mathbabe

Oh, and Cathy, here’s what I wrote in Slate a few years ago about the relationship between DFW and math.

“David Foster Wallace was well-known as an appropriator of prose registers that are not conventionally literary: the language of the bureaucrat, of the academic theorist, of the focus group, of the Hollywood agent. Less spoken of is the debt his writing owed to the language of mathematics—presumably because that language has no native speakers.

Some of the mathiness of Wallace’s prose was superficial—he liked to present careful definitions of terms to be used, and he decorated his arguments with side remarks and corollaries, labeled as such. He liked numbered lists and specialized acronyms (cf., w/r/t., u.s.w.) For mathematicians, this business imparts a kind of homey charm.

But there’s a deeper likeness, too. “We live today,” he told the Believer in 2003, “in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it’s next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life.” Technical complexity, a turnoff to most, was Wallace’s bread and meat. He was never interested in the kind of truths that you could sum up in 10 words—which is why it’s so hard to quote Wallace 10 words at a time. You usually get something as inert as a single line of a long proof.

Wallace’s writing was driven by his struggle with contradictions. He was in love with the technical and analytic; but he saw that the simple dicta of religion and A.A. offered better weapons against drugs, despair, and killing solipsism. He knew it was supposed to be the writer’s job to get inside other people’s heads; but his chief subject was the predicament of being stuck fast inside one’s own. Determined to record and neutralize the mediation of his own preoccupations and prejudices, he knew this determination was itself among those preoccupations, and subject to those prejudices. This is Phil 101 stuff, to be sure; but as any math student knows, the old problems you meet freshman year are some of the deepest you’ll ever see. Wallace wrestled with the paradoxes just the way mathematicians do. You believe two things that seem in opposition. And so you go to work—step by step, clearing the brush, cataloging what you find there, separating what you know from what you believe, your intuition sounding at all times the nauseous alarm that somewhere you’ve made a mistake. And until you find the mistake, there’s always a bit of hope—that your intuition is wrong, that your work isn’t wasted, that what seems like a paradox really isn’t one, that maybe the incompatible beliefs you hold can be satisfied all at once.

Usually it doesn’t work out that way.”

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