In the Garden of Knowledge
But times have changed. Sort of. Today, knowledge is considered a good thing, a useful thing. If you want evidence, watch the beginning of the movie Animal House. The scene is also in a garden, one located in a college. The camera focuses on a statue of the college's founder, moves down to the statue's base, and closes in on a plaque that reads "Knowledge is Good." Or, maybe this image is mocking us, a snarky critique of our educational system. Animal House mocks much about university life, so maybe we shouldn't take it as "The Truth" on matters of knowledge. What can I tell you…watch the movie.
From the third-floor window in my classroom, students look down into Loyola Marymount University's Sunken Garden, which has a few palm trees. This is Southern California, a mile from the beach. The Sunken Garden is so-named because the floor of the wide circular garden is about four feet lower than the higher edge, where life persists. This highness and lowness is a metaphor for the tensions surrounding knowledge and people. I'm up, you're down. Or maybe it's the other way around.
The word "sunken" also means depressed, even gloomy. This might be a problem, particularly if we associate "knowledge" with the process of learning. In that case, knowledge might not be a good thing. Perhaps you know students who get depressed when they have to write term papers. You know the kind. Citing sources, combining sources, making arguments, and creating a synthesis. Perhaps you are such a person. Perhaps for you, having to write such a paper—even if it is in the "pursuit of knowledge"—is a hard thing, a bad thing.
LMU's William H. Hannon Library, like the Garden of Eden, is a Garden of Knowledge. And trees. The library is filled with books. Where do books come from? Trees. And if you look up the word "book" in a dictionary, it says it comes from a Latin word for a type of tree: a beech tree. Why is this? Because early writing was done on wooden tablets made from these trees. In fact, the word "library" comes from a word for the inner bark or rind of a tree, upon which words were written. And for early "pagans"—think of people minus formal religious institutions—trees, like knowledge, were sacred. Spirits. God.
The story in this book is made up of students' stories about how they write a term paper—a "literature review"—in my class on research methods. I use their stories, which are created as comics, or "comix" (a "mix" of words and images), to show how students' comix portray their pursuit of knowledge as a heroic narrative, a myth of combat and conquest, a myth of becoming.
Myths, such as the one about Adam and Eve, have their roots in images: the ancient images of the universe as chaos and cosmos, the images of our human instincts toward love (eros), and death (thanatos). And by "myth," I don't mean a story that is not true. By myth, I mean a story that connects humans to the cosmos, connects people to the cosmic order of the universe and connects students to the cosmic order of the university. And these myths show relationships of power, which we call "ideology."
Comics have been considered sinful by violating traditional ways of doing things. That's because comics, or "comix," are viewed as an affront to the idea of "purity." Comics mix "words" and "images." But traditionalists argue that each art should seek its own perfection. Literature reviews should be only words; photographs only images. Therefore, the mixing of "words" and "images" is considered sinful (cf. Groensteen, 2009). But this mixing is also synthesis. As students mix parts together—both within literature reviews and within comix, and make arguments for new research, they learn how knowledge evolves. And knowledge—and our myths of knowledge—transforms, moves forward, from "original sin" to "original synthesis."