How We Think

I have never done illegal narcotics, nor too many legal narcotics, in my lifetime. There was that one time I passed a car where the occupants inside were obviously smoking a joint (my work buddy that I was walking by the car with helpfully pointed out that that's what pot smells like) and got a little contact high, but beyond that and the occasional alcoholic experience, I haven't much time for the drugs, as the kids might say. It's not that I have a moral stand necessarily against an individual person's right to enjoy a hit of reefer every now and then, and I honestly think the drug "war" would be a lot less wasteful if we legalized some stuff that isn't legal now (I'm sure the drug cartels will find some other way to fund their operations, perhaps by branching off into highly addictive coffee beans). I just know that my mind is weird anyways, without any outside help.

How We Think by Katherine Hayles is a bit like my explanation of why I don't do drugs, in that it chronicles in the latter stages (heh-heh, "chronic"-les...sorry) the rise of more computer-friendly fiction. There's a huge argument going on in the book about narrative versus databases (i.e., the stuff we study as English and humanities majors versus the stuff we use to store the info we've gathered), and I have to say that I was intrigued by the discussion of the two works that Hayles cites (The Raw Shark Texts and Only Revolutions) because I tend to gravitate towards the odder end of the literary spectrum, if only to dip my toe in with some authors while embracing some of the more fantastical writers (Pynchon, some DeLillo, William S. Burroughs, Vonnegut). I don't always understand what I'm reading (at least I'm honest), but I find the journey enjoyable in and of itself.

I couldn't help but think of Burroughs' work with the "Cut-Up Trilogy," three books that he fashioned together out of cut-up words and phrases from other publications, when I started reading about Raw Shark. I haven't read any of the trilogy, nor the Raw Shark novel, but I think that sort of experimentation, playing with narrative expectations, can be exciting (well, occasionally frustrating, but exciting too). I read Naked Lunch over the summer, and straight through; when I read on Wikipedia that Burroughs had meant for people to be able to start wherever they wanted to skip around as they chose (a sort of junkie Choose Your Own Adventure) I wondered if I'd read the book wrong, or if there was *any* right way to read it (this was Wikipedia that I was looking at, of course, and someone could have added that detail as a goof or an inaccuracy). There's a certain sense of playfulness in the descriptions of both Raw Shark and Only Revolutions, as if, while both works have their seriousness, they have an anarchic side too, something that deviates from the path. Something that makes the reader less passive than he would normally be.

All that said, I might be hesitant to actually try and *read* either of the books mentioned. I remember loving the movie Trainspotting when I saw it (still the best depiction of Scottish heroin junkies I've ever seen, by the way), and I was excited when I found the novel that the film was based on at a local bookstore. I got it home, turned to the first page, and was gobsmacked by the heavy Scottish dialect of the first few pages. I literally got a headache (I'm not exaggerating for comic effect). I stuck with the book, however, because (thankfully) it was a multiple-narrator novel (really a collection of short stories that fit together, from differing points of view) so that the heavy Scottish dialect parts weren't the sole part of the story. Several years later, I turned to the opening page of Finnegans Wake and decided after reading a couple of lines that James Joyce was batshit crazy, so I stopped.

I think, in the clash of narrative v. database, we'll see a happy (or unhappy) marriage of the two as time and technology progresses (at least until Skynet wipes out humanity). As Hayles argues (and as I agree with her), we are a narrative-based species, always searching for the story of how we came to be, or how we came to live in the places that we live, or why it is that we die, what happens when we die, etc. The ghost in the machine may be our need for a narrative, after all; databases store information, and they do a damn good job of it, but so far they can't tell a story. But narratives let us down too, in need of constant revision as more facts become known (just look at the narrative that the NFL was trying to sell us on the whole Ray Rice incident, before the second video came out, to cite a real-world example). You constantly hear "narrative" used with cynical connotations (such as "what is our narrative for the way events unfolded in Iraq"), but it's one of our defining characteristics. That being said, a database can provide information that wasn't known when we crafted our original narrative. It's a brave new world of narrative-database hybrids, as represented by the two works cited in Hayles. It may be a bit over my head, but I'm on board with at least trying.