11 East of Laughter: Chapter 6, "Wednesday at Oosterend"

Summer teaching—one class on economics and culture, another on Dante—together with the usual department grind, has eaten into the spare time I can carve out for Lafferty. Still, I want to jot down some thoughts about Chapter 6. We have arrived at the center of the novel, and Atrox dies his second death, if we can call it that.

After leaving Gaire Castle in Ireland, the Group of Twelve, along with the spares, find themselves standing near a beach at Oosterend. Jane Chantal died in a previous chapter, but the scene immediately gives us a surprise. In the middle of the night, a slightly translucent nine-year-old girl appears in the distance, near the shoreline, under moonlight and the cries of gulls. She approaches the Twelve, then she plays a guessing game until Hilary Ardri recognizes her as a younger, still-developing version of his wife, Jane Chantal, whom he believes Atrox murdered. Jane Chantal, now calling herself Jane Galatea, another of Lafferty's parthens*, confirms what we already know: Atrox has written her back into existence, though with slight modifications, including a larger mouth where the feather quill broke through her face. Jane Galatea explains her mouth:

After this, Laughter-Lynn Casement invites the Group to her big home for a Dutch breakfast, where they meet the ghost of her second drowned husband, Sea Captain Cornelius.

Captain Cornelius tells them about one of the marvels of the house at Oosterend: a miraculous Circular Stairway, built by Saint Joseph in exchange for a simple meal. Led by Laughter-Lynn, the Group descends this weird and winding staircase into the lower levels of the house, which extend beneath the ocean’s surface, reprising Lafferty’s Oceanic and all that comes with it. There the Twelve encounter the dead and the strange creatures of the sea: drowned humans, ocean-goblins, and sea-nymphs. These underwater beings complain about the roughness and obscurity of their environment, and they ask for a waterproof copy of a philosophical book by Atrox to help them understand reality. They, too, wonder whether they are unreal:

The Group then reascends the stairway to a level just below the ocean’s surface, where they meet three captains from Strange Cargoes Worldwide Shippers. Their ships bear the names of Columbus’s vessels. The captains and Gorgonius Pantera discuss how Prince Leonardo the Great, who sometimes shifts between human form and golden panther, used his intuition to find Caesar Oceano and give him a multibillion-dollar ocean-shipping empire. There is also an oceanic lottery that enriches people from time to time. The ships bring Laughter-Lynn an anonymous gift of seven steam calliopes, which provide the chapter’s musical number. Saint Joseph arrives and agrees to modify the calliopes so they can play automatically, while Gorgonius writes the intricate orchestration, “Wednesday at Oosterend.”

Finally, the Group climbs to the glass-enclosed Sky Studio at the very top of the staircase. There they discover Atrox Fabulinus, who is writing on a massive parchment roll with one of his nine-foot quills. Atrox explains that he is living in the year 453 as one of the seven Scribbling Giants. When one of the Twelve asks why the Giants do not create subwriters to ease the burden of writing the world’s scenarios, Atrox answers that he has already done something like this: he created historical authors such as Balzac and Charles Fort to help him document later centuries. Then Atrox falls asleep. The rest of the Group spends the evening painting and socializing while the calliopes play downstairs. At midnight, a colossal scream and a gurgling sound are heard from the Sky Studio:

The sound leads the Twelve to think that Atrox has murdered someone else with a Giant quill. This time, however, the murder victim will turn out to be Atrox himself.

If one image in the chapter dominates all the others, it is the stairway. For the first time in the novel, Lafferty makes the book’s preoccupation with verticality physical. He is clearly working with a version of the axis mundi, a familiar concept in comparative mythology and religion: the center of the world, or the cosmic axis joining earth, heaven, and the underworld. It is a bridge between realms, a vertical point of intersection where persons, spirits, and powers may travel and communicate. We find versions of it elsewhere in Lafferty, especially in great stories such as “Continued on Next Rock.”

At Oosterend, Lafferty gives us the dead at the bottom of the stairwell, in the drowned people beneath the sea; but he also fills the descent with the furniture of the unconscious. As one moves upward, one arrives at the studio, the site of authorship and the novel’s dominant image of a chief secondary cause. What seems clear to me is that any depiction of an axis mundi is also an account of how a belief system organizes its spatial and spiritual understanding of the universe. Lafferty’s stairway is oddly anthropomorphic, as if he were giving the reader a cosmological image of the author’s nervous system. Where does the image come from? From one of the better-known Catholic marvels in the United States: the staircase at Loretto.

In recent decades, historical sleuthing has supplied plausible natural explanations for the Loretto Chapel staircase and has tried to deflate the miracle legend. I am going to set that aside and give the legend as legend, since it is the version Lafferty draws on.

The wooden staircase at Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a beautifully crafted and unusual spiral stair built in the late nineteenth century. As the chapel neared completion in 1878, the Sisters of Loretto realized that there was no room for an ordinary staircase to the choir loft without sacrificing much of the seating below. Unsure what to do, they prayed a nine-day novena to St. Joseph, patron saint of carpenters. Here one should note that East of Laughter is itself a novena, taking place over nine days.

On the final day of the prayers, an unidentified man arrived. He carried only simple tools and offered to build the staircase. The novel plays with this tradition in its own St. Joseph with two glass planes and three nails. According to the legend, the mysterious carpenter worked for several months and built a freestanding spiral staircase that makes two complete 360-degree turns, without a central supporting column and without metal nails. He used wooden pegs instead. Once the work was finished, he vanished without collecting payment or revealing his name. The Sisters, and later generations of believers, concluded that the craftsman was St. Joseph himself, answering their prayers. Lafferty flags the connection through Captain Cornelius:

By drawing on the Loretto legend, though he largely effaces its traces so that non-Catholic readers are unlikely to know what is happening, Lafferty Christianizes the novel’s axis mundi.

Perhaps the other most important element in the chapter is that Atrox dies at the novel's dead center. His scream fills the lacuna from the first half of the book into the second, raising the question of whether the novel has entered a narratological region where the world scenario has not yet been written. If so, then the movement beyond Atrox is also a movement into a new kind of freedom for the characters.

It is also telling that Lafferty gives us, just before this passage, a wonderful set piece about three of his major influences: Rabelais, Balzac, and Fort. In moving beyond Atrox, the reader also moves beyond those writers into something wholly Lafferty’s.

Each of these writers contributed something powerful to Lafferty’s imaginative universe. Atrox Fabulinus’s claims about them operate on a meta-authorial level. Atrox says that François Rabelais, Honoré de Balzac, and Charles Fort are his fictional constructs, created to enrich the world’s timeline. He assigned Rabelais to sixteenth-century France, but the Rabelais character wrote backward in time about Atrox’s own family of Giants instead of documenting his appointed era. This is Rabelias’s great genealogy of giant-kind. It is sometimes overlooked that Rabelais’s Giants are an Old Testament parody, and that the early chapters of Pantagruel seem to take place in something like the Old Testamental age. It is as though the axis mundi in the Chapter 6 is being given a literary genealogy. After the non-novelistic world of Rabelais comes the novelistic world of realism, embodied in Balzac's documentation of nineteenth-century Paris. Then, just as Lafferty thought the novel had ended because the world had become unstructured, Atrox generates the unstructured Charles Fort in twentieth-century America to conceptualize the future heavens. Atrox says:

This has a parallel in Lafferty’s own career. In the 1970s especially, Fort became one of the writers through whom Lafferty imagined a way past the constraints of both realism and conventionalized science fiction. I’ve written about this trajectory several times. Stories such as “Nor Limestone Islands” show Lafferty drawing directly on Fort’s catalog of anomalous, “damned” facts. In other words, the genealogy Atrox gives for the world-scenario is also the literary genealogy Lafferty gives himself as artist: Rabelais, Balzac, and Fort become the stages by which he accounts for his own attempt to think beyond the novel and make worlds.

* Jane Chantal has become an erotically charged parthenic figure, and Lafferty shows this by calling her Galatea. The relevant Galatea comes from the Pygmalion myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, now best known to many readers through Shaw’s Pygmalion and its musical heir, My Fair Lady. The name Galatea is modern. It enters the tradition through Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion, where the statue becomes “Galathée,” the milk-white woman brought into life by desire, art, and divine concession. Lafferty is playing several ideas at once: Jane Chantal as the artist who becomes the art object; Atrox as demiurge; and Hilary’s desire to have Jane restored. But the wish is granted in a fashion that fits into Lafferty’s complicated erotics. Jane returns as a nine-year-old girl, who will, admittedly, grow older over the coming chapters.