Short Story Review # 3: Through Other Eyes (1960)

4.5/5

I'm starting to see that Lafferty may have had two mega-themes throughout his work, from early to late:  Creating and Seeing.  Lafferty's critical-theory interpreter and biographer, Andrew Ferguson, is doing yeoman's work on the Creating front, performing ongoing in-depth analysis of Lafferty's creative world-building and how his works metafictionally invite readers to participate in that world-building, especially given our world's present conceptual non-status.  I guess my essays in the first two issues of Feast of Laughter have been taking first stabs at the Seeing theme, especially as regards Lafferty's ability to widen and deepen our gaze to take in the non-human environment, and maybe that's going to be the bulk of the contribution I make to Lafferty studies.  I guess there are probably other major, central themes in Lafferty's body of work, but these seem to be two of them.  (Any ideas on others? If I kept on the present-tense verb terminology, I might call his emphasis on 'ghostliness', i.e. spirituality, his mega-theme of Being, which, of course, is ontological and undergirds his themes of Seeing and Creating.)

I've also begun to notice that Lafferty signals most of his major themes right from the earliest part of his career, sometimes with stories that are as accomplished and profound and groundbreaking as any he would write in his mid and late career.  We are put on notice that Creating will be a mega-theme from the outset by his chilling but somehow also invigorating story 'Snuffles' (1960).  So also, in the same year, he sets out for us his mega-theme of Seeing in the story 'Through Other Eyes'.

I think in the past this story has not been one of my top personal favourites because I got a little put off by the introduction, or first panel, of the tale.  I typically don't love it when stories or novels start off with dialogue - I'm a sot for description and that's how I prefer any piece of fiction get going. Immerse me in either action, or, even better, setting, and I'm a very willing reader.  Start me in the middle of a conversation, with little or no imagery, and I'm just enduring it to get through to whenever the description of this world I've entered will finally begin.  I'm sure some readers are opposite, or appreciate both.  (And, of course, I know dialogue does tons of the work of building the setting and telling the story.)  Having said all that, the first line of this story is a cracker:  '"I don't think I can stand the dawn of another Great Day," said Smirnov.'

But the characters' subsequent discussion of time travel experiments feels like a very clunky way to get started. (I think discursively top-heavy intros are often the case with the Institute of Impure Sciences cycle of stories, of which this is the earliest.)  It is very, very erudite and witty - if you are familiar enough with the references.  First of all, I'm not a general history buff, so I'm just not that interested, even if I know the references, but secondly, I had to look several of them up, some of which research yielded a smile or chuckle at Lafferty's handling of the historical material (especially Nell Guinn).  The take on Tristram and Isolde (a reference I did readily recognise) was amusing, and the portrait of Lancelot was the best of the lot to my mind: that he 'spent more time on the rubbing table than any athlete I ever heard of', like a 'high-priced quarterback who was never ready to play'.  (Incidentally, Gene Wolfe compares medieval knights to American football players in his novel The Knight.)  And the reference to Aristotle's treatises on the Beard in Essential and Beard in Existential (pretend treatises, as far as I can tell, though A. did apparently write something or other about beards in some work or other) was funny, a joke whose relevance has come round again with our present bewhiskered hipster-mania.  As I say, as clever and amusing as all this is, it is a slow start to the tale for me and a seemingly irrelevant one to boot given that it is not a setup to a yarn about time travel! Yet I did 'get it' this time round.  This opening gambit supplies an instance of how our successes at peering into unknowns can sometimes shrink rather than expand our world.  The past didn't look as glorious as our handed down accounts when you could actually be there and witness it. And that's the setup:  a foreshadowing of the results of the real experiment at hand in this story (which will be complexly fulfilled, as the subsequent experience will end up being too successful and overly expanding).

Now, I will say that catching this structural element this time round made something else click for me about Lafferty's works.  I'm noticing more and more that his structures can be very, very odd, often in this kind of asymmetric triptych, or otherwise 'panelled' sort of way, where the movements or sections are each quite different from one another in mode or some other aspect of presentation or performance or content.  In some ways it's almost like the stories change styles as they change scenes or sections.  I'm not going to try to analyse it right now, but 'Land of the Great Horses' and 'Thieving Bear Planet' are an early and late story that strike me as instances of this structural phenomenon (the former without the numbered parts and the latter a numbered asymmetric diptych).  A lot of Lafferty's structures are actually beginning to put me in mind of the ornate stories of Jorge Luis Borges.  More consciously recognising the tripartite structure of 'Through Other Eyes' this time round enriched the reading for me.  Even though I don't love the first panel of this particular tale, I do appreciate how it adds to the structural elegance.

At the end of this opening, Smirnov proffers the opinion that 'One pair of eyes is enough.  I do not see any advantage at all except the novelty.'  This is the view Lafferty will never tire of knocking down for the rest of his career.  (Cf. the notion that 'A man misses so much if he uses only one set of eyes' in his 1969 novel Fourth Mansions.)  And this statement from Smirnov allows Cogsworth to state the thesis of the whole short story:  'I believe that what we regard as one may actually be several billion different universes, each made only for the eyes of the one who sees it.'

For me, even though section or panel 2 is where this story really starts to pay gigantic dividends, we still have to get through another page or so of story-stalling theory-speak before it does so. Nevertheless, having just read William James's seminal paper 'What is an Emotion?' (1884), and its subsequent responses in the philosophy of emotion, for a course this past semester, I found Lafferty's little discussion of brains and perception quite neatly fitting into that discourse.  So that was a bonus and something probably worth digging more into.

But it's when Cogsworth's initial thesis is elaborated upon that this tale blows up for me and goes full Laffertian.  He experiences the age-old subjective perception question as a boy, with a fairly commonplace example:  'It may be that I am the only one who sees the sky black at night and the stars white [...] and everybody else sees the sky white and the stars shining black. And I say the sky is black, and they say the sky is black; but when they say black they mean white.'  But, as Harlan Ellison recently noted, Lafferty 'could take a simple idea and say, well, wait a minute, look at it this way.'  True to this propensity, Cogsworth then delightfully and freakishly stacks up weirder and weirder examples, starting with wondering whether others see cows inside out and finishing with wondering whether, when a bird eats a worm, does the worm think 'that his outside is his inside, and that the bird's inside is his outside? And that he has eaten the bird instead of the bird eating him?' (See the whole wonderful passage here.)  We are notified here that when Lafferty talks about every single person seeing the world differently than every other, he really means it, radically.  The amazing thing is that he pays this out in the rest of the story.  Incredible stuff.

After an entertaining wee wander through the eyes of a great man, a wide man, a mathematical man, a fastidiously detailed man, an already-looking-back-at-you man, and a radically sceptical man, there is nothing left but to look through the eyes of a woman.  She is an exceptional woman to Charles Cogsworth (he's in love with her as becomes clear), but Gregory will later tell Cogsworth she's a pretty average gal. Apparently, however, looking at the world through the eyes of even an average woman is wilder, fuller, and more challenging than looking through the eyes of any or all of those diverse kinds of men combined.  Cogsworth says he has seen the world through the eyes 'of a giant, of a king, of a blind hermit, of a general, of a peeping tom, of a fool' and now he will see it through the eyes 'of an angel'.  The narrator has this to say about that:  'Valery Mok may or may not have been an angel. She was a beautiful woman, and angels, in the older and more authentic iconography, were rather stern men with shaggy pinions.'  The implication is that even if Cogsworth saw through the eyes of an angel, he might see a much shaggier world than he was expecting.  At any rate, he is utterly shell-shocked by seeing through Valery's eyes, so much so that he has to spend six weeks in a sanatorium.

Now comes the third and final panel of the story.  Cogsworth eventually chats with his friend Smirnov some more and is challenged that perhaps he just doesn't understand girls!  I won't go much into this final panel of the story as I dealt with it somewhat extensively at the close of my essay for Feast of Laughter issue 2.  Suffice it to say, the view of the world just gets beautifully weirder as we're treated to a description of Valery's universe, imaginatively sensual and mythically literal to a genuinely 'ecomonstrous' degree.  What I do want to note here is how this story contrasts with C. S. Lewis's similarly themed tale 'The Shoddy Lands' (first published in the February 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction).  The male protagonist of Lewis's tale also sees the world through the eyes of a woman, but he sees not a wildly hyper-sensuous world but a 'shoddy land' full of vague, shoddy flora and people and objects, with a few frivolous and vain exceptions.  I've always really liked Lewis's story for its imaginative premise rendered quite evocatively.  And I don't think it's necessarily damning that the protag of 'The Shoddy Lands' happens to look at the world through a particularly vapid and boring young lady's eyes, especially as Lewis published a whole novel that same year, Till We Have Faces, which is narrated by the fiercely intelligent and fascinating voice of a highly admirable female protagonist.  Nevertheless, it's fascinating and instructive that, in contrast to 'The Shoddy Lands', in 'Through Other Eyes' Lafferty's view through female eyes is gobsmacking, challenging, expanding - the polar opposite of 'shoddy'.  Indeed, it's Lafferty's male protag that comes in for criticism from Valery for his view of the world being too shoddy:

She burst in on him furiously one day.

“You are a stick. You are a stick with no blood in it. You are a pig made out of sticks. You live with dead people Charles. You make everything dead. You are abominable.”

After a bit of half-hearted argument from Charles Cogsworth, he is duly humbled (as is, to be fair, Lewis's protagonist at the end of 'The Shoddy Lands' when he shrinks from the thought that someone might well look at the world through his eyes and see a similarly shoddy landscape, just differently distributed based on his own parochial inclusions and exclusions).  This is a story of being shattered by being too-suddenly immersed in the viewpoint of the Other, and then slowly put back together by further humbled engagement with that same viewpoint (and other POVs as well - it's not unimportant that Cogsworth builds back up to understanding Valery by first seeing the world through other people and even various animals, all of these views surprising, challenging, and enlightening).

One last thing I noticed this time round, which was a delightful surprise, is that this is really a 'cute' romantic love story buried in philosophical rumination.  Charles and Valery are married by the time of the one novel in the Institute cycle, Arrive At Easterwine (1971).  As a man married to a woman whose visual and sensual view of the world is generally far greater than my own, and who must lovingly remonstrate with me about my 'dead stick' view from time to time, and whom I can't help but love for it, 'Especially when it becomes beautiful when angry', I can really resonate with the love story aspect of this tale.

* Discussion of 'Through Other Eyes' on Facebook

* 'Through Other Eyes' entry on Continued On Next Rock blog

* 'Through Other Eyes' comments on ralafferty.org 

And what if the dog is right?

This idea of his—to enter into the mind of another, to peer from behind another's eyes into a world that could not be the same—this idea had been with him all his life. He recalled how it had first come down on him in all its strength when he was quite small.

“It may be that I am the only one who sees the sky black at night and the stars white,” he had said to himself, “and everybody else sees the sky white and the stars shining black. And I say the sky is black, and they say the sky is black; but when they say black they mean white.”

Or: “I may be the only one who can see the outside of a cow, and everybody else sees it inside out. And I say that it is the outside, and they say that it is the outside; but when they say outside they mean inside.”

Or: “It may be that all the boys I see look like girls to everyone else, and all the girls look like boys. And I say ‘That is a girl,’ and they say ‘That is a girl'; only when they say a girl they mean a boy.”

And then had come the terrifying thought: “What if I am a girl to everyone except me?”

This did not seem very intelligent to him even when he was small, and yet it became an obsession to him.

“What if to a dog all dogs look like men and all men look like dogs? And what if a dog looks at me and thinks that I am a dog and he is a boy?”

And this was followed once by the shattering afterthought: “And what if the dog is right?

“What if a fish looks up at a bird and a bird looks down at a fish? And the fish thinks that he is the bird and the bird is the fish, and that he is looking down on the bird that is really a fish, and the air is water and the water is air?”

“What if, when a bird eats a worm, the worm thinks he is the bird and the bird is the worm? And that his outside is his inside, and that the bird's inside is his outside? And that he has eaten the bird instead of the bird eating him?”

This was illogical. But how does one know that a worm is not illogical? He has much to make him illogical.

~R. A. Lafferty, 'Through Other Eyes' (1960)

Cover by Paul Orban

The Door Into A Dozen Or A Hundred Planet-Falls A Day (HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY, LAFF!)

R. A. Lafferty was born on November 7th, 1914.  One hundred years ago today, the world birthed its own Best Seer Ever since none of the world's inhabitants looked like they were ever going to get around to birthing such a person themselves.  This may have been an impatient move on the part of the world.  In her haste, she spawned an ugly-duckling-swan that spewed a billion words of incalculable worth late in life and at a rate that left his would-be readers thunderstruck and half mad. 

 

The way he looked, his own physical appearance, was part of it:  he was variously called troll, goblin, gnome, ogre, and leprechaun in his lifetime.  And he looked it a little.  For his own part, no matter what names they called him, the beautiful ugly troll boy always maintained that humans were his favourite of the fauna of Earth.  But it wasn't really his look, it was his looking that sent goosebumps of unaccustomed awe shooting up the arms of his readers and made them worry they might have to start all the way over and redefine everything.

 

For a decade or so in the 1960s and early 70s it looked like it might just work, the world's human peoples might just listen. (I suspect the world's non-human peoples sat up and took note just fine - the bears and whales may have been the most pleased of that lot, as Lafferty seemed to address them most frequently and flatteringly; the cats and spiders and snakes I can only surmise must have been quite a bit less impressed with his symbology, which mostly - but, in fairness, not always - cast them as pictographs for corruption.  Motor cars no doubt feel justly miffed and misrepresented.  But maybe they didn't totally understand him right.  Lightning, on the other hand, can still be seen preening at the all the lavish attention he gave it.  Limestone too probably felt fairly chummy toward him since it recurringly featured in the ugly-duckling-swan-troll's writings.  Then again, limestone has always been quite secure in its own self-image and has never craved much independent approval.) 

 

Yes, the human peoples for a little bit there looked like they might really listen, and listened like they might really look.  With the new eyes Lafferty offered them in both his open hands.   

 

By the 1980s, however (and up to today), the world's human population just couldn't take all that Big Seeing, all that unfiltered (or rather, enhanced-filtered) intake.  They shut the door on Lafferty's writing with a whimpering bang.  They shuddered and glanced at each other nervously, trying to laugh, but just kind of croaking their relief.  Besides, laughter was the ugly-duckling-gnome-swan's big thing.  He had made it an all-out philosophical bedrock and they could never feel quite as comfortable with it again, unless they brayed it brashly, nice and hollow.  (They were worried they'd find something inside the laughter if it got too full.)

 

Thus shut out, the leprechaun languished and died.  The crypto-swan left us to our tunnel vision and went to his reward.  (Lafferty was in no danger of being adjudged:  'You have already received your reward.')  A few ragged followers mourned.  The rest didn't even notice, or certainly pretended not to anyway.  (Did you feel that little bump, like the bottom of the world just fell out? one might say to another.  No, no, I didn't feel a thing.  All's well, we don't need a world-bottom anyway, another might reply.  No, no, I didn't feel anything either.  I can't imagine why I brought it up.)

 

So.  The world jumped the gun when she made that one.

 

Ah, but the old goblin-swan played a neat little trick on the human peoples.  In secret, he built a door.  Different from the one the humans had shut on him.  He had taken we don't know how long assembling it, careful detail by careful detail.  Maybe he assembled in the 80s and 90s, while the humans' backs were obstinately turned.  It was comprised of all that the human peoples refused to see and it opened onto so very much more.  It was the door to his office, and it's no wonder he wrote what he did inside there.  But this door would lead into his plenitude of worlds-right-inside-our-own-world no matter where it stood, at the entry to his office or anywhere else at all.  A collector obtained the door after the swan-ogre died.  The collector remains suspiciously silent as to the door's properties and powers and regarding any adventures he may have undergone thanks to its presence in his home.

 

Yet The Door to Lafferty's Office (as it has styled itself) has begun to make itself known more widely, offering itself to the world it would seem, and thereby offering Lafferty's vision once more to a wayward humanity.  It is an unexpected mercy that we don't deserve, but one which, if we've one last shred of wit left in our rattling almost-extinguished pumpkin heads, we will gladly receive with tears and smiles of gratitude and wonder.  The Door 'conveys' (as Lafferty often dubbed the speech of things without mouths) to those with ears to hear:  Fear not. Repent. Enter.

 

 

To me, most of the great moments of science fiction are planet-falls: unshipping and setting foot on new worlds. And yet the experience of planet-fall is a daily thing, one that never grows stale. It happens a dozen or a hundred times a day. We live on a tolerably new world, and there is always the feeling of having just arrived on it. This is a world that is always more than ninety percent unexplored by ourselves, and we have a compulsion to get on with the exploration. It’s an intricate and massive world, prodigious in detail and almost beyond numbering in its dimensions; compendious, encyclopedic, physically astonishing, prodigal in line and color, alive on a dozen different levels, of great friendliness and affection in most of its fauna and especially in its “superior fauna” known as mankind. This species is more delightful than all the tribbles and fuzzies that can be imagined. This world, probably a masterwork among worlds, is loaded with encounters and happenings; and do not forget that etymologically all happenings are happy.

-R. A. Lafferty, ‘The Case of the Moth-eaten Magician’ (collected in Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays By Notable Science Fiction Writers, 1981, edited by Martin H. Greenburg, Southern Illinois University Press)