04 East of Laughter, Chapter 1, "Are We Dreaming"

Chapter One of East of Laughter begins with one hell of an an expositional dump: the quotation from the Alpine giant explaining that reality is sustained by twenty-one “Pillars,” which sets up the exigency of replacing the Scribbling Giants, those life-weary, often melancholy and often blood-hungry writers the world’s history. It then introduces two vividly imagined primary characters, Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri, members of the Group of Twelve. Hilary will be far less important to the narrative than Jane Chantal, but both are selected for a mysterious global service through the Concerned Circus, along with the cohort of twelve plus three. Using tests devised by the giant Atrox Fabulinus, the web of validity, Hilary and Jane Chantal realize that their world is fundamentally unreal. What is one to about that?

This chapter then breaks a rule Lafferty had been given by his old editor Frederik Pohl when revising Past Master: begin a novel with action. It’s how we got Chapter 1 of Past Master. Instead of beginning with pyrotechnics, Lafferty's book delays action until the reader passes through its twelve character vignettes in Chapters 1-3. I read these chapters as prologue.

Chapter 1 numbers and profiles the first three members of the Group. Hilary exploits the physics of the unreal world to harvest nonexistent fish through a poltergeist-inhabited computer. Jane Chantal is a prolific artist and huntress who delegates the physical labor of her pursuits (and even inspiration it seems) to a similar sprite-operated machine, raising the question of what it means to be an artist. Finally, there is the parasitic pair of John Barkley Towntower and Solomon Izzersted. John is a human mathematician and ventriloquist whose body hosts Solomon, an aggressive, sentient belly growth, an egomaniac and superior mathematical genius who dominates him, even forcing John to adopt Solomon's name legally as the two develop “advocacy mathematics.” Later we learn Solomon is the son of Iofel, a trickster watcher who impregnates goyim with Jewish offspring.

In this first post on the chapters of East of Laughter, I want to pause to say that there is no natural place to start with this book. One could begin almost anywhere, provided one kept rereading. In time, one will begin to own the work, as readers always own a book they have internalized. East of Laughter is not really a novel meant to be read once. Lafferty said this about all his novels, but it is especially true of this one. That is bad news for the reader who wants to pass through it only once, because a first reading is likely to yield only a series of brilliant set pieces, pieces of microfiction, and isolated wonders. Almost everyone has the experience on a first reading that whole is smaller than the parts. That is why I want to propose a way of reading it that will lead to a greater whole.

One recurring claim of this blog, following Lafferty himself, is that every Lafferty reader has to put together his own Lafferty. With East of Laughter, I am just going to say how I read it, though that may not be how another reader wants to read it. Still, this is the reading that has made the novel rewarding for me. It requires a double act. On one level, inside the novel, there is a hierarchy of dream and unreality. Dream and unreality, at the level of narrated events, correspond to fiction at the meta-level. Within the novel, questions keep arising: what is real and what is unreal; where the real begins and ends; whether someone unreal can become real; when and how a forgery can surpass its original and so become, in some sense, more real than that original; whether to be real is to be perfected; and what ontological status belongs to forgeries that have no originals. I don’t there is any answer to this inside the novel except through the Laughing Christ, who is both a Lafferty character and Lafferty’s God.

So when I read East of Laughter, I read every word of it through this double action. There is R. A. Lafferty writing the book, imagining his strange cast of characters, being surprised by what these strange, unreal people say, and making them probe their own ontological status. Hilary Ardri brings this into view at the jump:

Lafferty can reach into the book, kill his characters, and bring them back to life. His hand will look like Atrox from the characters’ imaged perspective. Within the storyworld, they die by being impaled on the Giants’ enormous feather-quills. On the metafictional plane, Lafferty is killing them with his own pen as he scratches them into being. What is blood inside the novel is ink at the level of authorship.

Again, the first chapter sets this up. Hilary Ardri’s computerized world can draw anything from the ambient, which is why he can pull nonexistent fish from Tenkiller Lake, a lake with no fish. Lafferty explains the mechanics of this unreal extraction:

This is what every writer does in drafting a story or novel: he begins with the unreal ambient of the blank page and brings things forth from it. Where there were no fish, there are fish. Contradictions may be intolerable in reality, but they do not break fiction. Tenkiller Lake can have no fish, and yet Hilary’s company can supply fish from Tenkiller Lake.

This metaphysical awareness lies near the center of the novel. The reader is invited to experience the work almost from Lafferty’s side, as if watching him make the book. In Chapter Four, “Morning at Sora,” we discover that the characters are, in some way, aware of their own unreality. They speak of their sketchiness and blame it on Atrox, but Atrox is himself a figure behind whom Lafferty stands. To read East of Laughter well, then, one must keep one eye on the authorial plane—Lafferty creating fictional worlds and testing the act of creation itself—and the other eye on the characters, who know they are fictions yet, by the law of the fiction, remain “somehow” real within their own plane, authored there by Atrox Fabulinus and the other Scribbling Giants.

This becomes relevant to a second theme established in Chapter One: creations escaping their maker. If the book requires a double act of reading, and if it enacts real authorship through Lafferty while staging fictional authorship through Atrox and the other Giants, then much of the drama lies in watching created things run beyond the intention that made them. Atrox experiences this with his own creations, the Twelve plus Three, seven of whom will replace the old Giants. He is surprised when his characters do not act as he thinks they should, though he has authored them.

At the level of real authorship, this same pattern helps explain some of the novel’s confusion. Lafferty presses his characters until they say things they could not have been expected to say, and until they surprise even him. When the characters are magically whisked from one location to another and complain about landing hard on a road in Ireland, the novel offers only a perfunctory in-world explanation:

Part of the joke is surely that Lafferty, the real author of these unreal persons, has unceremoniously dropped them onto the streets of Ireland.

Chapter One also establishes one of the novel’s major concerns: created persons getting ahead of their maker. After we meet Hilary Ardri and Jane Chantal Ardri, and after Lafferty gives us Jane’s parody of what it means to be an artist in an unreal world, we meet John Barkley Towntower and his belly-growth, Solomon Izzersted. We also learn about their advocacy mathematics and their ventriloquist act. The advocacy-mathematics material offers a mock-explanation for pulling fish out of the ambient in an unreal world, and so it links the two halves of the chapter: the two Ardris on one side, and the two-in-one Towntower/Izzersted on the other. In the account of Izzersted, we learn that Solomon usurps the very ground of his being, as it were, in the body of John Barkley Towntower:

This is the novel’s first instance of a created figure refusing to stay in place, and it anticipates the ending, where Solomon Izzersted tries to usurp the headship of the Scribbling Giants. The comic horror of Solomon taking over John Towntower is an inset image of how the characters in the novel work as a whole. It is grotesque, certainly, but one can imagine Lafferty looking at his characters much as Towntower looks down at his own belly, where Solomon’s head shouts, “My name is Solomon Izzersted!” That image conflates the two levels of the double reading, but it also establishes the problem the novel keeps returning to: in such a world, where is the substratum of reality?

That question will open, finally, onto larger questions about history, fiction within history, the World of Fact, and, after the World of Fact, the Quest for an Acceptable Metaphor. It will also lead into the philosophy of history. In the World of Fact, the law of the aggregate holds: the world is the sum of the facts, and there is one history of the world. Lafferty’s post-novel is an attempt to write about a world that is not like that. There are many pasts because the past underdetermines its transcription. What one needs, then, is not a tally of facts but the right metaphor. By the end of the book, if one doesn’t know the metaphor, has the Quest for Reality failed? Of all candidates for a world metaphor, it seems obvious to me what Lafferty proposes: the world is a forgery. Much more on this later.

I’ll close by saying that East of Laughter should not be read only as a bedtime story, with the reader settling in and letting the world fall away. It is not a safe fantasy projected onto a screen, but one that pokes its author (self-dramatically and funnily) and the reader in the chest. It should be as a pantographic projection, one of its own metaphors, but also otherwise. One sees more if one reads every word as though Lafferty were calling nonexistent fish from the ambient of the white page, then interacting with what he trawled, getting himself into deeper and deeper fictional difficulty as he works toward the substratum that grounds his own reality, the Laughing Christ. One formula for this is that East of Laughter is an participating apocalypse of authorship and readership.