A Radical Corpuscle
In Wild Talents Fort remembered that his father used to punish him by forcing him to work Saturdays at the family’s grocery, scraping off the labels from canned goods and pasting on his parents’s label. “Theoretically,” he said, the punishment was meant to teach him “the errors of his deceitful ways”. Fort learned a different lesson:
“One time I had pyramids of canned goods, containing a variety of fruits and vegetables. But I had used all except peach labels. I pasted peach labels on peach cans, and then came to apricots. Well, aren’t apricots peaches? And there are plums that are virtually apricots. I went on, either mischievously, or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans, and succotash. I can’t quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humorist or a scientists. I think that it was mischief, but, as we go along, there will come a more respectful recognition that also it was scientific procedure.”
It may be that moments such as this one, in which Fort confronted his father’s authoritarianism and refused to truckle, were what bred his independence of mind. It may even be, as Philip Jenkins as suggested, that Fort was born to a particularly rebellious generation. Whatever the cause, Fort was an individual, which is paradoxical, as his adult philosophy questioned the very notion of individuality. In 1892, when he was 18, Fort left his home of Albany, New York, and traveled extensively, only returning after he was struck ill. Anna Filing, a girl whom Fort knew in his youth, nursed him back to help, and the two were married in 1896. They settled in the Bronx, and Fort eked out a living as a writer. Although he wrote several novels only one, The Outcast Manufacturers, was ever published; otherwise, he made do with short stories. Fort’s short stories won the attention of Theodore Dreiser, who became a mentor and patron. They ranged from the humorous to the mysterious to slice-of-life pieces, most marked by wit, sharp dialogue, and striking images. (A born collector, Fort carried pencil and paper wherever he went and wrote down similes, metaphors, and descriptions as they came to him. These he squirreled away in boxes that filled his and Anna’s apartment, going to them for ideas, arranging and rearranging them.) “A Radical Corpuscle,” published in 1906, continued Fort’s grocery-store philosophizing. A white blood cell lectures other leucocytes that they are not, as they imagined, individuals, but parts of a larger whole, and man himself part of a still larger existence: “He is a white corpuscle to the earth. He says the moon causes the tide. Perhaps. Then the moon is the Earth’s heart.” The cellular prophet, though, made no converts.
Around 1906, Fort began a new collection. He clipped stories from newspapers that fit into what he thought of as a developing system. This hobby grew into an obsession, so that by 1912he was spending great spans of time at the New York Public Library, taking notes from various technical journals and books, categorizing what would become 40,000 citations according to 1,300 general subjects--. Dreiser called him a “library mole” and warned, “Eat libraries and suffer inevitable encyclopediac apoplexy.” Instead, Fort wrote a metaphysical work, X. As reconstructed, later, by Damon Knight, X argued that humans were controlled by Martians—through a mysterious force known as X—and the evidence for it were the odd coincidences and mysterious happenings that Fort had been gathering in his research. While X sought a publisher—it had already wowed Dreiser—Fort went to work on a sequel, Y, claiming that an advanced civilization lived at the North Pole. His obsession became easier to maintain in 1916, and again in 1917, when small inheritances relieved Fort of the need to sell his stories, and he pushed on, imagining yet a third book in what was becoming a series, Z, about psychic phenomena. Of these manuscripts, only Z lived, although in modified form. Fort destroyed X and Y, probably in a fit of depression that also saw him destroy his notes and head to England. Before that, Z became The Book of the Damned (1919), and that was followed by New Lands (1923). In England, Fort returned to the haunting of libraries and collected new notes, which he continued compiling after he and Anna returned to New York, the research resulting in his final two books, Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932).
The four books that make up the Fortean corpus are unusual animals. They are not volumes of occultism—as they had been in their earlier iterations, X and Y. Fort nowhere straightforwardly argues for Martian bosses or hidden polar civilizations. Instead, they have the impish quality that characterizes the anecdote about his grocery-store rebellion, with Fort proposing outlandish theories, then undermining them, as when he discussed a newspaper report of a talking dog, but discounted it because the dog was supposed to have disappeared into green smoke: talking dogs are worth considering, but not vanishing ones. Neither can the books be classed as novels, either, although they are often novelistic. Fort commented about Lo!: “It is a kind of non-fictional fiction [so] that, though concerned with entomological and astronomical matters, and so on, it is ‘thrilling’ and ‘melodramatic.” And the narrator, as Colin Bennett notes, is not Fort, but a slightly different personality. Indeed, Fort rejects the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, just as he rejects the difference between peaches and succotash. The books are philosophical, at times wrestling with the meaning of Darwinian theories of evolution and quantum physics, but Fort did not consider himself a philosopher. “I’m just a writer,” he said. His books, weaving together the thousands of reports of strange happenings, solved what he saw as writerly problems:
“I have a theory that the moving pictures will pretty nearly drive out the novel, as they have very much reduced the importance of the stage—but that there will arise writing that will retain the principles of dramatic structure of the novel, but, not having human beings for its characters, will not be producible in the pictures, and will survive independently. Maybe I am a pioneer in a new writing that instead of old-fashioned heroes and villains, will have floods and bugs and stars and earthquakes for its characters and motifs.”
Nonetheless, there was a metaphysical unity to the books, one that makes sense of his humor, one that builds from his childhood tomfoolery through short stories such as “A Radical Corpuscle” and his musings in X and Y. Fort was a monist. He argued that all categories were specious, hiding the underlying unity of all reality—the sameness of peaches and apricots, the oneness of humanity with the moon. The key to discovering this unity were the bizarre reports he collected—the falls of stone, like what occurred in Oakland, rains of blood, mysterious lights and unexplained disappearances, and frogs, lots of falling frogs. Fort divided history into three epochs, what he called Dominants. The first Dominant was religious; the second was scientific. In each case, a selected group of people—theologians, scientists—erected a system of classification from the raw material of the integrated universe. To do, they had to exclude—in the case of scientists, this meant damning some data as wrong, as unthinkable. Thus, Fort could go through entire runs of scientific journals, picking out hundreds of facts that could not—and would not—be explained by scientists, but were instead ignored, forgotten, damned to oblivion. In resuscitating these facts, Fort wanted his readers to question not just the judgment of scientists (and theologians) but the very foundation of their respective projects. Scientists wanted to dismiss events such as those that befell Irene Fellows because they did not fit into their explanatory frameworks. But it was only by contemplating such mysteries that the nature of reality could be divined. Speaking of all those falling amphibians, Fort quipped, “We shall pick up existence by its frogs.” And so, pasting the same label on cans of seemingly different contents was science, as it accurately described not only the contents of the cans but of the entire universe. Everything is peaches. And everything is not peaches. The world was entering, Fort thought, a third Dominant, the Dominant of Intermediatism, the era of the hyphen, in which categories withered and died: fiction and non-fiction were the same; humor and science were indistinguishable; the fantastic was real, the real fantastic.
In Wild Talents Fort remembered that his father used to punish him by forcing him to work Saturdays at the family’s grocery, scraping off the labels from canned goods and pasting on his parents’s label. “Theoretically,” he said, the punishment was meant to teach him “the errors of his deceitful ways”. Fort learned a different lesson:
“One time I had pyramids of canned goods, containing a variety of fruits and vegetables. But I had used all except peach labels. I pasted peach labels on peach cans, and then came to apricots. Well, aren’t apricots peaches? And there are plums that are virtually apricots. I went on, either mischievously, or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans, and succotash. I can’t quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humorist or a scientists. I think that it was mischief, but, as we go along, there will come a more respectful recognition that also it was scientific procedure.”
It may be that moments such as this one, in which Fort confronted his father’s authoritarianism and refused to truckle, were what bred his independence of mind. It may even be, as Philip Jenkins as suggested, that Fort was born to a particularly rebellious generation. Whatever the cause, Fort was an individual, which is paradoxical, as his adult philosophy questioned the very notion of individuality. In 1892, when he was 18, Fort left his home of Albany, New York, and traveled extensively, only returning after he was struck ill. Anna Filing, a girl whom Fort knew in his youth, nursed him back to help, and the two were married in 1896. They settled in the Bronx, and Fort eked out a living as a writer. Although he wrote several novels only one, The Outcast Manufacturers, was ever published; otherwise, he made do with short stories. Fort’s short stories won the attention of Theodore Dreiser, who became a mentor and patron. They ranged from the humorous to the mysterious to slice-of-life pieces, most marked by wit, sharp dialogue, and striking images. (A born collector, Fort carried pencil and paper wherever he went and wrote down similes, metaphors, and descriptions as they came to him. These he squirreled away in boxes that filled his and Anna’s apartment, going to them for ideas, arranging and rearranging them.) “A Radical Corpuscle,” published in 1906, continued Fort’s grocery-store philosophizing. A white blood cell lectures other leucocytes that they are not, as they imagined, individuals, but parts of a larger whole, and man himself part of a still larger existence: “He is a white corpuscle to the earth. He says the moon causes the tide. Perhaps. Then the moon is the Earth’s heart.” The cellular prophet, though, made no converts.
Around 1906, Fort began a new collection. He clipped stories from newspapers that fit into what he thought of as a developing system. This hobby grew into an obsession, so that by 1912he was spending great spans of time at the New York Public Library, taking notes from various technical journals and books, categorizing what would become 40,000 citations according to 1,300 general subjects--. Dreiser called him a “library mole” and warned, “Eat libraries and suffer inevitable encyclopediac apoplexy.” Instead, Fort wrote a metaphysical work, X. As reconstructed, later, by Damon Knight, X argued that humans were controlled by Martians—through a mysterious force known as X—and the evidence for it were the odd coincidences and mysterious happenings that Fort had been gathering in his research. While X sought a publisher—it had already wowed Dreiser—Fort went to work on a sequel, Y, claiming that an advanced civilization lived at the North Pole. His obsession became easier to maintain in 1916, and again in 1917, when small inheritances relieved Fort of the need to sell his stories, and he pushed on, imagining yet a third book in what was becoming a series, Z, about psychic phenomena. Of these manuscripts, only Z lived, although in modified form. Fort destroyed X and Y, probably in a fit of depression that also saw him destroy his notes and head to England. Before that, Z became The Book of the Damned (1919), and that was followed by New Lands (1923). In England, Fort returned to the haunting of libraries and collected new notes, which he continued compiling after he and Anna returned to New York, the research resulting in his final two books, Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932).
The four books that make up the Fortean corpus are unusual animals. They are not volumes of occultism—as they had been in their earlier iterations, X and Y. Fort nowhere straightforwardly argues for Martian bosses or hidden polar civilizations. Instead, they have the impish quality that characterizes the anecdote about his grocery-store rebellion, with Fort proposing outlandish theories, then undermining them, as when he discussed a newspaper report of a talking dog, but discounted it because the dog was supposed to have disappeared into green smoke: talking dogs are worth considering, but not vanishing ones. Neither can the books be classed as novels, either, although they are often novelistic. Fort commented about Lo!: “It is a kind of non-fictional fiction [so] that, though concerned with entomological and astronomical matters, and so on, it is ‘thrilling’ and ‘melodramatic.” And the narrator, as Colin Bennett notes, is not Fort, but a slightly different personality. Indeed, Fort rejects the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, just as he rejects the difference between peaches and succotash. The books are philosophical, at times wrestling with the meaning of Darwinian theories of evolution and quantum physics, but Fort did not consider himself a philosopher. “I’m just a writer,” he said. His books, weaving together the thousands of reports of strange happenings, solved what he saw as writerly problems:
“I have a theory that the moving pictures will pretty nearly drive out the novel, as they have very much reduced the importance of the stage—but that there will arise writing that will retain the principles of dramatic structure of the novel, but, not having human beings for its characters, will not be producible in the pictures, and will survive independently. Maybe I am a pioneer in a new writing that instead of old-fashioned heroes and villains, will have floods and bugs and stars and earthquakes for its characters and motifs.”
Nonetheless, there was a metaphysical unity to the books, one that makes sense of his humor, one that builds from his childhood tomfoolery through short stories such as “A Radical Corpuscle” and his musings in X and Y. Fort was a monist. He argued that all categories were specious, hiding the underlying unity of all reality—the sameness of peaches and apricots, the oneness of humanity with the moon. The key to discovering this unity were the bizarre reports he collected—the falls of stone, like what occurred in Oakland, rains of blood, mysterious lights and unexplained disappearances, and frogs, lots of falling frogs. Fort divided history into three epochs, what he called Dominants. The first Dominant was religious; the second was scientific. In each case, a selected group of people—theologians, scientists—erected a system of classification from the raw material of the integrated universe. To do, they had to exclude—in the case of scientists, this meant damning some data as wrong, as unthinkable. Thus, Fort could go through entire runs of scientific journals, picking out hundreds of facts that could not—and would not—be explained by scientists, but were instead ignored, forgotten, damned to oblivion. In resuscitating these facts, Fort wanted his readers to question not just the judgment of scientists (and theologians) but the very foundation of their respective projects. Scientists wanted to dismiss events such as those that befell Irene Fellows because they did not fit into their explanatory frameworks. But it was only by contemplating such mysteries that the nature of reality could be divined. Speaking of all those falling amphibians, Fort quipped, “We shall pick up existence by its frogs.” And so, pasting the same label on cans of seemingly different contents was science, as it accurately described not only the contents of the cans but of the entire universe. Everything is peaches. And everything is not peaches. The world was entering, Fort thought, a third Dominant, the Dominant of Intermediatism, the era of the hyphen, in which categories withered and died: fiction and non-fiction were the same; humor and science were indistinguishable; the fantastic was real, the real fantastic.
