Short Story Review # 7: The Transcendent Tigers (1964)

4.5/5

First off, I want to say that I’ve been reliably informed that Lafferty’s own title for this story was ‘Needle’ and that a magazine editor chose its present title.  Once you’ve read the story, Lafferty’s own title seems far more powerful to me and I hope it will be restored some day.

(First published in Worlds of Tomorrow, 1964)

This is, among Lafferty readers, one of his better known and loved tales among the stories about precocious and preternatural children for which he is justly renowned.  Lafferty’s children seem quite unique in literature and are not to be missed.  Lafferty doesn’t see children as innocent, but often as almost amoral; and even more so as just wildly plastic with capacity for sheer power, which he portrays them as wielding in a very unwieldy fashion for good and ill at once.  He often refers to children and adolescents as ‘poltergeistic’ in his fiction.  Lafferty sees all humans as having a crucial ghostly element, but seems to see children as closer to that numinous quality, and thus… well, spookier.  Carnadine Thompson (the central seven-year-old girl of this story) is one of Lafferty’s most memorable child anti-heroes, along with Clarissa Willoughby of ‘Seven-Day Terror’ (1962) and the Dulanty kids of The Reefs of Earth (1968).

(Also collected in the 1972 anthology Young Demons)

‘The Transcendent Tigers’ is kind of a story about what precocious little kids would do with the planet if they had power to do whatever they wanted to with it at the largest and most complete scale, thus being able to treat the Earth as no more than a toy or an anthill.  Indeed, the kids do in this story exactly what many of us have done with our toys and with little architectures of nature:  poke holes in them, mutilate them inch by inch, for no particular reason, just to see what happens, just to watch the destruction; hell, just to break things.

In the opening gambit of the story, Lafferty’s sympathies are clearly with the smart flexibility of the mother and daughter over against the father’s inflexible intellectualism.  This comes out in a way that quite literally makes me laugh out loud every time the story comes to a certain point.  After the husband has already been bloviating to his fellow male for a few paragraphs about how ‘impossible’ it is to work the wire model of an ancient puzzle he has given his daughter for her birthday (ignoring his wife's  interjection that the girl had already worked and unworked the puzzle just a moment before), we get this:

“Carnadine,” said her mother, “let me see you work that again.”
Carnadine worked it again.
“The reason it is unworkable,” said Tyburn…

And I can't repress a chuckle, even before I hear whatever shape he gives his absurd reasoning.  So this is a story about possibility as well, and our rationalisations by which we try avoid such open possibilities.  (To some degree, this is a central element in all of Lafferty's fiction - it certainly is in the previous story I reviewed, 'Narrow Valley', which also featured a mother and her children accepting wilder ontologies than the father of the family was prepared to grant or experience.  One begins to wonder what the dynamic was with Lafferty's own parents.)

In many 50s/60s American homes the dynamic might well have allowed for the way Tyburn treats his wife when he says to her:  'Stop chattering, Geraldine.  I am explaining something to Horn' (the neighbour man).  But Lafferty clearly and amusingly subverts such uneven and demeaning gender and marriage dynamics (in this story and many, many others).  And it isn't that Lafferty views women as merely intuitive creatures while men are hidebound rationalists.  His men and women vary on such attributes throughout his fiction, but here Geraldine is quite rational as well as canny in accepting what her eyes see her daughter doing (even if she 'had been looking pop-eyed for a long time' because of such ontic antics).  When she asks her daughter how she can do such wonders (note her intellectual curiosity and innate sense of the need for causal order), we get this exchange between daughter and mother:

“There has to be a first time for everything, mama.”
“Maybe, but there has to be a first-class explanation to go with that first time.”

Geraldine's no intellectual slouch.

As to the pop-eyed impossible, the daughter Carnadine had already performed a feat more immediately spectacular than solving the 'unsolvable' puzzle:  she several times instantaneously turns her white rubber ball inside out and then back again without tearing it, turning its colour from white to red and back to white again because the ball is 'red on the inside' as she informs her mother when asked about it.  These little miracles are just the prelude to terrifying and gargantuan marvels to follow.  That's one of the things that made this a favourite story of mine from the first time I read it: the opening ropes you in with the oddity and humour, but you have no inkling of the tall-tale or wonder-story heights (and physical depths!) to which the story is about to leap.  It's one of the things Lafferty does best, setting out a little whizzer and then suddenly and swiftly stacking a gigantic whopper right on top of it, delightfully defying all sense of balance.

Here Lafferty takes a characteristic structural turn and inserts a series of what we might call para-narrations:  first an aside about the kids' club Carnadine has formed (and presides over) with her little brother and two other boys younger than her; then an excerpt from an article in a French academic journal (the article's in English) about powers and visitations coming to the Earth; and then the main event. This last is a fairly swift but amazing description of the peculiar mass destruction of various rural and small towns of the USA that most people have never heard of (I verified the existence of all but two by googling them).  That these, beginning with Kearney, Nebraska, are mostly midwestern and southern towns (with a few from New England) is also characteristically Laffertian and the listings of them, to my ear, make up little snatches of Weird Americana poetry:

Hanksville, Utah, Crumpton, Maryland, Locust Bayou, Arkansas, and Pope City, Georgia. [...] Highmore, South Dakota, Lower Gilmore, New Hampshire, Cherryfork, Ohio, and Rowesville, South Carolina.  

Lafferty also performs his characteristic juxtaposition of the high and the low, the academic and the homespun, when he first refers to a farmer's report of the unbelievable size of the thing ('more than a mile thick, and a hundred thousand miles long') that came from the sky and caused the destruction. Lafferty wryly and exaggeratedly heads off the reader's incredulity at such a report from such a source:

Did he know how to judge distances?  Certainly, he said, I know how to judge distances. It is ninety yards to that windmill.  That crow is flying at right onto eighty yards above the earth, though most would guess him higher.  And that train whistle is coming from a distance of five and one-quarter miles.

Then he inserts the writings of yet another theoretical academic, cited only as 'Winkers' (wink wink); a longer and more abstruse passage this time, but elucidating further on the Power and Visitation that the specialists are claiming has come to the Earth.  After several paragraphs it breaks into this pile-on of jargon and theory:

The characteristics of the Power, the Visitation, as projected by these methods (and always considered in the Oeg-Hornbostel framework) is that it is Aculeiform, Homodynamous, Homochiral, and (here the intelligence reels with disbelief, yet I assure the lector that I am deadly serious) Homoeoteleutic.

Yowza!  The italics are Lafferty's and all the terms are real, meaning respectively (and roughly):  'like a prickle'; segmented; a substance where 'all the constituent units are molecules of the same chiral form'; and 'having the same or similar endings'.  Just when we might be tempted to think Laff is splashing some pseudo-academic nonsense our way merely for the sake of its amusing contiguity with the previous banter from the farmer, the article continues:

For there is a Verbal Element to it, incredible as it seems.  This raises old ghosts.  It is almost as if we hear the returning whisper of primitive magic or fetish.  It is as if we were dealing with the Logos - the word that was before the world.  But where are we to find the logic of the Logos?

(Again, the italics are his.)  Any reader of Lafferty's 1971 novel Arrive At Easterwine will know that he is not likely to invoke the concept of the Logos only for arcane laughs.  There is buried in this simultaneously funny and disturbing story (a simultaneity Lafferty achieves very frequently) some real philosophical concerns of the author.  But they remain mostly buried, to be linked up by the attentive reader with their reappearance in many other passages across his body of work.  But the academic extract here does nevertheless serve to hilariously over-explain the very simple ritual by which Carnadine is presently seen to be wreaking all this gargantuan havoc.

The narration returns to an amusing exchange between Carnadine and her mother where her mother asks how Carnadine, who had previously been a poor reader, now knows how to say the names of the towns that are being reported as destroyed in the newspaper:

"Oh, it's no great trick, mama.  You just tie into the stuff and let go.  Crumpton! Locust Bayou! Pope City! Cherryfork! Rowesville!"

Lafferty's definitely reveling in the odd poetry of listing out these towns that I mentioned above.

True to the patchwork narrative structure the story has taken, we then observe a scene of a wholly different nature than all these earthly happenings:  'Far out, very far out, there was a conversation.' The subsequent description of these somehow spherical yet non-physical intelligences is to me a very comic take on Lovecraftian Old Ones or Elder Being types of super-cosmic entities.  Contra Lovecraft, such ultra-beings are not necessarily out to eat us and make us subservient - indeed, they might even be out to 'bless' us with new powers and potentialities.  Yet we are indeed so ontically inferior to them that they wouldn't have any qualms about casting us aside into the cosmic rubbish heap if we prove unworthy or incapable of receiving and properly utilising their blessing.  (For a somewhat similar, though more poignant, take, see Stephen Graham Jones's short story 'Catch and Release', collected in his 2013 Zombie Sharks With Metal Teeth.)

The lampooning of human failings and frailties from a superior alien perspective in this scene is perhaps somewhat standard fare of 1960s sf - with Lafferty panache, certainly - but the ideas also fit into larger explorations about the kind of 'confidence to con' (my phrase, not Laff's) that these beings expound on here, a theme which Lafferty repeatedly plumbs across his body of work with characteristic tension and ambiguity. (The very dark Not To Mention Camels and the more redemptive Aurelia come to mind as novels by Lafferty that explore this theme; the Wreckville con men of the story 'Hands of the Man' come to mind as well.) The scene also, of course, serves to juxtapose yet another vast greatness with comparative smallness: the picture of these meta-cosmic super-intelligences towering over human understanding resonates with the giant holes in the cities next to the tiny holes on the globe or the verbose academic articles next to the childish, badly rhyming couplets of the kids' club.

The penultimate scene of the kids making their rhymes and jabbing needles into the globe in order to destroy major cities is a fantastic coup de grâce.  It gives us Laffertian children in full ferocity,

And Carnadine stuck it in with full assurance of her powers, red cap atilt, eyes full of green fire.

the chuckling silliness of the rhymes -

“Peas and Beans—New Orleans!”[...]
“Candy store—Baltimore,”[...]
“Fatty's full of bolonio—San Antonio.”[...]
“Eustace is a sisty—Corpus Christi.”[...]
“Eggs and Batter—Cincinnater.”[...]
“Hopping Froggo—Chicago.”

- and the stunning summaries of the jagged destructions they thereby wreak:

“He rhymed and jabbed, manfully but badly.
“That didn't rhyme very good,” said Carnadine. “I bet you botched it.”
He did. It wasn't a clean-cut holocaust at all. It was a clumsy, bloody, grinding job—not what you'd like.
[...]
“I do wish that you people would let me handle this,” said Carnadine. “That was awful.”
It was. It was horrible. That giant needle didn't go in clean at all. It buckled great chunks of land and tore a ragged gap. Nothing pretty, nothing round about it. It was plain brutal destruction.”

(Also included in Lafferty's 1972 collection Strange Doings)

The story ends as many Lafferty stories do, with a fourth-wall-breaking call to participate.  Usually, however, his readers are called to participate in the creation of worlds, not destruction.  So this ending is clearly meant to disturb. It's quite a nasty trick because you absolutely cannot fail to add in your own ending.  Just reading the prompt - the final three words of the story - will automatically put the corresponding two words in your head.  The story finishes - or rather, Lafferty's part of the story finishes:

“Knife and Fork—

And we have no choice, given the pattern that's been effectively planted into our heads from previous pages, but to supply:  'New York!'

I suppose it probably seems like nothing more than an amusing little ending until you delve further into Lafferty's narratology.  But even if you don't, Lafferty's fiction has a way of working on you beneath the surface whether you consciously take note of it or not.  As I said at the beginning of this review, would we have done any different if we had been the kids endowed with such power?

And more generally, Lafferty's fiction is always probing us, pricking us like a needle, goading us to wonder: have we been endowed with Powers, and what creations or destructions are we unleashing with our gifts?  (Admittedly, the destruction here, as Andrew Ferguson has argued about Lafferty's works in general, can actually be a necessary part of the creation of new worlds, and I do think that valence is in play here.  But the satire on humans that the alien conversation performs requires that we also feel troubled by our participation in this destruction.  Was it really making way for new worlds or was it just a brutal botch job that only served our cruel and callous desire to see things break for no good reason?)

Note:  one of the elements I still don't grasp about this story is the name Carnadine and the crucial red cap.  Is the emphasis on red an allusion to blood, another theological element alongside the mention of the Logos?  Please enlighten me with your thoughts on this.

* Facebook thread on 'The Transcendent Tigers'
* Entry on 'The Transcendent Tigers' at Andrew Ferguson's blog
* 'The Transcendent Tigers' thread at RALafferty.org

An Excessively Normal Childhood (according to Lafferty)

Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal, for he came very near the high norms themselves.  He had walked and talked with ghosts from the day he was able to walk and talk.  All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel.  Abel was an imaginative, a creative boy.  He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world:  that is always important.  And he did not like empty spaces at all.  Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space he filled it with his imagination.  There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house.  He filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes.  He would eat apples and blackberries there till he got sick.

There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley.  A house had once stood there.  It had burned down: the house had faced on the side street.  Abel put another house there, a funny-looking house.  He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house and fixed their names to be Mrs and Mr Ostergoster.  He put a boy to live in the house.  He fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster.  Mikey fixed a cat.  Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away.  Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick.  Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man (he was a soldier such as they used to have in another time, not the sort of soldier they have now).  Mrs and Mr Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier.  Everybody began to have a big fight then.  Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking.

"You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters," Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into a secondary patina.  "There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them and remember how they burned in the little house there - ah, in the little house that is not there.  And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off that crazy man. With our reputation we can't afford to seem too old-line Southern.  And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog.  I remember that dog before they had to kill it.  It was one mean dog; its a wonder that you weren't bitten.  Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think that you're an odd kid."

But Abel wasn't an odd kid at all.  He was absolutely normal.  It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd.

The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel.  The family seemed to attract ghosts and the neighbors objected.  (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts... Both his father and his mother had talent.

And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult.  An average child will lose such talents, but a normal child will retain them:  the two aren't the same.

-R. A. Lafferty, 'Rivers of Damascus' (1974)

Serpent's Egg (1987) - 'That wonderful, that blessed, that hope-of-the-world thing'

Meet the Twelve Children of the Experiments, each one hyper-intelligent, each one a Mega-Person, each one under suspicion and surveillance as a potential Serpent's Egg to be crushed in the shell:

The Lynn-Randal Experiment:  Ruddy Lord Randall, the young male human; Inneall, the young female ambulatory computer; Axel, the young male Golden Ape (or Blue-Eyed Ape or Gargoyle, a member of the Unfallen People or Second Humanity).

The Wintergreen-Luna Experiment:  Marino the young male seal ('his mind and his personality and his outgoing spirit gleamed as his hide gleamed with its wetness in the sun when he came out of the water'); Luas the young male angel (who wouldn't be greatly missed in heaven - 'he was of one of the lower classes of the highest of creatures'); Henryetta, the young female human (flame-haired, flame-tempered, and flame-powered, gifted with pyro-kinesis).

The Dorantes-Saleh Experiment:  Lutin, the young female python (a prophetess); Dubu, the young female bear (whom all the other children called Little Mother); Schimp, the young male chimpanzee (erudite, degreed with a doctorate, he regularly wore an academic cap and gown).

The Gruenbaum-McGregor Experiment:  Gajah the unborn female Indian elephant (in the tenth and final year of her gestation in the womb of her mother, an Empress elephant; she communicates by telepathy as well as by means of a percussion language on a tiny drum inside her mother's belly); Carcajou, the young male wolverine (half animal, half devil); Popugai, the young male parrot (from New Zealand, big enough to kill and eat a sheep; with perfect recall and understanding and pronunciation, 'he knew the basic vocabularies of six hundred human languages, and of many thousands of insect, reptile, animal, and bird languages').

The location is only barely named, but this is one of Lafferty's many Oklahoma stories.  It is the end of summer in the year 2035, specifically the Last Three Days of Summerset.

Each set of three 'children' grew up together and now all twelve have been brought together as each approaches his or her tenth birthday.  Their project has been to find 'new ways of looking at the world, but not too cockeyed new'. But it looks like they have indeed been 'too cockeyed new' in their shining intelligence and vision and thus the Dolophonoi, the knife-wielding assassins, are drawing near to put an end to it before it really gets started.

Serpent's Egg is another of Lafferty's many apocalypses and shares themes (e.g. 'is this world an Egg that will shortly birth a new world?') strongly in common with Past Master (1968), Arrive At Easterwine (1971), and Annals of Klepsis (1983).  The novel also shares, in a more minor key, the theme of 'is any of this real or are we just dreaming?' with Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? and The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney (these two short novels are collected together in Apocalypses, 1977) and East of Laughter (1988).  The novel's satiric dystopian quality (e.g. a Kangaroo Court rules the Global Village) resonates with works like Lafferty's novella Ishmael Into the Barrens (1971) and his short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972).  The characters are said to be living on the Floating World and this critique of modern society's lack of depth frequently recurs in Lafferty's fiction - e.g. Fourth Mansions (1969), 'Encased in Ancient Rind' (1971), From the Thunder Colt's Mouth, (1975),  and 'Bequest of Wings' (1978).

From the above thematically associative list it's easy to believe Lafferty's own claim that his body of work really added up to one long unfinished novel (which he called A Ghost Story).

The prose in Serpent's Egg is perhaps not as dense or as lyrical as the likes of Fourth Mansions, Past Master, Annals of Klepsis, or The Devil Is Dead (1971) or indeed of many of Lafferty's most famous short stories (the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers contains many prime examples).  The poetry seems to mostly have been externalised into the very characters and events of the novel more than in the language that describes them.  The above cast is a shining example and various scenes in the novel sing out in sheer conveyance of the happenings.  Examples of the latter are that Inneall the little girl computer is making a New Ocean right there in the town and Heart's Desire Cove springs up round it as a local carnival or fair, the description of which is classic Lafferty 'high time' fun, full of outrageously oddball activities and elements:

Hearts Desire had become a great entertainment center, all within a week... A feature there was 'Computer Enhanced Music', and all sorts of music lovers came there.  The birds also were faithful listeners and participants.  Human music alone had never touched them much, but the enhanced music struck a chord with them.  Sometimes there were whole choruses of larks and catbirds and mockingbirds and of the multi-songed cardinals.  There was even the mightiness of ten-thousand voice crow-calls.  And the swifts and swallows and even the evil shrikes did air dances when the people and the 'people' danced.

And the fast-lunch and fast-drink places were attractions for old and young... Where else could one get Hot Coon Sandwiches?  Where else Ocean Catfish garnished with Crayfish tails?   Where else Persimmon Wine?  Where else Choc Beer as Mother Used to Make It?

[...]

At night there were the bonfires on Ocean Shore.  They were built out of folk memory... Oh the Campfire Songs that the people and the 'people' sang and entoned [sic] on the rocky shores of the Cove on those chilly End-of-Summer-Nights!  They sang 'Star People' and 'Skokemchuck Rag', 'Bandicot Blues' and 'World Village Medley', 'Ambulatory Ambles' and 'The Socsollabcomdem Party Potlatch', 'New Directions Ramble', 'Charisma Concerto', 'The We-Owe-A-Lot-To-Otto-Wotto Hootnanny', 'The Sixth Dream of Molly Mechanicus', 'New Entity Rock', 'Oh New Rice Feeds the Far-flung World!', 'Interspecies Intermezzo', 'Inneall's Ocean Hallelujah'.

[...]

Every night, some of the Computers sang 'Moon People Vaunt', a song that always caused at least a small amount of friction.  Only computers lived in the Moon Colonies.  Humans couldn't live on the Moon without elaborate support systems.  But Computers could live anywhere, even on the blistering hot surface of Venus or on the killingly cold surface of Jupiter... But everybody could enjoy such sing-a-longs as the 'Excitements Hot and Cold Suite' and 'It's the Crustacean in Me', a song of aeons-spanning nostalgia; and 'Going Home Over The Star Bridge'.

(pp. 57-60)

Or take the antic images that fizz and sparkle in your mind after hearing a series of little wisdom tall tales related by Dubu:

"I have a notion," said the young female bear Dubu, "that the answer to all the hard questions are written on the inside of one single Acorn somewhere.  This particular acorn, if placed in lye-water, will swell to a billion times its original size, and then it will burst open.  And whole mountains-full of writing will come tumbling out of it.  Then everyone can come and read it and enjoy it and know everything.  The only difficulty is knowing which acorn in the world is the right one.  I believe that there are clues pointing directly to the right acorn, but we do not notice them because they are so big and so plain and so close to our noses."

[...]

"Many bears in their natural state know everything.  Go down into the Winding Stair Mountains and walk out on the bear tracks.  When you meet another bear, if he is one of the bears who know everything, he will give you the 'All-Knowing Wink'.  No animal except the bear can give the 'All-Knowing Wink'.  The face muscles of other animals simply aren't adequate for it."

[...]

"I have a notion that turtles have uncanny and cryptic information written in the groove on the bottom side of their tongues.  The turtles themselves do not know about this, nor do the chelonologists.  But the people who work in turtle-soup factories are so very smart because they know about this hiding place.  They  read the turtles' tongues like Chinese fortune cookies, and what they read is total knowledge."

(pp. 74-75)

Lafferty's weaving together of folkloric, anthropological, and ecological tropes is both bewildering and awe-inspiring.  That, I suppose is part of the point of this novel.  It is a search (as is most of his work in one way or another) for how we can obtain an adequate view of the world that doesn't leave anything out and also Ties It All Together in some satisfactory and even salvific coherence - a coherence, we may be assured from the above quotes, that is comedic and carnival, not static and 'tidy'.  Indeed, it was the putting forward of two contrary views about this vision-casting that prompted Dubu's reflections:

"As to why we are here, Satrap, and what we are supposed to be doing here," Felix Snake-and-Dove got on the track again, "we are here to weave the seamless garment of our individual lives, and of the lives of those around us, of the neighborhood, of the countryside, of all the creatures down to the smallest, of all realms and continents and oceans. We are here to weave the seamless garment that will be highly detailed from the subatomic particles to the galaxy clusters. It must include all minds and ideas and inklings, all joys and all immediacies. There can never be enough weavers, there can never be enough brilliant details in the seamless garment known as 'The Life Affair'. And we can never be finished with it, for it continues to grow seamlessly."

"Weaving is outmoded, Felix," said Livius Secundus the history-writing Computer.  "Fabrics are no longer woven.  Now they are extruded by extruding machines.  Personal groups, landscapes, worlds, galaxies, all are extruded by a simple extruding machine which you could make yourself."

(pp. 73-74)

As always in Lafferty, there is a deadly urgency to these philosophical debates, as the presence of the aforementioned assassins attests (reminding one of the mechanical killers in Past Master and the nothoi-hunters in Ishmael Into the Barrens).  The Powers That Be in this tale are not only perpetrating socio-massive thought-control (another theme dear to Lafferty who repeatedly bemoaned catch-phrases and slogans and how the masses were made into 'sheep' by being 'fed' on them), but also death-dealing population control.

As to the former - thought-control - Lafferty describes a scenario very much like our 21st century internet planet:

It became a world in which everything and nothing was public.  It became a world with very little superstructure.  It became a world in which ideas and notions were transmitted instantly to every part of it.  But could such a world work? (p. 80)

He's asking the question honestly.  It is evident from his body of work that Lafferty loved technology and the sciences and he longed for humanity to truly stretch out and mature in itself, spiritually and intellectually, and in harmony with the natural environment.  Lafferty believed in the 'Fulfilment and Enlargement of the World' (p. 94), but his works dramatise how competing visions of what this is and how to bring it about collide. Wrong-headed utopias, Lafferty averred, would only make the bottom drop out on such maturing processes. The Kangaroo that Rules the World, as the elite social engineers in this tale are called, had backed the 'leveller movement':

One used to thinking of levelling as trimming the top off something into a semblance of evenness. But these 'levellers' trimmed the bottoms off of humanity and computerdom and the world itself. (pp. 80-81)

This was tragically not only the cutting out of our psychological and spiritual depths through reductionist philosophies and worldviews, but also the cutting out of our population depths:

The lower classes of everything were terminated without particular ado, without much apparent suffering, without any great quantity of visible bloodshed.  The bereft families did not ask where their inept members had gone because most of the families that had inept members went with them. Persons seldom asked where their neighbors had disappeared to, because usually it was entire neighborhoods that disappeared. The 'Don't make a big thing out of it' mentality was rife in the world, so a big thing was not made of the disappearance of eighty-seven percent of the persons in the world.  After all, that eighty-seven percent of the persons in the world had made ninety-seven percent of the trouble in the world.  In all logic there was much to be said for the 'removals'.

This is skin-crawling stuff.  The wisdom of Dubu the young female bear had earlier countered this pogrom programme:

"Oh, Oh, Oh, what will we do, Dubu, with all those countless billions of unwashed commoners?  I wonder whether they're necessary at all."

"Yes, they are necessary," Dubu answered in that 'ruf-ruf' voice that bears use for human talk. "We are the tree.  You are only the top leaf on the tree.  It's the one that quakes and moves in the wind as though it were an aspen leaf, the first one to fall when the inclement weather comes.  And I'm unwashed myself.  I don't use water.  I use a curry comb instead.  Curry combs are too good for horses, but they're just right for bears."

(p. 63)

If you read Lafferty long enough, you'll notice what might amount to a paranoia about this possibility of mass extermination of those who don't 'fit in' to certain versions of utopia.  But then again, his was a century that included literal secret police, travesties of trials, public executions, and dicatatorial mass exterminations of millions of people who didn't fit in to certain social visions.  (Not just Hitler and Nazism, of course, but also Stalin and Pol Pot and others.)

At any rate, though Lafferty was self-professedly 'cranky' and certainly had a dark turn of imagination, I can't in good conscience call his body of work pessimistic.  His themes of hope and of new birth on the far side of tragedy persist from the earliest to the latest novels and stories and Serpent's Egg is no exception.  The wonderful later chapters of this novel with their depictions of whales and sea lice building profound monuments on the ocean floor give vivid form to Lafferty's hopeful vision.  Chapter twelve in particular immerses the reader in an 'Oceanic Hyper-Active Dream State', which provides 'new eyes and new ways of looking at the world' full of creativity and possibility.  Our dream guide is a man who is one of the 'metamorphic creatures who can turn into Deep Ocean Denizens'.  Such a man is an 'Ocean Obscenity or Monster' for 'All Ocean Creatures are obscene, in the nicest sense of that word'.  Thus he is 'in his beautiful oceanic-ugliness-monsterness as we saw him and loved him today' (p. 144).  Lafferty is always very comfortable with placing grotesquery and monstrosity in the category of beauty and virtue.  With these phantasmagorical goggles on we see:

And the whales were making giant crypts and cenotaphs and menhirs from the blocks and shafts and trabants of marble.  It was utterly strange down there at Whale Town, and completely homey also.  A sign which the whales had put up proclaimed to all visitors "We're Glad You're Here".

[...]

The Temple-City that the Whales were building was certainly prodigious and entirely wonderful.

[...]

The beautiful pink, lilac, tan, orange, and mauve-tinted marble of the Whales' Constructions had also on it happy blotches and gouts of the greenest green ever.  It was a color so green that no language of Earth except only Malay has a word for the color.  Malay does have a twelve-syllable name for the color, a name that might be translated as 'The Green of Swarming, Ocean-floor etching, deep-sea lice'.  Yes, that vivid green was a living color, and one beautiful blotch of it, festooning the caput of a pillar, might contain a million of the small ocean-floor sculpturing Lice. They were quite small.

The small ocean-lice were etching figures and faces into the big marble and granite stone-pillars. Though not one, and not ten thousand of the little lice had enough scope and reach to comprehend what they were sculpting, to know what the statuary was all about, yet the lice were receiving and obeying orders from somebody, and likely from the whales.  The portraiture art, cut in high-and-bas relief out of the giant stone pillars and walls and lintels, had to be the Art of the Whales.

Mostly the faces and forms were those of famous whales of yore.  But there were also distinguished-looking animal faces, human faces, god faces, even strange computer faces, all emerging from the big stones that the sea-lice were sculpting for the whales.  And whenever they finished one of the great and distinguished faces, the sea-lice covered it over with a beautiful and thin plaiting of nacre or mother-of-pearl.

(pp. 137-138)

By the novel's end this dream of a coalescing vision of life has not yet saved the day.  It is still an underground thing. It is the resistance movement that stubbornly refuses to be stamped out.  It is the 'egg' of promise and new beginnings.

Indeed, one of the surviving Children of the Experiments, Lutin the young female python, who had become pregnant earlier in the narrative, appears to have given birth to a giant egg:

"Lo! - and Behold It!"

"That thing!" Inneall cried out aghast.

"Yes, that thing with the beautiful golden and blue light pulsating about it!"  Lutin spoke out of her mood of rapture.  "That wonderful, that blessed, that hope-of-the-world thing." 

(p. 154)

Dubu the wise young female bear says that 'a couple of odd fellows' gigglingly informed her about the egg:

"It is the joke by which the World will be saved and transformed". (p. 155)

And this too resonates with one of Lafferty's consistent themes.  In his early story 'Nine Hundred Grandmothers' (1966), when a space explorer asks "How Did It All Begin?" of those who purportedly can tell him the answer, those who were actually there at the Beginning, he is met with giggling and laughter and told: '"Oh, it was so funny how it began.  So joke! So fool, so clown, so grotesque thing!" [...] And they laughed. And laughed.  And went on laughing...' Storming off angry, thinking he hasn't received an answer, the explorer misses that he has.  He misses that he is being told that the universe is rooted in Cosmic Laughter.  In the short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' (1972), the scattered disciples of Christ are the only hope left for rebuilding a post-catastrophe world and one of them informs another that sometimes 'the Lord... jests, He jokes, and we be the point of His most pointed jokes.'  And so here in Serpent's Egg also, Cosmic Laughter is the creative power for the New Beginning as much as the Beginning. We are not told what is inside the egg, but only given clues and hints and an 'Epilog by a Sea Louse'.

This novel is one of the more coherently structured and executed of Lafferty's notoriously difficult novels.  It meanders a bit in the third quarter, but the majority of it is packed with Laffertian wit and wisdom and weird wonders.  It is perhaps not quite the feast that, say, Annals of Klepsis or Fourth Mansions or Past Master or Arrive At Easterwine are, but I would definitely call it unmissable.

"Hang in there, Gaea guys! Some of us are on your side.'

'The glob came upon them and swallowed them in its fetid breath.  It was sharp with teeth in it, and these were quickly identified as belonging to aerial snakes.  The glob brought with it a saturating mental and emotional depression, a stark consternation, an unbearable fearfulness and unpleasantness.  It brought dread.  It brought hallucination and contradiction and fear of falling, and fear of ultimate fire.  It brought flying foxes that fastened onto throats with hollow and life-draining teeth.  It brought violent small creatures who sometimes seemed to be human children and sometimes tearing monsters.

'But a voice came from one of the small and possibly human monsters.  It was a boy's voice speaking in Demotic or Low Galactic:

'"Hang in there, Gaea guys!  Some of us are on your side.  Don't let this whip you.  It's only a little psychic storm."

'What sort of stuff was that?'

-R. A. Lafferty, 'Quiz Ship Loose' (1978)