Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama, David Foster Wallace in Science
The Sexual Politics of Genius, Moon Duchin (via dianakimball)
These two essays pair are a spectacular pair of complementary reads. I mean “complementary” in its standard English definition rather than its mathematical one because the two essays have a common element: a dissection of the narrative and tropes of mathematical genius. Wallace writes about genre fiction but draws heavily from classic biographies of mathematicians while Duchin exposes many of these biographies to be flimsy fictions. The two essays share the same references. The blurry line of fact and fiction reveals what all readers want more than the truth—a satisfying narrative.
As someone who’s math education extended only two semester beyond calculus (which Wallace calls “roughly analogous to halting one’s study of poetry at the level of grammar and syntax”), I didn’t come to either essays with a particular interest in math or mathematicians. The real draw was the seeming mismatch between byline and essay: a fiction writer published in a science journal, a mathematician writing about sociology. Also, the two essays happened to both land across my eyeballs at the same time.
The protagonists of the two books reviewed by Wallace are both mathematicians whose genius is also their tragic flaw. Duchin’s essay about why the genius ideal is inaccessible to women does touch on this idea of genius being compatible with the real world: the genius is seen as transcendent while women are bound by worldly duties such as housekeeping. I was surprised that she didn’t make a point more forcefully about the conflation of madness and genius in men, especially as madness in women is so easily associated with hysteria and illness. In fact the supposedly mental frailty of women was oft cited as evidence of their weakness, yet we see it celebrated when it comes male geniuses. It is simply easier for men to pull off behavior that deviates from the norm. I remember a professor of mine presenting his research at a department-wide meeting wearing a wifebeater and cutoff shorts — can you imagine a female professor doing that?
I don’t mean to sound critical of Duchin’s essay out of the gate because it was excellent in just about every way. There’s an great section titled “Not (A and B) implies (not A) or (not B)” where she talks about the female mathematician Emmy Noether. Noether is only acceptable because she is masculinized — described as unattractive and obese. You can be female or a genius, but you can’t be a female genius.
Duchin’s essay was important to read because modern feminism has to battle the ingrained and insidious attitudes she so carefully traces in narratives of genius. (Instead of, say, the overt sexism that Noether had to battle when she was unable to study in a university.) I was prone to looking starry-eyed at the math geniuses I encountered in college, nearly all of them male and the female ones made acceptable with the same subtle and unconscious denigration that Noether was subject too. (I did, however, have a super hot math TF who is doing damn well in her academic career. But she was treated as such an anomaly!) The first time math drew any sort of feminist ire was in 9th grade, when I somehow won a math prize and was awarded with a copy of Men in Mathematics. I chucked it under my bed, where I think it still remains. Perhaps I will read it now because Duchin does make it sound like an entertaining read if not a trustworthy one — a gossip rag for the math set.
I’m not saying very much about the Wallace essay because I think it draws more obvious interest. Read both essays and you will see their natural convergence.
On the other hand, while Duchin’s piece is a great piece of academic writing, Wallace of course breaks all the rules of academic writing. It really is very funny to reach the standard “References and Notes” section of a Science article to see only one citation and a litany of David Foster Wallace footnotes. The piece, which reviews two fiction books, is pure DFW but I suspect a little bit sanitized—no swearing or sex references. It does however, give away the ending of both books and is chock full of meta discussions on how to review genre fiction. Wallace’s response to a letter about his review is, by the way, so Wallace it almost reads like a parody of Wallace. God, that man’s voice.
