06 East of Laughter, Chapter 3, "Strange Cargo"

A short post. Much of the material in “Strange Cargo” becomes fully relevant only in hindsight, as one moves deeper into the narrative. The chapter introduces several new members of the Group of Twelve, those fictional persons now beginning to wonder whether their existence is only a dream, a theory supported by the philosophical metatexts supplied within the world by the Giant Atrox Fabulinus. The chapter first presents Caesar Oceano, a former pirate turned shipping magnate, who receives a talking golden panther named Leonardo the Great. The epigraph explains why Oceano takes the panther to be a divine intermediary and why he decides it is wise to make Leonardo his business partner. Per Atrox Fabulinus:

Caesar is pleased with their success, but Leonardo becomes melancholy, opens a counseling service, and is trailed by a black panther-shadow. That shadow will matter later, in one of the novel’s most puzzling uses of Christian iconography, as Leonardo becomes a Judas figure, invested with counter-figured crucifixion imagery. The chapter also introduces Drusilla Evenrood, a British para-biologist who remains pragmatically absorbed in her work despite the Group’s growing doubts about its own existence.

The roll call continues with Denis Lollardy, an immensely important figure: an Italian master forger capable of recreating ancient manuscripts, artworks, and large financial checks with perfect fidelity. Denis becomes troubled when his recent forgery, the Laughing Christ discussed in previous posts, begins performing real miracles. The statue creates mirth in those who stand before it, but mirth occurs inside the person; it is indefeasible and nearly impossible to corroborate. So Lafferty gives us the kind of miracle the Church could confirm. A woman’s nose becomes right—right in the sense that it furthers her life—by being adjusted one millimeter. The narrator describes the bizarre precision of the event:

Next comes Mary Brandy Manx, a favorite character of mine in the book, the mayor of Port Saint Mary on the Isle of Man, who often appears as a local nature goddess, whether swimming or flying her hot-air balloon. As the members of the Group try to coordinate a global video conference in response to their destabilizing reality, Leo Parisi proposes admitting a thirteenth member, Hieronymous Talking-Crow. Leo argues that the Group may eventually need a replacement for its inevitable Judas, a remark that casts a backward shadow over Prince Leonardo. He explains the necessity of this to Jane Chantal:

Amid these introductions, a coordinated physical threat against the Group of Twelve begins to take shape. Several members, including Hilary Ardri and Mary Brandy Manx, suffer nonfatal gunshot wounds. Leonardo the Great is viciously mauled by his dark panther counterpart. The characters suspect that they are being tracked and assaulted by their “shadows.” Yet Hilary and Jane Chantal do not despair over the violence. They find reassurance in it. The presence of an active, plotting intelligence trying to harm them seems to prove that they exist in reality, rather than as dream stuff. Hilary explains this comfort at the chapter’s close:

But of course this is only the plot beginning. It is about to accelerate with an intensity rare even in Lafferty’s novels.

What, then, has the book established? It has heightened the menace that will drive the rush through the nine days of the week. Lafferty moves from leisurely assembly to frenetic action. In the first three chapters, the reader has learned the rules of this non-novel. The first is that the in-world characters now understand themselves, at least intermittently, as fictional persons. That self-conscious unreality licenses Lafferty’s radically fecund invention as well as the intrusion of reality. The novel's ultimate symbol of reality will be the Laughing Christ. Lafferty will leave it up to the reader to decide how to decode the Laughting Christ, but his point seems to be that if one rejects it, one ends up with a nihilistic metafiction, history as forgery all the way down.

The most important line in the chapter belongs to Dennis. Any reader who does not pick up on it, I think, is not reading the work Lafferty is writing: the forger speaks truth despite himself. At one point, he finds himself in the same ventriloquial relation that obtains between John Towntower and Solomon Izzersted:

Characters who find themselves speaking words not their own are nothing new in Lafferty. The best-known example is surely the way the Programmed Persons in Past Master use their “snakes” to speak through the mouth of Thomas More. Here, however, Lafferty gives us the reverse of that scene. In Past Master, More is deluded because his inner space has been infested by the devils of that novel. In East of Laughter, the question is different: who has made Denis say these words? I hazard the same Christ that occasioned his "fogergy" of the Laughing Christ, or so Lafferty implies.

Within the novel, there are only two strong possibilities: Atrox Fabulinus or R. A. Lafferty. As I read the novel, I see this as its central drama. Atrox is the fictional surrogate through whom Lafferty enters into metafictional relation with his characters. The bits of reality that fall from the sky under Atrox’s name, above all the bloody writing quill, are also images of Lafferty’s own pen. I therefore read Denis's utterance as Lafferty placing into his mouth what he takes to be the truth about the consensus reality of the Twelve: it is a forgery. But a forgery can become a myth, and a myth, as Lafferty said in an interview, is only a way of getting at the truth.