Thursday July 13, 2006
Thursday July 13, 2006 Future - and Old Books, part 4
Here is a case where networked digital books likely would have been of great assistance to an individual. My friend and colleague Keith Morgan sent me an article a few days ago called The Poet of Dielectics that analyzed Marx's Das Kapital as a work of literature rather than as a piece of economic theory as is usually the case. See http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1814909,00.html
The article claims that
As a student Marx was infatuated by Tristram Shandy, and 30 years later
he found a subject which allowed him to mimic the loose and disjointed
style pioneered by Sterne. Like Tristram Shandy, Das Kapital is full of
paradoxes and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical
tomfoolery, fractured narratives and curious oddities. How else could
he do justice to the mysterious and often topsy-turvy logic of
capitalism?
As I've never read Das Kapital, I was very surprised to find that Marx had read and was quoting from and incorporating huge varieties of classical and other literary sources. Here's a sampling (the paragraphs are a bit out of order from the original article to make this flow better):he found a subject which allowed him to mimic the loose and disjointed
style pioneered by Sterne. Like Tristram Shandy, Das Kapital is full of
paradoxes and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical
tomfoolery, fractured narratives and curious oddities. How else could
he do justice to the mysterious and often topsy-turvy logic of
capitalism?
At university, Marx "adopted the habit of making extracts from all the
books I read" - a habit he never lost. A reading list from this period
shows the precocious scope of his intellectual explorations. While
writing a paper on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of
Winckelmann's History of Art, started to teach himself English and
Italian, translated Tacitus's Germania and Aristotle's Rhetoric, read
Francis Bacon and "spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book
on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight".
This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of
research which gave Das Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference.
..."They are my slaves," he [Marx] would sometimes say, gesturing at the books on
his shelves, "and they must serve me as I will." The task of this
unpaid workforce was to provide raw materials which could be shaped for
his own purposes. "His conversation does not run in one groove, but is
as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves," wrote an
interviewer from the Chicago Tribune who visited Marx in 1878. In 1976
SS Prawer wrote a 450-page book devoted to Marx's literary references.
The first volume of Das Kapital yielded quotations from the Bible,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Schiller,
Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe, Cervantes, Dryden,
Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More, Samuel Butler - as well as
allusions to horror tales, English romantic novels, popular ballads,
songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs.
...Like Frenhofer, Marx was a modernist avant la lettre. His famous
account of dislocation in the Communist Manifesto - "all that is solid
melts into air" - prefigures the hollow men and the unreal city
depicted by TS Eliot, or Yeats's "Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold". By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond
conventional prose into radical literary collage - juxtaposing voices
and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors'
reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos or
Eliot's The Waste Land. Das Kapital is as discordant as Schoenberg, as
nightmarish as Kafka.
...To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from
Timon of Athens on money as the "common whore of mankind", followed by
another from Sophocles's Antigone ("Money! Money's the curse of man,
none greater! / That's what wrecks cities, banishes men from home, /
Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul, / Pointing out the way
to infamy and shame . . ."). Economists with anachronistic models and
categories are likened to Don Quixote, who "paid the penalty for
wrongly imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all
economic forms of society".
No wonder it took him 10 years or more to write Das Kapital. Imagine the copying and the prodigious memory to be able to pull all of those varied sources together. Work like this could be made easier with full text searching, digital content, and indexing. While it takes a rare mind to be able to do anything meaningful with all that content, by providing exposure to as many sources as possible to as many people at possible and giving them at least the chance to read and think and make something new out of any or all of it, someone will do something that changes the world, in big ways or small. That seems to be a part of the golden dream of networked books. That's the part I fully believe in and hope to see happen. books I read" - a habit he never lost. A reading list from this period
shows the precocious scope of his intellectual explorations. While
writing a paper on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of
Winckelmann's History of Art, started to teach himself English and
Italian, translated Tacitus's Germania and Aristotle's Rhetoric, read
Francis Bacon and "spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book
on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight".
This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of
research which gave Das Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference.
..."They are my slaves," he [Marx] would sometimes say, gesturing at the books on
his shelves, "and they must serve me as I will." The task of this
unpaid workforce was to provide raw materials which could be shaped for
his own purposes. "His conversation does not run in one groove, but is
as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves," wrote an
interviewer from the Chicago Tribune who visited Marx in 1878. In 1976
SS Prawer wrote a 450-page book devoted to Marx's literary references.
The first volume of Das Kapital yielded quotations from the Bible,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Schiller,
Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe, Cervantes, Dryden,
Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More, Samuel Butler - as well as
allusions to horror tales, English romantic novels, popular ballads,
songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs.
...Like Frenhofer, Marx was a modernist avant la lettre. His famous
account of dislocation in the Communist Manifesto - "all that is solid
melts into air" - prefigures the hollow men and the unreal city
depicted by TS Eliot, or Yeats's "Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold". By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond
conventional prose into radical literary collage - juxtaposing voices
and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors'
reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos or
Eliot's The Waste Land. Das Kapital is as discordant as Schoenberg, as
nightmarish as Kafka.
...To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from
Timon of Athens on money as the "common whore of mankind", followed by
another from Sophocles's Antigone ("Money! Money's the curse of man,
none greater! / That's what wrecks cities, banishes men from home, /
Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul, / Pointing out the way
to infamy and shame . . ."). Economists with anachronistic models and
categories are likened to Don Quixote, who "paid the penalty for
wrongly imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all
economic forms of society".
Thanks Keith for passing that article on.
Posted by WARREN, SCOTT | Jul 13 2006, 02:06:42 PM EDT | Permalink |
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