Missing words

1

On page 39 of the April 29, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, sixteen people have filled little boxes with prose advertising their self-published books. Reading from box to box, we realize something about beginners in narrative: they don't always understand that all of the space between writer and reader has to be filled with meaning. A psychotherapeutic book for children, for example, is consolingly titled I'm Not Weird, I Have SPD, but the copywriter has forgotten to define "SPD" for us. (Wikipedia suggests schizoid personality disorder, semantic pragmatic disorder, or sensory processing disorder.) And the entire copy for a book called Murder With a French Accent reads, "Microbiologist Alex Kertész has developed a commercially valuable strain of bacteria in his laboratory at the University of Jerusalem." Because we've just read the title's Agatha Christie formula, we're expecting the formula to be completed with a second sentence about Alex -- a sentence beginning "But . . . ". But the rest of Alex's box is empty.

Two boxes, two simple problems, one simple solution: take Creative Writing 100. The exercises will help you spot and fill the gaps in your prose. 

But how can we read the words of this third advertisement?

A dark cloud follows [protagonist's name]. She lives in a neighborhood that is rough and dangerous. She works at jobs where she is discriminated against.

Well, we could refer one more time to the Creative Writing 100 textbook. We could suggest reversing the order of sentences 2 and 3, to make something bad (discrimination) lead dramatically to something worse (danger). While we're in the rearranged sentence 3, we could cross out the two words "rough and" to focus on the more significant "dangerous." And of course we could point out that the paragraph as a whole is only exposition: the part of the story that comes before the plot begins. 

But I deleted the protagonist's name for a reason beyond any textbook's help: it is an anagram of the author's name. Letter by letter, the author tried to make herself over into a work of art, but the change failed to go to completion. To edit its prose residue, half-born as it is and still discolored with a life's blood, would be to edit what's left of a life. The words of that life aren't interesting, but neither was the life before its words. The words, as they are, are at least new. They're all that the life has now, because it has surrendered its prior silence. In such a situation, the logic of language says: some silences disappear without replacement; some words are always missing.

2

Same issue of the New York Review, pages 42-45: the mathematician John Allen Paulos reviews Masha Gessen's Perfect Rigor, a biography of the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who between 2002 and 2003 proved one of the most serenely Olympian generalizations of all time, the Poincaré Conjecture. As I understand it from Paulos's explanation, the Conjecture is an assertion about the way space arranges itself into  meaning, and Perelman's proof establishes a universal geometry of that meaning. Humbly, here on our little planet, the academic discipline of mathematics has tried to tell Perelman it understands the magnitude of that achievement by offering him its two highest honors: the Fields Medal, usually considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and the million-dollar prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute. But Perelman is an eccentric man, and he has refused to accept either tribute. Instead, he has withdrawn from communication. When the news of the Clay prize was delivered to him, Paulos writes, "He reportedly said through the closed door of his spartan apartment, 'I have all I want'" (45).

Paulos now stands outside that closed door, addressing words first to us readers of the New York Review and then, he hopes, to Perelman. To us, Paulos explains:

Some might argue that monetary awards for mathematical work are inappropriate, or that the Poincaré Conjecture is of little practical value and not worth the one-million-dollar prize. The aesthetic and epistemic value of the proof is priceless, however, and it may eventually yield more earthly consequences as well. As for the size of the award -- how many no-name hacks are there on Wall Street who make a million dollars or more not just once but every year, and contribute exactly what?

Paulos continues in that pragmatic register for one more sentence. Then, however, he turns away from us massed readers, pivots toward the closed door, lowers his voice, and pleads: "Reconsider your decision, Grisha." The name hangs there, suspended just above the page's bottom margin. It is the essay's final word, and the only one that is silent. Grisha Perelman is apparently on nickname terms with Paulos, and I suppose he may yet respond to the sound of Paulos's uttering voice. But here on its page of the New York Review the voice itself can't speak directly to him. It has been formalized. It is a work of written art.  Behind his door, Perelman the man stands in relation to Paulos the writer primarily as Catiline stood to Cicero: not as a hearer but as a grammatical object.

Cesare Maccari, Cicero Denounces Catiline,

from Wikimedia Commons

Click to enlarge.

We readers of the New York Review are the hearers. Designated recipients of Paulos's rhetoric, we communicate in the written language that calls Perelman's name. Unfortunately, however, in the silent geometric language that Perelman has translated into his own silence, we happen to be no-names. Like the artless writers who wasted their money on a vanity press, we don't know how to fill the space between our voices and Perelman's with meaning.


Sources:

Masha Gessen, Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Paulos's review, "He Conquered the Conjecture," is online at

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/08/he-conquered-the-conjecture/