Abstract
This article is a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s “Grünewalda, o una fábula del infinito” (1969), a short story from the collection El retrato de Zoe y otras mentiras. Elizondo purposely mirrors in “Grünewalda” a turbulent chapter in the history of mathematics—the turn of the nineteenth century—when this discipline went through a profound crisis. The article shows how Elizondo skillfully crafts a literary version of a process of arithmetization of writing, as taken from the basics of set theory, and how this process helps to discern the level-changing operators in “Grünewalda” and in all of Elizondo’s texts. Given that mathematical knowledge is merely verbal knowledge, Grünewalda’s life and death problems are syntactic and semantic in principle. Thus, beyond ascribing his rhetoric to a metaphysical sphere, a metamathematical realm is presented as a more adequate depiction of Elizondo’s writing.
Highlights
Windows there are none in our houses: for the light comes to us alike in our homes and out of them, by day and by night, at all times and in all places, whence we know not
“Grünewalda o una fábula del infinito,” a narration by the Mexican author Salvador Elizondo included in his 1969 collection El retrato de Zoe y otras mentiras, begins with an epigraph taken from The Principles of Mathematics, a book written by Bertrand Russell in 1900 and first published in 1903: “Mathematics uses a notion which is not a constituent of the proposition which it considers, namely the notion of truth.”
Last but not least, his writing resembles the structure and nature of mathematical logic discourse. It was the so-called Pythagoreans who most likely first assumed that the principles used in mathematics apply to all existing things
Summary
This article is a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s “Grünewalda, o una fábula del infinito” (1969), a short story from the collection El retrato de Zoe y otras mentiras. When Hippasus of Metapontum, one of the members of the scholar community founded by Pythagoras, revealed its content, he was drowned at sea, apparently as a punishment from the gods This arithmetization of the universe and of its corresponding way of knowing it has been revisited in many occasions with comparable tragic outcomes, in particular, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the German mathematician Georg Cantor audaciously explained infinity and when the concept of number was properly defined by fellow German philosopher, mathematician, and logician Gottlob Frege and by the English philosopher, logician, mathematician, and writer Bertrand Russell. It is in the overlap with logic and mathematics where Elizondo’s characters, plots, and feverish fable most remarkably surface
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