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Reading the Posthuman subject in The Alphabet Burt Kimmelman The Alphabet by ron silliman, a most remarkable and singular achievement in its great ambition and very presence, might call to mind the Western world’s early encyclopedias. These massive undertakings were products of societies that had become markedly literate. indeed The Alphabet, a huge book that is encyclopedic in nature, represents a historical moment in our own time— just as, for example, medieval encyclopedias characterize their era in the eyes of today’s historians. yet silliman (along with others) has referred to The Alphabet as a “longpoem” (“statement for the Guggenheim,” Mack and rome 740). and in the spirit in which this term has been proffered, i would argue that The Alphabet—a literary phenomenon and an event in literary history—is also peculiarly an epic poem. i would also note that the genre of epic poetry, unlike that of the encyclopedia, has its roots in preliterate times. as is true of the encyclopedia, the epic has always been in some respects a historiographico-aesthetic attempt to embrace the world in its entirety; in ancient times and even thereafter it was relied upon to report to its listeners or readers what the world beyond their immediate purview was like. although silliman’s poem should be acknowledged as a work fitting within the epic tradition, its élan and self-ordering methodology also make it an encyclopedia . it may seem that this generic insistence is not necessary to comprehend silliman’s achievement; yet what i hope to show in this chapter is not only that the basic instinct involved in The Alphabet’s creation has everything to do with civilized humanity’s encyclopedic activities, but also that this impulse resides at the heart of silliman’s world view, as evinced by this book. While many a commentator has provided for readers various insights into The Alphabet, there is still a need to consider it within the literary-historical context. to be sure, i would want to read it, first and foremost, within a history of ideas, or let’s say within our intellectual history. nevertheless, this reading the posthuman subject 71 book not only helps us to understand what an encyclopedia is all about; it also, in thinking about its encyclopedic nature, both enlarges and deepens our appreciation of one or another literary-critical analysis silliman’s work has already attracted. The encyclopedic impulse to gather the sum total of all knowledge in the world within the expanse of a book (or a series of books, when the plenitude of knowledge has exceeded the physical limitations of a single volume) has coalesced over time—since human beings first developed the technology of writing. starting with the beginnings of history as we know it, this impulse has embodied an inevitability. With the emergence of literacy, the motivation to hold the known world within one’s grasp, so to speak, found materialization in the artifact of the book, as if it were created for this purpose. accompanying this apparent achievement was a sense of triumph as people marveled at the record of their own civilization. This was no mere historical record but rather the entire panoply of human expression. such were the encyclopedias of the Middle ages in particular which were read by earlyliterate human beings who felt empowered by their accomplishments. indeed , the conceptualization of the mirror, which is a key image and symbol in the literature of the medieval era, is most apt in comprehending the role the medieval encyclopedia played within society. The invention of writing is the most significant technological development in human history. and an encyclopedia—itself a technological artifact distinguishing people of its time from their forbears—is impossible without literacy, due to its very nature and mission (as Walter ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word and elsewhere, and others, would suggest). in orally based societies a sceop or griot told stories in part as a way to keep track of who their preliterate people were. tales of the tribe (thus ezra pound’s famous coinage sagetrieb) imparted to listeners a sense of a past, nebulous as it might be, as well as identity and meaning. These stories were a kind of record keeping (of course record might now imply writing), though they naturally mutated over time due to a lack of objective documentation that might survive human mortality or contradict changing contemporaneous memory. This living “memorializing” could also influence the imaginative activities of...

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