Previous chapter     Next chapter     Title page

Chapter One:
INTO THE LAND OF LAUGHS

"He didn't like tomatoes. He collected picture postcards of railroad stations. He found names for his characters in a small Missouri graveyard. He began his books on a school-size blackboard in a musty room in his basement. He kept everything he had ever accumulated as a child, and when he came to America from Europe, changed his name to that of an imaginary character he created when he was a boy. He spent his free time working in a grocery store as a clerk at the cash register..." (from Thomas Abbey's biography of writer Marshall France, 6)

Jonathan Carroll's first novel, The Land of Laughs, is built around an imaginary character - or rather a ghost of one - a reclusive and largely mysterious writer of children's books named Marshall France. Already deceased at the time when the plot begins and never appearing "in person," he is the novel's focal point, the center of its literary microcosm: his silent presence pervades the whole of the novel and in a sense he is as much the author of The Land of Laughs as Jonathan Carroll himself. In the most straightforward reading, the novel develops as a biographer's quest for facts about the late writer's life to finally arrive at a complete, life-size portrait of Marshall France. For this reason it seems appropriate to begin the analysis by introducing the reader to the central figure of the novel (whose image reveals itself gradually from painstakingly collected artifacts and memories) before we proceed to the more immediately observed dramatis personae of the book.

Marshall France, an Austrian Jew, lived in a small town of Galen, Missouri, where he moved as a young man shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He was the author of peculiarly sad, eerie and enchanting books for children, books whose very titles would evoke feelings of magic and unfulfilled longing: The Pool of Stars, Peach Shadows, The Green Dog's Sorrow, or Night Races Into Anna. Although he earned for himself not only immense popularity and love of both young and adult readers, but also academic recognition of a "classic" author (a comparison with Lewis Carroll is not out of the way), France went to great lengths to avoid all publicity that came with literary success, and when he died of heart attack at the age of forty four, very little was known about him outside Galen, his American home town. Whatever there was to be known was fervently guarded by Anna France, his daughter, who took care of his estate and rarely allowed any of his stories to be reprinted and consistently refused to authorize any biography of her father. As the years passed, however, the power of France's writing did not seem to diminish and it still held thousands of devout readers under its spell. The examination and homage to this power, the magical creative power of an artist, make perhaps the most easily recognizable theme of The Land of Laughs. Jonathan Carroll's novel is however much more than a reflective essay on art: it is a fast-paced, captivating fiction which invites as many questions as it offers reflections. The trick that gets the story rolling is an intellectual experiment: the assumption that France's artful power did not exhaust itself in winning the hearts of young readers. In fact, as we are gradually led to understand, it extended far beyond any living author's dream...

The opening paragraph of The Land of Laughs introduces the readers to the bright mind of the narrator: Thomas Abbey, a thirty years' old teacher of English from Connecticut who - and this is the very first thing we learn about him - is the son of the late Stephen Abbey, a Hollywood actor of notorious fame. An ordinary, though very likable character that Thomas is, his life is overshadowed by the memory of his father, an icon, a star to thousands upon thousands of American moviegoers. Consequently, any personal interest that people may invest in Thomas is strongly marked by the true fascination (or mere curiosity) that the figure of his father arouses: "I recently told my mother that my name isn't Thomas Abbey, but rather Stephen Abbey's Son." (LL, p.1) Jonathan Carroll, who declares a regular, understanding relationship with his own father, makes this kind of situation, and the resulting emotional conflict, the starting point of almost all of his novels, as will be shown later on; at this point it is worthwhile to notice the parallel between the figure of Marshall France and that of Stephen Abbey: both famous and admired artists, albeit of different ilk, both are present in the novel as shadows of characters only, yet it is them who are responsible for whatever course its plot takes.

The second most important fact about Thomas Abbey is that he is endlessly fascinated by Marshall France's books. Since his father gave him a copy of France's The Land of Laughs (the self-reflexivity is characteristic) as a present for his ninth birthday, Thomas has become a lifetime enthusiast of France's art, his love bordering on obsession. He has collected the rare editions and tried to gather scarcely available facts about the life of his favorite author, treasuring each more than anything else in his life. His fascination went still further: "My dream was to write a biography of Marshall France, the very mysterious, very wonderful author of the greatest children's books in the world. Books like The Land of Laughs and The Pool of Stars that had helped me to keep my sanity on and off throughout my thirty years." (LL, p.4) Having received his birthday present he

read the book from cover to cover for the first time. When I refused to put it down after a year, my mother threatened to call Dr. Kintner, my hundred-dollar-a-minute analyst, and tell him I wasn't 'cooperating.' As always in those days, I ignored her and turned the page.

'The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one's seen.'

I expected everyone in the world to know that line. I sang it constantly to myself in that low intimate voice that children use to talk-sing to themselves when they're alone and happy. (LL, p.5)

As has been said, everything that happens in The Land of Laughs is, directly or indirectly, stimulated by art and artists. When we have finished the discussion of Carroll's first novel it will be clear how "artist as a god" is its central concept. To achieve this, we will employ an analytic rather than synthetic approach, saving the latter for Carroll's other novels: here we will be examining the plot itself more carefully, concentrating on specific passages, not only to provide the reader with insight into the characteristics of style and manner of writing, but most of all to show how the complete, consistent universe is created from scratch, to be operated upon in Carroll's later novels. Almost all of the key character types, settings and rules have their origin in The Land of Laughs and the guide to an unmapped territory that this study aspires to be, will point them out to the reader as potential places of intellectual interest.

From the very beginning we are able to notice that The Land of Laughs is a novel about art: its powers, lures and dangers. This pervading theme is conveyed on three levels, or modes of communication between the author and the readers. The first, most general of them, has already been mentioned: it is the story line itself, with the mysterious figure of the writer Marshall France at its core. Another level is more of a suggestive than explicit type: works of art of various kinds create the setting for the events and evoke the overall atmosphere of the book: they are quoted, bought, discussed, given as gifts of friendship. Thomas Abbey is a proud owner of a collection of exotic masks - among them the death mask of John Keats: not an accidental choice, given the romantic provenance of the English poet. The novel's first momentous event, the starting point of the plot, occurs when Thomas meets Saxony Gardner - a skillful puppeteer and, as himself, a devout reader of Marshall France's books - meets her where else but in a second-hand bookstore, searching for a rare copy of France's Peach Shadows. In similar manner, in the second chapter we watch Abbey discussing - or rather attempting to discuss - Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher:

In February, the month when suicide always looks good to me, I taught a class in Poe that helped me to decide at least to apply for a leave of absence for the following fall before something dangerous happened to my brain. A normal lunkhead named Davis bell was supposed to give a report to the class on The Fall of the House of Usher. He got up in front of us and said this. I quote. 'The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, who was an alcoholic and married his younger cousin.' I had told them all that several days before in hopes of stimulating their curiosity. To continue. '...married his younger cousin. This house, or I mean this story, is about this house of ushers...'

'Who fall?' I prompted him, at the risk of giving the plot away to his classmates, who hadn't read the story either.

'Yeah, who fall.'

Time to leave. (LL, p.6)

The reader will notice the irony behind the simple humor in the quoted sequence: the schoolboy's knowledge of Poe is limited to few, and probably misunderstood, facts of the writer's life, whereas the art and its meaning remain an enigma.(7) Carroll however goes further than that, and Poe's story resounds in the pages of The Land of Laughs. As Thomas is invited into Saxony's flat on the top floor of a house in an unpleasant district of the town, a dark flat where air is laden with incense and where only apple or chamomile tea is served, he remarks: "I shrugged again and said okay to the tea, and she led me into the House of Usher." (LL, p.12) A more distant analogy appears in the description of the Galen house of Marshall France himself, the photograph of which Thomas treasures: "It was one of those great old Victorian monsters that had been plopped down on an average little street in the middle of Middle America." (LL, p.6) And yet another, more disturbing parallel may be found in the closing section of the novel, when Saxony dies (and Thomas just barely escapes death) in the explosion of the house they lived in in Galen, which echoes with a distant but unmistakable analogy the dramatic "fall" of Poe's House of Usher.

Finally, there is the most immediate literary device the use of which makes The Land of Laughs very much "a novel about art," that is, references. Explicitly and implicitly, Carroll alludes to literally countless sources, names and titles, of which The Fall of the House of Usher is only the first. The angered Saxony in a rain-soaked poncho looked "like a rubber Bela Lugosi" (LL, p.18; the actor who starred as Count Dracula in Tod Browning's original 1931 version, as well as in other horror movies). France's books were illustrated by a mysterious Van Walt - Disney? - who later turns out to be France himself. In the course of the novel, a number of well-known books are mentioned: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the Grimm Brothers' tales, Bruno Bettelheim's famous Uses of Enchantment and even Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats again). Maybe the best example of all is the following sentence taken from a paragraph in which Thomas Abbey describes his late father's typical film role: "Richard Eliot, a.k.a. 'Shakespeare,' who just happens to be England's most effective secret agent in Nazi-occupied France, has been found out." (LL, p.194) An inventory of hints: T. S. Eliot, William Shakespeare and... Marshall France (who escaped from Austria fearing Nazi persecution) in a single sentence, as if an equal mark was put between these names, the three geniuses of literature. And not only is there Thomas' father's spirit hovering in the air of narration, but even the name Richard is one of major significance in the whole novel. By way of less direct implication, Carroll makes Thomas Abbey describe the second-hand bookshop assistant in the following words: "He had a Southern accent and reminded me of some character who lives with his dead mama in a rotting mansion and sleeps under a mosquito net." (LL, p.9) Such concrete and atmospheric imagery is not only characteristic of Carroll's style, but also rings with a distant echo of William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily.

As can be seen, from the very beginning The Land of Laughs works its meanings by way of hints and suggestions rather than definite statements, and Carroll prefers simple presentation of things as they appear to his characters to elaborating upon them by way of authorial comments: this is how Carroll achieves the high semiotic density in The Land of Laughs. Still, as far as its formal structure is considered, the novel appears to be quite traditional in the techniques of presentation it employs, which makes it easily accessible to the audience. At the end of Chapter Three of this section we will demonstrate a number of possible "readings" or interpretations that The Land of Laughs can yield on different levels of inquiry. For the moment it is only important to remember that the novel never tries to force its intricacies upon the readers, and that, self-conscious in the postmodern sense as it is, at no point does it become ostensibly "modern" or experimental. In this respect it seems to follow the rare tradition of such works of fiction as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland which, having given rise to numerous scholarly interpretations(8), still manage to work perfectly well on the simplest level as entertaining and emotionally engaging stories. Back to the story, then.

Having met accidentally (but this is an illusion: nothing happens in The Land of Laughs that is not, in one way or another, controlled and orchestrated by the shadows of the two great fathers: Stephen Abbey and Marshall France), Thomas Abbey and Saxony Gardner join their efforts in search for facts about the life of Marshall France, who in effect dominates their relationship.(9) What they are able to find only adds to their curiosity and stirs more questions:

First of all, his name wasn't really France - it was Frank. He was born Martin Emil Frank in Rattenberg, Austria, in 1922. Rattenberg is a little town about forty miles from Innsbruck, in the mountains. His father's name was David, his mother's name was Hannah, with an H. (...) He had an older brother Isaac, who died at Dachau in 1944. (...) France arrived in America in 1938 and moved to Galen, Missouri, sometime after that. (LL, p.19)
Leaving Saxony behind, Thomas travels to New York to gather more information from France's editor, David Louis. Louis, who remains one of the few authorities on France's life, questions some of Abbey's findings (e.g. he denies that France ever had a brother, or that his real name was Frank) and goes to great lengths to discourage Thomas from his plans. According to Louis, not only was France reclusive and eccentric himself (this is popular knowledge: even the shopkeeper mentioned above remarks: "Now, he was a strangey, that Mr. France", LL, p.8), but his daughter Anna, whom Louis gruesomely portrays as calculating and resentful, almost witchlike, is supposed to live in the closeted world of memories of his father, admitting entry to no one, scornful of any attempt to unravel the mysteries of Marshall France's life and art. It is also from David Louis that Thomas learns, in a true horror story fashion:
A couple of years ago an eager-beaver grad student from Princeton came through here on his way out to Galen. (...) I was interested to see how he'd fare up against the mighty Anna. I asked him to write if anything happened out there, but I never heard from him again. (LL, p.27)
Nobody has, in fact, but the morbid fate of the hapless scholar doesn't become unraveled until the final chapters, and the quoted digression provides only a limited clue to the goings-on in the small town of Galen, Missouri.

While in New York, Thomas pays another visit - to an Italian undertaker named Lucente, for whom young France supposedly worked in his early days in America. That a sensitive individual, which a writer - especially a children's writer! - is expected to be, should follow such a grim profession may seem suspicious. As a matter of fact it does "stand out," and rightly so. It is perhaps the first time that the novel ventures to avow its identity (partly a horror story, partly a pastiche of one); its theme (art as a human - as it were - undertaking, but most of all the darker side of art and any act of creation, possibly including the Genesis); and, last but not least, one of its major techniques of presentation and story-line development: the technique of opposites, of startling juxtapositions which allow certain expectations to be formed, only to be subverted in the next paragraph, the next page or chapter. It is characteristic that Carroll is reluctant to disclose his bearings until very late in the novel and that the clues he provides may be understood, if at all perceived on the first reading, as "distractors" rather than early warning signals.

Still, The Land of Laughs is a more complex novel, and Carroll's mind a more perverse one than this. With all the weirdness and resulting "suggestive" function of the passage, there is still a peculiar symmetry to be found there: Lucente's story grants us a valuable insight into the oddities and talents of the late Marshall France:

One day Lucente was working on a very beautiful girl who had killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. He was halfway through the job when he stopped for lunch. When he returned, the woman's arm was on her stomach and she held a big chocolate-chip cookie in her hand. Next to her on a small side table was a glass of milk. Lucente thought it was a great joke - this kind of black humor was traditional in the funeral business. A few weeks later, a mean old woman from down the block died in her sleep. A big yellow-and-black butterfly was taped to her nose the morning after they brought her to the funeral home. Lucente laughed again, but I felt differently: perhaps Marshall France had been creating his first characters. (LL, p.35)
And further on: Marshall France, alias Martin Frank, used the time he was free from work to study Gray's Anatomy. The newly acquired knowledge obviously was not lost on him, as we learn from Lucente that
...after six months Frank developed an extraordinary ability to model an expression on a face that was as lifelike as any the old man had ever seen.

'That's the hardest thing, you see. Making them look alive is the hardest thing there is. Did you ever look in a casket? Sure, one look and you know they're dead. Big deal. But Martin had it, if you know what I mean. He had something that made even me jealous. You looked at one of his jobs and you'd wonder why the hell the guy was lying down in there!' (LL, p.35-6)

This may be read as a beautiful passage about the making of an artist, stressing the role of solid craftsmanship as the basis for the creative flights of imagination, and it certainly does that. What is also important to notice, however, is the way Lucente's anecdotes foreshadow the revelation of France's real artistic power - that of "making them look alive" (an understatement) or how they may even be generalized as a parable of artistic talent.

Surprised, confused and enchanted by the stories he heard from Louis and Lucente, Thomas returns to the earthly realities of his life at home:

One of the kids on the hall was standing in front of my apartment when I got home. 'There's a woman in your apartment, Mr. Abbey. I think she got Mr. Rosenberg to let her in.'

I opened the door and dropped my briefcase on the floor. I kicked the door shut and closed my eyes. The whole place smelled of curry. I hate curry.

'Hello?' a voice called.

'Hi. Uh, hi. Saxony?' (LL, p.36)

And then:
"'Do you like curry, Thomas?'

Halfway through the meal my tongue was a five-alarm fire, but I winked back the tears and nodded and pointed my fork at my plate a couple of times. '...love it.' (LL, p.37)

The hassle of the journey, the initial surprise and embarrassment of meeting his female friend in his home, soon give way to a more romantic development - but is it accidental that the pretending is always there?
'I...' She looked at me, then away, then at me, away. 'I was really happy here this afternoon, Thomas. I came over right after I talked to you on the phone. I was really happy being here, cooking... Do you understand what I mean?' Her glare dissolved back into lip biting, but she was watching me very carefully.

'Yes, well, sure. I mean, of course I understand... Boy, that curry was excellent, Saxony.' (LL, p.37)

The discreet lovemaking scene that follows closes Part One of the novel. In typical Carroll style, we are not shown the act, but the foreplay - and despite the romantic aura, any unnecessary sweetness is avoided, along with dangerous clichés, by means of the matter-of-fact narration and, again, a sudden turn of the focus, as the erotic tension gets relieved in somewhat grotesque humor:
She looked over her shoulder and gave a little grimace. 'Can I ask a favor?'

'Of course.'

'I'm very shy about undressing in front of someone. I'm sorry, but do you think you could close your eyes or look away while I do it?'

I leaned across the bed and kissed her shoulder. 'Sure. I get embarrassed about that too.'

It was perfect. I hate taking off my pants in front of a woman I don't know. So this was great - I'd turn my back to her, pull off my pants while she pulled off hers, we'd both slip under the covers at the same time, turn off the light for a little while...

RRRrriiinnnggg!

I'd just stepped out of my boxer shorts when the phone rang. No one ever called me, especially not at twelve o'clock at night. The phone was on the other side of the room, so, naked, I sprang for it. Saxony let out a whoop, and unconsciously I turned and faced her. Her green panties were down around her knees, and from the look on her face, she didn't know whether to push them down or pull them up.

'Thomas, where have you been? I've been trying to get in touch with you for days!'

'Ma?'

'Yes. The only time I can ever get you is in the middle of the night. Did you get those pants that I sent you from Bloomingdale's?'

'Pants? Ma...' (...)

I got off the phone as fast as I could.(10)

Ushered into the Land of Laughs some twenty pages ago, the reader may already feel more comfortable here. For Thomas and Saxony, as they leave their quiet (and unidentified) Connecticut town for Galen, home of the France family, the real adventure is just about to begin.

    Next chapter     Previous chapter     Contents
© Marek Jedlinski. All rights reserved, yessir.
Title page and contents: http://carroll.tranglos.com
Email: webmaster@tranglos.com
This document is part of Not in Kansas Anymore: A Guide to the Novels of Jonathan Carroll, an MA thesis written at the University of Lodz, never published in print. Feel free to use it for non-commercial purposes, provided a suitable acknowledgment. This work may not be used for any commercial purposes without a prior written agreement with the author. Full version of the document, including footnotes, references and index, is available by email.
Last updated on: March 10, 1997