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Julian Jaynes Society
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The Legacy of Julian Jaynes

   Bastard Hat
       By David Auerbach

   Julian Jaynes is dead, but I'm going to leave him aside for now to
   look at the buried legacy of Charles Fort (1874-1932). While the
   Fortean Times continues to publish arch examinations of Wilhelm Reich,
   Immanuel Velikovsky, and other crackpots, Fort's own work is reprinted
   in series with the most drug-addled or Marxism-saddled ramblings of
   Foucault and Kathy Acker, and the ethos of Fort's work has diffused
   its way through the world. Fort's most infamous idea--"I think we're
   property" (of higher beings)--was ripped off in countless pulps and
   was partly responsible for the establishment of one or two religious
   organizations.

   Fort was roundly dismissed by scholars of his day as a cross between
   Robert Ripley and P.T. Barnum, with all the exhibitionistic trappings
   of both. However, Fort's sincerity surpassed a lust for fame: of his
   anecdotes and conclusions, he wrote, "I no more believe them than I
   believe that twice two are four."

   He had probably read Notes from Underground, but was too flighty to be
   nihilistic--he preferred rubber cement to Ockham's Razor. He is the
   patron saint of all the urban legends and conspiracy theories of this
   century, but also of relativism.

   Fort loved exceptions and corner cases, and so the story of Kaspar
   Hauser caught his attention. Hauser turned up in Nuremberg one day in
   1828, barely able to walk or speak, and later claimed that he had been
   kept in a cell since birth. Fort launches from the story into a
   bizarre sequence of suppositions about teleportation, alien transport,
   and the indeterminacy of history, and leaves them hanging firmly in
   the air.

   Which brings me to Julian Jaynes, the only writer who maintained a
   shred of credibility in most people's eyes while effectively pursuing
   the same course as Fort. Jaynes passed away last Nov. 21, which I only
   recently discovered, due to the generally low profile he kept after
   the publication of one brilliant book, The Origin of Consciousness in
   the Bicameral Mind.

   Jaynes wrote it as an all-encapsulating treatise on the very recent
   evolution of the human brain, postulating that we had only 3,000 years
   ago shaken off a left/right-brain split that had until then made the
   right brain act as "god" to the left, producing visual and auditory
   hallucinations. Schizophrenia in Jaynes's framework is a regression to
   this "bicameral" state, so that people such as Bruno S. would exist in
   a pre-modern state of awareness.

   Jaynes was far removed from the mainstream, and was as criticized by
   the conservatives as he was embraced by the extremists. Many
   disagreed, and it's not difficult to do so, but reading Jaynes to be
   convinced is for the narrow-minded. Jaynes stood in the nexus of
   ancient history, Vico, modern academia, and a good deal of Forteanism,
   and if any scholar could be said to have been in Bruno S.'s state of
   "other-awareness," it would be him. His main achievement for me was in
   re-mythologizing humanity.

   In 1988, Life asked Jaynes to contribute a comment on the meaning of
   life. Sandwiched between the homilies of Armand Hammer and Norman
   Vincent Peale ("Approach Life the Joy Way!") is Jaynes's Fortean
   answer: "This question has no answer except in the history of how it
   came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not
   life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests
   in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves
   and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe."
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                        © 1998 The Yale Herald, Inc.