Mazes: 64 Essays

167 Pages·1989·13.297 MB·English

by  Hugh Kenner

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The author and the publisher wish to thank the
magazines in whieh these essays originally appeared.
Copyright © 1989 by Hugh Kenner
FOR RICHARD G. STERN
Printed in the United States of America
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Kenner, Hugh.

Mazes: essays/by Hugh Kenner.

p. em.

ISBN 0-86547-341-2

I. Title.
Ac8·K45 1989

081-de19 88-61173
Contents
Preface ix

Light, Our One Absolute

3

Fractals 6

The Dead-Letter Office
9

The Untidy Desk and the

Larger Order ofThings
19

The Making of the Modernist Canon 28

When Academe Ran a Fever
43

Earth's Attic
51

Where Every Prospect Pleases
53

Fuller's Follies 62

A Geographer of the Imagination 67

Up from: Edenism
74

Colonial Lexicon 80

Bouquets from Your Bureaucrats 88

DARE to Make It Known

93

The Impertinence of Being "Definitive" 101

Joyce on the Continent 113

Classics by the Pound 118

Images at Random 127

The New Oxford Book ofAmerican Verse
136

ANew Voice
142

Jaina Riddles
146
~

ill
149
Rectitude and Certainty
153
One Reel a Week
157
Miltonic Monkey
161
The Folklore of Kinetic Man
165
Ezra Pound and Music
173
Illuminations Preface
176
Eye of the Beholder
184

Georgia O'Keeffe

187

American Homer
One morning back in 1969 I ended a long, long book called The Pound
190

Tumult of the Limbs
Era by typing "Thoughtis a labyrinth," a sentence Ilifted from a spec­
199

Darlington
ulation of Guy Davenport's on how the death of William Carlos Wil­
How the Cruiser Was Grounded
liams might have been linked with the fate of the sick elm he'd said
202
and Finn MacCool Returned
he'd not outlive. If life abounds more in coincidence than in causa­
213 tion, we can'talways be sure of telling them apart, and coincidence is
Please Welcome My Next Idea
223 an economy that unclutters mental life. Dante dated his vision 1300,
McLuhan Redux
230 Chaucer died in 1400, Henry V was 1600, Dryden died 1700, Lyrical
The Media Culture's Counterfeit World
235 Ballads was reissued in 1800. Noting an absent 1500, you can recall
The Wherefores ofHow-To

Pound's remark about a blankness after the death of Chaucer: "And
244
Mazes
for 180years almost nothing." And 1900? A thin year. Wilde died, and
252
Ironies About Irony
Ruskin; The Cardinal's Snuff-Box got published....That's one way to
261
The Politics of the Plain Style
start drawing a map.
270 Of his latte.rly famous son John Stanislaus Joyce said, "If that boy
Decoding Roland Barthes

was put down in the Sahara he'd set to making a map." A map to a
OBITS: 281 blankness is just conceivable. Mazes, though, demand maps. Hence
Frank Budgen, R.I. P.
284 my title.
D. P. Remembered

Late in 1985, when Time-Life was still struggling to keep its Dis­
295
Marshall McLuhan, RI.P.
cover viable, the editors wondered if I'd write them a piece about
298
R. Buckminster Fuller, R.I.P. mazes. Mazes? Well, I'd known Michael Ayrton, our time's premier
300
Buster Keaton: In Memoriam maze specialist. He'd been commissioned in 1967 to design a maze in
30 4 the Catskills and create sculptures for placing at its two centers. That
Charlie Chaplin, R.I.P.
30 7 commission had come because the patron had chanced on a book of
George Oppen: In Memoriam
312 his, a fictional autobiography of Daedalus. What put Ayrton onto
Louis Zukofsky: All the Words
Daedalus I don't remember, though what put me onto Ayrton was
317
Thomas: A Record of His Sayings
our shared respect for Wyndham Lewis. Havinglistened to Ayrton's
x Preface
discourses, I thought I had enough material to accept the Discover as­
signment (and experience the fantastic scope of Time-Life fact­
checking; their phone calls pursued me even unto a hotel in Toronto,
where I learned that, according to the London Bureau, the guards at
Hampton Court no longer bellow through megaphones as I'd heard
AZES

them do in 1964; we recasta sentence).
But my point is the intersection of two causations. Ezra Pound to
Lewis to Ayrton, that was one; and the other was Discover to me, fa­
cilitated by a former student who happened to be working for them.
But for Ayrton, I'd have had to say I didn't know enough; but for the
student, I'd have had no occasion to say anything. My sense of life is
that it's filled with intersections like that.
As Aristotle himself said, in his parable of the man at the spring.
The spring (vector 1) was in a wooded place; you can fill in the geol­
ogy. Brigands (vector 2) hid there because it was wooded. And the
man (vector 3) went there because he was thirsty. And the brigands
killed him; and his death (says Aristotle) was "uncaused" because no
clean line of necessity produced it. He was (for explicable reasons) in
the wrong place at the wrong time. But that's the map of most of hu­
man fortune, except that for "wrong" we can frequently say "right."
So, little in this collection originated with me; an editor had
thought of me, wanting something I happened to be able to deliver,
by pulling thoughts together and weaving available threads. (Ifa few
motifs occur more than once, that is understandable. Page by page
over twenty years, I'd no thought ofmaking a book.) No claim oforac­
ular unity is made either. Occasions differed, and times, and reader­
ships. The ones collected here are some I still find rereadable. A fu­
ture collection, more "literary" in emphasis, will be called Historical
Fictions.
FEBRUARY 1988
Light,Ouf

One Absolute

Bob Montiegel of National Public Radio phoned on March 6, 1979. He
wanted something to air on March 14, the hundredth anniversary ofAl­
bert Einstein's birth. And he specified exactly eight minutes ofairtime.
The funny old uncle nobody understands was a cliche I instinctively re­
jected;afit homage to Einstein mighttry to makeoneofhis ideas intelli­
gible.IchosetheTimeDilation.SuperblyproducedbyMontiegel, thevi­
gnette won that year's Ohio State Award for educational broadcasting.
AndmanylettersI gotcamefrom peoplewho'dheard it on the car radio
amidst a morning traffic jam.
This morning Earth and its passengers will have completed a hun­
dred trips round the sun since a child named Albert Einstein first
blinked at the light in a small town in Germany. Light remained the
first fact of his cosmos, as it had been for his remoteJewish forebears.
Before the sun was, says the Book ofGenesis, there was light. Before
God made the sun and moon and stars he created light, the messen­
ger of the universe.
It was 1676 before men were sure that light takes time to get from
one part ofthe universe to another. By the time AlbertEinstein was in
1i,11
Light, Our One Absolute 5
Light, Our One Absolute
4
You sayyouwererightontime: ourbeepsweresimultaneous. And
school, his teachers could tell him pretty nearly how much time it
I say yours was late. Clearly, that's because the signals took time to
took: a second to travel 186,000 miles: just over a second to reach us
travel. And Einstein says that in a universe where things are milling
from the moon, eight minutes from the sun. And at sixteen, Einstein
around, whether two events are simultaneous or not depends on
had found a question to worry about. What if I could travel at the
where you are.
speedoflight? Whatwould1see? Woulda mirrorinmyhandstay just
Now if you'll let me listen to your clock, I'll say it's running slow.
out of reach of the light streaming toward it from my face, and show

That's not difficult to explain: you are speeding away from me, and
me nothing? The answer, when he knew it after ten years, under­

every tick has farther to travel than the last one did. But your heart­
mined the common-sense world, which knows only common-sense

beat, when Ilisten, is slowed down, too. Fromhere inWashington I'd
answers. But Einstein believed that a well-defined question can be

say you were living more slowly, even aging more slowly. Your time is
answered, even though the answer may turn the universe inside out

slower than my time. And if we'd asked Albert Einstein which time
with a Theory of Relativity.
was "right,"hewouldhave saidbothwere right. Thereisnouniversal
We are used to many things common sense would reject if it con­
time.
fronted them. I am talking in Washington, D.C., with my eye on a
The faster you speed your spaceship, the more your time slows
clock. You are listening, I don't know where. We both know that we
down. There must be a limit, when your time would stop altogether,
are both onSpaceship Earth, being carried round the sun at nineteen
andyouhaveprobablyguessedwhatitis: thespeedoflight, whichis
miles a second. Still I don't know where on earth you are, and I don't
therefore a speed you can never reach. So we can finally answer the
know what time it is where you are. Your clock ticks along with mine,
question Einstein asked himself at the age ofsixteen: what wouldyou
but I don't know what "now" is your now, because I don't know how
see if you were travelling at the speed of light? He asked it when the
long my voice is taking to reach you. The radio waves that carry it
fastest things that moved were trains, but his answer holds in the age
dawdle along toward you at the speed of light, which takes a full six­
of the Saturn rocket. You cannot reach the speed of light. The most
tieth of a second to reach the West Coast, and we are used to a world
powerful engine could not boost you to that speed, because the uni­
in which a sixtieth of a secondis no insignificant time: long enough to
verse is so constructed that only light can ever reach it. And light, our
smash up a car, overexpose a snapshot, or tangle a computer's feet.
one absolute, travels at no other: never hustles, never tires.
H gets much stranger, strange enough for Einstein's attention, if
The child who was born a hundred years ago took years to gather
we board different spaceships. I'll stay in Washington, you leave
his wits. At nine he did not even speak with fluency. Normal people,
Earth: tuck your radio under your arm and blast off toward the stars.
he reflected later, never think about space and time because as chil­
As you watch Earth dwindle to a speck you can still hear me, and
dren they found such mysteries insoluble. "But my intellectual de­
thanks to technology I can hear you, so we can try an experiment. I
velopment was retarded, so I began to wonder about space and time
have a beeper (SOUND) and you have a beeper (different sound), and
only when Ihad grown up. Naturally Icould go deeper into the prob­
we can sound them together on the count of three. Three, two, one,
lem than a child with normal abilities."
BEEP. All clear? Count along with me, and BEEP.

So there is something to be said for delay. Speaking of delay, the
Now here's what you hear inyour spaceship:

light you may see through your window now left the sun just about
Three, two, one, BEEP

the moment this program started. In two hundred years it will have
beep

reached stars we can point to. Two hundredyears are unlikely tobring
But here's what I hear in Washington:

.. a second Einstein.
Three, two, one, BEEP beep

A
11,[, ,
Fractals
7
And Leonardo's Deluge was a scribble, unless, like Mandelbrot, you
were willing to credit "the superposition of eddies of many diverse
sizes."
Mandelbrot, sixty-two, has based a mathematical career on trustin
such vision as Hokusai's and Leonardo's. When we see "disorder,"
we are seeing nature's habitof repeating forms in infinite regress. The
Fractals
moonsofUranusaren'tsphericalbutpittedand pocked. Ontheirsur­
faces doubtless lie pebbles shaped like them. Mandelbrot's "fractal"
functions describe that as effortlessly as Euclid's can describe perfect
spheres no eyes have seen.
For several years Art & Antiques has printed my "Inside Story" each The twig, he reminds us, has the shape ofa limb; the limb, ofa tree.
month on its back page. This one appeared in May 1986. (And the tree? Of the human circulatory system. Nature rhymes as
resourcefully as Pope.) "Scaling" is his adjective for objects, natural
or man-made, in which subsystems of detail echo larger systems
ad infinitum. Other objects, like multistory glass boxes, are "scale­
bound"; their effect depends on their being the size they are, and the
closer you come the less there is to see.
Picasso tended to be a scale-bound artist; his sidewalk construc­
tion in Chicago looks strained and empty from having been enlarged
The line light draws from Sirius to your eye, 51 million million miles to monster size from the size at which it worked. Its bigness now ad­
long, is something school mathematics can describe. It's Euclid's vertises how much isn't in it. Van Gogh, on the other hand, made
"shortestdistance between two points." But the line of the ridge of the "scaling" pictures; come close and find detail, clear down to thebrush
Jungfrau, an eaten, wavering knife-edge against Swiss skies? The stroke, whosedynamicsarelikethewhole. Shakespeare'smetaphors
contour of the tumbling cloud above it? The pattern elm boughs etch work in miniature like his plays. Ezra Pound's Cantos, our time's pre­
outside your window? Euclid winces. For the mountain is not a cone, eminent "scaling" work, is made ofCantos made ofepisodes made of
nor the cloud a sphere, nor the elm a tracery of classic curves. details made ofword constellations, the unique identity patentin the
So they are "irregular." Cubism and Brancusi saw failed approxi­ closest close-up.
mations to Euclid and abstracted irregularity away. But rare eyes, like Mandelbrot's "proofs" have been scamped, a fact that can make
Leonardo's and Hokusai's, saw self-similarity: shapes repeated on the mathematical establishment look down its triangular nose. War
ever smaller scales. So they cherished what the Greeks rejected, un­ made his education so irregular he still isn't sure ofthe order of the al­
utterable formlessness, the flux Aphrodite renouncedas herS-curves phabet, an uncertainty shared, oddly, with Picasso. What has made
crystallized out ofit. his "Fractal Geometry" irrefutable is the pictures itcan generate, pure
Hokusai's Great Wave shatters into foamy wavelets that have each mathematical fictions that are manifestly moons and mountains. For
the shape of the wave; you can almost see each wavelet doing like­ that we can thank a uniquely American synergy.
wise. ExcepttotheeyeofBenoitMandelbrot, thatwasthekind00ap­ In1958heleftFrenchacademie for IBM; a few yearslatertheymade
anese fancifulness that forced little bonsai trees to mimic big ones. him an "IBM Fellow" with a staff including at least two gifted pro­
t
,i'
IA
Fractals
8
grammers, Richard Voss and Alan Norton, who could make ma­
chines hum to his fractal functions. The visions that leap up on color
screens cannotfail to carry conviction; ifMandelbrot's math can create
a plausible mountain, then his claim that it describes mountains grows
credible. His lectures fall on irregularly willing ears; the art is what
persuades. Thanks to IBM, you can turn through his pages compre­
hending not an x nor y and perceive a universe reclaimed for mind. The Dead-Letter Office

Commissioned, when I was still in California, fora special museum issue
(July-August 1971) of Art in America. The next year George Braziller
reprinted thewhole issueas ahardcovercalled Museums in Crisis. But
my argument is, more or less, that they are the crisis.
The State ofCalifornia, through the Buildingsand Grounds Commit­
tee ofitsMultiversity, has supplied me with an office in which to med­
itate, on the explicit understanding that I affix nothing to the walls. It
is a totally puritan interior, a plaster cube. I mayinflictno holes, insert
no fasteners. The penalties would include, presumably, Visitations
and Bills for Damages. A man with a pass key comes in every night to
emptythewastebasket, andpresumablyitis hewhochecksthe walls.
The State's postulate is clear: my usefulness to the brightest 10 per­
cent of its adolescents will not be enhanced by rectangular arrange­
ments of form and color.
Which is odd, since the campus does maintain a museum. Or not
so odd, since the museum (1) is overby the Art Department, and (2) is
a Visual Aid, i.e., an accessory to knowledge otherwise formulated.
Understanding, you see, is verbal, discursive (how else couldthey set
examinations?).
~