In the light of what we know

It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think? This is one of the self-referential lines of In the Light of What We Know and indeed it is nice. I, however, already knew (or at least knew about) many of those things sprinkled throughout this novel, and not only because I majored in Mathematics. Writing always happens in the context of a community with the requisite assumptions about what needs explanation and what is well known to all. This is a novel that is about about different communities rubbing up against each other.

Another self-referential passage has the narrator suggesting to Zafar, the British subject of Bangladeshi origin, that he write a book. Zafar quotes Naipaul saying,Indian literature written in English is astonishing since it is written by one people about those people for another people to read.

This is a book that is constantly reviewing itself and most often doing so better than any reviewers coming afterwards. Everything is examined and then the examination is examined. The distance thus created blunts the emotions so it is no surprise that it lead to Zafar being hospitalized for pathological boredom.

The emotion he needs to blunt so badly is rage.

What did I learn? The term "cognitive load," was new to me. And, though I'd thought I'd already known what a credit default swap is, Rahman's explanation clarified it and suggested why it was so called. I didn't learn about axolotls, or more accurately, I did but have already forgotten most of the details. I also learned about the political situation in Afghanistan, the child-rearing practices of Bangladesh, the casual and not so casual racism that confronts South Asians in the West, that an exile is a refugee with a library, how people love and yet betray each other. I learned tha Waugh said a novel is "experience transformed," which is yet another self-reference alluding to the common backgrounds of Zafar,the unnamed narrator, and Rahman and letting the reader wonder about the difference between what is true and what is false.

Learning is entertaining, like surfing the internet, but like the self-reference, it functions more defensively than as information. The discussion of axolotls is how Zafar escapes from having to justify why he won't write a book. The book is ultimately about escape. One reads fiction as an escape and here we are reading about Zafar trying to find to what community he belongs, which side he's on (the preoccupation of everyone in Afghanistan) and who is on his side. But in the end there is no escape and he belongs nowhere. he certainly doesn't belong in the narrator's attic writing a book.

Meanwhile we get self-reference self referenced as we are told about Godel's incompleteness theorem, a theorem about theorems which is proven by turning mathematics into a description of itself. Every mathematical statement is given a numerical value (Godel-numbered) and the meta-statement about whether mathematics is inconsistent becomes a theorem within mathematics itself, only one whose proof would blow up mathematics, like a suicide bomber.

As an aside (the novel is full of asides so let me have my own here) I predict that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem will soon be overtaking Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as the most misused scientific borrowing to serve as a literary metaphor. "Heisenberg" is now better known as a character in Breaking Bad. (Breaking Bad is one of the pop-cultural references in the novel, too.)

Meanwhile, the novel meanders leisurely and confuses us about who is speaking, Zafar, the narrator, or the author himself whose experience has been transformed. With further self-reference, the narrator complains that Zafar is telling his story with too many digressions and Zafar reassures him that he's getting there. When we finally do get to his rage, the narrator tells him it's OK to omit that part of the story, leaving us to deduce what actually happened. (And if that's not enough, the narrator tells us that the story Zafar told him has been told in other than the original order in which Zafar presented it to him.)

If there's a moral to the story, it's that we are kept from seeing the truth because we can't help seeing everything in the light of what we already know, and that there is no way to get around this bias. "We take much for granted, much that is granted by others, and we’re told to do as we’re told, and we agree. And we must agree.” “the only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking.”

Math is the most far reaching attempt to remove the personal point of view. When you know something is true in it, it is independent of the the opinions of others. Mathematics is what's left when you remove the real world from science, and Godel has proved it problematic, but that rubs off on the physical universe since we understand it through mathematics.

No matter how much we try to pull ourselves out of our biases, we are doomed to failure. I easily fell into taking an Eastern point of view, only to fall into the trap of trusting Suleiman over the American, Crane. That I was set up to make this mistake is no excuse.

If I had to name the bias that Rahman doesn't see, it's his attitude toward women. The novel badly fails the Bechdel test. Even if Emily is taken, not as a person, but as a metaphor for the West, women are just props in men's stories. Rahman reverses the cliche with the West, through Emily being inscrutable but we're still left with the cliche of the inscrutable woman.