The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Life by the Numbers

Numbers are everywhere - Real, Natural, Imaginary, Perfect, Amicable, Abundant, Deficient, Triangular, Prime (including both Mersenne and Pernicious as well as Twins) to name a few. And they're all here in The Housekeeper and the Professor, which Ms. Ogawa wrote in 2007. The Professor is of mathematics and has amnesia; the housekeeper is devoted and has a son. This melange constitutes the cast of a charming story of mathematics and love, subjects with a connection that is less than obvious. But there is a connection and it is fundamental and profound.

For a mathematician, defined by intensity of temperament not level of education, numbers are not simply classified as 'kinds' or 'types'. They are living species with distinctive genetic characteristics, with real family resemblances and lasting relationships, indeed with personalities. Some are rare, some shy, some awkward, some maddeningly unpredictable. Some may be hidden in infinity, some are waiting, desperate to be identified, and some may even be the last of their line, but we can't be sure. The ultimate mathematical accolade afforded to any number is to give it a family name, a formula by which all its relatives can be identified, even those we haven't met yet.

Thus the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 10 equals 55. But that is just this number's first name, as it were. It's family name is n(n-1)/2+n. All the numbers, 1 to n, in this family are related to each other and have this name. The numbers themselves have always known this, we as thinking human beings who aren't numbers, took some considerable time to recognise the fact.

Numbers, as living things, of course interbreed. They may be members of different families simultaneously. Plotting out the sister and brothers and cousins and aunts and the in-laws of numerical familial relations is what keeps mathematicians up at night. There are so many interesting genetic modifications, so many hidden liaisons, so many queer numbers waiting, and proudly wanting, to be outed. And the discovery of new families increases the possible connections among all the families. There's no end to the fun.

But why is such an appreciation of numbers of significance in a piece of fiction about amnesia? I think the answer to this question is best found through a comparison: The American novelist, Nicole Krauss, published her first book, Man Walks Into a Room, in 2002. Her novel has the same premise as Ogawa's, namely the condition of amnesia in a man who has suffered severe trauma. Both books then explore the relationship between memory and feelings in the victim - on the residual emotional bonds the victim maintains from his past, as well as their ability to create new relationships of intimacy.

Ogawa's amnesiac is even more disabled than Krauss's because the Professor's condition is anterograde amnesia which inhibits the creation of any new memories. So his memory 'store' consists of his life up to his early 30's plus the last 80 minutes, which recycles like a CarCam with a 16GB memory card. The condition of Krauss's victim is merely retrograde, meaning historical memories only are affected. He has, as it were, started a new reel in the film of his life; the entirety of this reel is available to him.

It is clear from the beginning that Krauss's story is going to end tragically. Samson Greene, her protagonist, whose trauma erased his memory back to his adolescence, is an emotional goner. His wife is not merely a stranger to him, she also evokes not the least emotional response in him; nor do any of the mementoes, photographs and other trinkets of their life together.

It is possible in fact that Samson is permanently crippled emotionally. Loss of memory is the equivalent of a comprehensive loss of affection and affective ability. He, sadly for the reader, also has not the slightest inclination to re-kindle his marriage and considers himself none the worse for it. He is not cruel, merely ennuied; his strongest emotion is melancholy

Ogawa tells a very different story. Although her mathematics Professor has a blank memory from his early 30's, his emotions are still stirred by the son of his housekeeper with whom he immediately feels an intense relationship of care. Despite the fact that the Professor must re-create this relationship every day from scratch, it in fact deepens on the basis of the mathematical tutorial that he has undertaken with the boy and his mother. His memory is blank, yet he has some level of residual emotional instinct and his capacity for relationship to his past life still exists.

I think that it is only in comparison with each other that both these novels can be recognised as profound metaphysical statements, contradictory to each other, but self-verifying by the protagonists, perhaps even to their authors. If I am correct, the responses of readers will depend primarily on the fundamental presumptions they hold not just about life but about existence itself. Here's why:

Krauss presents a decidedly Aristotelian vision of the world. Samson Greene is a physical scientist. He is a materialist in the sense that he lives in a world of strict cause and effect. Memory is a necessary causal condition for Samson’s emotions. Everything must have a cause and all causes are material in character. So no memory, no emotion. The cause/effect chain in his brain has been interrupted. The result is not simply that he doesn’t recognise his wife, he doesn’t recognise himself. He has lost his identity. He cannot remember his own name. While he mildly regrets these facts, he feels nothing more about them.

Ogawa's Professor is Platonist rather than Aristotelian. He lives in a world of Platonic forms - the apotheosis of which are numbers - that are independent not only him but of the world itself. Numbers are "contained in the notebooks of God himself." In effect numbers are attributes of God: eternal, perfect, trustworthy, and, most significantly, uncreated. They are not part of any chain of cause and effect. Yet their reality mysteriously governs the world. They are unaffected by the Professor’s injury and therefore provide what is a spiritual continuity in a materially interrupted life. While these number-forms cannot compensate for the Professor’s material deficiency, they permit him to keep his identity, which for a Platonist is a spiritual not a material entity. Numbers also mediate his current, otherwise fleeting, relationships, which spiritual things as well.

Consequently, Krauss’s story is one of irretrievable tragedy. Irretrievable because the gap in causality can never be recovered. The gap is a hole into which Samson's existence has fallen. He continues to be in the world but as a fundamentally altered being. That same gap exists for the Professor, and is just as materially unrecoverable. But the number-forms maintain their influence and ‘remind’ his material body on a daily basis of their existence, and his. They evoke the Professor's emotions, particularly love, which are not materially but spiritually-grounded. The Professor is debilitated but his ontology, his mode of being, is what it has always been.

Samson suffers mildly but has no real grief. He is now something other than human. He will probably function adequately and be perceived as normal, if somewhat aloof, by the world at large. The Professor on the other hand, may be pitiable to some, like his sister-in-law, and he does suffer, often intensely. But he is not pitiable to his housekeeper and her son. Through practical love and instinctive respect, they adapt to his condition and learn to live in his Platonic world, to their benefit as well as his. In a small but important way, he has improved the world.

Toward the end of Ogawa's book she has the Professor write a formula as a insistent communication to his sister-in-law:

This formula is known as Euler's Identity after the 18th century Swiss mathematician. It has been called the most beautiful formula in mathematics. Its beauty lies in its synthesis of at least four fundamentally different mathematical universes: Transcendental, Imaginary, Natural, and Irrational numbers. Each of these mathematical families has a genetic character as distinct as, say, the genetics of an earthworm and a human being. On the face of it, they should have no family connections whatsoever. But this is precisely what Euler's Identity shows they do have. It is an unparalleled 'abduction,’ or intuitive leap that couldn't have been arrived at by logical deduction or empirical induction.

The significance of Euler's Identity in the book is reasonably clear: It is the Professor’s way of expressing the synthesis of the worlds that he, his sister-in-law, his housekeeper, and her son are living in. Each is included without being denied, just as each mathematical family is included without being negated or changed in the Identity. A brilliant literary as well as mathematical insight therefore.

I have no idea if Ogawa has ever read Krauss, or if she has whether she intended to write a fictional riposte to Krauss’s Aristotelian materialism. Regardless, the two books certainly help to demonstrate what I think is the essential point of the other: It makes a fundamental difference in our lives what implicit philosophy we assimilate or adopt, perhaps without any awareness of the event. Perhaps we are simply born into one tendency or another, without the possibility of choice.

In either case, I am an inveterate Platonist and, like the Professor, find numbers unaccountably comforting. Who knows, they might even help me through my increasingly deficient aged memory. So for me Ogawa has written something far more than a merely charming piece of fiction. She has, either intentionally or inadvertently, addressed a fundamental issue of human existence. Thank you Ms. Ogawa.

See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for a discussion of the implications of these two books as a critique of science more generally.
See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for another literary use of number theory.

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