in his essay on Joyce’s Ulyssesand alluded to in his poem’s Greek and
Latin epigraphs and final notes on primitive myths. In some regards, this
secret code demonstrates Eliot’s literary conservatism, since it suggests
that even a poem as fragmented and dislocated as The Waste Landis
intended to bear a heavy freight of personal and cultural meaning—if
only to an elect few. Poets like Eliot and Pound, who were steeped in the
literature of the past, could wring interesting poetry from their tactic of
displacement because they worked within a vital tradition, just as Sterne
could tweak the rules of fiction to comic effect during the era of the
novel’s ascendancy. But as experimentation displaces tradition, avant-
garde one-up-man-ship inevitably pushes dislocation past the point of
diminishing returns, as the last century has shown.
A third type of difficulty occurs when modern writers, like the pro-
fessors of Lagado, substitute randomness for rules, placing their faith in
chance to produce order and meaning. “Give a monkey a typewriter,”
asserts a modern adage, “and in enough time, it will produce the col-
lected works of Shakespeare.”
This strategy, too, turns out to be a myth. When William Bennett, a
professor of engineering at Yale, tested this idea, substituting computers
for monkeys, he discovered that “if a trillion monkeys were to type ten
keys a second at random, it would take more than a trillion times as long
as the universe has been in existence merely to produce the sentence, ‘To
be, or not to be: that is the question.’” It turns out that randomly typing
monkeys can’t produce even one memorable soliloquy, much less the
complete works of Shakespeare.
However, after doing a statistical analysis of Act III ofHamlet,
Bennett devised a new program. In it, he arranged for some letters to
appear with the same frequency as they did in Shakespeare’s texts. When
he ran the new program, his computerized monkeys still typed nonsense;
but after he reprogrammed again, adding new rules about which letters
should begin and end words, simple words suddenly began to appear in
his text interspersed with the chaos. By adding still more rules, about
groups of three and four letters, Bennett’s computer finally produced—
after an all-night run, in the midst of endless gibberish—the following
ghostly echo of Hamlet’s famous line:
TO DEA NOW NAT TO BE WILL AND THEM BE DOES
DOESORNS CALAWROUTOULD.By systematically applying rules that increased redundancy and lowered
the system’s entropy, Bennett came closer and closer to producing a line
The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature 163