The Literary Milestones of the Algebraic Mentality:

Formative: The Koran, Wis and Ramin, The Story of Layla and Majnun, Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda. (One interesting feature of the shift from the concrete to the abstract is expressed in the shift from sexual love – the kind we see expressed in Horace, Ovid, and Catullus – to romantic love and erotic mysticism. This shift seems to start in India and Persia and soon spreads across Western Europe and reaches a climax in the elaborate behavioural code of courtly love in the high Middle Ages.)

Dominant: Tristan et Iseult, The Quest for the Holy Grail, The Death of King Arthur. (The Quest for the Holy Grail is a prime example in which the concrete landscape becomes an allegorical code. For me the medieval Algebraic Mentality is an algorithmic logical operation that says: If the daughter does not belong to the father, she belongs to me because I love her (the Persian poem, Layla and Majnun). If the wife does not belong to the husband, then she belongs to me, because I love her, (the Persian Wis and Ramin, and the Celtic Tristan et Iseult). If God is not a vengeful and frightening patriarchal Yahweh who belongs only to the Ark, the temple, and the high priest, then God is the Beloved and belongs to me as my heart’s desire (Rumi and Sufism in general).

Climactic: Dante’s Divine Comedy. (Dante and Fra Angelico are great artists whose imaginations can carry them beyond the limits of the mentality of their times. In his “Letter to Can Grande,” Dante shows how the allegorical mode is transcended by the hermeneutic of the anagogic, and with Dante, courtly love becomes cosmic love: “l’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle.”

The Literary Milestones of the Galilean Dynamical Mentality:

Formative: Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Descartes’s Discourse on Method. (The picaresque narrative celebrates the new non-heroic individualism of the common man, and shows life as a process of learning a new science and wisdom through trial and error.)

Dominant: Faust (all versions as performances of the European myth). Faust shows man challenging sacerdotal authority to gain power over nature, which is the dominant scientific myth of modernism. Melville’s Moby-Dick goes back to the Gilgameshepic in its vision of male bonding and slaying the beast of nature.

Climactic: James Joyce’s Ulysses is a conscious recapitulation of literary history, from the Homeric epic to the modern novel, and a brilliant performance of the shift from the linear narrative of a single hero to the complex dynamical system of an ecology of consciousness – a movement that he completes with Finnegans Wake.