Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature

Meghan Vicks

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501307225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The concept of nothing was an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition and essential to the creation or operation of human existence, as Jacques Derrida demonstrated how all structures are built upon a nothing within the structure, and as mathematicians argued that zero – the number that is also not a number – allows for the creation of our modern mathematical system, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature suggests that nothing itself enables the act of narration. Focusing on the literary works of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Victor Pelevin, Meghan Vicks traces how and why these writers give narrative form to nothing, demonstrating that nothing is essential to the creation of narrative – that is, how our perceptions are conditioned, how we make meaning (or madness) out of the stuff of our existence, how we craft our knowable selves, and how we exist in language.

1

Theorizing nothing

Zero

Zero is a paradoxical and controversial sign, and one of its many roles is a signifier of nothing. Here, I sketch the development and evolution of zero as a mathematical concept and sign, its reluctant adoption by medieval Europe, and its status as both a number and not-a-number. This sketch draws parallels between zero and nothing to illustrate how, as zero is necessary to the development of our modern mathematical system, nothing is necessary to the creation of conscious being, as well as to the creation of meaningful narrative.

Between 1999 and 2000, three books about the history and concept of zero were published (one might speculate that this was due to the mania surrounding the apocalyptic zero of Y2K): Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (1999), John D. Barrow’s The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe (2000), and Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000). These three studies give fairly similar accounts of zero’s origin and development, but differ in some important ways. All three discuss zero’s earliest developments between the sixth and third centuries bc by the Babylonians (

), in pre-Columbian Mayan civilization (

), and in ninth-century India (• or O); Kaplan makes an additional argument for the possible appearance of zero in Alexandrian Greece (O). These scholars also differ in their accounts of the origin of the Indian zero, which was ultimately adopted by the Arabs and evolved into our present-day zero: Kaplan and Seife argue that its origins can be traced back through Greece to Babylon, while Barrow holds that Indian mathematicians invented zero on their own, not unlike the Mayans.1

Sometime between the sixth and third centuries bc, the Babylonians created a sign that served as a placeholder, designating the absence of a number, in their positional system of numbering.2 This sign, often comprising two parallel slanted cuneiform wedges (

), indicated nothing in this space or column, and was not considered to be a number in its own right. Seife explains that “[The Babylonian zero] did little more than make sure digits fell in the right places; it didn’t really have a numerical value of its own … On its own, it meant … nothing.”3 Barrow also emphasizes that the Babylonian zero was quite different from the zero we know today, and signified only an empty space in an accounting register: “Their zero sign was never written as the answer to a sum like 6–6. It was never used to express an endpoint of an operation where nothing remains. Such an endpoint was always explained in words. Nor did the Babylonian zero find itself entwined with metaphysical notions of nothingness.”4 It is perhaps most accurate to think of the Babylonian zero more as a kind of punctuation mark—like a space or a period, something that clarifies the meaning of signs around it—and less as a number with a meaning of its own.

The presence of zero in ancient Greece is doubtful, and most scholars agree that the Greeks had no sign or concept for zero. Barrow, Kaplan, and Seife each explore the curiosity of zero’s lacuna in ancient Greece, and the peculiar phenomenon wherein puns about nothing are readily made (see the episode of Odysseus in Polyphemus’ cave, discussed in introduction), but a numerical nothing is apparently left unthought. Kaplan argues that it was not until Alexander the Great’s conquest of Babylon, then part of the Achaemenid Empire, when Greece encountered any semblance of zero, around 331 bc.5 However, it is not the slanted wedges found thereafter in Greek writings, but the symbol O: where did this O come from, and moreover, what did it mean? The common yet controversial explanation,6 Kaplan explains, “is that ‘O’ came from the Greek omicron, the first letter of ouden: ‘nothing,’ like Odysseus’ name [Outis]; or simply from [ou], ‘not’: like our nought.”7 This O possibly signified the absence of a given measurement (e.g. degrees, minutes), and certainly was not considered to be a number in its own right—again, utilized more as a punctuation mark.8 Further compounding the debate concerning this O’s meaning is the fact that it hardly appears outside of Greek astronomical writings. Writes Seife, “After doing their calculations with Babylonian notation, Greek astronomers usually converted the numbers back into clunky Greek-style numerals—without zero. Zero never worked its way into ancient Western numbers, so it is unlikely that the omicron is the mother of our 0.”9 In short, zero was largely absent in ancient Greece. The questions then arise: why did the Greeks reject zero, or what prevented them from developing it?

Seife and Barrow point to Aristotelian philosophy and its dismissal of infinity and the void to explain the Greeks’ rejection of zero, and later, Christian Europe’s long-standing hesitation to adopt zero. According to Seife,

The [Aristotelian] universe was contained in a nutshell, ensconced comfortably within the sphere of fixed stars; the cosmos was finite in extent, and entirely filled with matter. There was no infinite; there was no void. There was no infinity; there was no zero.

This line of reasoning had another consequence—and this is why Aristotle’s philosophy endured for so many years. His system proved the existence of God.

The heavenly spheres are slowly spinning in their places … But something must be causing that motion … This is the prime mover: God. When Christianity swept through the West, it became closely tied to the Aristotelian view of the universe and proof of God’s existence.10

Barrow makes a similar argument:

The dominant picture of the natural world that emerged from Greek civilization and wedded itself to the Judaeo-Christian worldview was that of Aristotle … Aristotle’s picture of Nature was extremely influential and his views about the vacuum fashioned the consensus view about it until the Renaissance. He rejected the possibility that a vacuum could exist.11

One important implication of hypotheses such as these is that a culture’s dominant philosophy and self-defining narratives influence and shape what are its supposedly more objective epistemological spheres—for example, mathematics and science. The argument therefore arises that zero’s status in a given culture becomes a reflection or symptom of that culture’s condition, and has the potential to tell us a great deal about the culture itself.

This ambiguous O eventually appeared in India. Kaplan argues that “the first indubitable written appearance of the symbol in India” dates from ad 876,12 but that it likely arrived much earlier via the Greeks when Alexander the Great invaded India or by way of commercial routes from Alexandria.13 In contrast, Barrow suggests that India invented zero independent of Babylonian/Greek influence.14 He claims that before the circle (O), a solid dot (•) punctuated Indian texts, serving to signify something missing or absent, and to act as a placeholder in positional notation. This dot eventually evolved into a hollow oval, and traveled to China.15 These dots had many uses. Kaplan explains that they could stand as a promise to complete an owed task, or as a gap in an inscription, “the dot marking a blank,”16 not unlike ellipses. These dots are perhaps similar to those found in the Torah that are placed above or below words or letters; some scholars suggest they are sometimes “intended to make it seem that the word had not been written. Rather like assigning it the value zero, or taking it off the board.”17 Moving away from the meaning of these dots in relation to words and into the realm of numbers, we find they functioned to signify the place-value of the numeral to which they were attached. Hence, this zero symbol still did not function as a number (or as a letter), but instead as a modifier, a punctuation mark, or a space between signs.

However, what’s perhaps most interesting about the...

Table of contents

• Title
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• 0 Introduction: Nothing and the twentieth century
• 1 Theorizing nothing
• 2 Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby
• 3 “Working in a Void”: Vladimir Nabokov and the semiotics of nothing
• 4 Samuel Beckett: Immanence, language, nothing
• 5 Victor Pelevin’s void and the post-Soviet condition
• Conclusion: Nothing as the transcendental signified
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright