"Mad Man" (1963/1964)

“Mad Man” could stand as an emblem of Lafferty’s work in the minds of many readers, even if it is not the story they first think of when they think of him. It is classic, quirky, light-seeming 1960s science fantasy, full of Lafferty’s humor and style. Read by itself, it is really fun. Read against the whole of his work, however, it becomes a fascinating story, especially for anyone interested in Lafferty’s developing thoughts about the relation between machines and human persons, through landmark stories on the theme, such as "Last Laugh" and "This Grand Carcass Yet" to Past Master and beyond. One can see him working out his ideas about what he called the Programmed, and he even gives us a useful piece of nomenclature for them as a group: homo conventus. As the name implies, he is extending the genus homo, which in Lafferty includes figures like Finnegan, if he is in fact a homo neanderthalensis, to machines. The “oil of dog” in the story, which imparts the human spark to the Programmed, anticipates what Epiktistes is when Lafferty thinks through Epikt's birth in Arrive at Easterwine. Like the main character’s daughter in “Mad Man,” Epikt is a kind of transhumanist artificial intelligence.

The following shows Epikt's creation, where Lafferty really goes wild with the concept of homo conventus. He will keep thinking about it, creating late characters such as Inneall in Serpent's Egg and writing that book's chapter-long meditation on artificial intelligence.

With this backdrop in mind, there is also something oddly perverse about “Mad Man,” and how it imagines the relation of homo sapien and homo conventus. After the summary, that is what I’ll focus on.

Lafferty imagines the Cortin Institute, where scientists harvest a complex biochemical substance known as "Oil of Dog" or "paranexus" from human beings. They inject it into advanced robots called Programmed Persons. Oil of the dog gives the robots a human-like spark of creativity and intuition, but there is a rub. It is most potent when extracted from "Very Angry Men." This is where the main character comes in. He is George Gnevni, the Institute’s top producer of oil of dog. He is a very angry man indeed. To enkindle his constant fury, the Institute has him live in grinding poverty, feeds him meals that cause gastric pain, and assigns him daily mechanical assembly tasks using deliberately defective parts and sabotaged tools. Gnevni’s experience with these defective items is an example of Lafferty writing like a virtuoso, showing his genius as a parts man:

Joker tools were sometimes substituted on him for the true tools—screwdrivers with shafts as flexible as spaghetti, key-drifts with noses as soft as wax, box-end wrench sets that were sized to fit nothing, soldering guns that froze ice on their tips, mismarked calipers with automatic slippage, false templates, unworkable crimpers, continuity testers that shocked a man to near madness.

Lafferty gives us two days in the life of Gnevni. On the first day, we see his rage abate. On the second day, we see it radically diminished. On the second day, he arrives at work and is placid. Outside the facility, he doesn’t do what he usually does: let himself become enraged by the Institute's standard provocations so the Cortin people can milk him. He gently pets a mechanical puppy designed to be kicked. He politely greets an actress hired to play a crippled old lady whose crutches he is supposed to knock away. Inside the Institute, his pleasant mood and newfound efficiency at his mechanical tasks (he completes them all in one hour) cause panic among the medical staff. Under-doctor Cotrel, Over-doctor Ratracer, and Director Duggle subject Gnevni to a truly dehumanizing physical and psychological routine meant to make him blow his stack, but Gnevni takes it all with no complaining. The narrative underscores the sheer absurdity of his calm endurance against the Institute's worst torments:

They put him through the routine. It was brutal. It would have made a roaring devil out of the sweetest saint. Even spectators commonly became white with fury when such a thing was put on, and there was no limit to the effect on the victim. Gnevni endured it with composed sorrow but without anger. And when even the routine didn't work what more could you do to him?

As a final resort, the doctors bring in Peredacha. She is a female Programmed Person who recently received Gnevni's biochemical additive, the oil of dog. They hope a pitiful shtick about being his daughter, done in the style of the little match girl, will lead to a truly violent outburst. Instead, Gnevni expresses affection for her, and later, he suggests they run away together, noting that she shares his cortin and adrenaline. All this deeply frustrates Under-doctor Cotrel, who completely loses his temper and screams and violently beats Gnevni. Observing the fury, Director Duggle dismisses Gnevni and assigns Cotrel to be the Institute's new Very Angry Man.

The oil of the dog in “Mad Man” is the precursor of the person précis necessary for the birth of Epiktistes, and the Programmed Persons seek it out. Because there is only one donor, things become a little odd.

From the time I first read the story, I have been puzzled by the way it combines the metaphors of wiving and siring in the Gnevn-Peredacha relationship. She is imagined as somehow both a daughter and a lover, something related, perhaps, to Lafferty’s fascination with the parthen. When Gnevni tells Peredacha that she is "cortin of my cortin and adrenalin of my adrenalin," he is giving a variation of Adam's declaration about Eve in Genesis 2:23: "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." By using this biblical formula, a few things are going on. First, Gnevni draws a parallel to the creation account of Genesis. Just as Eve was formed from Adam's body, Peredacha’s human-like spark and creativity were synthesized from Gnevni’s extracted biochemicals. In his mind, he is her Adam, the biological source of her awakening.

But the next part is where we enter complicated Lafferty territory. By drawing on Adam to figure a machine he calls his "daughter," one wonders what has happened. Has Gnevni been subjected to so much torture, isolation, and denial of "wifing privileges" that he has become warped? It looks as if he has been so starved for love and companionship that his psychological wires cross. Paternal creation and romantic partnership get confused. When he tells her that they "might go off somewhere," it becomes a pseudo-incestuous, romantic proposition so awkward and inappropriate that it actually forces a physical reaction from the robot, directly triggering Cotrel's breakdown:

“I know, but I'm unable to do it. I have been thinking, Peredacha, that since you are my daughter in a way — cortin of my cortin and adrenalin of my adrenalin — perhaps the two of us might go off somewhere and —”“Holy howling hog!” Under-doctor Cotrel took off in a screech too high for the human ear to follow, so perhaps only Peredacha heard and flushed.

Understanding that strange flush is for me the center of the story. The image Lafferty gives us is of a flushing little match girl who dies because her parents are so callous. In a way, Gnevni becomes the figure usually associated with the mother in the Lafferty parthen set.

An aside: why oil of dog? My guess is that a Very Angry Man is, in effect, an angry son of a bitch. Lafferty uses the verbal formula “son of a” at one point in the story. He uses the phrase "son of a she shink." Why "she" unless this is ephmetisic? That is where I draw the inference.

I’ll wrap up with something about “The Little Match Girl.” She is the title character of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous 1845 fairy tale. In that story, she is an impoverished, barefoot child, forced to sell matches on the freezing streets on New Year’s Eve and too terrified of her abusive father to return home empty-handed. So she huddles in an alley, lighting her matches one by one to keep warm. As she strikes them, she sees beautiful and consoling visions in the flames, including her loving, dead grandmother, before freezing to death in the night. Lafferty has fun setting this up as tear-jerking material, but he subverts the tragedy by redefining the nature of the “spark.”

In Andersen’s story, the spark of the match is ambiguous. It is an illusion of life and warmth before death. In “Mad Man,” the added spark that Peredacha receives is somehow the biochemical essence of humanity, Gnevni’s cortin and adrenaline, which awakens her robotic mind and raises her to genius. It is a cousin to what Epikt receives from some of the world's finest minds. When Peredacha mimics the Match Girl to enrage Gnevni, Lafferty twists the trope. She recognizes his own spark within herself when Gnevni refuses to play the cruel father, the sort of father Andersen’s little match girl had. Yet the scene is also coded in the language of sacramental marriage, where the match girl runs away with the father. What does one do with that?

Mad Man Notes.pdf

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