01 East of Laughter

In East of Laughter, the fabric of the world frays because the Seven Scribbling Giants are dying or abandoning their posts. These are beings who write the continuing history of the world, with the chief of them, Atrox Fabulinus, using nine-foot goose-feather quills. To prevent cosmic entropy from lack of input (scientists in the novel have a theory about all this, and a priest says the flow of grace has been choked off), a Group of Twelve (plus three spares) undertakes a week-long journey (plus two special days out of count) to replace the Giants.

It is a wild book. The stage is the world itself, with a geography as wide as The Reefs of Earth is local. The company travels through eighth-century “modern world terminals” to places ranging from an Irish fairy castle to the extra-temporal Eighth Day of the Week, where the living mingle casually with the dead. Along the way, they feast on roasted bear stuffed with giant eels. They consult the ghost of Charles Fort about subatomic circuses and one-hundred-and-nine-year space locusts. Fort himself lights his cigars by striking matches against the Fortean sky. The company is stalked by a Judas figure within its own ranks: a were-panther who murders his companions by impaling them with the Giants’ massive quills or, in one case, biting out a man’s stomach. There are deaths and resurrections. One climbs the stairway built by St. Joseph who says his son was a better carpenter. One character becomes a detached, baseball-sized talking navel; another is resurrected as a nine-year-old girl and goes on programming her hunting-horn computer. At last, the old Giants pass away. The seven surviving members of the Group, including a master forger whose possibly forged marble statue of the Laughing Christ works miracles he never intended, are raised to the vacant offices. They assume authorship of the world and restore its stability. Or seem to. The novel ends there, and does not tell us more.

East of Laughter is, I think, Lafferty’s most opaque Oceanic novel, though it ranks near the top of the Lafferty novels I most enjoy. It took me some time to get my eye in, and in hindsight I first read it without knowing enough Lafferty. Few readers, even informed Lafferty readers, seem to know the work well or value it highly. Reading it can feel like walking beside someone taking giant strides. Yet it is a magical ugly duckling of a book, strange beyond description, with boggling mysteries. Nowhere else is Lafferty inventing so much, so feverishly, or working his private artistic vocabulary so hard. In other words, it is visionary.

Lafferty wrote it when was nearing seventy and approaching retirement. It is self-consciously summative, and I consider it one of the peaks of the canon. I like it far more than Annals of Klepsis, which is wonderful in itself, and about as much as Serpent’s Egg. In a letter, Lafferty said it was better, with more insights. Its difficulties, however, will alienate many readers. It is certainly his most Rabelaisian work. I want, then, to attempt a chapter-by-chapter reading, pointing out what I see in the novel as well as where it still puzzles me. It may take me a little while to work out how to do it. This first post lays out some of the more important pieces.

First, Lafferty uses one of his old devices. When he is less interested in manhandling plot than in thinking through difficult ideas, he often turns to a temporal structure that moves the story forward because, once chosen, it must move. The imposed form gives him a schema: he can divide the material into smaller units and then paint the spandrels. In East of Laughter, the schema is the seven-day week, with two days out of count. This is one way the novel makes a statement. It says that human life, though trapped inside history, is larger than time itself. Day follows day, giving the book its chapter-flow. Each day takes place in a new location. Each location offers new wonders. After the opening chapters establish the situation of East of Laughter, the reader is swept through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on, each day more intensely imagined than the last.

One could say that this sequence exists as a series of pegs on which Lafferty hangs an encyclopedia’s worth of strange information. But to describe it only as a device would be misleading. Lafferty takes the human week, enlarged by the days out of count, as a primal measure of creation. God only needed a week. He then compresses time and history through that measure in order to write another apocalypse, this one about creativity. All the central Lafferty concerns show up, and he even includes a brilliant séance with Charles Fort, gathering up his 1970s Fortean fantasies into a final artistic statement, tying them off with a bow. It is as though Lafferty were writing a metacommentary on the Ghost Story itself.

Something personal. When I think of East of Laughter, I am put in mind of two scenes from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, my favorite childhood movie. The first is the “Pure Imagination” number, which since boyhood has given me a sense of unbounded possibility. Lafferty seems to be saying something similar about the largeness of the world, the wonder of the world, the visionary experience, and the mystery of creativity. Even so, there is that uncanny chord change, the one that feels like a dangerous suspension. The song catches, for me, the sense that by this point Lafferty is making very few (maybe no) concessions. We are fully inside his imagination factory, and there is risk in the garden. Lafferty, like Wonka, is a sphinx.

See into your imagination through my creation. You want to change the world? There's nothing to it. What we see will defy explanation.

Observe what has happened to Lafferty’s ambient:

The other song is “The Wondrous Boat Ride,” which, in its full version, blends with “Pure Imagination,” adding menace: rowing, rowing, rowing. That is closer to the experience of being swept through the escalating days of East of Laughter.

The novel is full of wonder, but also of grisly mowing: bloodsmell and murder. It moves fast, seems out of control at times, rewards rereading.

The first governing context of the novel is that the ambient is sustained by the twenty-one Pillars, arranged in three orders of seven: the Seven Saints, who sustain rectitude; the Seven Technicians, who sustain technology; and the Seven Scribbling Giants, who write the world’s scenarios and histories. In technical terms, the Pillars can be understood as the chief secondary causes by which history moves: the flywheel of history, and the machinery through which consensus reality becomes dreamwork.

In Thomism, a secondary cause is a real created cause that produces real effects, but only because it depends on God, the primary cause, for its existence, power, and operation. Gandalf makes the same point to Bilbo in The Hobbit when he tells him not to doubt the prophecies simply because he had a hand in fulfilling them. Put simply: God causes creatures to be causes. The Pillars, then, are neither metaphors nor surrogates for God. They cause the world, but secondarily. When one of these secondary causes fails or dies, the world quakes and quivers, as if the center cannot hold; when several fail at once, the world staggers.

Lafferty gives us this premise early, in a paratext by the Alpine Giant. Its source, I think, is one of the best-known chapters in Proverbs: “Wisdom hath built her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars” (Prov. 9:1). East of Laughter is therefore a book about wisdom. That is the first point a reader should keep in mind. What is wisdom? Gratefulness for the plenitude, the many mansions. Lafferty celebrates creation concretely in the book. Each page can set on off along a road self-education and restored appreciation of what life offers. The book itself is about perpetual renewal.

The second governing context centers on dream and the loss of Eden. As a poet once said, in dreams begin responsibilities. Very little has been written about how East of Laughter works, and, as far as I know, no one has emphasized the nature of its title, despite Lafferty making its meaning unambiguous. This surprises me, so a word about it. The title is not happy. To be east of laughter is to be estranged. It is to be, as Lafferty says, “East of the thing itself” and marooned east of reality. The phrase recalls Cain, who, after murdering Abel, is driven east of Eden into the land of Nod. Lafferty writes the novel as dreamwork, as though history and consensus reality were, at bottom, oneiric: a “web of validity,” in Atrox’s phrase, that would tear if we awakened. The writers of that dream, the authorial secondary causes, are the Scribbling Giants. They are by far the most important of the secondary causes, and the most difficult to replace. They are all Gentiles until Solomon Izzersted becomes one.

Saints, we are told, are easily replaced; competent saints are always available, because the world is full of holiness. The Technicians are harder to replace only because there are too many candidates. The Giants are the problem. They endure in their offices “for very many years, hoping in vain for replacements so that they may be allowed to die.” The death or failure of the Giants brings an Aeon-change, one of Lafferty’s Origenist ideas, and Aeon-changes are dangerous. East of Laughter is about one such change. It is set on a day that can be worked out from internal clues: Sunday, June 21, 1998, Midsummer’s Eve, the last Sunday-June-21 of the twentieth century. The feast day of St. Aloysius.

To press the point about the Giants as secondary causes: they are real within the metaphysics of the novel. They act according to their own natures, and they are providentially ordered forces of sublime, ebullient creativity. We see this most clearly in the rotation of the Giants at the novel’s end. Whoever replaces Atrox Fabulinus, we learn, will become the least of the Giants in the coming Aeon. That reversal puts everything we thought we knew on its head. We are marooned East of Reality, which I call Prime, but it is there.

As Scribblers who write the world’s history, the Giants do not stand in for an underlying real history. They are the means through which God’s ordering of time becomes the event-filled and person-filled time we inhabit. There is no behind-the-text of the sort modern historiography assumes, which is one reason the novel is so difficult. The world is being written in real time, somewhat as The Lay of Roadstrum sings the events of Space Chantey into being. The world’s history is simply what the Giants have written, and what they have written is what God permissively wills these secondary causes to write. To call their work fiction would therefore miss what the novel is doing. In East of Laughter, all history is fictional in this sense: it is written by Giants, and the Giants are the appointed means by which it is written. Fact and fiction are not opposed here. They are implicated in one another, depending on whether one asks a first-order or second-order question. As Lafferty once said, fact and fiction have the same meaning: to make.

As I said, the novel opens in a world already failing badly, and Lafferty has great fun showing the reader how to confirm this. The atoms are empty. Leo Parisi, the nuclear scientist, knows them as “no more than empty boxes.” He remembers them as once fully detailed, which is Lafferty’s theme of pleroma. He has been cheated of their plenitude, and later Solomon Izzersted will witness that plenitude restored. This is Flatland at its most ontological.

One sign of this a-borning emptiness, the invasion of the Ouden principle, is what the novel calls pnigmophobia, the choking-fear epidemic that recurs in cycles of roughly 109 years: 1017, 1126, 1344, 1453, 1562, 1671, 1780, 1889, and now 1998. Friday night in such cycles is the worst. Lafferty writes that thirteen million died across Europe on the Friday night of the 1344 outbreak. And it is happening on the Friday during which some of the novel takes place.

There are also rationalizers of what is happening. There are the Dublin Morning Docket scientists, Hennessee, Delany, and Monroney, who have ways of measuring the decline. Local gravity is falling. The magnetic field is dropping. The decay rates of natural plutonium and short-period comets are slowing. The influx of small particles is diminishing. The function-rates of animate beings are in decline. There are also the Cambridge intellectuals in Sussex, trying to make sense of the same collapse. As Lafferty writes, “The world is being strangled to death by lack of input. It’s as simple as that.”

In the first chapter, we learn that the characters use Atrox Fabulinus’s one hundred and one tests to determine whether their world is real or a dream. All the tests point toward dream. This is confirmed by Hilary Ardri’s Computerized Lake-Fish Company, which operates on the principle of “Theoretical Things That Could be Effected by a Computer in the Ambient of an Unreal World.” It works; therefore the ambient world is unreal. At one point, we are told that the world itself is becoming unbonded. And in one of the best lines in the book, Lafferty gives the novel’s great test for reality: “To be real is to be unique. To be unreal is to be common.”

At the largest level, these are not signs that something has gone wrong with Prime itself, a point later thematized in the strange history of the Laughing Christ statue. According to East of Laughter, Prime has always been like this, sustained by its twenty-one Pillars. Atrox is only the presiding figure of one structured understanding of history. The book is deeply concerned with the legacy of Rome; Rome is mentioned more than a hundred times. The shake-ups are signs, rather, that the Giants of the Old Aeon have reached the end of their term. The world is failing because the secondary causes that sustain it are flagging, and a new Aeon entails a leap forward. Dare we hope?

Atrox is fifteen hundred years dead, if he ever lived at all—the novel hedges this three separate times—and the recent new-world chapters attributed to him, distributed by an unknown Concerned Circus, are not enough to stop what is happening. Atrox has admitted the truth: history is a dream. The other six Old Giants in the novel—the Hsiang Giant in China, the Illacrove Giant somewhere on the seas, the El-Khatar Giant in Arabia, the Alpenriese in the German Alps, the Sanrio Giant on the Pacific Rim, and the Timbuktu Giant in Mali—are all dying, weakening, or losing the will to continue. The whole order of the Giants has reached its end. We are in one of Lafferty’s world-ending situations.

East of Laughter never treats this as a simple catastrophe. The Alpine Giant, for instance, has long hoped for a replacement so that he may finally be allowed to die. When Sunday comes at Klavierschloss, his twelve-hour dying is well earned. The laborer is worthy of his pay. The death of the Old Aeon is the natural end of secondary causes under Providence.

And yet the Giants are dangerous.

“Camel’s Nose” opens with an epigraph from Erasthenos of Patmos, “Of Wanton Giants,” which lays out the stakes of the Giants’ power:

For all its comedy, East of Laughter takes the Giants’ work with terrible seriousness. The Giants write people on clay, and what is done to the writing is done to the people. The asymmetry between Giants and human beings is not just a matter of scale, with Giants huge and people ordinary-sized. It is an asymmetry of ontological position. To be a Giant is to be an author of human possibility, and a wanton Giant can break what he has written. Such are the stakes of an Aeon-change. The next Giants will write the people of the world.

When Lafferty himself sat down to write the novel, he seems to have decided to invent the richest set of characters he could imagine. To enjoy the book, one has to slow down and attend to those character sketches, though they move quickly: Jane Chantal, fuzzily beautiful at her hunting-horn computer; Hilary Ardri at his Computerized Lake-Fish Company; Drusilla in her red-and-russet hills; Mary Brandy in her balloon dress. Their uniqueness is what makes them real rather than common, and it is what makes the Aeon-change provisionally hopeful. These will be the new authors, the new Giants who inherit the Lydian-clay capacity.

Eden is one of the novel’s central images, as it is in Lafferty’s Serpent’s Egg. As I suggested above, the title alludes to the fallen word. Lafferty plays several games with this. Each location visited has something Edenic about it, where Lafferty impresses on the reader the marvels of the created order. Instead of natura naturans, we get auctores auctorantes, with the bottom of the directly knowable cosmos being seven persons personing it. We learn of Lastoir de Gaire, an inner suburb of Dublin, older than Dublin itself, which engulfed the city centuries ago. In Shelta, the cant of the Tinkers and the Little People, we are told that Gaire means laughter. Lastoir de Gaire is therefore “East of Laughter.” By the testimony of Countess Maude Grogley Laughter-Liffey in Observations of Things Both Before and After the Beginning of the World, it was the fairy Eden, established eleven years before the human Eden, with its own expulsion. It survives now only on a Dublin tram destination sign and in a pub at the tram turnaround.

In Hebrew, Eden means delight; Shelta Gaire means laughter. The Lamia of Italy, whom Countess Maude interviewed, says that the two are "aspects of the same place." Both are callbacks to the lost original state, somehow doubled across two creations (fairy and human), and the Edenic toponym is therefore doubled: the place east of Eden (Cain's exile, Genesis 4:16) is the same place as the place east of Laughter. To be East of Laughter is the cosmological condition. It is probably best to think of it as where humans are, and should be placed within how the Ghost Story treats fallenness. For some reason, it seems to me that readers think the title cheerful, and we should hear that, but when one reads “East of Laughter” as a phrase, Lafferty wants the reader to hear the condition of man with original sin.

On the other hand, the title also invokes the divine laughter of Psalm 2:4, which serves as the epigraph to Chapter Ten: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” Healthy, affirming divine laughter is what the fallen world has been exiled from. At one point, the Group, standing at Bronze Cherub Corner in Dublin, sees a statuette of the Angel with the Flaming Sword, “which turned every way.” It has been reduced to a hitching post for horses, and then, after the Automobile Century, to an ignored relic. This is, of course, the angel who bars the return to Eden, and it reminds us that the original expulsion still holds. Again and again, Lafferty returns to the idea of inaudible laughter of the heavens. What has been lost is audibility, the capacity to hear the order of things as it ought to be. At the end of the novel, when we learn of the Riant Giant, the Aeon-change becomes hopeful insofar as it promises new or healed ears..

The novel first comes clearly into focus with the Group’s Quest at Gaire Castle on Tuesday, when they are “marooned East of Reality.” Gaire Castle in Dublin still carries the inherited memory of the Edenic delight-place under its laughter-name; even the eighth-century Modern World Terminal there is a vestige of the time when the lost order could still be navigated. The Quest, then, is that most Laffertian of things: an anamnesis.

Because the novel can be difficult for first-time readers, I want to spell out how the Aeon-change works. At least three factors matter here. None is a matter of heroic individual achievement, and all are providentially ordered.

First, there is rotation. At the end of the book, one learns about the rotation. Each new Giant succeeds an Old Giant. We learn this principle from Gorgonius in Chapter Twelve: the successor to the previous Top Giant becomes the new Bottom Giant; the successor to the previous Bottom Giant becomes the new Top Giant; and the other five rotate within the middle ranks. What was highest becomes lowest, and what was lowest becomes highest. This draws on one of the novel’s governing themes, Christ’s saying that the first shall be last and the last first: novissimus.

The rotation works out as follows:

• Atrox (Italy, the old Top, the historiographer) → Solomon Izzersted (new Bottom)

• Hsiang Giant (China) → Drusilla Evenrood (East Sussex)

• Illacrove Giant (the seas) → Mary Brandy Manx (Isle of Man)

• El-Khatar Giant (Arabia) → Jane Chantal High-Queen (formerly Ardri, accepting at Lecco)

• Alpenriese (German Alps) → Gorgonius Pantera (Klavierschloss)

• Sanrio Giant (Pacific Rim) → Caesar Oceano (San Francisco)

• Timbuktu Giant (Mali, the old Bottom) → Denis Lollardy (new Top, Lecco/Lombardy)

Atrox, the historiographer-Giant who accomplished such wonders as writing and forging the Carolingian centuries, is replaced in the lowest place by a Watcher’s son who proposes to make a billion dollars a year from the office. The former lowest Giant, the Timbuktu Giant, is replaced in the highest place by a master forger who carved a Laughing Christ that performed miracles he had not intended. East of Laughter is deeply interested in forgery, and Solomon Izzersted, the figure who replaces Atrox, is one of Lafferty’s anti-Semitic caricatures, a matter I will address in a later post.

Second, every Group of Twelve must have its Judas, we are told. Leo Parisi says this to Jane Chantal at the beginning of the novel, before any of the killings have occurred:

As I mentioned, the Judas in East of Laughter is Prince Leonardo the Great, the Golden Panther. Leonardo bears a variant of the Mark of Cain. He is a werepanther, and it turns out that the golden mantle covering his entire panther body, except for the black bar on his brow, is the Mark. Denis, who would end up being the head giant, explains this at the Manx gallows-gibbet after Leonardo has been hanged:

As with Cain’s mark, the Mark protects the one who would otherwise be killed. The Judas-figure in East of Laughter is protected for as long as the divine economy requires him, because the new Group cannot constitute itself without the deaths that only the Judas can bring about. Leonardo kills Jane Chantal Ardri at Sora on Monday evening, using Atrox’s nine-foot feather; he kills Roderick Outreach at East Sussex on Thursday; he kills John Barkley Towntower at Port Saint Mary on Friday evening, biting out his stomach to extract Solomon; and he kills Hieronymous Talking-Crow in the Pnigmophobia nightmare that same Friday night. Each death is required for the new order. Jane Chantal’s death and resurrection prepare her to accept the El-Khatar succession as High Queen. John Barkley’s death frees Solomon to take the lowest Giant-place. Hieronymous’s death completes the Group’s Judas-pattern. As we move through the chapters, this will become clearer.

Second, East of Laughter is a novel about forgery. As I have already suggested, the relation between forgery and history becomes one of its major themes. Denis Lollardy’s role as the new Top Giant, as I read it, points to the Catholic relation between human craft and grace. His carved Laughing Christ, though a forgery, works miracles the original never did, terrifying Denis because he realizes that he has become the instrument of something far larger than himself. The statue’s miracles, Saint Faunus’s emergence from it in one of the novel’s best scenes, and Denis’s possible Lombardy genealogy all show Providence preparing and using flawed human makers. As Top Giant, Denis will have the final say, writing the next world with the knowledge that what he makes may be taken up by grace beyond his control.

Solomon Izzersted’s placement at the bottom of the new Giant Pillar is more complicated. His claim to be the son of Iofel, a Watcher-class angel, makes him, on my reading, a Nephilim-like figure: diminished, comic, powerful, ambitious, disordered, and yet potentially redeemable, just as Lafferty apparently believed Satan himself might be. The novel does not finally punish Izzersted for his bribery, vanity, or propaganda. In Augustinian terms, even the fallen have their place in the order of the world. Solomon Izzersted is what he is, a Wandering Jew as a greedy bouncing ball, what the book calls an ewigerjude-tand, but the new Aeon has a use for him, as shown by its assigning him to the lowest rung of gianthood, where his disorder can exist. At the end of the book, a smile covers all of him.

One final point. I dislike treating Lafferty as hermetically metafictional, as though metafiction were what makes him interesting, because that approach downplays how seriously he takes Prime and his own metaphysical commitments. Still, if any Lafferty novel invites such a reading, it is East of Laughter. One can imagine that everything in it is a forged Atrox chapter, with Atrox, Denis, the Group, and the reader all caught inside a recursive authorship that cannot be explained from within. But on my reading, the novel is finally a comedy of secondary causes. They act without full knowledge, while Providence completes what they cannot see. It is Providence that places the possessor of the Laughing Christ at the top of the Giant hierarchy, just as Atrox himself had been the statue’s last owner. Lafferty writes:

By the end of the novel, divine laughter has become audible again. The world has been handed on; the old, tired Giants have died; new futures are promised; and the chief Scribbler is the one who possesses the Laughing Christ, which is “wrapped in the colored cleanliness of its own laughter.” Yes, Lafferty himself is nearing the end of his creative life. He seems ready to hand the work on to other scribblers. The complication, of course, is whether the statue of the Laughing Christ is a forgery. More on that next time.