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.
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