Chapter Three:
THE PARANOIA OF ART

"Art is beautiful until it becomes real or the truth."
- Jonathan Carroll

(A Child Across the Sky;
Outside the Dog Museum)

If it is becoming evident by now that, guiding the prospective readers through the Land of Laughs, we adopt a slightly more general approach with every next novel, and especially if the previous chapter has left a feeling that in the discussion of Sleeping in Flame we were tiptoeing around major issues most of the time instead of defining and dissecting them, then it ought to be pointed out that this is not at all accidental, nor is this due to some negligence on the author's part. Slowly but unmistakably, Jonathan Carroll's novels are becoming more nebulous (and thus more difficult to address) as their reflective content begins to challenge the descriptive; the issues are less clearly communicated, the conclusions are not as definitive as they used to be and, most importantly, the stories abandon their initial simplicity and thus garble whatever referential or allegorical values they still have. In simple words, it is becoming nearly impossible to summarize the later stories, as they tend to "propagate", grow in all directions rather than progress along a linear structure. This process accelerates in the two novels we are going to discuss in the present chapter - very appropriately, too, because the evolution we are trying to pinpoint is the evolution of art: asserting its sovereignty, becoming its own raison d'etre as it were. Both A Child Across the Sky and Outside the Dog Museum deal with art doing just this and more: transcending its boundaries, assuming an infinitely more creative and responsible role than it so far has been thought to serve. While it becomes increasingly hard to talk about the stories themselves, it also becomes necessary to pay closer attention to the position of the author, implied in the way they are told and to concentrate on how things - not what things - are being said.

Most characteristically, in the pages of these two novels there surfaces a near obsession with telling the story - obsession which we can trace back not just to Sleeping in Flame (the many retrospections of Walker Easterling's previous lives) but really to Carroll's first book. However, there is a world of difference between the earlier and the later novels. The Land of Laughs told a story which developed in a linear sequence and was thus easily accessible. With a little effort it is possible to outline its plot in a few sentences which would not only make good sense but also convey some of the novel's underlying concepts without making them vapid. Conversely, trying to summarize, to abridge in any way, the plots of either A Child Across the Sky or Outside the Dog Museum is an exercise in futility. The events that make them up provide only a loose skeleton for innumerable digressions, anecdotes, reflections and considerations. If, as we have shown, Sleeping in Flame was very much a story of, within and about a story, then that was really only a foreplay to a tournament in storytelling that both Carroll himself and his characters engage in later. It is a high-flying comparison, but the difference is equivalent to that between T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land. The former, for all its semiotic intricacies, tells a deceitfully simple story: about a middle aged man walking down to the house where lives the lady he loves; he would like to propose to her but is distressed and self-conscious enough to dismiss the possibility of being accepted and in the last minute turns away from her door. The latter poem also tells "stories" but they - and their mutual relations - are far too complex to be retold and together they make a literary work of a much larger scope, but by the same token The Waste Land loses some of Prufrock's intensity and lucidity.

One of the tangible symptoms of this change in Carroll's writing has already been mentioned before: as the Land of Laughs has become a self-sufficient, self-contained territory, the intertextual references (a number of which were identified while analyzing the first novel) are now limited to the close links between Carroll's own works. Allusions to the pieces of literary canon that are still to be found there have nothing of the symbolism of Thomas Abbey's references to Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. When Harry Radcliffe, a genius architect, the main character of Outside the Dog Museum, complaining about the anarchy and disorder on the building site, concludes sarcastically: "Welcome to the Pleasure Dome"(74) or refers to his ex-lover who is now going to marry someone even richer and more powerful than himself as his "not so coy mistress" (ODM, p.185), thus eliciting associations with Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, these allusions do not illuminate or enhance the novel's meanings: they are simply a kind of intellectual bravado, something one might use to grace everyday conversation: these are ornaments of the rich language telling a rich story.

On the other hand, since Bones of the Moon, Carroll's novels have become closely associated with one another. Cullen James' story remains the point of reference for defining the characters' attitude to both magic and literature (more about it in a moment) and certain events are common to all these books.(75) Still more then by the plots, the novels are connected by the characters that populate them: Weber Gregston, Philip Strayhorn and Harry Radcliffe are mentioned as early as in Bones of the Moon - and only Max Fischer, the narrator of After Silence, is the first person in the long time who has not been known to Carroll's books before.

And the stories... They, too, lose the unmistakable symbolism that made The Land of Laughs such an inexhaustible source of ideas. The plots of Carroll's earlier works, notably Voice of our Shadow and Bones of the Moon could be "translated" into their main characters' internal experiences (eg Sleeping in Flame can be understood as Walker Easterling's way to attaining self-knowledge). Later novels, however, do not allow for such one-to-one explication; using a critical cliché we might say that, as pieces of art, they are not made to mean but simply to be, to exist as aesthetic artifacts, carefully crafted compositions which ought to be experienced, not dissected. By the same token, trying to narrate these stories or quoting specific passages would usually only present some of Jonathan Carroll's style of writing rather than enable us to understand the novels better. Especially the "internal" stories, those told within the plot, exchanged by the characters who revel in sharing them and are ever grateful to listen, seem to find their goal and satisfaction in the pure enjoyment of telling, the wonder of hearing. Art for art's sake? For much more in fact, for creating and destroying rather than merely signifying.

In A Child Across the Sky there is Mr Fiddlehead: a short story quoted in full, authored by Philip Strayhorn (in fact, an independent story published separately in Carroll's The Panic Hand). Partly responsible for having destroyed his satisfying marriage, the story now literally grows, writes itself, long after its author committed suicide. When alive, Strayhorn was a famous movie director, a master of gore who shot the Midnight series of horrors, pictures so infinitely perverse and perfect in their representation of evil, that the last of them actually "disturbed the universe" even before it was released and not only led to its creator's death but opened a Pandora's box of disasters which could only be averted by a divine intervention - or this is what the readers are made to believe until the two final pages of the novel when even this unlikely chance of redemption is taken away. Guided by Philip Strayhorn from behind the grave by way of videotapes on which more messages appear with time, and by a guardian angel in the form of a little beautiful girl (it's ever so easy to disregard the clue that Pinsleepe is actually an angel of death) Weber Gregston, a director - we learn - much more artful and sophisticated, much subtler in his insights than his old time roommate and friend, is enticed to abandon his work (tired of making movies he turned to directing stage plays performed by amateur, cancer-stricken actors, giving the terminally ill people the last flicker of fulfillment in their lives) in order to recreate the supposedly evil scene which got mysteriously lost after Strayhorn had shot it and died.(76) Delighted to be "making movies" again and motivated by the thought of helping his bygone friend (as well as enchanted by all the magic that reveals itself to him) Gregston hardly stops to think how on earth perfecting the evil thing that got Strayhorn into all the trouble in the first place is supposed again to bring about the righteous order. Virtually deserting his living friends and even dropping his lifelong habits (like praying before going to sleep at night) he devotes every bit of his attention to the art he is creating. In the short scene he is shooting he includes not only the intellectual/melancholy bits from his own suave pictures, but also a real life footage of his colleague almost choking to death on a piece of cake at a party and a video recording of his mother dying in a plane crash, shrewdly provided by Strayhorn from the land of the dead. When Gregston's work is completed he himself understands that it is no less than perfect, absolute horror - much better than Strayhorn could have ever hoped to achieve:

Pinsleepe said, 'It will make people cry. That's the beginning.'

Strayhorn said, 'There's a line from Rilke, Works of art are of an infinite loneliness... Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.'

'You mean seeing Midnight Kills will make people love evil?'

'Yes. Because of your art.'(77)

'He made a work of art.'

'He made three minutes of art, but it was enough.' (CAS, p.237)

Corresponding ideas form the foundation of Carroll's next novel, Outside the Dog Museum, but here creative mastery serves to work out an entirely different scheme. Skipping over two hundred pages' worth of stories and ideas(79), we will move on to reveal that the Dog Museum which the eminent (and as self-confident as they come) architect Harry Radcliffe designs at the request of the Sultan of Saru - a fictitious Middle-East country, smothered by the pandemonium of a guerrilla war - turns out to be no less than the biblical Tower of Babel. Harry learns this from Morton Palm - his friend in Vienna, a beer-drinking ex-soldier, now a carpenter who makes wooden doors and ladders in his simple workshop, but who is "also" an angel, a real, God-sent one this time. What is important is that Harry doesn't build the Museum - the Tower - for architecture's sake or for financial reward.(80) He learns that the building of the original Babel was attempted while mankind still remained in the state of grace but because its purpose was all wrong God rendered people unable to communicate and understand:

They didn't want to build it as thanks to God for giving them this sacred gift of understanding. No, they wanted to build it because they were confused and dissatisfied with the opulence of God's language and wanted to create their own - a language of objects [so] God took the gift away from the children. He didn't do it because they challenged Him, but because He was worried for them. They took His gift, the infinite information, and wanted to use it to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Do you realize what a disaster that would have been if they'd succeeded? An utter waste of energy and spirit. Why build when they could have put that knowledge to such better use? (...) Radcliffe, the whole point is not to create, but to understand.(81)

We were talking about art, though. In the end of the novel, the half-erected Tower is bombed by Cthulu's terrorists and lies in ruin but (just like Strayhorn's short story which grows though nobody writes it) the earth trembles under Radcliffe's feet as it rebuilds itself to one-third its original height - as high as he was "correct in his design." Harry is led to believe this miracle is a work of God, a sign he is following the right path, but at the same time we have to view this event as yet another piece of great art living its own enchanted life.

Among the clues indicative of the novels' orientation are, as we have said, the common references to Carroll's earlier book, Bones of the Moon. They will be found not only in Outside the Dog Museum, but wherever they do appear they shed some light on the line of development that Carroll's writing follows. In Sleeping in Flame Cullen James' story of dream-journeys to Rondua is referred to as just this: a story that is held to be true, as attested by Weber Gregston who, at a certain point in his life, was himself under its magical spell. Gregston actually recapitulates the tale of Cullen's dreams that he used to share and describes Rondua in serious, vivid terms. The first change comes in A Child Across the Sky, where Cullen James and her experience with magic are pushed into the background while the book which she wrote (that is Bones of the Moon), and not so much the story, takes on primary importance. Not only does Gregston notice the volume displayed in a bookstore window, but he even goes as far as to quote some of the reviews that Bones of the Moon - a bestseller, we learn - gathered. Of course, as long as there is Gregston himself to testify for the truthfulness of the story, the incidents that Cullen reports never come to be questioned - but now they are viewed through the filter of literature: turned into art, their reality has become remote, almost impersonal.

It does become completely impersonal in After Silence, when Gregston is no longer around. In the third part of this guide we will show how that novel is essentially a retreat from the Land of Laughs, how hard-nosed reality - eluded, if not downright ignored in A Child Across the Sky and Outside the Dog Museum, returns with a vengeance into Jonathan Carroll's world. It may be an appropriate moment now to show how differently Cullen James' experience is looked upon in After Silence, for the readers to see the "big picture" before we speak in more detail about it. Here is what Max Fischer (as most Carroll's main characters an artist, but not a writer, architect or a movie maker anymore: a cartoonist) has to say about Bones of the Moon without even mentioning the title:

On the plane, a terminally obnoxious woman behind me with a voice like a musical handsaw spoke for five loud hours about a woman named Cullen James whose autobiography had changed this woman's life. According to the acolyte, Cullen had somehow left her body and traveled to another land where (as usual) she went through all sorts of hair-raising adventures. But by golly she persevered, learned THE TRUTH, and returned home A Whole Person. I'd seen this book in stores but one glance at the cover and summary on the dust jacket made me put it down fast. (...) It seems possible that via their gifts, geniuses might be able to find their way through life's maze. However deranged housewives, ageing movie stars, or retro 1960s gurus(83) who announce unashamedly to hear God or ten-thousand-year-old warriors(84) telling them the secrets of the universe... give me pause. I know if God contacted me, I'd at least be a bit humble. The way these nuttos describe it, they're all on a first-name basis with Him. Besides, little daily truths are hard enough to bear. Told THE TRUTH by one who knows would, if we survived, surely scorch us inside and out like a blown fuse. It did to me.(85)

As yet, however, the well-known reality is still being pushed behind the horizon that encompasses the Land of Laughs, and the elements of magic grow ever stronger, imposing themselves upon unsuspecting men who indeed were doing just fine without it. Much earlier, Thomas Abbey and Joseph Lennox wished to partake in the magic they did not have themselves: that of Marshall France's writing and that of the Tates' friendship, respectively. Cullen James accepted what supernatural powers stood in her way, at times using them outside the world of her dreams to her own benefit. Walker Easterling, the human child of a phantom wizard was endowed with his father's magic against his will and renounced it, cutting all the threads that connected him with Rumpelstiltskin's world, in favor of human life and satisfying earthly love. But the characters of A Child Across the Sky and Outside the Dog Museum are not given that choice: magic will work its way upon them no matter what their wishes and plans have been. They appear as mere tools in the hands of either God or the devil, or as marionettes whose strings are pulled by some divine fingers, to good or bad ends. Thus magic (widely understood) takes over and begins to control people's lives (as well as the history of the entire mankind), instead of being controlled by them as the most powerful instrument available to the creative minds of the likes of Thomas Abbey and Marshall France.

We have traveled into the Land of Laughs as far as the path leads, the path laid down by Jonathan Carroll, taking the visitors on a tour full of fascinating people and wondrous events. "Curiouser and curiouser" was the most frequently heard reaction to what we were allowed to witness, and very fitting, too. Reader, brace yourself: coming back from an enchanted journey like this, stepping out onto the busy main street of your town or city, you're in for a major shock. Or maybe we're not even coming back; maybe, without being fully aware of it, we have traversed the whole of the Land of Laughs and are now crossing its outer border. Either way, it's probably going to be a shock. We're coming home.