"Splinters" (1978)

"Bubbly, mighty bubbly, Miss Aster," Dr. Izzersted said. "Do you know that some days are very good for blowing soap bubbles (I blow a lot of soap bubbles in my business), and some days are terrible for it? Yes, on a bad day you can add all the glycerin and gloop that you wish to the mixture and you will still not be able to blow decent bubbles. And some fortnights are good for flying eidolons; but most times are very poor for it. This is an excellent fortnight for flying them. I don't know why this should be." — "Splinters"

One of my favorite people is a colleague with a serious interest in Greek philosophy. During our walks around campus, we talk about whatever we’re reading. Both of us enjoy having ideas challenged, and we’re good-natured enough not to take it personally. One topic that sometimes arises is how scholars reconstruct ancient philosophical schools. My friend can recite every doxa in Diogenes Laërtius and name the scholars working on obscure figures, such as the Cyrenaics. Then, without warning, he will jump ahead five hundred years to argue about something Maximus of Tyre once said.

This works out well for me. I get to learn a lot without doing the hard work. At the same time, I like to give him a hard time about the madness of trusting rational reconstruction. If you have ever looked at the theories people propose about Roman dodecahedra, you know what I mean. Today’s topic is somewhat similar to that: the eidola. Utterly fascinating. Full of ancient weirdness. Opaque.

In Lafferty’s media critiques, he frequently introduces the eidolon. The idea has a complicated history. Who knows precisely what Lafferty read on the subject, but he knew enough to make rich use of it. Just as the Greek word for Platonic ideas or images is eidos, the eidolon means “little image.” But it comes from a different intellectual tradition: the ancient Greek atomists. You find it in Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. You see interesting responses to it in later thinkers, such as Plotinus. One wild possibility is that Lafferty knew an obscure passage in Plutarch about how weather affects the eidola—because that is exactly what happens in “Splinters.” Plutarch was one of his favorite writers, as he said in an interview.

Eidola are meant to explain the mystery of visual perception, something that wouldn't be cracked until a brilliant Arab, Ibn al-Haytham (Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Hasan), developed a scientific theory of optics in the eleventh century. Ancient theories of sight are, frankly, monstrously arcane. They are tied up with ancient physiology, speculative physics, theories of the soul, and obscure presuppositions about ontology. But the basic atomist idea can be put in simple language: small copies of objects peel off from people or things and float through the void. (The atomists insisted on the void. You know you can't have motion without it.) Eventually, these floaty shavings reach the eyes. That's how vision works.

The eidola were thus conceptualized as being ultra-thin laminae, an airborne film. They had to be small enough to enter the eyes. But that raised all kinds of funny questions that other philosophers were quick to pick up on. If everything is constantly shedding substance, why don't things shrink? How can something as large as a mountain fit into your eyeballs? If millions of eidola float about in every direction, what happens to the ones no one sees? Oh, they evaporate? And how does the motion coordinate before evaporation?

Lafferty knew this, and he had a great time with it in "Splinters," where media doppelgangers are referred to as eidolons and likened to soap bubbles. He stresses their smallness, using the word "little" 35 times in the story, a big wink to the ancient atomist theories. The littleness is an inside joke throughout the story. Why little? They just are. Sometimes you reach them through little doors.

Lafferty does this so smartly that even though everything feels off, he never tips his hand. He certainly doesn't tell you what intellectual tradition he's playing with, snarking at the first materialists, though all the clues are there.

For example, a governing trope in the story is that its media-based eidolins are like soap bubbles, which connects to the idea of soapy film. Lafferty keeps repeating the word glycerin, which is hygroscopic. It draws moisture from air and gives a bubble a little longevity. So we can see the Laffertian pattern: Bubbles move through the air. So do TV signals. You get it. The one exception to this rule seems to be the character Dr. Izzersted, but upon closer examination, it is he who gives Evangeline Aster, a central character, the idea for her murderous and suicidal media spectacle. He, too, is in show business, part of the airy business of it all.

A quick outline:

Three friends—Charles Penstock, Ed Rivet, and "little" Otto Pankration—begin a late-night conversation about going fishing. But Otto reveals something strange: he can "materialize" people, or at least highly convincing versions of them, using a machine that looks exactly like a furnace. That furnace turns out to be the first doppelganger in the story. Otto summons the local TV weatherman, Hector Voiles, and a pundit named Barry McNary. But the real plot begins later when he secretly brings the charismatic news anchor, Evangeline Aster, into his den for a forced affair.

From there, we learn that a broader phenomenon is at work. The city is full of eidolins—the splinters of the title. These are partial or duplicate versions of real people that can appear at will, often with consequences. Evangeline's public death, followed forty minutes later by her strange reappearance on television, confirms the horror.

There's a lot to enjoy on the periphery of the story. Hidden carpentry jokes and building puns abound. Barry McNary's TV broadcast takes over at one point as if an eidolon threatens to contaminate Lafferty's prose. There's a sharp send-up of pop psychology. And throughout, Lafferty plays with images and sounds, afterimages and echoes, raising deep questions about how these are causally connected in the story, which peaks at the climax of the story, and is somewhat like the causally confused ancient theories of perception that first gave rise to the idea of eidola. All the while, death hovers over everything, with two real ghosts bookending the sky, as well as fog, Lafferty's image for the mass media.

Written a few years after Not to Mention Camels (Lafferty finished it on August 12, 1976), the story has clear ties to that novel and to other media-focused pieces he wrote throughout the seventies. One of those ties may have influenced his decision to write it. As you might recall, in the novel, the character Noah Zontik tells the protagonist that he is a derivative of someone on Prime World. Naturally, the moral monster and protagonist of Camels refuses to believe it. But at the very end of the novel, during his autopsy, we learn something important:

“You are sure that those are flesh fragments among the eidolon fiber?" Doctor Hans August asked. Hans was a thin and active man. He lifted his head, and his face— Wait a minute; Doctor Vonk has something to add. "Oh, there're plenty of flesh fragments," Vonk said. "Some of them are human, and some of them are regressed flesh. The eidolon and human and regressed are pretty well mixed together.”

This catastrophic interiorization of mass media is the counterpart to the catastrophic dissociation of moral identity through mass media in "Splinters." By the end of Camels, so much noetic darkening has taken place that it's easy to forget a central question: what is the relationship between the main character and the Prime Person from whom he derives? Lafferty relies on the reader's moral sense to see how much is broken. "Splinters" helps clarify the moral economy that might be at play in the novel's obscure media ecology and how responsibility reaches back to Prime. The scene I have in mind is the one where the real Evangeline Aster visits Dr. Izzersted.

“What is an eidolon?” Evangeline asked. “It was an eidolon of yours, Miss Aser, and not yourself, that carried on one of the great affairs of the century with the eidolon of a prominent man. What we are really having this fortnight is an eidolonic epidemic. But I wasn't sure that the primaries were aware of their own eidolons. You seem to be, to some extent, aware of your own.” “Then I'm not responsible for what my eidolon does?” “Of course you're responsible for it, Miss Aster. There is something wrong going on in you, and that's the way it comes out. But you are going to do something wrong, murder or arson or some such. And eidolons sometimes blow before the wind and arrive at a crux before their primaries.”

At the end of "Splinters," the real Evangeline Aster is murdered by her eidolon, who unexpectedly turns the tables and pushes her from the roof of the media building. It's a striking moment: the real body of the media star moves through the air not like a glycerin bubble or tv waves but like a stone. It's all so beautifully done that one hardly notices it's also a lesson in peccatum internum. And it makes one wonder about Camels and that possible person on Prime.

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