“Seven Day Terror” (1962) and Exposition
Updated: Sep 4
There are many reasons to think of Lafferty not as a science-fiction writer but as a writer who wrote science fiction. These include how he entered the field, the ideas that interested him, and how he used them. One of the strongest reasons, however, is his handling of exposition.
Lafferty was ingenious with exposition, but he also seems frustrated by its usual operation in the genre, especially the dreaded infodump. This helps explain why his dialogue so often runs counter to the conventions of naturalistic fiction.
A clear expression of Lafferty’s attitude toward exposition appears in “Seven-Day Terror” (If, March 1962). The story follows nine-year-old Clarence Willoughby and his little sister, Clarissa. Clarence invents a homemade “disappearer” that makes neighborhood objects vanish for seven days, though the duration of the disappearance is withheld from the reader until the end. At first, his mother, Myra, and his siblings watch with curiosity. Then Clarence begins making fireplugs disappear and flooding the streets. City officials, scientists, and law enforcement officers are powerless to intervene. The story then turns to eight-year-old Clarissa, who knows how to restore everything.
“Seven-Day Terror” is sometimes listed among Lafferty’s best stories, but it stands apart from most of his work in its tidiness. To me, it reads more like slick fantasy than typical Lafferty, except for one line:
“I was going to make a thirteen-year one, but for that you have to color the ends with the blood from a little boy’s heart, and Cyril cried every time I tried to make a good cut.”
The story’s simplicity and comedy are framed by two passages of deliberately subversive exposition. Together they form Lafferty’s commentary on exposition itself. Clarence supplies the first at the beginning of the story; Clarissa supplies the second at its conclusion. The siblings are, of course, etymological doublets.
The story begins:
“Is there anything you want to make disappear?” Clarence Willoughby asked his mother.“A sink full of dishes is all I can think of. How will you do it?”“I just built a disappearer. All you do is cut the other end out of a beer can. Then you take two pieces of red cardboard with peepholes in the middle and fit them in the ends. You look through the peepholes and blink. Whatever you look at will disappear.”
Later, when Myra asks how the device works, Clarence merely repeats the instructions for making it:
“Yes. You take a beer can with both ends cut out and put in two pieces of cardboard. Then you blink.”
Is this how Lafferty sees exposition in science fiction? Probably. Midway through the story, he takes a potshot at clumsy genre exposition through a trio of eminent scientists:
“This transcends the metaphysical. It impinges on the quantum continuum. In some way it obsoletes Boff,” said Dr. Velikof Vonk.
The language sounds explanatory but explains nothing. Lafferty reserves his full inversion of conventional exposition for the ending. Clarissa asks for a gold watch, a hammer, a list of chemicals, a yard of black velvet, and a pound of rock candy. The reader is led to believe that she will use these objects to restore what has disappeared. A conventional version of the scene would have Clarissa use them and then explain their functions to a character such as the Mayor, who would stand in for the reader receiving the infodump. Lafferty instead gives us this exchange:
“I shudder, too, Clarissa. But tell me, why did you want the chemicals?”“For my chemistry set.”“And the black velvet?”“For doll dresses.”“And the pound of rock candy?”“How did you ever get to be mayor of this town if you have to ask questions like that? What do you think I wanted the rock candy for?”“One last question,” said the mayor.“Why did you smash my gold watch with the hammer?”“Oh,” said Clarissa, “that was for dramatic effect.”
Amusing as this is, Lafferty does not rely upon so simple an inversion when he subverts exposition in his novels. Perhaps the richest example is Epiktistes in Arrive at Easterwine (1971), a novel written largely in the expository mode but narrated by a protagonist whose exposition is continually frustrated by the limitations of human readers. Epikt makes us the counterparts of the imbecilic Mayor in “Seven-Day Terror”:
“Should these journals ever fall into the hands of human persons, they will encounter great difficulties in much of them. For other intelligent machines, there should be no difficulties here.”
“. . . there are no tokens in human imagery (and few in our own) to express these fiercer things, even though they are human things.”
“People might not be able to understand the shattering bit about the night of assault and torture...Human persons...do not understand pattern; and they do not understand that its deformity is more than screw and rack and torture machine.”
“. . . humans are not instantaneous as we are; that they are always putting one thing after another.”
“People, human persons, you are not hopeless . . . Here are your depths revealed in their true aspects, which can only seem allegory to your uninstructed visions. I instruct you now! Follow me into this and through it all . . . You do not even know which side of your eyes to look out of.”
“. . . it is hard for an intense-speed realizing-machine like myself to explain things to human persons.”
“So there are whole episodes in these High Journals which the humans concerned will swear did not happen at all.”
“. . . how frustrating it is to serve such inconsequent Middle Folk.”
The difference lies in the nature of the imbecility. The Mayor fails to understand gold watches and rock candy. The human reader fails to understand the soul. Hence Epikt’s impatience. Lafferty pushes that impatience to exhilarating heights:
“People, human persons, you are not hopeless, you are not really the nothing things that you have appeared to each other this long time. Here are your depths revealed in their true aspects, which can only seem allegory to your uninstructed visions. I instruct you now! Follow me into this and through it all. You set me up, out of your blind need, to show yourselves to you. Then look! You do not even know which side of your eyes to look out of. Understand these wild creatures that are yourselves. Never has there been offered to your vision such fascinating things as are you, and you have not seen them. See them now. See them right. Tigers and giants and kings; witches and primordials, snakes and loaded prey; incandescent fellahin in their true Cogsworthian and Shiplapian forms, and the bush named Brusca, the love-wood, the Burning Bush; insufferable elegants who take it as high as it will humanly go, Corn oil from a dead man and the Audifaxian premise, aye, and the Diogenestic conclusion; and the earlier and more elegant bush with the fuller name, Labrusca, the wild-wine.”
For Lafferty, genre exposition often becomes a rhetorical battle that stretches the genre and sets comprehension against mystery. The reader’s failure to receive the exposition is often the point.
