"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality." — James Joyce
Joyce’s remark on puzzles, interpretation, and immortality raises a key question: can readers see literary works as both limitless play and intricate structures without losing what makes each compelling? And how does this relate to the experience of being overwhelmed by a difficult book—say, Arrive at Easterwine or The Elliptical Grave?
This post explores how we approach being overwhelmed when reading and how critical concepts like excess and difficulty factor into that, in an attempt to clarify my own thinking on the topic and set out some tools for attacking interpretive problems. If you have felt overwhelmed by the deeper reaches of a Lafferty novel, you may want to continue. If not, this likely won’t interest you—aside from the points about Past Master, which I have bolded for convenience.
Joyce’s line about Ulysses is both funny and motivating. It doesn’t surprise me that it proudly sits at the beginning as an epigraph of one of the absolutely essential tools for studying Joyce, Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. It also zeroes in on one of my favorite things about reading Joyce: thinking about how he constructs what he builds. But what makes it funny is the sting, the undying arguments of the professors.
This is an old problem. Every reader must decide how far is too far. Each reader faces when to treat an author's words as open to creative possibility and when to regard them as full of hidden depth waiting to be uncovered. For the past half-century, literary theory has reshaped academic interpretation, turning debates over meaning and signification into not just intellectual exercises but matters of academic survival. If you know anything about this, you know the days of high theory are long gone, but the broader intellectual orientation toward the ontology of language persists.
Interpretive trends have become more balanced. Just last year, Blackwell published A Companion to Literary Evaluation. When I was in school, even the phrase companion to evaluation would have seemed hopelessly naive. There are thousands of literature PhDs in the United States who would smile at the title even now. I once sat in a seminar where a brilliant postcolonial critic—fresh off a glowingly received book on the East India Company from the University of Chicago—reduced a 23-year-old to tears after delivering an intellectual beatdown in response to the student saying, “It just isn’t very good” about a piece of ephemera.
My interest in literary theory long ago shifted toward spending more time with the philosophy of language and the philosophy of literature—both housed within philosophy departments. What I want from criticism is a strong practical critic who can throw light on what I overlook while asking for as little ancillary philosophical commitment as possible. Many contemporary interpretative schools reject stable meaning in favor of perpetual instability. Posthumanism and affect theory modulate signification with process; decolonial critique resists fixed meanings as part of its broader challenge to Western epistemology and power. These approaches aim to expose hidden assumptions, but they also embed their own—often unacknowledged. The refusal to clarify meaning rigorously is itself a subtle assertion; it evades rather than resolves interpretive responsibility.
Some of these trends have aspects I like. Cognitive literary studies, for instance, applies empirical research from cognitive science to ask how readers process texts, assuming cognitive stability rather than radical indeterminacy. And certain strands of new materialism and posthumanism take philosophical realism seriously, even if only as a foil, which creates space for dialogue.
But in the end, I agree with Lafferty, who warned against those who use words to mean their opposites. He said about himself, "As to Fantasy, I am no more than ten percent true believer. I respect only 'True Believers' on the real things, in the eschatologies, in the ultimates, in the basics. I do not respect the 'True Believers' in toys. And the 'True Believers' in toys hate me completely, when they really know what I am."
A sacramental view of reality presupposes that signs correspond to real things—that meaning is not arbitrary but participates in the order of being. Most contemporary critical approaches are nominalist by default, treating meaning as contingent and language as sites of play. If Lafferty’s fiction is sacramental, it cannot be reduced to excess; it must be understood as an act of making, one that assumes a real metaphysical order beneath its difficulties. I'm not sure how to get around this without needing to think about how to reconcile nominalism with the operation of sacraments and the Church’s definition of the role of signs within them. Many have tried. Take a look at how well it has worked out historically.
One could argue that Lafferty consciously or unconsciously encoded a tension between sacramental realism and nominalism in his fiction ("Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967) and Ockham?). But the simpler, more convenient approach is to dismiss it as mere fiction—sidestepping the need to work it out altogether.
This last is likely the best approach, allowing one to preserve a convenient overlap between Lafferty’s sacramental worldview (in both life and fiction) and contemporary critical theories of excess and phenomenology. But what does this tell us about Lafferty and how sacramentality works in him—beyond reaffirming one's own theoretical commitments?
These are difficult issues that I genuinely want to understand. What others take as obvious strikes me as a fragile axiom. But I recognize that advocates of these positions would say the same about my own view—that meaning must be intrinsically tied to the essences of things for Lafferty’s sacramental vision to cohere.
The underlying issue is that Lafferty’s hardest novels overwhelm readers—not because they exceed meaning, but because they demand serious effort to uncover it. His inventiveness and ambiguity invite multiple interpretations, yet the challenge is not chaotic. Instead, his difficulty operates on different levels, requiring varying degrees of engagement.
This is where George Steiner—though not one of my favorite critics—offers a useful way in. In On Difficulty (1978), he looked at how language, designed for communication, can instead generate different forms of impenetrability and undecidability. His typology of literary difficulty helps clarify why Lafferty’s challenge is neither excessive nor arbitrary.
This debate over excess and difficulty is not just theoretical; it shapes how we actually read Lafferty. Past Master is an ideal test case: accessible, yet resistant to easy consumption. Applying something like Steiner’s categories allows us to see how its difficulties operate.
Contingent difficulties arise from unfamiliar words, phrases, or historical references that require some research. Allusions to figures such as King Yu, Mung K’o, and Chandragupta demand a background in Earth’s history to grasp their significance. The character name “Evita” has its root in the Hebrew word for “life” and “living.” Specialized terms like stoimenof d’étain (a deliberate barbarism on Lafferty’s part), the names of locations in India, and words such as Taibhse challenge the reader to look things up. In the title of my post, Dyoublong? from Finnegans Wake is a play on 'Do you belong?' and a reference to Dublin." That is easy contingent difficulty.
Questions like how many times and in what form oude appears in the Greek New Testament, or what the concrete details of passages excised from Past Master reveal about its final form, further illustrate how contingent difficulties shape interpretation. My notes aim to eliminate as much of this kind of straightforward difficulty as possible, with the hope that interesting and textually grounded perspectives will become clearer among Lafferty's readers.
Modal difficulties exist when the text’s tone or moral ambiguity create a disconnect between the reader’s sensibilities and the narrative’s stance. Even when the literal meanings of words and phrases are understood, the text may remain inaccessible. For instance, the violence of Cathead positions readers to confront moral positions and political stances that may be unrelatable. Surely, the squalor and suffering of Cathead and the Astrobe Dream are pitched too far apart to make much sense . . .
Tactical difficulty includes ambiguity, defamiliarization, pattern recognition, puzzle construction, structural disruption, and other forms of literary sleight-of-hand. In Past Master, the line “You will not know how to see” invites this by challenging the reader to say what Thomas More fails to perceive. Can the reader do that by the time the novel is set down? The dream of the fox, hawk, and shells cannot be figured out in ten seconds with a dictionary.
The title of this post, "Hush! Caution! Echoland!", has HCE in it—Here Comes Everybody, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker—the dreamer of Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s placement of this specific variation of HCE where he does in the Wake is tactical difficulty. As is my choice of this HCE for my post—the one I picked out of the dozens and dozens of variations on HCE in Joyce as cataloged here.
Tactical difficulty arises when Thomas More witnesses the death of the devil-hydra and claims to see allegory in the Feral Lands. Allegory for what? What is More seeing? Do I arrive at an answer after finishing the novel? How does this moment of seeing connect to “You will not know how to see”?
Ontological difficulties challenge the foundations of language and identity. In Past Master, the presence of multiple “selves” or aspects of characters like Maxwell might seem to complicate conventional notions of stable identity. I see why someone might take that view, though I would disagree, and I think it would make for a good debate. The relationship between the Devil, the Machine, the Programmed, and the Material Substrate is another ontological issue. Here, Lafferty blurs the lines between reality and illusion and manipulation, raising difficult questions about how we come face to face with truth, the role of language in our lives, and the implicit contract between writer and reader.
Excess presumes that meaning overflows boundaries, defying containment and resisting definitive form; difficulty, by contrast, presupposes meaning that demands effort to uncover. Lafferty’s densest work is not excessive, in my view—it is difficult.
This distinction between excess and difficulty mirrors the broader debate about how we interpret literary works: when to see them transcend authorial intent and when to see them remain anchored in it.
There are two primary positions:
A. The Case for Art Exceeding Authorial Intent
Major Premise: Any work of literary art that embodies inherent complexity and a dialogical, multi-voiced structure transcends the strict intentions of its author.
Minor Premise: Lafferty’s work is characterized by a high degree of complexity, multiple voices, and open-ended elements that invite ongoing interpretation.
Conclusion: Therefore, Lafferty’s work transcends and is not fully defined by his specific authorial intentions.
B. The Case for Recognizing Authorial Difficulty
Major Premise: If a work of art employs complicated elements that, when deciphered, reveal the author’s intended message, then that work is open to interpretation through a clear, decipherable authorial message.
Minor Premise: Lafferty’s work employs such complicated elements that, when deciphered, reveal his intended narrative.
Conclusion: Therefore, Lafferty’s work is open to interpretation through a clear, decipherable authorial message.
I see no problem with either of these positions except that Position A does not directly address the puzzles Lafferty built into his work. Puzzles to which he had answers in mind. Brilliant people working from Position A’s assumptions will likely say something insightful and creative about Lafferty.
Position B, by contrast, assumes that Lafferty’s novels operate as challenges rather than fields of excess. If one wants to understand Lafferty’s determinate difficulty, Position B is the better approach.
This matters because it shapes how we approach the hardest material in Lafferty. If his difficulty is deliberate, we should treat it as a riddle to solve rather than an endless proliferation of meaning. Here, George Steiner’s typology of difficulty proves useful, though we need not be wedded to it.
A related argument holds that Lafferty constructs his works so that we, in a sense, finish them for him. This is true. His narratives invite reader participation, demanding interpretation rather than passive consumption, and they cleverly complicate narrative closure. But this explanation can also become an easy excuse for failing to grasp key aspects of his fiction.
Lafferty’s essay "More Worlds Than One?" is relevant here—not as support for interpretive play but as a counterweight to it. His open-endedness is not an infinite Borgesian labyrinth where meaning disperses indefinitely. Instead, it returns readers to the real world, where answers exist—a world he envisions as hierarchical and reflective of divine reality. On the relation of story to this one world, he writes:
Science Fiction also has a vested interest in there being a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and civilizations. That is one of the small number of things that Science Fiction is about. But Science Fiction is, after all, only a fiction.
It is, isn't it? And persons will not defend the tenets of a fiction as stubbornly as they will defend the beliefs of their core institutions. They won't, will they?
Then why are all those people picking up jagged rocks when I give my belief that our Earth is very likely unique, that our carbon-based life is almost certainly unique in our universe and is the only life there is, and that our human species is absolutely
unique and its equal is not to be found in all of material creation no matter how many billions of billions of planets are examined?
Why are you people cutting my ham-string muscles and breaking my thighbones? Oh, to immobilize me and make it easier to stone me to death, your aim not being very good. And why are you putting out my eyes with those whetted knives?
Why no, I haven't priced blindfolds lately. Pretty costly, are they?
Have I any last request? you ask me.
Yes, throw soft rocks only. Those hard rocks hurt.
Catholicism is only one part of Lafferty’s appeal to me, and in this blog, I want to cover much that has nothing to do with it. But the relationship between his sacramental worldview and the distinction between excess and difficulty is critically important and warrants deeper consideration for those who are working to understand him.
When I hear talk of a sacramental worldview linked to excess, my formalist instinct is to ask—setting aside almost everything theological—what kind of literary difficulty do you mean? What does excess convey that difficulty does not? And what is excess doing in your critical vocabulary if it isn’t just a description of how he makes us feel?
So there it is: where others see excess in Lafferty, I see difficulty. As he wrote in "Riddle-Writes of the Isthmus," “one of the tall labors assigned to us is reading the riddle of the world and of ourselves.”
Do we treat puzzles as invitations to argument, or arguments as responses to puzzles? Both approaches have their place, and each overlaps the other. Difficulty demands effort; excess risks dispersing meaning until it becomes noise. If we want to open his works to a long-term wider readership, we need to dig—to unearth and struggle with his riddles—and that will continue to be my approach.
(For the Joyce fans, this article is fun.)
Comments