Insider Knowledge

 A friend is always accusing me of the annoying authorial habit of writing on this blog with a presumption of “insider knowledge.” That is to say, instead of simply explaining clearly what I mean by a particular reference or allusion, I will drop some offensive adverb that hints that the reader is supposed to already be familiar with the work I am about to cite. When my friend is not in fact familiar with it, he takes it amiss. 

What my friend resents most is a phrase like: “As Yeats famously observed….” I suppose he would prefer I say, “As William Butler Yeats once wrote”—and perhaps add an “the Irish poet” after the surname for good measure. He is convinced that such explanation is the least I owe my reader, and that my reluctance to append it can only stem from a craven impulse to seem au courant—to try to establish myself as part of an “in” crowd: one of the ones who “know.”

I won’t deny that sometimes my motives are as cowardly as he imagines. When I drop the “famously” or “obviously” adverbs into a line about Eric Redman’s The Dance of Legislation, say, it may indeed be because I had just learned that it is frequently assigned in freshman political science surveys, as an amiable introduction to the legislative process, and I am trying to disguise the fact that I had myself only just heard about and read it the week before, despite working for years in a policy profession. 

More frequently, however, the motive behind the “famously” adverb is a wholly legitimate and reasonable desire for self-preservation. No one wants to be the guy rushing into the room, breathlessly relaying as news what everyone else there already knows. (“Hey guys, I just read this amazing poem! It’s by Yeats, have you ever heard of him? It’s called ‘The Second Coming,’ and boy, golly gee, has it got some great lines!”)

And at the same time as I am saving myself from the social humiliation of coming across this way, I also imagine I am protecting my readers from affront. If they are already familiar with the citation I am about to make, after all, it would seem patronizing to explain it to them. 

And for those readers who are not familiar with it, the “of course” allows them to nod along as though they were. Thus, it spares the feelings of this group of readers too; whereas pedantically explaining the point might have left them feeling ignorant. As Pope recommends, among his other guidance in the practice of literary etiquette: when one is instructing one’s peers, it is best that “things unknown” be “propos’d as things forgot.” 

Ahem, or perhaps I should have said “Alexander Pope, the English poet,” lest someone wonder why I left off the definite article in front of “Pope,” or should respond to the reference with the question, “Which one?” as does a character overheard in a scene from William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (more on that book momentarily). You see how insulting the over-explanation can be? Society has had enough “mansplaining,” as well as “authorsplaining,” whether in speech or text. I don't need to add to it further. 

Plus, it’s not like I have deprived my readers of their ability to quickly gather for themselves whatever “insider knowledge” I have presumed. Even someone completely unaware of Yeats’s existence could infer from the context that he was some sort of poet or writer. Google or Wikipedia could take them the rest of the way there. 

Indeed, the phrase “As Yeats famously wrote…” is already unusually generous in the hand-holds it provides. Old-fashioned literary practice would have had me write “as the poet says…” instead, leaving the reader to either instantly recognize the reference or writhe unaided in the consciousness of their ignorance. Or I could take the approach Hazlitt typically does in his essays, and simply put certain lines in quotation marks, and leave you to take whatever guess you may as to their origin. 

Even these techniques, however, are no foil to the contemporary reader equipped with a WiFi connection. Whole lines can be looked up and traced through Google as easily as authors' names. If you don’t understand a reference, but it seems interesting, then look it up! Or don’t, if it doesn’t; no one demands you care enough to track it down in the first place. 

This advice to simply “look it up” has been the ultimate defense of the allusive writer since long before the internet age. A modern introduction by Thomas Pinney to Notes on a Cellar-Book—a guide to wine connoisseurship by the famously (there I go again) reference-prone critic George Saintsbury—notes that Saintsbury was aware of the amount of “insider knowledge” his texts presumed, but that he refused to apologize for it:

“I have,” Saintsbury is quoted as saying, “received complaints, mild and other, of the frequency of my unexplained allusions [….] I can only plead that I follow the Golden Rule. Nothing pleases me so much as an allusion that I understand—except one that I don’t and have to hunt up.” In other words, Saintsbury is saying, he’s doing us a favor. What fun—for now we get to go on a scavenger hunt to find the reference's source. 

William Gaddis (mentioned above) was also pilloried for what were seen as his “obscure” references, and made the same defense. His first and longest novel, The Recognitions, was deplored by critics upon its first appearance as being “unreadable,” due to the large number of abstruse allusions and citations it contains to everything from Egyptian funereal texts, to Mithraism, to the early Church Fathers. 

In a later novel, J R, Gaddis puts his frustrations with this line of criticism into the mouth of one of his characters—an otherwise unsympathetic stand-in for the author who has himself published a long and notoriously “difficult” novel called Agapē Agape. Faced with ignoramuses who couldn’t get past their incomprehension of the title’s opening Greek word, this character explodes, flipping through the pages of a reference book: “don’t know something look it up no God damned obligation encyclopedia right there look it up ag, ag, glass golf wrong God damned volume [….]”

Imagine how high this character’s indignation would tower in an age when looking up a reference required even fewer steps than finding an alphabetized encyclopedia. (Gaddis would, by the way, eventually publish a novel of his own under the title Agapē Agape concerning, among other things, a history of player pianos—a theme also briefly teased in The Recognitions.)

Gaddis’s character goes on to lament that all people want from books is to “tell them what they already know,” and this is—indeed—the core of the objection that people make to “insider knowledge,” “unexplained allusions,” causal references, and the rest. People don’t want to be reminded that something might exist with which they are not already familiar. It makes them feel ignorant; and no one wants to think of themselves that way. 

But, if one is capable of getting past that first moment of stung pride, one realizes that the only way to remedy ignorance is not to avoid any reminder of it, but to actually learn new things. The references found in literature that one does not immediately understand can be approached—as both Saintsbury and Gaddis recommend—as prompts to further study. They can be guideposts to learning something new. And what’s the point of reading at all if that is not precisely what one is seeking? Why read in the first place if one does not want to hear about anything one didn’t already know? 

A character in Gaddis’s Recognitions lodges the same complaint about readers these days as the one in J R. Asked for his honest feedback on a writer’s works, the former-divinity-student-turned-painter-turned-forger Wyatt Gwyon complains that so much writing today “never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know [….] They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people […] who know what’s going to come next […] and get angry at surprises.” But why, Gwyon seems to be asking, should we read at all, if nothing we find there will surprise us? 

Yet there is an irony here that Gaddis is toying with, for one of the core questions of his book is whether original work is even possible. The novel is full of counterfeiters, art forgers, plagiarists, and sundry other frauds, yet each of them defends himself as an artist who is simply working with preexisting materials (a counterfeiter says he was merely designing fake money; a plagiarizing playwright claims he has the right to draw upon the materials furnished by his environment, because all writers do the same, and so on). And are they wrong? Are even the greatest artists doing anything different? 

One of the many “abstruse” references in Gaddis’s novel is to a passage from Cicero, in which he was writing of the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles. According to Gaddis’s rendition of the passage, at least, (for I too am lazy, and do not always look up references in order to check them against the original sources), Cicero argues that Praxiteles did nothing more than remove marble, to reveal the preexisting statue within the stone block. 

Speaking in defense of plagiary, of attaching one’s name to the work of others, Gwyon gestures toward this same idea, in a sentence that furnishes one of the multiple justifications for the novel’s title: “Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it’s right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of… recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn’t be sinful to have wanted to have created beauty?” 

And indeed, this is surely the ultimate psychological reason why writers such as myself and Saintsbury and Gaddis want to make allusions and references in the first place. Hopefully we are careful enough to provide citations so that we could not be charged with plagiarism in the technical sense; but the impulse behind the desire to quote and the desire to pillage from another's work without acknowledgement is surely the same. It is the sense of familiarity and possession that one feels when one comes across a work of art that truly resonates. One thinks: “Ah, just so; that’s exactly how it is.” One recognizes it; one has thought the same thing oneself; one says—with Whitman—"I must have passed that way uncounted times ago"; and therefore one feels it somehow belongs to oneself, even if one did not write the original. 

And so perhaps the quoter, the dropper of allusions, is also only looking to find “things [they] already know.” And perhaps the things unknown in a work of art that speak to one really are “things forgot.” 

In which case, I have no real quarrel with the people who condemn “insider knowledge.” All they are saying is that their insider knowledge is not the same as mine. Whatever I was motivated to transcribe in the form of a quote or allusion on this blog spoke to me because it was—in some sense—a thing I already knew, by the time I read it. Apparently, it did not so speak to them. In that case, pass on. Read elsewhere. Await your own summons; it need not be the same as mine.