08 East of Laughter, Chapter 4, "Morning at Sora"

With Chapter Four, “Monday at Sora,” the setup chapters are behind us, and the action begins. The Group of Twelve holds a private video-world-conference, which inadvertently sets off a global panic (the etymology of panic is significant) when eavesdropping observers take its discussion of the “Tests of Atrox Fabulinus” as proof that the world is a dream. To evade the Panic Marshals, the authorities charged with suppressing panic, the Group ends the broadcast and agrees to meet in person. By rapid modern transportation, they converge on the hidden Italian villa of Leo and Perpetua Parisi, near Sora, where a lavish and eccentric feast has been prepared for the midnight gathering: roasted bear stuffed with trout and eels.

During the feast, a warning arrives. Local residents tell them to appease Atrox Fabulinus by setting out a plate and giving him utensils fit for a Giant, including a wine glass that holds six gallons and a funnel through which he can swallow eels. Sure enough, an ethereal outline of Atrox appears at the table, bolts down the food, and converses with the Group. Some of the characters, including Denis Lollardy and Solomon Izzersted, debate whether Atrox is a genuine supernatural entity, a manifestation of creative fraud, or an illusion cast by someone in the Group. Before vanishing, Atrox warns them about mockery, which leads Mary Brandy Manx to conclude that the illusion was at least partly a hoax perpetrated by Jane Chantal Ardri.

As the night goes on, the Group debates the sensation that their world, down to its atomic structures, is fundamentally unreal. They compare their existence to characters in a sprawling novel whose details have been poorly filled in. Then they begin exploring the villa’s vast, catacomb-like reference library, which miraculously manifests any desired work or wine. It also houses bodies, some decayed and some perfectly preserved. Seeing the need for advice, Hieronymous Talking-Crow awakens the spirit of Alexander the Great and speaks with him. Alexander offers a brief disquisition on the historical existence of “unreal” lands and dismisses Atrox Fabulinus as prolific but untalented, powerful but temperamental.

Throughout the chapter, Jane Chantal feels that something murderous is afoot. The Group also receives dire warnings from two local villagers, both tied to the Kabouter, Siog, and Little People material. They say that Atrox is furious, that there will be violent murder, and that an earthquake will bury the villa. Leo Parisi dismisses these predictions as the baseless superstitions of magical, non-human beings. The chapter ends deep in the night, with Jane Chantal Ardri isolated in a dark room and screaming in apparent terror, a reaction Mary Brandy Manx recognizes as a famous musical scene. Lafferty writes:

Where should one begin with Chapter Four? Perhaps with Mary Brandy Manx, the oldest member of the Group of Twelve. We have already learned that she is sixty, but that she still swims out over the Spanish Depths. There she submerges herself and hangs her linen-and-wool balloon dress on a knob of rock five fathoms down. At once, she becomes a sixteen-year-old sea goddess. When she goes ballooning more than a mile above the earth, she removes the same dress and weighs it down in the wicker gondola with five sandbags, lest it fill with air and sail away. Then she becomes a sixteen-year-old low-sky goddess. Lafferty describes the metamorphosis in the previous chapter:

Throughout the novel, Mary Brandy Manx is worth watching closely. She is one of the sharpest observers of what is happening, and Lafferty clearly cares for her. At times, she speaks for him. Later in the novel, when the Illacrove Giant says that she is the only one who can replace him, Mary Brandy agrees.

Of the seven named Giants in the novel—Atrox Fabulinus, Der Alpenriese, the Hsiang Giant, the Sanrio Giant, the Timbuktu Giant, the El-Khatar Giant, and the Illacrove Giant—the Illacrove Giant is the most mysterious, at least in name. What could Illacrove mean? Look it up, and one finds nothing in the usual sources. But the name can be worked out, and it connects to Mary Brandy Manx’s unique relation to what I have been calling the verticality of the novel’s imaginary cosmos. Mary Brandy speaks a variety of Gaelic, we are told, which ties her to the Irish world. Crove is a locality in County Donegal, and the word in Lafferty probably comes from the Gaelic craobh, pronounced “kroov,” meaning tree or grove. Illa is Catalan for “island.” So Illacrove means something like “tree island” or “grove island.” Mary Brandy Manx is herself tied to Catalan through the place where she becomes a sea goddess in the Spanish Depths. The first climax of the novel will take place in the chapter centered on her location, and she is, I think, clearly a figure into whom Lafferty places some of his own wisdom.

Several other points are worth noting. In the first appearance of Atrox Fabulinus, we see a version of the novel’s ending: a (half) forged projection. We also learn about the competing histories of the Laughing Christ, with disagreement over whether it was buried for 1,500 years or forged and buried for 15 days. That difference anticipates the time ratios that become important at the end of the novel, in the ninth day of the week, when its minutes stand in a strange relation to ordinary hours. We see that Solomon Izzersted is already anticipating how he can be separated from John Barkley Towntower. Prince Leonardo comes from the “Exterior Darkness,” the outer darkness mentioned three times in Matthew. There is also an allusion to Atrox as the least of the Giants in some meaningful sense, which recalls Matthew 25:40.

Hanging over the entire chapter is the puzzle that eighty percent of the world’s people are solid and apparently not dreaming. Mary Brandy Manx adds an important qualification to this, and it sounds very much like Lafferty himself. When the public reaction to the video-world-conference is discussed, the distinction between the masses and the elite Twelve is made clear:

On this point, the Sheryl Smith–Lafferty correspondence is interesting. Smith once argued that art is not meant to be didactic, and that only a small minority of people possess the emotional capacity to experience real tragedy. This seems close to the view held by most of the Group of Twelve, especially Jane Chantal, who has praised herself as a wonderful artist from Chapter 1 and will be the first of the Twelve to die. Lafferty rejected Smith’s position by countering that science fiction, of all genres, is inherently a literature of ideas, a form designed to convey concepts. From elsewhere in the nonfiction, we know that Lafferty thought that science fiction, when done well, was just Story with a capital "S," so didacticism can be taken transitively as something that, when done well, does not damage but enhances all story art. And on human emotion, the capacity for it, he told Smith, has the matter upside down.

Drawing on one of his private-vocabulary words, he speaks of the fellahin, whom he here defines as the ninety-seven percent of common humanity. They, he argues, possess the full emotional range and experience true tragedy in their daily lives. It is the weightless “elite” who lack authentic feeling. They need the “toy tragedy” of theatrical drama and opera as a substitute for real encounter. We might say that they need Gorgonius Pantera's Piano Castle to feel tragedy. It is a short step from this to what the airy Twelve. Mary Brandy Manx has taken the Lafferty position. And I would add that the final home of the Laughing Christ in the novel, once it is removed from Lecco, is to be found at that seat of art, Piano Castle in the Alps.

There are no doubt many ways to read the chapter, but I find it especially interesting as a metafictional reflection on Lafferty’s approach to character. His characters are often called one-dimensional, though that description is misleading. They are one-dimensional because he uses them to open onto other dimensions. That is why I think of them as closer to classical, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern types than to characters in the novelistic sense. If, for Lafferty, the novel had reached its end with the unstructuring of the world, then much of the older novelistic machinery had presumably reached its end as well: above all, the machinery that gave characters rich interiorities corresponding to the structured societies in which they lived. In “Monday at Sora,” thinness of character becomes the subject of the Group’s own anxiety, as though characters judged by a novelistic standard of realism looked at themselves and wondered why they had been sketched by Rabelais rather than Flaubert.

This appears in their suspicion that they are “no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that Atrox and perhaps some of his friends are writing.” The dread comes from their sense of insufficient detail. Solomon Izzersted and John Barkley Towntower feel that they are living in “somebody’s very sketchy and imperfect idea” of the United States. The joke is that Atrox, having died fifteen hundred or so years ago, would have had to imagine the place. As Hieronymous Talking-Crow suggests, this explains the problem. Atrox never visited places like Oklahoma, so he represents his American characters as “sketchy and silly,” lacking the richness he gives to his beloved Italy. Hieronymous laments this geographic disparity in the Giant’s imagination

On the metafictional plane, Lafferty is also commenting on the conversion of Rome and on the European historical imagination he found in writers such as Belloc. Something similar happens with Prince Leonardo the Great. Hilary Ardri observes that Leonardo appears to be a “sketchy and imperfect idea” of a panther, perhaps made by an author who has not seen a great cat in fifteen hundred years. Leonardo agrees. The joke is the old one about lions and other great cats in medieval manuscripts: creatures drawn by artists who knew the name, the tradition, and the symbolic value, but not the animal itself.

The Twelve’s intuition that they are poorly drafted fictions is later confirmed by the spirit of Alexander the Great. Alexander says that Atrox has a “second class” mind and entirely “lacks the talent for creating characters,” leaving his creatures to feel like nothing more than a poorly realized, “grubby lot.” The resurrected Alexander delivers this verdict on Atrox’s artistic powers:

How can one not read this as Lafferty joking about his own thousands of characters? In a healthy novelistic world, and in a structured world that supports novel writing, Alexander’s verdict would be damning. But Lafferty thinks that world is gone. If there are to be new characters for a new world, the old machinery of the novelist will have to change. The ghost of Alexander the Great offers good advice on this point: