While thinking about Past Master (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers another take on constructing a Programmed Person.
In the story, the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) creates a statue out of frog-colored travertine granite on his estate near Beaugency. The occult doctor Jouhandeau helps him enliven this statue—“Old Rock” or “Rock-Head”—with sensory abilities one by one: smell, hearing, sight, and speech. The experiment is meant to prove that there are no innate ideas, the central thesis of Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754), which broke with John Locke over the nature of reflection. Locke conceptualized reflection as an independent source of ideas alongside sensation. Condillac argued that reflection is derivative of sensation.
But the statue, observing and talking to travelers, children, and revolutionaries, begins to form its own thoughts and allegiances. Caught between its property—a sack of gold hidden in its head (Lafferty’s satire of Condillac’s Le Commerce et le gouvernement considérés relativement l’un à l’autre (1776))—and a band of revolutionaries, it is destroyed. The story’s ending circles back to Jouhandeau’s earlier claim: that he is more than two hundred years ahead of his time. In the future, there will be blood-soaked revolutions that follow his pattern.
It’s a very smart story, and there is much in it that deepens one’s understanding of Chapter 10 of Past Master. The mysterious material that Jouhandeau adds to the head of Condillac’s statue parallels what the Programmed Persons say about the creation of the first of their kind. There are interesting verbal overlaps as well. Take, for instance, these lines from the occultist Jouhandeau and the Programmed Person Pottscamp:
“I do not believe that there are any innate concepts either. I do not believe that there are any concepts of any sort, anywhere, ever.” “Of course we aren't, Thomas. We are machines. How would we be conscious? But we believe that men are not conscious either, that there is no such thing as consciousness. It is an illusion in counting, a feeling that one is two. It is a word without real meaning.”
I cannot recall Lafferty ever using the word "ideology" in his work, and I doubt he would have had much patience for it—the philosophical assumptions behind the concept likely irritated him. His stance on language and meaning, particularly in his sacramental poesis, resists the notion that thought is reducible to ideology. Instead, Lafferty demonstrates a deep aversion to the assumption that all thought is ideological rather than incomplete, mistaken, or confused.
The word ideology (idéologie) was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in the late 18th century during the French Revolution. It was to be the "science of ideas," grounded in empiricism and sensationalist epistemology, inspired by Condillac’s Traité des sensations, where the central thought experiment is Condillac’s statue itself. If this is of interest, read the Condillac entry in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912). I would put money on Lafferty having consulted it while writing the story, likely alongside his copy of Copleston.
The original Idéologues, influenced by Condillac’s empirical philosophy, wanted to apply rational analysis to human thought, education, and governance in the name of secularism, scientific progress, and constitutional principles. Their ideas gained credibility through figures like Antoine Lavoisier, who, in 1777, correctly identified oxygen as an element, disproving the phlogiston theory and laying the groundwork for modern chemistry. Lavoisier drew on Condillac's method of analysis to create an idiosyncratic system of notation for his experiments. The Idéologues saw feats like this as scientific vindication: if Condillac was right, and language could be used to map rationality itself, then those most adept at language—lawyers, rhetoricians, Enlightenment intellectuals—had a justification for their own intellectual authority alongside men of scientific genius like Lavoisier.
In the wake of the Thermidorian reaction (1794), it was ironically the Idéologues who opened the path for Napoleon, who would later turn idéologie into a pejorative, mocking their abstract theorizing detached from political pragmatism. By the mid-19th century, Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) redefined ideology as a system of ideas that reinforced social and economic power structures. Marx, who held that there is no outside of ideology, argued that only revolutionary ideology moves in step with the forces of production. 'Where might meets might, force decides,' he wrote in Das Kapital, vol. 1 (1867).
"This totalizing conception of ideology contrasts with Lafferty’s world, where thought is shaped by something beyond the reach of rationally reconstructed structures or political and economic forces."
"Lafferty’s subtitle points to what he is up to in "Condillac’s Statue." The wrens are what I have called the supernatural remainder, the thing that cannot be explained away. This goes deep into Lafferty’s treatment of animals in his fiction and how it relates to human fallenness. He writes in 'Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus' (1980):
The idea of a humanity both taller and deeper and more inclusive than now, of the time when animals were somehow contained in mankind . . . .
Condillac and Jouhandeau cannot exert control over them. “Wrens in my head, they say of me,” Rock-Head says, not just harboring them but identifying with them in one of the most memorable moments in the story:
“Wrens in my head, they say of me. It's a country expression, Condillac. Besides, I have them literally, quite a pleasant family of them inside my stone head. Learn from the wren wisdom!” Condillac angrily beat on the lower part of the statue with his leaded cane, breaking off toes. “I will not be lectured by a rock!” he crackled. “You have not these ideas originally, and mature brain matter will reject such. Therefore, you have them not! Reason is the thing, Statue, rationality. We promulgate it. It spreads. It prevails. The tomorrow world will be the world of total reason.”
The animal analogue—the idea that the lion can no longer lie down with the lamb after the Fall and that something fundamental has shifted in the animal part of man—is one of Lafferty’s major themes. It recurs throughout his fiction and thought, and his distinctive treatment of it sets him apart from nearly every other writer.
With "Condillac’s Statue" and the Programmed Persons in mind, it's his zoon anthropikon, which can be rendered as either “the human-animal” or “the animalistic human.” This Laffertian principle holds that animals exist within human consciousness, intimating what humanity has lost—or what it might yet become.
Current Notes:
(Marcel Jouhandeau (1888-1979) comes in for a savaging in “Condillac’s Statue.” In La Table Ronde, Jouhandeau wrote, “In 1927-1928 I was very much taken up with magic and occultism.” These are always fun moments in Lafferty.)
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