Benjamin Labatut's physics fantasy A Terrible Verdure - The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions

 I.

Benjamin Labatut’s Bolaño-Sebaldian 2020 novel-like object, Un verdor terrible (A Terrible Verdure, although Adrian Nathan West’s English translation is titled When We Cease to Understand the World) has been getting a lot of attention.  It is a fantasy novel where major twentieth-century scientists and mathematicians are mystics who make their discoveries through glimpses of the reality behind the veil.  Several, but not all, of the figures Labatut writes about were, in fact, mystics, although the relation, in what I call the real world, between their work and their mysticism is not so clear. 

In fantasy fiction, metaphors are made literal.  In A Terrible Verdure, high-cognition scientists are not just like mystics, but are mystics.  What do we get from this particular physics fantasy?

One thing is that the “genius poet” problem is solved.  Nabokov somewhere says that the hardest character to make convincing is the poet of genius, because the author has to actually be a poet of genius to provide the evidence that the character is such a thing.  Just asserting genius does not work.  The same is true for physicists and mathematicians.  By using real figures – primarily Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzchild, Alexander Grothendieck, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg – Labatut can use, or at least name, their actual contributions, while inventing much of the story around them.  Schrödinger, for example, comes up with the wave equation at the base of quantum mechanics (non-fiction) while reenacting sexy scenes from the contemporary novel The Magic Mountain (fiction).

Labatut turns everything mathematical into metaphor, and what else is he supposed to do?  “I understand about as much physics as you can without understanding mathematics” he says in an interview in Physics Today.  At least the physics problems suggest something in the material world; the chapter on Alexander Grothendieck is especially abstract, since his specialty was pure mathematics, so abstract that even the names of the fields barely mean anything.  In my own study of mathematics, I tapped out at real analysis, already getting too abstract for me, so poking around in Grothendieck’s actual work was amusingly pointless.

The speaker here is a Chilean mathematician who, inspired by Grothendieck’s retreat, afraid that math is destroying the world, retired long ago to cultivate his garden:

We know how to use it [quantum mechanics], it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it.  The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions.  It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.  (187)

Which words are doing all the work?  “[A]ctually,” “true”?  In another sense, lots of people understand quantum mechanics, thousands of people.  “You [physicists, but also anyone] need to let the book do what it’s trying to do, which is going to be harder if you’re a physicist,” Labatut says in the Physics Today interview, which I think is right, but the other side is that non-physicists should be clear about that the book is not doing.

II.

In the old days, a novel like this would have likely been about the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war, but Labatut barely gestures in that direction.  His recurring catastrophe is environmental, not the familiar one of climate change, but rather a disaster of superabundance caused by artificial nitrogen fixing, the great discovery of chemist Fritz Haber, who was also the father of modern chemical warfare, an irony that has been explored many times.

Haber is the eventual subject of the first chapter, “Prussian Blue,” which is a direct imitation of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995).  The first paragraph covers German soldiers hopped up on Pervitin, which moves us to post-war suicides, and thus to cyanide, discovered as a by product of the invention of the chemical pigment Prussian Blue, which brings us to silkworm cultivation, and so on to Haber and his life and work.  Just like a Saturn chapter, except shorter and simpler.  The silkworms are taken directly from Sebald, and I mean directly:

The Reich Association of Silkworm Breeders in Berlin, a constituent group within the Reich Federation of German Breeders of Small Animals, which in turn was affiliated to the Reich Agricultural Commission, saw its task as increasing production in every existing workshop, advertising silk cultivation in the press, in the cinema and on radio, establishing model rearing units for educational purposes, organizing advisory bodies at local, district and regional level to support all silk-growers, providing mulberry trees, and planting them by the millions on unutilized land, in residential areas and cemeteries, by roadsides, on railway embankments and along the Reich’s autobahns. (293, Sebald, tr. Michael Hulse)

Labatut compresses the first seventy-three words into two:

The Nazis planted millions of such trees in abandoned fields and residential quarters, in schoolyards and cemeteries, in the grounds of hospitals and sanatoria, and on both sides of the highways that criss-crossed the new Germany. (16, Labatut)

This is the only time I noticed the literal rewriting of a Sebald sentence (“sanatoria” is added to foreshadow the Schrödinger chapter), but now I wonder if there are more, and plenty of other bits are dropped in, like the herring on the last page.  I don’t exactly want to say that Sebald’s sentences and maze of connections are better than Labatut’s, but they are clearly more complex.

Someone with a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996) could, I suspect, enjoy a similar, or perhaps quite different, exercise.  See that Physics Today interview.

I enjoyed When We Cease to Understand the World quite a lot. But part of that pleasure was recognition, part was flattery, and part was because it was all kind of easy.