David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

The major problem with The Wild Numbers looks at first to be artistic but is actually rhetorical. All the book’s math is, as mentioned, made up, which is not necessarily a problem — all sorts of great science fiction, from Asimov to Larry Niven, is replete with fictional math and high tech. What is a problem, though, is that the fictional math in WN is extremely important but also extremely vague, comprising mostly repeated and contextless verbiage—“The trick was to construct a series of infinite sets of pseudo-wild numbers such that their intersection contained wild numbers only”; “If I could only establish its K-reducibility with the aid of a suitable calibrator set!”—without any definitions or even cursory fleshing-out, so that the book’s math-speak ends up most resembling the absurd pseudo-jargon of bad old low-budget sci-fi movies (“Quick, Lieutenant, prepare the antigenic nanomodule for immediate stabilization flux!”). Also vague and kind of bathetic is the novel’s depiction of actual mathematical work, which Isaac Swift appears to undertake only very late at night, bleary and unshaven and trembling with fatigue, “my head buzzing with complicated reasoning that led me around in circles,” “fiddling around with complex equations that only a handful of people understood.” 18

Apart from its intrinsic weaknesses, the sketchy made-up math here clearly indicates that The Wild Numbers is meant to appeal mostly to readers with little or no high-math background, an audience that either won’t know that the impressive-sounding terminology is fake or won’t mind that the terms never get connected to each other or anything else. This, too, is not necessarily a problem; many successful books, from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land to Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, use sort of perfunctory genre-conventions as scaffolding for what are really complex and essentially human dramas (i.e., for literature). But it is true that a genre book whose particular genre-elements lack technical depth or resonance must depend, for its appeal, on other, more traditionally literary qualities like plot, character, style, etc. And this is a very real problem for WN, because as any kind of literary narrative it is off-the-charts bad, its characters mere 2-D types (the neurotic schlemiel, the kindly mentor, the pompous crank, the vulpine reporter, the fiancée who Doesn’t Understand) and its plot howlingly implausible (e.g., for most of the book, both Isaac and Nobel-laureate Arkanov supposedly fail to spot in Isaac’s proof a basic, freshman-level logical flaw, the eventual discovery of which is sort of the novel’s pie-in-the-schlemiel’s-face climax). Worst, or at least most distracting, is the fact that the author-translator’s English seems rudimentary at best, 19and the actual line-by-line prose of WN is often so stiff and clunky—“My isolated existence was making me lose all sense of measure”; “How the tiny, quivering flame of my intuition was able to withstand the numerous onslaughts of my doubts remains a mystery to me”; “She unzipped her dress, and with a few sexy wriggles, let it slide from her shoulders”—or else riddled with ESL-ish solecisms—“She pouted her lip”; “In the distance, the three white lights of the television mast flashed on and off”; “ ‘I just don’t want to stifle my thoughts to accommodate for the shortcomings of a machine’ ”; “I found back my love for mathematics”—or unintentionally funny—“Her tongue probing deep into my mouth left little room for mathematical reflection”—or just plain bad—“They could not help but open like flowers in the brilliant sunshine of his presence, revealing their innermost secrets to him”—as to make the reader suffer that terrible, embarrassed-for-someone-else feeling on the author’s behalf. 20

It is true that Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture is also self-translated 21and its prose often awkward or stilted (“The custom of this annual meeting had been initiated by my grandfather and as a consequence had become an inviolable obligation in our tradition-ridden family”; “The next few days I played sick so as to be at home at the usual time of mail delivery”; “I was not made of the same mettle as he — this I realized now beyond the shadow of a doubt,” 22etc.). But here the clunky English is mitigated somewhat by UPGC ’s Greco-European setting and the fact that much of its action takes place before 1930. The novel’s framed (or “nested”) structure is itself almost Victorian: the middle-aged narrator, describing in retrospect the history of his childhood relationship with his reclusive uncle, recounts Petros’s own life story in a series of flashbacks “as told to him” by the great mathematician himself. The elaborate set-up and frames notwithstanding, it is Petros Papachristos’s obsessive and tormented career that drives the novel and comprises its heart.

UPGC is about as far from a schlemiel-comedy as you can get. It’s more like a cross between the Myth of Icarus and Goethe’s Werther, and it’s serious as a heart attack. 23Born in Greece around the turn of the century, Petros Papachristos is recognized as a child math prodigy and shipped across Europe to the University of Berlin, where in 1916 he receives his doctorate with a dissertation on “solving a particular variety of differential equations” that earns young Petros early acclaim because of its applications in WWI artillery targeting. It is also at U. Berlin that Petros has his first and only love affair, with his German-language tutor (a young lady by the rather unsubtle name of Isolde ), who toys with his affections and then elopes with a Prussian officer. In not its best moment, UPGC tries to establish this (wince) Isolde as Petros’s initial motive for tackling the Goldbach Conjecture:

In order to win her heart back, Petros now decided, there could be no half-measures… he should have to accomplish amazing intellectual feats, nothing short of becoming a Great Mathematician. But how does one become a Great Mathematician? Simple: by solving a Great Mathematical Problem! “Which is the most difficult problem in mathematics, Professor?” he asked [his U. Berlin adviser] at their next meeting, trying to feign mere academic curiosity.

Etc., whereupon Petros devotes the remainder of his professional life to the G.C., that Everest of unsolved problems. His twenty-year labor — which ends in failure and devastation — combines periods of seclusion in Germany with extended trips to Cambridge and Vienna, in which latter there are scenes of Papachristos rubbing elbows with some of twentieth-century math’s most important historical figures. The use of this Forrest Gump- ish device — i.e., of inserting actual famous mathematicians into the fiction’s plot and dialogue — implies that UPGC is written for readers who are at least familiar enough with higher math to know who Hardy, Ramanujan, Gödel, and Turing are; but many of the celebrity-scenes themselves are cheesy and kind of irritating. The complex and sensitive G. H. Hardy readers know from his Apology, for instance, gets reduced in Doxiadis’s novel to a sort of gouty old curmudgeon who spouts inanities like “Don’t you forget it, Papachristos, this blasted Conjecture is difficult! ”

Its treatment of the “real” Hardy is a good example of UPGC ’s particular rhetorical problem: the readers who will actually know who Godfrey Harold Hardy is are also the readers most likely to be put off by the way the book portrays him. 24And Doxiadis’s novel runs into this sort of logico-rhetorical problem again and again, because its big weakness as genre fiction is its weird, ambivalent confusion about just what kind of audience it’s for.