Doing The Math


 


There are people I know, good, intelligent people, who still can't get their minds around fiction. They feel that it's still just untrue stuff, that at best teaches nothing and at worst corrupts youth. I've talked about this before, but maybe it was because I said the magic words 'Roland Barthes' and my argument caused everybody's eyes to glaze over,as I've seen it do in many college classrooms.
This time, however, I think I've got a metaphor that might penetrate. So this is going out to all those people (and you know who you are) who own more than one copy of The Handbook Of Chemistry and Physics and who have that Keuffel + Esser Log Log Duplex Trig in a safe place.

(Pride compels me to say that I came up with this very quickly, but rather than write it in a really rather heated letter, I decided to let it aestivate. I've been promising myself that this would be one of the first things I'd put up during the long hot summer. So here it is.)

Let's start with a book at random, say, Anne of Green Gables . It was written by Lucy Maud Montgomery and was based in part on her childhood experiences in rural Prince Edward Island. Now the reader hostile to fiction may say and why didn't she write accurately about her childhood? It would be true!
But that's beside the point, as I hope to show.
For you see, what happens when the author changes the name from Lucy to Anne is not just substituting one name for another--as every reader of fiction knows implicitly.

Changing Lucy to Anne is not changing a to b, it is changing a to x. Rather than a substitution it is changing a quantity into a variable.

Anne of Green Gables is not somebody other than Lucy Maud Montgomery, it is a representative of a class to which Lucy and legions of young girls belong--as well as young boys and adults and so on. (not me, though. Hated the book.) While Lucy Maud Montgomery is a quantity, Anne Shirley, rather than a falsity, is emptied out of quantities and becomes general.

And by changing from quantities to variables, the value of the book undergoes a transformation as well. An equation like 3x=5 has one correct solution. It is a point, a datum. Turn it into a book, and it is a lump of facts--still very pointlike. But with more variables, the solution becomes a curve, a surface, a manifold in many dimensions. If you've ever seen a depiction of the solution of a differential equation, it's about as unlike the number 6 as you can get: it's a a space either colored and shaded with slopes and folds, or demarcated like a topographical map with a series of curves.
Turn an equation full of variables into a book, and you get a universe filling manifold that touches a surprisingly large portion of everything.

And since this is advanced stuff, more can be turned into variables than just people and places: actions and processes can be variables. In great fiction, everything gets emptied out of simple quantity and turned into something much more general than a fact.

When you have turned a set of quantities into a set of variables, you can do all the things combinatorial and analytic that mathematics does with equations.You can combine, you can substitute, you can separate and examine one cross-section. All the sorts of things that are tough to do when dealing with facts.

(Let me be emphatic: what you get out of these analyses are not more facts, any more than a transform of a differential equation gives you a bunch of numbers. You get a new colored map with new isobars, and new variable statements. But that is something entirely different from a truth or an untruth.)

You can call the thing that enters in when specificity empties out meaning--but that would be crude and simplistic. There's far more of a continuum than a book-report-like "what was the meaning of the fight in the barn?" (there was a fight in the barn, wasn't there?) An incident can be far more delicate and lightly colored than a meaning--the contact far less than an identification. reading Anne of Green Gables is not going to teach a young boy what it's like to be a young girl--but it is going to give a young boy something, to the extent that the variables make contact with him.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with books of facts. They're wonderful and exciting and tremendously valuable. But the difference between a book of facts and a book of fiction is the difference between 32+45=77 and ax+by=c. The difference between them is not truth or falsity: The first equation is true; the second equation is neither true nor false--it has nothing to do with truth or falsity; 'Is ax+by=c true?' is a meaningless question. But the equation is nonetheless useful in many ways.

It's easy to get this in a muddle--especially if one reveres facts, quantities and objects too much. A questioner of fiction will asks, but what do you get out of a novel. Unfortunately too many people will try to answer with a set of facts (which of course are contained in novels, but are almost always peripheral if not extraneous to the effect of the work.) You can learn all sorts of minutiae about bourgeois 19th Century French life from reading Madame Bovary--but as for the main flow of the book: "Cheating on your husband is a bad idea?"

But that's confusing mathematics with arithmetic: you want a number, and fiction gives you a series of parametric equations. The 'value' (used both ways) of Madame Bovary is not that it shows that cheating on your husband is a bad idea, or even that you should be more goddamn careful when choosing a husband-- but a whole bunch adjustments to the way in which you contact, the way in which you think about life's variables. It may very well be nothing you can define or even articulate-not if the book is at all good. But Madame Bovary may modulate the way you think about marriage and dreams not coming true, and Anne of Green Gables my add something to how you feel about being alone in a new place.

The most important thing, though about working in variables, is that it is a way by which individual experience can be talked about in common terms, so that we can actually begin to understand others--in the only ways that work, as complex curves approaching diverging and crossing in ways that generate other, more complex curves--not equality, inequality, greater or less than. One way is what you get from reading Naguib Mahfouz and the other from going through the 'It's A Small World' ride at Disneyland.

Back in college we told the joke that getting an engineer to fix a stereo was like using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito--while getting a physicist to fix a stereo was like using a mosquito to kill a sledgehammer.
And in a way that's the difference between fact and fiction: in one case, you'll almost certainly miss, and make a mess--while in the other, you'll find yourself going in directions you never intended, and learn to appreciate very small and subtle things.

Posted: Thursday - October 04, 2007 at 12:50 AM        

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