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Monday, October 13, 2008
Question for our readers: Intelligences vaster than our own?
Dear readers,
The following is a question from a colleague of mine, one that perhaps you are itching to answer: “I’m looking for literary examples of an individual and/or ‘man’ coming into contact with an alien intelligence so far beyond comprehension that human life becomes, by comparison, insignificant and beyond morality to the point of absurdity. The examples might be from Sci-Fi, but they might be from French Existentialism, Borges, Conrad, what have you. The nature of the alien intelligence can be conceived broadly: machine, organic, gassy clouds, whatever. The point is only that we get glimpses of something so far beyond human categories, that it renders the mind and soul without purpose.”
I suggested the Martians from Stranger in a Strange Land, as well as the Borg. He wrote in a follow-up note: “I’m after a more or less subjective account of the shock that comes from experiencing that vast intelligence beyond yourself and humanity. So I’m less interested in a vision of what extraterrestrial or alien beings actually might be (Ents, etc.), than in passages that describe the moment when you grasp something far in excess of human categories. These are sublime moments, but unlike the sublime, don’t support a compensatory moment when the human mind reasserts its cognitive powers. Also keep in mind that the examples don’t have to be from Science Fiction. They can be accounts of a primitive people experiencing a volcano and thinking its God, or accounts of the sea in Conrad--any account of shock and awe in the face of what seems to be something vast beyond the power of the human mind, something that is presumed to see humans as wholly insignificant.”
What would you recommend?
Comments
Solaris (the book)?
I recall such moments in Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. I’d be glad to hunt down the relevant passages if that might help.
Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” in _Stories of Your Life and Others._
The two that come to mind are 2001 (the film and to a lesser extent the book) and Solaris (the book and the Russian film version, not the awful Clooney remake). Both generate the “awe” element perfectly through thematic and visual discretion; nothing intimidates (and yet beckons) like inscrutability.
In fact, I once did a blog post on these two works at arspsychiatrica.blogspot.com.
Lovecraft.
Maybe the descriptions of Ubik in Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name? Unfortunately I don’t have it here so I can’t quote a passage.
Canopean agents in Lessing’s Canopus series. The Overlords in Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Solaris, already mentioned, is tailor made, and further explores what happens to scholarship in the face of the incomprehensibile—probably the best example of the three I’ve listed so far listed.
Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”?
God? Particularly in, say, Job?
This is Lovecraft’s entire body of writing, almost.
Stapledon is close. The problem with him, for this purpose, is that he generally doesn’t have an individual and/or ‘man’ meeting an alien intelligence—he has the entire human species meeting an alien form of intelligence and going extinct from a sort of cosmic failure to thrive from not understanding it in some way.
In Solaris—why go with the movie when the book is there—a man meets a planet, essentially, and is appropriately humbled. But the book functions to re-center him within a human scale, not to render him without purpose. I mean, it’s a great book, but the primary result of this contact on the protagonist is for him to spend a lot less time thinking about a mysterious planet and a lot more time thinking about his dead lover.
There are elements of this in R. C. Wilson’s Spin (and Axis). Not everyone in the story has that reaction to the Hypotheticals though.
For pushing the “mindblowing alien” past its usual sensawunda (or sensacreepy) point, there’s Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides, in which we’re so insignificant that we never even manage to see the aliens, much less contact them. They’re Godzilla; humanity is Bambi.
Much of Lem’s work concerns this question: His Master’s Voice and “Golem XIV” in particular. See also Fiasco for a different take. Roadside Picnic is also worth a look (And see Lem’s essay on it in Microworlds; it’s one of the better pieces of criticism I’ve ever read.)
Rich, if you remember the set-up of Last and First Men, it’s precisely a far-future human (alien) intelligence contacting a single human. Last and First Men in London continues with the conceit. Odd John discusses the consequences of a mutant superintelligence.
Greg Egan’s Distress is also quite interesting, epistemologically.
It’s quite a question when both the Borg and Borges are identified as potential answers. I have a feeling that there are a number of works which should be coming immediately to mind, but aren’t.
Is “Bartleby, the Scrivener” an unserious suggestion?
I’d recommend David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. The narrative voice is a non-corpum, an alien/spirit that moves across characters and chapters, but which ultimately questions the actions of the humans and humanity that it for a time occupies.
Mitchell is a fantastically clever writer, without being impenetrable. His other novel Cloud Atlas perhaps touches on the sublime in a more abstract way, because the intelligence is only ever hinted at through a comet birthmark passed on through generations of narrtors.
Isn’t Moby-Dick kind of the ur-text here? Well, I suppose that’s the Book of Job, really.
I suppose I should re-read it, but my memory of Last and First Men was that the human contactee was a cipher, a storytelling device so that the story could be told to someone, but that the real character in the book was the human species as a whole.
On re-reading the first few pages through Project Gutenberg, I’d go farther than that: the book essentially has no characters. The as-telling-to intelligence vanishes into the narrative, and the as-told-to person is supposed to be Stapledon himself, thinking that it is a work of fiction—not a stance in which the contactee is convinced that human life has dwindled into an absurdity, but one in which he’s supposedly shrugging the whole thing off.
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Yes, the Book of Job.
I’m becoming a cranky troll around here, but the first thought that comes to mind is this: your friend should read the books first and interpret them second. To begin with the interpretation and look for the books after is sort of weird to me.
Contact?
Everyone keeps suggesting aliens, so I’ll be contrary and weird: what about drugs?
The Electric Koo-Aid Acid Test might not really have what you’re looking for, but maybe Naked Lunch or Trainspotting (and I wonder if Palauniuk has any good passages on this) might be useful. And of course The Beats and all those opium eaters and whatnot from past lit as well.
The Book of Job? Really? When YHVH goes on about “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding” (King James version)—almost the first thing he says—it’s not the speech of an alien intelligence far beyond human categories. It’s the very human speech of a bully.
Robert Silverberg, “The Alien Years”: Earth is occupied by aliens of extraordinary power whose motives are completely opaque. They order the building of a wall around Los Angeles. They rearrange Stonehenge. Why? No one knows.
The Borg don’t quite work. Their motives are entirely comprehensible: ASSIMILATE.
“Space” by Stephen Baxter might work.
And I’d heartily agree with the recommendation of Lovecraft…
Rich, the “bully” reading of God is certainly part of my reading too, particularly since we are in on the bet of which Job is unaware, but Adam’s colleague is interested in reactions within the text, not ours.
That said, Job is not left “purposeless” by God’s actions: he insists until the end—and is eventually rewarded for it—that God behave as is right. God, to Job, does not transcend a human understanding of morality, he has to act according to it. So in that way, _Job_ does not fit the colleague’s specifications.
Maybe the religious context makes this example inappropriate (but hey, if someone can recommend The Book of Job...), so just in case: what about In Memoriam XCV?
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine,And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught,
The deep pulsations of the world,Aeonian music measuring out
The steps of Time--the shocks of Chance--
The blows of Death. . .
The famous middle sections, too, have something of that ‘confrontation with the ineffable’ quality ("Behold, we know not anything...")
Take a look at Natural History by Justina Robson. It examines the interactions between humans (the unevolved), the Forged (an evolving and created super species), and “stuff” which turns out to be a being that coexists on eleven planes of existence. The book examines the implications of being and becoming this super being of “stuff” which is a far evolved alien being. The added element of the Forged being both a sentient being and a machine created by humans brings another element of political implication to encountering the “stuff”.
Larry Niven’s Protector has some interesting stuff where the guy who gets turned into a protector suddenly realizes he has no more free will, because now that he’s become superhumanly intelligent, the answers occur to him before he finishes formulating the question, so the illusion of free will disappears.
Also, Sherlock Holmes is not exactly what you’re talking about, but there’s definitely a literary connection between the kind of fantasy he represents and later manifestations of that phenomenon in sci-fi and such (Holmes as ur-mentat, or something)
Absolutely, as several have suggested, the Voice out of the Whirlwind section in the Book of Job. (Rich, God might be a bully in this scene, but the effect he’s trying to achieve is the effect Joseph is looking for.)
Also maybe the “I had not realized death had undone so many” moment in The Inferno.
As per Trent above, though, he doesn’t actually achieve that effect. And the experience of having someone try to bully you is fundamentally human.
I’ve written a poem that concerns a lot of this, if anyone is interested.
"an alien intelligence so far beyond comprehension that human life becomes, by comparison, insignificant”
Almost seems written by a Melville scholar. So I’m with James, the only poster who mentioned Moby Dick.
Must say I’m a little astonished MD wasn’t everyone’s immediate first choice. True, Melville didn’t set his novel in space, or in the year 3024. Try not to hold that against him.
Re: Eveningsun’s suggestion of Dante.
I see the awe, of course, but human life never becomes “insignificant to the point of absurdity” in Dante. That absurdity requirement will exclude almost all Christian and even most Romantic writing from this list. Even Tennyson seems to me like a stretch.
The coupling of awe with the absurd is very much a modern phenomenon: post 1850ish. Absurdity in the old days went with comedy which generically excluded awe.
Re: Luther’s fear of becoming a “cranky troll.” I feel your pain.
Francis Godwin The Man in the Moone
Arthur C. Clarke Rendezvous with Rama
Frederik Pohl Gateway
Voltaire Micromegas
I’ve only seen part of the film version of The Sheltering Sky but Debra Winger certainly appeared to have had such an experience with the desert, her captivity, and whatever else happened to her in the part of the movie I hadn’t seen. For some reason I’m thinking “whatever else happened to her” included drug-taking. Does your friend want accounts of experiences only with true visions of super-human intelligence?
Other than that, I’m coming up mainly with parodies. Foucault’s Pendulum ends with a realization that paranoid theories of super-human systems paradoxically themselves form such a super-human system. Catch-22 is a mass of evidence pointing towards the existence of an inadvertent “system” that makes normal morality absurd. Nineteen Eighty-Four also seems obvious.
In SF, Stapledon’s Odd John and Clarke’s Childhood’s End, as I remember them, have similar themes: what’s “bigger than humanity” is a super-evolved or somehow alienized next generation, which may be closer to what your friend is asking for. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, one of Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels, leads towards the female protagonist’s final, full abdication of will to the wiser “Providers.”
I’ve also read some popular novels, incidentally, in which psychopathic killers are born out of such an experience: The Da Vinci Code might be one; a novel about an alcoholic detective and a villain who’s decided he’s now a “Golem for God” is another (the author’s name is somewhere in the vicinity of the R’s is all I remember).
Not Moby Dick. Ahab never loses his purpose; his will strives against the whale’s until the end.
Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule”.
“No Country For Old Men” - I haven’t read the book, but I thought the film presented Anton Chigurh in this light.
Trent,
The whale wins.
I hesitate to approach the vast thicket of Moby Dick criticism—and I use “thicket” rather than “ocean” after due consideration—but doesn’t it matter that the crew of the Pequod routinely catch, chop up, and consume whales? A quote:
“All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. “
So, yes of course the whale is not merely a whale. But it is practically assailable. Does that really count as being “far beyond human categories”?
And Tom, jokes about cranky trolling aside, you really shouldn’t be so dismissive a la “True, Melville didn’t set his novel in space, or in the year 3024. Try not to hold that against him.” Lovecraft didn’t set his works in space, or in 3024 (in any important sense); many of them are set in New England. If someone asks about “glimpses of something so far beyond human categories, that it renders the mind and soul without purpose”, the immediate first choice should be Lovecraft, who almost might as well have heard this request calling from the future and written his books to order. Lovecraft isn’t in Melvillle’s class as a writer, but ignorance of him as an important American author doesn’t give you a good basis for being surprised that Melville really isn’t the first choice.
Commenters, thank you so much! 37 responses so far and counting.
A further request: if you are able to provide specific texts—or, best of all, passages—that would be wonderful. He’ll be following up on all the single text recommendation, but for a prolific author like Lovecraft, it would be useful to narrow things down.
Both Lovecraft and Melville seem useful here, rather than in competition with each other. While it is true that whales can be killed, the indestructibility of The Whale (meaning both the genus and Moby Dick) is reinforced by these battles won in the course of a losing war.
How about a much more recent example, one very self-conscious about this very question: The Matrix trilogy. The specific element would be the world “outside” the matrix, the world of the struggle with the computers and Zion. Of course, some people do live there and are released from the matrix into it. I think they make the point well that most people could not, that just unplugging everyone isn’t nor may ever be an option.
Alternatively, I’d put up the abject child from Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas.”
"the indestructibility of The Whale”
Calling on an Adam Robertsian principle of truth in fiction, this reading can no longer be supported. The genus was nearly wiped out. Moreover, whaling had already stated to decline due to overhunting (as well as other factors) when Moby-Dick was published.
As for Lovecraft specifics, it’s been a long time since I read his work, and even then I far preferred works like The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, which were significantly less stereotypically Lovecraftian. But perhaps the short story The Call of Cthulhu, which also features a vast undersea being. In Call, admittedly, heroic human action does save the day, but only in a very temporary sense. The narrator returns home with everything seemingly the same, but knowing that he, and eventually humanity itself, are doomed.
Call is also quite racist, btw, like a good deal of Lovecraft’s work. But, after consideration of the role of Melville’s harpooners—perhaps the two works would go together in some sense.
Suggestions in Lovecraft:
* “The Call of Cthulhu”
* “The Colour out of Space”
* “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”
* “At the Mountains of Madness”
* “The Dreams in the Witch House”
* “The Dunwich Horror”
* “The Shadow out of Time”
Did anybody mention the encounter with the caves in _A Passage to India_ or the weirder take on that novel’s premise in _Picnic at Hanging Rock_? (the film is great, it makes the landscape into something beautiful and alien that Western civilization is unable to control or comprehend, but the novel the film is based on is much stranger, although in a more traditional “rip in the space-time continuum” way)
If I have the title correct, Gregory Benford’s short story “A Dance to Strange Musics” collected in “Worlds Vast and Various,” while it is science fiction, is a terrific riff on man’s insignificance. However, it takes this very literally and eschews characterization almost completely, so it might lack the subjective reportage your friend is looking for.
I have four suggestions: 1 & 2 are a couple of Frank Herbert novellas, _The Green Brain_ and _Hellstrom’s Hive_, both of which turn the cold war-communist-insect-group mind archetype on its head by representing humans as seen through its (many) eyes. I love FH’s prose style and the weird, grotesque invention of his short stories and novellas. 3, which does basically the same thing, is “System Shock 2,” one of the most compelling narrative video games of the 90s. And finally, the Tines in Vernor Vinge’s _Fire upon the Deep_. Love his work.
I wouldn’t put it as disparagingly as Ray Davis’ “sensawunda”, but the sense of wonder shading towards religious mysticism at contact with the alien is a very common SF effect. (I think I saw Patrick Nielsen Hayden call the trope “Touching the Face of God” somewhere, in passing, so I’ll shorten it to TFG.) I think that if you’re willing to settle for any SF book in which people say “Gosh!” at TFG and then basically go back to what they were doing before, you could get a very large number of these. (Not that all the examples I’ve seen listed are of that type.)
Rich:
Melville’s great novel is about the Whale. Not whales. Or whaling. Are you sure you have read it all the way through?
To Rich and the other regulars on this site who often write as if literature were a subgenre of sci-fi, rather than the other way around:
I don;t mind Lovecraft, and a very few others like him, but the posters on this site seem to take, say, Arthur Clarke seriously. Which of course they are free to do: no law requires us to graduate from early adolescence and develop an adult hostility to bad prose and clumsy narrative. But if the Clarkeans are so confident in their judgments (and in their respectability) then surely they can tolerate the occasional jibe from an outmoded highbrow like me.
On the other hand...I hear literary evaluation is returning to academe. Perhaps Clarkeans ought to be wary. They may call me Troll on this site, but trolls like me will be tenured shortly, and blackballing anyone with a PhD in kitsch.
Prof. Troll
Tom, I’m not even an Arthur Clarke fan, but even my brain’s not so rotten as to think *Moby Dick* is not about whaling. It is about The Whale to Ahab and Ishmael, but not to Starbuck. Let’s remember that the reader’s not meant to identify with Ahab’s psychodrama with Moby Dick, that Ishmael’s passages are often satires of Emersonian natural symbolism. Moby Dick *is* in fact just a whale in the end. If she were The Whale, Ahab would not be a tragic hero. He’d be Beowulf, not MacBeth.
Tom, you’re actually the one who calls yourself a troll; I don’t remember seeing anyone else do it. As a disarming gesture of self-victimhood it doesn’t really work that well.
As for Melville, I thin k that your interpretation is both ordinary and mistaken. People loved to play up The Whale in Melville because, first of all, it made him “respectable”, second, that kind of easy myth-identification was something they were good at. But if you read all the way through the book, you might have noticed that there’s a whole lot that’s actually about whaling, a good deal more than there is about The Whale. So the preeminence of The Whale is really an interpretation, and one that is getting to be frankly more and more stupid in a world in which everyone should know that The Whale rather than being some eternal principle can actually be wiped out rather easily and was in fact being wiped out by Melville’s whalers.
At any rate, it’s not clear to me how Moby Dick fits the specifications of JK’s friend, who is less concerned with the depiction of the ineffable than with reactions to it. Tom, if you want to contribute, and not merely engage in easy sniping, you might post an analysis showing how the whale does, indeed, render Ahab and crew purposeless.
We’re posting here in good will, trying to help JK’s friend find what he wants. We’re not claiming Clarke is a great writer. For my part, I haven’t read Clarke in more than two and a half decades, but from what I remember of his Childhood’s End, it seems to fit the bill.
Condescension is common among academics, but many of us are bored with such posturing. Frankly, it’s juvenile. The best way to appear superior is not to claim superiority, but to demonstrate it.
"True, Melville didn’t set his novel in space, or in the year 3024. Try not to hold that against him.”
Oooh! “Tom” is really Margaret “Talking Squid in Outer Space!” Atwood!
I’d suggest William Gibson’s Hinterlands. The story never tells us what the aliens are like, or directly lets us into the mindset of those who have met them. We just know that everyone who has encountered the aliens has killed themselves - possibly to protect the rest of humanity (and the reader) from knowing what they have discovered.
I’d also second (or third...) the recommendation of Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s screen adaptation in Stalker.
“And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher; for they trembled and were amazed; neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.” (Mark 16:9)
There’s also Allen Ginsberg’s letter to William Burroughs describing his experience of taking the South American drug yage. (Reprinted in The Yage Papers, San Francisco: City Lights Books)
... and at that moment - vomiting still feeling like a Great lost Serpentseraph vomiting in consciousness of the Transfiguration to come - with the Radiotelepathy sense of a Being whose presence I had not fully sensed - too Horrible for me, still…
(You should read the whole thing, though).
Perhaps I misunderstood the sort of examples Joseph’s friend was after. I assumed that what Luther calls “Ahab’;s psychodrama” would count, even if it is of course not the same thing as Melville’s psychodrama, or the “reader’s.”
Posturing...sniping...condescension...what a lot of words we have for unwelcome opinions! I’m just remarking on what seems true to me: you people read an amazing lot of uneven sci-fi and treat it with an almost creepy sort of reverence. One’s reverence is usually scarce, and so it’s no surprise that your reverence for better literature seems, to say the least, under-displayed.
If you were all just chatting, I wouldn’t bother you, but you are proposing to teach the young. I must say, I find that prospect “so far beyond comprehension that human life becomes, by comparison, insignificant and beyond morality to the point of absurdity.”
I’d enjoy having Mellers both define “better literature” and point out all the reverence shown sci-fi in this thread. Come on: be specific now, Tom.
Could it be instead that sci-fi as a genre tends to treat of “contact with alien intelligence so far beyond comprehension that human life becomes insignificant” more often than the superior literature that Mellers prefers, and that’s why it’s been mentioned so often here?
"almost creepy sort of reverence”
I know from posturing, sniping, and condescension, and yeah, you’re doing all three. It’s getting less amusing with each repeat performance.
That would be OK, but frankly, I don’t think that you have much to posture about. Your opinions about well-known literature are banal, and you seem to be much more ignorant than I’d expect from someone in your field. Your inability to read SF is your problem, not ours. It’s like someone coming into a thread on Proust and saying that he tried it once but couldn’t get past the first page. Funny, yeah, but it gets old.
I mean, you’re the guy, if I remember rightly, who asked Adam Roberts how he could stand the writing in SF. Which would have been like asking David Foster Wallace how anyone could get through one of the big long books that people keep insisting on writing these days. Like I said, funny, but gets old.
I account it high time for somebody to get to sea, before his hypos get such an upper hand that he starts methodically knocking off people’s hats in the street. Grr, grim, damp, drizzly November of the soul. Poor Tom!
Tom, people are annoyed at you because your comments are fantastically rude. Plus, your reading of Moby Dick is stupid. If you knew how to read, you would see that Moby Dick in no way fits the category.
What we need is retelling of Moby-Dick that is set in the year 3024 (or thereabouts) and which features a mysterious alien intelligence instead of The Whale. Like, say, Bruce Sterling’s Involution Ocean.
Funny, I would have responded with Involution Ocean if you hadn’t already written it. Of course, being early cyberpunk-ish-sort-of, Involution Ocean is Moby-Dick in space in 3024 with drugs.
Actually, perhaps some of the short stories in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix would fit—those short stories are, I think, his best work. In particular the short story Swarm, in which an arrogant human goes to take genetic material from what is essentially a giant termite nest in space, and instead the nest has evolved the defense against other predatory species of growing a sort of super-intelligent worker caste, whose single member informs the human that his descendants are going to grow up in the nest and defend it as their home and eventually lose their intelligence and become co-evolved nest parasites. It’s the horror of losing human individuality into not intelligent expliotation, or a machine-like system, but rather into a sort of biological-evolutionary re-mergence with unintelligent process. The protagonist isn’t quite “without purpose” at the end, because he puts on a brave front, but you can pretty clearly see that he’s destined to lose.
I think C. J. Cherryh’s Voyager in Night fits this theme. The alien entity of the title is a vast and ancient spaceship run by some kind of biological computer that likes to capture samples of intelligent lifeforms and merge/subsume/incorporate them into its mind/body to keep it company on its endless travels across the universe. The captured human protagonists suffer considerable existential horror as they come to understand what’s happened to them. In the end they are not quite insignificant, though; they find a suitable place within the alien menagerie.
"Could it be instead that sci-fi as a genre tends to treat of “contact with alien intelligence so far beyond comprehension that human life becomes insignificant” more often than the superior literature that Mellers prefers, and that’s why it’s been mentioned so often here?”
That did occur to me, I must confess.
"much more ignorant than I’d expect from someone in your field”
Might be time to admit that I’m sixteen. My “field” is high school.
But I still think you folks have crappy taste. Bruce Sterling’s Shismatrix is a book I HAVE read, and oh boy. I had been looking forward to college until I came across this and few other sites like it. Please tell me not all academics are like you! At least, will one of you experts please tell me where I should apply to study literature minus Bruce Sterling?
I appreciate the advice, and I’m not kidding.
Tom, I suspected you were very young, particularly after your posts on freshman composition.
No one is going to make you read SF in college. To find out what courses are offered at a college, simply visit its website or call and request a catalog. In addition, your high school counselor should be able to get you the information you desire.
Something you should consider. You were, as one poster put it, “fantastically rude” on this site. For the most part, responses to your rudeness were remarkably restrained. It wasn’t so much the position you staked out that was offensive (indeed, it’s a very common one), it was your hostility. It’s difficult to persuade people you’re calling idiots. That approach is useful for affirming the assumptions of allies, but it’s useless as a tool of persuasion. On an appropriate thread, make a thoughtful argument for restricting reading or discussion or teaching to canonical texts. (That’s what you appear to be arguing.) At the very least, the ensuing discussion could be interesting.
If you truly do want to discuss canonical literature, then take the opportunity to do so. I for one was sincere in asking you to discuss how Moby Dick, one of my favorite novels, fits the requirements of this little exercise. Or you could contribute to Adam’s thread about how we tend to view pre-Modernist works as if they were emergent Modernist texts. Bill has posted recently on how English departments have changed in the last 50 years; that issue would seem to be up your alley.
If you really are 16, then you are obviously brighter than most of your classmates, and are a student most teachers would have to have. And frankly, I think it’s great you value the classics as much as you do. But I hope you stop emulating the snarkiness of many academics; it’s a form of self congratulation, and has the effect of reducing discussion to ad hominem attacks. Remember the Socratic approach to dialectic: it’s a conservation between people of good will seeking to build upon agreed-upon assumptions accounts that can withstand rational scrutiny.
I find the idea that Tom is 16 more believable than his prior implication that he will “be tenured shortly” as Prof. Troll. But really, who cares. Tom, the problem as far as I’m concerned isn’t that you’re rude, it’s that you are so uninterestingly rude. If you really are 16, maybe you’re going through a stage, but that doesn’t make it any more interesting for anyone else. Couldn’t you concentrate on, I don’t know, sex and drugs?
And really, I’m not an academic, was if I was one and heard that an incoming student was all worried that they wouldn’t be able to find a class on Proust but instead would be forced to read Bruce Sterling, I wouldn’t think that they were very smart.
Tom,
I don