Both Kinds of Knowledge
Barbara Kingsolver’s brilliant novel, Demon Copperhead, masterfully gives its readers both knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance
It’s interesting that English only has one word for knowledge while other languages such as Spanish and French have two - saber/savoir and conocer/connaître. The first type refers to categorical, abstract, verbal knowledge, or knowledge by description - knowing that something is the case, as in knowing that 2+2=4, or that Washington, DC is the capital of the United States. The second type refers to experience, and is more concrete, personal, and not necessarily easy to adequately capture neatly in words. This can be referred to as knowledge by acquaintance, as in knowing a person, or place, as in “I know that neighborhood of DC very well.”
Understanding anything well seems to work best when we can combine both kinds of knowledge. Academic knowledge is rightfully dominated by knowledge by description, as it must be shared and capable of verification by anyone anywhere. But without some way of experiencing it for oneself, abstract knowledge lacks depth and power, so won’t necessarily move us deeply. This is where stories come in. Narratives can serve to make the abstract much more concrete and real, and can give us the feeling we have experienced something for ourselves in a way that statistics can’t match, no matter how convincing. This is why fiction can be so important in conveying the truth. It can put flesh and bones on the skeleton of evidence provided by data.
All this is a way to introduce why I enjoyed reading Barbara Kingsolver’s recent novel Demon Copperhead so much. [Review of the book here] As I had earlier read some non-fiction (history, sociology, etc.) that addressed problems of Appalachian poverty, drug abuse, etc., especially in response to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, I recognized what Kingsolver provided that the others were missing - the rich, experiential evocation of acquaintance knowledge that great storytelling (and art more generally) can accomplish. The difference is that Vance’s story, while perhaps true as far is it goes about his own experience, was false in what it claimed about Appalachia more generally without any substantial evidence beyond his own opinions, anecdotes, and victim-blaming “culture of poverty” confusing of the effects of the region’s deprivation with its causes.
Kingsolver, on the other hand, in her novel showed mastery of both kinds of knowledge, and the ability to convey both. The setting of her novel in southwestern Virginia is where she grew up, so she knows the people and places very well. Among the characters, she uses the narrator’s teacher and budding journalist friend of his who himself is trying to better understand the causes of the area’s pathologies, to explain to the reader what historians and social scientists have learned. All this is masterfully woven into the life story of a young man who is orphaned at a young age, but due to some combination of his own gifts, a great deal of luck, and having enough of the right people to support him, overcomes the odds to look as if he can make a decent life for himself. The novel is a brilliant update of the Dickens classic, David Copperfield, which was Dickens’ semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in Victorian England and succeeding against the powerful class-based odds. You don’t have to have read that book to enjoy Demon Copperhead, but I found it a lot of fun to recognize characters and plot bits from the older novel. As I read Copperfield so long ago, I kept referring back to the Wikipedia entry when a character or incident seemed familiar, and this added another layer of enjoyment to the experience.
It took me a few chapters to get into the novel, but once I did, I was fully engrossed, and found the characters, the voice of the narrator (first person, from “Demon” - his nickname), and the storytelling to be masterfully done. This was a brilliant, moving book. But what impressed me most about it was how it accomplished the interweaving of teaching some vitally important descriptive knowledge about Appalachia, its history, and the land and people’s exploitation (as well as how the rest of the country has been taught to view them) with the acquaintance knowledge of getting to know the people and area by the power of virtual personal experience that vivid, beautiful storytelling is able to evoke in the reader.
This is a great novel, and so would be worth reading in any case. But what put it over the top for me in terms of quality was the powerful ways in which it also does such a great job of conveying knowledge to readers about the plight of Appalachia (and areas in rural America suffering similar problems) and its people. Any time we can turn people and their problems from stereotypes and tropes into more nuanced, fully fleshed out human beings with whom we can relate, and with more complex reasons and richer context for how they came to be how they are, we will likely act more effectively to make things better. I can only hope enough people read this to begin moving us in the right direction.