Gilkey and Poiesis

Often times I read multiple books at the same time. I usually always have a book in progress on my kindle, one on my desk, and another floating around somewhere between my nightstand or day bag. While I can’t say that this makes my reading any faster, one thing it does do is give me an opportunity to compare different things books say, or in the case of books on a particular area of philosophy, understand their particular philosophical application as it pertains to situations in another book.

The particular juxtaposition that I’ve come across recently comes from Carl R. Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and Allison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is mostly a history book, tracing the ideas that have given rise to our current cultural amnesia and affliction of expressive individualism (in fact the subtitle of the book is “Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution”). Early in the book, Trueman describes Charles Taylor’s categorization of worldviews into two basic categories: that of mimesis, where the world has a given order and a given meaning, where humans are required to discover this meaning and conform themselves to it, and that of poiesis, where the world is raw material, out of which meaning and purpose can be created by an individual¹.

He then goes on to track these two thoughts through the works of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Nietzche, Mark, Darwin, Freud, Reich, Marcuse, and so on. Each time charting the application of these two underlying differences in worldview. The development of poietic worldview plays itself out in what becomes our current culture of expressive individualism.

In the second book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, the tale is told² of a man named John Gilkey, a serial book thief, particularly of rare books (worth quite large amounts). Bartlett portrays Gilkey in the book fairly even-handed, wrestling with the consequences of Gilkey’s actions and her own complicity by way of knowledge in an engaging way without necessarily judging Gilkey’s personality or coming across as a champion of his cause.

A few lines near the end of Bartlett’s book stuck out to me though, and probably would not have stuck out nearly as much had I not been recently reading Trueman’s book:

“I’d say that Gilkey is a man who believes that the ownership of a vast rare book collection would be the ultimate expression of his identity, that any means of getting it would be fair and right, and that once people could see his collection, they would appreciate the man who had built it.” (pg 251)

It’s clear throughout the book that Gilkey sees himself as wronged, as though the penal justice brought down on him by the booksellers whose wares he stole violated the expression of his identity. Bartlett even posits that she feels that Gilkey telling his story is a way of him “begetting this [his ideal] self”³, i.e., the practice of stealing books and eventually telling his story is an act of poiesis. He’s settled on an identity and expresses that identity in his actions, many of which happen to be illegal.

I also find it fascinating that only a couple of pages after this, Bartlett shares her own poiesis, relating herself to the book collectors she spent two years interviewing (emphasis mine):

“searching for them [stories], researching them, and writing them gives my life shape and purpose the way that hunting, gathering, and cataloging books does for the collector.” (pg 254)

It’s a connection I’m not sure would have stood out to me, had I not been reading both books either at the same time, or at least in close proximity.

• books
• poiesis
• crime