James Tadd Adcox, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge.
Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012. Paperback, 138 pp, $12.
When we were boys, my brother and I cut brown paper bags into treasure maps. We named terrains, dangers, and caches of gold. We burned the maps’ centers, so that important information cryptically came apart in our hands. Sometimes the maps were thinly-coded representations of real places (the basement, the backyard, the workshed), and sometimes the realms they represented were wholly imaginary. It seems to me that maps of every kind can carry a multivalent charge—maps as artful diagrams, as modes of perception, as the results (and instigators) of exploration.
You don’t need to have grown up making play-maps to enjoy the multivalent charge that crackles across every page of James Tadd Adcox’s The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. This incredible debut collection of short fictions contains pieces that, like maps, are small in size but enormous in scope. The table of contents (a stunning diagram in and of itself) indexes the book’s ambition—to map the entire system of human knowledge.
The system proposed by The Map of the System of Human Knowledge has three divisions, which structure this book: “MEMORY (HISTORY),” “REASON (PHILOSOPHY),” and “IMAGINATION (POETRY).” Each short fiction is an entry in this three-part system, and their titles reveal their place in its taxonomy—from as short as “HISTORY / SACRED” to as lengthy as “HISTORY / NATURAL / USES OF NATURE / ARTS, CRAFTS, MANUFACTURES / WORKING & USES OF SKIN.” The pieces themselves are beautiful, subtle, and exciting. Many move like prose poetry. Some provide the flavor of micro-memoir. What we have here is Etgar Keret high-fiving Donald Barthelme—these pieces explore the human heart and the human head at once, through compelling relationships and stimulating thought experiments, through serious play. A couple raises a “backup child”; a quantum physicist waits for the woman he loves to return from the bathroom; a work crew builds Indiana’s first mountain.
In one of my favorites, “PHILOSOPHY / SCIENCE OF MAN / PNEUMATOLOGY OR SCIENCE OF THE SOUL,” the narrator’s brother returns from the dead, but can’t remember why:
My little brother reappears seven months after his death, by drowning,
to offer me a warning. But then he can’t remember what it is. “Was
your death not an accident after all? Is there someone upon whom you
must be revenged?” He gives me a look that says, Don’t be an idiot. Of
course it was an accident. I was there, I saw him pulled into the riptide
myself. He stands a little to the left of the kitchen sink, fuzzy and
half-obscured, like a VHS tape on pause. He sucks on the pinky and
ring finger of his left hand, trying to think of what he’s come back for.
“Is there some terrible thing set to befall someone you love?” He thinks
about it, then shrugs, unsure. “Is there some terrible thing set to befall
me?” Again a shrug. “Well, how’s heaven?” I say finally, trying not to
sound exasperated. “Most of the people there are pretty old,” he says.
“Even the ones who died young are old by now. If you want to talk to
anybody you have to yell pretty loud, on account of their hearing’s
usually pretty sucky.” “Well, have you seen grandma?” “Sure, but she
doesn’t remember me. Nobody remembers anybody up there.”
Adcox is as playfully apt in his more “realistic” pieces. For example, the 61-word “PHILOSOPHY / SCIENCE OF MAN / LOGICA / ART OF COMMUNICATING / SCIENCE OF THE INSTRUMENT OF DISCOURSE / GRAMMAR / PHILOLOGY”:
The last two speakers of Ayapan Zoque have decided to stop speaking
to each other, I tell my wife, looking up from the paper. My wife is
washing the dishes. Each plate she washes, she slams into its place in
the cabinet. She doesn’t bother drying them. No big argument, I tell
her, no explosion. They just, you know, stopped. Talking.
In this collection, knowledge is valuable—but so is mystery, Adcox reminds us, the mystery that knowledge takes us into. And it’s in this mystery that The Map of the System of Human Knowledge unfolds, and unfolds, and unfolds.
