"Aloys" (1957/1961)

If present mathematics does not fit black holes, then present mathematics must be extended a trifle. That's better than smashing and exploding all the worlds.The fictions based on all this are unoriginal, yes. And the science that stutters around it is likewise unoriginal. — Something New Under the Black Suns (1979)

Lafferty wrote “Aloys” in the Fall of 1957 when he started his serious bid to be a professional writer, one of the strongest of the early Lafferty stories just in terms of speed of Lafferty invention and sheer compact Lafferty voice. Lafferty is always surprising, but this story pushes surprises from one sentence to the next with brilliant aggressiveness. Take, for example, the following short paragraph from it, on which so much of its plot turns:

Professor Aloys had become great in spite of—or because of?—his poverty. He had worked out his finest theory, a series of nineteen interlocked equations of cosmic shapeliness and simplicity. He had worked it out on a great piece of butchers' paper soaked with lamb's blood, and had so given it to the world.

It could hardly move faster. We learn that Aloys's scientific eminence is tied to extreme destitution. It outlines the conceptual scale of his nineteen interlocked cosmic equations. It contrasts the abstract intellectualism with the biological, low reality of the lamb's-blood-soaked butcher paper upon which the theory was documented and disseminated, the last being one of the story’s many comic drops.

Comic drops are what the story is built on. Ticking off drops that undercut high-concept setups with absurd realities, there is the memorable moment of Halley’s Comet drinking beer in a dive bar while denying its celestial nature. There is the wonderfully absurd account of Aloys, a globally revered scholar, surviving a transcontinental journey by eating offal from a bucket. There is a dry-cleaning visit and the account of the hand-me-down, ragged greatcoat that barks at the workers. We get the paralyzing linguistic crisis in which the genius can only recall words like "apple" and "maternal uncle." Laffer:ty writes:

“I remember bread and butter, but I don't know which one goes on top. I know pencil and penknife and bed, but I have entirely forgotten the word for maternal uncle. I remember plow, but what in the world will I say to all those great men about a plow? I pray that this cup may pass from me.”

Something like the Nobel Prize and its life-changing financial award (when Yeats was told he won, he said, “How much?”) was used as scrap paper for a stray formula. Then there is maybe the biggest one: the paradigm-shifting scientific lecture turns out to be a repurposed snake-oil pitch Willy McGilly used on yokels in New Mexico.

My sense is that “Aloys” is a Lafferty story that Lafferty readers remember, even if it doesn’t get talked about much, since it is one of Willy McGilly’s finest moments. It was one of the first Lafferty stories I read, and it lodged McGilly forever in my mind. McGilly doesn’t come into the story until late. Instead, we start with Professor Aloys Foulcault-Oeg. Oeg is brilliant and impoverished, but he does win recognition among a small, elite group of academics for creating a unifying theory based on nineteen interlocked cosmic equations. Living in extreme poverty and wearing that multi-generational, rag-stuffed greatcoat, he finds himself invited to accept a prestigious award. With it comes the monetary check he fails to recognize and uses absentmindedly as scratch paper. It is what will catch Willy McGilly's attention. Because he is so impoverished, Oeg opts for a grueling journey as a hidden, starving stowaway on a riverboat and an ocean tramp to reach the host city. He has remarkably little ego for a great scientist. I half suspect his last name is “ego” scrambled.

As expected, he isn’t going to be up for the big night. Aloys arrives at the venue, and Aloys is overwhelmed by crippling social anxiety. One thinks of the Nobel Prize ceremonies and the tuxedos, and one can understand Aloys’s sense of class inferiority. He is even unable to remember basic English vocabulary. But his luck is about to change because right before the event begins, he is intercepted by a man introducing himself as Graf-Doktor Hercule Bienville-Stravroguine. It is, of course, Willy McGilly. Willy takes the panicked professor into a back room, then he leaves him bound and gagged on the floor. The story then moves to the McGilly as imposter coming forth:

But when he emerged from that room he was a different man entirely. Erect, alive, intense, queerly handsome, and now in formal attire, he mounted with the sure grace of a panther to the speaker's platform.

This "new" Aloys is brimming with confidence, ready to deliver a three-and-a-half-hour lecture that will hold the highly educated crowd spellbound.

And it does. Afterwards, Willy McGilly cashes Aloys's forgotten check with the event's wealthy patron. There is a great callback joke that Aloys endorsed with a new invented mathematical formula when Aloys just didn’t recognize what a check was. The other scientists frantically copy it down. Then McGilly disappears with the cash and the gold trophy. The real Aloys frees himself from his restraints and is taken by another man to a secret location, Wreckville. There, Aloys reunites with Willy, who casually confesses the grifting:

“Only once in my life did I give a better speech,” said Willy. “It was the same speech, but it was newer then. That was in Little Dogie, New Mexico, and I was selling a snake-oil derivative whose secret I yet cannot reveal. But I was good tonight and some of them cried.”

Recognizing them for what they are, Aloys identifies the group as a syndicate of professional con men. He is recruited into their ranks. Now his talents won’t remain uncontrolled in the wider world.

This time through “Aloys,” I started thinking about one of Lafferty’s whole approaches to scientific knowledge and how his extreme openness to reality shows up in strange little moments of closure. A great example of this is his non-fiction essay “More Worlds Than One,” in which he scoffs at the idea of life on other planets. What makes Lafferty a puzzle, perhaps, is that he was so scientifically literate yet so paradoxical in his literacy. As we know, he was more willing to entertain the idea of prochronic time than natural selection.

Another instance of Lafferty in this mode is the book review “Something New Under the Black Suns.” It plays out the game of exploring the potential of novel science fiction concepts by examining the theoretical physics of black holes through two themed books. Lafferty pretends that they were sent to him by a mechanical Oracle. In surveying Jerry Pournelle’s anthology Black Holes, Lafferty outlines astrophysical concepts (dimensionless singularities, event horizons, and Stephen Hawking’s theory of random matter emission), and then he says the accompanying speculative fiction is stale and unrefined. So he goes back to the oracle, and the oracle points him toward John G. Taylor’s non-fiction Black-Holes. Lafferty reads it and finds a bunch of radical propositions about time travel, space-time inversion, and the existence of infinite, closed universes that act as cosmic cornucopias. And he shuts the book. It is all too inelegant and silly. The paradoxes require abandoning established science or theological faith. The route forward, he says, is that present mathematics just needs a slight extension. Lafferty says aesthetic elegance is the ultimate arbiter of scientific validity, writing:

The fictions based on all this are unoriginal, yes. And the science that stutters around it is likewise unoriginal . . . And is elegance a test of mathematical truth? Yes it is, absolutely. We observe all the stuff being generated by the black holes and we ask ‘How do we know that any of this is so?’ One does not ask such things of really elegant ideas.

One could read it and take away from it that Lafferty is just being cranky, but there is the issue that he was probably right. Black hole singularities are a theoretical necessity within classical general relativity. They’re those points of infinite density and space-time curvature. And they’re mathematically inevitable in Einstein’s gravity. But most physicists believe they do not physically exist. They’re a breakdown of current theory that might require quantum mechanics to resolve. Or such is my understanding of it.

All this led me to think a little harder about McGilly’s 19-point speech. I think it tends to be read as a long list of unrelated bits of snake oil, but maybe one should read it with a little more attention. If one does, one sees a lot of the real Lafferty in it. It is, of course, a trick first. McGilly anchors the talk in real terms. He mixes in obscurity and invention. He crosses disciplines wantonly. He foregoes proof and goes with a metaphor. A glance at just a few of the points from his outline demonstrates this synthesis:

Cerebrum and Cortex — The Mathematics of Melancholia. Microphysics and Megacyclic Polyneums. Ego, No, Hemeis — The Personality of the Subconscious . . . Diencephalon and Di-Gamma — Unconscionable Thoughts About Consciousness.

And he ends with praising elegance, the way Lafferty does in the Black Hole review piece, alluding to Einstein’s E=MC2 as the line about the invisible quadratic. If one looks at what McGilly seems to be saying, what the scientists forget, it can be reconstructed. It goes something like this. Reality is one connected system. Measurement is unstable. Mind and matter obey related patterns. History and language are full of hidden errors. Machines can inherit thought. The universe has shape, memory, and an ending. And underneath all of it, there is one simple, elegant law. How much of that would the real R. A. Lafferty have disagreed with?

Aloys Notes.pdf

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