David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

Notwithstanding all the narrator’s heavy declarations that “Uncle Petros’ sin was Pride” and his retreat into paralyzed seclusion “a form of burnout,” “scientific battle fatigue,” it emerges in UPGC that the real cause of Petros’s tragedy is his progressive withdrawal from the professional community as his ambition to solve the Conjecture becomes a rapacity that transforms his colleagues into first rivals and then enemies. The novel’s middle sections trace this progression out nicely. It starts in Cambridge, when Petros rejects an offer of professional collaboration with Hardy and Littlewood because he fears that “their problems would become his own and, what’s worse, their fame would inevitably outshine his,” and determines instead to work on the G.C. alone, withdrawing to Munich. There, over years of seclusion and nonstop work, privacy becomes secrecy, and Petros’s fear and suspicion of other mathematicians approaches “the point of paranoia. In order to avoid his colleagues’ drawing conclusions from the items he withdrew from the library, he began to… protect the book he really wanted by including it in a list of three or four irrelevant ones, or he would ask for an article in a scientific journal only in order to get his hands on the issue that also contained another article, the one he really wanted,” etc. (Q.v. here also Petros’s aforementioned “wild joy” at the death of Ramanujan.)

The real Minoan-type crisis, though, comes about halfway through the novel, when Petros achieves an important “intermediate result” in his progress toward the Conjecture — a “deep, pioneering theorem… which opened new vistas in the Theory of Numbers”—and has to decide what to do. Petros’s internal debate about whether to publish the result (which is really a Hyde-vs.-Minos argument about membership in a community) is probably the novel’s best moment:

Undoubtedly, its publication would secure him recognition in the mathematical world much greater than that achieved by his method for solving differential equations. In fact, it would probably catapult him to the first ranks of the small but select international community of number theorists, practically on the same level as its great stars….

By making his discovery public, he would also be opening the way into the [Goldbach] problem to other mathematicians who would build on it by discovering new results and expand the limits of the field in a way a lone researcher, however brilliant, could scarcely hope. The results they would achieve would, in turn, aid him in his pursuit of the proof to the Conjecture. In other words… he would be acquiring a legion of assistants in his work. Unfortunately, there was another side to this coin: one of the new unpaid (also unasked for) assistants might conceivably stumble upon a better way to apply his theorem and manage, God forbid, to prove Goldbach’s Conjecture before him….

He didn’t have to deliberate long. The danger far outweighed the benefit. He wouldn’t publish.

From here on, the die is cast. And because he is not a king, it is not his community but Petros himself who receives the inevitable punishment for this “hoarding of the general benefit.” 31What happens is that “his” unpublished result is independently discovered by another mathematician, a development Petros finds out about only years later, from Hardy, who “expressed his amazement that Petros had not been aware of this, since its publication had caused a sensation in the circles of number theorists and brought great acclaim to its young author.” 32

As UPGC ’s plot unfolds, this sort of Aesopian, reap-just-what-you-sow punishment gets inflicted on Petros again and again, worsening as each ego-blow increases his alienation and paranoia and sends him deeper into a kind of professional solipsism. Far more than any supposed misreading of Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem, it is this solipsism that leads to Petros’s “failure”—as both a mathematician and a person — and he ends up rather like Milton’s Satan, not just alone but Alone, sustaining himself on the sort of megalomaniacal self-pity that creative people everywhere know and dread: “I, Petros Papachristos, never having published anything of value, will go down in mathematical history — or rather will not go down in it — as having achieved nothing. This suits me fine, you know. I have no regrets. Mediocrity would never have satisfied me. To an ersatz, footnote kind of immortality, I prefer… total obscurity!” Despite the confused and confusing math-labyrinth it’s hidden inside, the embedded story of Petros’s fall is a kind of monstrous gem, one in whose facets readers of many different backgrounds and tastes might see parts of themselves reflected. Apparent implication: if math can be art, so sometimes can genre.

— 2000

oscitancy—the act of yawning osculate—to kiss osier—willow trees w/rodlike twigs used in basketry; or one of these twigs osnaburg—heavy coarse cotton fabric used for grain sacks, upholstery, drapes outland—out lying areas of a country, the provinces paleo—prefix meaning ancient, old, primitive: paleontrope? palliate—lessen severity, relieve symptoms palmary(adj.) — outstanding, great palmette—stylized palm leaf used as decoration in classical moldings, reliefs, vase paintings parallax—apparent change in the direction of an object caused by change in the ob-server’s position & new line of sight paraphilia—unhealthy sexual perversion parbuckle—sling for raising or lowering objects vertically pareve—kosher w/r/t diet parfleche—untanned animal hide soaked in lye to get hair off and then dried on a stretcher; a shield made of this material parget—plaster, roughcast, used to coat walls and insides of chimneys parhelion—bright spot appearing on either side of sun, or luminous ring or halo parol(n.) — oral utterance; (adj.) legal by word of mouth, not written partlet—collared ruffled covering for neck and shoulders… big w/Elizabethan women pas de deux—dance for two, especially in ballet pase—one-handed bullfighting maneuver pash—a romantic infatuation (icky British syllabic) pasquinade—lampoon posted in public (used of tabloids: “story of O.J.’s trial served up in lurid pasquinade”) pastern—part of dog or horse’s foot between hoof and fetlock pastille—small medicated or flavored tablet patelliform—shaped like a dish or cup or pan patelliphobia—fear of bowls, cups, basins, and tubs patois—regional dialect pavane—slow, courtly dance of 1500s and 1600s pa [0s basiwky—shrewd or cunning in humorous manner (mostly British) pawl—hinged or pivoted device adapted to fit into the notch of a ratchet wheel to impart forward motion or prevent backward motion peau de soie—soft silk or satin fabric with dull finish peculate—to embezzle peen(v.) — to hammer or bend w/peen (“the windshield peened with rain”) pelerine—short classy woman’s cape w/points on collar pelisse—long robe or cloak w/fur trim or all fur pellagra—disease from lack of niacin: skin eruptions, stomach trouble; pellagrous; pellagrin = person with pellagra pendent(adj.) — hanging down; awaiting settlement; pending peonage—system in which debtors are bound in servitude to creditors until debt is paid pepo—fruit of watermelon, squash, pumpkin, w/hard rind and flattened seeds perciatelli—thick spaghetti perfuse—to cover or coat with liquid, color, light peritrichous—having a band of cilia around the mouth as certain protozoans: “a woman with a perit richous mustache” perorate—conclude speech formally; speak at great grandiloquent length pettitoes—pig feet as food phlox—Midwestern flowered plant piaffer—horse trick where horse trots in place w/legs rising very high pima cotton—good lightweight cotton