"McGonigal's Worm" (1959/1960)

Since acorn worms and the human lineage diverged 570 million years ago, pharyngeal slits for filtering food evolved into gills for extracting oxygen, and later into today’s human upper and lower jaw and pharynx, which encompasses the thyroid gland, tongue, larynx (voice box) and various glands and muscles between the mouth and the throat. Humans and other terrestrial vertebrates actually initiate vestigial gills while embryos, though they disappear quickly and rarely persist in infants. — "Acorn worm genome reveals gill origins of human pharynx," Robert Sanders

“McGonigal’s Worm” is not well understood. It is an interesting example of where people read Lafferty and stop reading him. To cut to it, this is Lafferty’s earliest science-fiction satire of evolution, with the creation of modern birth control on his mind, and he is being very cagey, even for him, because this was an area in which his views are prickly. What fascinates me is that people read "McGonigal's Worm" and arrive at no interpretation at all. It is as if the story just happens and says nothing. People are cut off from the enlivening principle in reproduction, something Lafferty calls adynatogenesis, and then fertility returns thirty-five years later.

Some readers conclude that there is little story here at all. That happens often with Lafferty. When a Lafferty story keeps its secrets, it is usually because the reader has not entered into the shape he has built. I may, of course, be guilty of pareidolia, of seeing too many shapes. But in the absence of any developed interpretation of this story, I can only offer the reading that seems most satisfying to me. I will walk through the plot and explain what I take to be the important knowledge for understanding it as an anti-evolutionary fable about being thankful for the gift of life.

One Saturday, an inability to conceive affects all chordata on Earth, with the sole exception of a species of acorn worm called McGonigal’s Worm. The scientific community learns of a catastrophe through a pattern of failed laboratory experiments. One Director Conrad of the newly formed Palingenesia Institute confirms the sterility to the public. Rather than panicking, the global population reacts by deciding to amuse itself, a sure sign that we are looking at one of Lafferty’s indictment stories. As the Director and his assistant observe:

“We have for ten months, tested nearly everything in the world and we have found no answer. Yet, oddly enough, there is no panic.”“Except among ourselves,” said Appleby, his assistant, “whose province is its study. But the people have accepted it so completely that their main interest now is in the world sweepstakes, with the total sums wagered now in the billions.”

That title is improbably awarded to an Algerian claimant after a seemingly impossibly long gestation. Over the next thirteen years, no solution to infertility is found. International institutes form to study the cause, preserve human knowledge, and find a non-chordate species capable of being educated to carry on civilization. If humans have reached their end, perhaps they can pass on their species knowledge to other animals.

Lafferty inserts a subplot in the center of the story that dates it badly, largely because his ethnocentrism is crude. The Possibility Searcher Institute develops a test for potential fertility. It discovers only two positive human subjects among the three billion tested: a middle-aged Black Arabian named Musha ibn Scmuel and a wealthy white spinster named Cecilia Clutt. Diplomat Carmody Overlark (yes, that Carmody Overlark in his first appearance) is dispatched to persuade Cecilia to do her part in repopulating the Earth. Meanwhile, Musha is brought across the Atlantic by ship to meet her, but he wants to see a photo of Cecilia first. Lafferty’s joke:

[Musha] screamed like a dying camel. And he jumped overboard. He was a determined swimmer and he was heading for home. A boat was put out and it gained on him. But, as it came up to him, he sounded. How deep he dived is not known, but he was never seen again.

After this, society resigns itself to the situation. Primary schools close. Construction in general slows. Lafferty is clear as day that with infertility comes a cultural disaster; morality craters:

There had been a definite letdown in morals. Morals have declined in every generation since the first one, which itself left something to be desired. But this new generation was different. It was a tree that could not bear fruit, a hard-barked, selfish tree. Yet what good to look at it and shudder for the future? The future had already been disposed of.Now there was a new hobby, a mania that swept the world, the Last Man Clubs, millions of them. Who would be the last person alive on Earth?

It looks as if it is all over, but scientific efforts come together at the M. W. Institute. It focuses entirely on McGonigal’s Worm. A young, somewhat slow female employee, Georgina Hickle, is hired and told to bond with the worms. Shortly after, she and other female workers in the laboratory develop a mysterious ailment called "Hickle's Disease." Yes, it’s just the return of pregnancy. At the end of the story, we are reminded that we are reading about all these events in the distant future. Official scientific explanation now attributes the thirty-five-year period of global sterility to the solar system temporarily passing through an area of cosmic radiation, though some superstitious people still believe the McGonigal’s Worm had something to do with it.

I doubt anyone considers “McGonigal’s Worm” to be one of Lafferty’s better stories, and I’m pretty much with everyone on that point. I mentioned the squishy middle with the African and the spinster, which, in my view, mars the story. My deeper criticism is that the elements don’t come together, though I think we can see what they're doing with enough clarity to infer what Lafferty is up to in the story. One of these is something I see, but I don’t expect others to agree with, namely that Lafferty creates a story where people are punished with infertility at a moment when more Americans were signing on to prophylactics. The story was written in 1959, a period when the prevention of sexual reproduction used barrier methods, but already in 1957, the FDA had approved the pill for menstrual regulation, and it was formally approved on May 9, 1960. Even before this, many women were using it for contraceptive purposes. It was a high-profile topic in the American Catholic Church, and a controversial one because of the well-known views of Dr. John Rock, who argued that it should be permitted. As May 9 approached, Pope John Paul XXIII and others began speaking out against it. This is the first context that I think should be kept in mind when reading the story. It becomes important when an older woman sees the pregnant Georgina Hickle on her way to work and responds not with religious awe:

“Glory be,” said the old lady, “a miracle.” And she crossed herself.

The second major context is how evolution was taught in the first half of the twentieth century and the importance of the acorn worm in that story. The acorn worm was something of an emblem of what a primitive version of us in the phylogenetic tree might look like, the point where one moved from invertebrates to vertebrates. Typical of this is something like Dennis Hird’s in A Picture Book of Evolution (1906), which argues that the acorn-worm (Balanoglossus) is the most primitive member at the very bottom of the vertebrate class, because it possesses in rudimentary form the three defining features that unite all back-boned animals: gill-slit openings in the alimentary canal for breathing, a very short notochord located within its collar and projecting into its large proboscis, and a short nerve-tube also found in the collar, which in higher vertebrates develops into the spinal cord. Like others of the time, Hind says it entitles us to place this "marvellous worm" at the foundation of the entire vertebrate lineage. That’s the first piece. The second piece is that some acorn worms reproduce asexually.

At the end of the story, Lafferty offers two explanations for the thirty-five-year sterility, both presented as if only one can be true. The first is the official scientific account: the solar system passed through an area of cosmic radiation that temporarily suppressed fertility. The second is the folk belief that proximity to McGonigal's Worm somehow restored it. I have called the kind of associative structure Lafferty uses here palimphanic, rather than the more straightforward didactic moves that are easier to track in his fiction. What he seems to be doing is inverting each explanation so that it is right about the other and wrong about itself. The cosmic radiation (a natural force passing through the world from outside) is really an act of God, a chastisement visited upon a species that was already voluntarily choosing sterility. It is "cosmic" in the religious sense:

“The point,” said Hegnar . . . “is not whether sterility could have been caused by cosmic forces. Of course it could have been. It could have been caused in twenty ways. The miracle is that fertility had ever been possible . . . Who can say what cosmic forces are conscious? Or even what it means to be conscious?”

Meanwhile, the superstition about the worm is wrong in its fetishism—the worm is not a fertility charm—but basically right in its intuition. The acorn worm, which evolutionary science places at the very root of the chordate tree as the most primitive ancestor of all vertebrates, is for Lafferty not an exhibit in the case for natural selection, but a sacramental sign of God’s original gift of life. The evolutionist sees the acorn worm as a just-so story of phylogenetic ascent; Lafferty sees it as a symbol of life as sacred. That acorn worms look so phallic is part of the story’s joke, with Georgina's squeamishness.

The two endings are a bit difficult because they are true (within the story) when understood figuratively and false when understood positivistically (cosmic radiation) and then superstitiously (fertility fetish):

The official explanation is that the Earth and its solar system, for a period of thirty-five years, was in an area of mysterious cosmic radiation. And afterwards it drifted out of that area. But there are many who still believe in the influence of the McGonigal's Worm.

McGonigal's Worm Notes.pdf

Download PDF • 381KB