"A Special Condition in Summit City" (1964/1972)

This is the crux of Herder’s thesis, that language is constitutive of reflection. And at the same time, this shows how a constitutive theory of language breaks out of the bounds of the enframing. We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, and introduces a dimension of strong value. Language can only be explained through a radical discontinuity with the extralinguistic. — Charles Taylor, The Language Animal (2016), p. 33

“Young man, words do not half convey. They are only indicators—hints, small helps, refinements. But we cannot communicate by words alone. Try it! I believe that the people in Summit City are trying just that now—if they have not given up the attempt. Uniforms, sigils, conventions have become meaningless to them. They are cut off from direct understanding. All they have left is words, and they can't communicate with them.”

“All at once it seemed she was just jabber,” he said.

“A Special Condition in Summit City” was one of the first Lafferty stories I took notes on when I began reading him closely, before I knew anything about his development as a writer. Its 1972 publication date is misleading; it is exactly what you expect from a story he wrote in 1964. Everything is fun, and part of the pleasure lies in watching Lafferty enjoy himself, especially in the wordplay that follows the breakdown of communication at Summit City (see the table). This was when he was having 100% fun when writing. By the even, he told a correspondent he had a different percentage.

Like many of the early stories, “A Special Condition in Summit City” foreshadows major themes that Lafferty develops in his later work. It also reveals something interesting about how he understood language. But it is not a story that requires you to think about that. Unlike "Symposium," its didacticism stays at a low thrum, though there is a critique of the view of language found in thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, or Ernst Mach (1838-1916).

Mach wrote:

“The principal value of language is contained in the fact of its being a medium for the communication of thoughts; and the very circumstance that language compels us to describe the new in terms of the known, or at least to analyse the new by comparison with the known, is the source of a distinct gain, not only for the person addressed but also for the person who speaks.”

After the summary, I’ll say a little about what this misses and why it is relevant to the story.

Lafferty gives us Summit City, where two friends named Fenwick and Sumner debate the theories of Professors Hegeman and Bott-Grabman. The scientists think that "conventional signs owe their meaning to telepathy" and that words are just an index for consciousness. The theoretical becomes civic mayhem when a silent change suddenly washes over the city. Something is scrambling the personal waves of the inhabitants. And what happens, happens fast. Violence immediately breaks out. Lacking the telepathic “echo” they had previously shared, friends become strangers who cannot understand one another. Fenwick and Sumner’s friendly debate turns into a fistfight. Elsewhere, an Armenian man murders his Italian wife of thirty years because her familiar voice is now an intolerable jabber.

Evening progresses quickly. The city’s infrastructure implodes under the total semantic failure. A man punches a newsboy for selling him what looks like a "foreman paper," complaining, “I know it's the same words. Why can't I read it then? It must be in a foreman language.” Construction workers fall to their deaths when instructions to belay a line are misunderstood as a command to drop it. Confusion undermines even basic civil obedience; an good citizen ignores traffic lights because “Red don't mean stop to me . . . Even stop don't mean stop to me.” Solid brick walls burn. Vaccinated citizens contract smallpox. Without the shared consensus of reality, the physical world begins to disintegrate.

An oblivious science reporter interviews Hegeman and Bott-Grabman in their shielded laboratory. The scientists say that they are not trying to induce telepathy but are "inhibiting waves" to prove its existence by its absence. It is like stopping a constant thunder so a tribe might finally notice it. Professor Hegeman rejects the power of language, telling the reporter: “Young man, words do not half convey. They are only indicators: hints, small helps, refinements. But we cannot communicate by words alone.” For them, the chaotic result is not a disaster. They’re a successful demonstration that words are insufficient for understanding.

Enter the external forces that attempt to restore order. Soon the National Guard units come apart when they enter the city. Who can distinguish officers from civilians? General Gestalt, who is accustomed to depending mostly on himself, takes command and realizes that standard verbal orders are futile. Bypassing language, he grabs a corporal with a nose for trouble and follows the soldier’s instincts to the source of the disturbance, the laboratory. There the General orders the scientists to "turn that damn thing off," which ends the inhibition field and restores the city's ability to comprehend itself.

Communication is restored, but the four hundred are dead. The scientists are brought to trial for crimes against humanity. Hegeman and Bott-Grabman are unrepentant. The catastrophe was just an excessive success. It proved their theory about the "popular dependence on telepathy." The judge, unmoved, sentences them to death. He notes the irony that, lacking telepathy himself, he cannot bridge the gap between them: “Were I indeed a telepath, perhaps I could see into the twisted minds of you two and comprehend somehow your inhumanity... Being only a man, I cannot do it.”

That’s "A Special Condition in Summit City," and there isn’t much need to go further into it if all you want is a fun telepathy story. But if we read it as a glimpse of what’s to come, there is a great deal here worth noting. The linguistic surface of the story, that the scientists prove to be surface only, conceals the deeper worlds Lafferty would later explore. These range from the well-known, such as Ansel communication and passage-dreams in "Hopp-Equation Space," to communion with Ouden and the snakes in Thomas More’s head in Past Master; from Puca mind-reading and extra-sensory awareness in The Reefs of Earth to the almost entirely unknown, such as the unpublished story "Dig a Crooked Hole" (1976), where water communicates, and the shallow language of the exalted contrasts with the deep water of cellars and wells.

What ties all of this together, passing through "A Special Condition in Summit City" and going back to "All But the Words," which was written in 1961, is Lafferty’s refusal to treat language as merely designative. Our scientists are not men like Ernst Mach.

The idea has been expressed in many ways, but here I will follow a recent version given by philosopher Charles Taylor in his late masterpiece, The Language Animal (2016). The designative view of language treats language as an instrument. Language encodes information and refers to objects that exist independently of speech; words are essentially labels for pre-existing things or ideas. In another philosophical register, this is what Wittgenstein saw in Augustine.

By contrast, the constitutive view sees language not merely as a tool for describing the world but as something that actively participates in shaping it. Language makes human reality possible, much of which is not designative. By articulating experience, it enables new forms of feeling—indignation, for instance, as distinct from simple rage—new social relationships, such as the idea of citizenship, and new moral values, which could not exist without the fine-grained expression that brings them into being. Because we know King Lear, our own fear of old age without wisdom is made more socially and spiritually complex. This is more than labeling. It is creation.

In "A Special Condition in Summit City," Lafferty takes every non-designative feature of language and shoves it into a funny looking science-fiction box labeled "telepathy," effectively bracketing the constitutive dimension to show that words fail when treated merely as labels. What gets excluded is the lifeblood of human speech: language’s capacity to generate meanings and feelings, such as intimacy or moral worth, that did not exist prior to their articulation; its reliance on a holistic web of interconnected terms rather than isolated atoms; its origin in the shared space of joint attention and communion; its embodiment in gesture and enactment; its role in establishing social footings; its use of metaphor to show new aspects of reality; and its dependence on a sense of intrinsic rightness rather than instrumental success. All of that is blown up in the story by inhibiting telepathy and letting the designative labels hang in midair.

At the deepest level of Lafferty’s canon, this connects to his view of the Logos as the Word—its constitutive power at the center of the oceanic. And it's still just a really good story about telepathy.

Special Condition in Summit City Notes.pdf

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