04AD: "One-Eyed Mocking-Bird"
Last of the audio dramas. Given how rough they are, I suspect I’m the only one who likes them. As I wrote when I posted the first one, they make for a fun drive when I’m thinking about a Lafferty story. Working out the music and getting the voices as close as I can to what I want is the fun part. This last one is “One-Eyed Mocking-Bird.”
Not a much-loved Lafferty story. That must partly reflect its appearance in hard-to-get books: Golden Gate and Other Stories in the early 1980s and, more recently, Centipede’s Man Man volume. But you probably have to be pretty into Lafferty to enjoy it.
Formally, I think it’s pretty neat, albeit very minor Lafferty. Lafferty does his thing where character digressions do most of the plot work. A character portrait, scientific quarrels, and Toby’s account of the Cainite space-ark delay the rifle experiment. The ark is the kind of wonderfully weird thing one gets in late Lafferty (the story was written in 1979). Cain, banished to the Land of Nod, is said to have married Awan and fathered Enoch, his firstborn. His later descendants include Lamech, Jabal, Jubal, Tubal-cain, and Tubal-cain’s sister, Naamah. In the mocking Toby, the inventive genius of Cain’s family (they ate of the Tree of Knowledge "a second time") takes a modern form.
At the same time, there is something wobbly about it, as if Lafferty is making too many concessions for the kind of late story he wants to write. He seems to be writing in an easy-to-digest mode, a callback to his early genre stories, but the more one thinks about the story, the more convoluted it becomes. The embedded history of Cain’s family provides the proto-pattern for the bullet’s projected flight: eight thousand years and two and a half seconds become corresponding spans in the histories of communities forced to invent their way home. This nesting moves upward when Toby says that somebody larger tells him stories to motivate him, just as he tells stories to the microscopic nation.
“Oh what stuff, Toby, what stuff!” Viola Rafter admired. “That is the sort of stuff you tell to the small chemical smudges to motivate them, is it? That is something like the stuff I tell to my own house plants to motivate them; but I don’t do it nearly as well as you do. Is some larger person telling you this to motivate you for something?”“Yes, somebody larger tells me such narrations now and then. Yes, to motivate me, I suppose, as I motivate the small molecular smudges. And I do find myself curiously motivated now and then, and especially now.”
Narration thus becomes one of the forces acting within the fiction, something Lafferty develops most fully in East of Laughter, written four years later.
I also like the story for a typical Lafferty move. He sets himself a really strange task: tell the story of a bullet that moves through space, then comes back and blows a hole in the head of the man who fired it, but use definalization to keep the story going while making a theological point. Many of his later preoccupations come bundled in a pretty tight package here.
An attempt to show the shot, the rise of the micro-civilization that turns the bullet around, and the bullet blowing out the back of Toby’s skull as providential justice:
