-Mark Twain
If we can think about story telling in terms of reality building, then mythology can be deployed as a world-shaping tool. So often the expression "history repeats itself" is uttered as an explanation for why the world has repeatedly become subjected to the negative aspects of humanity. War, mass murder, monumental thievery: if history merely "repeats itself," then these disasters by human hands become explainable and, therefore, ignorable to any population that sedates itself with this credo. Mythology works by providing the realization that there is a certain connection between outside cultures and the self. For thousands of years, the telling of fiction has birthed visions of a future world by means of alegoreses, as well as illuminated histories buried under a dusty past, resulting in the resurfacing of that history's telling. Within the category of literary network theory, interconnectivity of texts fold the space between ancient and futuristic, and yield a stirring awareness of the present. The "there and then" becomes the "here and now" when this fold is realized, and it is best explained by a comparison of The Epic of Gilgamesh of ancient Mesopotamia, with Neil Stephenson's more contemporary cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash (1992).
Today, the interconnectedness of the world's societies has landed man in a unique situation of his time. Never before has the world been this close to truly becoming a single community, as computers and cyberspace have linked cultures together and blurred cultural boundaries. What is to be done with this reality, and what is its message in regards to where mankind has been and where he is headed? We start by analyzing the act of reading, and how its process allows the reader access to his own system of mind and thought, so that he may place himself within the space between happenings of the past and happenings of the future. Realizing the present betwixt these vast complexities of ancient and future time equips a reader with an acute awareness to patterns that connect past to future. Such a pattern underlies David Damrosch's investigation of Saddam Hussein as a novelist:
In the wake of his humiliation in the first Gulf War of 1992, Saddam evidently decided that, like Gilgamesh, he could best achieve immortality through literary means, and he embarked on an improbable second career as a writer of political romances. This career was thrown off in 2004 by the onset of the second Gulf War... As the American-led coalition made its preparations for invasion, Saddam reportedly left most of the defense planning to his sons, spending much of his time working on his novel.
Here, Damrosch exhibits unification of past, present and future by correlating these three dimensions with The Epic of Gilgamesh (a story confined to the past), Saddam Hussein (the resonances of that story with the present), and Saddam Hussein's novel (the preservation of a new story in the future). Gilgamesh's character in the story then is a monstrous archetype by which the powerful leader figure can be assessed, as it exhibits in the epic that heroics must eventually be abandoned for knowledge, clearly a realization that Hussein was exploring during the latter years of his life. Making such a connection may seem vapid, until its wiring is recognized as a positive feedback loop; a text written 3400 years ago has outlined the rise, hubris, and epistemological reckoning of a leader who used that same text to inspire his agenda for making sense of his own story, which was to be written from the same area of the world in contemporary times, riffing off of the same central themes of the original in a mimetic fashion. What is the use of the positive feedback loop? It is the rhyming of history, and affirmation that resonances are taking place between past and future in the dynamics of a literary network system that peeks its head into the present.
Literary mechanisms are vast in number, but there are a few that are worth specific attention when making sense out of World Literature and a meaning of the present. Literary network theory involves the recurring models and modes of historical representations, and is what initiates transition between texts that might otherwise be incomparable. It is a broad and omnipresent theory for literary analysis, reminiscent of mycelium extending itself out underneath a wet forest floor to sprout mushroom fruits; the category itself is not one that is concretely realized in the way that perhaps the category of Naturalism is, but the parallels and comparisons that it yields illuminate its ghostly presence, as protruding fungi from the ground do the mycelium. If numerous lines of communication are what make up the modern global society, then time, just as is exemplary with space via communication lines, can be understood in one dimension rather than three by uniting the past with the future in this way. A concrete definition of the network as a single system made up of interconnecting parts can be deployed to make sense of how the increasing symbiosis between "there and here" and "then and now" inevitably make one of space, make one of time, and climax with their intimately aesthetic fusion, which becomes the "here and now;" "the World."
As so far discussed, exercising network theory to conjoin past with future allows for each of their assessments in the space called the present. Comparing objects that seemingly have nothing in common by identifying their common structures is another literary mechanism that is deployed by literary network theory, and it is driven by the principles of cybernetics. Recognition of network patterns present in city structure (roads, communication lines), brain structure (neurons), and plant structure (rhizomes, root systems) opens space for comparing seemingly unrelated entities. The Metaverse in Stephenson's Snow Crash is a construct that mirrors cyberspace, but also amplifies organic human spaces of meditation or spirituality. Making this connection leads to the implication that the Metaverse, where information is obtained and skills are learned, is as essential as the meditative dimension within the mind. Cybernetics guides such a comparison and also begs the question of which is more alive: cyberspace or spirituality?
Perhaps this question can connect with a pre-existing one, and render an answer: what happens in the space between past and future? Hiro Protagonist, the main character in Stephenson's novel, takes a noble stab at answering this question in the story. Though the information he receives comes from a librarian who in turn gets his information from the Metaverse, Protagonist postulates a resonance between the ancient and futuristic using his own mind, hinting that perhaps human thought is still at the reigns of cyberspace. His realization compares the Sumerian god, Enki, to a hacker, and decodes the metaphors within Enki's story that convey his odd tendency to have sex with his daughters:
"I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is a metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process... Enki's water - his semen, his data, his me - flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it to flourish."
Longevity in biological terms is here severed from the confines of religious narrative by Hiro's crass attitude toward it, and is re-framed as longevity in epistemological terms instead. Here, Stephenson eschews hyper-sanctification and inoculates his reader with that stirring sense of the present. This stirring sense of the present is the realization that information and matter are interdependent, and malleable. Both Enki and Hiro possess a consciousness of this powerful concept in different times and different places as independent nodes within a common network of epistemological understanding.
Hiro Protagonist's resonance with Enki mimics the resonance with Saddam Hussein's novel with Gilgamesh, in that each comparison propagates a present from out of a fusion of past and future. Literary mechanisms within the category of network theory join past place and past time with future place and future time, granting access to their union which is the present. In the present, conscious readers actively decide whether certain mythological resonances are to be suppressed or propagated, and the awareness of its patterns is the rhyming of history. When planning for the future of how interconnectedness will guide the activity of the new network world, mythology can be deployed as a mechanism for shaping this reality, operating within the frame of literary network theory.
Bibliography
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Damrosch, David, The Buried Book (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007).
Foster, Benjamin, ed., trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Norton and Company, 2001).
Milburn, Colin, Nanovision: Engineering the Future (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008).
Stephenson, Neil, Snow Crash (New York: Spectra, 1992).
Van Dijk, Jan, The Network Society, 2nd ed. (Netherlands: SAGE Publications, 2006).
Weiner, Norbert, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1948).
Weiner, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (USA: Da Capo Press, 1950).
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