The Infinite Monkey Meme 6 comments

By David Griffith

A few years ago I was eating breakfast with my wife and daughter at a hipster diner specializing in cheap organic food and strong free-trade coffee. We were surrounded by wild-haired, paint-spattered vegans and their wild-haired children.

Inevitably, our daughter began playing with the other children and soon we were invited to draw up chairs and talk. They were all artists of one stripe or another, and so I offered that we—my wife and I—were writers.

When I said this, a tall man—thirty-seven years old, he volunteered—in madras shorts and beaten down New Balance running shoes, rag wool socks slouching at his ankles, said to me: “You know, if you chained 1,000 monkeys to 1,000 typewriters you would have the greatest novel ever written.”

I gave a fake laugh, nodded politely and then commenced staring into my coffee cup, mulling over what he said. What did he mean by this? Was he insulting me? Or was he just embracing the avant-garde ideology of chance, like John Cage’s I-Ching inspired rolling of dice, or William Burrough’s cut-ups?

Or did these 1,000 monkeys embody the romantic view of the artist as vessel: without ego, without anxiety, just plugging into the great collective unconscious and taking dictation? Or was he just being a gadfly, challenging aesthetic assumptions of greatness?

This off-handed comment troubled me all day long and into the next, and, as you can probably tell, troubles me to this day, so I decided to research the origins of this joke.

A Google search turned up a Wikipedia entry: “The Infinite Monkey Theorem.” It turns out this business with the monkeys at typewriter began years ago not as a joke but as a thought experiment used to illustrate the statistical probability that otherwise statistically independent events will occur in sequence; in this case the events are the pressing of keys to produce an intelligible sequence of letters.

No one knows for sure who coined the analogy, but it goes basically like this: An infinite number of monkeys, stationed at an infinite number typewriters will, by randomly pressing the keys over an infinite number of years, eventually produce a certain number of already existing texts.

The texts have changed over the years—in its earliest version it was the entirety of the British Museum, then it was the complete works of Shakespeare, then just a single play, Hamlet—but the concept has remained the same: given a finite number of keys (letters in the alphabet) and an infinite amount of time, the probability that such a complex text could be written (reproduced, actually, but more on that later) approaches zero but is not actually zero. In other words, the probability is so small as to be beyond human comprehension, but mathematically there is still a chance.

The theorem has all sorts of applications, from the statistical probability of natural selection, to the formation of the cosmos, to thermodynamics, but its most interesting application to the vegan’s breakfast quip is its challenge to the concept of authorship: given that there a finite number of letters in a given alphabet and a finite number of words, creativity is really just an act of rearranging the order of letters and words.

Borges, whose fiction often meditates on such theoretic situations, quotes Lewis Carroll’s novel Sylvie and Bruno: “Soon,” Carroll writes, “literary men will not ask themselves, ‘What book shall I write?’ but ‘Which book?’”

Carroll’s line got me reflecting on my writing life: Do I believe that the book “I shall write” is the book that only I could write given my personality and experience? I’m happy to say yes, I do believe that. Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine having written a different book. Of course, I can imagine making different choices, but the choices I did make were the result of intuition and experience, not the flip of a coin.

Noting this, I realize that I had never regarded the infinite monkey theorem as anything other than a jokey hypothetical, like “when a tree falls in the forest....” But I think it could actually be less benign.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, I had been working on a novel for a few years, but overnight the grotesque images of the scandal convinced me that I could not effectively write fiction when such atrocities were being perpetrated. I needed to take up a moral position against the actions depicted in the photos. I began writing essays about my feelings toward the images, which eventually, two years later, lead to a book—nonfiction.

I would like believe that there is zero probability of my book being written by a monkey randomly stabbing at a typewriter, because I believe my book, as most, if not all, books do, was/is the result of Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of emotion,” but not so much “recollected in tranquility” as collected, like a torrent of rain from the eaves and into a barrel while the storm is still thundering past.

Let’s see a monkey do that.

But that’s not the point. No one who loves literature wants to believe that randomly typing animals, no matter their sentience, could produce anything as achingly beautiful as a John Donne poem or as poignant as a Margaret Atwood novel.

Monkeys, we’re told, are uncannily smart, soulful creatures, so to picture them chained to typewriters and goaded, somehow, to type for all eternity, is sad, but also intellectually arousing in that allegorical, Swiftian way.

But that’s not my point either.

My point of is that the infinite monkey theorem has slowly become a meme whose replication and application to the fine arts (we’ve all been in a museum when someone says “a monkey could paint that”) like so much of our vain capitalist culture, devalues the importance of anything driven into existence not because it is clamored for by the masses, but by the need of a relative few who thirst for truth and justice.