Conclusion: Towards A Better Understanding

in the Age of Groundlessness

Back to the beginning

The background picture of the Tower of Babel that has been the visual theme of this website was painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the mid-16th Century, one of the three paintings by him on the subject. One of them is now lost. The two surviving ones are distinguished sometimes by their relative size (Great or Little), sometimes by their current location (Vienna or Rotterdam). The one we have been seeing is the Little Tower of Babel, or the Rotterdam Panel.

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The book published for the recent exhibition

dedicated to Bruegel at the Kunsthistorisches

Museum in Vienna notes that these paintings

have been awe-inspiring for centuries not only

for their visual beauty but also for the subject

matter itself: beyond religious creed, the

narrative of the Tower of Babel radiates 

"timeless metaphorical potential". 

 

It has been seen as a quasi-historical account of the plurality of languages; as a warning about the dangers of immodest pride and the futility of human endeavors before divine authority; or, conversely, as a testimony to humanity's potential to attain skyscraping power, so as to incite divine intervention to check it, given the ability to communicate clearly and synchronize efforts.

 

When I look back on my childhood in Korea as a devout Catholic, I think the main takeaway from the Babel story that they stressed at Sunday school had to do with hubris. It now seems to me an understandable choice, because obedience and respect of order have been our core virtues since long before we were first introduced to God, and because an emphasis on the confounding would have been relatively of little use, since most of us were going to be monolingual all our lives. 

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Babel is a narrative nearly universally

understood about universal understanding of

language. But violence and colonization

indubitably played a role in its propagation. 

There is also always some moral stake involved.

The tale of Babel became the global narrative

it is because of imperialism and indoctrination;

its nearly universal recognition is a contingency

of real historical events. Is art a means or an

end? Does its historical context of violence tarnish the Babel narrative itself? Do we find "timeless metaphorical potential" in it just because history made it so, or also because some quality or "autonomous signification" in the tale itself resound in us? We don't all agree on this issue, because the tower was broken and we got confounded. It does not have to be Hamlet's job to vindicate British imperialism from the get-go, but it can; at the same time, we don't have to strictly denounce all art produced by noticeably immoral artists, but we can. The same issue applies to the artifacts of globalization. As Hollywood-style film and music spread across the world, they do homogenize 'forms' or 'templates' of artistic expression at the expense of the existing dominance of local traditions; nonetheless, there is a resulting diversity in the ways each culture modifies the foreign import uniquely. In short, the 'grammars' of art are becoming more and more standardized, while the locally produced 'sentences' remain distinct.

 

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The Task of Us Future Readers

Do we like this kind of thing? Do we want it to keep happening? We need to keep on asking difficult questions. But if we're not allowed to ask 'what ifs' in history, we are by all means free to think up a hundred million alternatives in fiction. Had not the cultural standards around the world attained the globalized outlook we now expect, how would we receive the Babel narrative? What is this "timeless metaphorical potential"? Is it when a story is infinitely relatable and comprehensive, that it is "not of an age but for all time" like Shakespeare, according to his contemporary Ben Jonson? 

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Given the diverse international cycle of inspiration that now characterizes the creative process around the world, I think we have realized that there are no absolute limits as to what 'counts' as something that has metaphorical potential and what doesn't. It seems that everything can count to an attentive viewer.

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Production and distribution of art are always entangled with their political circumstances. Especially in literature, where the medium of expression (language) is an inevitably social apparatus, the content of art very often turns out to be more profoundly rooted in the social norms of the author's time than we might like it to be. This may well be farfetched, but perhaps this is where the moral and the aesthetic, while never to be treated entirely separately, are not to be considered identical, either.

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In a short story by Borges called The Library of Babel, we encounter a cosmos only made up of a vast library and numerous librarians. Each book in the library contains "four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters", and each letter is made of any of the "twenty-five orthographic symbols". The library is said to contain every single possible permutation of these elements. Because there are just so many of them shelved in this library whose end is not to be reached, many librarians are convinced that somewhere in the vast library must be books that contain prophesies or truths concerning fundamental mysteries of the cosmos.

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When I pictured myself one of those librarians in search of the book containing truth, something struck me as odd. Theoretically, if such a library were really to exist, than it must be true that at least one of them indeed contains a true message, unless there is no truth at all, which makes no sense. But I was not so sure, if I do find the book of truth, whether it would feel profound and revelatory. I think this odd feeling comes from the idea that the books in this vast library are nothing more than chance. They would be mere computations of a non-deterministic automaton that sometimes just happens to seem meaningful to the reader. Those books will be devastatingly impersonal because there would be no artists who decide to write one word rather than another, to try out this syntactic construction as opposed to that one.

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By definition, we can't be universal unless we are either context-free or inclusive of every context there is, because the universal is nothing more than the totality of every instance of the particular. But we can't be context-free because we are individuals each with no more than one place of birth and one place of residence at a time, with a limited lifespan. The meanings that we attribute to the general derive from our experiences as particulars. Risking optimism, I want to state that keeping our stead in such groundlessness is nobler than resorting to textual fundamentalism. 

 

In the Iliad, it is the unanimous condition of mortality that enables humans to find glory in their strife in war; similarly, it is the dark, solitary labor that makes Michelangelo more glorious, because it contrasts starkly with the his frescoes. The total grandeur that sprawls across the Sistine Chapel, lacking in nothing, somehow perversely reminds us of the toilsome experience of its particular creator that unfolded in tedious increments of dripping paint and fading eyesight.

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The first half of Yeats's The Second Coming sounds like it is observing the mood of today's West with journalistic precision. When a poem makes us feel certain feelings and think certain thoughts, and somehow we find those feelings and thoughts particularly significant, we feel that the poet is spitting truth, and we admire  for the way he put it. To do criticism (academic or not) on that poem is sometimes is to take those feelings and thoughts invoked, and articulate the correspondences between distant thoughts, feelings and moments that we otherwise may not have been able to experience. We articulate our solitary reading of the poem.

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Murakami Haruki (because East Asians put their surname

first) is a contemporary Japanese writer very popular in,

among other regions, South Korea, the U.S. and much of

Europe alike. He stands out among fellow Japanese

writers not least because of his predominantly Western

cultural references. Many names that inhabit his stories

were born across the ocean. If there is always going to be

some limitation to one's understanding of geographically

distant cultures, then is Murakami 'occidentalizing' from

a provincial outlook, under a cosmopolitan guise? When

Oedipus, Aristophanes, Schubert, Radiohead, Prince,

Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker appear on his novel 

Kafka on the Shore, many Western readers are thrilled not 

because they are by default more responsive to familiar 

thingsm but because they have never encountered those things as parts of that kind of environment; it is less the content than the context that feels strange. Along with The Tale of Genji, the Western cultural artifacts are, however they got there, real imaginations that fuel the author's creation. Having reached the East Sea, Kafka has landed ashore, and a whole new life is awaiting him there, in translation. Colonel Sanders, pimping under the red lights of Takamatsu, Japan, keeps on insisting: It's all but a metaphor!

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Whenever I hear Frédéric Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu, I suddenly remember how my mother would say repeatedly when I was growing up in Korea that she always wishes she knew how to play it; whenever I hear old soft-rock, such as Air Supply, Toto and Electric Light Orchestra, I am reminded of the many stories my father told me about the love he had for "pop" as a student in the 80s when he used to commute daily to his school in Seoul from its outskirts.

 

My madeleine, as in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, doesn't have to be kimchi or rice cake. Whatever art or story that fills our memory is part of that same world of our past on which the whole frame of memory is grounded. 

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