Lafferty’s description and visual imagery are as idiosyncratic as every other aspect of the man's work. Today, I want to consider a trick he uses in nearly every piece of his fiction. It works somewhat like metonymy and somewhat like iconicity.
Metonymy is a rhetorical figure in which one thing stands in for another with which it is closely associated (as in "the kitchen is working overtime," where "kitchen" represents the staff who work in it). Iconicity, on the other hand, refers to a resemblance between a sign and what it represents.
Lafferty will present readers with an important image without telling that it will be the counterpart of a vision in medieval literature: a compacted map of the story’s structure, embedding essential information within a single moment. It carries both the part-to-whole relationship of metonymy and the structural resemblance of iconicity. I think of this as Lafferty's iconographic insetting: he introduces an image as a visual key to the story’s structure, capturing it in an iconic moment. As the narrative progresses, the icon deepens in significance, transforming from picture to organizing principle.
Let’s look at three examples, each increasing in complexity and each showing how he uses this to shape his narratives. The first comes from his short story "Marsilia V," which he finished writing in 1975 but which wouldn’t be published until 1982.
If you have not read it, the story starts as a fish-out-of-water tale centered on an unlikely figure, Lieutenant Littlejohn. Littlejohn is an undersized officer stationed with an American battery in New Guinea during WWII. He is ridiculed for his intellectual pursuits (collecting butterflies and sketching plants) and for his inability to grow a mustache. When he leads a patrol into enemy territory, his eye for detail and botanical knowledge become crucial as his group faces the Japanese. The climax arrives when Littlejohn uses his knowledge of a rare plant, Marsilea vogelkopiensis, to trap the enemy in an expanse of quicksand. It swallows them, reshaping his men’s perception of him in an instant. Littlejohn is less soft than they thought.
It is a story I quite like, with some fun Easter eggs along the way, but what interests me here is how Lafferty sets up its iconographic insetting.
Early in the story, he writes of Littlejohn:
“He was left much in peace now, but it hadn't always been so. He had abandoned some of his more interesting hobbies, and others he now carried out furtively. He had given up his butterfly collecting entirely for the length of his service. There is a stigma attached to a butterfly collector. There are several men even today who will do imitations of Littlejohn and his net, and these imitations are hilarious. And yet, what's so bloody funny about it? Butterflies are interesting, and the net is the proper instrument for taking them. And some truly fantastic varieties had been seen at the stop-off stations of the battery.”
The story's iconographic inset is the mocking image of Littlejohn sneaking and hopping about with his butterfly net, convinced that “the net is the proper instrument” for catching butterflies. As the story goes on, his movement through the jungle recapitulates this comedy. By the end, the image has shifted from icon to emplotment, completing the iconographic insetting. This is where the butterfly net becomes something greater: the earth itself becomes Littlejohn’s net:
“After the Hard Heads were chest-deep and really frightened, it seemed that the pressure made it impossible for them to scream loudly. But they knew that they were being buried alive and that the hot sky was inexorable. And the eighteen patrollers watched the enemy disappear with plain horror. ‘If it would rain,’ said Crandall, ‘it wouldn't be so hot. And it wouldn't seem so bad.’ Why had he said such a silly thing as that? His mind was in a state of shock and his stomach was tied in green knots. But they all of them spoke inanities when they spoke. In three minutes, there was no sign of the Hard Heads. More than a hundred of them had gone down there, and the Marsilia had already begun to sew up its wounds, oozing its clover-leafed foliage again over the greenish sand. Littlejohn knew that the proper instrument for catching the Japanese was Marsilia vogelkopiensis.”
A straightforward example of Lafferty’s iconographic insetting: an initial image—the net—deepens and becomes an organizing principle that shapes the story’s denouement.
Lafferty does not confine this technique to individual stories. He extends it across his entire body of fiction, forming the intertextual ties of what he called his Ghost Story.
Even more fascinating is that he seems to do this more for himself than for his readers, given how much would necessarily remain obscure due to the complicated publication history of his work.
Take this passage from Not to Mention Camels (1976), published well before his early novel Dotty had any real chance of publication:
“There was a breath-flubbing triptych there. It was titled only Dotty. It showed on the left wing a girl clothed and pretty; in the center was the same girl unclothed and still pretty; on the right wing was the same girl shown cut away or visceral in the torso, and still pretty, even in the viscera. The triptych was signed by ‘Joe Smith’ on two of the three panels. The third panel was not signed; part of it was painted in a different hand. This triptych was almost too good, and almost too nostalgic of something, to be believed. It wasn’t the sort of thing one comes upon in every lifetime.”
This triptych iconizes Dotty’s style, its nostalgia, its spiritual torture, and its autobiographical undercurrents. More than that, its refusal to fix Dotty in place mirrors the novel’s overarching strategy—one reinforced by Dotty’s closing lines:
“Dotty is by no means saved. No more than you are. A practiced gambler like One-Chance Hardwich who owns the Chatterbox Club, and who will bet on anything, would give odds at no more than five to three in her favor. On yourself he would hardly go even money.”
This interplay between image and structure—where a static depiction evolves into something dynamic—is one way Lafferty builds his myths.
My last example is far more complicated. It comes from Past Master (1968), a novel I continue to work on, and is especially complex because of how it ramifies into many elements of the book.
It’s the image of Rimrock breaking through the ocean’s surface. The icon will take on eschatological urgency when it becomes an organizational principle, provoking deeper questions about its meaning.
The inset, which I will quote at length because of its centrality to the novel’s architecture:
“Well, we do know it, but we have garbled it in legend… The sky, we had believed ever since we had received wisdom, was at an infinite distance from us and would always appear at the same distance no matter how high we climbed. We now discovered that this was not so. We came closer to the sky and we were almost hysterical in our excitement. We came all the way up to it and touched it with our members. We did not die, as we had feared. An epic hero had done this aeons before, but he had died from it. So it was no ordinary thing that we did.”
This idea of a living being and a mountain piercing the sky and breaking through the Great Chain of Being is the inset. The pattern is repeated when the image becomes an inset again in Chapter 7, as Thomas More and his party climb the mountain without Rimrock. (One reason the Ansel Rimrock does not go with them is that he is seal-like; another is his ontological progression. He has already moved up the Great Chain of Being. "Ansel" is both a verbal and conceptual pun on "a seal" and on St. Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God, which centers on the completeness and perfection of God.)
Lafferty writes:
“They climbed. And then they climbed more steeply. The vegetation fell away and became more sparse… Above them the mountain spire was a pinnacle as a cartoonist might draw one, sharp and needle-like as a burlesque of a spire, and with a clean white doughnut cloud encircling it and settling down a third of the way from the top.”
Will the party ascend through the sky and break through into something transcendent? No, this is the middle of the novel, so there is a prophetic vision to be had, followed by a fight scene that pulls us back down into the novel’s plot entanglements.
At the apocalyptic conclusion of the novel, readers find themselves once more in the sky, poised to break through into transcendence.
“Lightning, a billion times as bright as that on Electric Mountain, a billion times as short in duration… In much less than an instant, in much more than forever, it is over with.”
This is the full emplotment of the iconographic inset of Ansel, sea, sky, and mountain spires. And we know what Lafferty does.
And remember that special one, the first rebirth of Astrobe, the appearance of transcendent humanity?"
“Well does it happen? Does the reaction become the birthing? What does it look like? Will we see it now, in face and rump, the new-born world?”
He freezes us in the moment, the recapitulation of the Ansels breaking through the sea-sky to become "transcendent Ansels."
In this way, iconographic insetting is not just a device but a major tool Lafferty uses to deepen narrative meaning. It can be as delicate as Lieutenant Littlejohn’s butterfly net or as momentous as a rupture into transcendence.
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