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"A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window." 

(Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? 1991)

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Adduction and Monstration: Daniel Otto Petersen describes "adduction" as a "nondemonstrative style of reasoning" suited to encountering monstrosity. Unlike scientific demonstration, adduction emphasizes feeling and intuition, amplifying rather than resolving anomalies. He pairs this with "monstration," a process through which monsters present themselves by their sheer impact, eliciting new leaps of understanding and creative amplification. Petersen argues that Lafferty’s narratives are adductive, engaging readers in playful and intuitive responses to monstrous excess​

 

Aeviternal Chrononaut: In his essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio" Montejo introduces "Aeviternal Chrononauts" as those beings in Lafferty’s Argo cycle who exist simultaneously within time and eternity, occupying the precarious interval between mutable temporality and unchanging divine existence. Montejo describes their risky temporal journeys as ventures into a "narrow interval of unreality," a hazardous space between the "devouring present" and the "waiting future," where characters risk fracturing their identity and reality itself.

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Apophatic Intervals: Gregorio Montejo’s essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," employs "apophatic intervals" to indicate the mysterious spaces between immanent and transcendent being in Lafferty’s Argo cycle. Montejo explains these intervals as metaphysical gaps or transitions within reality’s relational fabric, wherein Forms emerge and are apprehended. In Lafferty’s narratives, such intervals provide critical moments of ontological and aesthetic revelation, where beings communicate truths beyond positive description, calling attention to their underlying mystery.

 

Bloodsmell: The metaphysical presence of spilled blood in Lafferty’s fiction, where violence is never mere spectacle but signifies, justice or mercy, judgment or redemption, punishment or sacrifice. Blood in Lafferty’s world insists on meaning, drawing from biblical and sacramental traditions in which suffering is either merited and redemptive or unmerited and damning. The bloodsmell is the inescapable scent of these metaphysical realities.

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Bricolage and the Bricoleur: Gregorio Montejo, in his essay "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door," introduces "bricolage" as a central aesthetic principle in Lafferty’s visual and literary art, describing it as the bricoleur’s technique of creatively assembling meaning out of existing, diverse materials. Montejo identifies Lafferty as a bricoleur who, unlike an engineer, crafts new imaginative worlds not from raw materials, but through the innovative reconfiguration of already-available texts, images, and cultural fragments into constantly evolving new forms.

 

Claritas (Radiant Intelligibility): Montejo’s essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," defines "claritas," following Aquinas and Balthasar, as the quality of "radiant intelligibility" inherent in objects, a concept central to understanding Lafferty’s aesthetic in the Argo cycle. Montejo describes this claritas as the object's intrinsic power to communicate its hidden ontological essence to a receptive observer, enabling profound perception beyond mere external appearances. For Montejo, Lafferty’s prose exemplifies claritas through vivid, radiant descriptions of ordinary things that reveal extraordinary existential depths.

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Cognitional Reciprocity: Gregorio Montejo describes "cognitional reciprocity" in his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," as the essential interplay between subject and object in Lafferty’s Argo cycle. According to Montejo, the full being of an object—its essential truth—is only actualized through its encounter with a knowing subject, whose perception helps complete and fulfill the object's essence. Thus, Lafferty’s narrative technique often emphasizes mutual revelation, where knowing subjects and known objects bring each other fully into being.

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Counterfiguration: A literary strategy in Lafferty’s fiction wherein images, symbols, or ideas often coded as negative, destructive, or profane are intentionally put in contexts that invert and transform conventional associations, shifting apparent negation toward metaphysical affirmation. Through estrangement, familiar symbols are displaced from inherited meanings and matched onto deeper ontological or theological realities. More than mere subversion, counterfiguration re-signifies symbolic orders, intimating cosmic—eschatological, sacramental, supernatural, revelatory. In Lafferty’s work, this method challenges superficial symbolic conventions. For examples, see "Horns On Their Heads" and "The Forty-Seventh Island." 

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Compensatory Fabulation: Lafferty's storytelling strategy that uses flat characters, usually considered literary weaknesses, and transforms them into strengths through inventive storytelling, allusive depth, and intricate narrative concealment. In his fiction, this technique allows for unique effects by shifting narrative complexity away from character psychology and toward sophisticated literary games, clever emplotment, destabilized genre conventions, theological depth, and logogriphs, thus compensating for the absence of rounded, psychologically focused characterizations and the reality effects they create for readers.

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Dazzling Darkness: In his essay "This Was More Than a Spectacle, More Than an Illusion, It Was a Communicating Instrument," Gregorio Montejo invokes the term "dazzling darkness" to characterize the paradoxical experience of transcendent beauty encountered within Lafferty’s Argo cycle. Montejo describes this as an aesthetic experience in which clarity (claritas) becomes so profound and abundant that it transcends sensory apprehension, appearing as a radiant yet blinding darkness—a metaphor for the inexhaustible depth of being that permeates Lafferty’s relational universe.

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Difficulty vs. Excess: Lafferty’s works are not excessive in the sense of uncontainable meaning; rather, they are often deliberately difficult puzzles that demand effort to solve, yet remain satisfying even for readers uninterested in deciphering them, thanks to his use of depth camouflage. This difficulty stems not only from his sacramental view of meaning, where significance is embedded in history and religious tradition but also from his compositional method: he builds stories from interlocking sets of ideas, then spins them like tops for his own amusement. Treating this complexity as mere excess flattens his art into chaotic play, obscuring the structured metaphysical challenge he intends. It also blocks attempts to rationally reconstruct how he builds fiction and achieves his effects.

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Deflected Attention: Lafferty often plays with misplaced focus, where characters (and readers) fixate on the wrong details. Instead of seeing the deeper reality, they become absorbed in spectacle, trivialities, or over-analysis. His fiction critiques this habit, urging a shift in perception toward what truly matters.

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Depth Camouflage: Lafferty’s stories disguise profound ideas beneath playful surfaces. What seems like whimsy, satire, or tall tale often conceals deep metaphysical, theological, or philosophical structures, rewarding those who look beyond the obvious.

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Ecomonstrous Poetics: 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

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Effective Arcanum: 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.

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Entelechy (Inner Dynamism): 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.

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Expressive Fragmentation: Lafferty’s prose relies on syntactic symbolism, where short, fractured sentences mirror thematic concerns such as uncertainty, identity shifts, and temporal instability. These intentional breaks control pacing, direct reader focus, and intensify philosophical or poetic moments. Rather than merely "telling," his fragmented syntax enacts meaning, making his style both economical and symbolically charged.

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Form as Communicating Instrument: 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.

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Forza and Froda: 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.

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Fracturing of Reality: Gregorio Montejo uses the phrase "Fracturing of Reality" in his essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio" 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.

 

Ghost Story: 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.”

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Gold of Story: 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 insistently asks that readers seek the gold of story.

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Iconographic Insetting: 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.

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Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas (Three Qualities of Beauty): 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.

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Janusian Peripeteia: 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 simple tonal contrast (mood whiplash) but a 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.

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Logogriphic Play: Lafferty’s prose crackles with linguistic mischief and etymological play, inventing, reviving, and twisting words into strange delights. His use of hapax legomena—words appearing only once—turns language itself into a puzzle, making his fiction not just a story to follow but a game to decipher. When readers encounter a linguistic oddity in Lafferty, it is an invitation to consider logogriphic play.

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Metaxological Temporality: In "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio," 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.

 

Monads: 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.

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Mythopoeic Recombination and Recursive Creation: 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.

 

Ontological Plenitude: 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.

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The Principle of Keeping Count: 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.

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Prose Foot (Rhythmic Displacement): 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.

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Rationalized Mystery: Lafferty frequently highlights the human tendency to impose rational explanations on the inexplicable. When faced with the supernatural, many of his characters want neat, materialist answers—even if they don’t hold up. His work texposes this impulse as both comic and tragic, showing that that Mystery cannot be tamed by logic.

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Relational Form of Being: 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.

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Redemptive World-Building: Lafferty insists that true creation must acknowledge the Incarnation as its foundation. For him, leaving out Redemption doesn’t just weaken a world—it renders it hollow. His vision rejects neutral storytelling; instead, all meaningful subcreation must align with the “real shape of history” to avoid becoming a “screaming void.”

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Repeated Memes: 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.

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Sacramental Poesis: 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.

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Self-Communicating Being: 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.

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Sliding Scale of Allegory: 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.

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Spill-back (Temporal): Gregorio Montejo, in "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio, "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.

 

Supernatural Remainder: Some truths resist explanation. Lafferty’s storytelling often leaves behind an irreducible element—a presence that lingers beyond resolution. This remainder invites contemplation rather than closure, challenging readers to see beyond the limits of reason.

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Temporal Topology: Gregorio Montejo’s essay, "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio," 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.

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Textual Displacement: 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.

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Theotropic Dissonance: 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. 

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Three Easy Steps: 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​

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Trial Balloon Country: In the essay "Aeviternity: R. A. Lafferty’s Thomistic Philosophy of Time in the Argo Cycle Gregorio," 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."

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Unreality (Interval of): 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 Gregorio," 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.

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Weird Bioregionalism: Petersen introduces "Weird Bioregionalism" as the poetics of "homemaking in a very strange house, amongst a very strange family." This term is derived from Jeffrey Cohen's notion of "category crisis," where bioregional fiction employs uncanny and exorbitant imagery to narratively and conceptually unsettle readers. Petersen aligns this concept with Lafferty’s fiction, emphasizing a narrative method that simultaneously establishes and disrupts a sense of place, reinforcing perpetual strangeness and unsettling familiarity with the land​

 

Wonder Child: 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.

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Worlds with a Center: For Lafferty, successful world-building isn’t limitless invention. It must be anchored in the Incarnation, the “only valid environment.” Without it, a world is not just incomplete but a void. His artistic vision rejects pure creative freedom in favor of a mystical but ordered cosmos, where storytelling must enfigure the shape of sacred history, or become hollow.

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Zoon Anthropikon: 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.