"Cabrito" (1957/1976)

“Well, it is. When the soul is pulled out of the body it is just like the body only smaller. The same four limbs and all, but only the size of a cabrito, for the soul is the body in miniature.”

A colleague has invited me to give a talk on narrative. I’m looking forward to showing his students how semiotic squares are used to analyze stories, which connects well with what they have been studying in class. But there is something else. What a fine pretext to teach some Lafferty for the first time. I picked his early and impressive short story, "Cabrito." "Early" is a bit misleading, though, since—as Andrew Ferguson has pointed out—it was the first story Lafferty completed in 1957 when he began writing again. So another part of the fun is just that. The first time teaching him is the first story he completed in his 260+ story speedrun.

"Cabrito" starts in a curious setting, a borderland bar made to look three times its size by wall mirrors. An Airman (the Norwegian) sits with his companions. In the apparent world, Lafferty tells us, this is Airman Lundquist; in the real world, he is a wild Viking, and his mirrored doubles—his fetches—are not exact copies of him. They’re holding other conversations. Significantly, all the stories are self-preoccupied. The fetches follow invisibly when Lundquist and his friend, an Irishman, decide to get some cabrito. Rejecting a nearby joint, Lundquist says, “We will go farther and do worse,” and thus they travel miles into the desert (at fairy tale speed) to a barn-like building where rows of cabritos turn on spits over a fiery furnace. From there, the story has some great twists.

So why use semiotic squares on this one? The squares aren’t especially exciting in themselves, but they do bring a clarity that makes them a conceptual tool I like to use on tightly made short pieces, and “Cabrito” is that. In practice, the point isn’t to show the squares, but to let the clarity they generate shape the reading. All the scaffolding gets removed once it has done its work. Teaching them, though, is an excuse to leave the scaffolding in place and make the analyzing itself visible.

The Lithuanian-French semiotician A. J. Greimas (1917-1992), working in structural semantics and with others like François Rastier, developed the semiotic square as a tool to trace logical/semantic relationships among opposed concepts in texts. The process begins with that old standby, a binary opposition—say, Reality and Appearance—and expands it into four positions: the two original terms, their negations (Not-Reality and Not-Appearance), and the relations that arise between them. The last part is what makes a semiotic square special. The emergent structure helps the reader see more than bare oppositions. It flags contradictions, neutralities, and mediations that converge to complicate meaning. In a sharp analysis, the square makes visible the hidden relationships that shape a story: how themes, characters, or events interact across lines of opposition and transformation. That sounds like the world of “Cabrito.”

This kind of analysis is decidedly out of fashion, but I sometimes think about semiotic squares when reading Lafferty, since they offer a sort of precision. Take the notion of the liminal. We can all recognize it, but the term itself is vague: a thing can be liminal for countless reasons. A few months ago, I dug into how “the liminal” gained such academic and popular traction, eventually becoming a cliché of literary criticism. The word captures a mood, but as a critical tool, I find it unhelpful.

The above graph from Google’s Ngram Viewer illustrates the dramatic surge in the use of the word liminal, rising from near obscurity to current overuse. For more than 150 years, from 1800 through the mid-20th century, the term was exceptionally rare, appearing mainly in specialized academic contexts such as anthropology. A modest uptick began in the 1980s, but the wild feature is the exponential, hockey-stick-shaped spike that takes off around 2000 and accelerates sharply over the past decade. This kind of S-curve, when it comes to a piece of jargon, always leaves me skeptical.

This is not to deny that "Cabrito" is about the liminal, but rather to suggest that a tool like the semiotic square can begin to articulate it—not as a vague in-between, but as a specific configuration of relations within a semiotic context. In my mind, liminality does not sit on the main contrary axis (Reality vs. Appearance), but instead shows up in the spaces of negation: ~S1 (Not-Reality/Non-Truth) and ~S2 (Not-Appearance/Non-Lie). The square gives that ambiguity a defined place, showing exactly how it works within the text’s oppositions. In doing that, it sensitizes the reader to moments that might be overlooked, or seen as being disconnected, or thought of as a simple sequence.

In "Cabrito" the fetches occupy precisely the uncanny territory that a semiotic square can bring into focus. They are not the tangible, verifiable Lundquist (S1: Reality), nor are they a simple optical illusion like ordinary mirror images (S2: Appearance). Instead, they belong to ~S1: Not-Reality, a zone defined by threshold status. These are the fetches that can follow you, listen, and even be captured. They hover on the border of being and non-being.

The same logic applies to the story’s conception of truth. The line “the last story is always true until it is superseded” is not an absolute Truth (S1), nor is it an outright Lie (S2). It is provisional and temporary, a condition that the square can map as ~S1: Non-Truth. Semiotic squares thus provide a grammar for the ambiguity, revealing that charged elements live on thresholds, where established categories dissolve.

At the center of "Cabrito" lies something most readers will readily perceive: cycles of destabilization followed by substitution crossing narrative levels. A stable entity is drawn into a liminal state that leaves it open to replacement, and at times outright consumption, by the machinery of the narrative. Take the cabrito in the title. In Amata’s three stories, its identity shifts from goat to dog, from dog to the souls of the dead, and from souls of the dead to human meat. Watching Lafferty spit-roast narrative mechanics in this manner is one of the story’s big pleasures.

I'll add that I like Airman Lundquist. He is one of Lafferty’s poignant schizo-gashes, with memories of the violent Bougainville campaign in the Pacific, estranged from his wife, and perhaps clinging to a self-image that may or may not be true. I feel a little sorry for the guy when his fetches are caught at the threshold of the buggy and put in the vat. He seems to have already lost a lot.

But then again, maybe I don’t. Consider that we do not know which of the three Lundquist storytellers at the beginning is telling what story. I rather hope the fetches were the Lundquist reliving the past and the Lundquist given to infidelity. Airman Lundquist would probably be better off having them consumed by the narrative system, allowing him to cross back from the shadow-world into the order of the town and maybe return to his wife. He begins “Cabrito” wearing a familiar face: the loosened-up talker at the bar who is, in fact, a man in crisis. He ends it having survived by the skin of his teeth.

I'll wrap up by saying that the semiotic square applied to "Cabrito" is just one more way to think about how the liminal is active, unstable, and dangerous, as it so often is in Lafferty. It violates identities, breaks down categories, and creates aftershocks that drive the story’s cycle of replacement and succession.

"Cabrito"

The Taberna was only as big as a cracker box (S1 (Blue): Reality - The verifiable, physical serving as the story's stable baseline), but it had full wall mirrors on each end which made it look three times as large (S2 (Blue): Appearance - The first destabilization, introducing illusion. This triggers the next square, linking environmental instability to identity). The seven stools had (not in order of importance) the Norwegian, the Irishman, a Little Brown Man, a Big Brown Man, two lesser persons, and Anita. Anita on this evening was not being spoken to by any of the other patrons of the bar; it was as though she were not there.

The Norwegian, in the apparent world, was known as Airman Lundquist, and was stationed at the Air Base across the river (~S2 (Green): Non-Fragmentation - The coherent, stable social persona presented to the world). He had been a sergeant and Air Man for twenty years; and now, purged of wife and family, was happy in a border town with a twenty-four hour pass every third day. The Norwegian, in the real world, was a wild Viking with a keen sense of humor and adventure, and no other sense of any kind whatsoever (S1 (Green): Integration - The unitary, agentive self, presented as the 'true' core identity in contrast to his social mask.)

These seven people drank slow cool drinks and talked easily, for they were all good friends.

With the mirror images, it was as though twenty-one people were seated there in three only slightly separated groups; and Airman Lundquist was prominent in each group. An odd thing (hardly worth mentioning) is that, though the images of the other six persons followed them in detail, those of Airman Lundquist did not do so exactly (A semiotic cascade: The initial S2 (Blue): Appearance now deepens into ~S1 (Blue): Not-Reality, moving from simple illusion to the uncanny. This shift forces a corresponding move in the identity square.) There were (though none at first noticed it) three Airman Lundquists, each telling a different story and drinking a different drink (S2 (Green): Fragmentation - The coherent self (S1 (Green)) is now schizo-gashed by the environment, demonstrating how a breakdown in perceived reality precipitates a breakdown in identity.) The story of one was a happening at Bougaineville long ago in those happier days of the great southern war; and the story of another was of a wife in Minnesota who was separated from him . . . and the third one was talking about Elena... But except for these little things Lundquist and his two images were very similar as mirror images always are.

“We will go get some cabrito,” said Lundquist, the real and not the imaged or imagined Airman, “we can get it a half block from here and it's real good. Or we can go about twelve miles out and get some that's always burned. That sure is a rough ride out there and it'll take a couple of hours. Let's go get some cabrito.”

He left with his companion, the Irishman, and it seemed as if the two images of the Airman also followed, but invisibly. And all the rest of the evening they were following, for these as you have already guessed were fetches (The story solidifies its move into the uncanny. The fetches exist in the liminal space of ~S1 (Blue): Not-Reality and represent ~S1 (Green): Non-Integration, a self that is porous and extended beyond the body. This positions the reader in a state of uncertainty.)

“Irishman,” said Lundquist, “let's get in the buggy and go get some cabrito.”

“Norwegian,” said the Irishman, “we could walk the half block.”

“We will go farther and do worse.” (This choice is the narrative's engine, a deliberate move away from the stable world (S1 (Blue)) and a commitment to the journey through unstable, liminal spaces.)

. . . They went in and the two fetches of the Norwegian followed them.

There is an idea that only Irishmen have fetches or doubles... a great many people have them and the Norwegian had two of the best.

While they waited for their cabrito they drank an old essence of cactus juice... And Amata came over to talk to them. (The Revelation Phase begins. The story now shifts its focus from destabilizing reality and identity to destabilizing knowledge, activating the (Red) and (Orange) squares.)

“For a peso I will tell you a story... if you like that one too (listen closely) the third one will cost you only half as much.” (Amata lays out the rules of the game: truth is not a final revelation, but a sequential process. This is the first hint of the story's narrative law, S2 (Orange): Succession.)

“...They aren't cabritos at all, they're dogs... a never-ending supply... Isn't that a good story? Give me a peso.” (The first story operates as S2 (Red): Lie. Its function is to perform the initial act of conceptual violence on the cabrito, transforming it from a stable signifier of 'goat' into a liminal object of uncertain origin. It also enacts the theme of a self-sustaining cycle of consumption.)

An old lady came over in a fury. “Did you tell them the dog story? ... Believe me, gentlemen, it is a lie.” (The lie is negated, but this does not return the reader to certainty, but deepens the mystery, holding us in the space between truth and falsehood.)

“No, she is my granddaughter. I am enchanted . . .” (Amata herself claims a liminal, mythical status, positioning her narrative as ~S2 (Red): Non-Lie—not a simple falsehood but a purposeful myth that operates on its own terms).

“Well, the first story was a lie. But this is a true story. Those aren't really cabritos, they're animas...” (The second story, another S2 (Red): Lie, is crucial. It doesn't just offer a new explanation; it performs the act of superseding the old one. Amata is teaching the reader and characters the story's core narrative mechanic, which is the relentless process of S2 (Orange): Succession.)

“I hardly know whether to eat it or not,” said the Irishman, “I don't believe I ever ate either dog or damned soul before.” (The consequence of the semiotic destabilization: the character's reality (S1 (Blue)) is now permanently altered by the narrative (S2 (Red)). He is forced to act within this uncertainty.)

“The third story as I promised will only cost you half a peso. The first two stories were lies but this is the truth... they are calculating now... You can make six out of a man and thirty-one out of a horse.” (The narrative drops its final anchor. It presents itself as S1 (Red): Truth, reinforced by the promise of physical evidence (the ruts). This gives the reader a false sense of epistemological closure.)

“Is it true?”

“The last story is always true until it is superseded.” (The reveal. This single line threatens the search for a final truth. The law of this universe is not found on the Truth vs. Lie (Red) square at all, but is the meta-law of the Finality vs. Succession (Orange) square. The story enacts its own process, S2 (Orange): Succession, as the only stable principle. All "truths" are provisional truths (~S1 (Red): Non-Truth).)

They wiped their fingers on the bread and threw it to the dogs under the table, who perhaps would be cabritos the next night. (The characters now act in accordance with the law of succession, participating in the cycle they have just learned).

And when they left... they noticed that the ruts where they circled around to drive out were not as deep as where they came in; for always fewer people left than arrived. (The physical evidence confirms not the story of humans-as-cabrito, but the larger, the truth of a system of consumption and non-return (S2 (Orange): Succession).)

They got away safely, the last ones to do so that night. (A moment of false closure that represents ~S2 (Orange): Non-Succession. The reader is led to believe in an escape, an end to the cycle.) But the two fetches of the Norwegian were not so lucky. They stupidly allowed themselves to be caught just before they could jump on the back of the buggy. And despite their screams they were put in a vat and chopped up to the size of cabritos. And they were barbecued and served to the fortunate patrons the next night. (The synthesis and climax of the semiotic system. The liminal beings—defined by ~S1 (Blue): Not-Reality and ~S1 (Green): Non-Integration—are sacrificed to the story's narrative engine. Their consumption is the final performance of S2 (Orange): Succession, proving that nothing escapes the process. The story ends by reasserting its law, trapping the reader in ~S1 (Orange): Non-Finality—the knowledge that the cycle is endless.)