I was recently putting together a post about the
subject of writing, and mathematics.
Last Friday (April 7th), before I was able to finish the
post, The New York Times published an essay about the subject, by British
mathematician Sarah Hart. (Dr.
Hart's book, Once Upon a Prime, was published this week by Flatiron Books;
its subtitle--The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature--was also the title of the recent Times essay.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/opinion/the-wondrous-connections-between-mathematics-and-literature.html
https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Prime-Connections-Mathematics/dp/1250850886/ref
My interest in writing about the subject was rooted in a couple
of things I had recently read.
The first was an obituary, from The New York
Times online archive, of the novelist James M. Cain--who wrote such works as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934),
Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941). Mr. Cain died in 1977, at age 85.
The obituary was by the book critic John Leonard, and included
the following, about Mr. Cain's writing style:
In his last years, Mr.
Cain explained that it was "my algebra...moves...progressions. Suspense comes from making sure your algebra
is right."
A few days after seeing this, I was looking at the Wikipedia
page about the novelist Thomas Pynchon. The page included an excerpt of a New
Yorker review of Mr. Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow; the review was by the
poet, and essayist, L.E. Sissman. Mr.
Sissman wrote, of Mr. Pynchon: "He
is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest
stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his
knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary,
bracing linguistic risks."
(I will note that I have not yet read Gravity's Rainbow--have wanted, though, to do so for years--yet its opening words ["A screaming
comes across the sky."] constitute, I think--I am certainly not alone in believing
this--one of fiction's great introductory sentences.)
After stumbling upon these references to math and writing. I
looked online to see what else I might locate about the subject. I landed on a 2012 essay from The New Yorker,
by writer Alexander Nazaryan, "Why Writers Should Learn Math."
Mr. Nazaryan wrote, in the piece:
Poets have been more conversant with mathematics than
fiction writers, probably because they have to pay attention to the numerical
qualities of words when working in meter, forced to consider the form and even
physical shape of what they write, not just its meaning. Wordsworth praised
“poetry and geometric truth” for “their high privilege of lasting life,” while
Edna St. Vincent Millay remarked that “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”
Fiction writers have rarely expressed such earnest
appreciation for mathematical aesthetics. That’s a shame, because mathematical
precision and imagination can be a salve to a literature that is drowning in
vagueness of language and theme. “The laws of prose writing are as immutable as
those of flight, of mathematics, of physics,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to Maxwell
Perkins, in 1945. Even if Papa never had much formal training in mathematics,
he understood it as a discipline in which problems are solved through a sort of
plodding ingenuity. The very best passages of Hemingway have the mathematical
complexity of a fractal: a seemingly
simple formula that, in its recurrence, causes slight but crucial changes over
time. Take, for example, the famous retreat from Caporetto in “A Farewell to
Arms”:
When daylight came the storm was still
blowing but the snow had stopped. It had melted as it fell on the wet ground
and now it was raining again. There was another attack just after daylight but
it was unsuccessful. We expected an attack all day but it did not come until
the sun was going down. The bombardment started to the south below the long
wooded ridge where the Austrian guns were concentrated. We expected a
bombardment but it did not come. Guns were firing from the field behind the
village and the shells, going away, had a comfortable sound.
Mr. Nazaryan continued:
The procession here has an algebraic deliberateness,
but that simplicity gives way to a complexity of meaning. Hemingway starts with
the material (snow, wet, daylight, sun) only to end with the unexpected and
intimate “comfortable sound” of the receding Austrian guns... Everything in
this passage is intentional, from the plain imagery to the heightening of
narrative urgency that comes with the repetition of “we expected.”
In last week's New York Times essay, referred to above, mathematician
Sarah Hart wrote this:
Good mathematics, like
good writing, involves an inherent appreciation of structure, rhythm and
pattern. That feeling we get when we read a great novel or a perfect sonnet —
that here is a beautiful thing, with all the component parts fitting together
perfectly in a harmonious whole — is the same feeling a mathematician
experiences when reading a beautiful proof.
Dr. Hart also wrote:
Great literature and
great mathematics satisfy the same deep yearning in us: for beauty, for truth,
for understanding. As the pioneering Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya
wrote: "It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in [one's] soul
… the poet must see what others do not see, must see more deeply …. And the
mathematician must do the same.”
