What special magic does Lafferty offer? The simple answer has always been his use of language. Well what of it the field has many who can make a phrase sing or sing a phrase that's the thing. The true answer lies in that his stories sound like they're folk tales. Now I said something very precise there. Lafferty doesn't use the language of folktales, and only rarely uses their rhythm. But he lives so well within the langauge of his creation that his language particularly in the combination of slightly archaic folk speech and outrageous etymologies for his words sounds like language that some one has said somewhere. Yevgeny Zamyatin developed the concept of a "prose foot" as way of internal pacing of fiction. He saw it as a kind of rhythmic device that by causing the reader to remember an earlier part of the narrative became a force for a choral (as in pertaining to choruses) cohesion that bound the story together in a different way than plot mechanics. This method, which I can't detect in Zamyatin's works (since Russian is Greek to me) is the core of Lafferty's work. He has has invented the post-modern equivalent of the Homeric epithet.
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Don WebbR. A. Lafferty
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And I love it as a reader. He [Robert Aickman] will bring on atmosphere. He will construct these perfect, dark, doomed little stories, what he called "strange stories." I find the same with Lafferty. We were talking about Lafferty earlier as somebody who I'd love to read. I am hoping someone will do the complete short stories of R.A. Lafferty. What is interesting is that when you read the early Lafferty, the closer he comes to what one might consider a normal story, the less successful he is ... And Lafferty is something played in an Irish bar on an instrument that you're not quite sure what it is and you're humming the tune but you don't remember the words as you walk out.
R. A. Lafferty
[Lafferty] interested me in SF again, after I had outgrown my early love for Simak and Asimov and Heinlein. What a word slinger: what a richness of idea and image, in Irish-cadenced prose! Lafferty wrote the opposite of the post-Chekhovian modern short story. Show dont tell? The pleasure is in the telling. Rhetoric, in the grand old manner, was at the center of his game. He could go from high-faluting to just plain faluting, and back again, all in a paragraph. Like Charles Mingus, another American original, Lafferty loved the sounds he made; never satisfied with mere profundity, he was pretty, too. He was our Mingus, I think, elevating us all. ... I believe his day is yet to come; that like Melville, Lafferty will be "discovered," and his Okla Hannali will take its rightful place as one of the three or four truly great 20th century American novels.
R. A. Lafferty
The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing. Pure mathematics is just an abstraction from the real world, and pure mathematics does have a special precise language for dealing with its own special and technical subjects. But this precise language is not precise in any sense if you deal with real objects of the world, and it is only pedantic and quite confusing to use it unless there are some special subtleties which have to be carefully distinguished.
Richard Feynman
Those individuals looking from within the SF world may lack, or simply disdain, the linguistic and critical skills needed to begin to reveal that in Lafferty's work there is much more going on than meets the eye. The brave individuals who have attempted to do so have either merely produced fulsome praise or attempted to classify Lafferty's writings on the basis of superficialities (i.e., calling him a surrealist). Lafferty's use of displacement is not unique, but so few writers have consciously attempted the process, and their works are so varied, that there are no unifying articles, no language for the critic with a day job to draw on. Some bright lad or lass (with the appropriate dignifying letters following their names) may read this and look for the method of displacement in H. P. Lovecraft, James Joyce, Robert Pinget, Gilbert Sorrentino, Flann O'Brien, R. A. Lafferty, Howard Waldrop, and R. A. Wilson. Now there's a book worth reading. The astute observer will note that all the names on the list are Irish, saving those which are not.
R. A. Lafferty
[In these stories, Lafferty mostly] seems to be writing about places that are not on the map but are real just the same. Lafferty was a traveler in his youth, and he may have glimpsed some of these places on the watery horizon; whether he was sober at the time is not the issue right now. ... [Lafferty] has a reading knowledge of all the languages of the Latin, German, and Slavic families, as well as Gaelic and Greek. The army sent him to Morotai, New Guinea and the Philippines, and at one time he could speak pretty good Passar Malay and Tagalog. He turned to writing about six years ago, as a substitute for serious drinking. The tavernkeepers weep while we rejoice: Lafferty's stories are full of a warm, Bacchic glow, recollected in sobriety euphoria, comradeship, nostalgia, and the ever-renewed belief that something wonderful may happen.
R. A. Lafferty
Lafferty, R. A.
Lafleur, Guy
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