‘All of you are marooned East of Reality, and you are questing to find your way back to Reality … I myself love to play Quests.’
-R. A. Lafferty, East of Laughter (1987), p. 63
Renewed Mythology for a Diminishing World
R. A. Lafferty’s speculative fiction novel East of Laughter is a ‘Quest for Reality’ by a special group concerned about the un-detailed nature of the modern world, right down its empty-seeming atoms. It is a quest for a new narrative or new metaphor that can give real life and meaning back to the modern world, a world that has lost its mythology and is therefore barely rasping out its existence on a thin gruel of mere ‘facts’. The novel portrays this as an urgent quest because the world is in danger of total unreality—that is, in danger of ending, and, more importantly and most of all, of not beginning again.
