Reason - Passions - Note On A Book Review

 I dropped in on The Los Angeles Review of Books and was intrigued by Ed Simon's review Nightmares of Reason: On Benjamín Labatut’s “The MANIAC”. Labatut is a Chilean novelist, so part of the interest was in what goes on in the wider world. Then there is title, since I think we are living in an Age of Unreason. I do not think that is a good thing.

Bacon is only mentioned in the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s first English-language novel The MANIAC (2023) by way of a deftly placed epigraph drawn from Greene’s play, but the fantastical aura of the Brazen Head permeates Labatut’s allegory about the ways in which reason, pushed to its extreme, can become its opposite, about how a certain tyranny of unfeeling logic could very well usher in an apocalypse (and soon). The title of Labatut’s novel, after all, refers to the acronym for the thousand-pound supercomputer that once occupied a few floors at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s. The novel is ostensibly historical fiction concerning the Hungarian Jewish physicist and father of modern computing John von Neumann, but The MANIAC is actually something far rarer and more unusual—a bona fide experimental novel of ideas that has emerged from a publishing ecosystem that all too often only rewards dry literary fiction or lowest-common-denominator genre fiction. The necessities of marketing and publicity no doubt require the book to be sold as a “novel,” and while obviously the inner thoughts of the scientist’s wife Klára Dán von Neumann or the economist Oskar Morgenstern require a certain amount of speculation on Labatut’s part (even while clearly based on voluminous research), it’s difficult to fully categorize The MANIAC as fiction, even historical fiction. Rather, The MANIAC’s genre is better understood as historical creative nonfiction, philosophical argument, or some conjunction of the two.

The material on von Neumann occupies the bulk of Labatut’s attention, comprising the long middle portion of The MANIAC, wherein several different figures, ranging from the scientist’s wives and daughter to physicists Eugene Wigner and Richard Feynman, give first-person testimony in chronological order (almost as if they were being interviewed for a documentary, but no such framing conceit is offered). Meanwhile, the von Neumann narrative is bookended by a substantial prologue that sketches the biography of marginal Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who was simultaneously haunted by irrationality and the rise of Nazism and so murdered his Down syndrome–afflicted son and then took his own life in 1933. In keeping with narrative symmetry, The MANIAC ends decades later, in 2016, when the Korean Go savant Lee Sedol lost four of five tournament games to the computer program AlphaGO at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul.

That sounds like a tall order, and it gets more ambitious.

That the editors at Penguin were agreeable with Labatut’s novel ending in an 84-page (admittedly riveting) synopsis of the strategies that underlie a complex 3,000-year-old Chinese game speaks to an admirable conception of what novels can do, the way that they can be pushed and can in turn push our conceptions. Because what Labatut’s intent appears to be is nothing less than an interpretation of our nightmares of reason, this engine that powers a “reckless drive toward death and self-destruction” and embodies “an incorporeal wraith, an unholy spirit.” In that infernal trinity of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence, all avatars of humanity’s Thanatos, there is one figure who dwells within their nexus—Johnny von Neumann, the wizard whose supercomputer calculated the yield of the first hydrogen bombs, who advocated using those weapons as a means to control the weather in a potential Third World War, and who perhaps delivered to us the mechanism by which that conflagration will be fought in the form of the digital revolution. He is, if not in reality than certainly in The MANIAC, a demonic figure.

What I do not get from the review is that the book is needlessly intellectual or dull. Having seen Oppenheimer last week, after I read the review, I am even more struck by how this novel borders the territory of the movie: the irresponsibility of the pure science. This morning, David Hume is knocking on the door of my brain with his discussion of the passions, which does not exclude the emotions from reason:

Now, if we consider the human mind, we shall observe, that, with regard to the passions, it is not like a wind instrument of music, which, in running over all the notes, immediately loses the sound when the breath ceases; but rather resembles a string-instrument, where, after each stroke, the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays. The imagination is extremely quick and agile; but the passions, in comparison, are slow and restive: For which reason, when any object is presented, which affords a variety of views to the one and emotions to the other; though the fancy may change its views with great celerity; each stroke will not produce a clear and distinct note of passion, but the one passion will always be mixed and confounded with the other. According as the probability inclines to good or evil, the passion of grief or joy predominates in the composition; and these passions being intermingled by means of the contrary views of the imagination, produce by the union the passions of hope or fear.

Yes, madness can arise from pure logic; pure logic may be its own form of madness. We are a mix of the rational and the irrational. I can say from my own experience of depression that irrationality has its own logic, its own rationality. I have been allowed to step back, to see with more lucidity, where the madness is logical and the logical madness.

Of course, another book for which I have no time to read!

sch 12/14