The House of Fame

If I asked you to name a place that people could go to for all their information needs, you would say the Internet, right? But how did people find all the information they could ever need, including the really important stuff, such as Ryan Reynolds’s full filmography, before the Internet? Surely previous eras in human history also imagined that they had developed the capacity to amass all knowledge. In fact, yes, they did. Renaissance humanists dreamed of one encyclopedic, unitary text that could encapsulate all that mankind could ever know. The printing press served as the primary means for realizing this dream. However, the very pursuit of complete knowledge prevented any one encyclopedic text from sufficing since there was always more information to be added to a text (my thinking on this is heavily indebted to Sarah Wall-Randell's brilliant article "Doctor Faustus and the Printer's Devil," which is available from Studies in English Literature, which is behind a paywall). Thus, encyclopedic texts such as John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, John Stow’s Annales of England, and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland contain prefatory writing by the authors that expresses their doubts about their works’ completeness. John Foxe fears that readers will not see his book as satisfactory and admits that he cannot imagine “what the secret iudgementes of readers woulde conceaue” when reading his book, intriguingly describing the reader as an inscrutable textual judge whose is done behind a veil of secrecy (“The Utility of this Story” in the 1563 Acts and Monuments 1:26). Ironically, this author participating in the Renaissance endeavor to gain all knowledge admits that he cannot pry into the heads of his readers, in the process identifying one realm of knowledge that is eternally off-limits for any author. Roger Chartier writes in The Order of Books, “One of the major tensions that inhabited the literate of the early modern age and caused them anxiety [was that] a universal library (or at least universal in one order of knowledge) could not be other than fictive, reduced to the dimensions of a catalogue, a nomenclature, or a survey” (88). The key word here, therefore, is imagining. After all, that is what people have done throughout the ages, imagined that they can possess total knowledge, and this is especially true today. Google’s Eric Schmidt has been fact-checked for his rhetoric about the Internet’s capacity to encompass all knowledge in human history. The fact-checkers have shown that this rhetoric is, well, mere rhetoric (for all its inaccuracy, Schmidt’s rhetoric remains a great way to get free advertising for Google). He is not the first to think that a new technology can create an apparatus or a system of organization that promises the codification of all knowledge.

Perhaps looking to previous conceptualizations of what it looks like when knowledge is amassed into one place can help us understand what is really at stake in our own digital age. Let’s look back to an example from Ancient Rome. The Roman poet Ovid in his Latin epic The Metamorphoses conceptualized the amassing of all knowledge in a place we now refer to as the House of Fame. Here is Ovid's text (my translation follows):

Orbe locus medio est inter terrasque fretumque

caelestesque plagas, triplicis confinia mundi;
unde quod est usquam, quamuis regionibus absit,
inspicitur, penetratque cauas uox omnis ad aures.
Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce,
innumerosque aditus ac mille foramina tectis

addidit et nullis inclusit limina portis;
nocte dieque patet. tota est ex aere sonanti,
tota fremit uocesque refert iteratque quod audit.
nulla quies intus nullaque silentia parte,
nec tamen est clamor, sed paruae murmura uocis,

qualia de pelagi, si quis procul audiat, undis
esse solent, qualemue sonum, cum Iuppiter atras
increpuit nubes, extrema tonitrua reddunt.
atria turba tenet: ueniunt, leue uulgus, euntque
mixtaque cum ueris passim commenta uagantur

milia rumorum confusaque uerba uolutant.
e quibus hi uacuas inplent sermonibus aures,
hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti
crescit, et auditis aliquid nouus adicit auctor.
illic Credulitas, illic temerarius Error

uanaque Laetitia est consternatique Timores
Seditioque recens dubioque auctore Susurri.
ipsa, quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur
et tellure, uidet totumque inquirit in orbem.

There is a house in the middle of the world, between land, sea, and sky, from which anything can be seen, no matter how far away, and where every voice can be heard. The goddess Fama owns this house and chooses for herself a seat in its highest balcony. She added a thousand entrances and window frames but did not seal them with doors or windows, so night and day the house lies open. It is made wholly of resounding bronze. The whole house reverberates with murmurs, echoes, and voices on repeat. The house is never quiet, but it is also never too loud. Instead you can hear voices that sound like the waves of the sea, like if someone at a distance heard extreme thunder and lightning from black clouds. Crowds fill the entryways. They come go, carelessly mingling with truths, half-truths mixed with facts, wild comments, and thousands of rumors. In this endless cocktail-party, rumors fill greedy ears, news is spread to others, and the amount of false information grows as every new blogger adds onto what has been heard. There you’ll find Credulity in her finest, bold Error dressed to the nines, empty Joy, the Fears, the Whispers, and everyone’s favorite, the Rabble-Rouser. Fama herself sees from above what happens in heaven, on the sea, and on the land, as she examines the whole world. (12.39-63)

Vincenzo Cartari, Le Imagini
      de I Dei de gli Antichi  (sig. V3^v)

This “house” is a surreal, totally bronze structure that was designed to let every sound could echo, even whispers. Everything comes in waves in this House, which receives and inspects all news, night and day, and so is always crowded. It actually bears little resemblance to an actual domicile and seems more like an overstimulated cerebral cortex. It is less a physical structure than an “infrastructure of surveillance.”[1] In fact, it sounds a lot like the Internet, with its cultivation of anonymity, its ability to gather information from everywhere, and its permissiveness in allowing anyone to become a new author “nouus … auctor” (which I cheekily translated as blogger) who can pile onto “adicit” the miscommunications and half-truths “mensuraque ficti” that populate Fama’s House. But who is Fama? She is the Roman goddess who personifies fame and rumor. The Roman poet Vergil, who wrote a generation before Ovid, describes Fama as a giant bird descended from the mythic Titans that flies through the air and sits on the highest building in a given city, seeing and hearing all that occurs there (think Big Bird meets Big Brother). Vergil calls Fama in his Aeneid a “monstrum horrendum” with as many tongues, ears, and watchful eyes, as she had feathers on her body (4.181-3). Fama, or Lady Fame, or rumor, also is an unstoppable force once she gains momentum. As she progresses into the heavens, she sings “equally [of] things done and not done” (4.190). If you are interested in reading more about Fama, see Ivan Redi’s great blog post, http://ivanredi.com/house-of-fame/ or Philip Hardie’s also great recent book dedicated to Lady Fame, Rumour and Renown: Representationsof Fama in Western Literature.

So, the Internet is the new House of Fame. So what? Well, Ovid wrote at the start of the Roman Empire, when Augustus had taken control of a Republic that crumbled under the weight of decades of civil war. As there was a perception that the decay of morals in the late Republic caused the civil wars,[2] Augustus felt the need to both restore family values and restock the political class and nobility, the senators and equestrians, who were decimated by the civil wars.[3] To do this, he took extreme measures: he outlawed adultery. Suddenly laws were passed that enjoined upright citizens to spy on anyone they suspected of adultery. Through these new laws Augustus erected a state surveillance apparatus that was mainly crowdsourced, so to speak. If someone accused of adultery was found guilty, the informers (typically called delatores) who provided the damning evidence were paid part of the convict’s seized estate. This incentivized informing and led to many false convictions, as well as fostering resentment among the Romans for the government’s surveillance apparatus. Augustus also had an extensive empire to watch over. In the “coded language of imperial power,” the Roman Empire was described as spreading “ad finem lucis ab ortu,” from the sunrise to sunset, or from the distant East to the furthest West.[4] Ovid echoes this phrase in the Metamorphoses (15.619) and echoes Augustan language throughout the epic. In fact, many scholars have noted how the Metamorphoses provide an ironic commentary on the political and cultural climate of Ovid’s time. Some have even gone so far as to call Ovid anti-Augustan. The House of Fame is part of this commentary. It is a statement on the surveillance that was occurring under Augustus, who sat above all others in his court, just as Fama sits atop her House, overlooking and examining the world from East to West. This is how Ovid improves upon Vergil’s description of Fama: he politicizes and describes the House of Fame instead of Fama herself, which enables him to more forcefully comment on the nature of surveillance in his time. By placing the ancient Roman surveillance apparatus in the House of Fame, AKA the House of Rumor, Ovid undercuts the credibility of such clandestine services. Furthermore, the more people know they are being spied on, the less likely they are to respect the rule of law, and the more likely it is that the government’s credibility will erode over time.    

Ovid’s is not only a political statement, though. Everyone knows that the internet can be and is manipulated by governments for their own ends. But what Ovid is talking about is the way that such manipulation seeps into culture. The scant information we have on Augustus portrays him as well liked. People seemed to put up with his spying because he put an end to seemingly endless civil war. But the cultural valorization that comes from that can be dangerous.

We live in the age of the spy. President Obama praised “the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals” in the years that led up to the killing of Osama bin Laden. While I heartily agree with the President’s praise of those who risk their lives to protect what they hold dear or who have given “the last full measure of their devotion” to their country, I can see such rhetoric leaking into the daily lives of more ordinary users of the Internet and leading to a casual acquiescence to a culture of surveillance, which could result in our culture condoning much less heroic forms of spying, which, after all, is inherently duplicitous and dehumanizing. It is no coincidence that the decade that brought us Facebook and Twitter also witnessed governments ramping up intelligence-gathering operations. The act of spying is no longer exclusive to government agents. The Internet has provided many others with the tools to engage in it as well, and we need to remain vigilant against the slippery slope of thinking “because I can, therefore I should.” Technology like the Internet has a way of reshaping morality (it should be the other way around, no?), of making people prioritize—nay, deify—rumor and fame, and of leeching the credibility out of traditional methods of disseminating knowledge. 

But, most importantly, Ovid’s House of Fame shows that any attempt to imagine a way to gather and reorganize all human knowledge is only one side of the coin. The flip-side of the coin of the universal codification of knowledge, the twin of the impulse to know everything, is surveillance. Just as Google aspires to catalogue every book ever published, so does the NSA aspire to “own” the Internet. So, if we are “brainstorm the future” as Eric Schmidt and others have advocated and done, then we should understand how our own imagination frames our discourse and how certain things we would rather not imagine, such as surveillance, are also involved in how we conceptualize our acquisition of knowledge.  

To conclude, dear reader, I am including the extended explanation for the first installment of Canon Confidential, Tweet #1 Answer, which was Ndreway Arvellmay. He was sent to Holland in 1660 by Sir George Downing, who was scoutmaster in the Protectorate and immediately put those clandestine skills to use in the Restoration (ironically, he hunted down royalists for Cromwell and then regicides for Charles). Downing even bragged to his secretary Pepys (yes, that Pepys) about his spies' skills. Perhaps the final line of Marvell's famous couplet, " 'Tis death alone that this must do: / For death thou art a Mower, too" should read, "For Downing thou are a Mower, too."   

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[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/sunday-review/the-information-gathering-paradox.html?_r=0

[2] Galinsky, “Augustus’ Legislation on Morals and Marriage” Philologus 125 (1981), 128

[3] Field “The Purpose of the lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea” Classical Journal 40.7 (1945), 399

[4] Barchiesi, Alessandro. “Endgames: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti.” Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature. Eds. Roberts, Dunn, and Fowler. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997, 186.