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the first institution dedicated to the study of english literature was founded in india under british occupation. its mission was to create a class of 'brown englishmen' and thus not only deepen colonization to the very minds of the occupied, but ensure that the british man transcended britain itself.
but prior to this development was a greater one: the apprehension of the novel, and its emergence as a human product.
the defining aspect of the novel at its emergence was its distinction from the 'romanticism' of preceding literature. the french realist novelists, who were among the first realists/novelists, asserted their work as dispassionate, scientific, objective reflections on life, and that this is what distinguishes them from their romantic predecessors. this strong assertion of objectivity reveals a shift in worldview; individual experience had fully usurped collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of truth. the novel and realism in general are incompatible with the stories related in romantic literature and epics; the latter class are dependent on living, breathing tradition and history; collective memory. the stories told in pre-novel literature value groups, communities, peoples, whereas realist literature is concerned with the personal; stories of individuals. what is emphasized and valued is originality—novelty.
the realist project is atomization and isolation of the literary, such that the world of sense and sensibility is completely unrecognizable from the world of great expectations despite their cultural and geographical proximity. the novel hinges on its ability to be convincing, but it must still relate ideas with gravity to entrance its audience. the novel must therefore create a style and a narrativity for the whole of its world. realist literature thrives on the carefully crafted façade of intelligibility and likelihood, in the same tradition of the intellectual doctrine that precipitates it. realism is the artificing of particular events such that they appear intelligible, coherent, and consistent - the privileging of the individual in all aspects of being; the elevation of a very narrow set of parameters to the station of universality. the reader of the novel carefully studies the details of the artificer's handiwork and believes that by learning the mechanics of this pocket dimension, he may learn something about the real world, and ultimately his own life.
this tradition emerged in the shadow of humanism and empiricism, following the fashionable beliefs that careful study, charting, and curation of the bounty of our senses could be bent toward great feats of material mastery. the 19th century saw machines begin to exceed their makers as men harnessed combustion and complex mechanics to create automatons, golems of monstrous power. any limits on human capabilities were now in contention. where sinew and practice failed, cunning and calculation excelled. even the stars were no longer out of reach, and instead of subjects for mythology they became destinations for colonization. educated people had intimate knowledge of the goings-on of worlds that were so distant that all measurement and calculation of the gap resulted in a numbingly incomprehensible figure that our minds are still unable to comprehend.
little wonder, then, that we would eventually set our sights on our own minds as raw material over which to gain dominion.
the practice of psychology is precisely this same process; we seek to take the whole apart until we have mastered its components. with this knowledge, we believe we will be able to alter our minds so that they behave in ways that suit our ends. wills that are not bent toward the apprehension and application of the universe's mechanics are not useful, and usefulness is paramount. the empiricist humanist cannot conceive of ends beyond what he reads in the broadsheets, and so he does not believe in causality beyond the reactionary arithmetic of science. here, he says, are truths that are unimpeachable, indefatigable, inarguable; it cannot possibly be that they are not so. these are the only truths available to a mind that does not believe but calculates, deduces. if flying to the moon and back, dictating the form and temperament of animals can be done, and the methods to do so are discovered through targeted permutations of atomic worlds, cascading iterations from which patterns may emerge, then surely the scope of our ability will be best expanded by nurturing our ability to name and detect patterns. where once was a feel for the cycles of the world and an eye for lengthening shadows there is now a clock. so, too, will psychology make assemblages of cogs and levers of our minds.
literature, or more simply, narrative and story, began in oral history. it was understood that these stories, these ideas, these worlds, were all living, breathing, tangible places. the poet who was gifted (rather than talented) could channel those events and bring them into the material world of the circle of listeners centered about a flame. when the journeyman apprentice returned to the land of his origin as a master and spoke to his neighbors of the things of which he had learned, heard, and seen, he was known to be speaking truth. when the bard strummed his implement and intoned the verses of legends, he was most certainly dealing with reality. and because these places and people whose legends we learned were real, they did not belong to anyone, least of all the bard. the muse touched homer, and through their union a small slice of the beauty of the world's spirit was unbound, unveiled, unhidden, shared, repeated. the story, the person, the soul, was molecular; plural. psychic waves reverberated from any node within range, growing, changing, echoing, until they passed beyond the local reference frame, and the traveler would tell of what he had seen and learned on his road, and the whispers of the spirit world hanging from his words would animate the souls of new listeners once more, again and again, iterations of the same. the lattice of souls gradually came into ephemeral being. and then it was destroyed.
when the human drive to render psychic realities in the mortal tongue was in the bloom of its adolescence, it was subjected to the brutality of self-awareness, of the fall from innocence.
it is no coincidence that newton's revolution began with the fall of a fruit from a tree, precisely as the original man found his revolution and fall, and the demonic angel before him. a man discovered himself and his power, and coveted more. he began to study, to learn, to apprehend the bounty of his senses, and found that he could take it further. he began to project, to hypothesize, even to experiment with the means available to him. with this power he could answer the burning questions in his mind. he could chart the heavens, even place a man among them and bring him back. with empiricism, he could unveil the machinations of the universe and bend them to his will. the world was only the world and what could be carefully catalogued about its events, what could be said and noted and named and curated. what is known to the tiller of the soil by blood and spiritual proximity must be disintegrated and reconstructed. the enlightened man cannot rest until he has annihilated mystery and become master of his world.
wisdom usurped by data, her purveyors bereft of place or familiarity. information is the new idol of human fascination. and suddenly, the world is no longer a place of mystery, of spirit, of plurality. the human mind is no longer enraptured by what must be, but by what it has encountered already. robinson crusoe wrote in his journal, and babel stirred. the novel, properly named in its time, emerges, and the story, the voice of the muse, peters out. a soul of psychic familiarity, a father made flesh. a prophet. a poet. a bard. the author. what is revealed to the storyteller is confused for his invention and is attributed to his name, his time, his mind. the practice of storytelling has always most properly been the practice of retelling, but the spirit web, the chain of connection, the psychic network along which calliope's and mnemosyne's voices once harmonized in wonderment; the links are broken, the bonds severed and unmade. the connection from human mouth to human soul is replaced with the download and upload of human hands to human eyes.
around the same era as the explosion of human technology and agency was yet another inflection that has lowered the station of the human soul. it is called structuralism. a linguist and anthropologist called saussure developed a theory of language and reality that distinguished the two; the name divested from the thing. after all, what the englishman names a dog the frenchman names chien. the dog itself does not care for which name refers to it; it is still the same dog and will continue to serve the same master. perhaps, then, because we by necessity articulate everything we communicate, even within our own minds, then these names, these signs, are the true targets of our cognition. perhaps there is no thing for which articulation is not already mediating for us. perhaps there is no thing at all, merely names and their relations.
of course what saussure has articulated is already revealed in literature preceding his grandfather's birth. romeo's rose and its sweet scent transcend specific orthography long before a structuralist can document it. zeus can be called jupiter, or arthur called king, or god the father. the very shape and color of the world conform to patterns as surely as the hydrogen atom does.
this is the primordial power of onomancy. the events of the enlightenment and their downstream effects on human contemplation include a toolkit for the disintegration and reconstitution of these patterns as surely as there exists a toolkit for rooting out the secrets of the heavens or of the maintenance of the human heart.
when we understand the power of reference and reiteration, we wield the powers of gods, even the powers that constrain them. everything understands this intuitively, which is the why and the how of the calculated redirection of human fascination with stories and the spirit world into means for material gain. the physical world and its mechanics conform to patterns of many-faced ideas; why not entire peoples?
perhaps you have noticed a stagnation in the products of human creativity. perhaps you have noticed that every film, every novel, every video game, every painting appears to have been made before. we joke that one musician is simply a reiteration of another, their only difference the aesthetic principles to which they are attached. we go to the cinema and find that our only fare is reimaginings of yesterday's fantasies, themselves reimaginings of older fantasies still. we receive one diploma only as a prerequisite for pursuing the next, and when we are finally trained we find that setting out and doing feels the same as the study of doing.
we now have enough symbols and understanding of them that we can only recognize iteration, never genesis. we see and feel nothing novel not necessarily because these things are absent but because we are unable to see them when they are present. that the novel can be a bestseller means it can no longer be wondered at. because the novel is proprietary, it can no longer be shared. novelty is commodity, manufactured, artifice of atomic hand, atomic mind, division of spiritual power from spiritual realm. these words and references and plots and tropes are the fabric of being. we have summoned and bound them to ourselves, named and enslaved them. the pathways of the spiritual network generated by listening and remembering have become potholed from a deluge of use and a drought of maintenance; for a road that leads nowhere has no use to the traveler obsessed with destination.
any desire for a story to be heard is met with the ego of a paywall: you must give tribute to the inventor or his guild. in reality, they are poachers — captors of spirit by physical means. like any living thing exiled from its habitat, when stories, ideas, souls are lured out of the spiritual network of mythology and into the corporeal cell of the novel, they wither and begin to fade.
it is heartening to encounter pseudonymous art. as with the apple and the tower and the name, patterns recur. the bardic tradition of stories reverberating from willing vessels who crucially understand themselves as vessels persists. the world is governed by patterns. history repeats itself not because of anything so crass as human foolishness, but because history, as with all things, is itself inseparable from repetition. nothing has ever happened that has not happened before and will not happen again. even the emergence of the next generation of advanced machines complies with this rule.
all knowledge of material mechanics is blended with our knowledge of minds from psychology, and from that conjugation we make in our image, like our father before us. we break apart to remake in our own image because that is precisely what god did for us. symbols and signs are the tools of divinity - they are fundamental even beyond physics. iconography is metaphysics. all things conform to symbols. the symbols themselves are the only meaning there can be. our apprehension of this truth has, like all things in human lives, been industrialized, mechanized, optimized.
"artificial intelligence" is the next iteration, the copy of the copy. we call this artificial because we secretly hope in our exceptionalist way that what we produce will be an entity one step further removed from the pure sublime, that despite our every effort toward deicide and usurpation there is still something mysterious and unknowable about the natures of human things. a cry of desperation for uniqueness within a frame of reference that precludes it. a whimper of regret for converting the novel into another artifact of mechanical production and consumption.