actions matter, and whether its apparent order can be judged or transformed. This entry concerns the act of construction. Worlds with a Center concerns the metaphysical ground the resulting world claims or discloses. The presence of religious imagery alone does not settle either question.

Read further: Decoding the Lafferty Megatext; Reading the Argo Cycle

Source: Gene Wolfe; Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

Gene Wolfe’s description of Lafferty’s stories, quoted by Inoue in his discussion of possible futures and the choices made among them. Inoue associates imaginative storytelling with the work of discerning which possibilities ought to become real. A reader can enter a life he has not lived, encounter dangers he has not faced, and consider the actions they require. The rehearsal concerns the exercise of judgment, with failure and renewal among its possibilities. In the Argo sequence, journeys among futures give this activity the form of an adventure in which the fate of persons and worlds depends on what they choose.

Wolfe’s phrase as quoted by Inoue.

Works: The Argo cycle; More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” § 9; English translation, p. 10.

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo argues that Lafferty's Argo cycle exemplifies a "relational form of being," drawing from Hans Urs von Balthasar's Thomistic ontology. In this view, all objects inherently exist as "substance-in-relation," actively communicating their unique acts of existence to other entities. For Montejo, Lafferty's catalogic and descriptive style reflects this relational ontology by vividly showing how even the simplest objects actively participate in "the intra-cosmic dialogue," revealing their existential depths through interaction and self-communication.

Works: The Argo cycle

Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

In Inoue’s reading, remembering Argo restores a person’s awareness of a life and vocation that ordinary experience can obscure. The urn containing Duffey’s own ashes recalls a death already suffered in another part of his history. It also recalls the possibility of continuing after that death. The command “Remember The Argo!” joins recollection to renewed action: Duffey and his companions recover their place in a common voyage and their responsibility for its course. Material signs carry this memory across the divisions of their lives. Forgetfulness exposes them to the belief that the limits of the present exhaust what they are.

Descriptive heading for Inoue’s reading of Lafferty’s command “Remember The Argo!”

Works: More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” §§ 10–11; English translation, pp. 12–14.

Reading: Kevin Cheek

Kevin Cheek, in his essay "Cookies and Eyes: Character and Plot Development through Repeated Memes," identifies "repeated memes" as a narrative technique central to R. A. Lafferty's novel Fourth Mansions. Cheek defines repeated memes as visual images or metaphorical epithets recurrently associated with specific characters or themes, progressively accumulating depth and complexity. Through such motifs—Biddy Bencher's evolving epithet from "cinnamon cookie" to "cookie for Cerberus," Freddy Foley's developing visionary "eyes," and the insidious metaphorical spiderweb symbolizing antagonistic control—Lafferty economically tracks character evolution and plot progression.

Works: Fourth Mansions

Source: Lafferty

In "More Tedious Than Dragons," Lafferty describes the "Retreat from Humanity" as the underlying philosophical movement that gives rise to Heroic Tedium. He defines this retreat as a surrender to a "black hole," a worldview that has "discarded the real magic from person and world" in favor of "false and grubby magics." It is a profound spiritual exhaustion that turns its adherents—both writers and readers—into "machines writing for readers who are also machines." For Lafferty, this is not a stylistic choice but a deep-seated rejection of life itself, the foundational impulse behind the genre's turn toward a celebrated lifelessness.

Works: “More Tedious Than Dragons”

S

Lafferty's fiction is anchored in a deeply ordered vision of reality, rooted in Scholastic metaphysics. Creation follows a divine pattern (distinction, adornment, and fulfillment) where everything participates in being according to its ontological weight. His characters and worlds are not psychological constructs but pictures of hierarchy. Storytelling, for Lafferty, is joyous invention but also participation in divine creativity, moving toward an ultimate end.

Read further: Reading the Argo Cycle

Lafferty’s phrase, taken from “The All-At-Once Man,” for a division within the person. I use it more broadly to connect Lafferty’s split, duplicated, and diminished persons with his account of fallen human powers. The distinction matters: a creature may suffer a wound without division being the permanent condition of its nature. Penandrew’s attempt to possess all his ages at once gives the problem a particular form, since increased powers arrive without the integrity needed to bear them. Critical disagreement begins when this damaged condition is taken either as potentially healable or as evidence of a lack constitutive of being itself.

Lafferty’s phrase; the broader account of fallen personhood is an interpretation.

Works: “The All-At-Once Man”

Read further: The Book of Sands; Dan, Doubles, and Doppelgängers

A name for a critical approach that contains Lafferty’s most troubling statements within a late period and limits their relevance to earlier fiction. Such an argument may appeal to the dates of surviving correspondence, a proposed break in the writing career, or differences between early and late formulations. Its strength depends on the historical evidence for those distinctions. The label identifies a method of separating bodies of evidence; it should not make a critic’s religious identity the explanation of that method. A responsible account must examine both the case for discontinuity and the earlier material that might challenge it.

Read further: Belloc and Current Thoughts; R. A. Lafferty’s Antisemitism: A Guide to the Fiction

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Gregorio Montejo, in his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," identifies "self-communicating being" as central to Lafferty's fictional metaphysics, particularly evident within the Argo cycle. Montejo quotes a passage emphasizing how even stones "shine and shout their presence," recording and transmitting sensory histories. This self-communicating dimension demonstrates Lafferty's belief that every object continually discloses itself, thus embedding all reality in a profound relational interplay.

Works: The Argo cycle

Source: Lafferty; Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

Lafferty’s description, reported by Hiroshi Inoue, of the relation among Archipelago, The Devil Is Dead, and More Than Melchisedech. The novels recount overlapping lives and periods from different positions within the Argo legend. Finnegan’s ordinary life and his voyage aboard Brunhilde belong to accounts that More Than Melchisedech brings into relation through Duffey’s many lives. Reading the books together requires attention to their correspondences and disagreements as well as their chronologies. A scene in one novel can disclose an aspect of a life that another leaves hidden. Their simultaneity concerns the relation among the narratives, even when their accounts assign events different times or places.

Lafferty’s phrase, cited and interpreted by Inoue.

Works: Archipelago; The Devil Is Dead; More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” § 3; English translation, pp. 2–3.

Lafferty employs a dynamic range of allegorical techniques, from structured continuous allegory—where symbols directly shape plot logic—to freer, more elusive forms that resist fixed interpretation. This sliding scale allows him to encode propositional truths while simultaneously gesturing toward deeper, anagogical realities. His allegories are neither rigid nor haphazard but deliberately calibrated to challenge, misdirect, and ultimately reveal hidden dimensions of meaning within his fiction.

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In the essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty's Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle," Gregorio Montejo explains "Spill-back" as Lafferty's concept describing how future possibilities "drift into reality," negatively or positively influencing the present within the Argo cycle. Montejo quotes the character Melchisedech Duffey: "Almost all of the worst effects of the present come from the future," emphasizing the necessity of actively confronting these future-born threats to prevent their realization.

Lafferty’s phrase, interpreted by Gregorio Montejo.

Works: The Argo cycle

Read further: Notes: Duffey and Time

In Lafferty’s literary criticism, story has a longer life and a wider scope than prose fiction. He treats prose fiction as a historical form sustained by a shared social order in which persons, actions, obligations, and consequences remain intelligible. Storytelling precedes that form and survives the weakening of the conditions that supported it. This distinction helps explain why Lafferty can speak of the exhaustion of the novel while continuing to write long invented narratives. His account concerns the historical possibilities of a literary form. It should be distinguished from a claim that invention, narrative pleasure, or the capacity to tell stories has ended.

Lafferty’s literary distinction.

Works: Annals of Klepsis; “Rare Earths and Pigweeds”

Read further: Postfictional Elements

The element of a story that remains unaccounted for after an explanation has apparently resolved its mystery. Its form can be a surviving presence, an unexplained event, or evidence that exceeds the solution proposed by a character. To identify a remainder, a reading must state both what has been explained and what persists beyond that explanation. The term does not make every unanswered question supernatural, or treat incomplete information as proof of transcendence. It describes a particular relation between an offered account and the story’s continuing evidence.

T

The Hebrew noun for deep sleep, sometimes associated with a divinely imposed trance or stupor. It occurs in Genesis 2:21 and 15:12, 1 Samuel 26:12, Job 4:13 and 33:15, Proverbs 19:15, and Isaiah 29:10. Its scriptural uses include creation, covenant, protection, ordinary sloth, and a disabling of perception. Related verbal forms should be distinguished from occurrences of the noun itself. I propose the term as an analogy for certain visionary or creative states in Lafferty. That literary use requires a particular scene and an account of its relation to the biblical material; dreamlike narration alone does not establish the connection.

Biblical Hebrew, applied here to the fiction.

Read further: Tardemah: Hebrew occurrences

Source: Lafferty

In "More Tedious Than Dragons," R. A. Lafferty identifies "The Tedium Establishment" as the institutional power structure that promotes and defends Heroic Tedium. He describes it as a "militant alliance" that has taken over a majority of the science fiction field, complete with "self-serving enforcement apparatuses." This Establishment is not merely a trend but an organized force that controls awards and ruthlessly retaliates against critics. Lafferty's metaphor of needing a bucket to catch his own blood before naming its members illustrates his view of the Establishment as a powerful consensus that enforces its narrow, lifeless aesthetic.

Works: “More Tedious Than Dragons”

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

Gregorio Montejo's essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty's Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle" uses "Temporal Topology" to describe Lafferty's visualization of events within the Argo cycle as four-dimensional "geometrical objects." Montejo quotes Lafferty, explaining each event should be perceived simultaneously from "past," "present," "alternative present," and "future" perspectives, all integral to understanding its temporal and metaphysical significance.

Works: The Argo cycle

Read further: Notes: Duffey and Time

Reading: Don Webb

In "R. A. Lafferty: Effective Arcanum," Don Webb describes "textual displacement" as Lafferty's practice of defamiliarizing reality before the narrative even begins, frequently by employing invented texts or pseudo-historical references. Webb cites examples like the fictionalized works The Back-Door of History by Arpad Arutinov and The Fall of Rome, noting that Lafferty's method subverts conventional narrative structures by situating the reader in a world already estranged, where the strange is presumed normative rather than anomalous.

A term for an approach that examines connections between Lafferty’s troubling historical statements and commitments visible elsewhere in his writing. It asks whether later declarations intensify or make explicit ideas already present, and tests that possibility through dated correspondence and particular stories. Religious affiliation alone cannot establish such continuity. Earlier antisemitic assumptions, Holocaust denial, and later association with organized denial must also be distinguished chronologically. The Institute for Historical Review was founded in 1978; references to it cannot be assigned to the 1960s. Continuity remains a claim to demonstrate, with consequences for reading the fiction that require their own evidence.

Read further: Belloc and Current Thoughts; R. A. Lafferty’s Antisemitism: A Guide to the Fiction

Lafferty's storytelling pulls readers toward the divine (theotropic) while deliberately troubling allegorical simplicity (its dissonance). At its best, this technique elevates prophecy into eschatology, reshaping typology into active judgment. But when flat historical allegory dominates, the visionary force is constrained, its mystical power flattened by his ideological preoccupations.

Reading: Andrew Ferguson

Andrew Ferguson, in his essay "R. A. Lafferty's Escape from Flatland; or, How to Build a World in Three Easy Steps," explores Lafferty's literary strategy of world-building as a response to the "post-conscious," flattened cultural landscape of modernity. Using Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, Ferguson identifies Lafferty's fiction as a narrative project aiming to restore depth, dimensionality, and meaning. He emphasizes Lafferty's commitment to collaborative storytelling, interpreting it as an effort to reanimate readers' cognitive capacities and participation in an endlessly renewing, open-ended narrative process.

Source: Lafferty; Reading: Hiroshi Inoue

An inversion in which inner and outer worlds exchange places. Inoue takes up Lafferty’s phrase to describe the relation between the world a person inhabits and the worlds that imagination produces. Duffey can be read as an image of Lafferty the storyteller, while Duffey’s many lives give imaginative making the force of lived experience. The world within the maker can become the world through which he travels. Inoue uses this reversal to ask what kind of reality a story possesses, leaving open whether the worlds brought into relation have equal standing.

Lafferty’s phrase, interpreted by Inoue.

Works: More Than Melchisedech

Read further: Hiroshi Inoue, “The Strange Life of Melchisedech Duffey, and the Uncanny Beings Who Came from Outside Time,” §§ 5–6; English translation, pp. 5–7.

Source: Lafferty

In his unpublished essay "More Tedious Than Dragons," R. A. Lafferty introduces "the trashed-life premise" as the core assumption that justifies the Retreat from Humanity. Lafferty presents this as the foundational belief that life itself is fundamentally broken, meaningless, or "trashed." Heroic Tedium, in his analysis, is the "logical next step" of this premise. If one accepts that life is without value, one will naturally gravitate toward an art that serves as a "narcotic to dull the effect of life." The premise is the philosophical starting point that makes the embrace of a deliberately tedious aesthetic not just tolerable, but necessary.

Works: “More Tedious Than Dragons”

Reading: Gregorio Montejo

In the essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty's Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle," Gregorio Montejo cites Lafferty's phrase "Trial Balloon Country" to characterize the uncertain realm of future possibilities constantly emerging within the Argo cycle. Montejo quotes Melchisedech Duffey, who describes these potential futures as "mighty evil" or good, requiring active vigilance in the present to "shoot down" harmful possibilities before they "drift into reality."

Lafferty’s phrase, interpreted by Gregorio Montejo.

Works: The Argo cycle

Read further: Notes: Duffey and Time

Source: Lafferty

Lafferty’s image for the three-part story of sighting, pursuit, and killing or conquest, discussed in “Shape of the Science Fiction Story (A Scholarly Study).” The hunt, battle, and sexual encounter supply recognizable models for its movement. His objection concerns the authority the pattern acquires when it governs expectations about what a proper story must do. Activities and pleasures that do not culminate in conquest become difficult to accommodate. “Assault on Fat Mountain” offers a useful counterexample: catalogues, arguments, and an anticlimactic assault make the distribution of attention more consequential than the completion of a single hero’s adventure.

Lafferty’s image in his criticism of story form.

Works: “Shape of the Science Fiction Story (A Scholarly Study)”; “Assault on Fat Mountain”

Read further: “Assault on Fat Mountain”

U

Max Weber's Entzauberung—disenchantment, or more precisely un-magicking—describes modernity as an epochal shift toward rationalization: bureaucracy, calculation, and the belief that the world can in principle be mastered through technical means rather than magic or mystery. Lafferty has a word for Weberian people. They are the "unfolk," the commissioners and functionaries who govern the modern world through formal bids, reputable addresses, economy, and dignity. In "Nor Limestone Islands," the city commission hearing is a comic image of the un-magicked world: a miraculous bargain is rejected because it disrupts bureaucratic order. Lafferty's treatment of un-magicking is primarily comedic. Controlling the world through rationalized systems is, in itself, ridiculous. But un-magicking is only the surface of the problem. Beneath it lies the deeper wound of de-divinizing, the loss not merely of mystery but of the divine presences that once inhabited the world.

Works: “Nor Limestone Islands”

Read further: “Nor Limestone Islands”

V

A term for prejudice presented through an ostensibly moral, benevolent, or theologically affirmative purpose. In my reading of Dotty, imagery associating Jewishness with debt, exaction, and cunning can be turned toward an account of divine providence while retaining its ethnic associations. The altered value of the image does not by itself remove those associations. The adjective identifies the purported virtue being examined; it does not endorse the prejudice. An application of the term requires attention to the particular wording, the speakers, and the work’s treatment of their claims. It also requires distinguishing a character’s speech from the larger narrative use made of it.

Works: Dotty; “How Many Miles to Babylon?”

Read further: The Old Jew; Little St. Hugh of Lincoln

W

Reading: Daniel Otto Jack Petersen

Petersen introduces "Weird Bioregionalism" as a way to describe stories about making a home in a strange place with strange companions. The phrase comes from Jeffrey Cohen's idea of "category crisis," where fiction uses uncanny images to unsettle the reader. Petersen sees this at work in Lafferty's writing. Lafferty creates places that feel both rooted and unstable. His stories build a sense of setting, then disturb it. The result is a world that never becomes fully familiar. It stays strange, even as it takes shape.

Reading: Don Webb

In his essay "R. A. Lafferty: Effective Arcanum," Don Webb characterizes Lafferty's depiction of the "wonder child" as a nostalgic displacement, designed to evoke "a past that never was." Unlike typical childhood nostalgia found in other literature, Webb explains that Lafferty's child characters possess unexplained powers and experiences which align with the "rapid sense of childhood as we remember it," merging nostalgia with an inherent sense of unreality and wonder. This technique effectively estranges readers by eliciting nostalgia for non-existent pasts.

A critical description of worlds whose order is grounded in a reality beyond the will or machinery of their inhabitants. In this reading of Lafferty, the Incarnation supplies the decisive center: persons and their histories receive their significance within an order they do not create for themselves. The concept concerns the metaphysical ground of a represented world. It therefore differs from the techniques considered under Redemptive World-Building. A center need not be announced by an explicit religious statement; its presence is argued from the story’s treatment of agency, judgment, grace, and final ends.

Read further: Decoding the Lafferty Megatext; Reading the Argo Cycle

Z

Lafferty's fiction often depicts humanity not as a rational or political animal but as something more layered, an entity bound to both the animal world and a higher order of being. He writes as if human nature carries within it remnants of an older and more inclusive state, where animals were not separate from human consciousness but part of it. This lost condition lingers as both loss and possibility, and it surfaces in places where reason alone proves insufficient.

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3700 Angstroms▾

A

Adduction and Monstration▾

Adventus▾

Aeviternal Chrononaut▾

Aeviternity▾

Anagogical Leap▾

Anagogy▾

Anti-MacGuffin▾

Anti-Secret▾

Apocryphal Endings▾

Apophatic Intervals▾

B

Big Egg Problem▾

Black Revolution▾

Bloodsmell▾

Bricolage and the Bricoleur▾

Bricospolia▾

C

Caves▾

Claritas (Radiant Intelligibility)▾

Cognitional Reciprocity▾

Compensatory Fabulation▾

Completion▾

Counterfeit Worlds▾

Counterfiguration▾

D

Dazzling Darkness▾

De-divinizing (Entgötterung)▾

Definalization▾

Deflected Attention▾

Depth Camouflage▾

Didactic and Palimphanic▾

Difficulty vs. Excess▾

Doubles and Doppelgängers▾

E

Ecomonstrous Poetics▾

Effective Arcanum▾

Entelechy (Inner Dynamism)▾

F

Facts Told as Metaphors▾

Fantasia▾

Form as Communicating Instrument▾

Forteanism▾

Forza and Froda▾

Four Causes▾

Fracturing of Reality▾

Futurum▾

G

Ghost Story▾

Gnosticism▾

Gold of Story▾

H

Half Horrors▾

Heroic Tedium▾

Human Archipelago▾

I

Iconographic Insetting▾

Ideologized Erasure▾

Idolatry▾

Inhabited Space▾

Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas (Three Qualities of Beauty)▾

Interval of Unreality (Interval of)▾

J

Janusian Peripeteia▾

L

Law of Intellectual Constancy▾

Lists and Catalogues▾

Logogriphic Play▾

Low Mimetic (Frye)▾

M

Metaxological Temporality▾

Monads▾

Mythopoeic Recombination and Recursive Creation▾

N

Noetic Darkening▾

O

Oceanic▾

Ontological Plenitude▾