Since you have an internet connection, Dear Reader, I guess you’ve heard about ChatGPT. The Web is full of people arguing over what consciousness is and whether a Large Language Model (LLM) can have it. I don’t care to speculate on that; what interests me is that Owen Barfield created such an appropriate way to think about it a hundred years ago. This is all in his book Poetic Diction, which we in Tolkien scholarship know about because Verlyn Flieger told us about it in Splintered Light.
The part of Barfield’s work that applies here is the idea that humans invented language with words for large, unified concepts. Like breath, wind, and spirit weren’t three different words back then; people had a single thought that we’ve split up (splintered, if you will) into subconcepts now. The farther back linguists go, the more semantic unity they find. In the furthest depth of time to which linguistics can take us, it’s kind of amazing how many modern concepts come from a single proto-Indo-European root.
This splitting enables us to work with concepts that are more abstract than anything our ancestors had to deal with, but Barfield saw it as removing the poetry from language. He phrased it as “the decline of language into abstraction.” (p.122) It’s anti-poetic. Now, after a few millennia of the process, we’ve reached the point where poets make new meaning by taking two splintered words and putting them in unexpected contact.1 (p. 116)
I have nothing against splintering ideas and abstracting them.2 It’s what humans do, like a prism splinters light. Pace Gandalf, that’s a good thing. It’s how we know as much about the universe as we do. It’s the intellectual equivalent of division of labor and specialization. But, like the way specialization means people have lost their broad range of skills, something is lost in the process. The myths that Tolkien saw as essential to the creation of language3 are gone now. As Barfield put it, “The myths still live on a ghostly life as fables after they have died as real meaning.” (p.146)
Large Language Models take the splintering of language to its logical extreme. GPT3 has 175 billion parameters describing how its corpus of input can be divided into words. And at the end, exactly as Barfield conceived it, the meaning is completely gone. The myth has been electrolyzed into component atoms and has ceased to exist. LLMs generate text without meaning, mixing truth and falsehood like a dog mixing paint colors, though the reader is free (and often unable to avoid) to impose meanings on it. There is a tiny pathway for human language in their construction. GPT3 in particular uses “reinforcement learning with human feedback”, in which hundreds of human beings graded its texts during the training phase, marking which ones sounded right and which wrong. That prevents complete gibberish, but I doubt that path is broad enough for actual meaning to travel along.
No, a world full of LLMs will need poets. It’s easy to tell the difference between human-generated verse and computer-generated. As the models improve, more people will be fooled, but not all the people all of the time. Barfield predicted it: the poet’s job is “in certain respects to fight against language, making up the poetic deficit out of his private balance”. (p. 116) Computer programs have no poetry; it’s easy to imagine that LLM-generated code will take over the software industry long before they affect more human works.4 We may be headed for a world in which concerned parents push their college-bound children away from degrees in computer science: “How will you ever get a job with a degree like that? You need to become a poet, like your cousin!”
The theme of this year’s TexMoot was “how fictional worlds teach us to care for this one”. For once, I was not the designated curmudgeon. That honor went to Joe Ricke, who started off the first talk by expressing uncertainty that the theme of the conference was something that even existed. He was referring to an immediate connection: that a reader would read a work of speculative fiction and come away with ideas about what to do the next day (month, year…) to save the planet. And he’s certainly right.
It’s always nice to hear about an intellectual error of which I’m not guilty. That’s not at all the way I interpreted the theme. A more likely effect that speculative fiction has on the reader is to get us used to thinking on a scale of parsecs of distance and centuries of time.
Such an attitude is in direct opposition to the demands of everyday economics. Most people are trying to make a living1, which leads to a short-term focus. The value of gains and losses is time-dependent — money now is worth more than money some time in the future. If you don’t exploit all the things you have for profit right now, they’ll be taken over by someone who will. That impulse in the market economy caused most of the environmental destruction we’ve perpetrated in the modern era.
Speculative fiction can turn the reader’s relative valuation of possibilities away from the short-term, market-driven default. When we look at a tree, we’re not seeing just the fruit it produces, or its lumber value, but also Ents, and Yggdrasil, and all the other trees we know from literature. We see with different values. When I mentioned a half-baked version of this idea in class, Sørina expanded it with, “because we’re adding love to the calculation.” Which is an extraordinary thought. Apparently, among the powers of literature is to catalyze the reaction of love and mathematics.
As it turns out, the source of this idea is something I read long ago and forgot about. There’s a very similar thought from E.T. Jaynes, in his book 2 that launched Bayesian statistics to its current prominence. Jaynes is talking about the concept from decision theory of the “loss function” — a way to quantify what we stand to gain or lose from each possible choice we can make.
Failure to judge one’s own loss function correctly is one of the major dangers that humans face. Having a little intelligence, one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Worse, one person may persuade thousands of others to believe his private myths, as the sordid history of religious, political, and military disasters shows.
As the near-solecism “private myth” indicates, Jaynes is using the word to mean “falsehood”. Writing in the mid twentieth century, his thoughts were naturally going to be dominated by the negative implications of acting on fictional grounds, but “myth” has more meanings than that one. We now know that our standard way of thinking about nature is leading to disaster, so now myths can also be an opportunity to improve outcomes by changing our loss function. Expanding the elements of the computation to include all the lives involved, and the billions of years it took to bring them about, and the global (at least) results of our actions, are exactly the way speculative fiction has brought about its share of the change in attitudes to the environment that we’ve seen in the past 50 years.
Writers of both science fiction and fantasy know they’re doing this. Arthur C. Clarke said (several times), “If you take me too seriously, you’ll go broke. But if your children don’t take me seriously enough, they’ll go broke.”3 Those children are whom we call Generation X; the richest of us seem to have taken Clarke very seriouslyindeed.
This is Part 2 of my presentation at Mythmoot VII. Part 1 is here. Part 1 was the mathematical treatment; this is the humanities context.
This paper grew out of Prof. Olsen’s explication of Eminem last year. I took upon myself the mission to figure out why Tolkien fans should like Eminem. Paradoxically enough, it’s because Tolkien was a reactionary. It’s common to hear critics use that word about him. (Google Scholar returns over 2,000 hits.) But everybody elides one detail: Against what was he reacting? Well, in technology or theology, practically everything, but in terms of poetry, I think I’ve found a specific person.
Introducing Edith Sitwell
Celebrities
Dame Edith Sitwell was a character. A classic English eccentric. Wealthy as sin, six feet tall, thin as an icicle, descended from the Plantagenet royal family. She was a bit older than Tolkien, so she was a presence in the English literary scene when he was in his 20s and 30s. Emphasis on the word “scene” — Photographers loved photographing her, and she loved to be photographed, so she was a pioneer of the publicity-driven life we see so much of today. This photo is the level of celebrity we’re talking about: She and Marilyn apparently took to each other immediately.
As a medieval illumination
The second photo is what she looked like at the beginning of her fame as a writer, in the early 1920s. This is the time at which she would have come to the attention of the Inklings, the way she came to the attention of absolutely everyone.
I like this photo because she looks like she just climbed out of an illuminated manuscript. It’s easy to imagine her among her 12th Century ancestors.
Façade
The work I want to talk about is called Façade.[1] It’s a series of poems intended to be spoken aloud from a stage, set to music by a very young Sir William Walton. The poems frequently are titled with reference to music or dance: “Tarantella”, “Fox Trot”, “Country Dance”, “Hornpipe” … Edith and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell would write poems, then they would set up a screen in their parlor, and read the verse aloud from behind the screen. The verse was mostly nonsense. “It’s all a bloody façade!” said their housekeeper one day, so Edith named the whole piece accordingly.
Performance screen designed by John Piper
Façade is subtitled “An Entertainment”, and it’s fun to imagine what the audience thought they were in for when they walked into the theater. There on the stage were a few chairs, a piccolo, two trumpets, a saxophone, two cellos, and an array of percussion. Behind it all was a screen painted with a face whose mouth is a megaphone. The poems get read through the megaphone. They’re not sung, though performers sometimes try. If you look around YouTube you’ll see what a bad idea singing them can be. I like the way Paul Driver put it: “It is not so clear for what kind of non-singer Facade was conceived.” [2] Well, you’re about to find out.
This is what C.S. Lewis called “The gibberish literature of the Lunatic Twenties” in The Pilgrim’s Regress. [3] I can’t find any time that J.R.R. Tolkien mentioned the Sitwells, but Lewis was there to pick up the cudgel. At least one reviewer identifies the Sitwells as one of the inspirations for the “Clevers” in Lewis’s book.
Anyway, love her or hate her, I’m calling her the “Anti-Tolkien” here. What does it mean to be the “Anti-Tolkien”? Well, like matter and anti-matter, you have to have a lot of things in common, but disagree on one or two fundamentals. Both Sitwell and Tolkien were Modernists, but they pushed back against some of the basics of Modernism. A nice paper by Demoor, Posman, and Van Durme [4] put this part of the Modernist project in musical terms. To start at the beginning: The most inclusive definition of of “music” is “sounds arranged in time”. The arrangement can go two ways. Melody is the part of music that goes along with the flow of time; Harmony goes perpendicular to time. Modernism devalued melody and emphasized experimental harmony. Tolkien and Sitwell both thought the melody was the important part. They were united in the belief that language could and should be musical, but what that music ought to be about is where they parted company.
I’ve put the relevant areas of agreement and disagreement into a table.
Tolkien
Sitwell
Eminem
English
Yes
Yes
No
Edwardian
Yes
Yes
No
Poet
Yes
Yes
No
Drawing from country life
Yes
Yes
No
Inspired by Classical mythology
Yes
Yes
No
Scenic depictions of darkness
Yes
Yes
No
World War 1
Yes
Yes
No
Hunting shows up in odd places
Yes
Yes
No
Importance of musicality in poems
Yes
Yes
No
Respect for the traditions they’re appropriating
Yes
No
Yes
Poems should make sense
Yes
No
Yes
Structured rhyme
Depends
No
No
The big difference comes in their relationship to their inspirations. Sitwell is frankly imperialist, though she can see the end of Empire coming up soon. That’s actually the meaning of “Hornpipe”, which I just recited, but the tempo of the piece makes it invisible until you sit down and read it line by line and try to figure out if it’s really nonsense or not. Like any imperialist, she thinks of her source material as a resource to be exploited. She doesn’t care whether in reality a Hottentot is hot or not — all she wants is the sound of the words. Dame Edith definitely did not take Prof. Sturgis’s advice about how to write other cultures.
By contrast, when Tolkien takes inspirations from north-western English villagers, it’s with genuine affection. He notes their flaws, but likes them anyway. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is the clearest case.[5] When he’s done telling the story, we see that things that are flaws in one context sometimes turn out to be great strengths in another.
This leads directly to their second area of disagreement. Nonsense verse can be a lot of fun, but it’s rarely respectful. (That’s why I like it so much.) Tolkien occasionally wrote a tra-la-lally or a ring-a-dong-dillo, but only as a brief insertion into an otherwise intelligible sentence. Which, of course, is entirely consistent with English folk song. As Professor Flieger mentioned Friday, Tolkien is “longing for a lost and irretrievable past.” Sitwell is, to put it mildly, not.
Looking at the last column, Eminem and Dame Edith look like almost exact opposites, but their ears for rhyme have a lot in common. To understand the relationship, we’ll need a way to make the scattered rhymes of their verses visible, which means we have to dig into some rhyme measurement.
Rhymometry
William Harmon, in his wonderful history of English versification,[6] says Rhyme is lowbrow. Classical verse generally doesn’t rhyme in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew… Verse in old Germanic languages doesn’t rhyme either. It’s like Rhyme conveys a sense of frivolity, a lack of seriousness. Rhyming verse is down in the gutter, amusing the plebs. You know what rhymes? Light verse almost always rhymes. (Tom Hillman and I have written light alliterative verse, but it’s a really obscure niche.) And what’s more, the rhymes have to be perfect or it’s not funny. (This will come in later when the rappers join us.) The idea of rhyme as Art (capital A) only existed for a few centuries in English.
Rhyming verse came into respectability in English because the language was shifting from synthetic-suffixal to analytic-prefixal. That’s Harmon again; I don’t use words like that. The way it looked to me in high-school foreign language classes was “everything rhymes!” The French/Germanic fusion we were all speaking in the High Middle Ages was different, though. It put Chaucer in a position to grab two innovations and run with them: iambic rhythm and masculine rhyme. Or, as Prof. Olsen put it yesterday, the “single-syllable terminal rhymes” that would one day be the foundation of rap.
Two centuries later, Shakespeare was solidly in this respectable-rhyme world, but he’s already using enjambment to undercut the importance of the rhymes. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” – without seeing the rest of the sonnet, you’d never know which word of that sentence was the rhyme. By two centuries after Shakespeare, we were back to looking askance at rhyme.
But still, even with Chaucerian/Shakespearean pedigree, rhyme has a taint of the common people about it. It’s not serious. Which brings us to Eminem. Hip-hop is all about rhymes. Hip-hop poets even call their works “rhymes”, not “verses” or “poems” or “lyrics”, but what they consider a rhyme isn’t perfect (unless they’re trying to be funny). They use assonances, consonances, and other kinds of slant rhyme instead.
How rhyme is used
Part 1 of this paper showed graphically that the Modernists of the 1920s resemble the hip-hop rhymers of the 21st Century in their use of bursts of slant and mosaic rhyme. But I promised that there was a fight going on. What is the argument? What are these poets disagreeing about? We need to look at what each is doing with their art.
Eminem is trying to elevate hip-hop to an artistic genre. Rap is unquestionably lowbrow, with a few people trying to elevate the form from its natural habitat on the sidewalk to something higher. Their individual purposes differ. Chuck D is trying to motivate political action. Eminem does that sometimes, but usually he’s trying to exorcise personal demons, like any Romantic. As the musicologist Robert Greenberg says, “In many ways, we’re still in the Romantic period,” and that fits perfectly here.
You don’t have to listen to a work of hip-hop for very long before you hear the word “respect”. That’s what all rappers want. Eminem is making verse that tries to get respect from the highbrows, while staying entirely within the idiom of the street.
Dame Edith didn’t need any more respect. Her status was as sure as the Thain of the Shire’s. She was mining lowbrow amusements for form, just as she was mining the empire for sounds. She agreed with Tolkien that the current forms were becoming hidebound, and she re-vitalized them by bringing in this low-brow infusion. She might even have said, “The inhabitants were too stupid and dull for words, and an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.”[7] Everyone was shocked by the result, which was exactly what she wanted. In a sense, she was pushing the highbrows downward.
Tolkien was embracing the lowbrow for its own sake. He wasn’t gentrifying rhyme, he was celebrating it. Like Beethoven writing country dances, he’s showing his audience the merit in the simple people. At the same time, he’s trying to revitalize highbrow verse with an infusion of bucolic vitality. When the highbrow and lowbrow sides of culture are too separated, art stagnates. True vitality comes from free exchange between the sides of culture. Like Eminem, Tolkien wanted to create art by lifting up the bottom of society. Dame Edith Sitwell wanted to go the other way, bringing the high down to the low. And the war between the brows isn’t really as disconnected as it looked at first. Tolkien has become so popular that there are highbrows who look down on him. Especially since the Jackson movies made a billion dollars, there’s a nimbus of the lowbrow around the Lord of the Rings.
Artists frequently describe their work as in conversation with those who have gone before, but the conversation can go only one way. JRRT couldn’t respond to hip-hop for obvious reasons, so what this work has accomplished is to identify an analogous contemporaneous situation to which he clearly related, and restore a bit of symmetry. This, then, is my conclusion. A Tolkien fan who likes hip-hop can be entirely consistent with the artistic missions of both.
Works Cited
[1] Sitwell, Edith. Façade and other poems, 1920-1935. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1950.
[2] Driver, Paul. “‘Façade Revisited.” Tempo (1980): 3-9.
[3] Lewis, Clive Staples. The pilgrim’s regress. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.
[4] Demoor, Marysa, Sarah Posman, and Debora Van Durme. “Literary modernism and melody: an avant-propos.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55.1 (2013): 31-35.
[5] Tolkien, J.R.R The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. VI,ix.
[6] Harmon, William. “English versification: fifteen hundred years of continuity and change.” Studies in Philology 94.1 (1997): 1-37.
Knudson is discussing a posthumously-published story by Franz Kafka entitled “The Great Wall of China“. I had never heard of it before; getting to read a new Kafka fantasy means it’s already a good day. (The story is depressingly relevant in a few places.) Knudson’s paper talks mostly about the curious method of constructing the Great Wall, and notes its similarity to the “Cantor Set“. (Please go look at the pictures in that Wikipedia article — there’s a wonderfully unexpected one in there.) It doesn’t mention the messenger finding his way through the crowd, which appears to be a two-dimensional analogue of the same fractal process.
Cantor Set
If necessary, it’s possible to read Knudson’s paper like a moviegoer, skipping the theorems the way a Peter Jackson fan skips the poems in The Lord of the Rings. He always returns to plain English before long.
This kind of mathematics is related to graph theory in a way I hadn’t appreciated before, and graph theory is no stranger to Idiosophy. (Do you suppose the editors at JHM would be interested in hearing about calling people fools?) Anyway, at the end of Shi Wen’s post, there’s a link to a wonderful video, made by the kind of student I always wished I had.
Work Cited
Knudson, K. P., “Franz and Georg: Cantor’s Mathematics of the Infinite in the Work of Kafka,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 7 Issue 1 (January 2017), pages 147-154. DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.201701.12 . Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol7/iss1/12
Olga’s latest essay at Middle Earth Reflections is about escape. As usual, it got me thinking. The way Tolkien and Lewis thought of escape, it’s necessary for modern people. The modern world delivers material benefit on a scale that would have been unimaginable even three hundred years ago, but it comes at a social cost – we all have our little boxes, and we have to stay in them or the system grinds to a halt. People want to expand themselves. They “don’t want to play the part of a statistic on a government chart” [1]. We don’t like being confined, no matter how well it pays, so “escape” is now (more or less) recognized as a legitimate desire, and a (more or less) valid purpose for literature.
But what about life before the industrial revolution overthrew the tyranny of Malthusian economics? We can get an idea from folklore: many fairy tales involve people doing extraordinary things to get food. Children in mid-twentieth-century America had trouble understanding why, if someone offered to grant a character any wish they could think of, they’d ask for a roasted goose. Chapter 1 of Robert Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre[2] explains why: People were starving. Literally, the best thing they could think of was a decent meal.
Darnton isn’t the first to say that. Here’s Abraham Maslow: “Another peculiar characteristic of the human organism when it is dominated by a certain need is that the whole philosophy of the future tends also to change. For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined very simply as a place where there is plenty of food.” [3]
Hierarchy of Needs (1943)
Which brings us to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (You only need to read that link if your boss has never hired a management consultant – to everyone else it’s a cliché.) It seems relevant to the classification of fiction into genres. Hypothesis: Escapism is an important part of all fiction; different genres appeal to readers whose needs are at different levels.
Tolkien gave us the top of the pyramid. Darnton gave us the bottom. What about the rest of the levels of the hierarchy?
The second level from the bottom is “safety”. According to the hypothesis, there should be a literary genre in which people whose safety isn’t assured can read about characters who are threatened, but manage to triumph and find safety at the end. There is no difficulty finding two: Mysteries and thrillers fit the bill exactly. They are, respectively, #3 and #4 on the sales list. Nothing can be done for the corpses in Chapter 1 of those books, but the protagonist escapes danger with reassuring frequency. “Escape” is literal, in most cases.
The third level up is “love”. (Most updates to Maslow’s work say “social” here, but I shall stick to the original term because we’re talking about “social science”, and “social” is too weak a word to do double duty. “Love” is not. Like Maslow’s, my readers all know how many definitions the word “love” has.) It is easy to find genres here, too. Romance novels are #2 on the list of best-selling categories of fiction for adults. I’m going to put bibles here, too. They’re #1 of all kinds of books ever sold. It’s a bit of a stretch, because bibles generally go under non-fiction (despite the unicorns). However, etymologically, religions exist for the purpose of forming a community; books are an important part of that; and they fit the hypothesis so well that I can’t pass them up.
For those whose physiological needs are met, who have a safe place to exist, and are solidly placed in a group, the next level of need is for “esteem”. Originally, status within the group was the focus. Now, self-esteem is added to this category. At this point an Idiosopher might get into trouble: Are “novels” genre fiction? The 19th Century novels, from Jane Austen onwards, which caused the form to have its enormous impact on culture, are about little else than the pursuit of social status. In the more egotistical 20th Century, self-esteem joined the more venerable pursuit. General Fiction, or as I think of it “Muggle Fiction”, is #1 on the sales list. If it didn’t provide entertainment featuring characters finally getting the esteem they deserve, there would be large gaps on those shelves.
At the top of the pyramid is “Self-actualization” which is where we started. Fantasy and fiction (to a great extent) contain a strong streak of self-actualization, providing escape from the confinement of the bureaucratic economy. Role-playing games have become so popular that they belong here, too, though that would involve jumping over to a different medium.
So, what is left? According to this hypothesis, most lines on the Publishers’ Weekly chart can be filled in immediately.
Rank
Genre
Maslow Level
1
General Fiction
Esteem
2
Romance
Love
3
Suspense/Thrillers
Safety
4
Mystery/Detective
Safety
5
Graphic Novels
(multiple)
6
Classics
(multiple)
7
Fantasy
Self-Actualization
8
Science Fiction
Self-Actualization
9
Religion
Love
10
Action Adventure
Safety
11
Occult/Psychological/Horror
Safety
12
Western
(multiple)
There is no prose genre that doesn’t fit into one of the levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. The hypothesis holds up well. The lines marked “multiple” are due to Publishers’ Weekly breaking up books by how to sell them, not by their literary characteristics. Graphic Novels and Classics can have any kind of thematic content. They could easily be separated into the other classifications. Westerns are the same, though I’d bet the vast majority are actually thrillers. Westerns used to be much more popular. They’re down to about 1% of sales now, and I doubt they’ll exist as a separate genre much longer.
Coda
Other people have added other levels to the hierarchy since 1943. I think they’re not so well justified as the original five. Maslow himself suggested there might be other levels, but I’ve stuck with the basics. Except this one, which has a deep ring of truth and should not be missed.
Social-science experimentation in the 1940s wasn’t so bland and statistical as it is today. Maslow, speculating on a possible experimental test of the second tier of the pyramid, suggested: “…the child might be confronted with an exploding firecracker…” I’d love to see how the Institutional Review Board responded to that proposal.
(The core of Idiosophy is that the idiosopher can be misinformed and incorrect at every step in a logical process, and still arrive at a meaningful conclusion.) Our starting point is an earlier post, on which Tom commented, wondering what the “Ents’ Marching Song” would sound like in Latin.
1. The riposte humorous: Hexameters! Longfellowish sprawling hexameters.
2. Noticing a flaw in the joke: Wait, no. Archy the cockroach liked hexameters because he had six feet. Ents all have two feet.
3. Transfiguration: But ents have lots of toes. Ent-latin should have big feet with lots of syllables.
4. Observation: They do. The first line is definitely one long foot. I suppose it’s possible to argue that the second line is a jumble of small troches and dactyls, or maybe iambs and anapests with stray syllables at either end, but that’s not how I hear it.
⏑⏑/⏑⏑⏑⏑/⏑⏑⏑/⏑⏑/
In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the spring.
/⏑/⏑⏑/⏑⏑/⏑/⏑/⏑⏑
Ah, the sight and the smell of the spring in Nan-Tasarion!
LotR, III, iv
5. Following the thought wherever: How could we construct a sound-pattern for big feet that makes them into poetry? Alliteration is matching the sound at the beginning of the foot. Rhyme is matching the sound at the end. If we’re just using iambs and troches, rhyme and alliteration are our only choices. With big feet, though, we have the possibility of matching sounds elsewhere. That would be a novel poetic structure! Dactyls have three syllables. Can we match the middle consonant?
6. Noticing that someone smarter is ‘way ahead of me: “Errantry” has lots of that kind of central sound-match. It’s neither rhyme nor alliteration, but my ears enjoy it the same way.
he built a gilded gondola
to wander in and had in her
a load of yellow oranges
and porridge for his provender…
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, 3.
7. The unexpected arrival: J.R.R. Tolkien was a Modernist writer, and “the most striking element of modernist poetry is the invention and experimentation of new modes of expression.” This is what my heroes in the Oulipo are interested in, too. This is derived from a root as mathematical as any of their self-imposed constraints.
Up at the top of the page, I promised a meaningful conclusion. Coincidentally, Dimitra Fimi just published an essay in the Times Literary Supplement about world-building. She points out that writing speculative fiction is about creating a different set of rules from those we see in the world around us, and writing your story in strict adherence to those rules. But, she says, that’s exactly what the Oulipians do, except they’re doing it at the level of the text, while fantasy and science-fiction writers do it at the level of the story. So it’s entirely reasonable that JRRT was doing this on purpose,working on both levels at once.
Here’s my contribution, from Gargantua, Book 1, Chapter 5, by François Rabelais.
An almost-Socratic dialogue on drinking, law, mortality, and sports physiology. Or maybe it’s more of a symposium.
— Qui feut premier, soif ou beuverye?
— Soif. Car qui eust beu sans soif durant le temps d’innocence?
— Beuverye. Car privatio praesupponit habitum. Je suis Clerc. Foecundi calices quem non fecere disertum!
— Nous aultres innocens ne beuvons que trop sans soif.
— Non moy, pecheur, sans soif. Et si non presente, pour le moins future, la prevenent comme entendez. Je boy pour la soif advenir. Je boy eternellemeut, ce m’est eternité de beuverye, et beuverye de éternité.
— Chantons, beuvons un motet.
— Entonnons!
— Où est mon entonnoir?
— Quoy ! Je ne boy que par procuration !
— Mouillez-vous pour seicher, ou vous seichez pour mouiller?
— Je n’entens poinct la theoricque; de la praticque je me ayde quelque peu.
— Haste!
— Je mouille, je humecte, je boy. Et tout de peur de mourir.
— Beuvez toujours, vous ne mourrez jamais.
— Si je ne boy, je suys à sec. Me voylà mort.
I own a strange old volume of Rabelais in English translation, which seems to be samizdat to get around the old Comstock laws. It translates that passage this way:
Which was first, thirst or drinking? Thirst, for who in the time of innocence would have drunk without being athirst? Nay, sir, it was drinking, for privatio presupponit habitum. I am learned, you see. Foecundi calices quem non fecere disertum! We poor innocents* drink but too much without thirst. Not I, truly, who am a sinner, for I never drink without thirst, either present of future, to prevent it (as you know) I drink for the thirst to come; I drink eternally, this is to me an eternity of drinking and drinking of an eternity. Let us sing, let us drink, now for a catch, dust it away, where is my nogging? What, it seems I do not drink but by proxy. Do you wet yourself to dry, or do you dry to wet yourself? Pish, I understand not the rhetoric, (the theoric I should say), but I help my self somewhat by the practice.
Enough! I sup, I wet, I humect, I moisten my gullet, I drink and all for fear of dying. Drink always, and you shall never die. If I drink not, I run aground, and I die.
* These words bear allusion to what is said of some innocent people who are tortured with water forced down their throats to make them confess.
Here is my translation:
— Which came first, drinking or thirst?
— Thirst, for back in the days of innocence, who’d have drunk without being thirsty?
— Drinking, because privatio presupponit habitum. Arguments in Latin always win. Foecundi calices quem non fecere disertum!
— We innocents never drink too much, unless we are thirsty.
— Not me either, and I’m a sinner. Maybe I don’t have a thirst right now, but I drink as a preventative. I drink against the thirst to come. I drink eternally, because through an eternity of drinking, I drink in all eternity.
— Let’s sing and drink a motet!
— Let’s intone in tons!
— Where’s my ton-kard?
— What are you talking about? I only drink by proxy.
— Do you wet yourself to dry out, or dry yourself out to get wet?
— I don’t understand anything about theory, and I don’t have much use for practice.
— Enough!
— I wet, I humidify, I drink, and all from fear of dying.
— Well, keep drinking forever, and you’ll never die.
— If I stop drinking, I’ll be all tapped out.* And that’s as good as dead.
Why sports physiology? Because the sinner’s philosophy is what all coaches say now – start drinking before you get thirsty. Renaissance French rules, avant la lettre, if you will.
* A regret: English doesn’t have a slang term for “broke” that overlaps with slang for “sober”, so I couldn’t translate that last pun correctly. This is a shameful lacuna in my mother tongue.
Works Cited
Rabelais, F., La vie treshorrificque du grand Gargantua. Françoise Joukovsky, ed. Paris, Flammarion, 1993.
Rabelais, F., The Works of Rabelais, faithfully translated from the French, with variorum notes, and numerous illustrations. Privately printed, who knows when or where.
The book I’m reading right now has three levels of authorship. (Searching the Web for the phrase “levels of authorship” leads you to a maze of twisty passages, all alike, most leading to swamps of tedium and despond. This link doesn’t.)
By..by..by
The book is The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz, by Johann Valentin Andreae, by John Crowley. Or is it The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz, by Johann Valentin Andreae, by John Crowley? Or is it one of the other possibilities?
One reason I love librarians is that they can catalogue this book “by author”, file it on a shelf, and then find it again later. Librarians can handle anything.
Historical note: When I first read this book (after a reference in Foucault’s Pendulum), it was in German. I mentally translated “Die chymische Hochzeit von Christian Rosencreutz” as the “Chemical Wedding of” C.R., not the “Chemical Wedding by“. That was only the first of many bruises I got from attempting to read a book in renaissance German (in Fraktur!) after learning modern Hochdeutsch in high school. I knew I was going to like Crowley’s version when correcting that mistake was the first sentence in his Introduction.
Modern note: It never ceases to delight me that I can just pull up 400-year-old texts from my dining-room table. Living in the future is in many ways awesome.
In which your Idiosopher considers how to measure an author’s cultural depth.
Brenton has a quotation from a letter by C.S. Lewis that seems to say nice things about the way I’ve been approaching literature. Lewis doesn’t like the idea of canonical lists of books that youngsters should read. I don’t like canonical lists either, unless I’ve read everything on it and can feel smug therefore. The only time I’ve ever gone and read books because they were part of a canon, it was Michael Dirda’s list of the “100 Best Humorous Novels.” (Alas, no link. It was in the Washington Post, long ago.)
Un jour viendra où l’on montrera un canon dans les musées comme on y montre aujourd’hui un instrument de torture, en s’étonnant que cela ait pu être!
(Someday we’ll exhibit canons in museums, as we do now with instruments of torture, amazed that such things could ever have existed!)
What Lewis prefers is a sort of terrain-following model, as one work you love leads to other writers, in a long chain of culture. It’s not linear, of course. It’s more like following a river through its delta. Some streams split and merge, some flow straight to the sea, some spin around in eddies and backwaters.
For me, on the science fiction/fact side, one chain was Asimov → Clarke → Niven → Dyson → Feynman → Dirac → Einstein. [1]On the fantasy side, there’s a chain that goes Tolkien → Ursula LeGuin → Mervyn Peake → E.R. Eddison → Lord Dunsany → Thomas Malory → Medieval romances. [2]To be absolutely accurate, the latter chain should start with Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs, the libretto of which I read before Lord of the Rings. The chain has a kind of “V” shape in time, bouncing off World War II.
There’s a nice idiosophical vein here. Lots of people measure the cultural significance of a work by how many arrows lead from it. LotR, by this measure, might be the most culturally-significant work of the twentieth century, since arrows lead from it to a large section of modern bookstores and the entire art of fantasy role-playing games.[3] That’s the azimuthal direction, if you will. But maybe there’s another dimension: Might it be of interest how long the chains are, as well how many chains originate there? The depth to which authors connect into existing cultural structures seems orthogonal to their azimuthal impact, and might yield interesting insights. The fact that the metric will be biased towards books enjoyed by teenagers may be entertaining, as well.
Quantitative data to rank various authors by chain-length can be obtained from elderly scholars. They’ll have to be elderly, because these chains are only visible in hindsight. It seems easily parallelizable, hence ideal for the Web. The job could be a lot of work, but if you like talking to classicists and medievalists anyway, it wouldn’t be much of a chore.
[1]The linked pages were for fun; they’re unrelated to my own research. [2]The lectures of Corey Olsen are in there at the last step. [3]The Tenth Art, I think.
The part of Barfield’s work that applies here is the idea that humans invented language with words for large, unified concepts. Like breath, wind, and spirit weren’t three different words back then; people had a single thought that we’ve split up (splintered, if you will) into subconcepts now. The farther back linguists go, the more semantic unity they find. In the furthest depth of time to which linguistics can take us, it’s kind of amazing how many modern concepts come from a single proto-Indo-European root.
