MONKEY BUSINESS David F. BELL “Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shake- . Blair Houghton “ Ford! he said, ‘There’ an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out,’” Douglas Adams Le mathématicien francais Emile Borel a proposé un scenario imaginaire gui décrit des singes dactylographes tapant au hasard. Ces singes finissent par produire les textes contenus dans une bibliothéque. Le but du scénario est de montrer U'absurdité du résultat et donc son impossibilité, bien qu'on ne puisse prowver cette impossibilité d'une manitre formelle. “Monkey Business” montre comment certains auteurs tirent des effets littéraires de Vabsurdité du scénario. Ensuite Varticle explore les raisons pour lesquelles les singes de Borel sont mis en présence de la machine & éerire. Je minspire notamment des analyses de Friedrich Kittler portant sur l’invention et la commercialisation de ce type de machine, Ja spatialisation du signifiant, et la création d’une nouvelle théorie de la mémoire a la fin du dix-newvieme sidcle. Un récit de Conan Doyle de la strie Sherlock Holmes illustre les themes que Kittler développe. Je conclus par une réflexion sur le rapport entre la mémoire et un algorithme informatique dans une réécriture du scénario de Borel par Isaac Asimov. apes is some dispute about who dreamt up the scenario describing a group of monkeys randomly slaving away at typewriters and ulti- mately producing the complete works of Shakespeare or the contents of the British Museum. Was it Emile Borel or A. S. Eddington or someone else? The difficulty in adjudicating this dispute is not unrelated to the remarks I shall make below, because, among other things, the notion ofSESE SESE SESE ese Soe Etec RE eer SEseese 182 TEXTE authorship will be at stake. If the monkeys could actually reproduce Shakespeare's text, then what might authorship — or cultural memory, for that matter — actually mean? As for Borel, in any case, the “thought experiment” dealing with the « singes dactylographes » became a standard example recurring in several of his essays, and it corresponds quite well to the didactic manner of writing of this French mathematician, who spent much time explaining chance and probability to an eclectic reading public of non-experts, as well as to beginners in probability theory. It had a very specific purpose for Borel, functioning as an illustration of what he termed «laloi unique duhasard»: « Cetteloiest extrémement simpleet d'une évidence intuitive, bien qu'elle soit rationnellement indémontrable : \es événements dont la probabilité est suffisamment faible ne se produisent jamais; ou, du moins, | L'homme doit agir, en toutes circonstances, comme s'ils étaient impossi- bles. »1, The idea that a group of monkeys, no matter how numerous, each furnished with a typewriter and put into a situation where he or she would hit the typewriter keys randomly, could eventually produce the works of a Shakespeare or a Goethe is a striking example of just such an event. Borel’s point is not that the probability of this occurrence is incalcu- lable, because, quite the contrary, it is. In another essay, he explores the same idea in a different form. This time an urn containing the letters of the French alphabet is used, A (surreally long) series of random samplings are drawn from it, and the aim is to produce the first line of Racine’s Athalie (« Oui, je viens dans son temple adorer l’Eternel ») : “The probability that the first letter is an o is 1/26, 6.) .],and the probability % obtaining the above sequence of letters is thus 26’, which is less than 10°". If, instead of considering a single line, we considered a poem of 1,000 lines, the corresponding probability would be less than 10°°° At this rate, the probability of producing the complete works of Shakespeare would be expressed as 10 with a negative exponent in the tens or hundreds of millions... No matter how small that probability, however, one cannot mathematically prove the impossibility of the occurrences in question: Si l'on conclut de Ia petitesse extraordinaire de Ia probabilité que le miracle dactylographique est impossible, en vertu de la loi unique du hasard, on sort du 1 Emile BOREL, Les Probabilités et la vie (Paris, PUF, 1950), p. 8. 2 Emile BorEL, Elements of the Theory of Probability, trans. John E. Freund (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 60. MONKEY BUSINESS 183. dornaine de la science mathématique et il faut bien reconnaitre que affirmation, qui nous apparait comme évidente et inconstestable, n'est pas, a strictement parler, une vérité mathématique. Herein lies the rub, because a strange thing happens to probability theory on the way to the forum: seen from a certain perspective, the theory suggests that anything can happen, that any event is possible. Perhaps it will require a lapse of time exceeding by the tens of millions, even billions, the lifespan of our own universe, but mathematical theory can neverthe- less calculate the probability of even the most farfetched of events. Hence the difficulty Borel encounters in his statement of the law of chance. In order to announce that law, he is obliged to abandon the level of mathe- matical proof and to make a claim that is only empirical, intuitive, as he says, and therefore not provable by mathematical theorem. Late prob- ability theory, in other words, finds itself in a paradoxical position, apparently brought about by its own success. Conceived beginning in the seventeenth century as a tool to calculate possibilities in contexts where certainty is unattainable, honed into one of the fundamental measuring tools of modern scientific experimental practice, the theory is an emi- nently rational attempt to deal with ee human experience about which complete knowledge is impossible’. And yet it contains in its own premises an ever-so-slight trace of absurdity: if the possibility of any event is calculable, then any event is, in theory, possible. At the very least, non-specialists can read the theory in that way, but even specialists can tease it by drawing its conclusions toward an absurd exaggeration of this sort. Not surprisingly, literary treatments of Borel’s example of the typing monkeys are quick to jump into this small gap of absurdity in the-theory. If the chances of just about anything happening can be calculated, a truly rare event nevertheless should in principle occur well into what one can anticipate to be an extraordinarily long series of other events. In theory, however, it could occur toward the beginning, perhaps precisely at the very 3. Les Probabilitds et la vie, p. 11. 4 Historians generally take Pascal’s treatment of Méré’s gambling problem as the point of departure of the theory. See, among many other recent and extremely rich historical treatments, Lorraine DASTON, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988), or Ian HACKING, The Taming of Chance (Cam- bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990).184 TEXTE beginning, even though this is highly unlikely, or, as Borel concludes, impossible, This is the premise that Russell Maloney explores in a short science fiction tale entitled “Inflexible Logic” dealing with the Borel’s monkeys theme, published in The New Yorker in 1940 and anthologized in James R. Newman's The World. of Mathematics? - A quick outline of the story reveals Maloney’s intentions. A well-to-do retiree, Mr. Bainbridge, while attending a cocktail party, overhears a conversation describing the typing monkeys and the probability theory governing their activities. Quite an amateur of science himself, he erroneously understands the description he overhears not as a sort of imaginary, extreme scenario, but as a real experimental protocol, and he decides to conduct an actual experiment based on its premises. After procuring six monkeys (the conversation in question happens to have focused on an example em- ploying six monkeys), he sets them up in the proper conditions. The results are so astounding that he eventually asks James Mallard, an assistant professor of mathematics at Yale with whom Bainbridge had previously corresponded concerning the probability theory behind the monkey experiment, to come to his house to be the first witness to the results: “ ‘Oliver Twist,” by Charles Dickens,’ “ Professor Mallard read out. He read the first and second pages of the manuscript, then feverishly leafed through to the end. “You mean to tell me,” he said, “that this chimpanzee has written — “Word for word and comma for comma,” said Mr, Bainbridge.[...] “And all the chimpanzees” — Professor Mallard was pale, and enunciated with difficulty —"they aren't all —” “Oh, yes, all writing books which I have every reason to believe are in the British Museum,” Pressed by Bainbridge about the theoretical possibility that this kind of result would be produced by such an experiment, Mallard must respond that the outcome encountered is possible: “Looking at the thing scientifi- cally —and I hope I am at least as capable of that as the next man — there is nothing marvellous about the situation.” ‘. The absence of random events 5 Russell MALONEY, “Inflexible Logic” in The World of Mathematics, ed. James R. NEWMAN, vol.4 (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1960), pp. 2262-7. 6 Ibid, p. 2265. MONKEY BUSINESS = 185 in the experimental results, however, eventually drives Mallard mad, and he takes it upon himself to reintroduce that random. He goes to Bain- bridge's house and opens fire on Bainbridge and the chimps with a revolver. Everyone dies, and as the final chimp expires, he is in the process of beginning to type Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin with his one remaining healthy arm... Clearly, Maloney stands the Borel’s monkey scenario on its head: instead of representing the most remote possibility imaginable, the pro- duction of the works contained in the British Museum is actualized immediately. Other literary enactments of the theme almost necessarily treat it in a similar way. David Ives’s short one-act play Words, Words, Words recounts a comparable experiment, but this time told from the point of view of three monkeys, who have been put in a cage to see if they produce literary works in the course of their random typing. A discussion among the monkeys ensues about how best to impress their handler. As the play ends, the monkey named Kafka, who happens to be a female (the two male monkeys are called Swift and Milton), is typing the first lines of Hamlet, while Swift and Milton continue the dispute”. But I do not want to pursue only the purely probabilistic aspects of Borel'’s imagined scenario here, because they quickly become repetitive — simply because it is the counter example, the occurrence of the rare event at the beginning rather than at the end of a series, that provides the only real narrative energy when the scenario is mobilized in a literary context. I would like instead to reflect in much more detail on the elements Borel chose in order to construct the scenario at stake here. Simply put : Why typewriters and monkeys? What does it mean to produce Shakespeare by means of a random sequence of discrete events — in the absence of any intention on the part of the actual producer of those events? It would not have been possible to put monkeys and typewriters together in an imaginative probability scenario before the twentieth century, in part, of course, because the typewriter was not widely com- metcialized until the 1870s. Much more is at stake here than the simple serendipity of the invention and commercialization of the typewriter, 7 Tid, loc. cit, 8 David IvES, Words, Words, Wordsin Allin the Timing (New York, Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 19-30. The fact that Kafka is a female and that she ends up making the random “hit” would warrant discussion in itself — but this would take me too far afield.186 TEXTE however. The very conditions of its invention and dissemination as a technological object both signal and bring about changes in the rela- tionship between people and language. Friedrich Kittler has written extensively about those conditions and changes in Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 and in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter’. In the first place, the typewriter breaks down the flowing script of the handwritten word into series of discrete, spatially located signifiers!©. The hand holding the pen, viewed as a sort of extension of the soul, as an organic whole that remains fundamentally in a continuum with the voice of an author (the utopic vision of an older, hermeneutically-oriented culture), is replaced by the staccato movements of keys and connecting levers, the sharp reports of the type blocks as they strike the surface of blank paper stiffened by the pressure of the platen, as they impress the letters in spatially discrete form on the white surface. The hand and its fingers are distanced from the production of signifiers on paper, and the keyboard itself is a spatially conceived field, where the fingers individually encounter letters in a new kind of memory relationship that has a distinct physiological quality to it. In fact, Kittler reminds us, the first typewriters were linked crucially to blindness!4, Among those earlier typewriters were models imagined as writing machines for the blind, who, precisely, could not properly space their writing on a flat surface without technological aid. Furthermore, the mechanical configurations of the first typewriters produced text blindly — the person typing could not sce the letters as they were impressed upon the paper, since the paper was located inside the machine in a way that put it out of the line of sight of the typist. Even when models appeared that placed the paper in the typist’s field of vision, the ideal method still remained touch-typing, typing without looking at the keyboard by re- membering the spatial positioning of the keys — and these spatial mnemonics were ultimately translated into the spatial discreteness of the letters on paper: “Instead of the play between Man the sign-setter and the writing surface, the philosopher as stylus and the tablet of Nature, there is the 9 Friedrich KIT TLER, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metter, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999). The first was published as Aufichreibesysteme in 1985 and the second as Grammophon Film Typewriter in 1986. 10 Ibid., p. 193. 11 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 195. MONKEY BUSINESS 187 play between oy e and its Other, completely removed from subjects. Its name is inscription””“, The mechanical writing of the typewriter distances the typist from the text s/he is producing, giving it an otherworldliness that can only be felt as uncanny by those who have learned to write with a pen or stylus. Spatialization, inscription, impression: all of these writing charac- teristics under the conditions of the typewriter belong as well to the physiological theory of the localization of functions within the brain that was a product of the same historical period. Psychophysics was actively in the process of creating a theory of the mind that described memory as impressions burned into specific locations in the brain by a series of unconscious shocks, jolts, or electrical impulses : The signifier, by reason of its singular relationship to place, becomes an inscription on the body. Understanding and interpretation are helpless before an unconscious writing that, rather than presenting the subject with something to be deciphered, makes the subject what it is. Mnemonic inscgiption is like mechanical inscription, always invisible at the decisive moment!’ Memory is not conceived as the conscious construction of the past in the fullness of a mind ever present to itself, but as a sequence of discrete events inscribed upon the brain beyond the conscious control of the subject. The parallel with the technology of the typewriter is quite striking. As Kittler puts it aptly : “When, from the point of view of brain physiology, language works asa feedback loop of mechanical relays, the construction of typerriters is only a matter of course”™*, The elements that will project the typewriter into the scenario imaged by Borel are all present here. The typewriter permits the production of random sequences of letters inscribed in the absence of human con- sciousness. Why not, then, by monkeys? It creates the possibility, in fact, of producing random series of syllables that are beyond any known language: “Given an assortment of letters and diacritical signs, like a type- writer keyboard, [...] then in principle it is possible to inscribe more and different sorts of things than any voice has ever spoken”°, The number of 12 Lid, loc. cit. 13 Ibid., p. 196. 14 Iid., p. 189.188 TEXTE possible different series, once a length of even several letters is exceeded, becomes very large indeed. But if, in fact, any random sequence is possible once’ one begins hitting the keys of the typewriter, why not that most sacred of cultural sequences, the work of a great author like Shakespeare, for example? Is the infinite set of letter sequences then to be considered as a storage medium in which a work like Shakespeare's is already inscribed? ae the discrete set of letters contain some form of memory of the work!6> In his short play entitled The Universal Language, David Ives has sbelbearea us with a. hilarious rendition of many of the issues at stake in Kittler’s discussion!”. A self-described “word processor” named Dawn answers a newspaper advertisement that offers to teach a new universal language, Unamunda, to anyone who comes to an appointed office!® Dawn arrives at the office, encounters Don, who speaks nothing but Unamunda, and a funny sequence of exchanges ensues. Don conducts a lengthy language lesson at the end of which he admits that the language is a hoax, but by then Dawn speaks it so easily and so well that she does not want to give it up. Moreover, she has fallen in love with Don, who has, in turn, fallen in love with Dawn, and the two lapse back into Unamunda as the curtain falls. I indicated that Dawn is a word processor in the play, and I want to insist on the utter logic of this fact. She is the perfect example of someone who is “hooked into” the system of disem- bodied random combinatorics that has become the discourse network of the twentieth century.As such, she is thoroughly prepared for the sequen ces of nonsense and doggerel syllables that she will encounter when Don begins to teach her Unamunda. The language Ives creates through Dawn and Don in the course of the play is a curious mixture of Yiddish, Italian, 15 Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, p. 212, 16 Questions such as these have a familiar ring to readers of the Jorge Luis Borges stories “Pierre Mesnard, Author of the Quixote”, “The Library of Babel”, and “Shakespeare's Memory”. See Lawrence Schehr’s article in the present issue. 17 David Ives, The Universal Language in All in the Timing (New York, Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 31-52. 18 The term “word processor” can refer to the computer that does the processing, to the software program that runs the computer for such functions, or to the person who inputs the data. “Typewriter” also originally meant either the machine or the person typing. But now there is a third term in the equation: the software, neither the machine nor the person. MONKEY BUSINESS 189 American, and whatever else he can find to throw into the soup.But no matter how much the result resembles gibberish to the spectator, Dawn. is never fazed. Moreover, it turns out that she is more at ease in this language of repetition and nonsense than she-is in English. She has a stutter in English: “And the thing is, I do have this s-s-slight s-s-s—.... So it's always been hard for me to talk to people. In fact, m-most of my life has been avery I-I-long... (Pause)... . pause”, The word processor without a voice, then, catches on immediately to the game of gibberish syllables and quickly becomes an expert — even more expert than Don himself — because she is already skilled at the very things that are required for her to function in the environment created by the hoax : she knows the keyboard, and as a stutterer, random repetition is one of her strengths. It should be pointed out as well that the names of the two characters, Dawn/Don, appropriately reflect the paradigmatic combinatorics that underlie Unamunda — and that characterize equally well the discourse structure described by Friedrich Kittler about which I have been speaking. Finally, at one of the high points in the Ives play, when Don is extolling the virtues of Unamunda, he recites several verses from the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet in Unamunda — to great comic effect. It seems that Shakespeare is never far behind reflections concerning the random com- binatorics that are not only the basis of the discourse network within which we have communicated since the end of the nineteenth century, but also a prime subject of probability theory. I have jumped forward chronologically from the period of the com- mercialization of the typewriter at the end of the last century to a postmodern comedy about a word processor, but I would like to return for a moment to a typewriter (in both senses of the word : the person and the object) before turning my attention back to the question of the monkeys. We have seen how the disembodied spatial and sequential nature of discourse produced on a typewriter is fundamentally linked to a psychophysical theory of sense and memory impressions that goes against previous notions describing a mental life controlled in the fullness of consciousness. There is, however, another dimension to typewriter discourse that is linked to the characteristics I have been outlining. The random combinatorics produced by the typewriter clearly open the pos- 19 [id. p. 40.190 . TEXTE sibility of engendering a labyrinth of pseudonyms and anonymity, the ultimate stage of which would be to dissolve identity entirely. As Heideg- ger says in his essay on Parmenides : “Mechanical writing provides this ‘advantage,’ that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same” ”°, The detective story is quick to take up this problematic, since the question of identity is the very stuff of almost any crime mystery. An early and very savvy example is one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, “A Case of Identity”1, to which Kittler alludes in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”, Some attention to the detail of the story would be instructive. The puzzle Holmes must solve is the disap- pearance of the projected husband of his young client, Miss Mary Suther- land. It so happens the young lady is a typewriter (that is, a typist), who earns her living comfortably by dint of her speed with the machine :"Ifind Ican do pretty well with what I earn at typewriting. It brings me twopence a sheet, and I can often do from fifteen to twenty sheets in a day’, With his legendary perspicacity, Holmes guesses her employment, as well as the fact that she is nearsighted, as soon as she walks in the door at 221B Baker Street, and he immediately comments that it must be difficult to type with imperfect vision: “‘ I did at first [have difficulties] I, she answered, ‘but now I know where the letters are without looking’ .” 4 We have seen how questions of vision are tied to the technology of the typewriter, and Doyle, without really theorizing this issue, nonetheless includes it effortlessly in his construction of the story, so strong is the constellation of elements that define the meaning of the typewriter in the culture of the end of the nineteenth century. The identity of the man to whom Miss Sutherland has promised marriage is uncertain, because she knows little of him even though she has fallen in love with him.When the case is resolved, the missing man turns out to be none other than the stepfather of the bride-to-be, who has assumed a false identity in order to court his own stepdaughter and then to make her await the return of her mystery suitor, the better to prevent 20 Quoted in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 199. 21 Arthur CONAN DOYLE, “A Case of Identity” in Sherlock Holmes : The Complete Novels and Stories, vol. 1 (New York, Bantam Books, 1986), pp. 251-66. 22 IBid., pp. 206, 214. 23 "A Case of Identity”, p. 255. 24 IBid., p. 254, MONKEY BUSINESS 191 her from marrying anyone at all*>, Her marriage would have caused the stepfather in question to forfeit the part of her fortune that he controls as long as she remains unwed”, The solution to the mystery reveals the double-edged nature of the tale’s title. To discover the identity of the missing man is to discover that two people are one in the same, identical identities : a = a. Doubtless Mary Sutherland’s myopia plays a role here (otherwise, how could she not see her stepfather behind his disguise?), but how, precisely, is this fraud perpetrated? Quite simply, the bulk of the courting is done in love letters sent to Mary using the space of pseudo- nyms and anonymity provided by the typewriter””. The dishonest stepfa- ther composes letters to her on a typewriter, which gives him the means to assume his other name, his pseudonym, without risk of betraying his real identity.He disguises this identity not only by writing the body of the letters with the typewriter, but also by signing the letters in typescript as well. In this way, even his signature disappears in the subterfuge. One might easily imagine the typewriter as a creator of infinite identities. ‘Whatever pair of hands are laid upon its keys (or whatever fingers) are lost immediately in the staccato action of the levers, and they produce on paper the discourse of anyone and no one. But things are not quite so simple. If the effect of the typewriter is to separate the hand from the author, to transform language into anonymous discrete signifiers in random combinations, then the machine engenders a world of repetition, of chopped up significrs endlessly reproduced by mechanical action. Even if the typewriter functions as a barrier that screens the signifying context of the swindler’s discursive gesture and therefore disrupts the hermeneutics of his identity, nonetheless the very repetition that is its hallmark builds a second level of signification that can be interpreted. The repetitive impression on paper of certain letters creates the machine's signature and thus reconstructs a sort of compulsive 25 I shall not directly treat the incest motif, which is constantly at the fringes of the story — it could easily be associated both with the notion of identity and with that of repetition as I analyze them below. 26 Mary will steadfastly refuse to betray her betrothed, even though he has disappeared, and Holmes ultimately does not tell her the truth, believing that to do so would be too trautnatic for Mary. Thus the stepfather succeeds in his swindle. 27 Need!I remind the reader of the recent rendition of this theme in “You've Got Mail”, starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks? Money is at stake there, as well.192 TEXTE (that is, unconsciously repetitive and symptomatic) identity out of other- wise uninterpretable indices: “It is really a curious thing,” remarked Holmes, “that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note of yours, Mr. Windibank [Mary Sutherland's stepfather], that in every case there is some little slurring over the ‘e’, and a slight defect in the tail of the ‘r’. There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more obvious.””* A later science of detection will go further and realize that even new typewriters have unique peculiarities that engender the indices of their signatures. Ultimately, the repetition of the signifier through the mecha- nics of the writing machine gives away the author of the love letters addressed to Mary”®. This is almost a textbook demonstration of the effects of the compulsive repetition of the symptom. Its very repetition can be interpreted, but as the story shows, that interpretation does not necessarily lead to a curing of the symptom, to a resolution of the mystery in this case, that is, to a recognition of hermeneutic identity — at least on the part of Mary : she will never know the whole truth, and thus ironically the typewriter (Mary) is deceived by the very typewriter (machine) at which she is reputed to be an expert. Trapped by the repetition effect of the typewriter, her psychic life now becomes the slave of a repetition compulsion in the form of a never-ending wait for a loved one who never existed — except as a set of repetitive signifiers on a typewriter — and who will thus never return”? 28 Ibid, p. 263. 29 The typewriter in question is located in the business establishment of the stepfather. 30 Such a reading of the typewriter’s signature would have to be contrasted to a Sherlock Holmes story like “The Reigate Puzzle” (Complete Novels, vol. 1, pp. 544-62), in which Holmes calls upon his expertise in graphology to construct a veritable portrait of the double writers of a short note, which proves to be the key to an unsolved murder. The handwriting in the note gives Holmes rather direct access to a psychological analysis of its writers, quite unlike the kind of reading allowed by typewritten notes. Thus Holmes, perspicacious as he is, does not take into account the discontinuity between different media when he remarks “that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’ handwriting’. MONKEY BUSINESS 193 If indeed the typewriter is in an important way the technological expression of a certain theory of brain physiology and of memory as the accumulation of unconscious shock impressions, then the logical next step in Borel’s typing monkeys scenario would be to hardwire the typewriter to the monkey and to turn the brain spaces into a sophisticated database —and Isaac Asimov does precisely this in “The Monkey’s Finger”>!. In this very ironic short story, a science fiction writer, Marmaduke Tallinn, gets into an argument with his editor, Lemuel Hoskins. Two versions of ascene in a story Tallinn wants Hoskins to publish exist: Tallinn likes one, Hoskins the other. o resolve the difference of opinion, Tallinn proposes to submit the question to the experimental monkey of a certain Dr. ‘Torgesson, professor of psychodynamics at Columbia. Needless to say, the editor believes this is a joke at his expense, but he is intrigued enough to play along anyway. The two men go to Torgesson's office, where the doctor explains that he works in the domain of cybernetics and computers, and he asks if Hoskins and Tallinn have heard of chess-playing computers. Both reply that they have, and the doctor continues : Now imagine a similar situation in which a computing machine can be given a fragment of a literary work to which the computer can then add words from its stock of the entire vocabulary such that the greatest literary values are served. Naturally, the machine would have to be taught the significance of the various keys of a typewriter. Of course, such a computer would have to be much, much more complex than any chess player”=, In fact, the complexity is such that a human brain would be the ideal computer, but experimental protocols preclude using human subjects, and thus the doctor has had to settle for a capuchin monkey he calls Rollo: “Rollo [...] was subjected to a very delicate brain operation in which a nest of ‘wires were connected to various regions of his brain. We can short his voluntary activities and, in effect, use bis brain simply as a computer”®>. It goes without saying that this scenario realizes the physical meshing together of brain physiology and the combinatorics of signifiers produced by the typewriter: 31 Isaac ASIMOV, “The Monkey's Finger” in “Buy Jupiter” and Other Stories (New York,. Doubleday, 1975), pp. 49-59. 32 Dbid., p. 52. 33 Ibid, p. 54. eae194. TEXTE The professor trundled out a typewriter on a little table. A wire trailed from it. He explained, “ It is necessary to use an electric typewriter as otherwise the physical effort would be too great.It is also necessary to wire little Rollo to this transformer.” He did so, using as leads two electrodes that protruded an eighth of an inch through the fur on the little creature's skull. Indeed, a capuchin monkey is a bit small to maneuver the levers of a manual typewriter™>. But what, precisely, does this wired monkey brain do? When the doctor reads a sufficient sampling of a literary work of any sort to the monkey, it is capable of analyzing all aspects of the style of the passage heard and then of continuing exactly in the same style, in other words, of typing out the rest of the work to the end, if need be™®. The first experimental result discussed in the story is the production by the monkey of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, which the monkey was able to duplicate perfectly once it had heard the preceding passage of the play, save one error: “a sea of troubles” became “a host of troubles” in the monkey’s version. But this is not an error, argues the doctor, because what the monkey has done is to correct a mixed metaphor and improve the literary quality of the passage as a whole. We have come full circle here: from the random production of a sequence of signifiers by a set of monkeys slaving away on typewriters for a very long period of time, we have now arrived at the image of a monkey whose brain is hardwired to a typewriter and transformed into a computer and who can thus produce any literary text by sampling passages and reproducing the style. 34 Ibid, loc. cit. 35 Space constraints have not allowed me to address the question “Why monkeys?” quite as directly as I would have liked. To answer it, one would have to take into account Donna Haraway's wonderfully suggestive Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinven- tion of Nature (New York, Routledge, 1991), in which Haraway shows convincingly how primate studies in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s occupied a central position in a reevaluation of human social structures. Monkeys were very much on people’s minds during the period when Borel began using his “typewriting monkeys” image of an impossible random event. 36 It should be pointed out that the monkey has a problem with the space bar on its machine, and thus the typescripts it produces need to be retyped by Torgesson to make them more readable. A sample of one of the typescripts is given by Asimov in the text, and when the reader sees it, the impression caused by the spacing problems puts it in uncanny proximity with random gibberish. MONKEY BUSINESS 195 Earlier in my essay I asked whether Borel’s scenario should be interpreted to mean that the set of discrete letters/signifiers of the typewriter keyboard randomly assembled in very long sequences could be seen as a storage medium in which Shakespeare's text is somehow remem- bered. Now we have a scenario in which memory of such a text is imagined as compressed to a small sampling of the work in question. Given a sample, the monkey/computer can expand it to encompass the entire work one wants to reproduce. In other words, we have reached an extreme moment of the densest possible data compression, in which it is no longer a question of random sampling over an almost infinitely long petiod of time, but, rather, of storing the trace of the work as a fragment to be expanded at will. The combinations of signifiers fed into the brain/com- puter are compared against an entire stock of signifiers, then a pattern emerges in the form of an algorithm capable of reproducing exactly the rest of the text in question — and none other. For Borel, the typing monkeys scenario was an illustration of an “impossible” event, and yet the very machine mobilized in the illustration made that event somehow possible. The typewriter transforms its operator into an instant expert at producing sequences of signifiers in a repetitive manner and in a new relation to the notion of intention. Perhaps it is not necessary to remember Shakespeare in the conscious manner in which we normally use the term “remember”, because the random generation of sequences will at some point coincide “automatically” with Shakespeare’s text. But this model is ultimately quite wasteful — it would likely take a lapse of time millions of times longer than the lifespan of our universe. In Asimov's story, the typing monkey has become a sophisticated and ultra rapid computer, capable of generating a compression algorithm that unlocks within se- conds an entire Shakespeare play from the merest fragments of the play's text. Here the memory of the work has been short-circuited, stored as a fragmented and catalogued sample that only the iterative operation of a brain/computer can unlock. Moreover, that iterative operation is possible only if the brain is wired in such a way as to “short [its] voluntary activities,” in other words, to tap the characteristics of its physiology while suspending consciousness. : Strange description of literary and textual memory indeed! Asimov's typing monkey, suitably rewired and reprogrammed, will eventually be- come a search engine on the World Wide’ Web, iteratively and blindly seeking out signifiers that some operator has typed into its pop-up196 TEXTE window in hopes of making a “hit”. The random will thus be reborn in yet another form, but that is a story written a generation after Asimov's. Duke University