Bilocations, Chapter Five: Higher Math and Gayer Sex!

Here we are, back in England, which has been Lew's milieu, but although he's present in the background, this chapter isn't about him. The most important thing is that it introduces an important character, Cyprian Latewood, the "feckless scion" of Latewood's Patent Wallpapers. This chapter also gets into the difficulties with the idea of a coherent sexual identity. There's the idea, which you'll be familiar with if you've read Judith Butler, that one's gender isn't a stable, coherent thing but rather a series of acts, which are subject to destabilization. We will see A LOT more of that later on. I remember the first time I read this, I found it very confusing, but now I have a clearer idea of what's going on. Or so I think.

So the thing about Cyprian is: he's very, very gay. BUT. At the same time: he has a serious crush on Yashmeen, who, I don't want to alarm you but, is a woman. And a woman who, at this time, seems to be a lesbian. Everyone is very confused about this, including his pal Reginald "Ratty" McHugh:

"But Latewood, you're a sod. Aren't you. Unless you've been only pretending all this time, the way one must around this place?"

"Of course of course, but I'm also in . . . in love," as if this were a foreign idiom he had to keep looking up in a phrase book, "with her. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself."

[...]

"How exactly would you plan, let's say physically, to express your desire?" (491-2)

Of course, it's possible to have a crush on someone you're not actually physically attracted to. But what's going on here is considerably more messy than that. As will become very apparent.

Meanwhile, Yashmeen's pals--groupies, we might say--are similarly uncertain about why she bothers with having Cyprian around at all, or how any of this could possibly work. But Yashmeen herself is aware of the instability here. They may putatively be lesbians,

"And yet," said Yashmeen, "there isn't one of us, not even you, Noellyn, with that enchanting nose always in a book, who wouldn't go chasing after . . . I don't know, George Grossmith, if he tipped us the merest wink." (494)

Performative sexuality.  We will say more about this later.

Cyprian meets Professor Renfrew, which is going to help connect all of this to the Continental politics we're going to see, though he doesn't really do a lot here. Well, he also has some sort of crush on Yashmeen, maybe. But there's not much to say about him; I just feel it is necessary that this be noted.

Yashmeen is increasingly feeling kind of alienated by the T.W.I.T. You know what she's REALLY into? Math. I guess I should say maths, since this is the UK. In particular, she's making "like so many of that era, a journey into the dodgy terrain of Riemann's Zeta function and his famous conjecture" (496).

Now, math is not my strong suit. As you may know. But I really, really want to engage with the book as deeply as I can, so I am endeavoring not to just glide over it like I did in the past. You can of course look up good ol' Reimann and his Zeta function on Wikipedia, but it's just going to be impenetrable if you don't have the relevant background. Just LOOK at it:

Yeah. Thanks.

But if I'm not a mathematician, you know who is? My brother. So I asked him if he could explain all this Riemann nonsense to me as though I were a slow-witted child. And he really went above and beyond in presenting it to me. Do I completely understand it? No, of course not. But I at least have SOME very, very basic concept of the stuff we're talking about. So, like the slow-witted child I am, I will try to explain it. All laughable misunderstandings and distortions are my own and should in no way be attributed to him.

So this heavily involves imaginary numbers, and in particular the fundamental unit known as i: it has the property that when you square it, you get negative one. You can use it to create complex numbers: a+bi or a-bi--a and b both being regular ol' numbers such as 2. Or 7. Or 19. Or 20. Or 308. Or 1000. I could do this all day. Now--and this is where we're really getting into it--you can map these complex numbers on the complex plane, which is a graph where the real numbers are on the horizontal axis and the imaginary numbers are on the vertical. I hope you can see how THAT would be incredibly suggestive to Pynchon and relevant in particular to this novel's ideas about multiple worlds. So if you have the complex number 2+4i, you would place it at the intersection between 2 on the real number line and 4 on the imaginary number line.

When you have this, you can create functions, and I have to admit, my understanding here is a little hazy. You can apparently assign complex numbers to other numbers, but I really couldn't tell you why you can do this, or indeed why you'd want to. NONETHELESS: apparently, you could, if you were so inclined, take a+bi and decide that there's going to be a multiplication rule: this number just equals a times b. And the roots of this are the numbers that we're multiplying--the a and the b.

NOW, the Riemann Zeta function: that is another rule for dealing with complex numbers on the complex number plane, but a much more complicated one. Just what we need, eh? The Riemann hypothesis is trying to answer a question: what are the roots of the Zeta function? Well, we know some of them: specifically, we know that numbers like: -2+0i, -4+0i, -6+0i, etc. are all roots. The Zeta function transforms them into zeros. Why only ones where a is an even number? I DON'T KNOW. I'm doing the best I can here, dammit! The Riemann Hypothesis says that every other root--every other number that gets sent to zero--can be placed on a vertical line on the right half of the real numbers line, and that all of these are 1/2+bi.

This is all relevant to the question of prime numbers. Do you want to know, given a number c, how many prime numbers are less than that? Why wouldn't you? And there are ways to answer that, but most of them aren't exact; they have margins of error. Riemann gives a formula to answer that exactly, but the problem is, it involves all of the roots of the Zeta function, and we don't KNOW them all, dammit!

Okay. I kind of just wrote that all down so that I could understand it, to the extent that I'm able. Yashmeen is obsessed with it too, to the extent that she thinks about it even when she's in bed with one of her groupies. Mixing up sex with this purely abstract math and this imaginary other-world stuff...very suggestive. Very suggestive indeed. Still trying to figure out what it's suggesting, however!

She was not quite able to ignore the question, almost as if he were whispering to her, of why Riemann had simple asserted the figure of one-half at the outset instead of deriving it later..."One would of course like to have a rigorous proof of this," he wrote, "but I have put aside the search...after some fleeting vain attempts because it is not necessary for the immediate objective of my investigation."

But didn't that imply...the tantalizing possibility was just out of reach... (498)

WHAT? WHAT DOES IT IMPLY?!? At any rate, this gives her the idea that she should go to Göttingen, where where Riemann studied, to see if she can figure things out. Renfrew is going to give her a gift:

"'Snazzbury's Silent Frock,'" Yashmene read aloud. "'Operating on the principle of wave interference, sound cancelling sound, the act of walking being basically a periodic phenomenon, and the characteristic "rustling of an ordinary frock an easily computed complication of the underlying ambulational frequency... (500)

Basically, a James-Bond-type gadget, which seems to emphasize the spycraft to come. I feel like this item should have something to do with Riemann, but this is very hard to figure out.

Anyway, she's gone. Cyprian is sad. But cheer up: he will definitely see her again, and indeed much more than simply "see"...