November 3, 2023
The famous opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics says that human beings desire by nature to know. Every teacher is faced with coping with students who seem to refute Aristotle, starting by not even knowing who he is, but such students have had the natural curiosity we see in children sadly stunted. We want to know—and we need to know. We are not like the animals, hard-wired with instincts that control their actions and order their lives, and we are not emotionally capable of living in chaos. Chaos is mental collapse, the onset of psychosis, a fall into the abyss. The mind’s reaction to incipient chaos is fear, and, far from being the personal failing of special snowflakes who have grown up overprotected from life’s bumps, the epidemic of anxiety disorders at the present moment seems a rational response to a society, and indeed a world, that seems to be teetering on the edge of a plunge into complete chaotic breakdown.
Fear of chaos gives rise to a compulsive need for order, and this can lead, as we see everywhere today, to an attraction to fascism, to authoritarian rule that will impose unity on a disintegrating society. That is why authoritarians always persecute marginalized people, whose crime is simply that they are different and therefore a threat to the most immediate and tempting kind of unity, that of uniformity. But authoritarian systems are rarely content with unifying society by force alone. No, they must see themselves as merely the instruments of a higher Unity, an Absolute Truth: realizing that higher Unity demands the repression of all sorts of diversity. Individualism is seen as a sickness, a symptom of social decadence. The One Truth demands a higher collectivism, a total conformity, a “totalizing” that results in totalitarianism. Hence authoritarian political systems usually go hand in hand with authoritarian religions, as we see in the United States in the unholy union of fascism with Christian nationalism.
All this is obvious enough, and has been for some time, clear back to the time in which Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a novel about it, a parable called The Telling (2000). Most of LeGuin’s science fiction is set in a shared universe in which an institution called the Ekumen, a kind of more philosophical version of Star Trek’s Federation, tries to be a beneficent influence on a host of far-flung alien worlds, with the one big difference that, for better or worse, there is no warp drive, so travel has to be at speeds less than the speed of light. For better because this precludes the possibility of a Galactic Empire, the Ming-the-Merciless authoritarian pattern so common in early “space opera” style of science fiction of the 1930’s, and of which the Empire in Star Wars is a kind of satiric pastiche. There would be no way an Empire could rule over planets it would take decades, if not centuries, to travel to. There is, however, instantaneous communication via a device known as an “ansible,” and the Ekumen influences alien societies through the sharing or withholding of scientific and other knowledge. It also sends envoys to observe those societies, even though it takes decades for one to arrive. Such an envoy is the protagonist of The Telling, who has arrived at a planet named Aka on which, some decades previously, a kind of technocratic capitalism, ironically made possible by the sharing of the Ekumen’s knowledge, has imposed a weird corporate collectivism on the society. Citizens are forced to chant slogans praising science and reason and attacking “superstition” in a way that resembles, on the one hand, some of the Communist regimes during the Cold War, particularly Maoist China, and, on the other hand, the era in American business of the “corporation man,” the self-hypnotized drone for whom capitalism became a kind of religion. Microsoft’s business model based on freewheeling computer cowboys was a revolt against the corporate culture of IBM, in which employees wore identical suits and sang company songs in a bizarre kind of zombie teambuilding. This was the era that believed that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” It is now past, and such collectivism has been replaced by CEO’s who control their companies by more old-fashioned strong-arm tactics, such as setting up cameras constantly monitoring employees as in Orwell’s 1984, or simply by ending the pandemic practice of working from home, so that employees can be monitored and controlled directly.
The envoy, whose name is Sutty, grew up on earth in a future India that had been taken over by a fundamentalist religious movement known as Unism, whose name is more or less self-explanatory. Confronted with two forms of false unity, one in the present and one in her past, Sutty becomes interested in the old religion, which still survives surreptitiously. But the more she learns about it, the less she understands it, for it seems to have none of the features that she is used to thinking of as religious:
But there was no native theism or deism here. On Aka, god is a word without a referent. No capital letters. No creator, only creation. No eternal father to reward and punish, justify injustice, ordain cruelty, offer salvation….No hierarchy of Nature and Supernatural. No binary Dark/Light, Evil/Good, or Body/Soul. No afterlife, no rebirth, no immortal disembodied or reincarnated soul. No heavens, no hells.
She shifts to thinking of Akan religion as, then, “a religion-philosophy of the type of Buddhism or Taoism,” which is not wrong, but which will turn out to be too simple. That marks The Telling as a late work, the result of further processing, since LeGuin was attracted to Taoism to the point of actually translating the Tao te Ching, and the Taoist influence is evident in a number of her novels. It might put a finger on something to say that LeGuin is trying to gain some insight in what underlies ethical religion-philosophies of the Taoist type, something that has to do with the question of unity and multiplicity, one Truth versus many truths. The people of Aka do practice rituals of the old religion, though in secret. But these are subsidiary. The heart of the religion is an enormous body of texts, whole libraries of them, and the central part of the novel consists of Sutty’s researches in that vast collection of texts. That may not sound very dramatic, but in this quest novel, the quest is entirely inside Sutty’s head. What makes it compelling is that the insights she arrives at offer some hope to readers who are repelled by monistic systems of Absolute Truth, whatever their basis, but who also resist the nihilistic allure of despair, of surrender to chaos as inevitable.
Sutty is overwhelmed by the sheer number of texts and by the miscellaneous quality of the information in them:
…a wild profusion of information on all sorts of subjects, a jumbled and jigsawed map that for all its complexity represented only a rough sketch of one corner of the vastness she had to explore: a way of thinking and living developed and elaborated over thousands of year by the vast majority of human beings on this world, an enormous interlocking system of symbols, metaphors, correspondences, theories, cosmology, cooking, calisthenics, physics, metaphysics, metallurgy, medicine, physiology, psychology, alchemy,, chemistry, calligraphy, numerology, herbalism, diet, legend, parable, poetry, history, and story. (91)
This is not just an anthropological study of an alien culture (although LeGuin is the daughter of a famous anthropologist, Karl Kroeber). It is what the textual record of human culture looks like when we first encounter it, usually when young, trying to find a mental map to guide us in our life’s journey. We are looking for a key, something that will show us how it all makes sense, and what we get instead is the curse of Babel. All very well for the likes of Joseph Campbell to say that the day of received wisdom is over, and that now the task of forging a myth to live by is up to each individual. Who has time to sort through all this stuff, evaluating it and synthesizing a personal vision? A few maniacs do make the attempt, and may end up writing books and newsletters, but their hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy only ends up as one more version, one more text or texts on the reading list to get through. No wonder people fixate on one book that gives the total answer—usually the Bible, of course, but sometimes, say, a novel by Ayn Rand. But whenever Sutty finds a text or body of texts that seem to offer a total interpretation of all the texts, to which the others could be subordinated, it turns out to be only another variation, not the central theme. We seek understanding by seeking a name that categorizes, that pins something down:
She went back to calling it the system, the Great System. Later she called it the Forest, because she learned that in ancient times it had been called the way through the forest. She called it the Mountain when she found that some of her teachers called what they taught her the way to the mountain. She ended up calling it the Telling. (96)
But is it a system, or a random mess? If a system, what is systematic about it: that is, what supplies it with some form of organization, however invisible? And there do seem to be a few underlying patterns. Most persistent is a Creation myth that begins with One, out of which come Two, binaries. From the Two are born the Three, Four, and Five, in other words multiplicity. One symbol for this is the Tree, with two forks that grow many branches. As for the Mountain, one sage tells her, “The mountain is the root” (89). All this is traditional mythic symbolism, right up to modern terms in a poem like Wallace Stevens’s “The Rock,” in which the rock is unchanging “reality,” while “imagination,” the principle of change and life, covers the rock like leaves which are, being leaves, always transitory. The Mountain and Tree are a form of the axis mundi or axis of the world that has shown up many times in these newsletters.
Yet it is a unity that does not unify. Why? Because all of the texts, and all of the interpretations, are not reduced to it, but rather spring out of it, germinate, ramify in all directions in a vital uprush beyond all possibility of unification:
Every maz [religious teacher] gave her something else to read. Already she had read or heard countless texts written, oral, both written and oral, many or most of them existing in more than one mode and more than one version. The subject matter of the tellings seemed to be endless, even now, when so much had been destroyed. (102-03)
The maz, the teachers, do not help. Like any good teacher, they do not provide the Right Answer. What do they do?
But the essential work of the maz, what gave them honor among the people, was telling: reading aloud, reciting, telling stories, and talking about the stories. The more they told, the better they were paid. What they talked about depended on what they knew, what they possessed of the lore, what they invented on their own, and, evidently, what they felt talking about at the moment. | The incoherence of it all was staggering. (107)
I am no sage, yet I admit that I laughed out loud at this. It definitely has my number. I spend my life telling: in classrooms, in a book, in newsletters and podcasts. I have been doing it for 40 years, with no plans to stop.
Nonetheless, what good is all this telling? To answer this question will take more telling. We may begin with the observation that we are conditioned to think of “good” as organization, and to think of organization as unity. The first half of that assertion may be true, the second half maybe not. Life begins with simple units, the cells, and evolves towards higher and higher levels of organization, striving against the tendency to disorganization known as entropy. This much is true, and, strikingly, the order of words, as Northrop Frye calls it, operates in the same way as the order of nature. That is the premise of his central work, Anatomy of Criticism, which is an attempt to see literature as a Big Picture, a pattern formed by smaller patterns, down to the smallest verbal units of myth and metaphor, the literary equivalent of DNA, the endlessly recombinant kernels out of which the enormous variety of literature is inexhaustibly born. My own book, The Productions of Time, is a kindred enterprise.
However, in the Anatomy, Frye notes how larger forms like religious scripture and literary epic are not “composed,” that is, created out of some prior unifying principle. Instead, they aggregate out of a verbal sea of textuality perhaps comparable to the primordial soup out of which life is supposed to have emerged:
We note that traditional tales and myths and histories have a strong tendency to stick together and form encyclopaedic aggregates, especially when they are in a conventional metre, as they usually are. Some such process as this has been postulated for the Homeric epics, and in the [Norse] Prose Edda the themes of the fragmentary lays of the Elder Edda are organized into a connected prose sequence. The Biblical histories obviously developed in a similar way, and in India, where the process of transmission is more relaxed, the two traditional epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, apparently went on distending themselves for centuries, like pythons swallowing sheep. (52)
The Mahabharata has some resemblance to the Iliad: its central plot concerns a war between two related peoples, so that it is in some sense a civil war. However, the Iliad is about 15,000 lines long: the Mahabharata is 7 times that length, over 100,000 lines. The sheep it has swallowed, to use Frye’s witty metaphor, include other myths and legends and a great deal of didactic material. The idea of “unity” here is, shall we say, relaxed. It is not, to put it mildly, the kind of unity demanded by the neo-Classical critics of Shakespeare’s day, who demanded that plays have unity of a single time, place, and action.
The Bible itself is another python, which is why the attempt to read it from start to finish is something of an exercise in futility. The historical books of the Old Testament have been braided together, or redacted, out of four narrative strands, known as J, E, D, and P, which resulted in any number of inconsistencies: the mountain on which Moses received the Law is at times Sinai, at times Horeb. The Creation narrative is a redaction of the two quite different versions in J and P. Chronicles is simply a repeat of Samuel and Kings. Things are stuffed in odd places, as in somebody’s attic: out of the pedantic moralizing of Proverbs suddenly erupts the sublime soliloquy of a female Wisdom who claims to have been not only the witness but the instrument of the Creation, amounting really to a third Creation story from a feminine point of view. The New Testament has four inconsistent gospels and a plethora of Pauline letters, only some of which are by Paul. The efforts of anonymous redactors and the Church itself to impose a canonical unity on this material have only been partly successful. Beyond the editing process, the main method of unification has been that of the politicians: if you insist on something and repeat it often enough, a lot of people will start thinking it’s true. Thus, people who have usually not read the Bible simply assume it's a unity because the Church says so.
In traditional cultures, myths are unified into a mythology, and the mythical texts are unified into a sacred book or scripture. But alongside the mythology are stories told merely for entertainment, beginning in the oral period with folktales. Myths are not only unified but centralized: they become the mythology of one people or group. But folktales are the first illegal immigrants: they migrate everywhere, all around the world, respecting no borders, intermarrying themselves promiscuously to various cultures. I teach a unit on fairy tales that contains Russian, Algonquin, and Vietnamese versions of “Cinderella” in addition to the Grimm version, and, although they are clearly the same tale, none of them look a lot like Disney. In the Algonquin version, the prince is a spirit figure who chooses the Cinderella character because she is not just another greedy materialist. In the Vietnamese version, the Cinderella figure is murdered repeatedly by the evil stepmother and stepdaughter, but no problem: it’s a Buddhist culture so she keeps getting reincarnated in a new form. The canonicity of sacred stories means that, although they can be retold, they have to be retold faithfully, whatever that means. Folktales or fairy tales (two names for the same thing, at least for our purposes) can be freely played with. The recreating of folktales in our time, in both books and films, has become practically a genre in itself. Some of the new versions are simply modernizations; others are revisionist, such as feminist retellings that subvert the sexist messages in the old versions. Despite copyrights and trademarks, fan fiction based on Star Wars and Star Trek proliferates. The ingenuity of Spiderman: No Way Home (2021) was to unite three radically different versions of Spiderman, with separate origin stories, from three different sets of Spiderman films, using the metaphor of the multiverse. The multiverse, which is a real concept in theoretical physics, is a direct challenge to the assumption that we live in a single reality, a uni-verse. Whatever may be true in scientific theory, the Marvel and DC universes are actually multiverses. Any continuity is provisional and subject to alteration next week.
Where canonical myth values fidelity, popular literature that descends from folktale values novelty. The risk is that novelty will be mere novelty, superficial and formulaic. But the quest for variety responds to something genuine in the human imagination, a love of diversity, inventiveness, individuality, something comparable to the limitless prolific variety we see in nature. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer seems to be deliberately trying to include an example of every type of tale it is possible for a poet to tell, from the high tragic romance of “The Knight’s Tale” to the ass-kissing farce of “The Miller’s Tale.” Each tale is told by a vividly characterized individual, the tale suiting the personality of the teller. Blake theorized that Chaucer was aiming for a complete cycle of human psychological types. Moreover, Chaucer resembles LeGuin’s description of the miscellaneous nature of the Telling by going beyond the confines of fiction into other types of writing: “The Parson’s Tale” is not a tale at all but a prose treatise on penitence, and Chaucer’s complete works include a “Treatise on the Astrolabe” and a translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Shakespeare rarely invented his own plots, but instead ransacked a whole corpus of popular writing, from Italian novellas to Roman New Comedies to British historical legends. The first of his final four romances, Pericles, is based on a story from the Confessio Amantis (1390) by John Gower, who indeed shows up as a narrator. Gower in turn ripped off the tale from a medieval romance, Apollonius of Tyre. Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, was basically a didactic poet who included stories as exempla of concepts such as the Seven Deadly Sins. His work displays the tendency to burgeon: Frye speaks of him as one of those clerical poets who “tries to get everything he knows into one vast poem or poetic testament” (AC, 53). He certainly gave it his best shot: Gower wrote three long poems in three languages, Latin, French, and English, with a total word count approaching that of the Mahabharata.
Also in the 14th century, Boccaccio’s Decameron consists of 100 stories told by people sheltering from the plague. Like the Canterbury Tales, it includes a wide range of story types. It also multiplies diversity by including stories within stories, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which, for all its epic trappings, was the most popular book of the Middle Ages because it was read as a compilation of the tales of Greek mythology. Cervantes employed the tale-within-a-tale technique in Don Quixote, a book that on one level is about reading. Medieval romance employed a technique that has been termed “interlace,” after the intricate abstract designs of Celtic art. Interlace technique does not have main plot and subplot: instead, it juggles many plots, the trick being to keep all the balls in the air. The great example in English is Spenser’s Faerie Queene. A poem by Robert Graves says that “There is one story and one story only,” but that is the ideal of scripture or epic. The alternative ideal is that of a kind of verbal Noah’s Ark. Other examples in world literature include the Panchatantra, an ancient Indian collection of animal fables, and an 11th century work translated into English as the Ocean of Stories by the Sanskrit writer Somadeva. The framing device in the most famous of these collections, the Arabian Nights, gives us a clue to the underlying motivation of such collections. Like Scheherazade, we tell stories as a way of staving off death.
Ursula LeGuin’s own body of writing is an example of the Telling. I can think of no writer in the field of fantasy and science fiction who has her range. She has written stories set in her science fiction future history like The Telling and The Left Hand of Darkness. But she has also written one of the most eminent fantasy series, the Earthsea stories, and one of the most important utopias, The Dispossessed. Her corpus includes experimental and metafictional works, epistemological parables such as The Lathe of Heaven, plus poems, essays, children’s books. In fantasy, LeGuin’s original model was Tolkien, who wrote one big epic that was a world in itself. But since the publication of the Silmarillion, we have gotten a look behind the scenes, to see that the one definitive epic has its roots in a disparate body of materials, some mythical, some legendary and pseudo-historical, some folktales. Moreover, the Silmarillion was only a culling from a much larger body of material that has been published in nearly a dozen volumes by Tolkien’s son. The ideal of a thematic rather than fictional encyclopedic work, like Gower’s, has survived into modern times. Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic, The Prelude, is so titled because it was meant to be only the introduction to a vast work called The Recluse, although only one part of that larger work, The Excursion, was ever completed. Ezra Pound’s Cantos in the 20th century, also thematic rather than fictional, have omnivorously devoured the entire body of world culture, which they regurgitate in hundreds of fragments, from Chinese history to books on economic theory. Reading them has some of the fascination of wandering through a junk shop—or of randomly turning up titles at a library discard sale.
Slowly, LeGuin’s protagonist becomes aware that there is a question behind the question of the meaning of the Akan texts. The underlying mystery is that of “telling” itself. Why is telling so important? Another character tells her:
“It’s all we have. You see? It’s the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don’t have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of the river. We’d tumble and spin and be helpless if we tried to live in the moment. We’d be like a baby. A baby can do it, but we’d drown. Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. The past has passed, and there’s nothing in the future to catch hold of. The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is.” (132)
Sutty broods on this:
Nobody made the world, ruled the world, told the world to be. It was. It did. And human beings made it be, made it be a human world, by saying it? By telling what was in it and what happened in it? Anything, everything—tales of heroes, maps of the stars, love songs, lists of the shapes of leaves….For a moment she thought she understood. (133)
Because we have no instincts and cannot live in the moment—whatever mindfulness may say—we have to turn the world into story, transform the natural order into the symbolic order that is our real home. But there is yet another question, as there always is. On what model? There is an old distinction between two models of nature, called natura naturata and natura naturans. The first is nature recreated symbolically as what I have called a vision of order. Of the two Creation myths in the Bible, the one that opens Genesis is an example of this. God makes everything in a methodical way, and sees that it is good: a place for everything and everything in its place. But Genesis 2:4 begins what was once a second creation myth. A garden is watered by a mist, and everything grows, including two Trees. This is a naturans vision of nature as energy and process, fertility exploding into the million wonders of the natural world, some of them as strange as any alien race. This is not a refutation of the vision of order but its necessary, if paradoxical, complement. The vision of order anchors us, steadies us. But the vision of energy and endless creativity exhilarates us, fills us with wonder. Sutty comes to understand this by asking herself whether the Akans pray:
If prayer was praise, then perhaps they did pray. She had come to understand their descriptions of natural phenomena, the Fertiliser’s pharmacopia, the maps of the stars, the lists of ores and minerals, as litanies of praise. By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity and specificity, the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated in the fullness of being. The described, they named, they told all about everything. But they did not pray for anything. (125)
This vision of plenitude is our gift for renouncing the quest for unity, for order conceived as an imposition of oneness from the top down. The quest for plenitude is rather a descent myth. Difference and diversity are downward, in the direction of the unconscious, the realm of dream, with its endless metamorphoses, fueled by the twin drives of pleasure and power. The central work of Frye’s earlier career was Anatomy of Criticism, with its vision of order. In the second half of his career, Frye wrote two books on the Bible as the “great code” of art, the source of its vision of order. But he also wrote a wonderful book, The Secular Scripture, on romance, the literary genre of the popular stories we have been speaking of. At the end of its first chapter, he speaks of a line of Pope’s that exists in two versions: “A mighty maze of walks without a plan,” and “A mighty maze, but not without a plan.” Of these, he comments: “The first version recognizes the human situation; the second refers to the constructs of religion, art, and science that man throws up because he finds the recognition intolerable” (25). Intolerable—but still perhaps necessary. He quotes Ecclesiastes 6:9: “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire,” saying, “Great literature is what the eye can see: it is the genuine infinite as opposed to the phony infinite, the endless adventures and endless sexual stimulation of the wandering of desire. But I have a notion that if the wandering of desire did not exist, great literature would not exist either” (24-25).
We now have access to Frye’s equivalent of the Silmarillion, the thousands of pages of wanderings of his unpublished notebooks. The 77 notebooks, 4000 pages of material, which Robert Denham and I spent 15 years transcribing and editing, are a mighty maze, sometimes clearly the inspiration for his published work and yet at other times quite independent of them, with daring speculations that go beyond what he allowed into print, sometimes elaborating a dozen schemes for organizing one of his books, none of which he employed in the finished version. They are Frye’s form of meditation, and reading them is a descent into his primary process, which makes them, for all their indeterminacies and dead ends, at times as exciting as the published works themselves. Most of all, we learn that he spent 50 years trying to elaborate a unified vision of order, a set of 8 works based on 8 mythical and literary patterns, the “ogdoad,” an 8-fold unity—and failed. Each new published book became instead something different. Yet one wonders whether, without the vision of unity, he would have achieved the variety of his two dozen books and hundreds of articles and shorter texts.
One image of the Telling is the Tree. In the “Prologue” to his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung says:
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. (4)
In a complicated book called One Thousand Plateaus (1980), philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari also adopt the rhizome as metaphor, but reject the tree as a version of it. The tree is an example of the “arboresque,” that is, of a metaphorical model in which the proliferation represented by the branches is governed by a single dominating root, to them an authoritarian model. A true rhizome, for them, is a network without a governing base or center, a mighty maze without a plan. But if you dig up a tree, you will find that the root is not single—or rather, it is both singular and manifold. From the rhizome proper ramifies a network of roots and tendrils that is as complex and tangled as the branches aboveground. As above, so below. LeGuin has written a story based on the metaphor of the rhizome. In “Vaster than Empires but More Slow” (1971), an exploration party lands on a planet that has no fauna, only flora. By the end of the story, they recognize that the whole planet is a plant: that is, all the individual plants of all species—trees, bushes, grasses, everything—are connected by small nodes, forming one gigantic vegetable organism. And that the number of connections, comparable to the number in the human brain, has produced sentience. It is a rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.
Why do these models matter? Because they are models of both the psyche within and of society without. Deleuze and Guattari are searching for a model in which the Many are not governed by the One. But I do not think we find it by rejecting the One in favor of the Many, either as a model of the mind or of the community. As for the mind, Deleuze and Guattari had written a previous book, Anti-Oedipus (1972) advocating a psyche with no governance by a unifying ego at all, a condition they freely admitted was tantamount to schizophrenia, which is only regarded as pathological, however, by minds obsessed with control. I cannot follow them there, if only because I grew up with a schizophrenic mother, and I cannot be convinced that schizophrenia is actually heightened awareness. And a society with no unifying principle would be the war of all against all.
The only possible model for both psychic and social health would be that in which unity and diversity are not either-or but both-and. In The Productions of Time, I use terms for it out of the Romantic philosophical and critical tradition: identity-in-difference and “multeity in unity,” Coleridge’s definition of beauty. It is not a rational condition, but, despite accusations of “mystification,” it is not a merely irrational one either. Why does all this philosophical telling matter, on the most concrete and practical level? Writing in the time of the English Civil War, a war of all against all with resemblances to that which we are in the midst of now, he wrote in his great prose tract Areopagitica that we do not have the truth, only the search for it: “To be still searching what we know not by what we know…this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic” (742). And the search is conducted by telling, by talking, by the back-and-forth we call “conversation”: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making” (743). The person who fears this lack of unity is blind: “Fool! he sees not the firm root, out of which we all grow, though into branches” (744).
The ultimate model may be that of language itself. The criterion of true language is what the linguist Charles Hockett called “productivity,” the ability to generate an indefinite number of new messages rather than repeating a limited repertoire, as in animal communication systems. In English, about 40 phonemes or significant sounds form a cornucopia out of which pours the gift of gab, an Alpha and Omega or limited alphabet that is nevertheless without beginning or end, and yet always beginning, always beginning to end. “Oh, yoz,” laughs one of LeGuin’s sages. I keep going with talk. Just the way the world does.”
References
Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. In ‘The Secular Scripture’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991. Edited by Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Volume 18 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Volume 22 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Revised edition. Vintage, 1965.
LeGuin, Ursula K. The Telling. Ace, 2001. Originally published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2000.
Milton, John. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Odyssey Press, 1957.