The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy

by Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport (Illustrator)

Wide-ranging enough to encompass Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, horses, and a man riding a bicycle while wearing a gas mask, The Counterfeiters is one of Hugh Kenner's greatest achievements. In this fascinating work of literary and cultural criticism, Kenner seeks the causes and outcomes of man's ability to simulate himself (a computer that can calculate quicker than we can) and his world (a mechanical duck that acts the same as a living one).



This intertangling of art and science, of man and machine, of machine and art is at the heart of this book. He argues that the belief in art as a uniquely human expression is complicated and questioned by the prevalence of simulations—or "counterfeits"—in our culture. Kenner, with his characteristically accessible style and wit, brings together history, literature, science, and art to locate the personal in what is an increasingly counterfeit world.

Genres: Essays, Philosophy, Literature, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Nonfiction

174 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

If we are to take the ideas of this book seriously there are some people who believe people to be nothing more than machines who are wholly dependent upon their experiences and learning to shape who they are. They believe that what we call a person can be removed, or say bracketed, and that with the right amount of non-obtrusive observations one can learn everything there is to know about why a particular person-machine does that they do, actually this is a lie, not a particular person-machine but whole groups of person-machines once the data has been pumped into some statistical formulas, most likely done by a computing machine, because they are better at doing that kind of stuff that person-machines, and out will come an answer about why something happens, and then we can call this why knowledge, or wisdom about these elusive people-machines that are just fucking everywhere you look these days.

We call this science. Ok, maybe that isn't fair. But we do call this social sciences whenever they delve into the oh so clear waters of empiricism.

Maybe one doesn't agree with the sarcastic tone here, or doesn't think in so belittling of a way of empiricism as myself or the author of this book does. Me and social sciences haven't gotten along well together for quite awhile now. I don't want to point fingers but I don't think it's my fault, something just always smelled a little off in all of those psychology articles I read as an undergrad, all those numbers and standard deviations and those results which moved from being odds at the crap table of life magically into something we call truth (and working this analogy a bit more, I'll put my money on the C and E long shot bet (for those who have never spent time around a crap table, C and E is a one throw of the dice bet (as opposed to many of the crap table bets that are predicated on a certain number being thrown on the dice before a seven gets thrown). C and E stands for Craps and Eleven, you're betting that one of those will be thrown on the very next roll of the dice) on this crap table empiricism has created for us, because when that hits it pays off oh so well, and it makes it much more interesting than just blindly going for the sure-thing (of which of course there is none, work out this analogy in your head if you want, I'm pretty sure it works, but I'm not enough of a writer and it's too early in the morning for me to do this justice).

I feel I'm veering way off topic here, and getting ready to vent on my dislike of science. I'll save that for a more appropriate book or time.

This book is about satire and satire in Hugh Kenner's opinion (if I'm reading this correctly) happens when the the blandness of empiricism is twisted by a person aware of the game being played by empiricism enough to create a piece of work within the set of rules already set forth by empiricism. Is this confusing? I'm not doing this any justice. By the awareness of it all being a game and subverting the entire basis of empiricism by adding the 'human' into it satire is created (at times), or at other times a counterfeit item that might look like the real thing but is a time bomb of meanings waiting to explode.

Fuck this. I'm doing a terrible job at writing this. I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. The book is good. I liked reading it. Taking what it says and thinking about Adorno / Horkheimer and Deleuze and how they can all be put together might be a fruitful thought exercise. I don't know how to save this review. I suck.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't do justice to this exhilarating little book here. Hugh Kenner's take on the impact of 17th- and 18th-century empiricism on art and literature draws a line through Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, bad poetry, Vaucanson's clockwork duck, Charles Babbage, James Joyce, Buster Keaton, Alan Turing, and Andy Warhol. His reading of Gulliver's Travels, in particular, is dazzling -- to present the argument in very simplified fashion, he claims Swift as the inventor of the Turing test; and we can never be quite sure if Gulliver, whose mental world is fed entirely on facts, numbers, and the reports of his senses, is exactly what we'd call human, though he certainly walks and talks like one.

"Empiricism is a game. Its central rule forbids you to understand what you are talking about."

The Counterfeiters has been out of print until only very recently, and it deserves to find a wider audience. The book is written accessibly but with great economy; quite a bit is crammed into this slim paperback.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clearly argued, written with clear and perfectly crafted prose, exploring something which remains as important and illuminating today as it was then...and funny...and with cool pictures.
So, yeah, it is bloody great. That's all I got today I'm afraid.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book in league with Gaddis' Recognitions and Welles' F for Fake, a sort of post-modern play on the dichotomies between essence&appearance, truth&falsity, authenticity&counterfeit; but Kenner studies this in relation to the anglo writers on the 18th century, Swift and Defoe and Pope. His main thesis is that these writers realized a century or two earlier than everyone else that the enlightenment concept of 'essence' was meaningless, this being the basis of their satirical art. Pope's satirical epics have no regard for the 'spirit of gravity' of the epic poem and can thereby satirize them by merely writing all the cliches straight-up with intricate technical adequacy, to be compared with the hypercompetent Stoic comedy of Buster Keaton (a chronic Kenner favorite for his links to Sam Beckett); perhaps Michael Richards' Kramer is another interesting comparison. Defoe's novel derives its truth from its literal falsity as a deceitfully 'true story'; Swift's Gulliver takes this and makes the inadequacy of essence into a game that rejects humanity altogether -- Gulliver as narrator, and both as satirist and as misanthrope, is an inhuman voice that rejects humanity in a twisted parody of the Odyssey at its most platonically political. Kenner takes this a step further than most of the other deconstructive projects on this motif, however, and concludes in an almost apocalyptic dirge where the surrender of essence for mechanism (ie, teleological metaphysics exchanged for pure empiricism) creates a society defined altogether by the machine, where The Turing Test begins to make everyone into a machine and Andy Warhol's art becomes fully sincere, a society where one can simply be Waiting For Godot ... a progression into pure McLuhanism he feels began with Vaucanson's Duck, Pope's deadpan, and Gulliver's self-identification with hyperlogical horses.

PS While covering a somewhat earlier historical epoch, this book is a fascinating companion for Pynchon's Mason&Dixon -- by pure chance I happened to read sections on the mechanical duck on the same day, and of course both Kenner and Pynchon share a deep appreciation of Beckett's machinations

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in a week, apparently. It was so fun, I kept turning back to it instead of the many other books I am 'currently reading.' I was mostly just enjoying it as a strange rant about Gulliver's Travels, Buster Keaton, Robinson Crusoe, et cetera. The bits where he takes examples from the life of Charles Babbage and imagines them as scenes in a Keaton film are glorious. And as the recognized references piled up, and I had the feeling I was following what there was of an argument, I realized that this book made me feel smart, which is a good feeling, but a person can't let that feeling go to the head or it has the reverse effect and actually makes a person act stupider. Anyway... As the point of the thing came into sharper focus, I realized it is about some things that concern me a great deal, for example treating machines like people and treating people like machines. Kenner continually returns to Gulliver and made me think about it in a much deeper way then I had before, perhaps I will read it again someday. I've mentioned many times that I love it when books make me want to read other books, and this not only made me want to return to stuff I have read already, it also pointed at the work of A. Pope and left me feeling that if literary criticism can be this fun, I should try more of it.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kenner is always the same: interesting, quotable, unfocused. Here, he goes through a lot of Babbage, compares him to Marianne Moore, talks about the Stuffed Owl, argues that especially bad verse begins with Cowley but isn't systematically recognized as such until the Augustan period of Pope and Dryden.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not expect the funniest sentence I’ve read in years to appear in this book, and yet it did.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kenner, in a postscript, says that this strange little book is his favorite of his own books, so we ought to look twice at it. He also says he was working on it as a sort of trial run with the style that allowed for The Pound Era, which is the greatest work of creative literary criticism in existence. So there's that.
As for the book itself, well, it begins with an introduction which suggests that Counterfeit, Satire, and Verbatim Quoting seem to be the features of a new age of literature. Any one of those things could be a dissertation topic. He does it in about ten pages to get the engine moving. After that, it seems to be mainly about Pope and Swift, but with a lot of miscelanies, including silent actor Buster Keaton, math-and-process supergenious Charles Babbage, and computer prophet Allen Turing. And eventually it seems to say things about our whole way of living and thinking ever since the eighteenth century.
It is also illustrated by the author's personal friend Guy Davenport, who was a Ph.D who taught at Kentucky for a long time.
I don't know if it is exhausting to be brilliant, but it is pretty hard to keep up with brilliance when it moves so rapidly.
Try it out, it's fun. Maybe explain it to me sometime.

[John Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nimble, multifaceted, and lively treatment of Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" and the spread of empiricism. The idea might be summarized as "the human in the age of its mechanical reproducibility," though the approach shares nothing with Walter Benjamin (that I recall now). Many of its complexities were somewhat beyond me when I read this as a young undergraduate, in the early to mid 70s, but one thing that stuck with me was Kenner's survey of mechanical simulacra of thought and action—a calculating machine (such as Charles Babbage pursued), a mechanical duck, and so forth. Thus Kenner introduced me to the history of computing and robotics long before computers and robots themselves became subjects of common interest.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

As befits a book titled "The Counterfeiters," a book about the performative aspects of art (the performative aspects of "humanitas," too). At its best when Kenner gets going on empiricism and Swift.