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They Are Reading
Reviews
- Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, by
David Foster Wallace ’85
- Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, by
Ilán
Stavans
 Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. By David Foster Wallace ’85.
New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. 320 pp. $23.95 hardcover.
The voyeurism of our age extends naturally to matters of the
mind. We want to see what is going on under the sheets
of science and, if possible, be shown a
keyhole to the boudoir of mathematics. We don’t actually want to participate
ourselves, to get down and dirty with the
researchers; we just want to be titillated
by watching from a safe distance what they are up to. This desire has given rise
to an entire mini-industry: books, magazines, television programs and a veritable
army of suitably trained reporters, writers,
producers and other support personnel. Norton’s Great Discoveries series,
which Everything and More kicks off, is part of
this trend. Its leading gimmick is to pair significant intellectual achievements
with well-known contemporary writers in the hope that sparks (and sales) will
result. In this case, a tremendously talented writer of fiction and essays takes
on the multi-millennial history of attempts to domesticate the infinite, from
Zeno’s paradoxes through the development of the calculus to the emergence
of modern set theory.
I am skeptical of the general enterprise. Not on any prurient grounds, but because
(unlike an honest peepshow) it promises more than it can possibly deliver. It
seduces with the prospect of understanding, but what it ultimately provides is
little more than the illusion of insight. Understanding of achievements in high-level
science and mathematics cannot be had on the cheap, and so-called “general
understanding” is often merely a code word for the grasp of some pictures
and metaphors and the quasi-incorporation of a few strange words into one’s
vocabulary.
It is to Wallace’s credit that he knows all this. While affirming that
his book is a piece of “pop technical writing” (in that
it seeks to survey a substantial amount of material for the benefit of an audience
without much preparation), Wallace is
determined not to make it “fuzzy or Newsweekish.” He intends
to steer clear
of the Scylla of sensationalism by keeping his focus on the mathematical ideas
themselves (as opposed to the lives or general nuttiness of any particular cast
of characters). Of course, as he says, there’s a hitch, namely that the
enterprise breaks up on the Charybdis of complexity, that readers with no preparation
may find it impossible to understand the ideas so presented.
Wallace’s determination makes his book a glorious failure. Its glory consists
in a passion for the ideas he is trying to convey, a passion that leads him to
shun the usual journalistic pap served up in popularizations in favor of a depth,
breadth and complexity that, together with his scintillating style, make this
work a tour de force. It’s a failure for precisely the same reasons: the
work weaves together so many subtle discussions of so many abstract problems,
confusions and achievements that no one without a good background in mathematics
could comfortably follow. (None of this is helped by the absence of a table of
contents, section headings and an index.) In fact, the reader who will most appreciate
this book may well be the one who is already conversant with these ideas but
has never before seen them knitted together in such an intelligent and humorous
narrative. (Though said reader may also be the one to snag on the errors scattered
throughout the text.)
That’s not to say that general readers won’t be entertained. Wallace’s
full-throttle style will see to that: it is a quirky voice, at once very conversational
and highly learned, laden both with slang
and elegantly complex constructions, and replete with earthy vernacularisms,
wonderfully rare words and plenty of hilarious neologisms (my favorite: epistoschizoid).
(Some of these devices wear thin after a while; e.g., the “X-thing” locution,
as in “the whole algebraic-vs.-transcendental-irrational thing,” begins
to grate after the nth iteration. As does Wallace’s
general self-positioning as the outsider who eschews the “abstract math-class
vomitus” and
instead gives the skinny on what “almost
nobody ever tells undergraduates.”) The humor extends even to the structure
of the book, which comes to be controlled
by an increasingly elaborate, frenzied and hopeless apparatus of digression.
The reader will not be merely entertained, but electrified by the book’s
audacious and gripping chronicle of mankind’s long struggle with the infinite.
Readers might not come away with an understanding of just how work on the uniqueness
of representations of functions by trigonometric series led Cantor to his theory
of the infinite. But they will appreciate something at least as important and
amazing: that the several-thousand-year-old pursuit of the infinite—the
infinite!—has essentially been one of the longest-running cross-cultural
projects of all time. Now that, to use one of Wallace’s favorite words,
is weird.
—Alexander George
Professor of Philosophy
Next:
Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language >>
Photo: Kim Steele/Getty Images
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