Jed Rasula

Department of English
Queen’s University
rasulaj@post.queensu.ca

 

The adjective “encyclopedic” is equivocal: as an enticement to comprehensiveness and mastery, it is awkwardly shadowed by its Enlightenment provenance and tainted by its association with master narratives. Yet the sort of narratives associated with encyclopedism are the very ones most insistently cited for their burlesque heterogeneity; and, inclining to pastiche, this has made Gravity’s Rainbow seem paradigmatically postmodern. Our distance and our proximity to the thought of encyclopedic narrative is patently linked to the publication date of Pynchon’s novel. In 1976 Edward Mendelson published “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” (in the Pynchon festshcrift Mindful Pleasures) and “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (in MLN), establishing a cogent vocabulary and a rationale for viewing Gravity’s Rainbow as the latest in a line of singular narratives exceeding the bounds of the novel. Ronald Swigger had previously written “Fictional Encyclopedism and the Cognitive Value of Literature” (Comparative Literature Studies, 1975), citing Pynchon as example but concentrating on Flaubert, Broch, Borges, and Queneau. Hilary Clark’s doctoral study, published in 1990 as The Fictional Encyclopedia: Joyce, Pound, Sollers, was given concise theoretical recapitulation in “Encyclopedic Discourse” (SubStance, 1992). Despite its relevance to the prodigious debate occasioned by Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives, “encyclopedic narrative” (or “discourse”) has not been assimilated to studies in postmodernism. But the appearance of Underworld by Don DeLillo raises the spectre once again–if only by virtue of its thematic scope and sheer length–imposing itself on the postmodern because DeLillo’s work has been instrumental in weaning the novel away from the gambit of metafiction and, by doing so, staking a claim for a more patently contemporary postmodern fictional practice–one attuned to “waning of affect” (Jameson) and epistemological ungrounding, yet oddly sensitized to glimpses of the sublime.¹Insofar as the sublime is an anti-representational concept, it appears antithetical to the encyclopedic impulse. But as I will elaborate here, encyclopedism is a more complex legacy than its proximity to the household Encyclopedia suggests; its archival propensity is subject to a paradoxically restorative disabling which I will call “indigence.”

 

Mendelson’s portrait of encyclopedic narrative is descriptive rather than prescriptive, drawn from a select core of authors (Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville, Joyce, Pynchon). Indexing features common to these writers, Mendelson contends that the encyclopedic narrative offers a robust depiction of the knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while at the same time exposing its underlying ideological orientation, thereby providing a tacit theory of social organization. In this endeavor such narratives assume a polyglot dimension, since their ideological analysis is contingent on a broad understanding of linguistic variety (being polyphonic, as Bakhtin would say), and they assimilate various generic protocols as a way of integrating linguistic perspectivism into their structures. Encyclopedic narrative is therefore formally indeterminate, exemplifying the double function of prophecy and narrative and thereby tending towards an epic dimension–a dimension marked by gigantism. Its prophetic and satirical enterprise is at once intrinsic and extrinsic to the society depicted, so Mendelson indicates that encyclopedic narrative is set near the immediate present but not in it (Pynchon’s 1973 novel takes place during World War Two, Underworld traverses the 1950s and early ’60s, with stroboscopic bursts of the ’90s); but such works display a temporal elasticity commensurate with their formal indeterminacy. Finally, in what might seem the most specific and thus most exclusive feature of the encyclopedic narrative, Mendelson claims that it offers a full account of at least one technology or science.²

 

Where Mendelson’s approach is content-oriented, Hilary Clark’s anatomy of “encyclopedic discourse” is formalist and cognitive. With “unreadability” as its signature trait, such discourse is made evident in its compulsiveness, its impetuous desire, and its adoption of encyclopedic material as a pretext for philosophical speculation. Encyclopedic discourse is self-defeating, in Clark’s view, because its investigative energy is finally directed at its own premises and its own performance, and these are necessarily found wanting: “any text (fictional or not) that we would call encyclopedic must speculate on its own discursive processes of discovery and arrangement and on the limitations of these processes” (Clark 105).³ Ronald Swigger characterizes the resulting stance of the encyclopedist: “Impatience for cognition, for perception, is qualified in our modern and ‘postmodern’ literatures by various reservations: skepticism, aestheticism, and various sorts of irony” (352). Swigger equivocates, however, by refering this cognitive thirst for comprehensiveness to “literature as such”–an attribution which renders encyclopedism inconsequential, or else disqualifies as “literature” all but the most ambitious instances. Nevertheless, Swigger’s “impatience for cognition” corroborates Clark’s emphasis on the psychotropic profile of the encyclopedic compulsion; that is, the encyclopedic, disclosed as compulsion, is detached from objective conditions and made available to the more plastic measures of dream and desire. Underworld, for example, does not conform to Mendelson’s requirement for the comprehensive depiction of a science; but Underworld is an encyclopedia of mannerisms and gestures, a commodious vision of the mid-century American habitus, a panorama of inchoate desires.

 

What Underworld makes instructive for the legacy of encyclopedic narrative is not a database but the glimpse it affords of stasis, its mid-century America trapped in paralytic arrest–or is it hibernation? Mendelson’s avatars are conspicuously associated with pilgrimage, which endows Joyce’s Dublin or Pynchon’s Europe with a sense of topological adventure. DeLillo’s work summons a geographical expanse too, but only to render it claustrophobic (Clara Sax’s fleet of deactivated military aircraft being converted to art in the desert; Matt Shay’s relationship falling apart during a car trip, paradigmatic site of the open road; Lenny Bruce’s nightclub tour resolved into crammed venues, objective correlatives of the manic congestion of his performance rants; and even Bobby Thompson’s homerun baseball, passing from hand to hand, turns out to be a mockery of mobility, dissolving in simulacra–its pedigree being open to question–and sequestered in private collections of memorabilia). Underworld immerses us in cold war tensions between encyclopedism as cultural ambition and the fear of knowing too much–a subject DeLillo previously rehearsed in The Names, White Noise, Libra, and Mao II. The model of mobility was gradually adapted in the cold war to the command-control operation, in which omniscience belongs not to those out in the field but to those in the bunkers underground, scanning screens and radar blips and databases. DeLillo’s unique contribution is to help us see the extent to which the posture of immobility and confinement, having been associated with the omniscience of global warning systems for decades now, has itself become conflated with knowledge. DeLillo’s work discloses the impasse between information and understanding, between data and human sense. But, importantly, DeLillo resists the judgement that this impasse signifies a breakdown. Rather, he surveys a world in which the specifically human dimension that arises out of cognitive craving and encyclopedic resources is a profligate unproductivity; he is intent on discerning freedom and mobility outside those familiar (and thoroughly commodified) American icons, the open road and the rocket capsule.⁴ The claustrophobic paralysis of Underworld reminds us that, for all its oceanic voyaging, Moby-Dick is set on the confines of a ship. Confinement can itself resonate with encyclopedic pressures: this is what gives Beckett’s work its apocalyptic aura, and it’s what is rendered more patently encyclopedic in the archival sense in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, set in a tuberculosis clinic. Mental ubiquity and intellectual restlessness, it seems, are symptomatic of blockage rather than liberation, paralysis rather than mobility.

 

Although vague to begin with, and rendered hopelessly flacid by an ubiquity of citations, with modest foreshortening the term “postmodern” consistently evokes a certain mobility–speed and transitivity, symptomatized by channel surfing, jump-cuts, and hypertext modes of information linkage. Speed, of course, cannot be consigned exclusively to the postmodern, associated as it is with Marinetti’s manifesto of Futurism (1909) in which he celebrated a world enriched by “a new beauty… the beauty of speed” (Selected Writings 41). “Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science,” Marinetti wrote in 1913. “Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world’s life) do not realize that these various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on their psyches” (Futurist Manifestos 96). Behind Futurist hyperbole was an accurate assessment of communication technologies in the era of mass media and hyperkinetic transport.

 

The transportation revolution that has had such a conspicuous impact on the public sphere in the past two centuries has been accompanied by a corresponding acceleration of sapience. Arnold Gehlen ventures a plausible supposition that “the modern psyche develops at the same time as the science of it and as the art which mirrors it ” (81-82).⁵ Insofar as we associate modernity and speed, Gehlen’s triangular configuration speaks to a prolonged mutation in which the singularities of the present are obscured unless we submit them to a broader historical dialectic. To do so would mean, for example, overcoming the stereotypical association of Nathaniel Hawthorne with what was, even for him, an antiquarian interest in Puritanism, discerning in his work symptoms of Gehlen’s “modern psyche” in the vitro of industrial adaptation. In that light, Hawthorne’s story “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe” (1834) is prescient in its fanciful illustration that information outpaces fact, that in the feedback loop of signal/response a reversal of flow is possible–the response anticipating the signal which it then precipitates by virtue of impetuous expectancy. It also suggests a correlation between information and speed, an ominous complicity famously realized in Gravity’s Rainbow. When Pynchon gruffly concedes, late in the novel, “You will want cause and effect. All right” (663), we find ourselves confronted with Higginbotham’s catastrophe: that is to say, the traditional expository order of narrative is revealed as a regressive model of mental calculation. In fact, the real challenge of speed in modes of transport was always mental, not physical. The ultimate exhilaration of speed is psychic displacement, simulated ubiquity–not being everywhere, but knowing everything, as is now ineluctably demonstrated by the pervasive array of monitors (video games, personal computers, television) which combine sedentariness with speed.

 

My concern in what follows is to investigate, by way of a reading of Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain, the fate of this aspiration to know all, particularly as instantiated in the practical medium of print. The modern enthrallment with speed is a nascent stipulation of communication technologies, and these technologies are modeled on, and answerable to, the cross-referencing mobility pioneered in the Enlightenment encyclopedia. In these novels by Melville and Mann we find that beneath the utopian fantasy of total data transfer–a dream of unambiguous signals and noise-free channels–there is a different dimension, one that I call indigence. My choice of the term will be elaborated later; but for the moment I offer a preview by way of Italo Calvino. In the second of his six Memos for the Next Millennium, “Quickness,” Calvino writes: “In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication into a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language” (45). Sharpening differences: with this exhortation Calvino joins Maurice Blanchot, who commends the encyclopedic enterprise precisely insofar as it permits us “to know… in such a way that it renders us somewhat other in relation to ourselves” (51).

 

Encylopedic Narrative and the Legacy of Wallowing

 

The Encyclopédie pioneered by Diderot and D’Alembert remains the most famous and influential of encylopedic projects. Despite the contributions of Rousseau, Voltaire, the editors themselves, and a legion of notable peers, a conspicuous feature of the encyclopedic enterprise is that of a comprehensive book that writes itself out from under the coercion of authority and, by implication, releases itself from the charmed circle of authorship. The encyclopedia, then, is the “text” that dispels onerous authorizations of the “work” in Roland Barthes’s sense.⁶ But what are the guiding principles of such a text? It is evident that somebody, or some editorial board, is responsible for selecting the topics to be covered and somebody writes them. They are not spontaneously self-generating incarnations of a higher knowledge. By the same token, the “great books” are not self-selecting, despite Robert Hutchins’s contention that “there never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were” (xi), so the Great Books were “almost self-selected” (xx).⁷ Mortimer Adler’s Great Books of the Western World were adopted by committee, and may be said to have followed Enlightenment precedent by according a role to scientific as well as literary titles. The famous Syntopicon, a two-volume conceptual index to the fifty-eight volumes (of the second edition) of the Great Books, also conforms in an interesting way to the norms of scientific culture: it is numerically valorized and statistically directed. The Syntopicon charts 2,987 topics, recording 163,000 references to passages in the Great Books. “The five most discussed ideas are GOD, KNOWLEDGE, MAN, STATE, and LOVE, in that order” (there are 102 “ideas” in all, from ANGEL to WORLD). Moreover, these great ideas are validated as statistical dominants: “We can assume,” says Adler, “that the amount of space devoted to the discussion of an idea gives an approximate measure of how much thought has been bestowed on it” (Great Ideas 129).⁸ By what measure, however, may one of these ideas be regarded as under discussion in Moby-Dick (in volume 48) or, for that matter, in works by Sophocles, Rabelais, Cervantes, or Ibsen (among other authors of Great Books)? What is the fate of an idea when it is encased in and elaborated by satire, tragedy, saga, picaresque, drama, lyric?

 

The presumption of a “Great Conversation”–envisioned not only by Adler but by his cohort Robert Hutchins–proved to be seductive, at least as a marketing strategy.⁹ It has proven even more pervasive, culturally, as a tacit paradigm for the obscure and nearly inscrutable interplay of author and culture, text and context, which was addressed by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and, more flamboyantly, by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (or more openly configured as a cultural context in The Western Canon). To think of the “agon” of writerly self-assertion as a “conversation” may be accurate, but the convivial nature of Adler’s term obscures darker forces at work; it is almost too obvious to bear repeating to say that “conversation” is all too often a verbal exchange between participants who are unequally endowed, prepared, or situated. The same is true of “discussion.” Much is “discussed” in Moby-Dick, to be sure, but on what ground? When the narrator identifies the right whale as a Stoic and the sperm whale as a “Platonian” (443), on what basis is a discussion convened? That Melville sports with the austere topics of philosophical debate is evident to any reader of Moby-Dick, yet its inclusion in the Great Books tacitly dignifies its improprieties (generic, conceptual, strategic) by suggesting some “contribution” to the discussion. From the Great Books perspective, Melville’s place at the table is ensured not by virtue of his prodigious cetological lore, but because he compares one whale to Locke and another to Plato (his irreverence being construed as stylistic exuberance). But what if whales really are the vital matter in Melville’s textual leviathan, and the philosophical materials no more than arabesques?

 

The assumption behind the Great Books paradigm is one which has elsewhere been defined as the “archive”: “the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern” (Richards 11).¹⁰ Interestingly, the terms themselves suggest the problem: the master pattern is subject to the epistemological vicissitudes of its creaturely ordainer, whose representations of the “known or knowable” will indeed make use of the fantastic. (In Régis Debray’s concise definition, culture is “an incessantly renegotiated interaction between our values and our tools” [117].) Where there is method there is madness; though this does not necessarily mean aberrance, but rather a guiding and inspiring mania, a divine prompting, an enigmatic surplus which at once provokes, secures, and makes manic the dream of total knowledge. The archive predisposes value as preservation (and in the same gesture, it might be argued, disposes of use as value), and archival preservation in its purest form is inertia (the documents that are never handled last the longest). Rhetorical and performative orders arise and dissipate; but their interregnum, however stately and composed, is always accompanied by the entropic undertow of the archive. The mass resists the method: the bulk of available material impedes the convened strategies of mobility. Plenitude leads to intransigence, to wandering in circles or meandering without purpose.

 

As programmatically addressed in the Prospectus to the Encyclopédie, “The tree of human knowledge could be formed in several ways, either by relating different knowledge to the diverse faculties of our mind or by relating it to the things that it has as its object. The difficulty was greatest where it involved the most arbitrariness. But how could there not be arbitrariness? Nature presents us only with particular things, infinite in number and without firmly established divisions. Everything shades off into everything else by imperceptible nuances” (qtd. in Darnton 195).¹¹ The arbitrariness that concerns the editors is conceptual–concerning a final indeterminacy of nomenclature, of classification, or cognizance–but by a seemingly unrelated practical decision the arbitrary is instantiated as the governing principle of the Encyclopédie itself, in its alphabetic arrangement of topics. “C’est l’ordre alphabétique contre l’ordre divin,” writes Meschonnic (21). In the empirical universe of experimental science and technology sanctioned by the Encyclopédie, the sacred paradigm of the tree of knowledge is scrapped (retained only as a rhetorical topos, as in the passage cited above), and the resulting heap of data occupies a paradoxical condition: the subordination of knowledge to the categorical formatting of information renders knowledge strategically robust but conceptually ungrounded. “Information is knowledge fractured into bits and pieces that can be moved around easily but never really assembled successfully into an integrated whole,” writes Thomas Richards (76). By the 19th century, the modern dispensation of arts and sciences was rapidly being consolidated within a circle of learning convened by Enlightenment encyclopedism. The winnowing out of “divine learning”–which had still been a feature of Francis Bacon’s encyclopedic program–was a decisive step, escalated by Diderot and D’Alembert into a revolutionary principle.

 

The encyclopedic impulse is not to be accredited strictly to Enlightenment rationality. Even within the Encyclopédie itself there are conflicting aspirations, as the phantasm of “order” testifies to an underlying tension between technique and desire; between a positivist exposition of the emergent order of secular wisdom and a program of provisional confrontations with historical exigency; between strategies of accumulation and tactics of provocation. The iconoclastic intensity of the Encyclopédie was prefigured and inspired by Pierre Bayle’s idiosyncratic Dictionnaire historique et critique, a work of singular importance for Melville and a reminder that Moby-Dick anatomizes not only the bodies of whales but the ideological dispositions of men. Like Bayle’s Dictionary, the audacious labor of the Encyclopédie consists of a series of treatises and provocations. The Encyclopedia as envisioned by Diderot was a gesture of textual insubordination, an act of defiance against the authority of scripture, as was Voltaire’s (anonymously published) Dictionnaire philosophique, which appeared and was widely denounced by clerics in 1764, midway through the publication of the Encyclopédie (1751-1772).¹²

 

Wilda Anderson summarizes Diderot’s encyclopedic dream as an “operational poetics” (257). The mark of progress associated with the encyclopedia, she suggests, “comes not from accumulating content but from provoking an act of thinking” (100). Distinguishing the “d’Alembertian Reader” from the “Diderotian Reader,” Anderson characterizes the latter as moving in the “direction of increasing virtue (philosophical intelligence)” while the former’s emphasis on accumulation of knowledge is merely “erudite stupidity” (107). The truly progressive function of the encyclopedia, then, is twofold: to introduce order and recompose it through an active engagement with disorder.¹³ It is as a proponent of poetic resourcefulness that Voltaire and Diderot hail as heirs of their encyclopedic impulses not the functionalist cultural bureaucrats of the ordered secular state, but those polyglot nomads like Ezra Pound, or Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, and the insolent encyclopedism on display in Bataille’s Dictionnaire critique (in Documents, 1929-30), the anonymous Da Costa Encyclopédique (1947), and Dale Pendell’s Pharmako/Poeia.¹⁴ The dual legacy of Enlightenment encyclopedism persists inasmuch as we remain polarized between accumulation (d’Alembert) and provocation (Diderot); between the allure of “master narratives” (with Lyotard’s diagnosis of their serving as one more instance of their survival) and the countermotions of dissemination.¹⁵

 

A concomitant feature of the Encyclopedia as text is its arrangement of parts, its convening of a space made enticing by the prospect of increased fluidity. Such a prospect, of course, appeals as readily to the poet as to the statistician, albeit in different ways and for different ends. The modern (post-Enlightenment) encyclopedic activity has increasingly made its impact in the culture at large, outside the strict ordination of topics within the confines of a publication. Division of labor, cross-reference documentation, and centralization of data in major resources and institutions are the key characteristics of encyclopedic culture; together, they ensure mobility within a given field, a mobility contingent on conceptual consistency and standardization of aims. Cross-referencing is a technical device facilitating ease of movement; but such mobility obscures the aleatory dimension of non-hierarchical traversals of data. The efficiency of the archival web of encyclopedism readily leads to a complacent mirage of power and control, vividly depicted in Moby-Dick in “The Mat-Maker,” when the sailors grow lethargic in their mechanical expertise. In an analogy, Melville speaks of a weaver god, deafened by the sound of the weaving, who can’t hear the workers’ words “inaudible among the flying spindles”; but outside the factory windows they are audible, “so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.” Melville’s parable suggests the necessity of an outlet, a vent through which the sound of labor, and the undertone of dissent, can be transmitted and made audible.

 

Melville revisits the infernal factory in “The Tartarus of Maids,” this time a paper mill, in which the narrator is moved by the sight of the blank paper to reflect on John Locke’s tabula rasa, as well as the “unbudging fatality,” the “metallic necessity,” with which the multitude of blank sheets are forced through the presses. The attendant maidens are as pale as the paper: “there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls… their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica” (284-285). Melville’s conflation of blank faces and blank pages with the miraculous imprint of the saint suggests that, by some preternatural twist, blankness is not given, as Locke would have it, but marks the spot of an effacement. At present, the microchips powering our massive computational technoculture are produced overseas, by a largely female underclass, another “tartarus of maids” in which the only difference from Melville’s tale is that the spectral apparition of the saint would appear now not in the form of a face on a blank page but as a face in a hologram. Beneath the utopian fantasy of total data transfer–a dream of unambiguous signals and noise-free channels–we find this occluded dimension, one that I call indigence, manifest in the narrative deployments of Moby-Dick.

 

Melville’s factory scenes from Moby-Dick and “The Tartarus of Maids” resonate with an Enlightenment prelude. The effaced wage-slaves of the 19th century factory were a populace formerly consigned to the underclass category of indigence. In the revolutionary project of the Encyclopédie, the entry on Indigence ridicules the complacent presumption that social stratification is a measure of innate worth. “Indigent: a man who lacks the necessities of life in the midst of his fellow men who are enjoying, with offensive luxury, all the possible superfluities.” So contrary to nature is this state of affairs, according to the author of the article, that while “[a] vicious person is invited out, we shrink from the indigent” (40). To put this in perspective, it needs to be recalled that Diderot’s encyclopedic project scrupulously dignified technical manual labor: the whole enterprise can be read as a How-To Manual for tradespeople as well as an emancipation of reason from an (institutionally perpetuated) inheritance of superstition. Of course, the philosophes failed to foresee the rise of monopoly capital with industrial technology, which ensured that the indigents of the ancien regime would remain indigent ancillaries to the industrial revolution. The emergent social portrait is far more complex, of course, but what I want to establish here is a link between encyclopedia and indigence, specifically as narrative strategy. On a representational level the indigents appear in Moby-Dick as the indigenous figures Tashtego and Queequeg. On a structural plane, however, it is the bipolarity of Ahab and Ishmael that affords access to a narrative register of indigence.

 

The 19th century whaling ship was among the most advanced technological production units of its time; and it has been common to recognize Ahab as a captain of industry. Ahab is a “hot old man” Stubb finds; “eyes like powder-pans” (223). Ahab accuses Stubb of treating him like a cannonball (222). The captain of another ship surmises that Ahab’s blood is “at the boiling point!–his pulse makes these planks beat!” (553). Ishmael observes “his eyes glowing like coals” (650). Ahab is an explosive force, and Stubb’s prognosis of him as a cannonball proves accurate. Michel Serres provides an instructive perspective on the source of Ahab’s explosiveness. The body, he says, “is not plunged into a single space, but into the difficult intersection” of multiple spaces, and “whoever is unsuccessful in this undertaking… explodes from the disconnection of spaces” (44). This is not to ascribe Ahab’s agony to the overcommitments of modern corporate man, but to recognize the multitude of striations that mark and disfigure him–not only the lost leg, but the seam that runs the length of his body, as if he were in his essence a geophysical fissure that is sealed only momentarily, and like the Vesuvius in which Ishmael would dip his condor quill, Ahab is ready to blow.

 

Ahab’s seam is a crease marking the traversal of information technologies absorbed into the composition of Moby-Dick, and in its typological specificity it can be read as the mark of Pierre Bayle. Melville purchased Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696) in 1849. The book provided him not only with a compendium of resources on the thought of antiquity but also a way of rehearsing that legacy, in the spirit of Calvinism, as dualistic calamity–the religious inheritance of both Bayle and Melville. Through Bayle, Melville invents Ahab as Zoroaster, the fire-worshipping God of the Parsees and survivor of a lightning bolt.¹⁶ As a transposition of Bayle’s signature to Melville’s, Ahab is not simply the tragic hero of the tale but a trace-element of the mobile, cross-referencing encyclopedic resources at his author’s command. He is an insignia of Melville’s compositional procedure. As Millicent Bell indicates, Melville’s borrowings from Bayle are often very close, and would count as plagiarism had they been contemporaries. This is not a reproach to Melville, but evidence of encyclopedic culture in which cribbing is necessarily endemic. In the same spirit Thoreau closely followed Charles Kraitsir’s Significance of the Alphabet (1846) in his celebrated alphabetic reverie on the railway embankment in the “Spring” chapter of Walden.¹⁷ Likewise, Ezra Pound continues and amplifies the practice in The Cantos, explicitly incorporating an Enlightenment archive from John Adams and from Père de Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire générale de la Chine (1777-1783). Ahab, then, marks a complicitious network of resources which archivally predispose narrative potential, and he is himself the composite figure of competing information regimes.

 

Confronting the horizon of possibilities, Ahab’s is a posture of defiance. His hubristic ambition is an assault on the whale not as mammal but as god, enigmatic prototype of an “antemosaic, unsourced existence… which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over” (569). Father Mapple closes his sermon with the prescient question, “what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?” (143). Ahab’s impertinence consists in his determination to outlive his god, to exceed his earthly portion–compensating the insult of archival pre-inscription by outliving the nemesis that defines him. Ruminating on Vishnu as world-creator, Melville suggests that the Vedas pre-existed the creation as an archive of possibilities: “these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes” (472). The term “volumes” freely mingles text with water and with whale. The pun is later revisited by Ahab, who curses the “mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the world’s books” (583). Ahab is “down” in the world’s books in several senses: hemmed in by contractual obligations (the surface meaning of his remark); but also sunken or mired in complicity, drawing on the demonic resources of his shadowy Parsees to mobilize the crew as agents in his own vengeance (this would be the allegorical reading of being down in the books). Ahab is typologically down in the world’s books as Prometheus, as Lear, and as Faust.

 

The deadly unilateral force of Ahab is not to be associated with encyclopedism, despite his Faustian aspirations. He does not demand total knowledge, but impossible knowledge, like the knowledge of metaphysical shadows and phantom sensations. The alertness and vigilance of Ahab is at odds with the incumbency of the archive. But a distinction is needed between the archive and the encyclopedia. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault anachronistically imposes on the old regime of print media the switching capacity of modern electronic communications. The intransigence of the old archive took centuries and repeated attempts to dispell, as the cross-referencing practices of Pierre Bayle, Ephraim Chambers, and Diderot eventually succeeded in undermining the heavy archival mass of “sacred learning,” or institutionalized superstition as the philosophes saw it. Foucault imagines the archive as a propulsive force, like an explosion which necessarily displaces everything, introducing a new configuration by detonating the old. “It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make” (131). Foucault is describing the inexorable dispersal of temporality, the unbidden fatal archivist. When the inexorable is summoned into the scope of human affairs by an Ahab it takes the form of speed and realizes intensity as explosiveness.

 

Currently, the Internet reanimates our dreams of instantaneous telepresence, as this latest archival medium presumes to abolish the lag time that has hitherto been the atavistic impediment clinging to every technological innovation–a dream testifying to what Paul Virilio calls a “dromocratic revolution” in systems efficiency, in which we pass “from freedom of movement to tyranny of movement” (Virilio and Lotringer 70).¹⁸ The greater the subordination of components in a system, the more rapid the transit within it. But this coordination of resources also makes rapid transit compulsory. In the information pilgrimage, the marked link makes a repeatable path, and repetition smooths the way for enhanced speed. (Film and television serialization operates by means of such links, which help mobilize salient characteristics–stars, jingles, mannerisms, merchandise–into broader cultural orbits.) Mobility within the book is as crucial as geographical mobility outside it, and the book comes to mirror the world–no longer in the image of cosmic harmony, but as grand central station of rapid transit, with the figure of the earth itself consigned by NASA photos to its subordinate role as home base and launching pad.

 

In the old pedestrian topography, the wandering scholar is forced to soak in the world and its contingent apparitions as the condition accompanying access to the book. But what might otherwise seem a nuisance is given a different texture when we recall the consistency with which medieval culture epitomized the world itself as a book, “in which the pages are turned with our feet” as Paracelsus put it (qtd. in Curtius 322).¹⁹ The peril attendant on digitized telepresence is that the uniform encoding of data obliterates the tactile agency of the pilgrimage. The book of the world is no longer commensurate with the world of the (computerized) book. There is, however, a residual manner in which a phantom materiality lingers on, and this is traceable by way of the cross-referencing and multiple-coding options of the Encyclopedia. The obstacle that emerges with a plenitude of cross-referencing is one of surfeit: the enhancement of cognitive speed confronts the increased magnitude of material to which its rapid conceptual transit has access. This forces the recognition that the archive is latent in matter as such: material forms always bear the imprint of an ancestral script. Footprints and fossils, for example, contribute to a venatic drama of pansemiosis in which everything signifies simply by being in contact with matter, leaving its trace in a passive cascade of imprints, like the pallid faces of the Tartarean maids on the paper they produce. Ahab is a scholar of the whale’s traces, seizing on its moments of breeching as nothing less than apocalyptic transfigurations in the fabric of matter itself. For all that the whale is associated with force and speed, however, we need to disassociate it from Ahab’s messianic explosiveness, for these qualities do not represent the whale in its natural state but as preyed upon by humans. In his Etymology Melville construes whale from “wallen“–“roll” and “wallow” (75). A contemporaneous etymological fantasia attributes the derivation of all mental acts “from Material objects,” so thoughts are thereby “attached to the Agitation of the Earth”: “‘To Revolve things in the mind’ [is] connected with Wallowing in the mire” (Whiter 129). Wallowing is an image of felicitous habitation, being at home in the world, enjoying “the pleasures of merely circulating” (to quote Wallace Stevens).

 

As narrator, Ishmael is inclined to wallow, adapting his resources to the character of his subject. He is unflappably aware that we are all “down in the world’s books,” but rather than finding this an outrage he takes it as a compositional principle. Ishmael’s affirmation parallels his author’s, of course, and we hear them echoing one another in Ishmael’s query about the enigma of archival semiosis: “The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag?” (286). In the figure of Ishmael, Melville invents encyclopedic indigence. Ishmael is sanctioned to tell the tale not by superior wisdom but simply because he survived (“orphan” is the last word in Moby-Dick [687]). He is an indigent, a naïf like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, and his encyclopedism is instructively gratuitous. What we find in Moby-Dick is a circumspection with respect to the tyrannous mobility of encyclopedic culture. The tactical narrative expedient is one of delay, meander, filibuster–like a work stoppage, or a blockade of auto routes. Ishmael’s narrative detours are compendious not from bombast but as an understated (if overdone) way of deferring the chase. Cut to the chase we say, urging the action on to its bloody finality. Ishmael’s is a pacifist narration which demonstrates in its own terms the constancy of a bloodbath in the natural cycle of predation, illuminating the futility with which the cycle is recast in manichean metaphysics by Ahab. Maximizing the tension between documentation and storytelling, Ishmael’s narrative rhythms articulate a rhapsodic seismography erupting along fault lines of the archival grid. Its encyclopedism is dedicated to a whimsy no less caustic and devastating than that of Flaubert’s hapless Bouvard and Pecuchet, while at the same time disclosing that myth is the original encyclopedic fund or fundament.²⁰ The elusive chimera of the white whale attests to an archaic cosmos generative of archival magnitudes indifferent to the human archive–a circle, like the ouroboros, which is not contingent on the paradigmatic boundaries, and the self-absorbed constraints, of human learning.

 

The circle commands the entire scope of cosmological activity, from chaos to terrestrial paradise; and as a geometric figure, the circle accommodates these extremes by its ability to expand and contract. Melville is assiduous in complying with Emerson’s dictum on “Circles.” “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” When Queequeg is sick and preparing for his death he wastes away “till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing.” But “his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller…. And, like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand, so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity” (588). As the school of whales gathers in “The Grand Armada” the Pequod is surrounded by leviathans, and Ishmael discovers a preternatural calm at the eye of the latent storm:

 

though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. (498)

 

There is a final element in this non-vicious circularity in Moby-Dick which reminds us that “encyclopedia” means, in its Greek components, circle of learning–and which Pound adapted from Frobenius as “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” (57).²¹ Ishmael, expounding upon the magisterial dimensions of his subject (“when Leviathan is the text” [566]), admits to being swollen with purpose:

 

Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences.... Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. (566-7)

 

This organic expansion is narrative mimicry of the whale’s inbreathed volume of air flamboyantly released in a shower of spray when the whale breaches. The lampooning, speculative, and data-saturated asides that add so much bulk to Moby-Dick are nothing less than Ishmael’s breachings.

 

The affiliation of narrative venture with animal respiration indicates that Moby-Dick is not strictly an encyclopedic narrative: its somatic topology (in which leviathans are anatomized as The Folio Whale, the Octavo Whale, and the Duodecimo Whale [231]) is a covert nod to the predecessor of the modern encyclopedia: the Renaissance anatomy. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy parses its topic in such detail that a diagrammatic recapitulation runs to ten pages of fine print, with major headings given signs of the zodiac as emblems. The idea that a partitioned world needs to have guardians or patrons of its partitions goes back to the Middle Ages, and manifests as late as the 14th century in Domenico Bandini’s gigantic encyclopedia, Fons memorabilium universi, arranged in five parts in honor of Christ’s wounds (Collison 70). There is also a rich foreground of encyclopedism in the combinatorial diagrams of Ramon Llull, Juan de Celaya, Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, Athanasius Kircher, and Francis Bacon. What is instructive in the trajectory from medieval combinatorial wheels to enlightenment encyclopedia is a drama of expository mobility, a mobility that begins to impinge on the episodic character of the romance, injecting into the nascent genre of the novel a synoptic respiration. It is an itinerary that will culminate in Joyce’s Ulysses, with its diagrammatic scheduling of hours with motifs, organs, arts, symbols, and narrative techniques, its leitmotifs so sedulously reverberated in its own archival residue that repeated reading finds the whole text recapitulated on every page. (Almost: since Joyce doesn’t actually attempt this until inventing a language–a vehicle–for it with Finnegans Wake.)

 

As a narrative that sides with animal life, wallowing in its archival resources, Moby-Dick offers a distinctive response to the problematic legacy of the encyclopedic archive. Its epistemological lesson is that a surface rationalism conceals an atavistic endowment which is at once a “pre-rational” or mythic threat as well as a repository of creative energy–the very energy that is required in order to compose the work. So it convenes its circle of learning like the momentary apparition of circles on the surface of a pond, expanding and dissolving at once, its sapience at one with the agent of its recognition, forced to reckon with agency as the orphan of whatever will have occurred. Moby-Dick also demonstrates that truth does not remain unblemished by being immersed in the volatile medium of actual human agents–a point amply and equally evident in Thomas Mann’s encyclopedic novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).

 

The adventures of Moby-Dick constitute Ishmael’s education, just as Melville said of his own whaling experience that it was his Harvard and Yale. Likewise, The Magic Mountain rehearses its author’s humanistic training in the comparably remote setting of a tuberculosis clinic in the Alps. Hans Castorp’s experience in the clinic is a model paideia, a scene of instruction in which he is exposed to humanism in the figure of Settembrini, spiritual messianism in the Jesuit Naphta, medical science in the clinic’s director Behrens, experimental science in Krokowski’s lectures, and Dionysian joie de vivre in Claudia Chauchat and Peeperkorn. In contrast to the unilateral program of Settembrini’s encyclopedism, Hans Castorp forms a non-cumulative relation to the learning to which he is exposed. What he retains, and rehearses, is the model of the circle rather than the learning (the enkyklos not the paideia of “encyclopædia”). “In both space and time, as we learn from the laws of periodicity and the conservation of mass,” Castorp says, all motion is circular (376) [Alle Bewegung ist aber kreisförming… Im Raume und in der Zeit, das lehren von der Erhaltung der Masse und von der Periodizität (536)].²² He comes to this understanding through the precession of the zodiac, which rehearses what he calls “the practical joke of the circle, of eternity that has no permanent direction, but in which everything keeps coming back” [der Eulenspiegelei des Kreises und der Ewigkeit ohne Richtungsdauer, in der alles wiederkehr (521)].

 

It’s as if we’re being led around by the nose, in a circle, always lured on by the promise of something that is just another turning point–a turning point in a circle. For a circle consists of nothing but elastic turning points, and so its curvature is immeasurable, with no steady, definite direction, and so eternity is not “straight ahead, straight ahead,” but rather “merry-go-round.” (365)

 

[Man wird ja an der Nase herumgezogen, im Kreis herumgelockt mit der Aussicht auf etwas, was schon wieder Wendepunkt ist... Wendepunkt im Kreise. Denn das sind lauter ausdehnungslose Wendepunkte, woraus der Kreis besteht, die Biegung ist unmeßbar, es gift keine Richtungsdauer, und die Ewigkeit ist nicht «geradeaus, geradeaus», sondern «Karussell, Karussell». (520-521)]

 

Late in the book Hans Castorp calms a neurotic patient by speaking with “serene religiosity” of these elastic turning points and of “the mirthful melancholy of eternity” (622) [gelassener Religiosität… der übermütigen Melancholie, die in der ohne Richtungsdauer in sich selber laufenden Ewigkeit liege (887)]. The circle is not a panacea, however, as Castorp comes to recognize the viability of deviation and noncompliance with the revolving order of things. In the blizzard he wanders in a vast circle in a vain attempt to escape, and subsequently sees in circularity something “natural and impersonal and beyond all individual conscious effort, much as the temptation to wander in circles overcomes someone who is lost or sleep ensnares someone freezing to death” (526) [gesetzmäßig-unpersönlich und überlegen aller individuellen Bewußtheit, wie die Schlafverführung, die den Erfrierenden umstrickt, und wie das Im-Kreise-Herumkommen des Verirrten (749-750)]. One cannot act personally with reference to the entire cosmological order as configured in the zodiac; in fact, the assignment of natal identity in terms of a given zodiacal sign suggests that, beneath and within the circle of universal respiration, human affairs zigzag and criss-cross, meander and snag and only fitfully approximate the grand design by submitting to “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” (to cite a title by Wallace Stevens²³).

 

Despite its exemplary circularity, the cosmological cycle resists being cast in human terms.²⁴ This enigmatic recalcitrance of fate is beautifully summarized in an episode in which the inmates of the sanitorium gather in seance. The spirit Holger comes to them, and recites an epic poem, piling up

 

a thousand details that it seemed would never stop--and an hour later, there was still no end in sight, for the poem, which had dealt relentlessly with the pain of childbirth and a lover's first kiss, with the crown of suffering and God's strict, fatherly kindness, had plunged into the warp and woof of creation [sich in das Weben der Kreatur vertiefte (933)], into epochs and nations, had lost itself in the vastness of the stars, even mentioning the Chaldeans and the zodiac, and would most certainly have lasted on through the whole night, if the conjurers had not at last removed their fingers from the glass and with politest thanks declared to Holger that that had to be it for now. (654)

 

The otherworldly encyclopedic summation of the entire cosmic panorama, in short, moves its human auditors to boredom. At the level of basic human awareness and interest, encyclopedism is best confined to smaller projects; immortality, as it were, requires intimation not elaboration.

 

Settembrini’s project is paradigmatic. As a member of the International League for the Organization of Progress [Internationaler Bund für Organiserung der Fortschritts (344)], the Italian humanist is engaged in an ambitious international undertaking, a “large-scale scientific program of reform… embracing all presently known possibilities for perfecting the human organism” (241) [Ein wissenschaftlich ausgearbeitetes Reformprogramm… das alle augenblicklichen Vervollkommnungsmöglichkeiten des menschlichen Organismus umfaßt (345)]. One aspect of the program is an encyclopedia in some twenty volumes, Sociological Pathology [Sociologie der Leiden; Sociologischen Pathologie (346, 347)], one volume of which is devoted to literature. As editor of this volume, Settembrini envisions it as “solace and advice for those who suffer, a synopsis and short analysis of all masterpieces of world literature dealing with every such conflict” (243) [den Leidenen zu Trost und Belehrung, eine Zusammenstellung und kurzgefaßte Analyse aller für jeden einzelnen Konflikt in Betracht kommenden Meisterwerke der Weltliteratur enthalten soll (347)]. Mann’s wit (too often mislabeled “irony”) is evident here, not only in view of the fact that literature is very nearly all about suffering–so Settembrini’s project is interminable–but also that The Magic Mountain itself is an immense chronicle of suffering, set in a tuberculosis clinic. Such a malady enables Mann to demonstrate that suffering is rarely physical, but predominately psychological and cultural. In fact, Hans Castorp’s own condition is ambiguous: he never manifests any real tubercular symptoms, and the fever that wins him admission to the select clientele of the clinic is gradually made to appear synonymous with life itself–albeit life as corpuscular rage, life as the supreme malady. Hans Castorp, in short, like Ishmael, incarnates in his indigence an encyclopedic propensity which is properly that of organic life, that microbial sapience that makes us what we are without our ever having to know anything about it; the charmed circle of life, in which the pleasures of circulating exceed the compass of human knowledge.

 

Despite his almost visionary cordiality with the divine legation of the stars, Hans Castorp remains “life’s problem child” as Mann refers to him throughout the book [Lebens Sorgenkind (1006)] and he descends from the mountain to join in the first world war, that “wicked caper of amusement” [das arge Tanzvergnügen (1006)]. The entire novel is in many ways a rehearsal, after the event, of the intellectual and cultural stakes leading up to that conflagration. It is not incidental that the contributing ideologies are dissociated from militarism, and reviewed in the passional setting of personal debate and friendship. As a novel of ideas, though, its conceptual fabric is permeated with the personalities of the asylum residents, rendering problematic the Enlightenment aspiration to codify principles of universal validity. The truth can never remain unblemished when immersed in the volatile medium of actual human agents.

 

Myth and the Pathos of Data

 

Thomas Mann presents a deliberately static survey of humanistic pedagogy in the sealed confines of a tuberculosis sanitorium, exposing and satirizing the gridlock of disciplinary thinking, for which the only release appears to be Naphta’s “Terror” or the apocalyptic conflagration of war. In The Magic Mountain, as in Moby-Dick, we find a distinctive response to the problematic legacy of the encyclopedic archive, the prevailing lesson being that a surface rationalism of instrumental organization conceals an atavistic endowment which is at once a “pre-rational” or mythic threat as well as a repository of creative energy. Mann’s novel, like Melville’s, concedes that a subconscious or preternatural encyclopedism persists as a menacing subtext that is ineradicably part of encyclopedic rationalism. The dream of reason is accompanied by the dream of unreason, and together they form an uncanny alliance, at once traumatic and enlivening. Likewise, in the postmodern environment of encyclopedism recast in the chimerical allure of the Internet and online telepresence, we should bear in mind the imposing parameters of myth as phantom delegation and informing undertow.

 

“Myth is a form of integrated perceptual awareness which unites ‘fact’ and ‘explanation,’ because it is a form of awareness in which fact and explanation have not yet become disunited” (Falck 117).²⁵ Colin Falck’s definition is part of his attempt to restore a sacralizing outlook in the service of a “true post-modernism.” Falck diagnoses a regressive tendency in technophilia, reminding us that “objective or theoretical modes of explanation–such as natural–scientific ones, which in effect determine much of what we experience, as well as of what we do, in a technological world–may remain dependent on quite different, and ultimately more primitive, modes of comprehension which are essentially mythic” (119). It is not a coincidence that fledgling technologies are accompanied by such phenomena as Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars, and Neuromancer; for there is a deep proximity between hi-tech and mythic resonance. Falck’s aspiration (openly derived from Romantic and Modernist precedent) is to restore myth to making so as to reaffirm the constitutive faculty by which we invent what is memorable.²⁶

 

Charles Olson (the American poet credited with one of the earliest known uses of the term “post-modern”) was adamant in retaining myth for his “special view of history,” regarding myth as “what is said of what is said”–now more familiar simply as “discourse” (57).²⁷ Discourse is the vibratory archive of propositional forms, the quivering web of language we inhabit; any proposition summons retort or affirmation in a complex series of overlapping echoes, perturbations of the known. Some statements achieve priority as assertions of fact, some as assertions of feeling, others as examples of alluring shapeliness. Mythopoesis can be thought of as the stitching together of incommensurate discursive charms (“charm” in the sense in which any particular discursive register exercises its magic in convincing us it is self-evident).²⁸ Northrop Frye sought to preserve history and myth as co-extensive terms. “To me myth is not simply an effect of a historical process,” he wrote, “but a social vision that looks toward a transcending of history, which explains how it is able to hold two periods of history together, the author’s and ours, in direct communication” (Words with Power 60-61). In Libra, Don DeLillo depicts the fragile matrix of sentience attending the historical trauma of President Kennedy’s assassination:

 

People were lonely for news. Only news could make them whole again, restore sensation. Three hundred reporters in a compact space, all pushing to extract a word. A word is a magic wish. A word from anyone. With a word they could begin to grid the world, make an instant surface that people can see and touch together. (414)

 

Nicholas Branch, the intelligence analyst in Libra who is archivist of the assassination files, is appropriately situated in “the room of history and dreams” (445). History and dreams: this is the decisive configuration; and we should understand by “mythopoeisis” our propensity for rendering the concrete plastic and malleable. In Diderot’s hands, it was not the data that set you free, but the exercise of faculties (reason and passion) that kept you free.

 

Even the basic hermeneutic act of establishing a horizon of understanding inevitably partakes of a speculative and sympathetic (that is, pathically endowed) approach. Our historical understanding of another time, no less than gleaning the intent of another person, is stabilized by a mythopoetic reckoning in which we make what we know encompass more than we can possibly know, and in the process make the image of the known into the image of the possible. If this sounds risky, it’s because it is. The stakes in myth are always high–that is, imaginative risk is not recuperable to the ideology of “development.” It is a mistake to link myth with belief, says Roberto Calasso: rather, “we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves in such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul casts on itself” (278). When Robert Duncan attests that “[t]he depths emerge in a kind of dream informed by the familiar tale. It is important here that the myth be first so familiar, so much no-more-than an old story, that the poet is at home with what is most perilous” (27), he might as well be speaking of Ishmael’s fate, his domesticity consentingly risked astride the perilous depths.

 

It is from the depths that a symptom of engulfment emanates, a clue or reminder of what has been lost and what awaits recovery–the indigent reserve, the anomalous animation of the texture of the real.²⁹ Stanley Romaine Hopper refers to it as the cry of Merlin:

 

[T]he surfacing of Merlin's "cry" in the literature of our time signifies that we realize today more keenly than we have ever done that we live within a symbolic reality. Whether we think of this in terms of "standpoint" philosophy, or a philosophy of symbolic forms, or mythopoiesis, or "world hypotheses," or "master images," or archetypes of the unconscious, or radical metaphor, or "models," or "fields," or "frames of reference," or "language games," or "the global village," or the "house of being," the same point is being made. Our "thinking"--religious, philosophical, literary--belongs to "that prodigious net of numinous creation in which man is captured, although he himself has brought it forth." (15)

 

In Hopper’s view, the constraints of knowledge networks and operative paradigms need the alleviation of “a new logos, a new grammar of awareness” (14). If “rational grammar” meant a measure proportionate to the human condition, it would suffice to call it that. But the claims of encyclopedism need to be viewed with the same circumspection as that applied to Reason. The Encyclopédie was a project, a venture, a point of engagement, a political weapon, an act of profound cultural generosity, and much more; but it was also an iconoclastic project, everywhere bent on clarification and elucidation–Promethean light–bringing–banishing the dark, the undertone, the demi-monde of anything not dedicated to the claim of reason. In the wake of this prejudicial inclination of the philosophes, there have been numerous works laying claim to the occulted legacy of a pre-Enlightenment encyclopedism, of which Finnegans Wake can be taken as exemplary.

 

In the Wake Joyce depicts (in part through the polyglot texture of the book itself) the exemplary resolution of archival mass as a rubbish heap fermenting provocative incitements that do not so much illuminate as thicken or increase the texture of the darkness. In Underworld DeLillo offers a comparable vision; and the contending claims of illumination and passion converge in a passage in which Brian Glassic, a waste management engineer, confronts an enormous refuse heap, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.

 

In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behavior, people's habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us. (184)

 

Any search for a new grammar of awareness would benefit by attending to the indigent recess heaped up in our needs and wishes, our passion and excess.

 

It is from the vantage given us by this exceptional prospect–this unwarranted and mongrel exemption; this underworld with its undertones, its duende of all that makes dark sounds³⁰–that we might, in conclusion, recognize a familiar thread of thought that is at once alluring and disturbing. The thought goes by various names, from mathesis universalis and lingua generalis to the lucid demystifications of the Enlightenment philosophes, though our vernacular expression is now simply “encyclopedic.”³¹ The positive aspect of encyclopedism is increased access to comprehensive knowledge which is beyond the capacity of any of us to know on our own. It is this aspect that has been revitalized by computer technologies. Despite its association with McLuhan’s Gutenberg galaxy exploding into the hot and cold media of the electronic era, the issue is not strictly technological. It has also been propagated through more organic models, including Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, Bohm’s implicate order, and, earlier in the century, Jung’s collective unconscious, Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere and H. G. Wells’s “world brain.”³² These organic visions are now being revisited in utopian affirmations of our multi-media “infosphere”–a “process of information linkup toward the building of a global nervous system, a global brain” (R.U. Sirius), a “‘hive-mind consensus'” through which we will supposedly “evolve into ever higher forms” (Louis Rossetto), with humans as the “brain cells… waking up” the planet (Jody Radzik).³³ Such euphoric proclamations are tantamount to pledges of religious faith in the beneficence of a higher power (albeit without Teilhard’s explicit Christology). But emanating as they do from the convulsive archives of blip culture and channel surfing, I am inclined to see them rather as evidence of a condition forecast early in this century by Henry Adams. Reviewing his own contortions of mental growth in the instructively third-person format of The Education of Henry Adams, Adams found that the exponential development of power and information had broken the historical neck of the old Enlightenment viewpoint which had formed the characters of his presidential predecessors. “Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions,” he discovered, as “the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive. The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 to 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social mind. As though thought were common salt in indefinite solution it must enter a new phase subject to new laws. Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, the mind had successfully reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail to react–but it would need to jump” (498). And jump it has. What Adams in his prescience recognized was that there is no advantage in revisiting, let alone attempting to resuscitate, the romantic/modernist antinomies of nature versus culture, primal intuitive energy versus rational artifice.

 

The “new American” has long since become the Global Everyone, although the “need to think in contradictions” has not necessarily resulted in any vernacular dialectic. Rather, contradiction has become so pervasive as not to seem anomalous: as the material I’ve reviewed here suggests, there is a violence without and a violence within, but the relation between them lacks the reciprocal elegance of Wallace Stevens’ formulation (“The mind… is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality” [36]). Stevens, writing in 1942, was attempting to preserve a balance between imponderable violence and civil grace, and (like Adams) he thought of nobility as a “force.” As we enter into the pacts and pledges of cyborg life and hypertext mobility, the assignment of force to any particular sphere is increasingly perplexing. A “show of force” by striking workers hangs in limbo when management in the global economy is at once everywhere and nowhere; as for “mind,” we might now adjust Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s famous remark in Axel to read: “Thinking? Our computers can do that for us” (183).³⁴ While they are doing that, we might get busy thinking of ourselves (meat puppets that we are) not only as creatures whose desires and fantasies alone can keep pace with the new dromocracy–the world of entitlements to speed–but who have a long and instructive legacy of wallowing and apparently aimless circularity. Entertaining the thought of such insouciant drift in the figures of Ishmael and Hans Castorp, we might wonder about the cost of impetuously casting such indigence behind us once and for all. The Enlightenment legacy derives from the recognition that, if knowledge is power, specific acts and agents are what empower it. In The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa Maas confronts the question of such empowerment: to ask whether to project a world is at the same time to ask shall I know what I know?³⁵–that is, shall I discern the limits of what I know and include that within the compass of my knowledge? The augmentation of an act of knowing by metacommentary adds one circle around the other. As Pynchon, DeLillo, Mann, Melville, and Joyce each exemplify, the circle of learning is empowered by an encompassing circle of awareness about the scope and limits of “learning” as such. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn,” wrote Emerson, “and under every deep a lower deep opens” (403).

 

Notes

 

1. Since Libra vaulted him into prominence, DeLillo has been conspicuously affiliated with postmodernism: see John A. McClure, “Postmodern Romance”; Frank Lentricchia, “Libra as Postmodern Critique”; and the articles collected under Lentricchia’s editorship for New Essays on ‘White Noise.’ In this collection Michael Valdez Moses (“Lust Removed from Nature”) celebrates DeLillo for having “given [postmodern technological reality] its most detailed, expressive, and philosophically powerful representation” (63); while Paul A. Cantor (“‘Adolf, We Hardly Knew You'”) acknowledges that “[b]y setting White Noise within the academic world, DeLillo may have taken us close to the bloodless heart of postmodernism” (47). Cantor is thinking of the epistemological slippage associated with the simulacrum, and ventures an important distinction: “Is DeLillo a postmodern writer or is he a pathologist of postmodernism?” (58).

 

2. See Edward Mendelson, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” and “Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon.” My summary covers the points common to both articles.

 

3. The dilemma of endless differential slippage as a challenge to encyclopedic completeness is taken up by Vincent Descombes, who elaborates on Derrida by citing the “extra place of the supplement [which] takes the place of the missingplace in the book” (59). “In other words, what is missing [in the encyclopedia] is the place for what is missing, and that is why it is necessary to supplement this lack” (58).

 

4. As some of the more hyperbolic reviewers (like George Wills) of DeLillo’s novels have suspected, there is something “un-American” in his work; but they are too eager to equate this with anti-Americanism. DeLillo’s fiction is remarkably free of editorializing or grandstanding, and actually conforms to Stendhal’s model of the novel as a mirror carried through the common road, its mudstains deriving from the road not the mirror. In Underworld, though, there’s no mistaking capitalism as a malevolent force–a force which is significantly relocated at the end of the novel in the new Russia, while its American foreground is consigned to dump sites and inner city collapse like the Bronx.

 

5. A similar historical thesis is developed by J.H. van den Berg; see The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology (“Metabletica”) and Divided Existence and Complex Society.

 

6. I combine, in this remark, the import of two of Barthes’s most influential essays: “From Work to Text” and “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language.

 

7. For more on Hutchins and the Great Books, see Jed Rasula, “Nietzsche in the Nursery: Naive Classics and Surrogate Parents in Postwar American Cultural Debates.” The trope of self-selection continues to thrive in such sites as the rhetorical framing of American poetry anthologies: see Rasula, “The Empire’s New Clothes: Anthologizing American Poetry in the 1990s.” A somewhat different approach to the problem emerges when the genre is not poetry but pornography: “The principle of self-selection by the reader–so that all pornographic texts become, formally, like encyclopaedias–is what is largely responsible for the monotony with which they are charged by literary critics,” writes Jeremy Palmer in “Fierce Midnights: Algolagniac Fantasy and the Literature of the Decadence” (94). The alliance of pornography with encyclopedism is not as capricious as it may sound: Roland Barthes pointedly anatomizes the encyclopedic proclivities of pornography, spiritual exercises, and social reform in Sade, Fourier, Loyola.

 

8. The number of topics and of references are given in the Introduction by William Benton (vii), who cites the further statistic that the Syntopicon took $2 million and eight years to compile. In his autobiography, Philosopher at Large, Adler remarks that “Bill Benton never forgot, and never quite forgave, the enormous discrepancy between the original estimate and the final cost” (239). The original estimate was $60,000 and two years. The most famous vilification of the project remains that of Dwight Macdonald, who characterized the Syntopicon as “one of the most expensive toy railroads any philosopher ever was given to play with” (260).

 

9. To frame the hard work of reading Aquinas or Kant as a conversational contract was crucial to the commercial success of the project. Character-building by means of market resources is the tradition to which the Great Books enterprise belongs, much as it was institutionally sanctioned during Hutchins’s term as president of the University of Chicago beginning in 1929, and later with the founding of St. John’s College in Annapolis in 1937, which retains its Great Books curriculum to the present. The concept of a core curriculum of “great books” was pioneered by Columbia professor John Erskine (Adler was one of his students). Erskine’s affable approach is epitomized in his recommendation to aspiring readers of the Great Books: “get yourself a comfortable chair and a good light–and have confidence in your own mind” (qtd. in Rubin 168).

 

10. See Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. Richards’s subject is more specifically elaborated in a clause appended to the above citation, which continues: “… master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire.”

 

11. These two dispositions of the tree of knowledge are derived from Ephraim Chambers, whose Cyclopædia (1728) was the work Diderot and D’Alembert were commissioned to adapt in 1747 as the basis for a French encyclopedia, a task which famously outgrew its founding intent. Diderot and D’Alembert preserved Chambers’s avowed didacticism, but they also retain and amplify the “scientific” dimension which Chambers found less congenial. In his prospectus he distinguishes these approaches:

 

There are two manners of writing: in the one, which we may call scientific, we proceed from ideas, and things, to words: that is, first lay down the thing, then the name it is called by.--This is the way of discovery, or invention; for that the thing ought to be first found, before it be named. In this way we come from knowledge to ignorance; from simple and common ideas, to complex ones. The other is didactic, just the converse of the former; in which we go from words and sounds, to ideas and things; that is, begin with the term, and end with the explanation.--This is the historical way, or the way of teaching, and narration; of resolving the extraordinary knowledge of one person, into the ordinary of another; of distributing artificial complications into their simple ideas; and thus raising, and levelling again, what art had erected. (xvii)

 

Chambers adds that his own work follows the latter method.

 

12. Voltaire remarked, of the Encyclopédie, that “[t]wenty folio volumes will never make a revolution. It is the little portable volumes of thirty sous that are to be feared. Had the gospel cost twelve hundred sesterces the Christian religion would never have been established” (Besterman 7). Undeterred by the anticlericalism of the Enlightenment enclopedists, Northrop Frye locates the encyclopedic paradigm in scripture itself, in which he sees a continuous form that totalizes the episodic elements feeding into it as tributaries, such as oracle, commandment, parable, prophecy, and aphorism (Anatomy of Criticism 55-56).

 

13. Disorder obviously means something different for us than it would have for an Enlightenment philosophe. As an “operational poetics,” however, a link can be made. Eighteenth century verse practiced orderliness. The metric regulae of Pope’s couplets secures for poetry even so encyclopedic a topic as an “Essay on Man.” Subsequent perigrinations of the medium through blank verse to free verse and most recently to transcribed talk (Antin, Benson) and aleatory and cut-up methods (MacLow, Andrews) have not abandoned order but, quite the contrary, pursued more resourceful means of procuring it. To subscribe to the rhymed couplet, after all, is not to appeal to an innate condition of mind, but to refer the material resources of the poem to such accidents as morphology and phonology. If rhymed couplets had never been invented until 1960, they would assuredly have become, by now, as idiomatic and pervasive a sign of the times as Warhol’s soupcans.

 

14. Both the Dictionnaire critique and the Da Costa are translated as Atlas Arkhive Three (Documents of the Avant-Garde), Encyclopaedia Acephalica, assembled and introduced by Alastaire Brotchie. Bataille’s concept of the informe informs and forms the arrangement of topics in Formless: A User’s Guide by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. Finally, Pharmako/poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft by Dale Pendell is a lovely promenade of esoteric information and gentle sagacity, arranged in a topical alphabet of hallucinogenic plants.

 

15. Jay David Bolter traces another tension in the encyclopedic tradition, one between a synoptic vision of knowledge and the establishment of accurate information. See Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (88-93). Bolter favors the potential of hypertext to achieve both goals simultaneously. Hilary Clark addresses the issue in comparable terms as a tension between tactical goals and ideal completeness, and in the process raises another concern: whether order is discovered or imposed, objective or subjective (a concern which is also that of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49).

 

16. See Millicent Bell, “Pierre Bayle and Moby Dick.” On Bayle, see Paul Burrell, “Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique.”

 

17. See Michael West, “Charles Kraitsir’s Influence upon Thoreau’s Theory of Language.”

 

18. Another useful model for considering speed is that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, in which they distinguish between striated and smooth space: between the systematic regularity of institutionally convened (or striated) space and, on the other hand, the perturbations and irregularities of nomadic (self-effacing or smooth) practice. Singularities prevail in nomadism; duplication and repetition are characteristics of the striated grid. A comparable paradigm is explored in The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau. Virilio’s thesis of dromocracy is elaborated at length in Speed and Politics.

 

19. See Curtius passim 319-326 on “The Book of Nature.”

 

20. “Le mythes sont la première encyclopédie,” says Henri Meschonnic (Des mots 214).

 

21. It was the dense complexity of “tangle” that Pound emphasized: “I shall use Paideuma for the gristly roots of ideas that are in action” (58).

 

22. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg. [Gesammelte Werke Band 17] (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1981). Subsequent bracketed German citations follow this edition.

 

English citations follow The Magic Mountain, tr. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995).

 

23. “Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby | Might well have been German or Spanish, | Yet that things go round and again go round | Has rather a classical sound.”

 

24. This resistance of universality to the finite labors of human expression persists as incitement to philosophical encyclopedism, however. Mark Taylor remarks of Hegel’s encycopedic labors, “[t]he voice that says it all… talks in circles,” adding that for Blanchot philosophy is “the discourse that tries to say it all by talking in perfect circles” (Altarity 222). And Hegel himself affirms that “[t]he whole of philosophy resembles a circle of circles” (Taylor 224)–a prospect which Emerson finds to be the character of life as such: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn” (403).

 

25. There is much to recommend Falck’s position, but it’s not helped by his hostility to all things “post-structuralist.” So he is not inclined, for instance, to recognize in Paul de Man a recuperative potential congruent with his own project. When de Man calls “the conception of literature (or literary criticism) as demystification the most dangerous myth of all,” far from conflating literature and criticism (as Falck assumes) he is asserting literature’s unique claim to be “demystified from the start” (14)–that is, not engaged in partial projects of demystification, but something that “knows and names itself as fiction” (17) and thereby ungrounds itself. De Man surely learned from Blanchot, as did Derrida, that lack of a ground does not disable literature but, on the contrary, discloses in it what the poet Robert Duncan called “fictive certainties” (the title of a collection of his essays). De Man’s recommendation that criticism follow literature (in its program of self-demystification) is not a declaration of their indistinguishability, as it is often taken to be.

 

26. “The narratives we agree to call myths are the products of an intellectual activity that invents what is memorable,” says Marcel Detienne in “Myth and Writing: The Mythographers” (11).

 

27. In the early 1970s Olson was a major figure in the Boundary 2 context, at a time when it bore the subtitle “A Journal of Postmodern Literature.” But, despite the prodigious outpouring of work on postmodernism since then, it was not until 1995 when Olson’s prescient claims for the post-modern were finally recognized: see Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern (20-23). Despite a common perfunctory gesture towards Language poetry (sanctioned, in effect, by Fredric Jameson’s remarks on a poem by Bob Perelman), the genre of poetry as such has been neglected in discussions of postmodernism–a condition attributable, I think, to a shift in the profession of literary studies in which a presumed vanquishing of the New Criticism also discarded the genre most conspicuously associated with Tate, Ransom, Blackmur, Warren, and Brooks.

 

28. Northrop Frye sought to preserve history and myth as co-extensive terms. “To me myth is not simply an effect of a historical process,” he wrote, “but a social vision that looks toward a transcending of history, which explains how it is able to hold two periods of history together, the author’s and ours, in direct communication” (Words with Power 60-61). Frye’s own openly declared inclination as an anatomist led him to favor sensible wholes over abstract distillations of data. The sense-making provocations of a multi-generic legacy of “encyclopedic aggregates” like that canonized as the Bible was Frye’s model of encyclopedic as “a total body of vision” (Anatomy of Criticism 55-56).

 

29. The concluding quote within the citation is by Erich Neumann.

 

30. “All that has black sounds has duende,” Federico García Lorca cites approvingly (from composer Manuel Torre): “Play and Theory of the Duende” (43).

 

31. Encyclopedic programs are of course imponderably numerous and diverse. But, apart from the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, a very short list might include “Das allgemeine Brouillon” of Novalis, Coleridge’s “Opus Maximus” as well as his plan for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, Bentham’s “Chresthomathia,” and Humbert de Superville’s ambitious attempt at “a single, figured and configuring, sign system,” the aim of which “was to uncover the corporate or permanent character of human thought and feeling” (Stafford 41). One might also take into account the encyclopedic social physiology in the novel cycles of Balzac and Zola, as well as The Cantos of Ezra Pound, with their explicitly extra-literary obsession with historical, fiscal, philosophical and scientific data (an uncited but pertinent predecessor being Lucretius’s De rerum natura). Finally, encyclopedic pressures impinge on Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Scriabin’s synaesthetic “Mysterium.” And even A Vision by W.B. Yeats attempts an encyclopedic synthesis of the phases of sublunar existence. For a wide-ranging and thoroughly informed panorama of encyclopedic impulses (though not named as such) in a multi-media context, see Donald Theall, Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication. “The tendency to scientize all progress often leads us to disregard the importance of the heuristic power of the poetic in what comes to be,” Theall writes (265); his book seeks to rectify this oversight.

 

32. H.G. Wells’s “world brain” may be the least known concept on this list. In the mid-1930s, he delivered a series of talks urging the international synthesis of knowledge in “a sort of mental clearing house for the mind” (49) that “would compel men to come to terms with one another” (16); “not a miscellany, but a concentration, a clarification and a synthesis… [that] would play the rôle of an undogmatic Bible to a world culture” (14), “directing without tyranny” (23)–yet spreading “like a nervous network, a system of mental control throughout the globe” (23)–to establish a “common ideology” (62) (or “common sanity” [48]) as “the only means, of dissolving human conflict into unity” (62). Fritjof Capra provides a useful synthesis of research in self-organizing systems (like Gaia) in The Web of Life. The theories Capra discusses have striking affinities with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of cosmogenesis–a resemblance due in part to the fact that Teilhard’s “noosphere” is explicitly modelled on the notion of the biosphere. As is the case with Jung’s “collective unconscious,” Teilhard’s references to his most famous concept abound throughout his books. A convenient source is “The Formation of the Noosphere” in The Future of Man; but the concept is so thoroughly integrated into an evolutionary framework (drawing on paleontology, biology, chemistry, physics) and elaborated in a religious synthesis (Catholicism) that it’s worth attending to Teilhard’s more complex resumes in The Appearance of Man and The Phenomenon of Man.

 

33. The citations from Sirius, Rossetto, and Radzik are from Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (47). A blend of organic and technological hyperbole, while increasingly common, is perfectly achieved in a Mondo 2000 exhortation: “Why settle for passé kinkiness when you can actualize techno-aphrodisia from the infosphere?” (Dery 38).

 

34. The passage in Axel involves a renunciation of earthly existence in terms that are also relevant to current visions of techno-transubstantiation: “It is the earth, don’t you see, that has become the Illusion! … in our strange hearts we have destroyed the love of life–and… it is indeed in REALITY that we ourselves have become our souls! To agree to live after that would be but a sacrilege against ourselves. Live? Our servants will do that for us” (183).

 

35. “Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world? If not project then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among constellations and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross” (82).

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