I am reading Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude; thus far, the protagonist is still in the fifth grade. I especially enjoyed this passage:
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Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read still couldn't, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year plan, the going concern. You couldn't be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You'd retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D-enriched chocolate milk....
You met zones everywhere. The schoolyard was neighborhoods: black, black girl, Puerto Rican, basketball, handball, left behind.
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That last little taxonomy of schoolyard cliques reminded me of the classification of animals in an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, as quoted in the beginning of Foucault's The Order of Things (my senior seminar in philosophy was on Foucault).
I went looking for the Foucault passage to include it here, and realized I had forgotten that Foucault had been quoting Borges, which therefore makes the Chinese encyclopedia almost certainly fictional, although there is some debate. Here is the passage from The Order of Things:
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This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a `certain Chinese encyclopedia in which it is written that`animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.
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Also from the article quoted above was a passage from George Lackoff which offers some insight on Borges' inclusion of the fabricated Chinese taxonomy:
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Borges of course, deals with the fantastic. These not only are not natural human cateogires they could not be natural human categories. But part of what makes this passage art, rather than mere fantasy, is that it comes close to the impression a Western reader gets when reading descriptions of nonwestern languages and cultures. The fact is that people around the world categorize things in ways that both boggle the Western mind and stump Western linguists and antropologists.
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Lethem's schoolyard taxonomy, I think, comes close to the impression an adult gets when dealing with the long-forgotten vagaries of childhood socialization (or, "the stark impossibility of being nine").
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Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read still couldn't, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year plan, the going concern. You couldn't be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You'd retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D-enriched chocolate milk....
You met zones everywhere. The schoolyard was neighborhoods: black, black girl, Puerto Rican, basketball, handball, left behind.
-----
That last little taxonomy of schoolyard cliques reminded me of the classification of animals in an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, as quoted in the beginning of Foucault's The Order of Things (my senior seminar in philosophy was on Foucault).
I went looking for the Foucault passage to include it here, and realized I had forgotten that Foucault had been quoting Borges, which therefore makes the Chinese encyclopedia almost certainly fictional, although there is some debate. Here is the passage from The Order of Things:
-----
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a `certain Chinese encyclopedia in which it is written that`animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.
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Also from the article quoted above was a passage from George Lackoff which offers some insight on Borges' inclusion of the fabricated Chinese taxonomy:
-----
Borges of course, deals with the fantastic. These not only are not natural human cateogires they could not be natural human categories. But part of what makes this passage art, rather than mere fantasy, is that it comes close to the impression a Western reader gets when reading descriptions of nonwestern languages and cultures. The fact is that people around the world categorize things in ways that both boggle the Western mind and stump Western linguists and antropologists.
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Lethem's schoolyard taxonomy, I think, comes close to the impression an adult gets when dealing with the long-forgotten vagaries of childhood socialization (or, "the stark impossibility of being nine").