"Goldfish" (1960/1996)

And once more it was like a high dive that Leo was afraid to take, like a leap across an abyss — but he must get it off to however unlikely a goal was left him. So he achieved separation. Then Fang struck and broke the body of Cuthbert in half, and there was no life left in it at all. — "Goldfish"

“His brain is now emitting impulses in the delta pattern... Lisman is sending, he's probing, he's getting ready for a leap. He's gauging the footholds and handholds on the other side before he makes the grand jump out over the chasm.” — Not to Mention Camels (1976)

Andrew Ferguson has covered the publication history of Goldfish, a story that remained unpublished for more than three decades. Today, I want to do something modest by asking what changed when the story became a poem. At one point, Lafferty seemed to believe the story would never be printed. In a 1993 letter, he wrote: “As to the story ‘Goldfish,’ it was very short and very slight, and I finally turned it into verse.”

The story "Goldfish" tells is simple. Its most intriguing element, perhaps, lies in how a scientist’s effort to conquer death results in his being pushed lower on the chain of being. What makes this idea especially compelling is how it evolved in Lafferty’s imagination. As always with Lafferty, the language displays his peculiar inventiveness, and the murder of the goldfish by the brutal Fang is memorably succinct and gory.

Our main character is Leo Skatterly. His extraordinary predicament begins with a dim awareness. Lafferty writes, Leo "didn’t know how long he had been a goldfish. Probably not long.” His consciousness, once that of the world’s greatest scientist, now inhabits the body of Cuthbert—a goldfish he had named himself in a moment of cuteness. Lafferty has some fun with the bogusly scholastic, telling the reader that Leo is “only goldfish per eventa and not per essentia.” In his pre-goldfish life, Leo had been trying to prove that thought is a detachable thing, something that could exist apart from the body. His obsessive work on the subject led him to neglect his wife.

Lafferty imagines an absurdist thriller given through a flashback in which we learn about what happened to Leo. His fat assistant, Gorden Gaster, confronts him one day, revealing that he and Mathilde have been conspiring. Gorden has mined Leo's research for profit and cuckolded him. He says, "We have decided that there is no point in your living another hour. We believe that life bores you." Faced with a loaded gun, Leo’s detachment starts to evaporate. "Where is your detachment?" Gorden says. "Buried under my terror," Leo says. Begging for ten seconds for one last experiment with death itself, Leo pulls off identity transference just as Gorden fires the shot, and Leo’s mind makes a desperate "leap across an abyss . . . and disappeared with muted mind into the fishbowl."

Here Leo starts to recognize some limits. He experiences "frustration in having the finest mind in the world and not being able to implement it." His powerlessness is amplified as he watches Mathilde discover his body. She hums “You Rascal You” over Leo’s corpse, then she carefully messes her hair with a studied carelessness, and then belts out a scream for effect. Convinced he must reveal his survival, Leo decides to arrange the thirteen pebbles in his bowl to spell his name, this after abandoning a long-winded explanation. After a full night of nosing the stones into place, he succeeds in creating a crude "LEO."

His message backfires. When Gorden and Mathilde return to the room, Gorden spots the name spelled out on the gravel. He leans over the bowl and whispers, "Ah, Leo... There you are." Recognizing that a spelling goldfish is dangerous, Gorden decides to eliminate Leo. He introduces a new fish, his pet Fang. Fang is part Burmese fighting fish and will eviscerate Leo. Gorden mocks Leo one last time, "We will see what taking thought will do for you now. Cheers."

As Fang launches its attack, tearing Cuthbert's body apart (Cuthbert is dormant in the fish's mind when Leo occupies the seat of consciousness), Leo makes a desperate, last-second transference. Lafferty writes,

Imagine a shark four inches long if you are only three inches. Imagine a lightning-killer and you in a goldfish bowl with him and no escape. Gorden had given Leo ten seconds (less two) before he killed him. How do you ask a killer fish to give you ten seconds? How do you practice detachment under the circumstances? And where in the room was there another living creature to which Leo could transfer? Yet it had to be done. Leo-Cuthbert achieved a detachment of a sort while certain slices of his underbelly were detached from himself. And he almost achieved separation, as lengths of viscera were separated from himself. Then the introductions were over, and Fang came in for the kill; there was no doubt of it.”

Poor Cuthbert! Leo, though leaps, foreshadowing the plot that would become Lafferty’s Not to Mention Camels. The story ends as it began. A slow, dawning consciousness. A new and fragile form. Leo is now a fly, clinging to a curtain.

As I wrote, Lafferty later took apart the story and turned it into light verse. It went from being a comically tense, science-fiction-y thriller about a murderous conspiracy into a whimsical, darkly comic fable called “All in the Boundless Ocean.” This was accomplished by scrapping the plot of “Goldfish” and, most critically, by replacing the two malicious human villains—Leo’s wife and an assistant—with a single, far less menacing character. The tonal shift was completed by transferring almost all of the character agency from the humans to an ambitious, manipulative female goldfish. In the story, the female goldfish, Gwen, is just a pretty, mindless goldfish, so it was quite the promotion. By doing this, Lafferty moved the core conflict from a domestic struggle to a passive, fated acceptance of the absurdity of the situation. Leo in the story becomes Roy—both obviously variants of king—but Roy, unlike Leo is ready to roll with it.

More interesting to me is what comes later. Leo prefigures the ontological slide we find in Not to Mention Camels, because Leo eventually becomes an insect (per eventa). It is as if a metafictional identity transfer took place: one part of the short story "Goldfish" was transferred to the poem, and the other part —the jumping to avoid death—to the novel. Ontological descent just isn't very relevant to the finished poem with the exigency of death removed.

On the other hand, the descent angle matters for understanding the protagonist of Camels and his noetic darkening. Cyrus Evenhand says of Pilgrim Dusmano, “I believe he is a giant insect in the form of a man, one veined with green scum and inelegant instincts. Ah, I'd like to know what color blood that fellow bleeds." And there is more insect imagery associated with the character. In both short story and novel, we get a related idea: that the death jump is really a fall, something similar to what happens in "Fog In My Throat," with its own ironic take on noetic darkening.

“A long-term fly isn't afraid of falling, and does not cling in terror to the mesh of a curtain.”

Goldfish Notes.pdf

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