This post is prickly and polemical. Deliberately so. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia and its online iteration are important resources that I have relied on for years. The entry on R. A. Lafferty falls short. For many readers, it will be their first critical encounter with Lafferty’s legacy. And because the Encyclopedia is bounded by science fiction as a genre, it imposes limits that cannot account for him. Even on its own terms, however, it trips over itself. Below are five statements from the entry that I find to be unclear or mistaken.
“He has fairly been described as a writer of tall tales, as a cartoonist, as an author whose tone was fundamentally oral.”
Fairly? This line exemplifies a familiar critical misstep: overemphasizing the oral quality of Lafferty’s style. While he obviously draws on oral traditions, especially the tall tale, his “orality” is a literate, highly stylized second orality: fully conscious of rhetorical and prosodic form, and rooted in classical prose traditions that treat language as a presentationally transparent, even mystical, medium. To fixate on the surface features of speech is to miss the real stylistic innovations. The oral mode is only one layer in a densely constructed literary performance. I’ll add: I’ve yet to read anyone who’s said anything especially interesting about Lafferty’s textual orality, likely because it’s so often flattened into “speech” rather than seen for what it is: a hyper-stylized hybrid unique to him, whose registers haven’t yet been mapped.
“his conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he wrote (or has been ignored); he has been seen as a ransacker of old Mythologies, and as a flippant generator of new ones; he clearly delighted in a vision of the world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish, but at times paid scant attention to the niceties of plotting”
There are several problems here. First, Lafferty’s Catholicism is not ambient or incidental; it is foundational. Second, he is not a “ransacker” of myth but a deliberate, often reverent, re-integrator of the Native American and Western traditions. Third, the phrase “niceties of plotting” is misleading. It smuggles in a whole set of assumptions about what constitutes proper narrative form, as if the reader should simply know and accept them. But Lafferty’s plots are not lapses in craft; they are alternative architectures. To imply that this is compositional inattention on his part is to read him with critical inattention.
“he was technically inventive, but lunged constantly into a slapdash sublime only skittishly evocative, and only occasionally, of anything like the traditional Sense of Wonder”
This sentence collapses under its own metaphors. “Technically inventive” is at odds with “slapdash.” Does a technician lunge? And what exactly is a “slapdash sublime”? The phrase “skittishly evocative” looks like critique but it is a tonal sneer rather than argument. The contrast between “sublime” and “Sense of Wonder” is likewise underdeveloped. What kind of sublime is meant? Longinus? Burke? Kant? Is this saying that Lafferty moves too rapidly to earn sublimity? Of all verbal shortcuts in the entry, I have to say that "a slapdash sublime only skittishly evocative" annoys me most because it uses word magic to hide its laziness.
“Throughout his writing career, these various affects and effects were used by Lafferty to construct stories and novels that nestled within larger (but often untold) tales and universes, and were often to be understood as epigonal offshoots of those larger, earlier, linguistically more complex, mysteriously governed worlds. In the end, his corpus as a whole gave off a sense of teasing incompletion and of secrecy: almost as though it was only the entire story (to which his numerous unpublished manuscripts added almost mythic stature) that made sense, that commanded the rest.”
This confuses two distinct registers in Lafferty’s fiction. One is fragmentary and personal, his “ghost story,” in his own words. The other is religious and fixed—an expression of Roman Catholic orthodoxy as cosmic order. These levels are interpenetrating but not identical. To conflate them is a mistake. It would be like calling James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon secretive because they put demands on their readers. To read him attentively is to perceive both levels and not confuse them.
“For his career's sake, it was certainly unfortunate that his response to renown seems to have been an intensification of the oddness of his product; final judgement on the effect of this failure to observe normal canons of writing still awaits a coherent presentation of his work as a whole.”
There is some truth here. The mismanagement of his literary estate has undeniably impeded the reception of his work, and the deck in a secular age was already stacked against him. But the reference to “normal canons of writing” likely refers to marketing norms, not literary virtues, and Lafferty was never going to conform to marketing norms. The real problem is that an assessment like this, sloppy, partial, and genre-bound, blocks the “coherent presentation” it claims to await while trying to look measured. It blocks the door, then acts like it’s a damn shame no one’s walked through it.
Clute, John. "Lafferty, R.A." In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. 3rd ed. London: Gollancz, updated December 16, 2024. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lafferty_r_a
Comments