When we cease to tell the truth: On The MANIAC, 3

 

Seen from the outside, some stories have more truth than others, but the truth value of the story does not depend on its actual truth content. – W. G. Sebald 

What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth, even though I now know that it was all a lie. In the end all that matters is the truth-content of the lie. – Thomas Bernhard 

Type "John von Neumann" in YouTube and one of video clips that pop out is his guesting in a 1950s American TV show (link).

 

In The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, the video clip was described by Klára Dan, Neumann's second wife. 

He [Neumann] had just come home after doing something that was completely unheard of for him: he had appeared on television. It was one of those saccharine programs intended for “young adults,” which I’m sure that nobody ever enjoyed, Youth Wants to Know—it ran on NBC for almost a decade. Government officials, renowned sportsmen, and noted scientists were questioned on subjects of current interest by an eager panel of boys and girls. Johnny was forced to participate as part of a PR campaign set up by the Atomic Energy Commission, and I almost cried with laughter when it aired: in his episode, he is surrounded by a huddle of children dressed in their Sunday best and is interviewed by a chubby blond boy with a buzz cut and a bolo string tie. No more than sixteen years old and already a head taller than my husband, that teenager asks him a series of inane questions—Does the United States have enough educated technicians to operate all the new technologies that are popping up? Are there are [sic] sufficient scholarships for young people?—queries that my Johnny answers with such gentle saintlike patience that you would think he was America’s favorite uncle, all smiles and nods, ambling about with his head weighed down by a massive microphone hung around his neck, as they tour an exhibit inside a nuclear power plant, with the program’s presenter leading him by the arm and pointing out several thick cables on the floor, so that my spouse, who is moving in his usual distracted manner, won’t trip over them as he expounds on the inner workings of Geiger counters, scintillators, and other instruments used to measure radiation, still completely unaware that his own exposure to that very same energy during the atomic tests had already cost him his life. That ridiculous little TV program is the only extant record, the only film of him that exists. How can that be? A genius lowered to the status of a bumbling tour guide.

In the age of deepfake and hyperdata, everything was verifiable. Truth was a commodity subject to evaluation and fact-checking. 

Was Klára Dan's opinion of the "saccharine" TV program Youth Wants to Know her own or was it invented by Labatut? This question could not be verified unless there existed a written account about Klára's views about the TV incident. There was an unpublished autobiography of Klára.

"No more than sixteen years old and already a head taller than my husband", said Klára in the novel, but in the video one could see Neumann was just the same height as, if not a bit taller than, the boy who asked the question. The taller one was the one behind Neumann.

True or false, invented or not, the passage above was telling us more about the state of mind of Klára than that of his husband: her bitterness at the cause of her husband's cancer due to radiation exposure.

The method of narrative appropriation, imputing words on historical characters, was central to the artifice of fiction and almost always invited questions on authenticity and ethics. Fiction was aesthetic appropriation and approximation, as Max Sebald explained. Thomas Bernard was more succinct and direct: All that matters is the truth-content of the lie.

A novel is not fact-checked but truth-checked. There is a difference. For Lisbon-based Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper and author of "A Factless Autobiography", entire passages might contain a few or many lies but still be entirely true. Soares believed in the necessity of lies. According to him, we lie because we are social animals.

We make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never accomplish. 

Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know never existed.

If they are any effective, the truth-content of images in a writing are but a smokescreen of the characters' inner feelings. They could be evocative because they are accessible by other's feelings when faced by the same situation, the same dramatic tension.

The last section of The MANIAC—the five-match duel between Lee Sedol the South Korean grandmaster and world champion of Go and AlphaGo the AI program developed by eventual Nobel Prize laureate Demis Hassabis's team at Google Deepmind—was a further invitation to truth-checking in fiction. This was a standalone section that rivals the suspense in Kawabata's The Master of Go, the Japanese novelist's reportage of a 1938 Go match. 

Labatut seemed to follow Kawabata's principle: "Since I was reporting on a match sponsored by a newspaper, I had to arouse interest. A certain amount of embroidering was necessary." Cross-checking Labatut's "facts" with the available online materials showed more than "a certain amount" of embroidery. It was almost a reshoot and re-editing of the documentary film, AlphaGo (directed by Greg Kohs), on which the Go matches of whole section was anchored. Labatut's fictionalized version of Lee vs AlphaGo was a textual documentary spliced from various tweaks of facts and truth-contents of lies. 

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, p. 66, as quoted in 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.”

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).