Erudition

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Erudition

1asurbanipal
dec 27, 2020, 4:25 am

I was thinking about various types of erudition, depending on the author's country of origin.
Joyce was Irish, then European. He knew a lot about Homer, the history of Ireland, about science. He used names of African rivers in Finnegans Wake, but Africa was in fact beyond his scope.
Gaddis, an American, had an erudition focusing on the history of Europe.
Borges was Argentinian. I like his type of erudition. He had English, Portuguese, Spanish roots. But he also included Arab motifs.
Eco - Eco was Italian and knew a lot about the Middle Ages and later epochs, until 1700, let's say.
It's worth noting that Eco made allusions to Borges, and Borges made allusions to Ireland. They are a certain type of writer, extremely well read in old stories.
Shakespeare, I believe, was an erudite, he read lots of medieval chronicles.
Poe was well-read, especially in European matters.

2thorold
dec 27, 2020, 4:52 am

Isn’t erudition in authors a bit like physical fitness in athletes, or a talent for sherry-drinking in professors, a basic qualification that only starts to become an interesting topic for discussion when someone succeeds in the profession without having it?

3asurbanipal
Redigerat: dec 27, 2020, 8:21 am

With Borges especially, I had the impression that he went so deep as to see certain patterns, as to be able to be a bit prophetic. In a sense, he knew what would happen next, like an experienced stock broker, he knew where to search for these new trends.

I mean their books are not all erudition, there is a lot of life experience mixed in, relations between people.

4asurbanipal
Redigerat: apr 19, 2021, 10:53 am

Melville and his librarian. Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow and Gaddis in The Recognitions. Dante Alighieri. Jules Verne.

5melannen
apr 19, 2021, 11:53 am

How has the meaning of erudition changed in the age of Google?

I have been re-reading Sayers, which - while not, perhaps, erudite in the sense of some of the authors quoted here - is well-known for referencing widely in the canon of the educated of 1920s British. I am well-read enough that on my first Sayers read - about twenty years ago, when the modern world of information was developing, but still very new - I able to recognize a lot of her references, and when I didn't, to at least recognize that they were references, and I didn't get them.

Re-reading them now, there's a Sayers website that has annotations for every quotation, and anything that isn't there that I'm curious about, I can just look up on my smartphone as I read.

And re-reading it that way, while thinking about my first read, also gives me a new perspective on the shape of Sayers' erudition: what seemed, when I was just floating over it in with a general sense that she was learned, becomes, with the annotations, the knowledge that she had half a dozen or so authors she knew very well, that the average person might only have heard of, and quoted them extensively; a large pool of very well-known references (like the Bible or Shakespeare) or things that were in the popular culture of the time, and only seem erudite now because they're old; and a smaller number of private references obscure enough that even with Google, the annotators aren't entirely sure what she's referencing, or possibly she's just misquoting so badly they can't track it down.

These things mixed together give the impression of vast learning - the well-known references that everyone can catch, and go 'oh, she's clever!'; the less well-known ones that people aren't going to catch, or might halfway catch, to go 'oh, she's cleverer than me!'; and the very obscure ones, which the average reader experiences as ripples on a vast pool of knowledge inaccessible to them. When in reality, that 'vast knowledge' is that she knows four or six poets very well, is good with pop culture, and isn't afraid to reference things her audience won't know.

I don't mean to pick on Sayers - a lot of 'erudite' novels look more like this, when you use Google's ability to source any quotation in five seconds or less to break them down. Sayers is a good one to think about, though, because the characters are very self-aware about their displays of erudition (and ironic about it in a way that feels very modern.) Which means you get things in the books like the heroine knowing she has been quoted at but not recognizing the quote, and sneaking off in secret later to try to look it up, 'which took her two days'. It took the annotators with Google much longer to track that one down - which leaves me desperately curious about what methods she would have used to give Sayers that two-day estimate! And also trying to remember what it looked like to put together an 'erudite' piece of writing before the internet - where that half-remembered quotation would stay half-remembered forever unless you could find the physical book you'd read it in, and where the only way to fake being wider read than you were was something like Bartlett's.