"There is no way that I myself can be hurt. I am beyond that. I can be killed, but I cannot be hurt. I have a 'Home Free' certificate. And how does one get such a thing? One reaches out the hand, and it is given. If you don't have such a ‘Home Free’ entitlement, it is only because you didn't hold out your hand for it. People of my governorship, if I were to give you hard sayings you would try to figure them out and perhaps fulfill them. Because I give you easy sayings, which happen at the same time to be true, you say, 'There is something wrong with that. It cannot be that easy. Give us something hard.' People, see that scarp of all-sized rocks there that have tumbled down that cliff. Select rocks there and bite on them if you want something hard. But take my sayings because they are true and they are easy." By such tidbits and by his inimitable style, Lafferty holds the attention: but no really satisfying shape emerges from the text. What is actually going on in his Fourth Mansions, in The Devil is Dead, in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney, gains power through never being too clearly articulated but growing out of oblique touches seen from the corner of the eye. In Aurelia it seems either that the surface distractions have proliferated to the extent of obscuring the deeps, or that—a reluctant hypothesis—there is nothing much happening beneath that clever surface at all. — Review, David Langford (1982) Gregorio Montejo does something funny in his essay on Aurelia and Thomism. He does the classic academic "let the dumb thing hang on the page" move by quoting Langford as calling Aurelia’s homilies "flatulent," and shows that Langford seems to lack even the most rudimentary awareness that Lafferty is doing something with Thomism. Why does Montejo do it? Farty. I, too, despise it. It is untutored, pun intended. Montejo was provoked by gussed-up idiocy that Aurelia culminates in a series of homiletic sharts. Maybe that is unfair to Langford: Langford is smart and obviously a decent writer. He can certainly explain the hell out of the profundities of Harry Potter. But he is interpretively instructive. Who knows what he knew about Aristotle or Thomism in 1982? But it was still a dumb thing for David Langford to say, and, make no mistake, there are degrees of dumb. He just happened to be the one guy saying anything, really. People who write well can dress up dumb exceedingly well. On the other hand, Langford is undoubtedly right about how many people will experience Aurelia: namely, those who do not live within a cave of resonance where Scripture is heard in odd places. The inventive surface will seem to have proliferated to the point of obscuring the depths, an impenetrable algal bloom, when in fact it is simply something Lafferty knew anyone who attended daily Mass would recognize. After all, if one goes to Mass, one passes through all of it over the course of the lectionary cycle. The dangerous stupidity in Langford’s review, the one that will block you from understanding Aurelia as a book, is in the phrase "surface distractions." Speedster critics like David Langford are going to get the right elbow from the real Lafferty. Langford implies that the novel wants to shore up meaning additively from below, when in Aurelia, the locus of meaning comes from above, from the real Shining World that Aurelia's far smaller Shining World parodies. Langford seems to have thought that if you dove deep enough, you might find something, but he himself chose to stay in the surf zone of Gaea. So he ends with his reluctant hypothesis, one horn of a dilemma. Pick one: distracting detail or shallowness. No sense of the tertium quid. Aurelia teaches the reader to stop decoding Lafferty downward and start receiving Lafferty upward. It is his most unapologetically Christian novel. Aurelia, like "Ishmael into the Barrens," is a different kind of Lafferty work: postfigural + amnesiac, apocalyptic, symbolic, intertextual, and comic-grotesque. Its Thomistic homilies are mediated through Farrell and insufficient by themselves. Langford's review can be found here. My favorite part of it: Meanwhile, the nastiest characters of all have for their symbol the balanced yin-yang, concretized as a murderous double-bladed yo-yo; the emblem of complementarity is finally used to polish off nice Aurelia and her complement. Presumably Lafferty is implying that one should be absolute for black or white, and never embrace a compromise (a similar theme emerges early in G. K. Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross, and Lafferty is a Chesterton fan). Even this much is rather difficult to extract from a welter of symbology concerning horned and antlered men, mysteriously appearing primitive creatures, at least one orthodox Christian miracle, etc. Let it hang there. The presumption of “presumably.” Zero awareness of grace or how it works in the novel. Langford's post-Christian cognition grinds against a book that takes post-Christian cognition as one of its comedic themes. (That term, post-Christian, is ironic. From a traditional Catholic point of view, there are pagans, heathens, Jews, Muslims, unbelievers, heretics, schismatics, apostates, and the lapsed. But there are no “post-Christians,” because Christianity is not a phase of consciousness one graduates beyond. Elevation will come from within Christian fulfillment, as it does in Fourth Mansions, The Elliptical Grave, and in so many of the other Lafferty books about the leap.) If someone asked me what Aurelia is about, I would say the same thing I have been saying all along in this series of posts: it is about the seven-day visitation of a girl from a planet of Shining People. She descends onto a fallen world and, without knowing it, postfigures the life of Christ, who has already come and has largely been forgotten. Planet X, her destination, is a disguised version of a terribly amnestic Flatland. If you don’t know old words such as Michal, Achen, and Caiaphas, you live there. All part of Lafferty’s point. It isn’t his fault that people forgot the grammar of Revelation. At first, the novel seems to suggest that Aurelia’s own world will be the source of her final strength. It is not. The Shining World is not the world where the Compensation occurred. The novel opens in a double channel, apocalypse and nativity, with the order reversed, and the apocalyptic is as important as the nativity. Thus I would pass along my two favorite formulations of apocalypse, not simply as a theme, but as a mode that acts upon the reader, because this is what Lafferty is trying to awaken by displacing Earth history: For [St. John] all these incredible wonders are the inner meaning or, more accurately, the inner form of everything that is happening now. Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself. and What is symbolized [in Christian apocalypse] as the destruction of the order of nature is the destruction of the way of seeing that order that keeps man confined to the world of time and history as we know them. This destruction is what the Scripture is intended to achieve. When Lafferty destroys a world order in a book—his favorite way of ending a novel—he is out to create “a way of seeing that order that keeps it confined to the world of time and history as we know them.” At the level of inner form, Aurelia is a partially realized eschatology. Informed people will grasp this. The last things promised by God—judgment, salvation, the kingdom, eternal life—are not merely future events. They have already begun in Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, and gift of the Spirit. A Catholic can affirm this in a qualified sense: eternal life begins now through communion with Christ, especially in faith, charity, and the sacraments. But a Catholic like Lafferty would never accept a realized eschatology that erases the future consummation of history. Christ will come again. The dead will rise. Judgment will be final. Creation will be fully renewed. The Catholic position is therefore an already-but-not-yet eschatology. The kingdom is present in Christ and in the Church, but it remains incomplete until God brings all things to fulfillment. This is what Aurelia means when she says, “Can these things be? Yes, they can. Where and when? Right here and right now. These are the things that happen and exist every day in the real world. And here and now we are at least in the ante-room of the real world. The right key that opens the door in the wall is called on one side of it ‘Grace’ and on the other side of it ‘Love a-burning.’ It opens the door even if you use it upside down. In one hour, I will go from one room of this incredibly fair land to a larger room of it.” That seems more important to me, in relation to Aurelia, than, for instance, knowing the Camiroi stories themselves. Lafferty treats the Camiroi precursor material much as he treats the Institute stories in Arrive at Easterwine: the Institute is a point of radical departure. His interest lies elsewhere. Aurelia does something similar with Camiroi. So while it is useful to know that Camiroi is the planet that could not choose the highest thing—and while that idea was as much one of Lafferty’s starting points for the plot as the tenth-grade assignment—you do not get Aurelia out of the Camiroi stories. First, Aurelia lands and is found by Rex Golightly, the tycoon who becomes her guardian. This introduces the magi motif. By the time the reader meets the Floating World people, the nativity phase of the novel is over. Before this, the reader is told that the children of Light are the race Aurelia comes from, and here Lafferty uses his old trick, counterfiguration, playing with the idea in Daniel 12:3: those who shine as the brightness of the firmament. The first instructions or admonitions are to remember that you are of the "Shining People" and will not really need instructions. What you do will be, by definition, right... But that sixteen-year-old instructor hadn't known Aurelia very well. What if one of the 'Shining People' suffered a dim-out? What if blind destruction rises up and gobbles one up completely? Coruscating Contignations! It's all coming apart. Look out! Aurelia made a bad landing. The Dark Counterpart, Cousin Clootie, follows Aurelia onto the planet within minutes of her arrival. The planet, we are eventually meant to assume, is Anti-Earth, or Gaea. Clootie is sent to govern in shadow as Aurelia governs in light. As he explains to the bodyguard, their shadow-mission operates strictly beneath the “bright distraction”: "Why did you follow her here?" "To govern here. We do the meaningful governing. We slip in under the bright distraction of the 'Shining People' and do the work that they think they are doing." This sets up the book’s pattern of doubling. Aurelia represents the bright, consoling side of Christianity; Cousin Clootie postfigures its harder side: divine hiddenness, judgment, and purgation. He belongs to the line that runs from Psalm 18:11—“He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies”—to Revelation 3:16: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of My mouth.” It is made comical because Cousin Clootie is such a broody teen, but make no mistake: he is there to remind one of the consuming fire of judgment, the fire that burns Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10:1–2, and the fire Elijah calls down on the captains and men sent by King Ahaziah, and that Clootie uses to threaten Aurelia's bodyguard Julio Cordovan, who is also Michael Straightstreet, who, in turn, postfigures St. Michael, the archangel warrior who knows that God "will make all your paths straight" and alludes to verses such as Isaiah 40:3: A voice cries, 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God." The events of the four days leading to the triduum can be broken out in different ways, but it is useful to have them in mind as plot beats: During these days, Forcedmarch recognizes Aurelia as the Beatrician Moment. Aurelia asks who his Beatrice is; he deflects, assuming it's the one she had herself just mentioned; she corrects him. It is one of the most important exchanges in the book: "You are the 'Beatrician Moment,' " Forcedmarch said in admiration . . "Who is the Beatrice that you talk about here, I want to know that?" she said. "I thought it was the same one you mentioned, Aurelia." "There are several of them. Tell me what world this one is and I might tell you about the Beatrices of this world." This is, of course, the historical Bice Portinari, the donna angelicata of the dolce stil novo, the Marian mediatrix. She stands in for divine grace, ultimate truth, and spiritual salvation. Aurelia is postfigured inside it. Aurelia's spacesuit should be blue, not red. One of the more puzzling aspects of the novel is the fish-prophet—speaking, on its second appearance, through what may be Rex's own ego-fragment in the river. On the first occasion, by the lake, the fish delivers the countdown, a Lafferty joke about time and eschatology: forever can't come first or last: "Then she will live forever, or for three days, whichever comes first," a second fish told tall Rex. "That's as near to it as we can come." In the conversation recalling this prophecy on the second day morning, the fish, with all of its obvious Christian associations, confirms that Aurelia will die the next night. By then, the peripateticus is already underway (it had begun the previous morning with Aurelia's leap from the tower), and what organizes the three days is the twelve-meal grid (Ientaculum, Prandium, Merenda, Cena). It is where one gets the Thomistic homilies. The writ-in-water scene comes later. What seems to be a medium of evanescence (water, grass, flesh, etc.) becomes the permanent inscription in the Book of Life: "Fish!" Rex Golightly commanded in a strange voice. "Write this on the water! Preserve her name. Her name is Aurelia. Write those words! Write them now!" The fish wrote the words on the water. And the words did not fade . . . They buried her there without a grave-stone. Her only monument was certain unfading words on water: Preserve her Name. Her Name is Aurelia. During the peripateticus, Aurelia mentions the Compensation doctrine at Herr Boch's table. Aurelia is at the largest scale about postfiguring the Compesnation. Aurelia asks if they are in the final age, and Boch confirms the planet's unique theological status, and we learn that we are in St. Augustine's sixth age: "My question," Aurelia said, "and I wouldn't know how to ask it of anyone else, is what age of the present world are we in here? I assumed that we were in the sixth and final age, but are we? Has the Compensation been made yet or not?" "This is the World of the Compensation, Aurelia," Herr Boch said. "It is the only such world. Yes, the Compensation has been made." Of course, the Compensation is the Atonement. We aren't told what the Compensation was or is, but it gathers a lot of language around the Crucifixion without crassly bringing in the image of Passion Week: Anselm's satisfactio, Aquinas's satisfactio superabundans, and Tyndale's at-one-ment or, really, unity. On the heels of this, we get the yin-yang false balance, a false unity, which is named with the same words, but Aurelia rejects it. The third day of the peripateticus is the death-day. Spencer-Trencher, who is said to be a great philosopher in the novel, brings Aurelia a bowl of Slowpoke Snails. The Slowpoke Snails are one of the weirdest things in the book. Elsewhere in the novel, they are connected to the Media-Extinction Arm's slow-poison weapon. Miraculously, the bowl does not empty. Aurelia ladles the snails to all five thousand of her regular entourage and to many irregulars. She dumps the leftovers in the river, and the fish rose to them gratefully, Lafferty writes. We learn that assassins were going to use Slowpoke Snails to poison Aurelia, but postfiguration is used to make a didactic point: the murder-attempt becomes fish food. In that same scene, Spencer-Trencher delivers the world's diagnosis. He says an alliance was formed between Aurelia and the people of Gaea. It is the sickness of a fallen environment rejecting its cure: "You die of a sickness, fair-haired Aurelia," he said. "It is the same sickness that a roebuck dies of when the lion breaks its neck and severs its throat . . . Yours is a type of 'seven-day sickness.' For you, it might be called a 'world sickness,' for you really do not belong to this world . . . An allergy is set up between you and this local or narrow human race. It rejects you out of its blood stream." This is a flipped version of the earth sickness that sometimes shows up in Lafferty, most memorably in The Reefs of Earth, where it affects the Dulantys. In The Reefs of Earth, in other words, sickness says, "There is something wrong with this environment." In Aurelia, the environment, which is actually sick, rejects the postfigured gospel. The next day, after Aurelia's death, Doctor Thorgrimson develops a theory about it all in Wide Awake, the Morning Medical Journal. This rejection of the Word is likened to an antibody response: This world responded to the children by classifying them anaphylaxically as 'intruders' and by secreting a murderous toxin against them as 'intruders.' The response is so complex as almost to go beyond the province of the medical . . . The question is whether a mucous membrane is responsible for its reaction against an alien pollen or irritant. Here is the most dramatic, final variant in the novel of a theme that gets repeated many times in the book on smaller scales, the gospel-rejection doctrine of John 1:11—He came unto his own, and his own received him not—but it has been crossed with Mark 12's wicked husbandmen, Matthew 23's ye would not, and Romans 8's enmity-against-God. Rejection of the Word is an anaphylactic response, a mucosal membrane response, and an antibody response, but that is Lafferty using counterfiguration. What Gaea's immune system rejects is medicine. Rejection is described as drug-induced anaphylaxis. Thorgrimson is, in the novel, a marginal but sympathetic figure who hopes the world can be taught to modify its reaction. There is probably a pun here because Thorgrimson's name refers to the son of a god and fits into the typological network. At one point, Aurelia's bodyguard relays the warning of Aurelia's spaceship-monkey (the mechano-organo) that she can only be killed by a worm with a pistol, and that she will have to cooperate by bending low—a third oracle alongside the fish and the sibyl: The monkey from the ship has advised me that there is such a shot . . . But it must originate from so low a level that only a worm could shoot it. And you must cooperate with that worm also, to shield it from the protection of the space ship with your own body. That means that you would have to bend low over the worm. Aurelia, if you see a worm in the grass who is armed with a pistol, do not lower your breast . . . It comes to a head when Aurelia sees the worm-with-pistol image painted on the murder weapon, the double dart (echoling Ephesians 6:26's "quench all the fiery darts of the wicked"), without recognizing it in time as her own death. Here we are seeing, in the worm with the pistol, one of the more difficult images in the book, a compression of many traditions, but four Christological traditions are surely important: the patristic Christological reading of Psalm 22 (Christ-as-worm, I am a worm, and no man), the worm-redeemed of Isaiah 41, the suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, and the consent of Philippians 2 and John 10. That, in addition to all the figuration around the worm as a symbol of death. The cooperation requirement might be called the consent doctrine: no man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. Does Aurelia really do this, or is it taken from her? The question remains ambiguous, and I think only something like a category of postfiguration can keep it sufficiently open: she is falling into the fulfilled antitype of Christ, innocently and sillily, and her last words about it all being silly are as Scottish as Cousin Clootie’s name—silly originally means innocent. In the chaos of the climax, the physical act of bending low gets her killed: "Don't anybody whistle!" the stentorian voice of the bodyguard Marshal-Julio rang over the multitude. But it rang a moment too late . . . But Aurelia, bending low over Cousin Clootie, was in the way of its withdrawal, and in the way of the protective shafts from both the space ships. The dart tried to withdraw. And it skewered out of the chest of Cousin Clootie and into the breast of Aurelia. What has Aurelia done in bending low and dying? Maybe that is Christ accepting the cup; maybe it both is and is not. Those who want to read Aurelia as a simple Christ figure will emphasize the bending low, while those who see the comedy of it are better served, I think, by seeing it as postfiguration: a figure that brings together typology, quotation, allusion, and echo. "Humans are magic creatures, with something very much the matter with them. All nature cries out with apprehension, 'There is something the matter with the People.' It is true. There is a crippling that had already taken place before any of us came here. This old destruction of part of us does not belong to our original human nature, but now it is part of our second human nature."

“We already had the World of Fact. Oh, the poor, dingy, hopeless, small-minded World of Fact! It didn’t deserve much, but it deserved at least to have its nakedness clothed with metaphor and mythology. The World of Computers is bearable. The old World of Fact was ceasing to be. “Even the Quest for Reality of the talented but diminishing Group of Twelve has now changed (without their knowing it) into the Quest for Acceptable World Metaphor.” East of Laughter buries the lede, so I want to say something about that. The lede is the nature of reality, which for Lafferty is Christological. Hence the importance of Lafferty’s strangest and perhaps most challenging creation, the Laughing Christ, the seemingly center of his worldview and his most radical break with the Catholic tradition. For most Christians the idea of the Laughing Christ is uncanny. None of the major theories of humor can accommodate it. Lafferty first introduced the Laughing Christ in his novel The Fall of Rome, which he wrote in the early 1960s, although it wasn’t published until the early 1970s. There, the "laughing Christ" is an extraordinarily profound and fulfilled image originally carved by Creophylus. And who is this Creophylus? Well, Lafferty never tells us. There is just the name. Immediately problems arise because the historical Creophylus of Samos was a legendary poet, said to have been a pupil of Homer. He is associated with a lost epic, the Capture of Oechalia. This makes the known Creophylus flagrantly anachronistic and pre-Christian. The legendary figure was a poet, not a sculptor. In the Creophylus legend, the idea for the epic poem, and in some versions actual work itself, had been given to Creophylus by Homer as a sign of friendship. In The Fall of Rome, whoever Cerophylus is, his depiction of Christ plays an important narrative role. It is embraced by the clever Greek-Goth Singerich, who sees it as representing a much truer Christ than the solemn figure revered by the Puritans and Manichees. It is a hopeful image that points beyond a Rome that has exhausted itself. In creating it, Lafferty clearly drew on Chesterton for inspiration, just as he did for the entire theme of The Fall of Rome, which takes Chesterton’sThe Ballad of the White Horse as one of its launching points. The following lines should be known by every Lafferty fan because of the weight Lafferty gave them and because they are present in every one of his world endings. Christianity, in other words, is not Rome. These lines about the world having ended many times before are the source of so much of Lafferty that it is remarkable that no one has emphasized them. In The Fall of Rome, the Laughing Christ is specifically linked to a latent Gothic inclination toward grotesque playfulness and unruly humor Lafferty likes, something uncanny and yet regenerative. We learn that this Gothic trait blossoms centuries later when French cathedral builders craft "another Laughing Christ" by a Gothic hand. Think of all the gargoyle love in both Chesterton and Lafferty. Chesterton wrote a poem where Christ laughs alone, away from all observation, but Lafferty wants the reader to see the laughing face of Christ. In East of Laughter, Atrox dies his second death, and we know that as he dies, so finally dies the fifth century, which makes East of Laughter an offshoot of The Fall of Rome: “Oh, it is a memorial. The Fifth Century is finally over with. The last man who was still living in the Fifth Century is dead now, so that era is finally finished. I wonder whether any other century can now dispute the twentieth its reality?” That was Gorgonius giving those words. East of Laughter, one could say, buries The Fall of Rome. Rome has finally fallen completely. The age of the great cathedrals, in which the Laughing Christ reappears in The Fall of Rome, belongs to the holiness of the thirteenth century, which Lafferty calls in East of Laughter the holiest of all centuries. It is the one century untouched by the strangulation sickness that is starving the world of input: “The Thirteenth, the Holiest of Centuries, was spared the apprehensive sickness,” Father said. “But Friday night, the fifth night, is usually the worst for the victims. That is the night of the nightmares, of the deliriums, and of the deaths.” In East of Laughter Lafferty rewrites this. At one point, Denis Lollardy says that the Laughing Christ is his greatest "creative forgery," a piece he sculpted from fine travertine marble with no physical original, which he then buried for 15 months to give it an authentic patina of age. Atrox Fabulinus will reject this and then vehemently accuse Denis of theft. We hear the cogs turning as one aeon leads to another. In fact, Atrox goes further. He says that the artifact is not a statue at all, but rather the living Christ himself "in the train of his second sepulture," whom Atrox had buried in the Italian earth to one day rise out of the ground and renew the world: “Denis Lollardy, besides you being a common forger, you are an uncommon thief. You stole from me the thing I most prized in my life, the thing that has authorized my strange continued life. That was the statue or figure of eidolon The Laughing Christ. Well, it has been mistaken for a statue or an eidolon, but I believe that it is the Christ himself in the train of his second sepulture. I buried him, as he had instructed me to do, in the ground of Italy. And after three quinque-centums of years he was to rise out of that ground again and renew the world.” As the thing that ties the old top scribbling giant, Atrox, to his replacement, Denis (complicated by the rotation principle in the novel), no matter what one makes of it, the Laughing Christ is deeply important. Unless one struggles with it, the novel will refuse to disclose its inciting meaning: how does the Laughing Christ span all aeons. The Laughing Christ drives what is happening as the World of Fact ends and the Quest for Acceptable World Metaphor begins. We are told that it is a thing of overwhelming joy and profound beauty: Well, this was the most pleasant piece of statuary that any of them had ever seen, slightly larger than life-sized, and wrapped in the colored cleanliness of its own laughter. It can work genuine miracles, and this terrifies Denis, who is somewhat like Thomas Moore as depicted by Lafferty in Past Master: often a borderline believer. The Laughing Christ can cure the melancholy of anyone who gazes upon it, and miraculously changes a Roman lady's horrible nose into a feature of immense joy and pleasure: Thunderation! The statue did work genuine miracles. And it terrified one man. Denis Lollardy had never been a pious man. He had only been a borderline believing man. But he knew miracles when he saw them, and he was terrified (Oh, but there was joy mixed with the terror also) by the miracles worked by the Laughing Christ that he himself had carved. It will also have an interesting connection to Saint Faunus, who, it turns out, inhabits it in Lollardy’s garden like a "Superman telephone booth to change into his Superman costume," a point that I’ll get into when touching on the chapter where it appears. Just note that this trope is the one finds in Milton’s great nativity ode with the death of the oracles. At the center of the whole mystery of the Laughing Christ in East of Laughter is a stubborn contradiction. Atrox says he buried the real Jesus Christ in the ground of Italy fifteen hundred years ago, at Christ's own instruction, and that Christ was to rise from that ground in 1998 and renew the world. That is the promise of the parousia. The future has been botched, from Atrox’s perspective, but it is the persoective of the fading old regime, and it is one sided. Denis says the figure unearthed at Lecco in 1998 is his own forgery, carved from travertine in 1996 and buried briefly to age it. He explains to Atrox exactly how this paradox came to be: “No, Atrox, you are wrong,” Denis Lollardy said firmly. “You did not bury him in the ground, you buried him in your mind. And I found him there, for all of us can raid into your mind as you can raid into ours. And then I carved him out of fine travertine marble. He was one of my greatest forgeries, forgeries for which there was no physical original.” The two accounts look incompatible, but are they? It is perhaps the deepest mystery in the book, and as I said the lede has been buried. We will want to keep an eye on it as we proceed through the novel.

My working theory is that the best anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s line that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even says that “the year is uncertain.” But then he does something odd: he gives the day of the week, which creates several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, so he would have remembered what he was doing that day. In the plausible postwar range, that date fell on a Friday in three years: 1947, 1952, and 1958. The year being 1952 fits with what Archipelago establishes about Finnegan's boozing. The day-of-week detail survives cross-checking, and when set beside the sister novel’s major fixed dates—February 1943, May 1946, and summer 1950—it triangulates the sailing of the Brunhilde, and therefore Finnegan’s epic blackout, to Friday, November 7, 1952. November 7, of course, recurs throughout Lafferty’s work. He dated his retirement as a writer from his seventieth birthday in 1984. Flatland is also tied to the date: if the Tuesday on which it arrives falls on November 8, 1960, as Barnaby Sheen notes in In a Green Tree. Lafferty’s birthday fell on a Monday that year. What set me thinking about this was an odd note in Lafferty’s papers. He writes: “The double novel, printed in alternate lines of black and orange, each set to be read separately but with sub-[?] in-feed from the other. In a way, Archipelago and The Devil Is Dead could be printed this way.” What would such a double novel look like? In the case of November 7, perhaps something like this:

Giulio Romano, The Fall of the Giants, 1532–1534. Fresco, Sala dei Giganti, Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy. "No, Atrox, you are wrong," Denis Lollardy said firmly. "You did not bury him in the ground, you buried him in your mind. And I found him there, for all of us can raid into your mind as you can raid into ours. And then I carved him out of fine travertine marble. He was one of my greatest forgeries, forgeries for which there was no physical original. Then I buried my magnificent statue in the ground to age it, and afterwards I dug it up again." "It has been said, by Samuel Butler, that although God cannot alter the past, historians can. So the historians' is no mean calling." In Lafferty’s papers, there is a handwritten note in which he says that fake evidence often appears before real evidence. He gives the example of Galileo, whom Lafferty believed had faked evidence for the heliocentric model of the universe. The immediate context is speculation about Darwin, but the idea is relevant to East of Laughter. Ask someone what the book is about, and the answer will usually be, it is somehow about the Scribbling Giants. That is the potted version of the plot. Nothing I have found goes beyond it. Not for novices, one Lafferty authority says. Certainly, the book is about the Giants, but in thinking about how it is about the Giants, the most important factor is forgery: what forgery means, and what one does with the epistemology of forgery inside a Christian cosmos, and that within a World of Record that is full of forgery. Before going through the chapters of East of Laughter, it makes sense to clarify what forgery is doing, because it colors almost every page. You live a forged life. I live one. This is the first of a two-part lead-up to the chapter readings. In this post, I want to unpack why forgery is so complicated in the book. In the next, I will turn to the central act of forgery, the Laughing Christ, and propose a way of understanding it. At the end of the post is my glossary for the novel, which should be useful if you choose to go deep into it. It is as interpretively neutral as I could make it while stuffing it full of weird oddments. At one point in East of Laughter, the question arises whether Atrox Fabulinus forged the entire existence of Charlemagne and the Carolingians. Lafferty came up with this conceit about a decade before someone in the real world argued for it in earnest, in what came to be known as the Phantom Time theory. In the novel, it is an amusing aside about Atrox, but it has a serious edge because Lafferty believed that the twentieth century itself was a forgery. How can you ever trust your history books? In his view, not only had the Holocaust not happened, but the evidence for it had been manufactured. This is one reason his Holocaust denial matters so much for understanding Lafferty, for understanding his theory of history, which one finds running through his fiction, not just in Three Armageddons, which I read as a Holocaust denial novel. From the first page of East of Laughter, the reader is confronted with the problem of a dreaming or unreal world. Forged history and unreal reality are not separate problems in the novel. They are part of the same historical crisis. By the end of the book, Denis Lollardy, the master forger, assumes the office of head Giant and initiates a new period of history in which forgery has a greater role. Presumably, it will be a future that can live with forgery in a new way. A new aeon. Throughout the novel, Lafferty imagines forgery as a property of the world, giving us layer upon layer of the fake and the real. The diagram above makes this visible by showing the range of scales on which forgery appears. I think it is helpful to keep them separate. There is so much forgery in the book that it becomes easier to read once one slows down and asks what, exactly, is being forged in each instance, and how the forged thing stands in relation to the real. At times, it is an imaginary relation. Lafferty plays with so many permutations of the idea that it helps to list the many forms that forgery takes, culminating in the central question East of Laughter poses to the reader: Is the Laughing Christ, who also appears in The Fall of Rome and the Coscuin books, a forgery? And if he is, does that mean he is removed from the authentically Christological? How could one sort through a thoroughly forged history to arrive at Christ? What if one only had Atrox’s Armenian infancy gospel? For a Catholic, it is very Kierkegaardian. East of Laughter also has an unusual internal shape: two tours, followed by a coda of days out of count. The first tour shows what I mean when I say that Lafferty makes few concessions to the reader. He drops in his twelve main characters, numbers them, and spends the first three chapters giving us a tour of the person as person. He sets them down as rarefied morsels. Get their measure, these twelve. Learn these extraordinary persons, reader. You will be enriched. This is not how novels are supposed to work. Then, beginning with Chapter Four, “Monday at Sora,” he sends the reader on a madcap scrambling second tour, this time a tour of places, each associated with a character (or two). The novel thus, roughly, moves from persons to places, and then toward a central act of thwarted forgery: the trickster Jew Solomon Izzersted’s attempt to maniplulate his way into the top office of head Scribbling Giant, demiurge of history. The others see through the scheme. Solomon is blocked, and he ends not as the first of the Giants but as the least of the seven, content, or nearly content, with his billions of dollars. The final words of the book are a business card. At the end of East of Laughter, Lafferty leaves the case of the Laughing Christ for the reader to decide.

“Yes. All of you are marooned East of Reality, and you are questing to find your way back to Reality. So you have come to the Castle originally named East of Laughter though now the name has generated simply to Gaire or Laughter. And yet we are still somewhat to the East of the thing itself.” JANUS ’Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new. CHORUS OF ALL All, all of a piece throughout; Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue. ’Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new. In East of Laughter, the fabric of the world frays because the Seven Scribbling Giants are dying or abandoning their posts. These are beings who write the continuing history of the world, with the chief of them, Atrox Fabulinus, using nine-foot goose-feather quills. To prevent cosmic entropy from lack of input (scientists in the novel have a theory about all this, and a priest says the flow of grace has been choked off), a Group of Twelve (plus three spares) undertakes a week-long journey (plus two special days out of count) to replace the Giants. It is a wild book. The stage is the world itself, with a geography as wide as The Reefs of Earth is local. The company travels through eighth-century “modern world terminals” to places ranging from an Irish fairy castle to the extra-temporal Eighth Day of the Week, where the living mingle casually with the dead. Along the way, they feast on roasted bear stuffed with giant eels. They consult the ghost of Charles Fort about subatomic circuses and one-hundred-and-nine-year space locusts. Fort himself lights his cigars by striking matches against the Fortean sky. The company is stalked by a Judas figure within its own ranks: a were-panther who murders his companions by impaling them with the Giants’ massive quills or, in one case, biting out a man’s stomach. There are deaths and resurrections. One climbs the stairway built by St. Joseph who says his son was a better carpenter. One character becomes a detached, baseball-sized talking navel; another is resurrected as a nine-year-old girl and goes on programming her hunting-horn computer. At last, the old Giants pass away. The seven surviving members of the Group, including a master forger whose possibly forged marble statue of the Laughing Christ works miracles he never intended, are raised to the vacant offices. They assume authorship of the world and restore its stability. Or seem to. The novel ends there, and does not tell us more. East of Laughter is, I think, Lafferty’s most opaque Oceanic novel, though it ranks near the top of the Lafferty novels I most enjoy. It took me some time to get my eye in, and in hindsight I first read it without knowing enough Lafferty. Few readers, even informed Lafferty readers, seem to know the work well or value it highly. Reading it can feel like walking beside someone taking giant strides. Yet it is a magical ugly duckling of a book, strange beyond description, with boggling mysteries. Nowhere else is Lafferty inventing so much, so feverishly, or working his private artistic vocabulary so hard. In other words, it is visionary. Lafferty wrote it when was nearing seventy and approaching retirement. It is self-consciously summative, and I consider it one of the peaks of the canon. I like it far more than Annals of Klepsis, which is wonderful in itself, and about as much as Serpent’s Egg. In a letter, Lafferty said it was better, with more insights. Its difficulties, however, will alienate many readers. It is certainly his most Rabelaisian work. I want, then, to attempt a chapter-by-chapter reading, pointing out what I see in the novel as well as where it still puzzles me. It may take me a little while to work out how to do it. This first post lays out some of the more important pieces. First, Lafferty uses one of his old devices. When he is less interested in manhandling plot than in thinking through difficult ideas, he often turns to a temporal structure that moves the story forward because, once chosen, it must move. The imposed form gives him a schema: he can divide the material into smaller units and then paint the spandrels. In East of Laughter, the schema is the seven-day week, with two days out of count. This is one way the novel makes a statement. It says that human life, though trapped inside history, is larger than time itself. Day follows day, giving the book its chapter-flow. Each day takes place in a new location. Each location offers new wonders. After the opening chapters establish the situation of East of Laughter, the reader is swept through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on, each day more intensely imagined than the last. One could say that this sequence exists as a series of pegs on which Lafferty hangs an encyclopedia’s worth of strange information. But to describe it only as a device would be misleading. Lafferty takes the human week, enlarged by the days out of count, as a primal measure of creation. God only needed a week. He then compresses time and history through that measure in order to write another apocalypse, this one about creativity. All the central Lafferty concerns show up, and he even includes a brilliant séance with Charles Fort, gathering up his 1970s Fortean fantasies into a final artistic statement, tying them off with a bow. It is as though Lafferty were writing a metacommentary on the Ghost Story itself. Something personal. When I think of East of Laughter, I am put in mind of two scenes from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, my favorite childhood movie. The first is the “Pure Imagination” number, which since boyhood has given me a sense of unbounded possibility. Lafferty seems to be saying something similar about the largeness of the world, the wonder of the world, the visionary experience, and the mystery of creativity. Even so, there is that uncanny chord change, the one that feels like a dangerous suspension. The song catches, for me, the sense that by this point Lafferty is making very few (maybe no) concessions. We are fully inside his imagination factory, and there is risk in the garden. Lafferty, like Wonka, is a sphinx. See into your imagination through my creation. You want to change the world? There's nothing to it. What we see will defy explanation. Observe what has happened to Lafferty’s ambient: To take one example, the one that he did take, he learned that in an unreal world, the amount of fish that may be taken out of a lake has no connection with the amount of fish in the lake. The amount of fish to be taken out is related only to the amount of fish that the computer programs to be taken. It does not matter whether or not there are any fish at all in the lake. In an unreal world, the ambient is never restrictive. The fish will be processed as the computer programs them to be processed. They will be delivered, collected for, and deposited for as the computer programs them to be done. It is a little mental game that one may imagine for a computer. And it is safe, for it will work only in the ambient of an unreal world. The other song is “The Wondrous Boat Ride,” which, in its full version, blends with “Pure Imagination,” adding menace: rowing, rowing, rowing. That is closer to the experience of being swept through the escalating days of East of Laughter. The novel is full of wonder, but also of grisly mowing: bloodsmell and murder. It moves fast, seems out of control at times, rewards rereading. – nine feet long, driven into her mouth that was now a mouth no longer, and speared through her entire body and coming out below, while the everywhere blood – They left her there in her bloody death and rushed into the starlit outdoors. They climbed slidingly from no-longer-safe places to crumbling places that were a little bit safer. They saw the entire villa covered with sliding earth and rocks, and the stars were darkened from the dust of it. The first governing context of the novel is that the ambient is sustained by the twenty-one Pillars, arranged in three orders of seven: the Seven Saints, who sustain rectitude; the Seven Technicians, who sustain technology; and the Seven Scribbling Giants, who write the world’s scenarios and histories. In technical terms, the Pillars can be understood as the chief secondary causes by which history moves: the flywheel of history, and the machinery through which consensus reality becomes dreamwork. In Thomism, a secondary cause is a real created cause that produces real effects, but only because it depends on God, the primary cause, for its existence, power, and operation. Gandalf makes the same point to Bilbo in The Hobbit when he tells him not to doubt the prophecies simply because he had a hand in fulfilling them. Put simply: God causes creatures to be causes. The Pillars, then, are neither metaphors nor surrogates for God. They cause the world, but secondarily. When one of these secondary causes fails or dies, the world quakes and quivers, as if the center cannot hold; when several fail at once, the world staggers. Lafferty gives us this premise early, in a paratext by the Alpine Giant. Its source, I think, is one of the best-known chapters in Proverbs: “Wisdom hath built her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars” (Prov. 9:1). East of Laughter is therefore a book about wisdom. That is the first point a reader should keep in mind. What is wisdom? Gratefulness for the plenitude, the many mansions. Lafferty celebrates creation concretely in the book. Each page can set on off along a road self-education and restored appreciation of what life offers. The book itself is about perpetual renewal. The second governing context centers on dream and the loss of Eden. As a poet once said, in dreams begin responsibilities. Very little has been written about how East of Laughter works, and, as far as I know, no one has emphasized the nature of its title, despite Lafferty making its meaning unambiguous. This surprises me, so a word about it. The title is not happy. To be east of laughter is to be estranged. It is to be, as Lafferty says, “East of the thing itself” and marooned east of reality. The phrase recalls Cain, who, after murdering Abel, is driven east of Eden into the land of Nod. Lafferty writes the novel as dreamwork, as though history and consensus reality were, at bottom, oneiric: a “web of validity,” in Atrox’s phrase, that would tear if we awakened. The writers of that dream, the authorial secondary causes, are the Scribbling Giants. They are by far the most important of the secondary causes, and the most difficult to replace. They are all Gentiles until Solomon Izzersted becomes one. Saints, we are told, are easily replaced; competent saints are always available, because the world is full of holiness. The Technicians are harder to replace only because there are too many candidates. The Giants are the problem. They endure in their offices “for very many years, hoping in vain for replacements so that they may be allowed to die.” The death or failure of the Giants brings an Aeon-change, one of Lafferty’s Origenist ideas, and Aeon-changes are dangerous. East of Laughter is about one such change. It is set on a day that can be worked out from internal clues: Sunday, June 21, 1998, Midsummer’s Eve, the last Sunday-June-21 of the twentieth century. The feast day of St. Aloysius. To press the point about the Giants as secondary causes: they are real within the metaphysics of the novel. They act according to their own natures, and they are providentially ordered forces of sublime, ebullient creativity. We see this most clearly in the rotation of the Giants at the novel’s end. Whoever replaces Atrox Fabulinus, we learn, will become the least of the Giants in the coming Aeon. That reversal puts everything we thought we knew on its head. We are marooned East of Reality, which I call Prime, but it is there. As Scribblers who write the world’s history, the Giants do not stand in for an underlying real history. They are the means through which God’s ordering of time becomes the event-filled and person-filled time we inhabit. There is no behind-the-text of the sort modern historiography assumes, which is one reason the novel is so difficult. The world is being written in real time, somewhat as The Lay of Roadstrum sings the events of Space Chantey into being. The world’s history is simply what the Giants have written, and what they have written is what God permissively wills these secondary causes to write. To call their work fiction would therefore miss what the novel is doing. In East of Laughter, all history is fictional in this sense: it is written by Giants, and the Giants are the appointed means by which it is written. Fact and fiction are not opposed here. They are implicated in one another, depending on whether one asks a first-order or second-order question. As Lafferty once said, fact and fiction have the same meaning: to make. As I said, the novel opens in a world already failing badly, and Lafferty has great fun showing the reader how to confirm this. The atoms are empty. Leo Parisi, the nuclear scientist, knows them as “no more than empty boxes.” He remembers them as once fully detailed, which is Lafferty’s theme of pleroma. He has been cheated of their plenitude, and later Solomon Izzersted will witness that plenitude restored. This is Flatland at its most ontological. One sign of this a-borning emptiness, the invasion of the Ouden principle, is what the novel calls pnigmophobia, the choking-fear epidemic that recurs in cycles of roughly 109 years: 1017, 1126, 1344, 1453, 1562, 1671, 1780, 1889, and now 1998. Friday night in such cycles is the worst. Lafferty writes that thirteen million died across Europe on the Friday night of the 1344 outbreak. And it is happening on the Friday during which some of the novel takes place. There are also rationalizers of what is happening. There are the Dublin Morning Docket scientists, Hennessee, Delany, and Monroney, who have ways of measuring the decline. Local gravity is falling. The magnetic field is dropping. The decay rates of natural plutonium and short-period comets are slowing. The influx of small particles is diminishing. The function-rates of animate beings are in decline. There are also the Cambridge intellectuals in Sussex, trying to make sense of the same collapse. As Lafferty writes, “The world is being strangled to death by lack of input. It’s as simple as that.” In the first chapter, we learn that the characters use Atrox Fabulinus’s one hundred and one tests to determine whether their world is real or a dream. All the tests point toward dream. This is confirmed by Hilary Ardri’s Computerized Lake-Fish Company, which operates on the principle of “Theoretical Things That Could be Effected by a Computer in the Ambient of an Unreal World.” It works; therefore the ambient world is unreal. At one point, we are told that the world itself is becoming unbonded. And in one of the best lines in the book, Lafferty gives the novel’s great test for reality: “To be real is to be unique. To be unreal is to be common.” At the largest level, these are not signs that something has gone wrong with Prime itself, a point later thematized in the strange history of the Laughing Christ statue. According to East of Laughter, Prime has always been like this, sustained by its twenty-one Pillars. Atrox is only the presiding figure of one structured understanding of history. The book is deeply concerned with the legacy of Rome; Rome is mentioned more than a hundred times. The shake-ups are signs, rather, that the Giants of the Old Aeon have reached the end of their term. The world is failing because the secondary causes that sustain it are flagging, and a new Aeon entails a leap forward. Dare we hope? Atrox is fifteen hundred years dead, if he ever lived at all—the novel hedges this three separate times—and the recent new-world chapters attributed to him, distributed by an unknown Concerned Circus, are not enough to stop what is happening. Atrox has admitted the truth: history is a dream. The other six Old Giants in the novel—the Hsiang Giant in China, the Illacrove Giant somewhere on the seas, the El-Khatar Giant in Arabia, the Alpenriese in the German Alps, the Sanrio Giant on the Pacific Rim, and the Timbuktu Giant in Mali—are all dying, weakening, or losing the will to continue. The whole order of the Giants has reached its end. We are in one of Lafferty’s world-ending situations. East of Laughter never treats this as a simple catastrophe. The Alpine Giant, for instance, has long hoped for a replacement so that he may finally be allowed to die. When Sunday comes at Klavierschloss, his twelve-hour dying is well earned. The laborer is worthy of his pay. The death of the Old Aeon is the natural end of secondary causes under Providence. And yet the Giants are dangerous. “Camel’s Nose” opens with an epigraph from Erasthenos of Patmos, “Of Wanton Giants,” which lays out the stakes of the Giants’ power: The trouble with giants is not their stealing and eating whole herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and leaving the people destitute. Worse than this is their wanton destruction. They come with their long elephant ears and hear everything. They come with their long, moist camel noses that can smell every detail, and they learn every private thing about the people of a place. In the time of my grandfather, a giant came to a deme in Lydia and spied on all the people with his long ears and nose. Then he wrote all the details about all the people on a piece of clay. After he had dried the clay in the sun, he laughed and then broke the piece of clay into very small pieces with a hammer. And all the people in that place were thereby broken into small pieces, and thus he killed them wantonly. For all its comedy, East of Laughter takes the Giants’ work with terrible seriousness. The Giants write people on clay, and what is done to the writing is done to the people. The asymmetry between Giants and human beings is not just a matter of scale, with Giants huge and people ordinary-sized. It is an asymmetry of ontological position. To be a Giant is to be an author of human possibility, and a wanton Giant can break what he has written. Such are the stakes of an Aeon-change. The next Giants will write the people of the world. When Lafferty himself sat down to write the novel, he seems to have decided to invent the richest set of characters he could imagine. To enjoy the book, one has to slow down and attend to those character sketches, though they move quickly: Jane Chantal, fuzzily beautiful at her hunting-horn computer; Hilary Ardri at his Computerized Lake-Fish Company; Drusilla in her red-and-russet hills; Mary Brandy in her balloon dress. Their uniqueness is what makes them real rather than common, and it is what makes the Aeon-change provisionally hopeful. These will be the new authors, the new Giants who inherit the Lydian-clay capacity. Eden is one of the novel’s central images, as it is in Lafferty’s Serpent’s Egg. As I suggested above, the title alludes to the fallen word. Lafferty plays several games with this. Each location visited has something Edenic about it, where Lafferty impresses on the reader the marvels of the created order. Instead of natura naturans, we get auctores auctorantes, with the bottom of the directly knowable cosmos being seven persons personing it. We learn of Lastoir de Gaire, an inner suburb of Dublin, older than Dublin itself, which engulfed the city centuries ago. In Shelta, the cant of the Tinkers and the Little People, we are told that Gaire means laughter. Lastoir de Gaire is therefore “East of Laughter.” By the testimony of Countess Maude Grogley Laughter-Liffey in Observations of Things Both Before and After the Beginning of the World, it was the fairy Eden, established eleven years before the human Eden, with its own expulsion. It survives now only on a Dublin tram destination sign and in a pub at the tram turnaround. In Hebrew, Eden means delight; Shelta Gaire means laughter. The Lamia of Italy, whom Countess Maude interviewed, says that the two are "aspects of the same place." Both are callbacks to the lost original state, somehow doubled across two creations (fairy and human), and the Edenic toponym is therefore doubled: the place east of Eden (Cain's exile, Genesis 4:16) is the same place as the place east of Laughter. To be East of Laughter is the cosmological condition. It is probably best to think of it as where humans are, and should be placed within how the Ghost Story treats fallenness. For some reason, it seems to me that readers think the title cheerful, and we should hear that, but when one reads “East of Laughter” as a phrase, Lafferty wants the reader to hear the condition of man with original sin. On the other hand, the title also invokes the divine laughter of Psalm 2:4, which serves as the epigraph to Chapter Ten: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” Healthy, affirming divine laughter is what the fallen world has been exiled from. At one point, the Group, standing at Bronze Cherub Corner in Dublin, sees a statuette of the Angel with the Flaming Sword, “which turned every way.” It has been reduced to a hitching post for horses, and then, after the Automobile Century, to an ignored relic. This is, of course, the angel who bars the return to Eden, and it reminds us that the original expulsion still holds. Again and again, Lafferty returns to the idea of inaudible laughter of the heavens. What has been lost is audibility, the capacity to hear the order of things as it ought to be. At the end of the novel, when we learn of the Riant Giant, the Aeon-change becomes hopeful insofar as it promises new or healed ears.. The novel first comes clearly into focus with the Group’s Quest at Gaire Castle on Tuesday, when they are “marooned East of Reality.” Gaire Castle in Dublin still carries the inherited memory of the Edenic delight-place under its laughter-name; even the eighth-century Modern World Terminal there is a vestige of the time when the lost order could still be navigated. The Quest, then, is that most Laffertian of things: an anamnesis. Because the novel can be difficult for first-time readers, I want to spell out how the Aeon-change works. At least three factors matter here. None is a matter of heroic individual achievement, and all are providentially ordered. First, there is rotation. At the end of the book, one learns about the rotation. Each new Giant succeeds an Old Giant. We learn this principle from Gorgonius in Chapter Twelve: the successor to the previous Top Giant becomes the new Bottom Giant; the successor to the previous Bottom Giant becomes the new Top Giant; and the other five rotate within the middle ranks. What was highest becomes lowest, and what was lowest becomes highest. This draws on one of the novel’s governing themes, Christ’s saying that the first shall be last and the last first: novissimus. The rotation works out as follows: Atrox (Italy, the old Top, the historiographer) → Solomon Izzersted (new Bottom) Hsiang Giant (China) → Drusilla Evenrood (East Sussex) Illacrove Giant (the seas) → Mary Brandy Manx (Isle of Man) El-Khatar Giant (Arabia) → Jane Chantal High-Queen (formerly Ardri, accepting at Lecco) Alpenriese (German Alps) → Gorgonius Pantera (Klavierschloss) Sanrio Giant (Pacific Rim) → Caesar Oceano (San Francisco) Timbuktu Giant (Mali, the old Bottom) → Denis Lollardy (new Top, Lecco/Lombardy) Atrox, the historiographer-Giant who accomplished such wonders as writing and forging the Carolingian centuries, is replaced in the lowest place by a Watcher’s son who proposes to make a billion dollars a year from the office. The former lowest Giant, the Timbuktu Giant, is replaced in the highest place by a master forger who carved a Laughing Christ that performed miracles he had not intended. East of Laughter is deeply interested in forgery, and Solomon Izzersted, the figure who replaces Atrox, is one of Lafferty’s anti-Semitic caricatures, a matter I will address in a later post. Second, every Group of Twelve must have its Judas, we are told. Leo Parisi says this to Jane Chantal at the beginning of the novel, before any of the killings have occurred: "With the Prototypical Group of Twelve, there was a second twelfth, to replace Judas, remember, who dropped from the twelve . . . Symmetry or floating justice or ultimate compensation or something almost requires that we should have a Judas in our group." As I mentioned, the Judas in East of Laughter is Prince Leonardo the Great, the Golden Panther. Leonardo bears a variant of the Mark of Cain. He is a werepanther, and it turns out that the golden mantle covering his entire panther body, except for the black bar on his brow, is the Mark. Denis, who would end up being the head giant, explains this at the Manx gallows-gibbet after Leonardo has been hanged: "No, no, the very opposite of that. I mean the golden mark everywhere except that one place on his brow. He was a black panther on his brow. He was a black panther with the golden Mark of Cain all over him. How many bad men have been spared because they bore the beautiful golden Mark of Cain! Then the Lord gave Cain a mark so that no one finding him should kill him. If the mark had been a black blotch instead of a golden mantle, the people would have killed all of them seven times over." As with Cain’s mark, the Mark protects the one who would otherwise be killed. The Judas-figure in East of Laughter is protected for as long as the divine economy requires him, because the new Group cannot constitute itself without the deaths that only the Judas can bring about. Leonardo kills Jane Chantal Ardri at Sora on Monday evening, using Atrox’s nine-foot feather; he kills Roderick Outreach at East Sussex on Thursday; he kills John Barkley Towntower at Port Saint Mary on Friday evening, biting out his stomach to extract Solomon; and he kills Hieronymous Talking-Crow in the Pnigmophobia nightmare that same Friday night. Each death is required for the new order. Jane Chantal’s death and resurrection prepare her to accept the El-Khatar succession as High Queen. John Barkley’s death frees Solomon to take the lowest Giant-place. Hieronymous’s death completes the Group’s Judas-pattern. As we move through the chapters, this will become clearer. Second, East of Laughter is a novel about forgery. As I have already suggested, the relation between forgery and history becomes one of its major themes. Denis Lollardy’s role as the new Top Giant, as I read it, points to the Catholic relation between human craft and grace. His carved Laughing Christ, though a forgery, works miracles the original never did, terrifying Denis because he realizes that he has become the instrument of something far larger than himself. The statue’s miracles, Saint Faunus’s emergence from it in one of the novel’s best scenes, and Denis’s possible Lombardy genealogy all show Providence preparing and using flawed human makers. As Top Giant, Denis will have the final say, writing the next world with the knowledge that what he makes may be taken up by grace beyond his control. Solomon Izzersted’s placement at the bottom of the new Giant Pillar is more complicated. His claim to be the son of Iofel, a Watcher-class angel, makes him, on my reading, a Nephilim-like figure: diminished, comic, powerful, ambitious, disordered, and yet potentially redeemable, just as Lafferty apparently believed Satan himself might be. The novel does not finally punish Izzersted for his bribery, vanity, or propaganda. In Augustinian terms, even the fallen have their place in the order of the world. Solomon Izzersted is what he is, a Wandering Jew as a greedy bouncing ball, what the book calls an ewigerjude-tand, but the new Aeon has a use for him, as shown by its assigning him to the lowest rung of gianthood, where his disorder can exist. At the end of the book, a smile covers all of him. One final point. I dislike treating Lafferty as hermetically metafictional, as though metafiction were what makes him interesting, because that approach downplays how seriously he takes Prime and his own metaphysical commitments. Still, if any Lafferty novel invites such a reading, it is East of Laughter. One can imagine that everything in it is a forged Atrox chapter, with Atrox, Denis, the Group, and the reader all caught inside a recursive authorship that cannot be explained from within. But on my reading, the novel is finally a comedy of secondary causes. They act without full knowledge, while Providence completes what they cannot see. It is Providence that places the possessor of the Laughing Christ at the top of the Giant hierarchy, just as Atrox himself had been the statue’s last owner. Lafferty writes: “Whatever gave you the idea that you were the Top Giant of the World, Solomon?” Gorgonius asked. “Even if you were the replacement of Atrox (and that confused old dead giant still refuses to approve you or anybody), you wouldn’t be Top Giant. The position rotates. The successor to the Top Giant is never the new Top Giant: he’s the new Bottom Giant. Everybody misunderstood the situation there, and I neglected to correct the misunderstanding. The successor to the Timbuktu Giant is the Top Giant now. And that successor is, yes, Denis Lollardy. And now that I remember it, Denis was the last one to accept giantship, in his case Top-Giantship. And of course it was when, just after the Sanrio Giant had slipped over theline to death and Caesar Oceano had succeeded to his giantship, that the Timbuktu Giant was felt to have died and Denis succeeded him to Top-Giantship, it was then that the Wave of Reassurance passed through all the people, reassurance and hope and relief.” By the end of the novel, divine laughter has become audible again. The world has been handed on; the old, tired Giants have died; new futures are promised; and the chief Scribbler is the one who possesses the Laughing Christ, which is “wrapped in the colored cleanliness of its own laughter.” Yes, Lafferty himself is nearing the end of his creative life. He seems ready to hand the work on to other scribblers. The complication, of course, is whether the statue of the Laughing Christ is a forgery. More on that next time.

“To remedy this insufficiency, I’m enclosing a little book, very informative, though only a little over six hundred pages. It’s a sort of resume of the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. You’re very well informed on all the perimeters of the subject, but your information on the center itself is very weak. I’ve given away about twenty copies of this book in the last twenty years, but only to people intelligent enough to handle it.” A post on Walter Farrell, O.P., whom Lafferty respected and whose books he sent to people he respected. Farrell was one of the most important American Dominican writers of the twentieth century. Not because Farrell's thought was especially original, but because he unlocked Aquinas for ordinary readers. He was smart about the highest things without being pretentious, brisk, glib, turgid, dull, or daft. He was, in other words, a Catholic intellectual who popularized Aquinas, the greatest doctor of the Catholic Church. And because Lafferty absorbed Farrell’s popular Thomism so deeply as a popular vocabulary of fun and happiness, anyone who wants to understand how Aurelia was constructed should begin (after recognizing how saturated the novel is with Scripture for understanding incidents in it, as I hope the first Aurelia post showed typologically) with Farrell. Farrell is also a writer I have come to love through Lafferty. He is genuinely enjoyable to read, full of good humor and wisdom, with a measured, plain style that sometimes rises into eloquence. I just really like him. If only my prose were so unhistrionic and lucid. Only a handful of figures are as important for understanding what might be called the traditional side of Lafferty’s mind, which is a great reason to know Farrell’s work. I think of Walter Farrell in the Whole Lafferty as an iron plank. He sets one of the harder limits on the theological games Lafferty plays. Get really far away from shore, and look back for Farrell on the shoreline waving a flashlight. And Farrell’s clarity helps define the orthodox ground from which Lafferty’s experiments often soar. I wish we knew when Lafferty first read My Way of Life, but I would wager it was in the mid-1950s at latest from echos in prenucleation material. Gene Wolfe, who never made the dumb mistake of reducing Lafferty to a funny teller of tall tales or quirky entertainments, once said that a steel rod runs through the center of Lafferty’s stories. It a Wolfean principle I would hand on to any Lafferty reader because I learned from Wolfe. He seems to have known the problem facing Lafferty reception is premature adequacy. The antidote to it is the steel rod of good but steely Catholic sense Laffery’s work dramatizes, and it is what one finds in Farrell’s writing. In sum, Farrell’s importance for Aurelia is determinative because Aurelia’s homilies are not warmed-over Aquinas. They are, rather, warmed-over Walter Farrell, O.P.. Lafferty picks his duet partner in Farrell, set on doing octave doubling: in all twelve, one hears both Farrell and Lafferty with Aquinas being the theme. This is true not only at the level of content, but also at the level of cadence, phrasing, and verbal texture (see the resource at the end of this post). Among the writers who left a lasting impression on Lafferty’s mind and became shaping forces in his work, Farrell must belong near the top of the list. It is true that Lafferty did not write as many stories based on Farrell as he did on E. I. Watkin, but Farrell is far more important as a continuous presence. Watkin fell away from Lafferty after Lafferty exhausted him and moved away from TMWKE to Green Tree, but Aquinas, and it was in many ways Walter Farrell's Aquinas, was inexhaustible. Farrell was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 21, 1902, and received his early education in Catholic schools, including Notre Dame and St. Columbanus. He then studied at Quigley Preparatory Seminary before entering the Dominican Order. On September 14, 1920, he received the habit of St. Dominic at St. Joseph’s Priory in Somerset, Ohio, and, after his novitiate, made profession as a member of the Order of Preachers. His formation continued at St. Rose Priory in Springfield, Kentucky, and at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He was ordained to the priesthood on June 9, 1927, in St. Dominic’s Church in Washington, D.C., by Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore. After ordination, Farrell pursued advanced studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he received the Doctorate of Sacred Theology in 1930. To understand Farrell’s vocation, one should begin with what it meant for him to be a Dominican. The Dominican Order, formally the Order of Preachers, was founded by St. Dominic for preaching and the salvation of souls. Its greatest intellectual glory is St. Thomas Aquinas. Dominican life has traditionally been centered on prayer, study, community, and preaching. In that sense, Farrell’s writing was not separate from his vocation; it was one form his preaching took. The Dominican ideal is not to study for its own sake, but to study in order to support clear teaching, wise preaching, and service to the Church. After returning from Switzerland, Farrell began the work that made him famous. From 1930 to 1933, he taught dogmatic theology at St. Joseph’s Priory in Somerset, Ohio. He also served as Assistant to the Master of Students and later as subprior. In 1933, he started teaching at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., where he spent many of his most productive years. He became Pro-Regent of Studies for the Province of St. Joseph in 1938 and Regent of Studies in 1939, serving until 1945. From 1940 to 1945, he also served as President of the Dominican Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Washington. In 1940, the Master General of the Dominican Order elevated him to the rank of Master of Sacred Theology, the Order's highest academic title, in recognition of his theological learning. Farrell’s great contribution is that he could explain theology so clearly to a lay audience. His most famous work, A Companion to the Summa, was a four-volume explanation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Aquinas can obviously be hard going for someone who lacks training in scholastic philosophy. When he died, his obituary in Dominicana called the Companion his “towering four-volume masterpiece” and said that, more than almost anyone else, he helped popularize the Summa and pioneered “the teaching of theology to the laity.” It is not hard to see why Lafferty admired Farrell’s work. Both distained pretentiousness. Farrell’s concern connects to My Way of Life, which shapes nearly every page of Aurelia. The book is often associated solely with Farrell, though it was completed with Fr. Martin J. Healy. In the TAN Books edition, there is a note that Farrell died soon after completing Part I, and that Healy wrote Parts II and III. The book presents the theology of St. Thomas in a compact and practical form, covering God, angels, human happiness, the divine life, the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the last things. Its purpose was to make the wisdom of the Summa usable for ordinary Catholics, not only as abstract doctrine but as a guide for living. Farrell was also closely connected with the Thomistic revival in American Catholic life. He founded The Thomist in 1939, a scholarly quarterly devoted to Thomistic philosophy and theology. At the same time, his work was not confined to professional theologians. A history of the Dominican Order in the United States credits Walter Farrell especially with helping promote the study of theology among laypeople through Thomist Associations, regional study groups, books, periodicals, and theology courses. This is one of the most important facts about him: Farrell believed theology belonged not only to specialists, but to the whole Church. During World War II, Farrell’s priesthood took another form. From 1942 to 1945, he served as a chaplain in the United States Navy. That included active duty aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Yorktown. His health had been poor for much of his life, and he initially could not meet the physical requirements for the chaplain corps. According to his obituary, President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally intervened in his favor. Poor health was a major part of Farrell’s story, yet he remained incredibly productive. He wrote books, contributed to theological journals and Catholic magazines, preached retreats, lectured widely, and helped shape American Catholic intellectual life. Among his works were The Essence of the Natural Law, A Companion to the Summa, and The Looking Glass. He contributed to publications such as The Thomist, Cross and Crown, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, New Scholasticism, and The Sign. In 1942, he received the annual Catholic Literary Award of the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors. Farrell died in Chicago on November 23, 1951, in his sleep. He was forty-nine years old. His funeral was held at St. Pius Church in Chicago, and he was buried in the Dominican Fathers’ plot at All Saints Cemetery. At the time of his death, he was still working on several projects. One of these was a life of Christ. The suddenness of his death shocked those who knew him; fragile as his health had been, he had stayed extraordinarily active as a priest, scholar, and writer. Understanding Thomism as texture in Aurelia should begin with My Way of Life. It is far wiser than cracking open the Summa itself, which is better suited to deeper inquiry. Yet I would emphasize that Aurelia is not demandingly Thomistic in the sense that one needs to know much about the Thomistic tradition or Aquinas’s own words to enter into it. As Lafferty was drafting the book, it was Farrell, not St. Thomas Aquinas, that he had at his elbow. Find one of the old pocket edition copies if you can, especially if you want to delight in Aurelia. I will add that My Way of Life is not just well done as a popularization; it is lovingly made as a physical object, it feels like Lafferty’s Catholicism in the hand, and copies are still inexpensive. Buy it and you will also understand Lafferty’s joke in the headnote. Next time, I’ll look at one of the unusual symbol economies in the novel. There are about ten of these that help me, so I’d like to address the main ones.

Advanced Lafferty. What comes next won’t depend on it. Not much has been written about Aurelia, but of the handful of things said about it, by far the most interesting and intellectually strongest is Gregorio Montejo’s essay “Eudaimonism in R. A. Lafferty’s Aurelia,” which appeared in Feast of Laughter in 2015. Anyone who wants to read Aurelia seriously should understand its argument. As a teacher of mine used to say, firstest with the mostist criticism. Today I want to walk through that argument, say where I agree, and mark a few places where I think it needs to be supplemented, because I think it is largely correct, and because I also think correctness is not adequacy. Most of my quibbles would be unfair, since they go beyond what Montejo sets out to do. He writes about a specialized topic for a general audience, at the beginning of the now sadly snuffed out Lafferty Renaissance. There is no reason he should advance distinctions that might distract from his main, pathbreaking points. His argument is presented in academic machinery, unnecessary given what he says and the amount of concrete Lafferty text explicated. He is dead-on right about a few points. As I see them, his main points are two. First, Aurelia must be understood in relation to both her life during her assignment on Planet X and her teaching, and the teaching must be read through her life. Without both, the novel will not hold together. Second, Aurelia’s homilies converge on the meaning of life, which is happiness, and Lafferty’s view of this, in its general form, is Aristotelian-Thomistic. Montejo’s essay can be found here. To start, some evidence codes that will help us unpack Montejo’s argument. And, again, the big takeaway: The argument: 1.1. The relation between kerygma and didache has become immensely complicated since the distinction was made nearly a century ago by the Protestant theologian C. H. Dodd. I find it a useful analytic distinction, but it isn’t convincing to me as a first-century operationalized reality in the Church given the scholarship done after Dodd. But read Dodd if you haven’t. No one is clearer, and he is always terse and interesting. Essential knowledge for the educated Christian. What does this mean? Well, it means we need conceptual space. A third category will be needed for Lafferty’s novel. In the first thinking-aloud post, I called that third category anamnesis. Remembering as a process and theme in the Whole Lafferty is centipedal, and Lafferty’s novel is being dispatched to the amnesia-filled audience of Flatland 1982 who loves science fiction. Postfiguration reawakens in some amnestic science fiction reader that Compensation happened, if it does its job. 1.2. I agree with all this except the last point. I see no evidence that Aurelia’s death is sacrificial, at least if sacrifice requires willing self-offering. She doesn’t offer herself. She says it is silly!* Christ goes to the cross willingly in the New Testament after asking that the cup be taken from him. One could say that Aurelia is a sacrifice in the Old Testament sense: offered unwillingly, she dies as an animals dies. A stretch. I think the issue is again complicated by Lafferty’s development of a postfiguration technique that he uses a handful of times (“Ishmael into the Barrens,” “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire,” “And Mad Undancing Bears,” “Horns on Their Heads,” etc.). Aurelia is a girl whom Lafferty subjects to postfiguration. She is not a sacrifice. That is brutally unsentimental and why I love RAL. 1.3. I agree. 1.4. I agree. I would add that one will not understand Lafferty’s own didactic intent, as distinct from Aurelia’s homilies, unless one sees that the kerygma-didache relation within Aurelia is being figured through anamnesis. The original kerygma-didache relation, whatever it was in the early Church, does not have this feature, because it witnesses typological fulfillment. It does not postfigure it but testifies to it and teaches it as a second phase process (if we want to keep Dodd’s stipulation of didache). 2.1. Lafferty says this consistently, both in the fiction and in interviews. His eudaimonism, however, is elusive, because he is, as he puts it, often rowdy-dow about happiness. Aristotle has leisure, and Aquinas has play, but neither is rowdy dow about anything. In Aristotle, the highest happiness is contemplative; in Aquinas, perfect happiness is the beatific vision, the seeing of God’s essence. A love of the rowdy-dow, where the wildness of creation is celebrated, is one of the aspects of RAL that makes him so surprising and interesting as a Catholic artist and appealing to non-Christians. 2.2. Lafferty says this, but it is a partial statement. He is not giving an outline of the Summa as a whole. Rather, he is mostly providing an outline of the Secunda Pars, with a few highly important exceptions. Much that matters to the kerygma of Aurelia, angels, for instance, belong to other parts of the Summa and are not outlined in the homilies, but they do inform the action of the kerygma and anamnesis in the book. 2.3. There are difficult questions here, turning on man’s proportionate end, that I will address in the next post when I discuss Lafferty’s primary source for the novel, Walter Farrell, O.P. The issue is the relation between imperfect happiness and perfect happiness. Montejo no doubt understands this, but he places two thinkers with differing views in a footnote as shorthand (I assume), and the difference is worth drawing out. 2.4. I agree. 3.1. I would add that the formulas are exact chapter titles from Walter Farrell’s My Way of Life. More on this on the next post. 3.2. Uncontroversial claim. 3.3. Agree, but the homilies do introduce non-Thomistic material as well as reinterpret Thomistic material. For instance, Lafferty on law is not Aquinas on law, in my view, and the cognitive/appetitive composition is more properly handled at Ia q. 16 or Ia q. 79-82. Reasonable people can disagree on the last point. 3.4. Agree. The problem is that an educated reader will know Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s arguments about the summum bonum, so this does not explain the novel as a novel. One needs something like postfiguration unless one’s goal is simply to teach the general shape of some of Aquinas’s thought, which is what Aurelia is doing, but without the rest of the novel, you are better off with a Great Course from the Teaching Company. The homilies do not go deep. They are far less deep than a survey in a freshman-level college course. But Lafferty is doing something else. He is staging Aurelia’s teaching. In other words, one does not sit at Aurelia’s feet and learn from her only; one watches her teach others who learn from her, if one already knows the tradition within which Lafferty is working: scripture, philosophy, and theology. Then one marvels at the defamiliarization. 4.1. Perhaps, but postfiguration complicates this. To read Aurelia simply as a Christ figure reduces her, as does seeing her as just a cruciform life. Aurelia’s is a character but we are invited to think of her as a person. Christology and narrative do not consume her as St. John does the little scroll, which is relevant to Aurelia’s consumption of the seeds and antler nubs. The novel is clearly having it both ways. Aurelia is postfigured through Christ, but she is also, in important ways, just a person, a girl who often does not know what she is doing. I know Montejo probably sees this “fictional fact” about her personhood, but postfiguration keeps Aurelia from being didactically consumed narratively as a golden martyr. 4.2. I agree. 4.3. This is an interesting point to me. I agree with Montejo’s statement, but I think it can obscure the oddness of Aurelia’s life. A worked example. At one point, a lecherous older man attempts the “funny uncle” routine with Aurelia, and she gives him an “instrumental knot.” To put it plainly, she ties his penis, literally or metaphorically, into a knot. No one can untie it. Aurelia was alone on a world that she didn’t even know the name of a young and weak girl defenseless and unarmed, without friends anywhere near, and confronted by a sanctionless and sloppy fiend. And the fiend had a hold of her, avid to force his evil will on her, with his fetid breath rattling his whole body (that was a good phrase; Aurelia had read it in a book once), and with his instrument actually barking and howling in its passion. Poor Aurelia. What could she do? She tied an Instrumental Knot in it, that’s what she did. That man Uncle Gifford made quite a noise about it when it happened to him. And he kept up the noise for some time, until the empty luxury cabin had filled up again with curious and apprehensive persons. Some persons do not know about the Instrumental Knot. They regard it as only a legend of ‘Shining World.’ Experts were sent for and flown in. “Dear girl,” said the knot expert who had been rushed in by the Navy. “Do you know how to untie this knot?” “Oh sure,” Aurelia said, “but it can’t be untied in a single day. Maybe not in a single week.” The doctor then asks if there is a way to untie it, warning that Gifford might die. Aurelia writes down the instructions, but the doctor notices one final catch. “Yes. A knot like that will inflict the worst pain known to man,” the doctor said. “Ah, how simply it is, now that you write it down. I’ll untie it in just a moment and have him out of his agony. But this last twist, that will still hold it, won’t it, Aurelia?” “Yes. That’s the time twist. You still can’t untie it till the time runs out.” “And when will that be, Aurelia?” asked the doctor who was the foremost constriction expert in the world. “When I leave this world, that’s when the time will be out on it. Then you will be able to untie the knot if you follow those instructions.” This is the power of binding and loosing that Christ possesses and bestows on St. Peter in Matthew 16.9: "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." The keys themselves show up at the end of the novel as a double-key that parallels the yin-yang and double dart. As one rabbi said to another, “How do you Christianize a dick joke?” Let’s look at what is happening. Lafferty works the binding authority through sexual parody. The demonic parody is de-sacralized because it is anamnesis for the reader who catches the allusion, not kerygma: the reader is meant to recall the binding power of Christ, but the image has been so radically postfigured, sexualized, and made comical that one can hardly call it simply part of the cruciform shape of a Christlike life. The proclamation is not that Aurelia tied a funny uncle member into a knot, which is why one needs more than kerygma/didache to make sense of how Lafferty innovates literary form. He burlesques sacred scripture without disrespecting it, something made possible by postfigural distance. 4.4. “Required” is too strong, and finally not explanatory. What is the force of the requirement? I understand what Montejo is saying, and in one sense I agree with him. But if Aurelia is to be read as a novel that can be discussed paragraph by paragraph, one needs considerably more. One needs a tool like postfiguration. One needs both proclamation and reclamation. Again, this goes beyond the remit Montejo sets for himself, so it is only a quibble, though significant. 5.1. I find this uncontroversial. 5.2. I find this uncontroversial as well. 5.3. It is important to understand that the Mystery of Iniquity is not merely sin, but apocalypse (2 Thessalonians 2). 5.4. I agree, though the nature of the relation between sin and eudaimonism in Aurelia would benefit from being unpacked. It is a major problem in Thomism, and it bears on the larger question of whether a Thomistic ethics, as distinct from a Thomistic theology, is possible at all. This is relevant to how one receives the novel’s homilies as a reader of Aurelia and turns on how one understands the duplex beatitudo. Can a secular reader take the homilies as a freestanding ethics of happiness, ordered to man’s natural/proportionate end? Or must they finally be received as irreducible theology, as in Aurelia’s claim that each person is an arc? “It is because I can’t make you understand your present position and composite that I can’t make you understand your choices, though it seems so easy to choose the excellent over the execrable. A living and bodied person is a sort of arc of a circle, or perhaps of a parabola. If we continue the lines of that arc out beyond the body and the person, we come to a puzzle. The lines cannot be completed in the person’s own world or context. They go over the edge. Part of the enclosed, extended person will be either ultra-natural or infra-natural—anyhow it will be in another world, beyond the bounds of its supposed nature. We are sometimes told to become whole persons, and so we must do. But our own life and world are too small to contain our whole personhood.” Consider what is at issue. In the controversy over the possibility of a purely philosophical Thomistic ethics, the really big question is whether an autonomous moral philosophy can be validly abstracted from Aquinas’s theological framework without distorting his thought. On one side are figures such as Jacques Maritain, Denis Bradley, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who argue that a purely philosophical, Aristotelian-style ethics is incompatible with Aquinas’s deepest theological commitments. On this view, such an ethics depends on a natural end, eudaimonia, achievable through autonomous human action; but Aquinas holds that humanity’s only true ultimate end is the supernatural beatific vision, and that the fallen human will requires divine grace to achieve genuine moral goodness. This brings us back to the curious fact that Lafferty does not really talk about the beatific vision. On the other side, defenders of an autonomous Thomistic ethics, such as Ralph McInerny, Wolfgang Kluxen, and new-natural-law theorists like John Finnis, argue that it is both possible and necessary to extract from Aquinas a valid this-worldly moral philosophy. They hold that Aquinas’s accounts of imperfect natural beatitude, natural inclinations, and the first principles of practical reason provide a coherent, universally accessible ethical foundation that does not require theological commitment or dependence on revealed doctrine. My own view belongs with the first camp. It is also where one finds Walter Farrell, Lafferty’s source, and the subject of the next post. Lafferty, oblique as always, leaves this all-important question strategically underspecified because he wants to awaken the reader, not preach and teach. Aurelia herself does it, another reason to see the kerygma/didache distinction as being analytic, not metafictionally actual, as it were. The old guys said, concedo, distinguo, nego, addo for a clearer picture. *Complicated by the fact that silly is a Scottish word and Aurelia is punning on it as she dies next to the Scottishly named Cousin Clootie.

A brief supplemental post about how Aurelia puts late modernity under judgment. Judgmental pressure expands Aurelia’s postfiguration sideways into epistemology. All in it should be read in light of what Aurelia says about Final Happiness, full personhood, justice, and the Father of Lights. To show this, I have created seven diagrams at the end of the post that unpack the pre-Tower-Jump interrogation, which postfigures the questioning in the temple, commonly known as Christ Among the Doctors or the Disputation in the Temple (Luke 2:41-52). The whole thing is absurdist, a sequence of specialists arriving at Rex Golightly's "Potlatch" cabin and questioning Aurelia. One after another, the experts parade their credentials. Each represents a rough precinct of (parodied) modern knowledge (which, following Lafferty, we might call the subject matter of post-consciousness, the entire sequence constituting one large syllabus of post-consciousness); each “doctor” has a professional deformation and advances the themes Lafferty is exploring. Crabman teaches corporate raiding as if it were the ultimate rationale of commerce. Peter Principle celebrates modern politics as the the ritual lynching of the blameless. George Cheros smuggles cosmological dualism under the cover of astronomy. Charles Greenpasture mathematizes theology as bilateral compensation, thereby walling off God. Walter Kunste, H.H.H., humanist extraordinaire, could not be happier about the descent of the humanities through animalities into diabolities and the gusto-disgusto dynamic of contemporary culture. Rory McCory works in mathematics with a rogue prime inserted between five and seven—Aurelia names it the Hell number, the Number of the Beast, continuing Aurelia’s apocalyptic motifs. Among the seven, James Forcedmarch, the artist, alone sees Aurelia as a person whose arc pushes beyond. Lafferty has an image for this: her pseudo-surface and true surface twenty millimeters apart, her pointillistic constitution, her identity as what the book calls the Beatrician Moment. Forcedmarch’s Interior Science is the discipline that still sees some of what the other disciplines have lost. I think of him being the way Lafferty saw Jung: very wrong, but not quite as wrongheaded as many other currents of thought. Inside out. Aurelia's homilies after the Tower Jump don't refute the specialists one by one. Instead, they lay out a unified counter vision that will be present for anyone who rereads the novel and re-weighs the pre-Tower interrogative segments. After all, the homilies happen only after the reader has passed through the predominantly “kerygmatic” first part of the book. Then one learns about Final Happiness as the human end, the will and intellect together, more about the Father of Lights, all Law being One, the arc of the person being completed/perfected beyond the present world. It is what Montejo correctly associates with the Greek noun didache via C. L. Dodd. Each specialist's deformation distorts of the movement toward that perfected whole, which Lafferty calls life under the Law of Happiness. The First Ientaculum rules out wealth, power, and pleasure as the goal of the Life Affair, disqualifying Crabman's commerce and Peter's politics. The Second Prandium's account is the powerful explanation of the person whose arc cannot be completed inside its own world, which is the billion-lateral ontology that Greenpasture's yin-yang bilateral equation misses, as well as the dimensions beyond that McCory's endlessly enchained mathematics, which ties into what I have elsewhere called Lafferty’s interest in something like Hegel’s bad infinity as a metaphysical problem. The pleasure-versus-happiness distinction and the scholastic intellect-and-will interaction bear on Walter's gusto-disgusto dynamic in the contemporary humanities. The Father of Lights is the un-shadowed source that breaks Cheros's misunderstanding of the Universal Dark-Companion claim and shows what is wrong with either Manicheanism or Yin-Yangism as covering laws that obtain in the cosmos. Aurelia's saying she was sent and will not abort her mission bear on the exchange with Forcedmarch. I take his overall perception to be correct directionally, but his counsel is wrong: he thinks Aurelia should run away, back to the Shining World beneath the transcendently Shining World. The homilies show that he is wrong.

“All these things are possible. If you will worry about them, then I will cease doing it. I hate duplication.” “I will worry about them,” the bodyguard said. “It is my job to worry about them. Are you also going on a peripateticus, as Rex calls it, when Aurelia goes?” “Yes. Today. And that is all the questions that I will answer, Mr. Bodyguard.” “But I would like to know—” “Black lightning of which you felt only a sample, man! Black lightning to burn you to a cinder!” Cousin Clootie the Dark Counterpart said. And then Cousin Clootie walked away with his awkward shamble. Fifth thinking-aloud post. A post on antagonist mapping. Aurelia is another of Lafferty's novels featuring devils and a demonic conspiracy. One would have to look closely at the Floating World and the “trolls” to make the case fully, and show how the materials that became Aurelia emerged from the German-set E. T. A. Hoffmann pastiche that had been the original draft. What seems to have happened is this. Lafferty started working with Hoffmann in mind, and he wrote the riverboat scenario, which survived and became a part of the final novel. That material is dreamy and odd, partly because of the history of Aurelia's compositional process. It is obscure. What I can say is that Lafferty wrote the basis for the scenes and most of the material itself before he knew he was going to write a postfiguration of Christ. He started with a book about art and magic, and he worked himself into a corner. That was when Aurelia was still Aurelia McDermott. He needed a way to make Aurelia centripetal. Postfigure her through the Christian tradition. One can see this by noting a few points. First, there is the original German setting of "To Aurelia With Horns.” This is from the original abandoned manuscript: Second, there is the very important reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann. Third, there is the fact that Lafferty takes the description of Julio Cordovan straight from E. F. Bleiler. In the original MS, this is explicit inspiration: This is Bleiler on Hoffmann, from page v of his introduction to the tales. Lafferty kipes Bleiler: Finally, in the published version of Aurelia, Bleiler and Hoffmann have disappeared. Julio Cordovan remains: I point this trivia out because the devils in the book have passed through a filter of Hoffmannian fantasy before becoming part of the Aurelia that was published. If you haven't read him, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a German Romantic writer, composer, artist, and critic best known for difficult fantasies such as “The Sandman.” Wonderful and weird, Hoffmann is as tricky to read as Lafferty. Nowadays in the U. S., he is best remembered for The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which became the subject of Tchaikovsky's famous work. What I am calling Hoffmannian fantasy is a style of fantasy in which ordinary reality becomes unstable, uncanny, and dreamlike, often blending the supernatural, madness, doubles, automata, and psychological fear, leaving readers unsure whether events are magical, delusional, or both. That is Hoffmann but it is also RAL. Lafferty had read Bleiler's introduction to Hoffmann's tales closely, and he was experimenting with the Hoffmannian mode, no doubt because so much of Hoffmann is so Lafferty adjacent. Consider a small point. Why the gory blood drinking scene in the novel? I suspect it is because of the mention of wine drinking in Bleiler and because Hoffmann wrote a novel called The Devil's Elixir. In any case, the riverboat people are the powers and principalities, in my view. They show up in Sandaliotis in the Fortean intelligences. A devilish conspiracy in a Lafferty novel is about as surprising as a twist in an O. Henry story, so that isn't surprising. What is surprising in Aurelia is the presence of another set of antagonistic forces, all gathered under the sign of the yin-yang. This becomes the main set of antagonists outside of the Floating World passages, although the Floating World people will play their role. Lafferty associates yin-yang with the New Age counterculture. Before getting into the yin-yang disgusto dialectic (the novel’s term for love-hate as the bad infinite), I think Aurelia becomes much easier once one appreciates how much doubling is going on. A few examples, from my notes on the categories of doubling in Lafferty: By the time one is well inside the novel, two primary obstructions stand before Aurelia: the people of the Floating World and the yin-yang. What is the yin-yang within the novel? It is not merely a symbol. It is a spiritual worldview, one Lafferty plainly disliked, and it proves even more hostile to Aurelia than the power politics of the Floating World. It imagines reality as a necessary balance of complementary opposites: light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Neither side is absolute; harmony comes from holding them in equilibrium. Lafferty writes from a different metaphysical world. For him, God is absolute light and goodness. Evil is a corruption to be defeated, not a partner to be accommodated. To the Christian imagination, the claim that good needs evil in order to be whole is not wisdom but a dangerous lie. Aurelia, of course, is not a theological essay. It makes the point by turning the yin-yang into a physical object: a weird and deadly weapon that kills both Aurelia and Cousin Clootie. The cultists wield “yin-yang yo-yos,” double-spiked darts used for assassination. By turning a symbol of spiritual balance into a murder weapon, Lafferty suggests that inviting evil into one’s metaphysics does not bring peace. It brings death. At the same time, the yo-yo is deliberately ridiculous. It mocks the cyclical shape of the philosophy it embodies. A yo-yo spins out and returns to the hand. It achieves nothing. It goes nowhere. That is the opposite of Aurelia’s teaching on fulfillment in “Final Happiness.” Here is how Lafferty describes the weapon: “Those double-dart yo-yos could be sailed with a flick of the hand, and they would go straight to a selected target-tree and embed themselves in it . . . they would go back and kill the thrower if he had any reservations about the yin-yang philosophy. There were many mysteries about these murderous toys.” Aurelia recognizes the spiritual trap. We see this when a dowdy cultist approaches her and calls the yin-yang the “perfect balance” and the “celestial compensation by which the universe runs.” Aurelia rejects the premise at once. The universe does not require an equal measure of darkness to offset the light. Lafferty’s Augustinian formation shows here. Aurelia tells the woman: “I am not at all disposed to deal with a yo-yo . . . I tell you that it is out of balance. . . . It is all a false compensation and a false balance. It is a little bit of evil that the enemy has devised to blur people. I do not believe that if I want to walk up stairs I must first dig a compensating hole in the ground for balance. I do not believe that every time we light a light we must also light a darkness for balance.” Whatever Planet X's real name, many of its people have been so damaged by this specious doctrine of balance that they cannot endure Aurelia’s unmixed goodness. The citizens feel compelled to complete a “love-hate dialectic,” as though admiration must be balanced by violence. Finally, Lafferty could have written the novel as if it focused on Cousin Clootie, because Clootie's high-school assignment runs in parallel with Aurelia's. The two of them, working together, form a counterimage to the black-and-white duality of the yo-yo that does not make a yin-yang mistake. Cousin Clootie is her dark counterpart, the stick to her carrot, but the horns they blow are in harmony and in time, not discordant with one another, opposed to one another, or in a dialectical relationship. She has her mechano-organo monkey (cyborg/AI), and he has his, the black tarsier. At this point, we have looked at the novel from several levels that I think are necessary to get the most out of the book: the biblical-postfigural, Thomistic, and symbolic-antagonist dimensions.

The Frenchman Jules Verne appeared with a blaze of novels that were all "voyages" (but all Science Fiction stories are ‘voyages’ in a sense): Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863); A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864); From The Earth To The Moon (1865); Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870); Around the World In Eighty Days (1874). Verne’s "voyage"novels were genial and pleasant and original. There was good comedy in them. As a comic writer, Verne was at least equal to Mark Twain. There is some good technology for the times, and even a touch of science. The ‘voyages’ were freighted with magic and gold; but it wasn’t recognized immediately that Verne was an authentic sun. — “Great Awkward Gold” A digression on an oddity. What is Michael Strogoff doing in Aurelia? Michael Strogoff is one of those figures modern readers have largely forgotten, though he once held a place in the popular imagination. He is the heroic protagonist of Jules Verne’s adventure novel Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar (1876). Brave, loyal, and almost preternaturally self-controlled, Strogoff is a courier in the service of the Russian czar, sent on a dangerous secret mission across Siberia to warn the czar’s brother, the Grand Duke, of a rebellion led by the traitor Ivan Ogareff and invading Tatar forces. It is one of Verne’s best books. The novel follows Strogoff’s journey from Moscow to Irkutsk, a journey of physical danger, disguise, betrayal, capture, and, well, torture. Along the way he meets Nadia, a young woman traveling to find her exiled father. Much of the plot turns on Strogoff’s endurance, patriotism, and self-command as he struggles to complete his mission against overwhelming obstacles. Like the best of Verne’s work, the book offers travel, suspense, geography, and adventure. What it does not offer is science fiction. It is a political and military thriller. Strogoff appears as a blinded man in the riverboat set piece that already existed in the original draft of Aurelia. The curious point, however, is that he was not in that draft. Lafferty evidently decided, when reworking the material, that the passage needed something Strogoff could supply. In Verne’s novel, Strogoff’s blinding is one of the great dramatic moments. Captured by the Tartars and exposed by the traitor Ivan Ogareff, Michael is sentenced to be blinded by a white-hot saber passed before his eyes. Verne makes the scene emotionally powerful by having Michael look at his mother, Marfa, believing that she will be the last thing he ever sees. For several chapters, the reader believes he has been blinded. Only later does Verne reveal that Strogoff’s tears, brought on by the sight of his mother, protected his eyes from the heat, allowing him to continue his mission while pretending to be blind. It is melodramatic and so very sentimental. Does this mean that Strogoff is not really blind in Aurelia? What is Lafferty doing with him? Let's go through how he appears in the novel. We first meet Strogoff when Aurelia boards the River Boat. Around the table sit the gamblers: Karl Talion, Blaise Genet, Julio Cordovan, Helen Staircase. These are the Hoffmannian figures playing the game of symbols, the people I take to be powers and principalities. They play dangerous card games involving blood, death, masks, and fraud. Michael Strogoff sits at the same table, but he is separate from the action: There was one other man at the table, playing cards, and yet not playing with the others. This was the very old man, Michael Strogoff, who was blind and who played by himself with blank cards. Later, Strogoff adds one special card to his own deck. While the others play corrupt and violent games, his attention turns wholly to Aurelia. The gesture links her to the novel’s symbolic economy of horns and marks her singular importance on the River Boat: The old blind man, Michael Strogoff, was also playing cards, by himself, at the same table. To his blank cards he had now added one value-card. It was a multi-colored Aurelia card. It was equal to the ace of trumps, to the ace of trumpets as they once called it correctly. True to his borrowed identity from Jules Verne, he later in the book acts as a courier, and he fulfills his Verne-like role by delivering a vital message: A man, oh, he was that blind man Michael Strogoff (he’s been at the same table with the gamblers on the River Boat) handed Aurelia a bank newspaper. "There is a piece here about you and your dark companion, in The Afternoon Endeavor," he said. And he pointed it out to Aurelia. Near the end, we see him one last time, a part of the River Boat’s weird fake/replica world. Aurelia sees the River Boat figures again—Karl, Julio, Blaise, Helen, Michael, and even Aurelia herself—continuing their endless game, only now revealed as mechanical constructs: And they were in the gambling room now, Karl Talion, Julio Cordovan, Blaise Genet, Helen Staircase, Michael Strogoff, and Aurelia herself. And they were playing "brag," except Michael who was playing solitaire with blank cards and with one Aurelia-value card. Well, they were wax figures, wax over some sort of jointed armatures, and they moved very mechanically. I do not know with certainty why Michael Strogoff is in the book, but I would hazard this: he is there to show what kind of world Aurelia has entered. It is an amnesiac world of blank signs, counterfeit persons, violent games, and distorted messages. That is Lafferty’s symbol cluster of mechanical and wax-work man with mask on top of mask. Strogoff is a messenger with an all-important content that must be conveyed, and his one clear action in Lafferty’s novel is to recognize Aurelia as the most valuable card in the game of Hoffmannian symbols. Blind or not, he sees enough to know that Aurelia really matters for Gaea, earth’s anti-world. She is the trump card that wins Gaea. Like him, she carries an important message from the King, though unlike him, she does not really know the message she bears. That is the point made possible by the novel’s postfigural logic: Aurelia is not the source of the message, but she has become its bearer.

Vietnam was unified on July 2, 1976, with the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Because one digressio leads to another, I want to note one of Aurelia’s stranger internal crossings. Although completed in 1976, the novel already contains the Vietnam argument that Lafferty later makes explicit in Part IV of In a Green Tree, “Incidents of Travel in Flatland.” It is an instance of Lafferty allegorizing history from within the postfiguration machinery of the novel itself. He does something similar with his old “Mud Violet” ideas, when he writes about the River Boat people, the throat pulling, and the polter knocking that haunts Julio Cordovan, whom he calls, in one of his many nonce terms for the schizo-gash, a split-wit. The book is filled with small esoteric touches like these. If I am right, Aurelia is a postfigural Catholic novel whose coherence is hidden in Scripture, Farrell’s Thomism, Lafferty’s own corpus, his political imagination circa 1976, and the symbolic machinery and narrative techniques he had spent decades building, with counterfiguration explaining Cousin Clootie. That is why the novel can feel incoherent when it is not. Its order is not chiefly the order of the surface plot, though recognizing patterns is significant. One should see that the succession of characters who question Aurelia are postfiguration of the interrogators of the child Christ in the temple and so on. The book is theological, symbolic, and intertextual. Martin Crookall is probably representative of most smart readers’ experience of Aurelia. He writes, “Every corner contains things and there are more corners than any normal geometry allows. It’s not one of the major Lafferty novels, and like all of them it leaves you shaking your head and wondering, just what was that I just read? Think about it. You can spend a lifetime asking yourself, just what was that anyway?” I don’t know his standard for a major Lafferty novel, and I don’t think many people have even have a well-formed one. This readerly experience of overwhelmingly filled-corners should not be mistaken for incoherence. It isn’t a long book. We can look at it piece-by-piece. It is just that Aurelia is coherent, though not chiefly at the level of plot. Its coherence is theological, symbolic, and intertextual, again. To read well, one starts at the upper left-hand corner and works to the end, and then one does it again, as my favorite critic once said. To take the novel apart concretely, rather than merely retelling its plot or extracting its Thomistic layer, one needs conceptual tools: Scripture, typology, Farrell’s popular Thomism, Lafferty’s draft history, his symbolic economies, and his habits of allusion. For most readers, that labor will not be worth the trouble. But an annotated edition could make Aurelia far more intelligible than it is now. I made one but can’t share it because of copyright. Without such help, the novel can look like this: space girl crashes on a planet; strange things happen; the whole thing seems somehow Christian; and near the end she delivers a set of introductory-level Thomistic homilies. It is often funny. That is not wrong, exactly, but it misses most of makes the book cohere. Anyone who wants to answer Crookall’s question—“Just what was that, anyway?”—cannot think about the book from a distance. One has to enter the Lafferty thicket. Aurelia will always be a book for a very small company of readers. For that company, it is a gift. A work of wounded wisdom. One last digression. When a Lafferty reader thinks of butterflies, the story that probably comes to mind is “Eurema’s Dam.” But Lafferty’s greatest butterfly is Aurelia. As he surely knew, aurelia is an old word for a butterfly’s chrysalis, from the Latin aureus, meaning golden, because some chrysalises have a metallic gold sheen. From the same root came aurelian, an archaic term for someone who studies or collects butterflies, what we would now call a lepidopterist. It is also a name associated with the first Christians, found on Roman tombs. Thinking aloud about Aurelia could go on indefinitely. I will close this sequence in the next post with a few close readings of incidents that seem especially important for judging the novel as a story. To do that, I’ll refine the idea of postfiguration by showing how it relies on metalepsis (transumption).

This is a very miscellaneous post about a text I have wanted to write about for a few months: To Aurelia With Horns. It can hardly be called a version of Aurelia, but it is a kind of drafting out of ideas that were later repurposed for it, even if 90 percent of those ideas were drained away. There is zero St. Thomas Aquinas here, which will be surprising for anyone who has read Aurelia. Altogether, it is one of the strangest Lafferty documents that I have read. Enough of it survives to give one a strong sense of how it works, and yet, more than with any other Lafferty document I have read, one gets the sense that Lafferty is really thinking through a problem and not quite getting where he wants to go. Toward the beginning, it looks as though we are going to get a plot in which Dionysus plays a major role. By the end, Lafferty tells us that a narcotic has changed the world. Even more than the published Aurelia, with its linearity, the manuscript pages for this other Aurelia seem to me to belong to the perspective and narrative skewering he was doing from Not to Mention Camels through Iron Tongue of Midnight. As in Not to Mention Camels, we are in a universe with a prototype world and derivative worlds. As in Iron Tongue of Midnight, there is a sense that the overlays are flickering in and out of focus while occupying the same space. These pages are almost the point, I think, where Lafferty broke off from trying to explore those ideas in the novelistic way he had been pursuing. Aurelia would be something else, closer to the Oceanic works of the 1980s. To the degree that there is a narrative in To Aurelia With Horns, and the draft opens with an extremely strong narrative about Aurelia in Germany, the story circles back to Aurelia McDermott. Here, Aurelia is not a fourteen-year-old Camiroi but an adult woman, an artist, traveling through a stylized antiquarian Germany. She takes a night river-boat (Die Nixe) from Heidelberg to Heilbronn, where she plays high-stakes poker with four strangers, all characters we meet again in the novel Aurelia. There is Julio Cordovan (a thousand faces), Helen Staircase (two meters tall, made of cheese), Karl Talion (who tears a double deck of cards in half with his bare hands), and Blaise Genet (a private investigator who turns out to be a police informant). Aurelia wins one million Baden-Württemberg Marks, which we are told is a "transcendent whole number." Then Aurelia walks three miles uphill to Weinsberg and goes into Antikenladen of Herr Boch, an old fat man with double eyes who is custodian of a figurine of the Prince of Nysa, who is Dionysus himself, imprisoned inside a rubber frog-sheath that makes him look like a bullfrog to one set of eyes and a prince to another. Boch feels it's worth selling for one million of whatever currency; Aurelia has exactly that sum. Yet Boch warns her not to buy, and then a creature inside him takes over, perhaps the Prince of Nysa himself, and he assaults her. It is one of Lafferty’s more violent pieces of writing, a scene that stops short of consummation, which wasn't its goal: Then the manuscript takes a turn. Aurelia paints the Prince's portrait with automatic hands on the roof of das Einhorn, and Julio steals it; the draft moves into a number of smaller pieces: philosophical asides about Aleika (the strange drug), the twilight hours, optics, and the floating world. It seems as if Aurelia and her companions on the Night Boat are all archetypes of some kind, locked into variations of a play. Aurelia is shot with needles by three strangers who tell her, "When we shoot you as an arrow, not when we shoot you as a target," which is what happens in Aurelia, the novel, as if Aurelia were one version of the realities we learn about on the Night Boat and how it transects worlds. In a surviving sequence, a food magnate named Irving Pluto, who originated Aleika and feeds a billion extra people, is hauled before Senator Capitoline and crucified Prometheus-style, eagles eating his spleen, for the crime of making the world better. The powers that be just wanted the world to be more involved. The manuscript breaks off. So what is going on? Very hard to say. What does come through is a very strange cosmology. First, there is the solid world or worlds. It is the ordinary modern world—cars, electricity, Stuttgart automobile factories. It's always there. I assume Aurelia walks through a version of this to get to Weinsberg early in the manuscript. But she won't see it. We are told by the narrator that Aurelia's perception literally filters reality: Aurelia nowhere traveled through any except the stylized antiquarian country, although there was almost everywhere another and more modern land that was coextensive with it. Aurelia, however, would not see the more modern land. She was in a mood, she was in a phase; worse than that, she was in a period. She was in an old brown-and-gray-stone period and she was not ready to come out of it yet. That takes one to the stylized antiquarian world, which Lafferty, with his love of Germany, has fun writing about. Aurelia lives here by preference, and the manuscript treats it as more real than the modern world, not less. We are told that Die Nixe burns fish oil in its lamps, while the other riverboats run on electricity. Die Nixe is "a masterpiece of wood carving," while they're "tin tubs made in a tin tub yard." The antiquarian world is richer, a place where everything possesses deep context: Is a setting less real if it is seen in its deep and wide context rather than as isolated? Things could be, in these last many hours, seen by Aurelia with all their analogies and congruences in place about them. Not only could events and encounters be seen and experienced, but also the ancestors of those events and encounters, and all the deep parallels and alternates to them. We tread about the floating world, a concept that is reused and varied in Serpent’s Egg, and are told it is Bohemia, with Lafferty borrowing the Japanese ukiyo concept and transplanting it. It has no foundation, no territory of its own. You can go into nine dwellings and be in the solid world, then walk into the tenth and be in the floating world instantly. It does have a magical property, though—instantaneous transmission: tell a joke in a Floater in Vladivostok, and they laugh in Rio or Pasadena, Texas. Nothing originates there ("there is no way that originality could break through its atmosphere of stale innovation"), but everything new passes through it first, including the drug Aleika. The Night Boat itself, which seems, again, to anchor our archetypes, moves mostly in the floating world, docking at entertainment docks on the Arkansas River in Tulsa. Lafferty writes that the floating world is pseudo and yet not dismissible: It is a pseudo world, a place of pseudo art and pseudo lives style, pseudo relationships, pseudo lives and loves. And yet there is a lot of fun to be found there on an irregular basis, and much sorrow and degradation as a daily thing. But many great personages loved to walk in the floating world, and not all of them were slummers. Dionysus rode in a chariot through the Floating World; and Christ walked in it. They were not slummers. Then Lafferty introduces a fascinating idea he calls the twilight hours. There are two extra hours every day (one at dawn, one at dusk) that "do not count on the clock." They exist whether or not you're taking Aleika, but Aleika intensifies the experience. Their duration can't be measured: The two twilight hours, one at dawn and one at dusk, are possibly given over to alternate worlds. They do not in any case represent time consumed in the regular world . . . There is a duality about the 'hours', for the regular hours are going on in some manner even while the twilight hours are reigning. And the twilight 'hours' are not to be measured, so they may parallel very many regular hours, or sometimes only a minute of so. Regular time continues to run beneath them, like a river under ice. The night river-boat is said to straddle the boundary: "one side-wheel in the twilight hours and the other in the regular hours, one foot in each world." Special people appear only during these hours, and whether the dawn people and the dusk people are the same people is compared to the old question of whether Venus is both the morning and the evening star. Then Lafferty writes, "And the question is not settled." The twilight hours may be where alternate worlds are accessed. Finally, Aleika. The drug. Lafferty doesn’t explain much about it. He says it comes in boxes of shapes that are mathematically impossible and may be empty. It "heightens all the senses and sensibilities." It's "synonymous with luck." It's part of the "Wonder Story"—Lafferty's term for the numinous substrate underneath everything. In one of his more interesting asides, he writes: Aleika is a Wonder Story and it has serpentine roots. It is the magic; but the essence of a magic is that it can only be grasped in a changed form . . . The real essence of magic is that it will be partly forbidden magic. Even the most tedious of all things, the porn, is part of the Wonder Story; it is a part of the Wonder Story that has gone wrong. Aleika doesn't create the other layers (the twilight hours exist without it, the floating world predates it), but Aleika saturates them all, making each one more intensely itself. So we have all of these planes. How do they relate? They aren't stacked. They aren't sequential. They don't have borders. It looks to be a simultaneous superimposition, where everything happens at once in the same place, and what you experience depends on your form of apperception. As Herr Boch explains it: "There will be alternate worlds as long as there are alternate forms of apperception, as long as there will be alternate forms of consciousness to which one may arrive . . . And that will be for as long as there are alternate forms of people." "True," said the Prince of Nysa who was table companion to Herr Boch. An odd and mysterious fragment of fiction from Lafferty that became more radically transformed than any other piece he wrote that I know about. It is certainly an interesting place to begin thinking about Aurelia. Lafferty demolished it to write the novel we know.