I was lucky enough to come across Andrew Ferguson’s thoughts on Lafferty’s ghost story early on—Lafferty's idea that his fiction forms a single, ongoing work of art, with an underlay that occasionally flickers into view. It’s a fascinating idea, but hard to pin down. If you’ve read enough Lafferty, you recognize it when it happens. I wanted a more concrete way to conceptualize and track this ghostly presence, so I experimented with different philosophical and literary frameworks. Eventually, I landed on a personal heuristic (extended metaphor?) inspired by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Monadology. This post might not be useful to anyone else, but on the off chance it is, I figured I’d put it out there.
Leibniz’s Monadology
If you haven't read the Monadology, Leibniz argues for a universe composed of monads—indivisible, immaterial “building blocks”—which never physically interact but still mirror the entire cosmos within themselves. The monads exhibit a “pre-established harmony,” set in motion by God. Despite the seeming chaos of daily life, every part of reality reflects a larger, divinely ordered pattern.
Leibniz distinguishes four main categories of monads based on levels of perception and activity:
Bare Monads: The simplest, with only the faintest perceptions, lacking self-awareness or memory. They are the lowest levels of existence, from inanimate matter to the simplest forms of life.
Soul Monads: Possessing a higher degree of perception and memory, they correspond to animals. They can react to past experiences but do not engage in rational thought.
Rational Monads: These monads have perception, memory, self-awareness (apperception), and the capacity for reason. They correspond to human beings, capable of reflection, abstract thought, and moral reasoning.
The Supreme Monad (God): The highest monad, infinitely perceptive and rational, guaranteeing pre-established harmony..
Repurposing Monads as a Heuristic for Reading Lafferty
If monads in Leibniz’s system reflect the cosmos in miniature, then in this heuristic, Lafferty’s monads are ghosts, each reflecting the underlay in its own way. Let’s go all in and call Leibniz’s pre-established harmony Lafferty’s underlay. What we need, then, is a way to rank these "Lafferty monads" by how much they reveal that hidden structure. Here’s how I think about it:
Bare Monads: The simplest story elements, environments, or characters, transmitting glimpses of the underlay. They’re toys in Lafferty’s sandbox, offering offhand clues through patterns of action.
Soul Monads: Rich story elements, environments, or characters. A character like Glasser (with his "soul" balloons tied to his teddy bear, not his body) is a particularly interesting Soul Monad.
Rational Monads: Characters or other story elements that enact a mystical or cosmic sense of reality. Intensely attuned to the stranger truths behind their world, they are consistently revelatory of the underlay.
Two Illustrative Passages
To see how these monadic layers circulate and transpose above the underlay, let’s look at two extended passages. Both involve Dutch priests, paired with Irish identity and self-pity. The recurrence of these Dutch Catholic and Irish Cholic monads is one small, quirky corner in Lafferty’s underlay.
Passage 1: From “Dotty”
Dotty had already achieved education and aplomb. She could read and understand. In mathematics she was the best girl in school, and she bested all the boys except one. She did write a bad hand. Still, it could always be read, and many fine and flourishing hands cannot always be.
She learned a lot from Father Van Heuvel whom she treated as an equal. You cannot treat people as interiors just because they are Dutch.
“There is a certain stability about your kind,” Dotty told him. “Oh, it’s true you Dutch are stodgy and prosaic, not brilliant and intransigent like us Irish.”
“In one thing you exceed: in feeling sorry for yourselves. The Irish have brought it to a fine art.”
“Perhaps if others were as good at it they would indulge it equally. But there has to be Dutch in the world. We cannot all be birds. Some are born to be rocks.”
“That is high praise from you, Dotty. On a rock the Church was founded.”
“I wouldn’t have picked Peter if it’d been me. I don’t mean to criticize, but do you know who I’d have picked? Thomas. There was a man with a mind of his own. If he’d have been picked, the Church would have had an easier time.”
“Much easier, Dotty. But it would have been Arian, or the modern word for the same thing, Episcopal. It would not have been Catholic.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure, Dotty.”
“Well, some are born to be rocks, and it may be a good thing for the rest of us that they are. We can’t all be Irish and talented. But I always thought it would have been a good thing if He’d picked one Irishman for an Apostle. I wonder why He overlooked that? He didn’t overlook much.”
“We do not know for certain the race of all of the Apostles. Only eight can absolutely be set down for Jewish. There is slight evidence that two are Greek, and we can only guess about the other two.”
“Then maybe one of them was a wandering Irishman after all? But what if it should turn out to be Judas? Maybe there was no oversight on His part. He may have picked one Irishman, and in kindness it is hidden from us.”
“There is something a little Irish about Judas, Dotty. And in legend he was red-headed.”
Passage 2: From The Reefs of Earth
A priest came to see Henry Dulanty in his cell. He was an old Holland Dutchman, not one of your new young priests who doesn’t know an Analect from the Anastasis.
He found Henry reading and was surprised at the book he had.
“It’s almost like a staged thing that I should find you with that,” the old priest said, “nearly a touch of the phony there. Where are you reading?”
“Maerens incedebam sine furore, consurgens in turba clamabam.”
“Og, from Job. It goes on ‘I was the brother of dragons and companion of ostriches. My skin is become black upon me. My harp is turned to mourning.’ I had a professor once who called him the Majestic Cry-Baby. You aren’t, are you?”
“Yes, a little. We luxuriate in our misfortunes more than do the people of—that is—more than”
“More than do the people of Earth, Dulanty? I guessed you as soon as I came in. In a long life, I believed I had encountered it twice before, but I wasn’t sure. With you I am. You’re from an alien world. But it’s odd that an alien should be reading Latin.”
“Father, our briefing was a few centuries out of date, I believe. Latin, and three American Indian tongues (which I cannot identify with any presently known), were the only Earth languages I learned before I came to Earth… Our own teaching is that the Anointed will be born on the meanest of worlds, hardly to be called a world. Some have sensed that it may be Earth, but this interpretation isn’t widely held…”
(...)
Henry Dulanty confessed to the old priest, and it did kill him. Not immediately, but it killed him… It was lost in a strangeness more frightful than any evil he had ever suspected. The talking creature was an almost-man, but he flicked his ears like an animal and showed green billowing flames behind his eyes…
Circulation and Transposition
These passages have a monadic connection. You can think of the pairing as the same monadic spooks inhabiting different receptacles and reflecting the underlay: In Dotty, the “Irish presence” stands at a higher level (Rational), entertaining a Soul Monad (the priest). The outcome is funny and lightly subversive. In The Reefs of Earth, both Henry and the priest are Soul Monads, which means they’re prime candidates for Lafferty’s cosmic shredder—the usual rule being that the lower your monadic status as a Lafferty character or story element, the rougher your ride is going to be.*
What does this mean for the ghost story? It means the ghostly in Lafferty is the circulation and transposition of different kinds of monads that reflect the underlay, with Lafferty being especially interested in how those differences play out in the overlay.
“Each Monad is a living mirror of the universe, according to its own point of view.” (Monadology, §56)
“Each type of story element in Lafferty is a living mirror of the underlay, according to its own point of view.”
At this point, we have a tool to outline a segment of the underlay, and we can move on to identify other shapes within it.
Feature | Description |
Name | Transpositional Prelate |
Core Identity | Dutch priest meets Irish motif |
Monadic Role | Shifts between structural (rational) and affective (soul) layers |
Permutation | Recurs and reconfigures across narrative levels |
Function | Reflects the underlying order |
*It’s one reason I think Lafferty puts so much effort into making Pilgrim in Not to Mention Camels a bare monad who mistakenly believes himself to be a rational one; he isn’t a “real” person in Lafferty’s highest fictional monadic "rational" form, though he fakes being one until Lafferty squashes him like the bug.
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