Critics sometimes distinguish two types of authorial distance: emotional detachment from characters, and the gap between the implied author and the actual writer. These distinctions help clarify how unreliable narrators work.
One reason Lafferty appeals to me is his premodern approach to authorial distance. He keeps considerable emotional detachment from his characters, which lets him get away with narrative hijinks few other writers could pull off.
At the same time, there is usually minimal distance between the implied author and the actual R. A. Lafferty (though exceptions do occur). It’s one reason he generally avoids first-person narration.
As a result, Lafferty's trickiness arises not from unreliability but from concealment: logogriphs, clever emplotment, allusiveness, destabilizing genre, private games, and other narrative techniques.
Another topic critics often consider is how readers receive and interpret a story. Reader responses can roughly be categorized as intentional, symptomatic, or adaptive. (Other frameworks exist, such as Stuart Hall’s receptive, oppositional, and negotiated readings.)
Let's briefly clarify these categories.
Adaptive readings creatively borrow from an author's original work, reinterpreting, transmediating, or expanding upon it while retaining meaningful connections to the source.
Symptomatic readings try to explain what lurks "behind," "beneath," or "above" the author's work, seeking to uncover deeper economic, political, or psychosexual contexts. (Consider the sources of wealth in Jane Austen's novels, or the deeper implications behind the desire to sit on a woman's lap.)
Intentional readings want to understand the author's intended meanings or anticipated reception work, even when differences exist between the implied author and the real one.
You can probably guess my preferred analytical approach.
One further point before turning to the story.
You probably know that E.M. Forster distinguished between flat and rounded characters in Aspects of the Novel (1927), arguing that modern literature's triumph lay in its rounded, complex characters, as opposed to predictable, psychologically flat ones. Forster wrote:
“The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is flat pretending to be round." Chapter 4, "People"
Lafferty writes flat characters (again, with a handful of exceptions). But unlike Forster, who believed only rounded characters could sustain complex modern literature, Lafferty transforms this supposed literary defect into a strength through his extraordinary powers of fabulation. I call this approach compensatory fabulation. Indeed, Lafferty could not achieve many of his most powerful and unique literary effects if his characters were rounded.
"Haruspex" is a fun story, though unlikely to achieve widespread popularity even among dedicated Lafferty fans. Despite its weird and intriguing elements, the narrative unfolds straightforwardly (by Lafferty standards). It has considerable emotional distance from its characters, minimal separation between the real and the implied author, legible authorial intention, and flat characters. Plus, it comes packaged with a moral lesson. That asks contemporary readers to swallow quite a bit.
Here's the plot:
A ruthless interstellar invader named Hazh-Bazh and his Rim Raider family arrive on World, accompanied by his five nephews, planning to compel surrender by exploiting the compassion of Worldlings. He will achieve this by torturing prisoners taken from orbital stations.
Director-Designate Marc Edel and his staff underestimate Hazh-Bazh and the Rim-Raiders' reliance on entrail-reading for secret insights into their adversaries. The Rim-Raiders have obtained organs (entrails and brain) from Jimpson Ginseng, a gentle but dim mental patient, as they will later from the compassionless Cecelia Fitzpeter. They use these to understand the nature of the Worldlings.
Upon examining Jimpson's organs, Hazh-Bazh mistakenly concludes that all Worldlings are weak and overly compassionate, prompting him to torture orbital abductees to force the Worldlings into surrender. Media ("Bleed-ia") coverage amplifies the horror, but after studying Cecelia's organs, the Hazh realize not all humans share such compassion. Cecelia is devoid of empathy. She is more than willing to sacrifice the captives to defeat the Rim-Raiders.
Recognizing their earlier overreliance on insufficient evidence (Jimpson), the aliens decide to withdraw. Hazh-Bazh surrenders his own life to World leadership as payment for reading Cecelia's entrails and brain. In the aftermath, former Director Edel is discovered examining the entrails of a canary killed by a cat, dryly remarking that he must "start somewhere."
Unfortunately for the Rim-Raiders, they are superficial hermeneuts, stuck "on the rim" of understanding human minds, drawing oversimplified, one-dimensional conclusions. Jimpson has excessive compassion (revealed through his entrails), while Cecelia has extreme cold utilitarian rationality (revealed through her brain). Both become victims of surprise attacks by the Rim-Raiders, who subject them to operations with a device resembling one that performs "bowl cuts," removing their skullcaps for haruspicy.
There is much delight to be had in this story. Hazh-Bazh ("Hodge-Podge") and his nephews parody Eastern-sounding tropes, satirizing science fiction’s historical reliance on Ming-the-Merciless/"Yellow Peril" motifs to depict alien threats. Jimpson is wobbly, twitchy, and collapses when operated upon; Cecelia, meanwhile, sparks mechanically—a nice variation on Lafferty’s recurring theme of incomplete humans and incomplete machines. Additionally, Lafferty provides wonderfully weird details about haruspicy: Rim-Raiders read both brains and entrails, with entrails containing a "blind loop" holding critical personal information. Reading brains reveals the nighttime (unconscious) side of a person, while entrails unveil secrets of the daytime (conscious) psyche.
Beyond these playful elements, "Haruspex" is pretty much a straightforward Thomistic parable.
"Haruspex" as a Thomistic Parable
Aquinas teaches that divine providence orders all things toward ultimate good (ST I, q. 22, a. 1), though human beings often struggle to perceive this. In "Haruspex," this truth is treated ironically through the Rim-Raiders, who confidently rely on haruspicy to gain “complete” insight into human nature. Lafferty preserves religious mystery by leaving the mystical dimension of haruspicy ambiguous, but exposes how this practice fails due to one-sidedness and immoderation.
The Rim Raiders' big error lies in mistaking their limited knowledge of humans—represented by the entrails and brain of Jimpson Ginseng—for a universal truth about humanity. They incorrectly conclude that compassion equates to weakness, believing humanity will thus be subdued—failing to realize it was Jimpson, happy with a few dollars a week and occasional escapes through a loose panel in a cyclone fence, who was vulnerable. Had the Rim Raiders studied Aquinas, they might have recognized this error for what it truly is: a classic case of hubris (ST II-II, q. 171-175).
Aquinas grounds morality in natural law, the divine order governing creation (ST I-II, q. 91, a. 2). From this perspective, compassion should be rightly ordered by reason, becoming an expression of the natural moral law. In "Haruspex," Jimpson Ginseng has real compassion, but his virtue remains incomplete, as his innocent but disordered intellect leaves him vulnerable to exploitation. It is a susceptibility from which the Rim Raiders mistakenly generalize humanity's universal weakness. Thomistic philosophy makes this point: compassion, without moderation by rational justice, invites exploitation.
While "Haruspex" may not be a Lafferty story readers revisit often, it does demonstrate how deeply Aquinas’s teachings on justice and mercy influenced his thinking. Lafferty wants to show that justice without mercy leads to cruelty, and mercy without justice to vulnerability (ST II-II, q. 30, a. 3). These paths are dead ends, yet one must start somewhere.
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