Ultimate Books
Truth and lies and all things in-between, shaken, not stirred.
September 7, 2003There is an idea from my off-line notes that struck me again today as I re-read it—the idea of Ultimate Books.
I posit that there is only one ultimate truth in the world, which is the world in all its ramifications. Its ultimateness is ensured by its comprehensiveness, for by definition it includes and subsumes all truthful statements.
Since presumably literature is the greater the closer it takes us to the truth—a problem statement in some quarters—in surveying works of increasing sophistication we should find also the increasing shrinkage of the range of subjects those works cover. In other words, as lies are sloughed off, all veracious books will converge on the one, the only true topic that has ever existed.
Since Truth is stupendous and immense, such veracious books will only describe its different facets (like dream hunters gleaning only pieces of Adam Ruhani’s body in Pavič’s Dictionary of the Khazars), yet we can envision that some superhumanly perspicacious writer could fashion the Ultimate True Book, one that speaks to any reader with final authority and does not leave anything out. This is the ideal book: all others are its subsets, or shadows, clear or blurred by lies and errors. Religious people, of course, hold the Bible, or Koran, or some such tome, to be this book. Diderot tried, perhaps unwittingly, to approach it in his Encyclopedia. Others deny its existence, or, in the case of postmodernists, deny that it could ever exist.
Some might surmise that the Ultimate True Book is just another name for the Book of Nature; that is, for the world itself regarded as an extremely rich, long novel. That is not correct. In fact, the two ideas conflict. The Ultimate True Book is not nature, it’s about nature. It sees nature as the ultimate story and narrates it as such. To the early Christians, however, the ultimate story was god’s plan, whereas nature was the book that told it, reduced from message to medium. In their view my True Book would be not second but third in the hierarchy, penultimate rather than ultimate, a narration of a narration.
Regardless of which view is correct, the Ultimate True Book should be incomprehensible to a human reader. He would drown in an infinity of information referring mostly to phenomena outside human perception and understanding. Besides, he would run into linguistic difficulties. Since our languages parallel our limited worldview, the Ultimate True Book would have to use an expanded, quite literally universal language, of which human languages purged of fallacious concepts perhaps could constitute a subset. This universal language could not be learned by a human due to lack of requisite mental capacity.
So far our literary ideal sounds like an awfully distant, cold and useless abstraction. Perhaps we should settle for an Ultimate True Human Book, a scaled-down version of the complete original adapted to fit the limits of the human mind. It is to this book that the greatest works of literature aspire.
If you reverse all the reasoning above you will arrive at the opposite end of the spectrum where, devoid of any truth whatsoever, resides the Ultimate False Book. Although they claim that for every truth there are a thousand lies, the bible of falsehood ought to number only one for reasons similar to those that govern the perfect truth: a lie cannot be called ultimate if other lies escape its compass.
Further edification and tomfoolery:
Ask a Foolish Question, Robert Sheckley’s sci-fi take on computers that hold answers to the ultimate questions.
The International Language, an amusing short film on overcoming language barriers, by the San Francisco comedy troupe Killing My Lobster (MPEG video, 5.5Mb).
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