Pseudo Documentarism in Classical Literature

Pseudo-Documentarism in Classical Lit

PREFACE: MUNDUS VULT DECIPI

-oY tambien se salvaron los que le clavaron los clavos?

-Si -replico Espinosa, cuya teologia era incierta.

Jorge Luis Borges, "El Evangelio segun Marcos"

Housman, in preparing his critical edition of the text of Lucan in 1927, had memorably sharp words for his predecessor C.M. Francken: "The width and variety of his ignorance are wonderful; it embraces mythology, palaeography, prosody, and astronomy, and he cannot keep it to himself" (Housman xxxiv-v). Were Housman alive today, he might lacked such capacity for wonder -- these days, what is one German philologist compared to the Internet? On the Internet, the width and variety of human ignorance can seem all-embracing, and may push our wonder into stupefaction or exhaustion.

Even so, the methods of textual criticism retain an extraordinary utility in the era of the Internet. Textual criticism aims at discovering the phylogeny of error; meanwhile computers, and the Internet, are engines for the replication of text. A work that might have taken a monastic scribe weeks to transcribe can now be replicated with a simple keystroke. It is no accident that "viral" is a key adjective in describing the progress of information in the Internet age -- it implies replication without sense. Ecdotics, and the study of cladistics and stemmata, are precisely relevant to the way the Internet works. The only difference is that mistakes made on the Internet can be transmitted globally, and multiplied a thousandfold, almost instantaneously.

Let us consider the simple Latin sententia "mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur." A computer user in early 2008 might have encountered this tag in reading the New York Times blog of economist (and future Nobel Prize winner) Paul Krugman. A different computer user in 2008 might have encountered it in a computer game, "Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst," where the words are reproduced as part of a puzzle. If we Google the words "mundus vult decipi," the first result -- unsurprisingly -- is Wikipedia, which ascribes it to the Roman satirist Petronius. Tucked into Wikipedia's apparatus criticus, however -- the page entitled "Talk" -- one editor asks "Does anyone have the source of attribution to Petronius?" The words occur nowhere in the extant text of Petronius, of course. But it hardly matters: a Google search for "mundus vult decipi" + "Petronius" now yields over 25,000 results. Other sources are offered for the words, on Wikipedia and the Internet generally: Krugman was sufficiently scholarly to give his source for the Latin, a novel by Alan Furst entitled The Spies of Warsaw, where the phrase is referred to, with no evidence, as "Herr Hitler's favorite saying" (Furst 225). Google tells us the phrase is used in texts by Martin Buber and Theodor Adorno, so some commenters on the Internet attribute it to them (Adorno 24; Buber 9). But this is the upshot of our advanced information technology: when a Latin adage is somehow credited variously to Adolf Hitler and Martin Buber, to limn the cladistics of error becomes an exercise in pointlessness. In any case, the question of how Petronius gets credited so widely for the words is easily solved -- Wikipedia credits him in 2006. By the time that Krugman's readers or gamers encounter the phrase on their computers in 2008, their Google searches all led straight to Wikipedia, and the error was perpetuated.