Factual fiction?: On The MANIAC, 2

"Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet" was how W. G. Sebald titled the first of four parts of his prose work Vertigo (1990, tr. Michael Hulse, 2000). Its opening sentence: "In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great St Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible."

A glance at the contents of Benjamín Labatut's The MANIAC revealed three sections with Sebald-inspired titles: "Paul or The Discovery of the Irrational", "John or The Mad Dreams of Reason", "Lee or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence". The opening sentences of the first two sections were patterned after the Sebaldian opening move (indicative of how Max Sebald, just like in Labatut's Un verdor terrible (2020), remained a guidepost in the novel's composition).

One afternoon in the 1840s, as George Boole walked across a field near Doncaster, a thought flashed into his head that he believed was a religious vision. Boole suddenly saw how you could use mathematics to unlock the mysterious processes of human thought. 

The Chilean novelist used the same tricks of the German novelist: extended digressions, serpentine sentences, a chain of ideas and thoughts delivered in manic pace. For good measure, the The MANIAC even contained three black and white photographs strategically positioned in between its discrete parts, making it a true specimen of photo-embedded fiction. 

The same Sebaldian tendency to recast or gloss over factual information – to fictionalize for aesthetic purposes (or otherwise) – was amply displayed in Labatut's novel. The first parts of the novel focused on the mathematician John von Neumann, foregrounding intimations and presentiments about the harm of AI or AGI (artificial general intelligence). The narrative followed a Rashōmonesque style of telling: Neumann's various acquaintances and family members bore witness about him and the milieu of his time. 

The MANIAC of the title was acronym for an actual computer machine, but it was also implied to be Neumann with his bloated figure and all-caps personality. His photographic memory and monomaniacal intelligence kept him apart from his peers; his morals were suspect. His computational abilities were legendary. Neumann's mathematical work in game theory and self-replicating machines paved the way for the development of AI machines. 

I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history. That gave him a certain sense of security, an overconfidence that would no doubt have betrayed a lesser man. But Janos [Neumann] was many moves ahead; he behaved as if he was looking back at things that had already happened.

While AI was often anthropomorphized or personified in this novel (and elsewhere in books and other media), Neumann was here likened to a computer processor or mental machine. The novel tended to depersonify him as an inanimate, intelligent machine: an AI himself.

The Neumann parts of the novel were almost hagiography, or its inverted sense. It was consistent about its subject's outsize influence on the scientific and mathematical problems of his day and of the current era. 

The MANIAC was essentially a long version of When We Cease to Understand the World. The eco-anxiety in the latter was here transmuted into other chilling ventures of modern science: nuclear arms race, H-bomb, supercomputing, AI. The Manhattan Project section directly complemented scenes from the Oppenheimer (2023) movie. 

Of the cast of characters that populate the novel, Richard Feynman provided a distinctive, energetic voice in the narrative even if his parts recounted the development of the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb by a bunch of genius scientists in Los Alamos.  

* * * 

Labatut was transparent in providing the source materials. They were listed at the novel's end. Any reader who had time on their hands could investigate and review how the novelist appropriated the primary materials for his own fictional purpose and integrated them into the schema of The MANIAC. 

Biographies of Neumann and other scientists, memoirs, science journal articles, blogs, live-streamed videos of Go matches with professional commentaries uploaded in YouTube, expert analyses and summaries of the Go matches, TV footage and audio recording uploaded in YouTube, documentary films. The reference materials could be easily accessed and cross-checked and a comparison could be made to see how fiction was spun out of these materials.

Below was a "lateral reading" of a passage from the novel and a book on Neumann. 

Labatut, The MANIAC

William Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb (1993, via musings and rough drafts)

How could such a little country [Hungary]—surrounded as it was by enemies on all sides and torn between rival empires—produce so many extraordinary scientists in so little time? ... He believed that our country’s outstanding intellectual achievements were not a product of history or chance, or any kind of government initiative, but due to something stranger and more fundamental: a pressure on the whole society of that part of Central Europe, a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of either producing the unusual or facing extinction.

Stanislaw Ulam recalled that when Von Neumann was asked about this “statistically unlikely” Hungarian phenomenon, Von Neumann “would say that it was a coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individual, and the necessity of producing the unusual or facing extinction.” [p. 66]

I'm not sure if Labatut sourced his information from William Poundstone's book. The left passage simply reworded the text found in Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma, except that the speaker on the left was Eugene Wigner while the right was a recollection from Stanislaw Ulam. Nothing earth-shattering so far. 

Unless one is doing a dissertation or fiercely interested in the subject matter, one does not have the luxury of time to closely read the published biographies and nonfiction – e.g., Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson and John von Neumann by Norman Macrae – to detect the novel's deviations from factual information.

Contents available online (YouTube) would provide readers a better idea of how Labatut assembled, fictionalized, and stitched together the facts he collected on his subjects. That would make for a more accessible approach to understanding the fictionality of what the novelist called "a work of fiction based on fact".

My next post/s on the novel would try to investigate the "truth-content of the lie" (after Thomas Bernhard).

Doomscrolling: On The MANIAC, 1

 

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut (Penguin Press, 2023)

 

In her review of Benjamín Labatut's first book to come out in English – When We Cease to Understand the World (2020, translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West) – Ruth Franklin had some words about the fictionality of the enterprise.

There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, even nightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true? In the era of fake news, more and more people feel entitled to “make our own reality,” as Karl Rove put it. In the current American political climate, even scientific fact—the very material with which Labatut spins his web—is subject to grossly counter-rational denial. Is it responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two? 

The ceaseless arguments about truth, lies, and fiction were here revived to accommodate the pressures of "the era of fake news". Must fiction writers also contend with the artifice of social media propaganda and tweak their works to push the boundaries of reality in the factually correct spectrum.

Labatut may or may not be concerned about the noise in the background. He was after a different cloud of doubt in his second book in English. Like the first book, The MANIAC (Penguin Press, 2023) was a warning about the destructive effects of Western scientific thought and the latter's propensity to go in directions that annihilate order in the world. In The MANIAC, the dangers of nuclear physics and artificial intelligence were brewing behind a backdrop of scientists and mathematicians literally going insane as they went about their rational work of plumbing the truths and realities of the universe. 

On the morning of the twenty-fifth of September 1933, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest walked into Professor Jan Waterink's Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children in Amsterdam, shot his fifteen-year-old son, Vassily, in the head, then turned the gun on himself.

The fictionalized portraits of scientists and mathematicians served the greater (or gruesome) purpose of fiction. Since we were also reading about grand theories and concepts of the day, and not all readers were keen on the STEM track, novel writing could devolve into science communication.

He would pour out everything he took in, delighting those around him with fabulous displays of knowledge and his uncanny ability to translate the most complicated ideas into images and metaphors that anyone could understand, threading together concepts from disparate fields that he drew from the ever-growing number of books he fed on with ravenous sponge-like intelligence.

To what ends? In the first novel, "Heisenberg had glimpsed a dark nucleus at the heart of things". In the second novel, The friends of Ehrenfest (Bohr, Dirac, Pauli, Einstein) admired his intelligence and his deep or overwhelming "desire to understand, to grasp the core of things":

Ehrenfest sought relentlessly what he called der springende Punkt, the leaping point, the heart of the matter, as for him deriving a result by logical means was never enough: "That is like dancing on one leg," he would say, "when the essence lies in recognizing connections, meanings and associations in every direction."

Labatut might also be describing how his novels were constructed: a series of associations nested or threaded together. And his scientists were always after the elusive kokoro, the heart of things. In the process of trying to grasp the essence or core of things, a paradox opened. How, in our sincere desire to understand the world, we cease to be human. We develop the ineluctable capacity to be cruel to others.

The MANIAC was bedeviled by something ominous, a specter of evil. Dark forces of history were driving the scientists on the brink of madness.  

Nazism, according to Ehrenfest in the novel, was "fueled ... by a dark, unconscious impulse that was driving us to a future where our species would have no place, substituted, sooner than later, by something completely monstrous." That monstrous entity was the architects of the holocaust and its allegiants. But the novelist was also hinting at a far future menace. AI.

 Doomscrollers would have a field day reading the book.  

Interview of A. (Author) by R. (Reader)

Monstruo by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles

I recently had an exclusive interview with Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (aka Ayer) about his septology of sonnet collections called Sonetoismo. The first two books in the series came out last year: Laging Patúngo and Monstruo. More books in the series are forthcoming next month. I visited Ayer in the university where he is working. The sonnet-interview that follows was first posted in Goodreads.

 

R: In Monstruo, you started breaking the mold of sonnetness and formed new sonnet-variants.

A: If you say so.

R: In "Dalawang-Linyang Soneto" (Two-Lined Sonnet), "Kalahating Soneto" (Half-Sonnet), and "[Walong-Linyang Soneto]" ([Eight-Lined Sonnet]), you broke the cardinal rule of the sonnet, that it contains 14 lines. How do you explain these monstrosities?

A: Monstruo does not mean monstrosity.

R: How do you define a sonnet?

A: A sonnet defines itself. Poetry-reading is an active reading constructivist activity. The sonnet-reader constructs meaning based on his/her prior knowledge and lived experiences. The sonneteer cannot control that.

R: I find that sonnetification, at least as exemplified in your septology project called Sonetoismo, is an emergent property of form, content, and process. Your brand of sonnetization is freedom from form and content but not from refined sense and sensibility.

A: Let's not talk about Jane Austen.

R: I meant to say that, or rather I wanted to ask if you were bored of the traditional forms of poetry.

A: Sonnetively speaking, no.

R: How can a mere couplet be a sonnet?

A: Why can't a sonnet be a grand couplet?

R: But, A., the form, remember? You have to complete the 14 stations of the cross.

A: Regardless of the number of stations, Christ would still be crucified and resurrected.

R: We are not in Golgotha.

A: Precisely, R. We are of this world.

R: Yes, there may be exceptions to the rule. But rules are not meant to be broken. So why create a rule of exceptions?

A: Rules are meant to be ruled over.

R: Is that cheating?

A: Poets are cheats.

R: Yes. In "Not the Stuff of Sonnets": Ilang Talâ sa Sonetoismo (Notes on Sonetoismo), you called a poem by Rio Alma as "malikhaing panlalalang" (creative deception) because it splits the 14 lines into more lines than required by the form. What is form for you?

A: Forms, for me, are spectral substances. I mentioned in that monograph that, beyond form and content, the writing process of and constraint in poetry are what held attraction for me.

R: You were after innovative treatments of form. You said of your entire sonnet series project that its aim is to offer linguistic innovation and formal investigation into the form. And you included as an ideal example the piece of Allan Popa called "Sonetong Lumalabis ng Isang Linya" (Sonnet Exceeding a Line"). Later on, in response to readers asking about the syllable and rhyme scheme that you are (or are not) using, you said that "Sinusubukan kong baklasin din ang soneto" (I am attempting to deconstruct the sonnet). What is it about deconstruction that appeals to you?

A: Meter is myth and rhyme is riven. Deconstruction is not escaping rhyme and reason. I will not say something grand like, "It is excavating the essence of being."

R: You favor free verse and simple words, as in the work of Jose F. Lacaba.

A: I favor freedom, delicious food, and sufficient sleep.

R: In a couple of poems called "Indise ng mga Unang Linya" (Indexes of First Lines), you splice together the first lines of each of your completed sonnet – fourteen first-lines, all told – and hence produced sonnets in the process. Is this what you mean by process-driven concept?

A: The proof is in the pandesal. Maybe I just ran out of things to say.

R: I find it a convenient way to thematize what you mean by deconstruction. In discussing a poem with 15 lines, you wrote in "Not the Stuff of Sonnets":

[I]sinusulong ang ideya ng pagbabaklas na ito ng interogasyon ng anyo sa pamamagitan mismo ng pagpapakita o pagpapamalay ng proseso ng pagbubuo-pagbabaklas ng mga soneto. Sa ganito, binibigyang-diin ang soneto o ang sonetong sunuran bilang proseso at ang anyo hindi lang bilang hubog kundi, ang mas mahalaga, bilang puwersa at politika, dahil sa pagkasangkapan sa anyo ng sunuran.

[This very idea of deconstructing form is itself promoted by demonstrating or making apparent the process of the sonnet's construction-deconstruction. With this, the sonnet or sequence of sonnets is emphasized as a process, and the form as not merely scaffolding, but more importantly, as power and politics, because of the appropriation of form in the sequence.]

A: The sonnet is lost in your translation, R.

R: I find the rule-breaking sonnet a product of a sophisticated crime.

A: I cannot confess my guilt.

R: You tend to favor the ordinary and commonplace as topics of your poem.

A: The ordinary contains the miraculous and grand narrative of our lives.

R: That is a sick line! Let me write that in my notebook.

A: Are you done?

R: The extraordinary in daily practices. Why are you after these?

A: The extraordinary turns of thought arise from the daily grind.

R: You likened sonnet-writing to writing entries in a diary. The series will contain 366 pieces. The earth revolves around the sun in roughly 365 and one-fourth days.

A: And you are overstaying your welcome.

R: Wait, I'm almost done with the interview. In "Pormularyo sa Ebalwasyon ng Manuskrito Bilang Walong-Linyang Soneto" (Formulary in the Evaluation of a Manuscript as an Eight-Line Sonnet), were you enumerating the qualities you are looking for in an innovative and rule-breaking sonnet?

Orihinal ba at kahali-halina ang akda?
Mataas ba ang antas ng pananaliksik?
Ano ang masasabi mo sa estilo? Gaano
kahalaga ang akdang ito? Kailangan ba
ng manuskrito ng rebisyon? May iba pa
kayang akdang tulad nito? Ano pang
publikasyon ang maaaring maglathala?
Ano ang iyong panlahat na mungkahi?

[Is it a work of originality and beauty?
Is the level of research superior?
What about the style? Is it a work
of great significance? Does it need
any substantial revisions? Are there
other works just like it? What other
publications might carry this piece?
What is your overall recommendation?]

A: I repeat: I do not break rules. A formulary is just a checklist. A cocktail of wine. It is not the rules but the path I'm trying to break. And this interview I'm trying to break free from.

R: Speaking of "free", is freedom the virtue of sonnets that do not consist of 14 lines?

A: Freedom is not measured by lines. Free verse is not entirely free. Was it Borges who said it is more difficult to write free verse? Free verse is shackled by not rhyming and not measuring. Virtue is overrated.

R: A sonnet, whatever the number of lines it contain, is the poet's explicit expression of existence. Do you agree?

A: I do not subscribe to these kinds of thoughts and solemnities.

R: What inspires you to write?

A: Is it anxiety? Is it celebration?

R: For my last question: Why a septology? And a follow-up, if you'll excuse me: What, in the end, makes a sonnet?

A: The septology is a means, not an end. A sonnet is nothing but an accident or happenstance. There is no sonnet that does not call itself one. A sonnet is self-determined. By poets and readers both.

R: Thank you for this sonnet, Ayer. I truly appreciate it.

A: Why do you call this interview a sonnet, Rise?

R (looking at A. very intently and not blinking): I'm calling it a sonnet, Ayer!

A: Whatever makes your day, Rise.


Note: The above "sonnet" is a work of fiction.

Forever in transit

Laging Patúngo by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles


 

 

 

 

Laging Patúngo [Forever in Transit] is the first book in Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles's Sonetoismo, a cycle of seven books of sonnets in Filipino. Its title is taken from the last line of the poem called "Siyudad," which I reproduce below. It is followed by my translation. 

Siyudad

Lahat ng bus na dumaraan
sa munti naming bayan,
patungo sa siyudad. Lahat
kami ay hangad lumisan
sa munting bayan, hanap
ang mithing siyudad. Pero
kung nasaan itong siyudad,
wala talagang nakaaalam.
Walang bus na humihinto
sa aming bayan kaya hindi
kami makaalis sa pangarap
na makaalis. Napakalayo
ng siyudad upang maabot.
Lagi lang kaming patungo.

***

The City

All buses passing through
our small town are destined
for the city. All of us
yearn to escape from
this place and enter
the city of our dreams. Yet
no one has ever known
where the city is located.
No bus ever stops
in our town so we
could not leave and run
after our dreams. The city
is so far, and out of our reach.
We are forever in transit.

 

***

 

You can read my "sonnet-review" in Goodreads (link).

 

 

Firebrand

Narkokristo, 1896 by Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr.

Mararating na nila ang kahustuhan ng unang bahagi ng kanilang pag-aaral. Nakalatag na ang mga talang pinagtibay ng kanilang mga isinagawang pagsusuri. Pinakamahalaga ay ang mga kasunod na preguntas de investigación o salitang sa Aleman ay forschungsfragen—na kanilang dadalhin sa Universität Heidelberg sa Alemanya—para sa gagawing pagsasala ng mga kapuwa iskolar at propesor. Sa gagawing presentasyon, layon nilang itanghal ang kanilang mga materia tulad sa nangyaring Exposition de las Islas Filipinas noong 1887, sa Parque de la Vuelta del Duero, Madrid.

[They are on the brink of completing the first phase of their study. The findings, certified by their investigation, are now on file. The most important thing are the new preguntas de investigación or what in German is called forschungsfragen—what they plan to bring to the Universität Heidelberg in Germany—for peer review by fellow scholars and professors. In the upcoming presentation, they aim to showcase the specimens, just like what was done in the Exposición de las Islas Filipinas in 1887, in Madrid’s Parque de la Vuelta del Duero.]

The 1887 Exposición General de las Islas Filipinas was an event meant to showcase the economic resources and human populations of the Philippines as a colony of Spain. The exhibits included living people from various ethnic groups of the Philippines, among them Igorots, Manobos, and Negritos. They were displayed as if in a “human zoo” for the colonizers to mock and gawk at. Even José Rizal was scandalized by such an exhibition mounted by the “civilized” people of Spain; he viewed it as a violation of human rights. This kind of exposition was a fad during colonial times, meant to assert the superiority of the western colonizers over their subjects.

An “expo” akin to this was recounted in Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr.’s Narkokristo, 1896, a novel that disrupts the template of the Filipino historical novel. Vivo trained his sights on the consequential events in and around Pateros town during the flashpoint year 1896 when the revolution against Spanish occupation broke out. The characters in the novel shared profiles of the novelist's characters in his previous books: corrupt people in power (now in the robes of Spanish friars and military rulers) and victims navigating the maelstrom of violence and forces which transformed them into desperate vigilantes seeking justice to avenge personal wrongs. The readers knew they are situated in a new dreamland world with the same restless nightmares when they are thrust into a spate of killings and injustices, both extrajudicial or state-sponsored (although the two may be synonymous). The readers also knew they will bear the impact of this violence and trauma.

What are the uses of historical novels in an era bursting with information both factual and fake? The outline of events in Philippine Islands, circa 1896, has already been recreated in books and films a hundred, a thousand times over. Do we still need new configurations of characters, motivations, and plot points in the competing narratives of history? These “research questions” are moot once the novel applied its brute and blunt force, i.e., once the characters were triggered and emboldened to enact the ideas of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli.

A novel can retell or reiterate things past. It can tell a good story and entertain readers, explore facets of history already familiar or in a new light. Yet a novel can embroider history just as well. It can falsify things, create new characters, motivations, and storylines in the service of the story or some other agenda. It can be a corrective of history to set the record straight about some unknown characters or unreported/misreported events. At worse, a novel can be a false revision of history.

In 1904, as part The Philippine Exposition in the St. Louis World’s Fair, American organizers boasted off the conquerors’ new possessions: the peoples and natural resources of the new colony. Unlike the Madrid exposition, this one was grittier and more cinematic: “Entire villages were built to replicate those of the Visayans, Bagobos, Samals, ‘Moros’ (as they were called then), Igorots, Tingguianes, Negritos, and 30 other tribes. These villages were ‘stocked’ with over a thousand tribal men, women, and children as living exhibits.”

In the Negrito Village, half-naked Negrito men and boys displayed their bow and arrow skills to curious fair-haired men and boys in suits and bowler hats.

The Igorot Village, spread over six acres with 100 natives, was a World’s Fair hit. Every day, throngs of curious Americans flocked to the village to witness the G-stringed tribe boil a dog for dinner. [Filipinas Magazine, 1994, reprinted in Ortigas Foundation Library]

The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair would go down in history as the “largest human zoo”. But we are getting ahead of ourselves with the American occupation. Vivo's projected trilogy will be set in three colonial periods (Spanish, American, Japanese). In this opening move, he already dramatized the literal and metaphorical caging of human lives during colonial times. In this novelistic draft of history, we recognized how conquest and colonialism wore the same garb as human trafficking, slavery, and establishment of a human zoo on a massive scale.

So the historical novel could have many functions and purposes. An annotation of historical events; an exposition of human tragedies and capacity for cruelty; a “living exhibit” of crimes, violations, and iniquities; a corrective against ignorance and forgetting. As written in Narkokristo's dedicatory page, the novel resurrects the heroes whose names never reached our consciousness.

If it has power at all, the historical novel could be a diorama of stories that give life and agency to characters who act in unforgiving situations and take justice into their own hands. It arms the subjugated and gives power to the vanquished so they can achieve justice denied them by history. While the novelist has no power to rewrite history, he has the power to reimagine actions and situations, the power to choreograph power plays, and the power to yield power to the oppressed. The historical novel can be a form of redress. In troubled times or at any time, it dispenses justice when no authority can.

But what of the colonial mindset, the caged spirit? The colonized is caged if their mindsets do not allow them to hatch resistance and revolt. The colonizer is caged whose mindsets do not allow them freedom to think beyond their perverse beliefs.

If it has power at all, the historical novel is also a decolonizing instrument. It subverts power and decolonizes worldviews. It overturns notions of racial superiority, manifest destiny, and bigotry. Western pseudoscience, xenophobia, slavery, and racism. These kaput ideas and ideologies propagated through a caged mindset and toxic doctrine of dehumanization cry for obliteration.

The radical novelist decolonizes history by shattering the zoos and cages of the mind. He sets fire to entrenched values and philosophies of race superiority. He arms tortured souls and demystifies the grand spectacle of savagery. He torches imperialistic dreams and razes naked power to the ground.

The radical novelist is an arsonist.