Ionesco. An Error of Calculation?

Abstract

IN The Lesson (La Leçon), Ionesco’s Professor is astounded at his Pupil’s skills in multiplication (she says she has learnt all possible multiplications by heart, just as we learn simple ones as small children). He has tested her with 3,755,998,251 multiplied by 5,162,303,508. As La Pléiade edition notes, she is able to calculate: ‘mentalement, en un clin d’œil, le produit de nombres immenses’.1 Her instant answer is: 19,390,002,844,219,164,508. The astonished Professor (equally implausibly) immediately suggests that the last digit should be a nine, but then concedes that the Pupil is right. But the sum is actually wrong. The correct answer is 19,389,602,947,179,164,508. So the Pupil, the Professor and Ionesco are 399,897,040,000,000 out (or, to follow the text, which gives words rather than numerals: three hundred and ninety-nine trillion, eight hundred and ninety-seven billion, forty million). The perfect correspondence of the last seven digits of the correct and incorrect answers seems to suggest an error of long multiplication by the author. Ionesco’s text ridicules any confident foundation for our knowledge, particularly in language or number. But the joke, here, depends on the ludicrous accuracy of the Pupil’s multiplication (especially as she cannot do the simplest subtraction, thinking that four minus three equals seven, or that two minus one equals two). Can anyone cast any light on this anomaly? Did Ionesco know the sum was wrong?