The anomaly is a novel that tells the unlikely story of an airplane that covers the Paris-New York route and that appears in the airspace of the United States, ready to land, with the same passengers, three months after having landed for the first time . The plot focuses primarily on eight of the passengers (including the pilot) and two mathematicians trying to understand how the aircraft has been duplicated: they are a topologist and a specialist in probability theory.
Beyond the occupation of two of the protagonists, The anomaly it is full of mathematical winks. Not in vain its author, Hervé Le Tellier, is, in addition to being a man of letters, a mathematician. At the end of the day, I suppose that the training received is shown in the writing, the organization and the contents of each book. Le Tellier is the current president of the mathematically inspired literary group OuLiPo (acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, that is to say, Obrador de Literatura Potential) created in 1960 at the initiative of the writer Raymond Queneau and the engineer François Le Lionnais, supported by some writers, mathematicians and painters.
On The anomaly, Le Tellier pays a special tribute to Raymond Queneau: the titles of the three parts in which the novel is structured correspond to extracts from his poems: As black as the sky, Life is a dream, they say and The song out of nowhere. Each of these sections presents, respectively, the main characters, the investigation of the event by the authorities and the way in which life continues after this duplication. Another reading is possible, a non-linear one, one that allows (by choosing the appropriate chapters) to know the history of each character and their double, forgetting the rest of the protagonists.
The author weaves the stories of these people as they cross their lives after the incident. The life of each character (from a hit man, to a suicidal writer, to a sick plane pilot or a girl who suffers abuse) is told in a different genre: crime novel, introspective or sentimental literature or psychological novel. This last genre is key in the book. The anomaly caused by the appearance of the second plane forces each character to confront his self: how would you react if you find yourself with an exact copy of yourself, but three months younger? Would it be the opportunity to rectify an error? Maybe your double would be the only person with whom you can talk about an unspeakable secret?
The anomaly raises scientific, philosophical, religious and political debates in the book. In the scientific part, the topologist and the specialist in probability theory try to explain the inexplicable. Maybe we are just a simulation, an experiment? And this anomaly, Was it a system failure?
Allusions to OuLiPo abound in the novel and, in fact, the author has declared that the text is part of this current. One of the main characteristics of this group of literary experimentation is that rules or restrictions are imposed on writing, which govern the structure of their texts and do not reduce the creativity of their writings, on the contrary, they encourage it. Many of these restrictions are also mathematical in nature. The main restriction of The anomaly It is applied to its structure: the crosses of characters that obey a braiding of colors in the “scoubidou” style.
One of OuLiPo’s best known works is Style exercisesby Queneau. In this book, the author tells a nondescript story that happened on a bus in 99 different ways (some of them math). This oulipian work, that of the “exercises in style”, has been widely covered. Le Tellier himself, in Joconde jusqu’à cent: 99 (+1) points de vue sur Mona Lisa proposes, humorously, different visions of the enigmatic protagonist of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting. The following is the “point of view of the Boolean mathematician”:
Let B be the set of dark-haired women who wear a black silk net on their heads, let I be the set of people who have an indefinable smile, let P be the set of paintings by a given artist p.
Prove that if the intersection of I, B and P is La Gioconda, then p is Leonardo da Vinci. »
In my opinion, one of the most beautiful oulipian proposals with mathematical restrictions is that of the mathematician Michèle Audin in Mai quai conti. The text is structured in thirteen chapters corresponding to thirteen dates of 1871 that coincide with thirteen sessions of the Académie des sciences in Paris. Each chapter is accompanied by a geometric figure (an ellipse) with several marked points and segments relating some of them: they are steps in the demonstration of the Pascal’s theorem (a result of projective geometry) that structure the plot of the story. It is a work of art.
Let’s go back to The anomaly, which ends with a calligram simulating an hourglass containing a final oulipian reference: the word “ulcerations”, which is a hindrance to making poems from a fixed word. The letters disappear, the sentences are shortened. The author leaves a message hidden between these letters that fall announcing the end. Just from the book?
Marta Macho-Stadler is a professor in the Department of Mathematics of the University of the Basque Country and author of the book ‘Mathematics and literature’
Editing and coordination: Ágata A. Timón G Longoria (ICMAT).
Coffee and theorems is a section dedicated to mathematics and the environment in which it is created, coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT), in which researchers and members of the center describe the latest advances in this discipline, share meeting points between the mathematics and other social and cultural expressions and remember those who marked its development and knew how to transform coffee into theorems. The name evokes the definition of the Hungarian mathematician Alfred Rényi: “A mathematician is a machine that transforms coffee into theorems.”
You can follow MATTER on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#anomaly #science #fiction #mathematics