Short Story Review # 6: Narrow Valley (1966)

4.5/5

This story genuinely deserves to be included in anthologies of the American (USA) short story.  It is a regional yarn of post-colonial irony, highly amusing, its wonders deftly described, and a narrative richly layered with allusive material for class discussions and the writing of essays.  May the day speed on when we see this title listed next to stories by Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, Jack London, Charlotte Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Langston Hughes, and so on.

I wrote a very short section about this story in my recent dissertation.  It was only in doing this that I properly realised just how many themes and elements Lafferty folded into this one short, seemingly light, tale.  In the dissertation, I could only talk a tiny bit about the land itself as a sort of character in the story.  It pained me not to even touch on the other elements.  If I could have done so, it would have strengthened even the discussion of the land because all the elements of the story reinforce each other (as well as leading off on individual tangents).

The story's three main themes that seem most central to me are:  1) the delightfully portrayed marvel of the valley's anomalous spatial-perceptual behaviour (with its political as well as ontological implications); 2) the wry lampooning of white reductionist views of Native Americans; 3) the equally wry lampooning of 'scientific' explanations and our modern psychological need for them in order to keep a mysterious universe at bay.

But these don't exhaust the story's charms and riches.  The dialogue, for example, is some of the funniest and sharpest in all of Lafferty's output.  One of my favourite instances is the exchange between the Rampart children and the Indian Clarence Little-Saddle when they're down in the valley together.  For example:

“Is there any wild Indians around here?” Fatty Rampart asked.

“No, not really. I go on a bender about every three months and get a little bit wild, and there's a couple Osage boys from Gray Horse that get noisy sometimes, but that's about all,” Clarence Little-Saddle said.

“You certainly don't intend to palm yourself off on us as an Indian,” Mary Mabel challenged. “You'll find us a little too knowledgeable for that.”

“Little girl, you might as well tell this cow there's no room for her to be a cow since you're so knowledgeable. She thinks she's a short-horn cow named Sweet Virginia; I think I'm a Pawnee Indian named Clarence. Break it to us real gentle if we're not.”

This badinage carries on, disabusing the children of their ethnic stereotypes.  Mary asks Clarence where his war bonnet is if he's a real Indian.  He in turn asks her why she's not wearing the Crown of Lombardy if she's supposed to be a real white girl.  After a little more back and forth, including asking where his bow and arrows are and him admitting he only did archery once and poorly at a range in T-Town, we get this:

“Hey, you old Indian, you lied!” Cecilia Rampart shrilled from the doorway of the shack. “You do have a war bonnet. Can I have it?” 

“I didn't mean to lie, I forgot about that thing,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “My son Clarence Bare-Back sent that to me from Japan for a joke a long time ago. Sure, you can have it.”

An example of other elements buried in the story is the very occluded reference to the Rampart matriarch's own possible non-white ethnicity.  Her name is Nina, and she confesses to sometimes having an urge to disappear to Mexico forever.  This might be another reason why she and the children, unlike Robert Rampart the patriarch, are able to enter the fun and humour of the recalcitrant valley and thus 'play along' and experience its true dimensions.  At least for a little while.

I suppose that's a fourth central element:  humans having or lacking true dimensionality, which determines their ability to experience the true dimensionality of the world in which they exist (and the true dimensionality of one another, especially across racial lines).  Cue the concluding punny joke between Clarence and the ever-popular Lafferty stalwart, Willy McGilly the 'eminent scientist':

“Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flat-lander say to the other?”

“Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said. “No, I don't think we overdid it, Willy.”

It's an all round great tale of magic, theory, repartee, and subversion of Manifest Destiny, supplying a variety of pleasures only truly appreciated on repeated readings.  It also, along with the other American Indian short stories Lafferty wrote, is deepened by (and deepens) a reading of Lafferty's historical novel of the Choctaw people Okla Hannali (1972).  There are various interesting resonances, but the poignancy only lightly implied in 'Narrow Valley' gets full voice in Okla, along with plenty more wonders and horrors and hilarities.

* Discussion of 'Narrow Valley' on Facebook

* 'Narrow Valley' on ralafferty.org (including many links to other blog reviews of this story)

'Narrow Valley' appeared in this anthology among several others, as well as being included in Lafferty's seminal short story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970)

anthropological SF and Lafferty

So I've started doing general SF reviews over at my blog They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven On Their Heads.  The latest is of Michael Bishop's short novel Stolen Faces (1977), which is a specimen of 70s anthropological quasi New Wave science fiction.  The general discussion of the book may be of interest to Laffertians.

But it's got me thinking about anthropological SF (maybe most emblematically exemplified by Ursula Le Guin) and Lafferty:  does his work fit into this category/phase/expression of science fiction?  Probably not any more than his work fits into the New Wave in general.  But just as his work is amenable to the literary, experimental, psychological, linguistic, philosophising characteristics of New Wave (such as the likes of Zelazny and Delany exhibited), so too his work is amenable to the emphasis on indigenous identity, worldview, magic, ancestry, ritual, and culture in the anthropological SF of the likes of Bishop, Le Guin, and Tiptree.

One potential difference I see in Lafferty over against other practitioners of anthropological SF is that Lafferty's exploration of 'tribal' ethnicity and culture feels much more insider than what I've read in other authors.  Other writers often feel more like the compassionate and self-censuring view of a master race who is trying to repent of its atrocities and make amends.  Don't misunderstand that:  Le Guin and Bishop, for example, are exemplary liberal humanists (Taoist and Christian respectively) who are earnest about repentance and new policies toward the Other, working that out deeply and powerfully in their fictions.  But Lafferty feels more like a tribesman speaking out on behalf of the People.  His voice comes across to me more like a Chinua Achebe or Black Elk.  (It's interesting to note in this connection that Gene Wolfe said Lafferty's unique genius would have been taken more seriously in the USA if he had been of South American or some other non-white ethnicity.)

Lafferty deals often with other ethnicities and tribes than his own, sure - Native Americans and Native Indonesians spring to mind - but I think his empathy comes from the inside of his experience.  And those other Others sometimes stand in symbolically for his own, I think.  I know he self-identified as an ethnic and religious minority.  In one interview he said he just narrowly missed being a WASP by being instead a Ruddy Irish Catholic.  His own worldview too was far more in line with various indigenous peoples of the world than with the modern secular humanist worldview dominant in the West.

While I can think of quite a few short stories which are explicitly anthropological in theme, I'm not sure I can think of any of his novels that are really centred in this concern (aside from the obvious Okla Hannali).  Past Master, for example, seems more about sociology and political philosophy (and class is more at issue than race).  Anyway, here are a list of some of the short stories, off the top of my head, that are pretty deeply anthropological I think:

'Narrow Valley'
'Ride a Tin Can'
'Groaning Hinges of the World'
'How They Gave It Back'
'Frog On the Mountain'
'Nine Hundred Grandmothers'
'Land of the Great Horses'
'Smoe and the Implicit Clay'

More stories that feature anthropology, but I'm not sure whether they centre in that theme:

'Cliffs That Laughed'
'Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne'
'Name of the Snake'
'Old Foot Forgot'
'Tongues of the Matagorda'
'Happening in Chosky Bottoms'
'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'

Can anybody think of other instances and perspectives on this?