of English blank verse. Paradoxically, it was by reducing the freedom of
his imaginary monkeys that he liberated them to write something resem-
bling human speech. Still, there are limits on the ability of low-level
rules to produce a Hamlet. To generate the works of Shakespeare, we
need a complex human culture, a literary tradition, and a poetic genius
as well as chance. It took four billion years of an evolving Earth to pro-
duce the works of Shakespeare. Throwing off the rules that make such
complexity possible produces only nonsense.
Similarly, writers who avoid closure, preferring a poetics of endless
process, misunderstand the nature of creativity. Poems and stories can
no more achieve perfection than people can. A “totalizing system” is a
chimera. However, by submitting to conventional constraints, writers
can create works of infinite depth and complexity. Like a Koch
snowflake, a great poem is a fractal shape, bounded yet never complete;
it can sit in the palm of one’s hand, yet contain a figure of infinite length.
In creating his language machine in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan
Swift displayed far greater sophistication than our modern avant-garde.
Like Professor Bennett of Yale, he knew that chance alone would take
forever to generate interesting phrases, so he allowed his misguided pro-
fessor to apply some statistical rules to govern his mechanical frame.
Only after making the strictest “Computation of the general Proportion
there is in Books between the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs,
and other Parts of Speech” did the professor manage to produce an occa-
sional fragment of intelligible speech.
Swift knew that such a simple-minded system could never match the
infinite generativity of the human brain. That was the whole point of his
satire. But then, Swift was a brilliant poet, satirist, and author of one of
the world’s great books, not a theory-maddened professor trying to
improve mankind. Now that modern science is supplanting old models
with vital new theories of art and mind, poets and writers should work
with renewed confidence in the transformative powers of the literary
imagination. As they weave poems and stories on the mind’s enchanted
loom, the giant gears inside the academy are beginning to creak.164 Paul Lake