What a mess. Forbidden Knowledge: from Prometheus to Pornography, as written by Roger Shattuck, is a book by a literary scholar who knows a lot but doesn’t know what to do with what he has learned.
The question Shattuck poses is simple and clear: are there things that humans should not know? His answer from the start is a clear and succinct “Yes, absolutely.” But as the book progresses he chips away at his own conclusion and leaves the reader doubting the author’s convictions.
Shattuck starts off in the ancient world, analyzing texts from the Greek and Roman mythologies. Prometheus, who gets punished for eternity for stealing fire from the gods, is used as a framework for the rest of the book. Just as importantly, Prometheus’s sister Pandora, the one who opened the forbidden box unleashing evil into the world, is also just as prominent. The moral he derives from these stories is that Prometheus and Pandora deserved to be punished because they did what they were forbidden to do. The result is that we all have to suffer because of their transgressions. Shattuck does not thoroughly examine any alternative interpretations of these myths, which are considered by some to be archetypal heroes’ journeys. Prometheus, for example, sacrificed himself to bring useful knowledge to humanity, a step along the way of human progress. From the start of the book, Shattuck runs the risk of losing his audience. If he does not want to preach to his own choir, the tastkof the author then is to win over the resistance. His next move in the argument is not helpful.
It is not hard to see a connection between Prometheus and Pandora to the Bible. Prometheus is an obvious progenitor of Jesus Christ, among hundreds of others. Pandora easily predicts the transgression of Eve in the Garden of Eden. He draws the same overly simplistic conclusions from the Bible that he got from Greek mythology: stay in your place or you will get punished and bring immense harm to everybody else in the world. This amounts to little more than circular logic. Even worse, Shattuck’s religious bias comes out into the open, freely displaying that, to him, dogma, belief, and obedience are more important than rational inquiry or exploration of ideas. To be fair, Shattuck’s analysis is more literary than theological, therefore he gets off the hook for not merely being a Bible-thumping, knuckle-dragging conservative. Up to a point, he does put some thought into what he is writing. But another further problem creeps into the text here. Just what does the author mean by “forbidden knowledge”?
Regardless, Shattuck takes a quick flyover of the Middle Ages to bring, what he calls the Wife of Bath Syndrome into his argument, the meaning of this being that when you tell someone that an act is forbidden, that makes them want to do it even more. This is derived from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. This makes an easy transition to John Milton.
Shattuck first takes issue with Milton for his poem Areopagitica, a piece that celebrates and vindicates free speech. Then he goes into a fairly detailed analysis of Paradise Lost. We all know the story of Adam and Eve, but Milton famously brought the characters of Satan and Eve into full three-dimensionality. This isn’t the part that Shattuck fixates on though. After taking Eve to task for eating the forbidden fruit, committing the sin of disobedience, he makes an exaggerated claim, based on a stanza from the epic poem, stating that people should learn but never more than they need to know. Shattuck keeps beating this same drum throughout the rest of the book without ever analyzing it, testing it, or examining its useful application in practice. In one paragraph he even goes so far as to say the Hegelian triadic method of analysis involving thesis-antithesis-synthesis should be dropped for a dyadic thesis-conclusion method of argumentation, meaning counter-arguments and analytical reasoning should be abandoned in favor of argument by authority and acceptance of unproven axioms. Authorities became authorities because they were right, therefore authorities can never be wrong so just do as you are told and don’t ask questions unless you already know the answer.
What follows is analyses of several classic literary texts. Goethe’s Faust, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Emily Dickinson. Like in the author’s discourse on Milton, a thorough breakdown of themes and literary stylizations are given, followed by some references back to Prometheus, Pandora, and Eve. The passages on Emily Dickson are especially problematic because they don’t expressly address the theme of forbidden knowledge. Shattuck actually praises Dickinson for not marrying the man who loved her. She follows Milton’s dictum that you should never know more than what you need to know. Dickinson is a role model for Shattuck; he gives her a patronizing pat on the head while telling her she is the good little girl he believes she should be. His reasoning behind celebrating her virtue is that she wrote a poem that he liked. The discussion gets no more complicated than that. This begs the question, what does this have to do with forbidden knowledge? Is marriage forbidden knowledge? Is marriage even a form of knowledge?
The most exciting part of this train wreck is the chapter on Albert Camus’s The Stranger. While Shattuck has a slightly different take on the book than my own, he claims that Meursault is a man who lives without any self-knowledge or self-reflection while my interpretation was more in line with traditional existentialism which means he goes through life refusing to make choices, we both agree that The Stranger is the most misinterpreted book in literary history. A lot of readers fail to recognize that Meursault is an unreliable narrator who lies to the audience and to himself as well. Also a lot of readers fail to see that he is not being sentenced to death for not crying at his mother’s funeral, as so many seem to think based on the lawyer’s testimony, but he is sentenced to death for the cold blooded murder of an innocent man. You can only make the case that Meursault is a hero if you ignore the fact that he committed the crime. But Shattuck’s larger point is that Meursault does not awaken to himself until he is put in the prison cell where he begins to grow in self-awareness for the first time. You could make the case that Meursault has forbidden himself from self-knowledge. But doesn’t that go against Shattuck’s thesis? If Meursault had transgressed his own self-imposed limitations, in pursuance of forbidden knowledge, he probably would have avoided getting himself into the trouble he did. Shattuck, in the most effective argument he proposes in his book, shatters his own argument in the process.
At the end of this first section, two things stand out. One is clear, the other not so much. The clear point is that Forbidden Knowledge is a work of literary criticism more than an examination of ethics or epistemology as it is originally presented. The second, and less clear revelation, is that Shattuck’s definition of “knowledge” is fuzzily defined and broadly includes the other concepts of “actions” and “experiences”. Therefore, Faust is transgressing the law of forbidden knowledge through the act of selling his soul to the Devil and Viktor Frankenstein is doing the same with the act of creating a human life in his laboratory. Both stories are about forbidden acts, not about forbidden knowledge. Furthermore, Emily Dickinson is celebrated for remaining a virgin and Meursault is punished for murder. Although it is possible to have knowledge of marriage and murder, sometimes both in some tragic circumstances, the knowledge and the act are not the same thing. Knowing how to build a nuclear bomb is not the same as the act of building a nuclear bomb. Imagining yourself saving a baby from a burning building is not the same as the experience of saving a baby from a burning building. If so, then everybody who knows how to build a bomb would be a bomb-maker and everybody who imagined themselves rescuing a baby from a burning building would be a hero. By logical extension, most men on Earth would thereby be millionaires and porn stars and we know that isn’t the case. Reality doesn’t work that way.
So half way through, can this book get any worse? Yes it can.
The second section addresses an unusual pairing of subjects, namely science and the Marquis de Sade. In the scientific chapters, Shattuck specifically addresses genetics and the mapping of the human genome. His writing on this topic is histrionic, paranoid, and sadly misinformed. Shattuck worries that genetic engineering will lead to some kind of evolutionary disaster without taking into account that geneticists have already taken the moral implications of their science into consideration. They aren’t a bunch of back-alley kitchen chemists who fund their projects by manufacturing low-grade crystal meth in abandoned trailers in the woods of Tennessee. He calls for congressional oversight and watchdog panels even though we already have these things in place. His biggest fear is that gene editing will inevitably lead to the creation of a monster in the same way Dr. Frankenstein created his own creature. Never mind that scientists have already asked these kinds of questions before setting out on their endeavors. What is truly worrisome is that Shattuck falls back on classic literature to say that the human genome should not be mapped. It should be left alone because Pandora opened her box, Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and Viktor Frankenstein created a monster that killed all his friends. We can use Shattuck’s own advice against him. He could have prevented himself from making this error in judgment by not trying to claim expertise in a scientific field that he doesn’t understand. This doesn’t mean he shouldn’t learn about science. It means he shouldn’t condemn it when he doesn’t know enough about it to make an effective judgment.
The final chapter on the Marquis de Sade is confused, muddled, and lacking in direction. Shattuck defines pornography as “works of art or literature whose sole purpose is sexual arousal”. He uses that as a starting point but then never sufficiently examines whether Sade wrote pornography or not. Considering that Sade’s oeuvre consisted of a mixture of sex, violence, and philosophy, it might not be so easy to pigeonhole him into the category of “pornography”. Sade’s lesser known works consisted of essays, novels, short stories, and plays that contain almost no sex at all in them. Furthermore, it is not obvious that Sade actually wrote with the intention of sexually arousing anybody. Most readers react to his writings with a combination of disgust, amusement, and boredom and unless you are a complete sicko, you probably won’t be sexually aroused by any of it. If Sade was a pornographer, he wasn’t a very good one. It is probably that Sade’s main intentions were to shock and offend rather than turn them into practitioners of his poorly articulated philosophy.
Shattick’s intentions in writing about Sade are not especially clear. Once again, he analyzes a lot of content without giving a definite purpose for it. He claims that reading Sade makes one take the risk of turning into a pervert or a sadist and that living in the kind of world Sade imagined would be a disaster for everybody even though such a fantasy world could not possibly exist. But do we really need to be told this? Do we really need to have someone explain to us why having sex with a mutilated baby corpse is wrong?
Shattuck’s two biggest worries are that some psychologically imbalanced people might try to imitate what Sade wrote, citing Ted Bundy and the Moors Murderers as examples since they were inspired by the Marquis. The other is that Sade might become part of the literary canon. His concern is based on the fascination that some obscure French modernist intellectuals, and Camille Paglia too, admire Sade for various reasons. It isn’t likely that Sade will ever sit comfortably in the ranks of Homer, Voltaire, and Dickens any time soon, especially not in this era of political correctness. American college students probably think a literary canon is a big gun that shoots books anyways. Most people of the internet generations don’t even have a long enough attention span to read a Sade novel.
Shattuck doesn’t think Sade should be censored, but he should be kept away from those who are potentially psychopathic, as if we can easily spot them as they grow into adulthood. Imagine the courts granting a restraining order on some twelve year old kid, preventing him from accessing 120 Days of Sodom because the judge fears it might turn him into a serial killer. By the same token, we should suppress operas by Wagner because they might inspire another Hitler. Charles Manson was inspired by Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Maybe we should restrict people’s access to that one too. Has Shattuck put any thought into what he is saying? And again, his critique of Sade is more about forbidden acts of sex and violence and less so about what the perpetrators of these acts actually know. Ultimately we are the ones who should be forbidden from knowing about Sade. Shattuck himself should never be forbidden from reading those books though, and why he is exempt from such restriction is never explained. I suspect it is because, like many conservatives, his moral grandstanding is a smokescreen to prevent people from thinking he actually enjoys pornography.
Forbidden Knowledge is a pointless mess. The arguments are not well-supported, terminologies are not well-defined, and logical conclusions are not drawn. It is primarily a work of literary criticism, even though a lot of the literary analysis has no direct connection to the position that the author argues for. He never addresses real issues of forbidden knowledge like the necessary secrecy of governments, corporations, the military, or espionage agencies. He also never addresses the need to keep personal data private, a necessity that is more endangered now that we have digital technology and people are willingly giving up private information to vampiric data mining companies for the sake of being popular on social media. I wouldn’t fault Shattuck for that, however, because he wrote this book before the internet became the dominant entity in our lives. Roger Shattuck has an incredible range of knowledge, but his range is too deep and not wide enough. He can’t see past his own nose. Maybe he would have done himself better by pursuing more of the forbidden knowledge he prevented himself from knowing.
Actually, considering how shallow and ignorant most Americans are these days, more people could benefit from the pursuit of knowledge rather than the pursuit of likes on the internet. There’s plenty of information out there to be known and a lot of this forbidden stuff is of trivial importance but at least it gets people interested in reading. Real knowledge consists of how to separate quality information from garbage and having what it takes to use it effectively once the reader has apprehended it. Leave censorship to cult leaders and authoritarians who exert control over people by restricting their access to information. Freedom comes from the pursuit of knowledge be it good, bad , or ugly so don’t hold yourself back just because some puritanical control freak doesn’t like whatever it is that interests you.
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