02 East of Laughter: Forgery

In Lafferty’s papers, there is a handwritten note in which he says that fake evidence often appears before real evidence. He gives the example of Galileo, whom Lafferty believed had faked evidence for the heliocentric model of the universe. The immediate context is speculation about Darwin, but the idea is relevant to East of Laughter. Ask someone what the book is about, and the answer will usually be, it is somehow about the Scribbling Giants. That is the potted version of the plot. Nothing I have found goes beyond it. Not for novices, one Lafferty authority says. Certainly, the book is about the Giants, but in thinking about how it is about the Giants, the most important factor is forgery: what forgery means, and what one does with the epistemology of forgery inside a Christian cosmos, and that within a World of Record that is full of forgery.

Before going through the chapters of East of Laughter, it makes sense to clarify what forgery is doing, because it colors almost every page. You live a forged life. I live one. This is the first of a two-part lead-up to the chapter readings. In this post, I want to unpack why forgery is so complicated in the book. In the next, I will turn to the central act of forgery, the Laughing Christ, and propose a way of understanding it. At the end of the post is my glossary for the novel, which should be useful if you choose to go deep into it. It is as interpretively neutral as I could make it while stuffing it full of weird oddments.

At one point in East of Laughter, the question arises whether Atrox Fabulinus forged the entire existence of Charlemagne and the Carolingians. Lafferty came up with this conceit about a decade before someone in the real world argued for it in earnest, in what came to be known as the Phantom Time theory. In the novel, it is an amusing aside about Atrox, but it has a serious edge because Lafferty believed that the twentieth century itself was a forgery. How can you ever trust your history books? In his view, not only had the Holocaust not happened, but the evidence for it had been manufactured. This is one reason his Holocaust denial matters so much for understanding Lafferty, for understanding his theory of history, which one finds running through his fiction, not just in Three Armageddons, which I read as a Holocaust denial novel. From the first page of East of Laughter, the reader is confronted with the problem of a dreaming or unreal world. Forged history and unreal reality are not separate problems in the novel. They are part of the same historical crisis.

By the end of the book, Denis Lollardy, the master forger, assumes the office of head Giant and initiates a new period of history in which forgery has a greater role. Presumably, it will be a future that can live with forgery in a new way. A new aeon. Throughout the novel, Lafferty imagines forgery as a property of the world, giving us layer upon layer of the fake and the real.

The diagram above makes this visible by showing the range of scales on which forgery appears. I think it is helpful to keep them separate.

There is so much forgery in the book that it becomes easier to read once one slows down and asks what, exactly, is being forged in each instance, and how the forged thing stands in relation to the real. At times, it is an imaginary relation. Lafferty plays with so many permutations of the idea that it helps to list the many forms that forgery takes, culminating in the central question East of Laughter poses to the reader: Is the Laughing Christ, who also appears in The Fall of Rome and the Coscuin books, a forgery? And if he is, does that mean he is removed from the authentically Christological? How could one sort through a thoroughly forged history to arrive at Christ? What if one only had Atrox’s Armenian infancy gospel? For a Catholic, it is very Kierkegaardian.

East of Laughter also has an unusual internal shape: two tours, followed by a coda of days out of count. The first tour shows what I mean when I say that Lafferty makes few concessions to the reader. He drops in his twelve main characters, numbers them, and spends the first three chapters giving us a tour of the person as person. He sets them down as rarefied morsels. Get their measure, these twelve. Learn these extraordinary persons, reader. You will be enriched. This is not how novels are supposed to work. Then, beginning with Chapter Four, “Monday at Sora,” he sends the reader on a madcap scrambling second tour, this time a tour of places, each associated with a character (or two). The novel thus, roughly, moves from persons to places, and then toward a central act of thwarted forgery: the trickster Jew Solomon Izzersted’s attempt to maniplulate his way into the top office of head Scribbling Giant, demiurge of history. The others see through the scheme. Solomon is blocked, and he ends not as the first of the Giants but as the least of the seven, content, or nearly content, with his billions of dollars. The final words of the book are a business card.

At the end of East of Laughter, Lafferty leaves the case of the Laughing Christ for the reader to decide.