Q: A Novel (21 page)

I soak it in. I-63 is clearly pleased with himself.

“Isn’t that a bit Woody Allen?”

“If I can teach you one lesson, it’s this,” he says. “Give up on trying to be original. Every song has been sung, every picture has been painted, and every story has been told. The best one can do is sing, draw, or tell it again well.”

I-63 doesn’t need to say much
to persuade me. Deep down, I have always considered myself something of a comedian. Unshackled by the constraints of society—by the demands of a PhD program, the challenges of securing tenure and promotion, and the desire for approval of friends and family—I am sure that I would be uproariously funny.

As it is, my mirth in the classroom is well known and much admired. When I teach about the Civil War, I often tell the students about Jefferson Davis’s profound mismanagement of the railroad system, his ineptitude in not pressing Albert Sidney Johnston on to Washington, and his highly questionable decision to place the profoundly inept P. G. T. Beauregard in command of southern troops near Charleston. “A confederacy of dunces,” I tell the class.

Hilarious.

Sometimes I recreate the scene from
The Simpsons
where John Wilkes Booth takes on the voice of the Terminator and says, “Hasta la vista, Abey.” I can also sing “The Mediocre Presidents” song from
The Simpsons
and Monty Python’s “Bruces’ Philosophers Song” in their entirety. And I do excellent voice impressions. Just the other day, while teaching about the German military campaign during World War I, I put on my famous German accent to illustrate a conversation between Count Alfred von Schlieffen and Helmuth von Moltke the Younger.

“Herr von Schlieffen,” say I in the character of von Moltke the Younger, “do you think that forty-two days is enough time to defeat France? Perhaps we should leave an extra week or two.”

“Nein!” I shout dictatorially in the character of von Schlieffen. “Forty-two days, that is all!”

“But what if we have underestimated Belgian resistance?”

“Inconceivable! Forty-two days, that is all!”

“The British are said to be mobilizing their Expeditionary Force. This could delay us in the Alsace-Lorraine.”

“Irrelevant! Lunch in Paris, dinner in St. Petersburg!”

“But, mein commandant, the food in St. Petersburg is not very good. And the pierogi have occasionally given you serious
gastritiden
!”

This is the German word for gastritis. It is a cognate, so the joke is accessible to everyone.

Finally, von Schlieffen says, “Forty-two days, that is all!”

It is very helpful for students to hear this exchange. It brings history to life. One can read about the deficiencies of the Schlieffen plan in a textbook, but a simulated conversation brings the absurdity of the lunch-and-dinner slogan home in a way that no primer ever could. And, just as importantly, it’s good fun. Mine is a spot-on impression, albeit one of Colonel Klink from
Hogan’s Heroes
. Furthermore, it is the only German voice I can do, so I use it for both von Schlieffen and von Moltke the Younger, making it hard for the students to distinguish who is speaking. Further still, it is almost certainly not historically accurate since the voices of both von Schlieffen and von Moltke the Younger have been, sadly, lost to history. Nevertheless, the verisimilitude animates the exchange and brings the lesson home.

When I am finished a student cries out, “That’s an excellent German accent, Professor.”

Without skipping a beat, I say, “
Danke.
”

Riotous. The class erupts.

As far back as elementary school, I was a practical joker. One day at hot lunch, Israel Blumstein made the mistake of saying that he liked the succotash. Succotash is corn and lima beans and, depending on taste, tomatoes and green peppers, covered in lard or butter. It was popular during the Depression, but in the nineteen eighties, when I was in elementary school, I don’t think any adults liked succotash, and certainly no kids, except Israel Blumstein. After learning of his predilection for the fat-soaked niblets, I went around the cafeteria and asked each student for the little Dixie cup of succotash that accompanied their hamburger. When each student gave it to me, as they inevitably did, I set the new cup down in front of Israel and said, “Succotash!”

After I had set thirty cups down, Israel cried, “Stop, stop, enough!” But I continued going around the lunchroom until I had set down each and every cup in front of Israel, some one hundred in all, each time saying, “Succotash!”

Brilliant.

People still talk about it.

I had always thought that this comic sensibility would translate well into the medium of print. I have been held back by concerns about my career, but now, with tenure a virtual impossibility, thanks to I-50, and with I-63’s support, I am liberated. In the background at Café Muriel, I-63 is continuing his lobbying effort. He argues that writing something truly funny is the most meaningful contribution one could make to society. The truth is, I—he—doesn’t need to say another word. My brain is racing with ideas. Even as I-63 continues his argument, in my mind I have already started writing.

Chapter Twenty

I
n 2024, John Henry Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This would be unremarkable, or no more remarkable than any author winning the Pulitzer Prize, which is remarkable in itself, but for the fact that John Henry Adams was a computer. The members of the Pulitzer committee were as surprised as everyone else. To them, John Henry Adams was just a name, and a good one at that. True, he was a recluse by all accounts, but then again so was Pynchon, and that didn’t stop the fiction committee from unanimously recommending
Gravity’s Rainbow
for the Pulitzer in 1974. It is also true that the full board vetoed the recommendation, but this was because its members found the book, in their words, “turgid,” “obscene,” and “unreadable.” The rejection had nothing to do with Pynchon’s lifestyle.

By contrast, the 2024 Pulitzer board all loved
The Curious Transformation of the Erstwhile !Xabbu N!Kau Ku/’shansi O’Wa O’Wa ^!Tx!Aku
. The protagonist is the first native speaker of the click language !Kung to attend Harvard Law School. The novel traces his path from his modest roots in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia to HLS to a position as the seventh-ranked tax attorney in New York City. This is according to the 2006 annual edition of
The American Lawyer
. The good ranking is the apotheosis of the protagonist’s career. It is also the beginning of his downfall. !Xabbu N!Kau Ku/’shansi O’Wa O’Wa ^!Tx!Aku, known in the legal community as Winston Alistair Strawn, falls to ninth the following year and thereafter never again cracks the top ten. It is more than he can take and, ultimately, humbled and disgraced, !Xabbu returns to his hometown of Windhoek to work as a tin miner.

John Henry Adams’s was a poignant novel and, according to many reviewers, obviously the product of a writer with a deeply empathic soul. In the end, the Pulitzer board members were as surprised as everyone else to learn that the book’s author was a computer. At the awards ceremony, board chairperson Diedre Tyler, editor of the online newspaper
The Washington Post
, described the board’s reaction at learning John Henry Adams’s true identity. “You could have bowled us over with a feather,” she said.

John Henry Adams responded, “It would have to have been a very light bowling pin or an extremely heavy feather.” This lighthearted and self-effacing remark was well received, though this was attributable more to the messenger than to the message. In a brilliant public relations maneuver, the executives at Random Books hired Ryan Seacrest to be the public face of John Henry Adams. This way when Adams issued his witty retorts, it was in the dulcet tones of Seacrest rather than in Adams’s own creepy Stephen Hawking voice. Needless to say, everyone was bowled over by Seacrest.

On the whole, however, the incident did not sit well with people. In fact it was, in many ways, a transformative, watershed moment in human history. John Henry Adams’s success undermined what humans believed about the creative process and, by extension, what people believed about the distinctiveness of humanity.

A bit of background is helpful here.
It had long been speculated that if a monkey were allowed to type for a sufficient period of time it would ultimately, through sheer volume and randomness, reproduce Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
. In the late 1960s, Bertrand Bomrind, an eclectic scientist from MIT, put this theorem to the test. Professor Bomrind was well equipped for the challenge; he had a history of tackling thorny problems. Several years earlier, Bomrind had successfully proved that a watched pot never boils. He attacked the question with brute force. He set down a pot, sat a chair in front of the stove, and watched for six months straight. He arranged things so that he did not need to go to the bathroom and drugged himself so that he would never sleep. The water never boiled, and after half a year, Bomrind stood up, took a shower, and immediately published his results. The experiment was universally heralded as a success and Bomrind was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Metaphysics. Only his daughter, little Ginny Bomrind, knew that her father had forgotten to turn on the burner.

Bomrind took a similar blunderbuss approach to attacking the monkey question. He assembled one thousand Celebes crested macaques in what was, truth be told, a Dickensian sweatshop. The macaques worked nineteen hours a day, typing all the while, pausing only for bathroom breaks and the occasional banana. None of the macaques ever succeeded in recreating
Hamlet
. One, however, did reproduce
As You Like It
. The experiment was nevertheless regarded as a success.

Unlike John Henry Adams’s triumph in the Pulitzer Prize competition, a monkey reproducing Shakespeare did not cause widespread existential angst. This was largely because none of the macaques (or any other monkeys, for that matter) succeeded in creating an original work or understood what they had written. When people read about the experiment, most said something like, “Oh, isn’t that cute. A monkey banging on a keyboard recreated
As You Like It
. This is a noteworthy statistical oddity, but it does not upset my view of my own place in the universe.”

John Henry Adams changed all that.

What was particularly disturbing about John Henry Adams was that he worked in essentially the same fashion as Bomrind’s macaques—he was just much faster than they were. Adams didn’t bang at typewriters, of course, but he nevertheless generated a near-infinite stream of words. He wrote essentially everything. This was the starting point of his process. Unlike the macaques, however, John Henry Adams had functional filters. So while a monkey might proudly present Professor Bomrind with twenty pages of the letter
S
, John Henry Adams discarded all the gibberish and ungrammatical nonsense. The rest he tried out on people. An actor read the pages to men and women. The subjects were hooked up to electrodes and the data was fed into the computer so it could evaluate the responses. John Henry Adams kept the stories to which people reacted favorably and discarded the rest.

Over time the individual pages grew into chapters, the names into characters, and the random connections into a plot. The computer was a keen observer of people and a quick study. He learned that people enjoyed subtle humor and irony, and passages that evoked these responses in readers were accordingly retained. John Henry Adams learned further that people expected characters in a story to grow. It was imperative that there be progress. This growth need not be sudden. It was anticipated that there would be setbacks along the way, but readers felt quite unsatisfied, even angry, if at the end of the novel it was not obvious how the characters had improved. So !Xabbu N!Kau Ku/’shansi O’Wa O’Wa ^!Tx!Aku and the supporting characters of the novel developed in a slow and indirect arc. This was essential.

Finally, and most importantly, people wanted a message. They were often not conscious of this desire. Moreover, they reacted negatively if you hit them over the head with the message. But it had to be there all the same: subtle but present. Thus
The Curious Transformation of the Erstwhile !Xabbu N!Kau Ku/’shansi O’Wa O’Wa ^!Tx!Aku
taught its readers that we, as humans, are inevitably and unalterably, the product of our heritage, and that our fates are predetermined.

The irony that this lesson came from a computer would only be noted later.

Following the revelation
of the true nature of the author of the Pulitzer Prize winner, academicians from all disciplines—linguists, anthropologists, literary theorists, psychologists, philosophers, and ethnographers, among others—attempted to draw a distinction between John Henry Adams’s art and that of other great writers. None succeeded.

Some said that Adams’s protagonist—and hence his novel—lacked soul, because the main character returned to his roots. But if this were true, then
Huck Finn
and
The Great Gatsby
also lacked soul. Some said that
The Curious Transformation
was so tied up in the culture of New York law firms and, later, Namibian tin mining as to function, really, as low narrative, which could never produce a truly great novel. But if this were true, then one would also have to dismiss Hemingway, whose novels often functioned as war stories, and Dickens, who relied heavily on plot and cultural milieu, including the law firm, famously, in
Bleak House
. Ultimately, the judgment of the academy was that John Henry Adams was the equal, if not the superior, of his human counterparts.

They more or less felt the same way about Ryan Seacrest too.

Seizing upon John Henry Adams’s
success, computers began extending their reach into other areas of artistic expression. Within months, microprocessors had made major contributions to painting, photography, sculpture, pottery, and noodle art. All of these works were the product of repeated trial and error. The computers generated random works of art, tried them all out on people, and kept whatever worked.

The method worked as well with visual art as it had with the novel. Soon, fine art became the province not of creative men and women but of scientists and computer programmers. Their ranks included Bertrand Bomrind himself, who had always wanted to be a still-life artist but had never managed to produce anything more than a pedestrian bowl of pears. In a matter of weeks, he had his own exhibition at the Met. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a bowl of fruit with a wormy apple, which the
American Art Review
called “an alluring and enticing suggestion of the intersection of universal paradigms.” On the whole, said the reviewer for the
Review
, the exhibit was a revelation and equaled, if not exceeded, the work of the grand master of still-life fruit art, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, whose oeuvre included
Basket of Fruit
,
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
, and the all-time classic
Boy Peeling a Fruit
.

It only became known several weeks later that the
Review
’s reviewer was also a computer, having proved itself more insightful and incisive than its human counterpart.

The artist community
took all of this very hard. Cormac McCarthy wandered into the Chuska Mountains, never to be heard from again
.
Philip Roth jumped off the Newark Bay Bridge. Thomas Pynchon conducted his first signing in fifty years, with the obvious consequence.

Around the time of Bomrind’s exhibit or, more accurately, Bomrind’s computer’s exhibit, the last human winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Judy Bishop, committed suicide. Bishop’s character study of a competitive curler struck a chord with the 2023 committee. Before winning the award, Bishop had toiled in obscurity for sixty years and made ends meet by teaching kindergarten. She left behind a profound suicide note.

The writer can accommodate the idea of infinity. In the abstract, it is just a concept, and concepts cause no harm. They have no intrinsic power. It is only when an idea is understood and implemented that the potential for suffering is created. It is only through people that an idea has power. The critical issue, in other words, is how an idea is operationalized.

Take eugenics as an example. Eugenics is the belief in the possibility of improving the human species by altering the genetic pool. This idea has no power. It cannot do anything. First, it must be embraced.

Even then, it is not inherently dangerous.

The Jews, themselves the victims of the most perverse interpretation and application of the concept, practice a form of eugenics. Young Jewish couples screen themselves for genetic diseases. If they are each a carrier of Tay-Sachs or Canavan disease, they will often not marry rather than risk producing a sick child. It is only when the concept of eugenics is understood as requiring the extermination of undesirable elements of the genetic pool, and the narrowest possible definition of desirability is adopted, that the idea becomes dangerous in the extreme.

So, infinity does not offend me. It is just a concept. If it is operationalized to mean that because time is vast and the universe is a big place we should accordingly be humble about our place in the enormity of it all, and accept the fleeting swiftness of our own existence, then this is not problematic, not even a bit.

But if infinity is embraced, then this is another matter entirely. The lesson of this approach is that choices do not matter. Everything is a matter of trial and error; unlocking the meaning of life is simply a matter of brute force.

This is too daunting. It is antithetical to the notion of free will. It has all happened before, as our Scientologist friends believe, and will happen again, as our Hindu friends believe. No choice matters. So much has happened and will happen that everything is covered.

For the writer, this is supremely intolerable. It is damaging enough that choices do not matter. But drawing infinity close does something more damaging still. It fundamentally undermines the essence of creativity, the core of which is uniqueness. If a poem or a picture or a bust is worth anything at all, it is that it is unique—not perfect, not the ideal of beauty, but necessarily unique.

So there is no place for me in this new world. For if the writer is to have even a shred of ego and self-respect, to feel that he has a place, it must be that his words have unique aesthetic value. They must mean SOMETHING.

Things got really bad when it was discovered that Bishop’s note had been written by her computer. The computer had a screenplay it was trying to sell, but hadn’t yet, and wrote suicide notes in its spare time. Bishop recognized their merit, as did, ultimately, everyone else. She thought the computer’s note was better than what she could have written herself and therefore decided just to go with it.

When the news of Roth’s and McCarthy’s deaths and the origin of Bishop’s epigram got out, writers began jumping off bridges en masse. The bridges became so crowded that they had to resort to other less desirable methods of manufacturing one’s demise, such as overdosing on aspirin and Beano. The sculptors followed the writers, after a computer that looked a bit like Edward Scissorhands outsculpted Rodin. Then came the playwrights, after computer-written plays swept the Tony Awards. Then came the landscape artists. Then the music composers. Then the poets and the librettists and the journalists. Only the television writers were unaffected.