Hardy et l’arithmétique
Little has been written on Hardy and mathematics, although he was a contemporary of Cantor and had certainly heard about Zeno’s paradoxes. However, arithmetics plays an important part in his novels, where the tragic characters are often bad calculators, like Henchard who is bad at figures whereas Fa...
Zapisane w:
| Wydane w: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/fathom, |
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| 1. autor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Język: | Français |
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FATHOM
2017
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| Hasła przedmiotowe: | |
| Dostęp online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Streszczenie: | Little has been written on Hardy and mathematics, although he was a contemporary of Cantor and had certainly heard about Zeno’s paradoxes. However, arithmetics plays an important part in his novels, where the tragic characters are often bad calculators, like Henchard who is bad at figures whereas Farfrae is a numerate young man. Keeping measure is a quality inherent in Farfrae, and it should be opposed to the measurelessness of tragic jouissance, as indeed Henchard knows no measure. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, the question of arithmetics underlies the narrative discourse, for Oneness is a key-issue: Knight wants to be Elfride’s first suitor and cannot bear to be “second or third in the field”. If two is omnipresent in the novel (as well as in the “pair” of blue eyes of the title), it is in fact an indivisible entity, another figure of One, which is not the “unary one”, the countable “one” that proceeds from zero and initiates the series of numbers, but the unifying or “unian” one, which has a totalizing function, tends towards the communal, and erases differences. So it seems impossible to count in this novel – or at any rate the succession of numbers only leads to a tragic ending.The “unary” and the “unian” One: the distinction is made by Lacan, who in the seventies was interested in the work of two mathematicians, Peano and Frege. The impossibility of arithmetics in A Pair of Blue Eyes tells us something about what is most human in us (as well as most inhuman): the desire to free oneself from the trammels that hamper ordinary human life, to overstep the limits that confine desire, and to occupy the blank of origin – a space that must be kept vacant for a human being to be able to enter diachrony. |
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