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For all the hype that American culture imposes on the importance of “thinking outside the box,” scarcely any of us, myself included, are able to do it.
I suppose this is confirmation of Wittgenstein’s observation that thought runs in pre-formed ruts, like those made by carts in dirt roads, so that the hardest thing to do is to deviate from a line of thought just a little.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is too seldom considered as a maker of metaphors; scarcely at all, in fact, though I first encountered him via analysts of metaphor as mode of investigation, Stanley Romaine Hopper’s school. And today, of course, he is scarcely considered at all, being considered passé.
But I digress. This note is occasioned, as so many of mine have been, by the arrival of the new issue of the NY Review of Books.
Speaking of boxes, this obviously is one; I’ve noticed that one can often tell from a theorist’s direction and tone which magazines, hard-copy or online, they do and do not read.
Anyway, H. Allen Orr does a pretty good job of taking on Richard Dawkins as he should have been taken on from the first, as a thinker who, in The God Delusion, doesn’t seem very good at thinking. That many of his opponents are even worse at it does not excuse Dawkins from so many bizarre followings of wheel-ruts down intellectual paths that lead nowhere very useful.
The attempt at an ironic twist on the creationists’ Boeing-747-manufactured-in-a-junkyard argument, for example. That is the analogy that biological existence is so complex and intertwined that its arising by chance is akin to a whirlwind roaring through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a Boeing 747. Dawkins retorts that the presupposition that complex things cannot rise out of simple things means that the existence of a Creator is even more improbable, because that Creator would thus have had to arise out of a reality even more complex than the Creator.
This is where theology falls back on the incapacity of intellect to comprehend spheres or beings that choose to evade empirical investigation. (“Our little minds were never meant,” to which Charles Williams retorted, “yes, they were.”) However, the whole argument Dawkins so ineptly tries to refute depends on a single model or metaphor (Creator/creation) that ignores all the other possibilities of mythic explanation: for example, that the wretchedly inefficient and horrific nature of biological existence is the result of random processes having been tweaked, not necessarily omnisciently or uniformly well. This is more or less what the gnosticizing religions of late antiquity believed. (I think it’s Kenneth Rexroth who points out that these are responses to Greek science, Hans Jonas who points out that they are responses to the terrifying world of contending imperial ventures, and Carl Jung who points out that they are responses to depth-psychological processes overlooked by less reflective religions. Yes, they are; all of the above.)
I bring this up, too, because elsewhere in this issue of NYRB Luc Sante has a go at explaining Thomas Pynchon’s new novel. Sante goes against most reviewers in arguing that Against the Day is actually quite coherent, dense but not flabby. Which it is; but nobody seems to see that it is akin to the multilayered model I’ve just laid down for gnosticizing religions, or complex myths of creation.
Pynchon wants to explain a world in which monstrous injustices are clearly the work of channels of secular power and economic forces. Personal desires of greed et cetera come into play, but not only personal desires, cumulative decisions having consequences, and yada yada yada. Meanwhile the world also seems overlaid by patterns of coincidence and meaning that almost make sense, but the operative word is “almost.” Some of these patterns seem, but perhaps only seem, to have been bound up with efforts to kick some ass vis-à-vis the world’s social injustices; not by mobilizing the troops with inspiring speeches, but by more subtle and mysterious modes of intervention.
This is Pynchon’s universe, though only in part, since his fiction is also bound up with playing with the multiple, inadequate models for telling the story that we don’t quite understand. These models are known as rhetoric and literature both high and low: popular songs, pulp fiction, serious novels, the carefully sequenced sentences of the balanced essay, what have you. So you can’t tell a story about complexity and deadends and restarts without tossing all of it into the mix, in-jokes included.
A scrap of conversation quoted from Against the Day, page 173, with the words “something has happened to him” in italics in the original: “an hombre who knows full well that something has happened to him, but for the life of him he just can’t figure what --- you know that feeling? --- sure, who don’t? --- and he’s trying to work ’at through, here on paper, how it was done to him, and better yet who did it.”
That is the motivation of half the characters in the novel, and the half who don’t have that motivation live in a different mental universe from the ones who do. It is what drives the anarchist bombers and the crazed mathematicians and explorers of the existence or not of the Luminiferous Aether. It is also what drives the writers of boys’ fantasies parodied in the Chums of Chance sections, and the lunatic theorists of the hollow earth who are referenced so early on that it is scarcely a spoiler to note their presence in the book.
All of these people collide with one another quite entertainingly. All are also driven by the usual sexual motivations and other disreputable causes of human behavior. They just aren’t primarily driven by that, but by the determination to figure out what the hell it was that happened to them, how it was done to them, and who did it.
Dawkins, of course, says that nobody did it, but Dawkins seems to have no clue that anything at all might have been done to him, and perhaps nothing ever was.
An essay on Clifford Geertz, also in this issue of the NYRB, contains a few quotes germane to this meditation, though I have just now read them, while looking for my other sources. Thus Robert Darnton on Geertz: “he read at a prodigious speed, extracting the essence of a book along with a vast amount of detail, which he blended with information derived from other books, so that trails of evidence criss-crossed in unexpected patterns from one subject to another.” And this: “Cliff was always seizing on points that ran counter to our intuition. … He had ideas about everything --- jazz, foreign affairs, horse racing, automobiles, mathematics, the New York Yankees, James Joyce, colleagues. Instead of pulling subjects into the gravitational field of his own expertise, he pursued them into corners where they were most unfamiliar, where he could capture their otherness.”
That is not Thomas Pynchon, who does tend to pull all his subjects into the gravitational field of people trying to find out what was done to them and who if anyone did it. But Pynchon’s line of thought, too, “occasionally hit home with such force that he broke open a whole new way of thinking.” And since the strand that I claim is Pynchon’s chief feature spills over into so many different endeavors, he effectively does capture the otherness of topics from Tibetan mythology to the manufacture of mayonnaise.
One could also say this of other writers we know and love, but not in this post.
Other topics in this issue of NYRB include Erich Auerbach’s view of Dante; the present and past condition of the Iraqis; the sudden ascendancy of the Democratic Party; and pieces on Thomas Bernhard; James Baker; Silvio Berlusconi; Marie Antoinette; Annie Leibovitz; and others who also ought to be separated thus by semicolons lest it be thought there is some intrinsic connection between them, which there is not. The connections are extrinsic.
I expect to be exhausted by the end of this one.
Joyce Carol Oates on Leibovitz got me kick-started on this journal post; it is illuminating to read a piece that is bracingly thoughtful and exceptionally well-written at the same time. Oates thinks outside the wheel-ruts, and has never gone so far as to have a box which it was necessary to think outside of, other than the box of the English language. (I assume her novels are boxes of a sort, but I am in that minority of Americans who have never actually read the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.)
I suppose this is confirmation of Wittgenstein’s observation that thought runs in pre-formed ruts, like those made by carts in dirt roads, so that the hardest thing to do is to deviate from a line of thought just a little.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is too seldom considered as a maker of metaphors; scarcely at all, in fact, though I first encountered him via analysts of metaphor as mode of investigation, Stanley Romaine Hopper’s school. And today, of course, he is scarcely considered at all, being considered passé.
But I digress. This note is occasioned, as so many of mine have been, by the arrival of the new issue of the NY Review of Books.
Speaking of boxes, this obviously is one; I’ve noticed that one can often tell from a theorist’s direction and tone which magazines, hard-copy or online, they do and do not read.
Anyway, H. Allen Orr does a pretty good job of taking on Richard Dawkins as he should have been taken on from the first, as a thinker who, in The God Delusion, doesn’t seem very good at thinking. That many of his opponents are even worse at it does not excuse Dawkins from so many bizarre followings of wheel-ruts down intellectual paths that lead nowhere very useful.
The attempt at an ironic twist on the creationists’ Boeing-747-manufactured-in-a-junkyard argument, for example. That is the analogy that biological existence is so complex and intertwined that its arising by chance is akin to a whirlwind roaring through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a Boeing 747. Dawkins retorts that the presupposition that complex things cannot rise out of simple things means that the existence of a Creator is even more improbable, because that Creator would thus have had to arise out of a reality even more complex than the Creator.
This is where theology falls back on the incapacity of intellect to comprehend spheres or beings that choose to evade empirical investigation. (“Our little minds were never meant,” to which Charles Williams retorted, “yes, they were.”) However, the whole argument Dawkins so ineptly tries to refute depends on a single model or metaphor (Creator/creation) that ignores all the other possibilities of mythic explanation: for example, that the wretchedly inefficient and horrific nature of biological existence is the result of random processes having been tweaked, not necessarily omnisciently or uniformly well. This is more or less what the gnosticizing religions of late antiquity believed. (I think it’s Kenneth Rexroth who points out that these are responses to Greek science, Hans Jonas who points out that they are responses to the terrifying world of contending imperial ventures, and Carl Jung who points out that they are responses to depth-psychological processes overlooked by less reflective religions. Yes, they are; all of the above.)
I bring this up, too, because elsewhere in this issue of NYRB Luc Sante has a go at explaining Thomas Pynchon’s new novel. Sante goes against most reviewers in arguing that Against the Day is actually quite coherent, dense but not flabby. Which it is; but nobody seems to see that it is akin to the multilayered model I’ve just laid down for gnosticizing religions, or complex myths of creation.
Pynchon wants to explain a world in which monstrous injustices are clearly the work of channels of secular power and economic forces. Personal desires of greed et cetera come into play, but not only personal desires, cumulative decisions having consequences, and yada yada yada. Meanwhile the world also seems overlaid by patterns of coincidence and meaning that almost make sense, but the operative word is “almost.” Some of these patterns seem, but perhaps only seem, to have been bound up with efforts to kick some ass vis-à-vis the world’s social injustices; not by mobilizing the troops with inspiring speeches, but by more subtle and mysterious modes of intervention.
This is Pynchon’s universe, though only in part, since his fiction is also bound up with playing with the multiple, inadequate models for telling the story that we don’t quite understand. These models are known as rhetoric and literature both high and low: popular songs, pulp fiction, serious novels, the carefully sequenced sentences of the balanced essay, what have you. So you can’t tell a story about complexity and deadends and restarts without tossing all of it into the mix, in-jokes included.
A scrap of conversation quoted from Against the Day, page 173, with the words “something has happened to him” in italics in the original: “an hombre who knows full well that something has happened to him, but for the life of him he just can’t figure what --- you know that feeling? --- sure, who don’t? --- and he’s trying to work ’at through, here on paper, how it was done to him, and better yet who did it.”
That is the motivation of half the characters in the novel, and the half who don’t have that motivation live in a different mental universe from the ones who do. It is what drives the anarchist bombers and the crazed mathematicians and explorers of the existence or not of the Luminiferous Aether. It is also what drives the writers of boys’ fantasies parodied in the Chums of Chance sections, and the lunatic theorists of the hollow earth who are referenced so early on that it is scarcely a spoiler to note their presence in the book.
All of these people collide with one another quite entertainingly. All are also driven by the usual sexual motivations and other disreputable causes of human behavior. They just aren’t primarily driven by that, but by the determination to figure out what the hell it was that happened to them, how it was done to them, and who did it.
Dawkins, of course, says that nobody did it, but Dawkins seems to have no clue that anything at all might have been done to him, and perhaps nothing ever was.
An essay on Clifford Geertz, also in this issue of the NYRB, contains a few quotes germane to this meditation, though I have just now read them, while looking for my other sources. Thus Robert Darnton on Geertz: “he read at a prodigious speed, extracting the essence of a book along with a vast amount of detail, which he blended with information derived from other books, so that trails of evidence criss-crossed in unexpected patterns from one subject to another.” And this: “Cliff was always seizing on points that ran counter to our intuition. … He had ideas about everything --- jazz, foreign affairs, horse racing, automobiles, mathematics, the New York Yankees, James Joyce, colleagues. Instead of pulling subjects into the gravitational field of his own expertise, he pursued them into corners where they were most unfamiliar, where he could capture their otherness.”
That is not Thomas Pynchon, who does tend to pull all his subjects into the gravitational field of people trying to find out what was done to them and who if anyone did it. But Pynchon’s line of thought, too, “occasionally hit home with such force that he broke open a whole new way of thinking.” And since the strand that I claim is Pynchon’s chief feature spills over into so many different endeavors, he effectively does capture the otherness of topics from Tibetan mythology to the manufacture of mayonnaise.
One could also say this of other writers we know and love, but not in this post.
Other topics in this issue of NYRB include Erich Auerbach’s view of Dante; the present and past condition of the Iraqis; the sudden ascendancy of the Democratic Party; and pieces on Thomas Bernhard; James Baker; Silvio Berlusconi; Marie Antoinette; Annie Leibovitz; and others who also ought to be separated thus by semicolons lest it be thought there is some intrinsic connection between them, which there is not. The connections are extrinsic.
I expect to be exhausted by the end of this one.
Joyce Carol Oates on Leibovitz got me kick-started on this journal post; it is illuminating to read a piece that is bracingly thoughtful and exceptionally well-written at the same time. Oates thinks outside the wheel-ruts, and has never gone so far as to have a box which it was necessary to think outside of, other than the box of the English language. (I assume her novels are boxes of a sort, but I am in that minority of Americans who have never actually read the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.)
