Mercury of the Waves: Modern Cryptology and U.S. Literature by Henry Veggian B.A. in English, Montclair State University, 1994 M.A. in English, Montclair State University, 1996 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2005 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented By Henry Veggian It was defended on 12.1.2005 and approved by Eric O. Clarke Marcia Landy Jonathan Arac Dissertation Advisor: Paul A. Bove` ii Copyright © by Henry Veggian 2005 iii Mercury of the Waves: Modern Cryptology and U.S. Literature Henry Veggian, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 The doctoral dissertation examines United States literary and institutional history during the period 1900-1973. The study demonstrates how cryptology was detached from its philological residence over three phases (the amateur, institutional, and professional). In the amateur phase, which was regionally specific to the Midwest, the science was characterized by social reformist debate. In the second, institutional phase, the amateur version of cryptology was institutionalized by the United States federal government following WWI to imitate a specific institutional model (that of the French Bureau du Chiffre). During the third, professional phase, the prior two were enhanced during the interwar period by linguists, mechanical engineers, literary modernists, and cryptologists. Running parallel to this narrative is a modern American literary genealogy that, beginning with Henry Adams and extending through Thomas Pynchon, engaged cryptology during that same era. The dissertation locates their discourse within Vichian humanism, and in doing so it first explains how modern literature (and the American novel in particular), its practices, and institutions contributed discursive rhetoric, hermeneutical methods, and institutional models to the emergent 20th century U.S. security state; secondly, it argues that a particular genealogical style that spans the writings of Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and Thomas Pynchon elaborated an diverse rhetorical discourse by which to respond to that assemblage of new institutional entities, and without which that assemblage would be incoherent. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE....................................................................................................................................VI 1. HENRY ADAMS AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF AGGREGATE INTELLIGENCE.......................................................................................................................... 1 2. THE DOUBLE SCIENCE ................................................................................................ 65 3. THE SLAYER OF ARGUS: FIGURES OF A NEW INTELLIGENCE AND THOMAS PYNCHON’S “ENTROPY”............................................................................... 141 4. ALLEGORIES OF THE INANIMATE: PYNCHON’S V........................................... 194 5. THE HERMETIC DIVIDE............................................................................................. 260 6. THE HERMETIC TURN: FAULKNER, PYNCHON AND THE PULPS ................ 358 7. A VOCABULARY OF CURVES: GRAVITY’S RAINBOW...................................... 437 APPENDIX A ........................................................................................................................... 494 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................... 504 v PREFACE Run for we are discovered. I am forced to write this.1 I. The following study follows two divergent and occasionally convergent lines of a single discourse. Francis Bacon characterized the lines as a dual mission for the science of grammar in The Advancement of Learning (1605). The first outlined a study of the “popular” languages and literatures which congealed during the 19th century into scientific disciplines such as anthropology, archeology, and philology. Each of these sustained schools or methods dedicated to the study of “popular” languages and literatures; each was later institutionalized by the modern nations, thus assuring a continuation and longevity that reached beyond the individual scientists or schools and guaranteed that “popular” languages and literatures would reinforce national ambition with epistemological valence, among other things. The second mission of Bacon’s proposal differed from the first insofar as it was to be a speculative mission, a science that would be “philosophical, examining the power and nature of words, as they are the footsteps and prints of reason.” (The Advancement of Learning 138). The Elizabethan philosopher deemed the philosophical branch neglected and worthy of further development. The second branch, while less easily integrated into the modern national institutions, also assumed more distinct forms during the 19th 1 Elizabeth Wells Gallup “The Mercury Example.” Note dated July 23, 1919 (The Bacon Cipher Collection, New York Public Library). vi century (the most persistent being the Anglophone and Germanic schools of modern logic). The two missions proposed by Bacon were not necessarily segregated. Baconian empiricism unleashed a tremendous challenge to modern thought: could the “popular,” anthropological branch, and the speculative, logical branch be combined in a single science? Anglophone intellectuals developed what is perhaps the most influential response to this question over the following centuries. Marcel Danesi has noted that beginning with Hobbes, modern British and American thinkers “believed that thinking was essentially a mechanical process and that, in principle, machines could be built that were capable of thought” (47). Following Cartesian principles, a school of Anglophone thought that included Boole, Russell, Whitehead, and Turing theoretically separated the mind’s operations from the human body. This mechanistic tradition, with its abstract model of the human mind, extended through the American Information theorist Claude Shannon, whose work demonstrated that “the brain could finally be studied as an information-processing device” (47), thus returning the mechanistic model to its corporeal habitus (yet with significant alterations). There is another less familiar tradition (particularly to Anglophone readers) that elaborated the popular and speculative branches proposed by Bacon with The Advancement of Learning. This tradition begins with the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico who studied Bacon (or Lord Verulam, as Vico referred to him) and proposed that human history, rather than an abstract study of the rational mind, was the only possible field that could unite the two missions into a coherent entity. Vico loosely followed the four types of history proposed in Book Two of The Advancement of Learning, those being “Natural, Civil, Ecclesiastical, and Literary,” with an eye, however, towards considering “Literary History” in the greatest detail. Beginning with the first edition of La Scienza Nuova (1725), Vico argued that the vii “theological poets” of antiquity had founded the civilized nations (19). Over the two successive editions of La Scienza Nuova, the study of the ancient customs and the origins of institutions would depend increasingly upon the study of the origins and development of words and languages. Where Bacon had perceived “poesy” as a historical ornament, Vico had raised etymology, rhetoric, and grammar, to a privileged position: the “popular” languages and literatures of the ancient world, studied in the speculative manner, opened the door to a new endeavor: the human science of history. Vico deployed the speculative component of Bacon’s system in a historical register against one of the most important philosophers of the previously cited mechanistic tradition, Rene` Descartes.2 Vico posed the historical science in direct opposition to the Cartesian philosophy of “mind,” a theory which Vico objected to because it failed to explain the processes by which human individuals and their institutions developed (Vico was, after all, also a professor of Roman law). Without certain customs, rituals, and laws, Vico noted, human minds would not develop towards civilization and history. The conduit of that motion was the metaphorical potential of the language that expressed it, and which in turn formed dynamic patterns of institutional, cultural, and legal development. These were, as Edward W. Said noted in an eloquent essay on Vico, inseparable from the human body.3 In the words of Marcel Danesi: Vico’s approach to the study of mind has always stood in diametrical opposition to the mechanical view. For Vico, the study of rational thought was not a point of departure; it was its point of arrival. Modern computational theories of mind would be seen to be products of the metaphorical imagination. (47) Vico’s argument that metaphor was the source of human thought and history effectively amplified Bacon’s empirical philosophy of grammar in a historical key. 2 For the most explicit critique of Descartes, see Vico’s On the Study Methods of Our Time. 3 See “Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. 83-93. viii Metaphor was the key to a scientific understanding of complex linguistic processes such as the relationship between words and things, which in turn suggested the origins of other creative historical processes. Vico afforded