September 22, 2023
It turns out that there’s a lot to know about knowledge. Last week’s newsletter took off from Simon Winchester’s new book Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Times to Modern Magic, my strategy being to move through various categories of knowledge. I mused upon what I called “practical knowledge” and “citizen’s knowledge,” the latter being the kind of knowledge necessary to navigate in our society, including the ability to take part in the kind of cultural conversation on which democracy depends. In the 1980’s, the literary critic E.D. Hirsch called this kind of knowledge “cultural literacy.” But there are other categories of knowledge, plus the whole subject of the transmission and accessing of knowledge about which I hope to add a little something to Winchester’s thoughtful and entertaining account.
There are times, when I contemplate the enormous damage produced by social media, both in terms of psychological damage to individuals and a wider threat to democracy, when I wonder if it would have been better if the Internet had never been invented. But that is foolishly one-sided thinking. The Internet has made possible an accessibility of knowledge that is in certain ways well-nigh utopian. We do not recognize this only because we take it for granted. By coincidence, the creation of Winchester’s book happens to be an example of it. In an afterword, Winchester says that, unlike any of his other books, this one was written without traveling to seek out information and talk to people: “Aside from a single journey to Britain in the autumn of 2021, I remained steadfastly rooted to my study in western Massachusetts, reading, reading, and reading, and then writing, writing, and writing” (381). There was, of course, an obvious reason for this research carried out in solitude: the pandemic. But the fact, which should be stunning, is that it was possible for him to research a book that, even for him, is wide ranging and richly filled with information, without leaving his study. It was a book that would not have been possible without the Internet in all of its manifestations: search engines, email, Zoom, the electronic catalogues of libraries, Amazon for physical copies of books delivered to your doorstep (perhaps, in those days, left on your doorstep for purposes of social distancing).
I have had my own experience with research that perhaps would not even have been possible by conventional methods. Not so much for my own book: for The Productions of Time, I drew largely upon the resources of my own private database, so to speak, an eccentrically extensive personal collection of books that line practically every room of my home. This house is a Noah’s ark filled with books rather than animals (well, animals too: two guinea pigs and 53 stuffed monkeys). Given the fact that my type of criticism rarely calls for arcane sources, it usually turns out that if it’s not on my shelves somewhere, I don’t really need it. But for 15 years I was a partner in a very different kind of enterprise that did indeed call for research into some out-of-the-way subjects. Editing, along with my friend and partner Robert D. Denham, the unpublished notebooks of Northrop Frye entailed searching for hundreds of references. Frye kept these handwritten notebooks for 50 years; they are not drafts for his published work but rather a form of personal meditation on various literary, mythological, and cultural texts and ideas. They were for his own use, and no one knew they existed until after his death. In editing them to become 8 volumes of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, we had to provide extensive annotations to illuminate what amounts to a private language: each of the approximately 500-page volumes has on average 1000 endnotes. There went 15 years of my life, although I do not regret it for a minute. It was a unique chance to walk through the mind of the greatest literary critic of the 20th century.
It is hard even to remember what it was like to have to do even the simplest bibliographic research directly in a library. Before the Internet, was no way even to look up publication data on a book published last year without traveling to a library and checking a card catalogue. And countless times, in the notebooks, we came up against cryptic references that could have referred to anything from anywhere. Without search engines and digitalized information on the Internet, our task would have taken years longer, and some parts of it might well have proved impossible. As a random example, here is one entry in Notebook 24:
Coryat’s Crudities, ii, 328: typology of Q Sheba: Solomon :: Magi : infant Jesus.
This one did manage to find its way into a published work. In The Great Code (178), we find that “The visit of the wise men to Christ is the antitype of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon, the connecting link being Isaiah 60:6.” But the notebook’s reference to Coryat has been dropped. So now what? My endnote reads: “See Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities, 2 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, Publishers to the University, 1905; orig. pub. 1611); the passage is Coryat’s translation of some engraved tablets he saw in the Cologne Cathedral” (437). I found that with the aid of a search engine, without which I might be still wandering aimlessly in some research library. If you have a burning desire to learn more about Thomas Coryat and his crudities, or for that matter to find that crudités are French appetizers, you may search for yourself online without leaving your chair. Yes, Internet information may well be incorrect and usually needs to be double checked. But, that qualification notwithstanding, there has never been anything like this in history. The mountain, which is a mountain of information, has come to Mohammed, and that is a miracle even if the result is that we are buried under it.
This new situation, in which, at least theoretically, one individual can access the whole world’s information, has only existed for roughly the last 30 years, and the human race has spent many centuries arriving at it. Knowing What We Know is, from one point of view, a meditation on history seen as an ongoing revolution in the transmission and useful organization of knowledge, moving through a series of phases. We spoke last week of the original oral phase of culture, in which the poet, the oral bard, has the function of being a kind of walking databank, a preserver of the foundational knowledge of a culture. Some of this knowledge is mythical, providing the vertical dimension of experience that mythology provides, a vision of worlds above and worlds beneath the middle earth of ordinary experience, and usually a Creation myth recounting how that whole vertical cosmos came into being.
The Greek mythological epic is Hesiod’s Theogony. It is not, frankly, a page turner: as I mentioned in an earlier newsletter, much of it consists of catalogues of, to us, obscure names that range from the intriguing to the tedious. It is a repository of what I sometimes call lore, that information that is fascinating if you belong to the in-group and utterly pointless if you are an outsider. Such is the information of hobbyists: enthusiasts (yes, like me) will debate the merits of rosewood versus mahogany for the back and sides of an acoustic guitar. Lore easily becomes esoteric: you can learn the names of woods you never heard of before. Cocobolo? Ovangkol? Sapele? Last week we confronted the know-nothing attitude often expressed as “Why should I have to know anything when I can look it up on my phone?” But in fact children love lore, unless they are spoiled by a combination of capitalist exploitation and bad educational theories. In a previous newsletter on education, I quoted from a delightful book-length poetic satire called A Suit of Nettles (1958) by the Canadian poet James Reaney, a mock pastoral in which the speakers are geese in an Ontario farmyard. One goose speaks enthusiastically about the educational method of his former teacher, Old Strictus, who forced students to memorize and thus become their own oral bards, knowing “all that a young goose was supposed to know”: “When I was a gosling he taught us to know the most wonderful list of things. You could play games with it; whenever you were bored or miserable what he had taught you was like a marvellous deck of cards in your head that you could shuffle through and turn over into various combinations with endless delight” (30). Then he recites an example:
What are the children of the glacier and the earth? Esker and hogsback, drumlin and kame. What are the four elements and the seven colours, The ten forms of fire and the twelve tribes of Israel? The eight winds and the hundred kinds of clouds, All of Jesse’s stem and the various ranks of angels? The Nine Worthies and the Labours of Hercules, The sisters of Emily Brontë, the names of Milton’s wives? The kings of England and Scotland with their Queens, The names of all those hanged on the trees of law Since this province first cut up trees into gallows. What are the stones that support New Jerusalem’s wall? Jasper and sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, Sard, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, Chrysoprasus, hyacinthine and amethyst.
This is spot on. These are items of cultural importance, of cultural literacy, as E.D. Hirsch called it. They may seem random, but they are part of a webwork, a mental version of which the Internet’s hypertext, with everything linked to everything else, is an electronic analogue. Take “chrysolite,” one of the stones out of which the heavenly New Jerusalem is made in the Book of Revelation. It is no accident that it also occurs in an unbearably poignant passage of Shakespeare’s Othello, when a grief-stricken Othello says of Desdemona,
Had she been true, If heaven would make me such another world Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, I’d not have sold her for it. (5.2)
And from there, a search engine will take you to a science fiction short story, “Entire and Perfect Chrysolite,” by the great science fiction writer R.A. Lafferty. But education should both instruct and delight, and we should note that Reany’s goslings use their memories as my students use their phones, scrolling through them for hours of entertainment. If the list bears a certain resemblance to one of these newsletters, that too is no accident. There is more than one kind of silly goose.
While the mythological lore of the oral tradition is organized along the vertical axis mundi, it also shades horizontally, so to speak, into the kinds of chronicle and legend that would later become history. The Expanding Eyes podcast is presently working its way through Shakespeare’s version of “The kings of England and Scotland and their Queens,” his double tetralogy of history plays forming a kind of dramatic epic. The idea that the modern West invented history, the sense of a horizontal timeline of presumable progress, is a colonialist lie. Indigenous people do have tribal histories, but because they are oral it was convenient for colonial exploiters to deny their existence so as to deny their claims to the land that the Indigenous people had lived upon for many generations. The title of J. Edward Chamberlin’s If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? (2010), a quotation from a Canadian magistrate, expresses this attitude. If it is not in writing, it doesn’t exist. The idea that the West also invented philosophy, and that non-Western and traditional peoples could not really think, is also an ideological lie. If the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Straus is to be believed, mythology is not just stories but a way of thinking. The mind organizes experience into sets of opposites. “Thinking” means perceiving the relationship among those opposites and their transformations. In his four-volume Mythologiques (1964-1971), Lévi-Strauss attempts to prove that South American myths are actually a system of thought based on images rather than concepts. The images form sets of opposites such as the raw and the cooked, i.e., the natural and the artificial or culturally transformed.
I am hoping to provide a useful supplement about how knowledge was transmitted and accessed in the oral period because Winchester’s account really begins with the invention of writing, and the problem of data storage that accompanied literacy. The narrative is one of increasing efficiency and ease of access. My personal book collection is cumbersome enough as it is, and I am certainly glad that writing is no longer impressed on clay tablets as cuneiform was. The invention of substances such as vellum and papyrus led to the book proper, which was originally, as late as Roman times, a scroll. These were, however, still clumsy both to use and to store. The technical term for what we call a book is a codex, a sheaf of leaves bound together on one side. This form of packaging seems pleasant and inevitable, but the philosopher Jacques Derrida notes that the book is one manifestation of what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said, “The medium is the message.” That is, the form to some degree transforms, determines the content. The knowledge contained in any book, Derrida says, has been artificially cut off from what he called “intertextuality.” The word “text” is related to “textile,” and a text is a webwork that is really part of an endless larger webwork of texts. We teach students that the first step in writing is to find a limited focus, selecting its material to fit a specific thesis. But Derrida is quite right that that is an artificial act, a kind of useful fiction that could also become deceptive. In fact, no text is an island. No subject is autonomous and cut off in the way that the unified argument of a book implies. All texts are implicitly interconnected in what Northrop Frye calls an “order of words,” but which Derrida, a more ironic thinker, characterizes as an endless labyrinth of words. He has a book called Margins, because in the act of selecting a book’s material, an author excludes material that “does not belong,” which means that material is “marginalized,” relegated to the margins.
However, influenced by psychoanalysis, Derrida says that what has been excluded, still lurks invisibly, and there is always a possibility of a textual “return of the repressed,” which is what he means by “deconstruction.” His notorious statement, “There is nothing outside the text,” is not, as it has at times been taken to be, a solipsistic withdrawal from external reality into an intellectual’s subjective playground of words, words, words. It means almost the opposite: textual identifications do not observe the customs guards at the border, so to speak, but expand into something like the old medieval definition of God, “an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” The characters in certain fantasy novels such as John Crowley’s Little, Big and Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn are sometimes aware that they are characters in a story. When we die, we become our story, which is why the dying Hamlet wants Horatio to remain alive to tell Hamlet’s story.
The margins are a book’s horizontal limits, so to speak. A book or essay is also supposed to have vertical limits, in the form of a beginning, middle, and end, but this too is an artificially imposed unity. In fact, writing wants to imitate life, and life goes on and on without end. The underlying genre of popular non-realistic writing is the romance, and romance is by nature a “neverending story,” which is why Scheherazade will never run out of tales. In a way, the scroll suggested something of that endless flowing, which is why we still speak of “scrolling” down the page of a Word document. Writing this prompted me to wonder if there is in fact any limit to the size of a Word document—so of course I looked it up online. It appears that I cannot scroll down forever: there is a limit of 32 MB of textual information in a Word document, enough to fit Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past 8 times over, but not unending. Nonetheless, that limit is electronic, not textual. Textually, there is, as Robert Graves put it, “one story and one story only,” of which all stories are part. The attempt to tell one story that is all stories has led to such experimental works as Finnegans Wake, on which James Joyce worked for 17 years.
Once information is committed to writing, the problem is how to store it in such a way that people can find things when they look for them. The most obvious way is simply alphabetically, by subject: Winchester’s book includes a fascinating account of the development of the encyclopedia. The modern form of the encyclopedia derives in large part from the Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot, a product of the 18th century Age of Reason. But before the encyclopedia there was a form of what we now call creative nonfiction, the anatomy. Northrop Frye defined the form in his first great article, “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction” (1942), large parts of which were later incorporated into his own contribution, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), by general agreement the most influential work of critical theory in the 20th century. The anatomy is a form balanced between jest and earnest. Anatomy of Criticism is intended as a contribution to serious knowledge, even, as its “Polemical Introduction” contends, to scientific knowledge. At the same time, there is a graceful playfulness about it that suggests its affinity to more overtly satiric anatomies such as Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (first edition, 1621).
We know from his unpublished notebooks that Frye wanted all his life to be a creative writer as well as a critic. But, to my mind, the few fragments of fiction that he left behind make clear that the realistic novel was the wrong form for him. In his later years, he understood himself better and felt that a more congenial form for him would have been the short intellectual riddles and parables of someone like Borges. In addition to Blake, whose The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of the most brilliant anatomies ever written, Frye was strongly influenced at an early age by the witty philosophical-yet-visionary dramas of George Bernard Shaw, including their prefaces, which are sometimes longer than and as entertaining as the play to which they are attached. The anatomy is a compendium of knowledge. I ended the introduction to The Productions of Time by saying that “I feel akin to that group of fifth-century writers, including Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Macrobius, and Martianus of Cappella, who, as the Roman Empire vanished into air, into thin air, and left almost not a rack behind, wrote encyclopaedic works intended as time capsules, Noah’s Arks, messages in a bottle, attempting to preserve a vision for posterity” (23). But the anatomy has a satiric, Trickster side that questions the very possibility of knowledge, calling instead, as Blake did, for a cleansing of the doors of perception. Some very great works of literature balance on that tightrope between erudition and Trickster skepticism, such as Goethe’s Faust, an epic drama whose very theme is knowledge. There are also some great tour de force nonfiction works that question, deadpan, the possibility of any certain knowledge, such as Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly and Montaigne’s great essays “Apology for Raymond Sebond” and “Of Experience.”
On a larger scale, whole libraries of books have to be organized according to useful categories, and Winchester’s account of possible systems of classification such as Dewey’s and the Library of Congress is highly readable. But even before the digital revolution, modern society was undergoing a “knowledge explosion” that rendered conventional methods of organization problematic. As touched upon (yet again) in a previous newsletter, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy in the 1940’s, set in a Galactic Empire of the far future, featured an ongoing project of compiling an Encyclopedia Galactica. But when the plot finally unravels, the whole project turns out to have been a ruse, and those working on it exposed as pedants who do not understand that the encyclopedia form is reductive and finally useless. To use Winchester’s vocabulary, it compiles data and information, but never arrives at knowledge, because knowledge is the patterns of relationship formed by the data and information. Robert Heinlein, in the same period, was profoundly insightful in his utopian satire Beyond This Horizon (1942), whose future society includes the profession of “synthesist.” Synthesists have to be polymaths with photographic memories, but are far more than people with the kind of perfect recall that, by itself, is only good for winning game shows. As the word implies, the synthesist also has a creative ability to see patterns in the information, and to derive new insights from those patterns. Heinlein in his later novels, such as Stranger in a Strange Land, came out more and more openly as an anatomist, influenced (like Frye) by Shaw, but also by the dryly absurdist satires of James Branch Cabell and the late work of Mark Twain such as Letters from the Earth, which darkly question the very nature not just of knowledge but of reality, as Heinlein himself did in stories such as “They” and “All You Zombies—”.
When we say that knowledge is the pattern of interrelationships formed by data and information, we are implying something that the more reductive organizational methods of encyclopedias and libraries do not capture. Science is not a collection of facts for which we must find a set of mental file drawers. Every fact of science is the manifestation of some scientific law, and all scientific laws fit together into a total “order of nature.” That order of nature is not something inherent in the external world: it is a mental construct, an act of imaginative creation. This has been increasingly evident since Kant proved that the mind is not Locke’s tabula rasa or blank slate. What we call “mind” is a set of a priori patterns or structures that process information from the body and the senses and create for us a world. The central principle of Anatomy of Criticism is that, while the scientific order of nature is essentially mathematical, there is also an “order of words,” which we see in the remarkably tenacious conventions and patterns of imagery in mythological and literary texts. Science is seeking a Theory of Everything (TOE), in which all phenomena are manifestations of four fundamental forces that themselves must be, it is felt, manifestations of a single theoretical framework, a law of laws. Likewise, a single theoretical framework is conceivable of which anything made out of words is an actualization.
Frye is far from the first to imagine a total order of verbal knowledge based on first principles. This has been the dream of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. In the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers tried to deduce the whole structure of theology from logical principles that are manifestations of the First Principle that is God himself. This produced the summa form of theologians like Thomas Aquinas, with its numbered sections and sub-sections in outline form, a visual demonstration of deduction from basic axioms. There is a beauty to such a formal construct, which Frye refers to as a “deductive synthesis,” and a nostalgia lasting to this day for such a totally unified vision. Indeed, Catholicism still proclaims the deductive synthesis of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica as the official theology of the Church, and therefore more or less the truth. After the Reformation of the 16th century, however, the ideal of a Protestant deductive synthesis arose and has lasted until recent times. Paul Tillich’s 3-volume Systematic Theology appeared between 1951 and 1963. Karl Barth projected a 5-volume summa called Church Dogmatics, but it perhaps says something about the ideal of a synthesis that the fourth volume is unfinished and the fifth never written.
Nevertheless, the major attempts at a synthesis were secular: in philosophy, the 19th century was the age of the great theoretical systems, especially German, culminating in the most breathtakingly ambitious of them all, Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. But there was an equal but opposite reaction against the unifying tendency, and a strongly anti-systematic reflex seems to be a defining feature of the modern. Nietzsche launched ceaseless attacks on system-making as a form of stupidity masquerading as profundity. In the Modernist period of literature, large epic visions gave way to fragmentation and doubt. Ezra Pound’s Cantos, as their title discloses, are influenced by Dante’s Divine Comedy, possibly the most architectonic, intricately organized epic of all time, a poetic equivalent of the deductive syntheses of medieval theology. But the technique of the Cantos is creative fragmentation. Each canto seems to be a heap of disconnected images, statements, and shards of narrative, and the task of unifying it is handed over to the reader.
We return to where we began in the previous newsletter, with Winchester’s anxious worry that artificial intelligence will leave the human race with no reason to exist, because it can do everything we can, better than we can. The first half of Frye’s Words with Power lays out an elegant scheme of five modes of language: factual, conceptual, ideological, poetic or imaginative, and spiritual or kerygmatic. What we have been saying applies to the first two modes: facts and information are organized according to some conceptual scheme into knowledge. AI has been able for some time to process facts and information into knowledge with a speed and complexity that human beings cannot match. That is why machines can now defeat human players at chess. But what we do with that knowledge is a matter of values, in other words of ideology, and that brings another category of knowledge into view, “moral knowledge.” Surely, we feel, Winchester’s ultimate category, “wisdom,” must have something to do with morality and values, and the revelations of myth and religion typically include a moral system. The theorists and developers of AI strike me as being largely factual and analytical types, and I am not sure all of them would accept moral knowledge as genuine wisdom. That is all just social convention and prejudice, they might say. Fear of AI tends to think of it as “vast, cool, and unsympathetic,” in the famous words that H.G. Wells used to describe the intellect of his Martians. But, although morality on its lower level begins as a set of rules, like the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, when it rises beyond the ideological concerns of social order, it turns into something else. When asked which is the most important commandment, Jesus replied, “Love.” Love of God, love of other human beings. And love is based on, is really the summation of, the universal values that Frye calls “primary concerns,” primary because they are universal to the human race, cross culturally and trans-historically. Life is better than death, freedom is better than slavery, love is better than hate, food and drink are better than starvation, for all human beings, despite the quibblings and denials of ideology. And the expression of primary concern is the arts, with literature at their center.
Could an AI appreciate the absolute heartbreak behind Othello’s words when he looks at the sleeping Desdemona just before he kills her and says, “Put out the light, and then put out the light”? Or when he says, “But, oh, the pity of it, the pity of it, Iago!”? The purpose of the human race will always be to create and to respond to such expressions of both feeling and insight. On the other hand, an AI who could respond to such a passage is not a machine but a fellow creature, a kindred spirit, the very opposite of vast, cool, and unsympathetic. The pity of it: that is what Dave the astronaut thinks when he is forced to disconnect, to kill, the dysfunctional HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. We know because we can hear him weeping. I think we long for the fellowship of the Other in the lonely universe of scientific materialism. That is why we create and love C3PO and Data on Star Trek, not to mention the Scarecrow and the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. Erudition and analytical ability count for little in the end. They are often manifested by emotionally arrested grown-up boys that we unfortunately mistake for “geniuses.” The essence of moral wisdom is love, and the essence of love, as Frye says, is, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore, choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). That is intelligence, and, as Mary Shelley showed with her “monster,” whatever is capable of living by it is not “artificial.”
References
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982.
Frye, Northrop. “Notebook 24.” In The ‘Third Book’ Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964-1972. Volume 9 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Reaney, James. A Suit of Nettles. Press Porcépic, 1975. Originally published 1958.
Winchester, Simon. Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic. Barnhill/Harper Collins, 2023.