"The Polite People of Pudibundia" (1959/1961)

“Yes. Even ourselves it would kill. That is why we have our eyes always shielded. That is also why we erect another shield: that of our ritual politeness, so that we may never forget that too intimate an encounter of our persons may be fatal.”

Lafferty wrote “The Polite People of Pudibundia” early, in 1959. Gene Wolfe once said that early Lafferty is Lafferty with water, and later Lafferty is straight Lafferty. “Pudibundia” falls squarely into the first category. It is also one of the dozen or so Lafferty stories whose copyrights were not renewed and that have therefore fallen into the public domain, so one can find readings of it on YouTube. Anyone encountering it for the first time will be suspicious of the ultra-polite Pudibundians, but they turn out not to be so bad. The problem is that, for them, any direct encounter is lethal. All the props of politeness in Pudibundian life—the goggles, the circumlocutions, the prohibition on the second person, the deferential ball, the rituals of self-effacement—exist for a reason. Lafferty’s Camiroi have elaborate customs, many of which seem culturally arbitrary, but the Pudibundians have customs that also function as strategies of biological survival. This is minor Lafferty, but it is more memorable than much of his lightest work. Readers have missed its perverse subtext.

This time, Lafferty gives us homicide captain Marlow for the Solar Police Force, who travels to the planet Pudibundia to solve a mystery: a pattern of unexplained deaths. Over the years, young space pilots have returned from the planet with stories of the Puds’ extreme, ritualistic politeness, which includes wearing colored goggles based on social organization and speaking in circumlocutions. These pilots return only to die shortly after their return. Marlow has some intel on the aliens. For instance, he knows the Puds are shape-shifting bipeds who alter their appearance to match the humans they encounter. Marlow’s goal is to uncover the hidden connection between local customs and the deaths of pilots.

Once he reaches Pudibundia, the Puds assign Marlow a local host who politely adopts the name "One-Million-Times-Lesser-Marlow" (OMTLM). To put visitors at ease, the Puds mimic one’s appearance. Lafferty introduces the reader to the quasi-Orientalist/Brahman-like way the Puds talk (“one hears of one who hears of one”) that had already passed into science fiction through the hyper-formal, comically baroque dialogue found in Jack Vance. It turns out that on Pudibundia, one can cut through much of the periphrasis by passing a differential ball back and forth. As OMTLM explains, the physical object carries an immense, unspoken burden:

“For this, in private, and only in the strictest privacy, we use the deferential ball. Within it are all the formulae written minutely. You have but to pass the ball from hand to hand every time you speak, and it is as if the amenities were spoken . . . . Should you forget, I would not, of course, be allowed to notice it. But when you were gone, I should be forced to kill myself for the shame of it.”

Soon, Marlow is looking more closely into what is going on on the planet, yet he finds himself distracted. He takes advantage of the Puds' metamorphic abilities by having a local female shape-shift into the likeness of an Earth woman, Irma, whom he nicknames Mitzi. Marlow then spends a week enjoying the planet's nightlife with Mitzi, which includes a visit to the underground Iris Room. It’s a club where patrons take off their goggles under heavily filtered light. Toward the end of his trip, Mitzi warns Marlow that the higher authorities have ensured he will never return to Pudibundia.

Then off goes Marlow to meet with his host, OMTLM. A now frustrated Marlow says his investigation has stalled. Believing the pilots' deaths lie in the one physical feature the Puds always hide, Marlow asks to look into his host's eyes. OMTLM, bound by unbreakable rules of politeness, removes his goggles. This is when the reader learns that the gaze of a Pudibundian is fatal. All the complex etiquette and mandatory eyewear are survival techniques that prevent lethal eye contact. The host notes that at first glance, it takes weeks to kill. What follows is a climax that perfectly pastiches the hardboiled detective genre Lafferty is riffing on:

“Why did you do it to me?” demanded Marlow. “You asked to see my eyes. It would not be polite to refuse.” “It takes you several weeks to kill. I can do it in a few seconds.” “You would be wrong to try. Our second glance kills instantly.” “Let's see if it's faster than a gun!”

Other readers have noted the role of Orientalist-style courtesy in the story. In “The Polite People of Pudibundia,” Lafferty seems to make the case that courtesy is no longer merely a cultural overlay. It is more like a containment system for a hazard that goes beyond culture and into nature. Presumably, the Pudibundians developed their elaborate set of glasses and light-filtering rooms because the alternative was extinction. The Iris Room, the deferential ball, and the circumlocutions remain funny and are signs of a civilization that lives with a permanent threat from itself.

Why the name Marlow? Since the story includes the name Conrad, it has been suggested that it knowingly plays with the colonialism of Heart of Darkness. That must be true, but I do not see the Heart of Darkness connection as clearly as I see the connection to the other famous literary Marlowe, the detective at the center of Raymond Chandler’s sequence of stories and novels. Pudibundia derives from the Latin adjective pudibundus, meaning easily ashamed or bashful, but it of course shares that etymology with pudendum, the external genital organs. In The Big Sleep (1939), Chandler’s first Marlowe novel, General Sternwood hires Marlowe to deal with a blackmail attempt against his wild younger daughter, Carmen, and the trail leads to Arthur Gwynn Geiger, who runs a Hollywood rare-book store that is a front for a pornography lending library, renting illicit photographs and books to wealthy clients. I think this bears on the strange turn the story takes when Marlow has Mitzi take on Irma’s form, and on the exchanges about her body and the convolutions of her ear. Lafferty leans into the bizarre, malleable nature of desire here:

“If you could only give me an idea of the convolutions of her ears,” said Mitzi, “and the underlying structure of the metatarsus. My only desire is to please. Or shall I improvise where you do not remember?” “Yes, do that, Mitzi.” And how that girl could improvise!

That is to say, “The Polite People of Pudibundia” is more a fantasy of scopophilia than one of politeness. The Chandler connection brings into focus the significance of the Mitzi sequence, and that is what most needs explanation, or, at least, what most puzzles me. If the story has a mystery beyond whatever the Pudibundians are hiding, it is the question of why Lafferty wrote the Mitzi material. Why does Marlow go off on his own Pygmalion frolic in the middle of the story?  The original version of Mitzi, which is a version of Marlow as a horse-faced female, is a masturbatory mirror, one that turns him off, but Marlow has Mitzi reshape herself into something that looks like Irma, which turns him on. Working feature by feature, from a photograph and his own Tex-Avery-like hand motions in the air, where he gives her body the curves he wants, he gets a version of Mitzi he is sexually attracted to. Then he has Mitzi fill out what he cannot remember, including the convolutions of Irma’s ear and the underlying shape of the metatarsus. Mitzi becomes something more like Marlows limerence Irma than the real Irma, part of a fantasme:

Marlow, with his hands, sculptured in the air the figure of Irma as he remembered it, and Mitzi assumed the form, first face on, then face away, then in profile. And when they had it roughly, they perfected it, a little more here, a little less there. But there were points where his memory failed him.

This Mitzi, as a sex object who stands in for Irma, is the rare-book-shop-as-pornography-front transposed into a fully metamorphic medium: a body that exists to be looked at and shaped by looking. Marlow's investigation and Marlow's pleasure turn out to be related activities. Both are kinds of looking, with the Iris Room being a public version of visual disrobement.

Let’s go back. What, specifically, got the young male pilots killed? We know it was the Pud gaze, but how did it work? Mitzi seems to feel genuine affection for Marlow (she tips him off), but what about the other pilots? Did they also slip into the same R&R hedonism Marlow embraces and die after looking into the females’ eyes? Were their girls like this? Lafferty leaves it unresolved. We just know you never find old pilots who have made the trip to Pudibundia.

Marlow is this an archetype: he is an investigator who cannot help but look and who moves from scopophilia to socopocidal victim. What he lacks is the virtue that exactly corresponds to pudibundus: prudentia.

Polite People of Pudibundia Notes.pdf

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