07 East of Laughter and Belloc

In 1955, Hollis and Carter published a volume of Hilaire Belloc’s uncollected essays under the title One Thing and Another. Lafferty was an avid reader of Belloc, so it is unlikely that he did not know the book. It contains many delightful pieces, all charmingly (or gratingly) dated by Belloc’s premodernist sensibility, but one essay is especially important for thinking about Lafferty: “The Historian,” perhaps Belloc’s clearest statement of his philosophy of writing history. That philosophy should be distinguished from Belloc’s particular historical judgments: his polemic against Protestant historiography, his expositions about European politics, and above all his unrelenting view that Jews were a people marked by ineradicable dual loyalty. The question of Protestantism enters the essay indirectly when Belloc distinguishes between writing for those who largely share one’s worldview and writing for those who do not. At the end of this post, I include a copy of the essay, which is, I think, an invaluable primer if one believes, as I do, that Lafferty held Belloc’s view of history but also believed that the world had become unstructured either during or after Belloc’s lifetime. Today, I want to go through some of this because it is relevant to East of Laughter.

Belloc closes “The Historian” with a maxim that could hardly be more Laffertian: “history is to society what memory is to a man, and only by true record do nations know themselves.” East of Laughter, for all its fantasia, is grounded in this view. Its world is sustained by those twenty-one Pillars, seven of them the Scribbling Giants who write “the scenarios and histories of the world.” When the the Giants are killed or die, the world loses not only its record but its coherence. In Lafferty’s terms, this is a world-ending; and after a world ends, there follows, presumably, a period of unstructuring of the sort one finds in The Fall of Rome or at the end of Past Master. East of Laughter says as much when Lafferty writes:

History can sustain a human-made world in being. Laffery picked that verb carefully, knowing in Latin it means “to hold up.” It is slightly ambiguous. Productively so. As I have often argued on the blog, “world” in this sense does not mean Prime, the substratum of reality. Metafictionally it means a human order: a structure of memory, inheritance, institutions, habits, and shared meaning. This makes Belloc a useful companion when reading East of Laughter.

In short, Lafferty gives fantasy form to the crisis Belloc describes in historical writing, the moment when historical memory goes off the rails. For Belloc, this produces what he calls “the Dull”: history without the real whys. For Lafferty, the same failure appears under his master trope of Flatland, or, as he puts it:

Belloc calls it the essential teleology of all truly historical writing. History can sustain a human-made world in its conservation. As I have often argued on the blog, “world” in this sense does not mean Prime, the substratum of reality. That takes care of itself the way the pillars just are. It means a human order that the pillars propagate: a structure of memory, inheritance, institutions, habits, and shared meaning. This makes Belloc a useful companion to East of Laughter. He circumscribes the possibilies of both historical amnesia (Whig history) and history a forgery or lie (Whig history).

The point can be put simply. Lafferty gives fantasy form to the epistemic crisis Belloc describes as failures in historical writing: the moment when historical memory goes off the rails. He is essay is a diagnosis of typical ways this happens. For Belloc, this derailment produces what he calls “the Dull,” history without the real whys. For Lafferty, the same failure appears under his master trope of Flatland, or, as he puts it in “The Day After the World Ended”:

He spells this out further in his essay on Tolkien as a Christian when he says the only valid environment is the Incarnation:

In the wake of world loss, people still have to make informed choices and speak to one another about higher things. Those who are well ordered will know that something is missing from any utopia that does not acknowledge the only valid environment. For Lafferty, that means an environment ordered around the Incarnation and Resurrection as the axis of history. Something has to signal the stakes of world loss. A flat world is flat because it has lost verticality. The furniture of the old order may be gone, but for Lafferty, the capacity and the obligation to make new worlds never go away.

In East of Laughter, Lafferty uses the salvific image of the laughing Christ to make this point. A flat world is one that cannot laugh the deepest laughter that knows the world is comic because it has a happy ending. And if anything keeps breaking through the oneiric rubble of East of Laughter, it is laughter: field hands who “laugh and giggle as if they’d rupture themselves,” the Second Psalm’s “He who is throned in Heaven laughs,” and the book’s most important secondary figure, the Laughing Giant, the Riant Giant:

which is, in turn, a world birth. Solomon Izzersted tries to usurp the role of head midwife, but Dennis Lollardy, the man who forges the laughing Christ, achieves the office of head giant. He resets or makes visible the substratum of reality.

This is where Belloc and Lafferty only seem to part ways. Belloc wrote within a structured world, one he quarreled with; Lafferty, according to his lights, wrote in an unstructured one, one he quarreled with. In “The Historian,” Belloc assumes settled communities: readers who share “the arms and manners of that world,” as he puts it. The historian’s method, he says, depends on whether he is writing for his own kind or “for those who are not of us.” This is not a fashionable view of altering, yet that shared world is an enabling condition, or communion, for historical writing. It presupposes a common, intact past, just what Flatland has lost and what dream cannot firm up. Once the shared world has gone dim, once the noetic darkening repeatedly mentioned in East of Laughter has set in, there is no stable “us” left for the historian to address. As Leo Parisi asks the ghost of Charles Fort, "Charles, either in the context of the Special Fortean Universe, or in the larger General Universe, do you know what has gone wrong that the stars and moon and sun have all been dimming for several days, that all the vital functions of the world and the universe have slowed down or weakened?”

Still, Belloc half-saw Lafferty’s kind of exit, though held that the strongest kind of history can convert its audience, bringing “a new state of mind” into being. Such writing does not just shore up an old horizon but makes one. That, in its unstructured-world way, is what East of Laughter is about. Look around and the world is empty. It is like blowing up a photo and seeing between the pixels. It is also like the old joke about the two grandmothers who meet on the street, one pushing her new grandchild in a pram. “Your granddaughter is so beautiful,” says the first. “Just wait till I show you her picture,” says the other.

For Belloc, the goal is historical retrieval. He wanted to save old Europe and what he called Tradition, which was the continuity of the Catholic historical imagination. Although Lafferty mostly sets East of Laughter in a phantasmagorical old Europe, the act of world-writing, or scribbling, is not retrieval. Belloc was, in many ways, a post-Reformation thinker who knew that one could not simply return to his idealized Middle Ages. Nonetheless, he believed that one could build a continuity from that world to his own structured moment in time. Crooked English timber and rot called for intense house inspection and renovation. That is why he wrote so many biographies, so many books about France, so many essays on Catholicism, so many works on tradition, and the works on the Reformation itself, especially on the way he believed it had been Whiggified, that is, distorted by bourgeois Protestants.

When Jane Chantal, newly made a New Giantess, describes the work of making history, it is not retrieval at all. Better to conceive of it as fiat, or a response to "The world is dying, you know, from diminished input":

She memorably grows a mahogany tree where mahogany does not grow:

Declaration, not memory, has become necessary to filling out a valid environment given the unstructuring, one centered around Atrox's most prized possession, the laughing Christ. That last point is to say she does not write the substratum of reality she writes on. She did not author the cosmos, and she did not author her own return:

she says, announcing the book’s resurrection motif. She measures her work against a standard she finds rather than makes, speaking of "points of contact between their trashiness and my valid work." Beyond the fiat, underneath holds an unwritten ground that institutes the three sets of seven pillars, which no Giant calls into being. The pillars might totter, but they, as analytic institutions, never end.

Things are so bad in East of Laughter, so estranged, that the only way back to sanity is through righteous laughter. Belloc’s situation, Lafferty assumes, was not like this. For Belloc, what is needed is besieged truth under discipline: “advocacy is the negation of truth.” Lafferty’s ground laughs, and discloses the plenitude I mentioned in the last post not through austere record but through fertile making, what he called fir at the end of “The Day After the World Ended.” That is why, I think, the chief world-writer is a forger, and why the book can say without irony that we “live in a Forgers’ World,” where someone handles “necessary forgeries in writing the world.” It is a pun.

Whether this opposes Belloc’s philosophy of history or only extends it depends on how bad the unstructuring is, and how deep. This shows in the pun of the book’s master trope of forgery. If forge means “deceive,” then Lafferty licenses a holy fabrication that Belloc would have rejected as a lie. If forge means “make,” then the two agree at bottom and differ only in degree. A forge is a smithy, and forge descends from the Latin word for workshop. In this case, “necessary forgeries in writing the world" means "necessary writings in writing of the world." There is a great distance between a world kept structured by the true extension of a previous record and a world sustained by laughing invention, but that distance can be bridged by the middle term of forging as a creative act, should there exist a minimum substratum of reality.

In “The Historian,” Belloc gives the reader an image for this. True history, he says, is “not a spear thrust, but rather a piece of carving.” In East of Laughter, Atrox is murdered with his own writing-quill, a nine-foot goose feather later found “with blood and gore on the quill end,” and at that death the reader is told that “the World staggered.” In a world made legible by historical writing, the pen is double. It brings the truth of a world into view, but it can also write new worlds under conditions of amnesia, where the past has been unwritten because it has been forgotten. This is not postmodernism because Lafferty does not think the world is finally only a master narrative, as Lyotard would have it, or an emplotment, as Hayden White would have it. The Incarnation certifies the valid environment, and at the center of that environment stands a non-narratological actuality: Christ.

To close, I would say that Belloc and Lafferty share a grammar of what history was: history was a society’s memory, and it may become so again if the new Giants script it into being. A truly historical world, even one as zany as East of Laughter, needs proportion, measure, and making. No one in East of Laughter re-members the body of the old world back into being. Instead, the novel gathers lively fragments of that world, what I have called bricospolia, and drills down to the one thing that makes an environment valid.