David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

“a thin young man of average height, with small myopic eyes behind thick glasses

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove Goldbach’s Conjecture,” he told him in a low, intense voice, “and now you’re telling me it may be unprovable?”

Gödel’s pale face was now totally drained of color [ sic ].

“In theory, yes—”

“Damn theory, man!” Petros’ shout made the heads of the Sacher café’s distinguished clientèle [ sic ] turn in their direction. “I need to be certain, don’t you understand? I have a right to know whether I’m wasting my life!” He was squeezing his arm so hard that Gödel grimaced in pain….

Gödel was shaking. “I un-understand how you fe-feel, Professor,” he stammered, “but I–I’m afraid that for the time being there is no way to answer yo-your question.”

25 Some of these footnotes are so weird and U.S.-reader inappropriate that it’s worth giving a concrete example, such as let’s say p. 41’s FN to a line about the narrator enrolling in a U.S. college: “According to the American system, a student can go through the first two years of university without being obliged to declare an area of major concentration for his degree or, if he does so, is free to change his mind until the beginning of the Junior (third) year,” the very meaning of which is anyone’s guess.

26 N.B. here that the following main-text ¶ itself is geared to a very-strong-math-background audience; nobody else is going to get the ¶’s references, and this reviewer has neither the space nor the expertise to elucidate them. So feel free to skip it if you do not fit the ¶’s demographic.

27 Interested Science readers can find a discussion of Schnirelmann’s proof in W. Dunham’s Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics (Wiley, 1990) but will probably have to don a miner’s helmet and go all the way back to Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society Series vol. 2 no. 44, 1938 for T. Estermann’s “On Goldbach’s Problem: Proof That Almost All Even Positive Integers Are Sums of Two Primes.”

28 Unless you are yourself a professional mathematician, the best place to find a nonlethal discussion of this proof (which is known in number theory as “Vinogradov’s Theorem”—that’s how famous this guy was) is in Section C of R. K. Guy’s Unsolved Problems in Number Theory (Springer-Verlag, 1994).

29 N.B.: End of audience-background-and-interest-restrictive main-text ¶.

30 You might further recall (from, e.g., Ovid’s Metamorphoses ) that this bull ends up begetting on Minos’s queen the Minotaur, a hideous teratoid monster who has to be secreted in a special labyrinth and propitiated with human flesh, and who basically symbolizes the moral rot at the heart of Minos’s reign. That rot is, as Joseph Campbell describes it, a certain kind of alienated selfishness:

The return of the bull should have symbolized Minos’ selfless submission to the functions of his role. By the sacrilege of the refusal of the rite [of sacrifice], however,iceretur the individual cuts himself as a unit off from the larger whole of the community…. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of “my and mine.”

31 Clearly, Petros’s real “sin” is not “Pride” so much as plain old selfishness, Greed. It’s not clear whether UPGC ’s narrator truly fails to grasp this, or whether he is being presented as naive, or whether the whole thing’s just a translation problem.

32 Obvious though it is, Doxiadis appears to fear that his audience won’t get the compact irony here, so he has Hardy then rather sniffily advise Petros “that it might in the future be more profitable for him to stay in closer contact with his scientific colleagues.”

1 (N.B.: from The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition ’s definition of “prosaic”: “consisting or characteristic of prose”; “lacking in imagination and spirit, dull.”)

2 (Numerals don’t count as words either, obviously.)

3 N.B. that this sort of problem is endemic to many of the trendy literary forms that identify/congratulate themselves as transgressive. And it’s easy to see why. In regarding formal conventions primarily as “rules” to rebel against, the Professional Transgressor fails to see that conventions often become conventions precisely because of their power and utility, i.e., because of the paradoxical freedoms they permit the artist who understands how to use (not merely “obey”) them.

4 (Imagine offering a gymnast the chance to levitate and hang there unsupported, or an astronaut the prospect of a launch w/o rocket.)

5 Just in case these reasons [as well as the anthology’s real intended audience] are not yet obvious, q.v. the following announcement, variations of which appear in regular font on Best of The P.P .’s editorial page, in bold at the end of Johnson’s Intro, again in bold in an ad for The P.P. after the contributors’ bio-notes, and yet again, in a bold font so big it takes up the whole page, at the very end of the anthology:

The Prose Poem: An International Journal will be reading for Volume 10 between December 1, 2001 and March 1, 2002. Unsolicited work submitted before this date will be returned unread. Please include an SASE and a two-sentence biographical note. Please send no more than 3 to 5 poems.

1 Bonus Factoid and Suggestion:It so happens that you can occupy a bright child for most of a very quiet morning by challenging her to use that five times in a row in a single coherent sentence, to which stumper the solution is all about the present distinction: “He said that that that that that writer used should really have been a which .” (You can up the challenge to six in a row if the kid is old enough to know about the medial-question-mark-in-sentence trick: “He said that? that that that that that writer used should have been a which? ”)

1 Of course, Borges’s famous “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ”

2 Actually, these two agendas dovetail, since the only reason anybody’s interested in a writer’s life is because of his literary importance. (Think about it — the personal lives of most people who spend fourteen hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill-rides to hear about.)

3 This is part of what gives Borges’s stories their mythic, precognitive quality (all cultures’ earliest, most vital metaphysics is mythopoeic), which quality in turn helps explain how the stories can be at once so abstract and so moving.

4 The biography is probably most valuable in its account of Borges’s political evolution. A common bit of literary gossip about Borges is that the reason he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize was his supposed support for Argentina’s ghastly authoritarian juntas of the 1960s and ’70s. From Williamson, though, we learn that Borges’s politics were actually far more complex and tragic. The child of an old liberal family, and an unabashed leftist in his youth, Borges was one of the first and bravest public opponents of European fascism and the rightist nationalism it spawned in Argentina. What changed him was Perón, whose creepy right-wing populist dictatorship aroused such loathing in Borges that he allied himself with the repressively anti-Perón Revolución Libertadora . Borges’s situation following Perón’s first ouster in 1955 is full of unsettling parallels for American readers. Because Peronism still had great popularity with Argentina’s working poor, the exiled dictator retained enormous political power, and would have won any democratic national election held in the 1950s. This placed believers in liberal democracy (such as J. L. Borges) in the same sort of bind that the United States faced in South Vietnam a few years later — how do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting? In essence, Borges decided that the Argentine masses had been so hoodwinked by Perón and his wife that a return to democracy was possible only after the nation had been cleansed of Peronism. Williamson’s analysis of the slippery slope this decision put Borges on, and his account of the hatchet job that Argentina’s leftists did on Borges’s political reputation in retaliation for his defection (such that by 1967, when the writer came to Harvard to lecture, the students practically expected him to have epaulettes and a riding crop), make for his book’s best chapters.