Sept. 6: Lumps in Foucault, Pale Fire and the Biographer's Tale

When I was little my father once told me there were only two kinds of people in the world: Lumpers and Splitters. Lumpers, in order to make sense of their cosmos, have to take all the small details and lump them together into ideas that are easier to understand or that fit into a grander picture. Splitters take all of their daily thoughts, words and actions and split them up into more manageable forms which they constantly scrutinize so that they can further split them into smaller pieces. For the most part I'm still a little hazy on the distinction between the two but it makes perfect sense to my father.
The young biographer in the Biographer's Tale begins his story by collecting all the smallest pieces of evidence about his biographer and lumping them into categories that he can further lump together so that he can make sense of what is going on in the biographer's analysis of his subject's lives. The marbles and note cards, which he continuously examines and rearranges, represent the little details of the biographer's life which the young man is trying to lump together to make into a complete human being. The final product would have been completely different if the young biographer had taken these small pieces and analyzed and further divided them with all of the numerous literary, behavioral and psychological theories he constantly tries to avoid. The young biographer's methods of analysis and his interpretation of the biographer's notes and symbols determine the entire evolution of the young biographer's life. These strange little ways of organizing life, Foucault's very specific list of slimy, unwholesome creatures he would not eat and the gibberish of the young child in Pale Fire, are a manifestation of the character and personality of the mind's behind such random organizations. These organizational methods have do not have the same meaning from one person to the next. The biographer's marbles, for example, represent an entirely different set of thought for the young biographer than the deceased man he's studying. For the young man the marbles played a key role in his development as he found out who he was and what kind of work he wanted to do with his life. For the old biographer, the marbles represented places, times, people and all other sorts of things he encountered while studying those about whom he was going to write his interpretations of their lives. In the end the young biographer puts them in a bowl on display whereas the old man had them hidden away in a shoe box in his niece's attic. The objects are important for both characters but the details of their importance are different for each man and help to distinguish what sorts of lives they live or lived.
The lumpers and splitters theory still boggles my mind, but it explains how some people organize their lives and how they make sense of the events that unfold on a daily basis. Random lists of disgusting animals that one would not want to eat may be an important indication that Foucault did not think like the average man and helps to explain how he could ask such previously un-thought-of or at least un-voiced questions about the nature of society. Rather than looking at the world from what most people would consider a forward facing perspective, listing all the foods he would like to eat, Foucault starts from the opposite end and lists those that would probably turn most stomachs.