10 East of Laughter, Chapter 5, "Tuesday at Gaire Castle"

Jon Nelson
6 hours ago
10 min read

I answer that, It must be said that every evil in some way has a cause. For evil is the absence of the good, which is natural and due to a thing. But that anything fail from its natural and due disposition can come only from some cause drawing it out of its proper disposition. For a heavy thing is not moved upwards except by some impelling force; nor does an agent fail in its action except from some impediment. But only good can be a cause; because nothing can be a cause except inasmuch as it is a being, and every being, as such, is good. —Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 49, Article 1

Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say, that Gravity was an errant scoundrel, and he would add,—of the most dangerous kind too,—because a sly one; and that he verily believed, more honest, well-meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one twelve-month, than by pocket-picking and shop-lifting in seven. In the naked temper which a merry heart discovered, he would say there was no danger,—but to itself:—whereas the very essence of gravity was design, and consequently deceit;—’twas a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that, with all its pretensions,—it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it,—viz. “A mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind;”—which definition of gravity, Yorick, with great imprudence, would say, deserved to be wrote in letters of gold. — Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. I, Chapter XI.

Chapter Five brings an interlude in which the reader sees Atrox at work and finds Lafferty speculating about the nature of reality. The situation facing the Group of Twelve becomes unambiguously theological. After Jane Chantal Ardri has been killed by a nine-foot feather, one of Lafferty’s grisliest deaths, and after the Villa Parisi at Sora has been destroyed by a landslide, the survivors narrowly escape.

Laughter-Lynn Casement briefly steps into the center of the narrative, and the Group uses an ancient, eighth-century world-terminal to transport itself to Dublin. Their destination is Gaire Castle, the ancestral home of Laughter-Lynn’s mother, Countess Maude Grogley. The castle is hidden behind a perimeter of ordinary shops and a local pub, and is cut off from the outside world by a narrow, continuously flowing moat that defies gravity. The joke is that gravity is both a natural law binding on bodies that have lost praeternatural grace as well as humorlessness:

. . . like true castle moats everywhere it flows round and round the castle, always running swiftly down hill. But always it returns to its starting place. Like everything else in the Castle it is now much encroached upon by things of the world and the town, and it is so narrow now that a good leaper could leap across it.

Inside Gaire Castle, the characters become acquainted with Countess Maude, who welcomes the Group and introduces them to the magical character of her home. The castle is populated by giggling bats, who will later be set against more sinister bats; by other strange beings; and by Atrox:

In this Castle, both the mice and the bats giggle a lot. The bats fly down the corridors in units of a legion, six thousand of them in each flight, supposedly. But sometimes in this castle we are undermanned and underbatted. Well, the little beasts are funny, and they make me giggle too.

The Group then speaks with the Morning Angel, an Ogre-Siog, and Saint Brandon. Brandon gives them his cosmological testimony: the true and real earth is a lens-shaped mass floating above a largely unreal spherical planet. He once traveled to its outer limit, extended a plank beyond the edge, and looked down:

Then I crawled out to the end of the plank and lay on my belly and gazed down into the void that is beyond the world. I could see the faint outline of the spherical world below me; but it was no more than wispy clouds and gouts ofmist.

While the Group listens to these philosophical discussions about reality and existence, Gorgonius Pantera programs the castle’s perpetual-player harps to perform a newly composed melody. Here, the reader sees that each action-progressive chapter will have its own musical theme.

Meanwhile, Hilary Ardri is broken by the death of his wife, Jane Chantal, and confronts the Giant Atrox Fabulinus, whom he blames for her murder. Later, we will learn that the murderer is in fact Prince Leopold, though it is worth noting that the end of the last chapter makes it seem as if Prince Leopold could not be the killer. Atrox, now wielding a nine-foot quill pen like the one found by the Parisis in the previous chapter, attempts to make amends by using his giant parchment to write Jane back into existence. She keeps coming into being and then flickering out again, appearing as a transparent, balloon-like iteration:

Several times, transparent figures in the shape of Jane Chantal had appeared near where Atrox was working. But then the bumbling giant would mutter “Not right, just not right” and he would jab his big pen angrily into the parchment, and each transparent Jane Chantal would collapse in turn like a punctured balloon.

As midnight approaches, the Group continues to debate. They discuss cosmic contagions and forged artifacts, then try to decide where they should go next

With his big quill pen, Atrox Fabulinus the Roman Rabelais wrote one word "Oosterend" on his parchment. And immediately all the loose membership of theGroup of Twelve was on its way to Oosterend.

“Oosterend” means “East End,” a name that keeps faith with the book’s governing condition of estrangement as being east of laughter

This is a fun chapter that touches some of the book’s heaviest themes. I want to consider three parables about the nature of reality and how I make sense of them: St. Brandon’s lens-shaped world, the discourse on gravity, and the Ogre-Siog’s inside-outside doctrine. Each is really a discussion of unreality. The chapter treats the question as good-natured talk, but it moves toward an answer that will be familiar to readers of Lafferty, especially those who know Past Master. Unreality is a privation, a thinning of being: the atoms of the earlier chapter gone mostly empty, as if Ouden were snacking on them. It is not a rival substance.

In my reading, St. Brandon’s lens thesis is participation metaphysics spatialized as geography. Beneath the lens, we are told, is another spherical earth, difficult to perceive but real enough to cast a shadow on the moon. It is “less than cloud-thin,” real only “for that part of it that corresponds to the lens-shaped world.” This is straight out of Lafferty’s toolkit: the old Platonic-Augustinian doctrine of degrees of being, literalized as a fable about a human space that only partly conforms to the measurable, scientific world-picture:

The spherical world (I learned it for certain then) is completely unreal, exceptfor that part of it that corresponds to the lens-shaped world. Oh, it will cast a spherical shadow on the moon and little tricks like that to give the impression that it is real. But its artifice is easy to see through, literally. It is not real.

St. Brendan says that the real is Holy Ireland.

I take the fable of the lens-shaped world to turn on a pun, just as the gravity discourse will. The lens is what allows one to see the local ambient, but St. Brendan wants to get beyond the lens. What he sees beneath it is the vapor that Qoheleth says the world is made of in Ecclesiastes. The moral lesson, if there is one, seems to be that a local circle of reality is where grace is met. Grace is experienced as a local event, and it can be withdrawn, so that lands “drop out of reality after being real for a few centuries.” Something like this must be the case with Flatland, which is not a lens, with its zero curvature. When a local reality is lost in a world-ending, people are left with fading collective memory:

But many parts of the spherical world have been intersected by the lens world as the compilation drifts and changes through the centuries. The unreal regions and the presently unreal people in them sometimes have legends and memories of the time when we were real.

This recalls Alexander the Great from the last chapter. But notice that Brandon speaks in two ways. On one hand, he speaks in terms of gradation: “the less real earth.” On the other, he speaks in terms of a binary: “completely unreal, except . . .” Past the lens lies privatio boni. St. Brandon’s ambient tapers from a hundred miles to a hundred feet, and then to the edge where the plank hangs over the void of hevel, the vanities of vanities, meaningless meaningless. There, contingent being can thin toward nothing. The metaphysics of a world built this way is held together by something like Aquinas’s doctrine of conservation as continuous creation, which is what Atrox is doing in the next room as an instrumental/secondary cause, though his time is coming to an end.

The Ogre-Siog then enters the chapter’s dialogue as something of a corrective voice. We are moving vertically in the chapter. His doctrine is that the inside of the world is real, while the outside is less than real. Reality is relocated inward:

There are two sides to the world, the inside and the outside . . . The inside isreal and the outside is less than real. Mostly we Sioga live on the inside orreal side of the world. We only come onto the outside of the world to steal apples or, in my case, to visit with the Countess Maude Grogley whom I love.

With his demurral from Brandon—“there is a slight difference in them, but not as much as he makes out”—the Ogre-Siog pulls Brandon’s discourse back toward genuine privation, as if the lenticular surface were goodness thinned rather than a second substance. Atrox, in the next room, is doing something that looks demiurgic; Lafferty therefore installs an anti-Gnostic guardrail. The inside is the locus of being.

This is something like the perspectival jolt in Dante’s Paradiso, Canto XXVIII. From below, we look up at the night sky and see stars and planets moving in vast concentric shells around us. From the vantage point of the Empyrean, however, the relation is reversed: what seems furthest is nearest, and the immense universe Dante has traversed becomes small, while the spiritual realm expands boundlessly around the bright point of light at its center. Or it is like moving through the mansions in The Interior Castle.

The Ogre-Siog’s discourse also picks up what the novel has already shown in its mythology of Little People underground. The Ogre reminds us that the sídhe live beneath the earth and come up to steal. From the vantage point of the lens, the Sioga seem to cross from the less-real into the real, but that, of course, gets the matter backward, like taking the lens out of one’s glasses to see better. The medieval reason for the Ogre’s crossing brings together appetite and cosmology, the world in which love moves the stars. The Ogre says that what drives him is appetite and love, motors in the Augustinian and Thomistic traditions. The fruit-theft is a clear wink at Confessions II, where Augustine steals pears not from need but from disordered desire. In this second fable, the traffic between inside and outside runs two ways: cupiditas or caritas.

Then comes the third fable, this one from the Morning Angel. Whereas the first two fables use the imagery of space to make their points, the third turns turns to the metaphysics of time. The vocabulary is scholastic. Gravity and death, the Angel says, are not natures but “accidents or illnesses . . . subject to easy cures.” What is is accidental to nature can be removed without destroying nature. Then we get the epidemiology of gravity, drawn from Romans 5:12. The contagion entered through “a very narrow corner of the universe”; then “it spread, it spread”; and now it has “peaked,” is “declining,” and will “disappear”:

Once it was of a very limited extent, a slight sickness, like a cold in the cosmic head, that afflicted only a very narrow corner of the universe. But then it spread, it spread, it was one of those quick contagions. It was like the three-day flu. And it was everywhere . . . But I believe that it has peaked and that it is now perhaps declining. I feel that it will decline rapidly and then disappear. So then, in all likelihood, it will prove to be much less than a three-day influenza.

A resurrection joke in a chapter about resurrecting Jane Chantal, this recapitulates Augustine’s pear theft while also recalling Eden, which is fitting for Gaire Castle and its connection to Eden. The matter is gravity and grace: heaviness as the law of fallen nature. More specifically, I think Lafferty is making something like the Thomistic endowment of the glorified body, agilitas, which Thomas describes as freedom from weight, and of which Dante receives a measure when he takes flight into the heavens. Lafferty writes, “Death is but a minor episode in life,” his definalization theme, but here, too, privation is restated because God did not make death. It will be the last enemy destroyed. What the Morning Angel describes is the hope of a world that will come fully into being only after the General Resurrection; but gravity may already be lessened wherever something like a Riant Giant, or a Laughing Christ, is recognized.

What Lafferty does next is typical of his fiction, but it can frustrate a reader. Having led us into a wild debate over reality and unreality, he then points out that this debate is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of his universe:

Reality-Unreality is only one of the eleven aspects of things, and we should notgive more than one-eleventh importance to it.

Yet the entire novel is all about it. Relatively unimportant? What does this mean? Toward the end of the novel, a minor character gives us a list of some of the other eleven, and that list will place the reality-unreality distinction in sharper perspective by showing the coordinates of unreality.

Jane Chantal seems to me the central fact of the chapter. Understanding how she relates to the three fables is obviously important, though I have not worked it out in a way that fully satisfies me. At present, I can say only that she functions as a test case: either she is real, or an unreal thing that can become real. Atrox’s attempt to vivify her, followed by his frustrated stabbing of the page with his quill, seems to enact the question. And it is probably good news that she comes back.

Finally, we have the mystery of how to bring any reality into being. Since “only good can be a cause,” we know that reality may be lost or restored, but how can it be manufactured out of its own absence? This may be why Atrox’s pen becomes so frustrated. The murder and the un-murders, the draft-by-draft Jane-figures, all belong to the good doing the causing, while unreality keeps running up against an absence. The demotion of the reality question to “one-eleventh importance” follows from the same principle. A privation cannot be the main thing about anything. What is real is the being a thing possesses, not the being it lacks. "If she was real before, then she will be real again. If she was not real before, then she will not be real afterwards."