Both Flesh and Not: Essays
Page 14
The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you'd first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn't any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the rewards of strangers' affection is as dust, lint.
—1998
isochronal—equal in duration, taking same amount of time isomer—two molecules of same element but w/different arrangement of atoms isotropic—identical in all directions; invariant w/respect to direction; isotrope, isotropy jakes—latrine or privy jape—joke, make sport of journal—the part of a machine shaft or axle supported by a bearing keep (n.)—jail; stronghold of castle (he watched from the keep of the tree) keloid—a red raised scar from an injury kepi—French military cap w/flat circular top and a visor: classic FFL hat, Casablanca, etc. kerf—a groove or notch made by a cutting tool like an axe or saw kidskin—leather made from goat kill (n.)—Northern, Dutch term for a creek; Southern equivalent is “run” laciniate—fringed laconic—terse, of few words ladder (v.)—to run as a stocking does lamelliform—having the form of a thin plate lamina—thin sheet, plate, or layer laparoscopy—using laparoscope (slender, tubular pelvic endoscope) to treat endometriosis lapstrake (adj.)—nautical, “clinker-built”(?) last (n.)—mold shaped like foot used by cobbler lath—thin strips of wood in rows as substructure for plaster, shingles, tile lavabo—ritual of washing hands by priest before Eucharist lavation—washing lee (n.)—place sheltered from wind; side of ship away from wind legato—music: in a smooth, even style leptosome—frail, skinny person Levant—countries bordering eastern Mediterranean from Turkey to Egypt; Levantine levator—surgical instrument for raising depressed parts of a fractured skull; in anatomy, a muscle that raises a body part leveret—a hare less than one year old limbus—a distinctive border or edge, e.g., junction of cornea and sclera of eyeball limen—the threshold of a physiological or psychological response limnetic—of or occurring in the deeper parts of lakes or ponds limnology—study of lakes linstock—long forked stick for holding match… used to light cannons linuron—herbicide to kill weeds littoral—of or on a shore lobation—being lobed; a structure resembling a lobe (i.e., a rounded projection) loblolly—Southern for mud hole or mire lorgnette—old-fashioned eye-glasses or opera glasses with a short handle lowboy—towing device w/wheels and bed for hauling stuff behind vehicle lowery (adj.)—cloudy, overcast luteous—moderate greenish yellow luxate—to put out of joint, dislocate luxe (n.)—condition of gross luxury, a luxury macle—a dark spot or discoloration in a crystal malediction—curse malocclusion—faulty contact between upper & lower teeth when jaw is closed malpais—bad country, badlands, desert (? check before using) Maltese cross—four arrow heads joined at point; looks like ragged K lilantear maquillage—heavy theatrical makeup marcasite—ornament of pyrite marplot—stupid meddler who interferes with undertaking matrix—womb; a surrounding environment or container in which something originates mattock—digging tool that looks like flat-bladed hammer maugre—in spite of, notwithstanding
OVERLOOKED: FIVE DIRELY UNDERAPPRECIATED U.S. NOVELS >1960
Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass (1966)
Gass’s first novel, and his least avant-gardeish, and his best. Basically a religious book. Very sad. Contains the immortal line “The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.” Bleak but gorgeous, like light through ice.
Steps by Jerzy Kosinski (1968)
This won some big prize or other when it first came out, but today nobody seems to remember it. Steps gets called a novel but it is really a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.
Angels by Denis Johnson (1983)
This was Johnson’s first fiction after the horripilative lyric poetry of The Incognito Lounge. Even cult fans of Jesus’ Son often haven’t heard of Angels. It’s sort of Jesus’ Son’s counterpoint, a novel-length odyssey of mopes and scrotes and their brutal redemptions. A totally American book, it’s also got great prose, truly great, some of the ’80s’ best; e.g., lines like “All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces.”
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
Don’t even ask.
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson (1988)
W’s M is a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism. A monologue, formally very odd, mostly one-sentence ¶s. Tied with Omensetter’s Luck for the all-time best U.S. book about human loneliness. These wouldn’t constitute ringing endorsements if they didn’t happen all to be simultaneously true—i.e., that a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde could also be so moving makes Wittgenstein’s Mistress pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.
—1999
maul—long-handled sledgehammer used for splitting logs, etc. mazy—labyrinthine meconium—dark green feces in fetus that is discharged near time of birth medulla—inner core of some body parts, like bone marrow is medulla; (adj.) medullar meerschaum—dense fine white claylike substance; a pipe made of this (w/white bowl) mensal (adj.)—used at table, i.e., to dine meridian—noon, l Nyliongitudinal circle circumscribing world metamere—homologous longitudinal segments that compose the body of earth worms, lobsters, etc. midden—dung hill or rubbish heap; place in antique kitchen where biowaste is stored milliner—hatmaker milt—fish sperm; spermy stuff in general minaudière—small cosmetic case minim—tiny or insignificant portion moiré (adj.)—having a wavy or rippled surface… used of cloth monocoque—metal structure, like airplane, in which the skin absorbs all or most of the stresses to which the body is subjected monopsony—a market in which there are lots of sellers for just one buyer moratory—authorizing delay in payment mordacious—given to biting; caustic, sarcastic moreen—sturdy ribbed wool or cotton used for upholstery Mormon cricket—big wingless western grasshopper bad to crops Mornay—served w/white sauce w/grated cheese and seasonings: eggs Mornay mudra—series of symbolic body postures and hand movements in Hindu dancing & meditation mummer—a masked and costumed merrymaker muntin—strip of wood or metal that separates & holds various panes in a window, like a window w/four individual panes arranged in a big rectangle, etc. (that’s putting it well, Dave) muricate—covered with short spines murine—rodentlike must/musth—period of heightened sexual drive in elephants (Vulcans) when they’re more aggressive multivoltine—producing several broods in a single season; prolific birthing nates—buttocks, shanks neap (adj.)—from “neap tide,” lowest possible tide nictitate (v.)—to wink nidifugous—leaving the nest shortly after hatching (slackers are not nidifugous) nidify—to build a nest nidus—nest for eggs of insects; central point for start of infection in organism niello—black metallic alloy used for decorations on surfaces numismatic—of or relating to coins & currency numismatist—coin collector nummular—shaped like a coin, circular or oval nutation—the act of nodding; a wobble in a gyroscope or spinning body obdurate—stubborn; “an obdurate chin” obligate (adj.)—able to exist only in a certain kind of environment obloquy—harsh, derisive language ocherous—moderate orange yellow… e.g., early sunset odonate—dragonflyish, stiff-winged oneiric—of, relating to, or suggestive of dreams ordure—excrement, dung ordurous—dungish or shitty orgeat—sweet flavoring, orange/almond orgone—theoretical life-force emanating from living things oriel—a small bay window… prevalent in NE and SF houses orotund—full in sound, sonorous; “orotund tones” orrery—a mechanical model of the solar system
RHETORIC AND THE MATH MELODRAMA
MATH’S CULTURAL STOCK HAS risen hard in recent years, no doubt driven by the same booming and metastatic Knowledge Economy that’s turned yesterday’s non grata nerd into today’s cyber-tycoon. Call the ph
enomenon “Geek Chic” or “Hip(2b)2” or whatever you will: abstract tech is now sexy, the mathematician a viable commercial hero—see for example the success of recent films like Good Will Hunting and π.
Or a better instance of math’s new cachet here is Amir D. Aczel’s Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem, which made nonfiction bestseller lists in 1996 and transformed Princeton’s Andrew Wiles into a weird kind of horn-rimmed pop icon, and in the wake of which has appeared everything from Paul Hoffman’s The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind1 to David Berlinski’s Newton’s Gift and Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
Though fiction, Philibert Schogt’s The Wild Numbers and Apostolos Doxiadis’s Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture both draw heavily on Aczel’s Fermat’s Last Theorem (as well as on G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology2). And there are other, rather striking similarities between these two novels. Both are set in the world of academic mathematics and feature characters whose specialty is number theory,3 higher math’s most purely abstract branch. Both novels revolve around their protagonists’ quests to solve famous and long-standing number-theoretic problems. And both WN and UPGC have been translated by their own authors from foreign-language originals.
The facts of these two novels’ close resemblance and near-simultaneous release here in the States, as well as the vigor with which their U.S. publishers are hyping them,4 appear to signal the inception of a whole new commercial genre—the “Math Melodrama,” as it were. This is a development that should come as no surprise, given the success of some of the other titles mentioned supra, not to mention the commercial success in recent years of other nascent tech-intensive genres (the cyberpunk of Neuromancer et seq., the Clancy-style technothriller, the plucky-young-hackers-thwarting-evil-monolithic-institutions of Sneakers, Hackers, The Matrix, etc.).
As exemplified by WN and UPGC in fiction and Fermat’s Last Theorem and A Beautiful Mind in non-, the Math Melodrama can be roughly characterized as combining the “Vocational Travelogue”5 charms of genre authors like Arthur Hailey and Michael Crichton with some of the weightier allegorical functions that other genres and their heroes often serve—the Western sheriff as emblem of Apollonian order, the Noir private eye as existential hero, the plucky young hacker as Odyssean trickster. The Math Melodrama’s own allegorical template appears to be more classically Tragic, its hero a kind of Prometheus-Icarus figure whose high-altitude genius is also hubris and Fatal Flaw.6 If this sounds a bit grandiose, well, it is; but it’s also a fair description of the way Math Melodramas characterize the project of pure math—as nothing less than the mortal quest for Divine Truth. What’s odd here is that whether a particular reader accepts this characterization or sees it as pretentious and silly will often depend less on the qualities of the Math Melodramas themselves than on certain biographical facts about the reader himself, namely how much knowledge and experience of higher math he happens to have.
This sort of oddity is, in fact, a frequent problem in reviewing or assessing “genre fiction,” which is a type of narrative it’s usually fair to call “the sort of thing someone who likes this sort of thing is apt to like." The evaluative criteria tend to be rather special for genre fiction. Instead of the basically aesthetic assay the reviewer gets to make of most literary fiction—“Is this piece of fiction good?”—criticism of genre fiction is ultimately more rhetorical—“To whom will this piece of fiction appeal?” In other words, as is the case with all but the broadest and coarsest genre fiction, the central questions about novels like WN and UPGC concern what rhetoricians call “audience”: What is the intended audience for these books? And is this audience apt to find the novels satisfying on the same terms by which it finds other Math Melodramas satisfying? And if not, are there other audiences whom these books are more likely to satisfy? And so on. One reason this is a problem for reviewers is that book reviews are usually supposed to be short, clear, and relatively simple, and rhetorical criteria tend to yield very complex, sometimes even paradoxical conclusions. In the case of The Wild Numbers and Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture, the paradox is that the type of audience most likely to accept and appreciate these novels’ lofty, encomiastic view of pure math is also the audience most apt to be disappointed by the variously vague, reductive, or inconsistent ways the novels handle the actual mathematics they’re concerned with.
To put it in a simpler, more book review-ish way: neither of these novels is very good (one, in fact, is downright bad); but the precise ways in which they’re not very good will vary directly with how much an individual reader already knows about the extraordinary field these two books are trying to dramatize.7
Not just professional mathematicians, but just about anyone lucky enough ever to have studied higher math understands what a pity it is that most students never pursue the subject past its introductory levels and therefore know only the dry and brutal problem-solving of Calc I or Intro Stats (which is roughly analogous to halting one’s study of poetry at the level of grammar and syntax). Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art”8 and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc…. but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.9
It may be that mathematics is not generally recognized as one of the arts precisely because so much pyramidal training and practice is required in order to appreciate its aesthetics; math is perhaps the ultimate in acquired tastes.10 And it’s maybe because of math’s absolute, wholly abstract Truth that so many people still view the discipline as dry or passionless and its practitioners as asocial dweebs. Some readers of Science will probably know all too well the frustration of trying to describe the beauty and power of Gauss’s differential geometry or the Banach-Tarski Paradox to someone who remembers only the drudgery of factoring quadratic equations or the terror of a trig midterm. In fact, the weird fear and distaste that low-level math provokes in so many11 is part of what makes the emergence of the Math Melodrama exciting: if the genre can find ways to vivify pure math and communicate the discipline’s extraordinary beauty and passion to the average reader,12 both readers and math itself stand to gain.
The ways in which Schogt’s and Doxiadis’s novels go about trying to humanize and animate math are also kind of similar. Besides both struggling to solve classic problems in number theory (the actual Goldbach Conjecture in UPGC, in WN a fictitious conundrum called “Beauregard’s Wild Number Problem”13), the books’ protagonists also both conceive of their projects almost wholly in terms of personal achievement, glory. WN’s Isaac Swift, a once-promising student whose pro career has stagnated, spends much time fantasizing about solving the Wild Number Problem and having “an international symposium held in my honor… and, now that I was not just a mathematician, but a famous mathematician, women would suddenly find me attractive, not just eccentric or at best amusing.” And UPGC’s Petros Papachristos, while already a number-theorist of substantial reputation who holds an endowed chair at U. Munich, nevertheless “sought in mathematics a great, almost transcendent success, a total triumph that would bring him world fame…. And to be complete, this triumph should be exclusively his own.” Despite their different stations and attainments, the two protagonists suffer almost identically (and at great length) from the insecurity of measuring themselves against their colleagues and the fear that s
omeone else will solve “their” problem first (Petros actually rejoices when Srinivasa Ramanujan14 dies young of tuberculosis, simply because Ramanujan’s “unique intellect was the only force he considered capable of purloining his prize”). Both protagonists’ work is characterized as an anxious race against the clock and calendar; both novels make much of the fact that pure math is a “young man’s game” and that the vast majority of important mathematicians do their best work before thirty-five.15 And both heroes brood and expound at great length about the particular despair of being a good but not immortally great mathematician, i.e., a mathematician brilliant enough truly to appreciate the genius of Riemann, Euler, Poincaré, et al. but not brilliant enough to be their equal. As UPGC’s Petros tells his nephew:
Take Hardy and Littlewood, top-class mathematicians both of them. They possibly made the Hall of Fame—a very large Hall of Fame, mind you—but even they did not get their statues erected at the grand entrance alongside Euclid, Archimedes, Newton, Euler, Gauss… That had been my only ambition and nothing short of the proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture, which also meant cracking the deeper mystery of the primes, could possibly have lead me there. [sic]