“Madness” and “insanity” are the words most often deployed in descriptions of Hilda Hilst’s enigmatic novella, With My Dog-Eyes. It gives voice to “a mind unravelling,” writes Nick Lezard in The Guardian, “and through the gaps we see a horrified fascination with the body, a kind of carnal awareness of existential futility.” “[F]luid, shifting narration tells the story — if you can call it that — of mathematician and poet Amós Kéres’ descent into madness,” adds The Independent‘s Holly Williams, “mov[ing] rapidly between first person present tense, recalled memories, reported speech, and chunks of poetry; between absurdism, theory, fable and filth.” The novel “reads like a long poem,” Juan Vidal concurs in his review for NPR, “with utter insanity pervading each and every page. The vivid, disjointed prose mirrors the troubled mind of our protagonist… an expert in pure mathematics who is losing his grasp on reality.”
For me, however, the most captivating quality of With My Dog-Eyes is not the way in which Kéres’ burgeoning insanity leads his representations of events to become increasingly disjointed. That sort of thing has been done often enough before that it no longer bears remarking on. More captivating here is the way in which the novel’s structure projects a mind so fundamentally, inflexibly logical — so absolutely committed to mathematics — that when his reality begins to lose its logical underpinnings, when he ceases to grasp the causal connections between sequential experiences, Kéres mounts a resistance to insanity by seeking refuge in mathematical logic and marshalling his experiences into a form that follows its rules. Although this choice of form is to some extent suggestive of Kéres’ insanity, I was struck by how it also suggests his striving for coherence in the face of insanity — albeit a coherence that may likewise appear to be tainted by insanity insofar as the structure beneath the novella’s narrative surface is built upon an alternative to narrative logic.
“Poetry and mathematics,” Kéres muses, identifying his twin passions while recalling the onset of his insanity:
The black stone structure breaks and you see yourself in a saturation of lights, a clear-cut unhoped-for. A clear-cut unhoped-for was what he felt and understood at the top of that small hill. But he didn’t see shapes or lines, didn’t see contours or lights, he was invaded by colors, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that was not fire. He was invaded by incommensurable meaning.
Kéres suffers from this event, of course, and begins to succumb to inexplicable lapses of time. While delivering a lecture on mathematics one day, he loses his train of thought and pauses for what he believes is only an instant. Later, though, he learns that his audience watched him staring into space for fifteen minutes before he returned to the task at hand — and worse than that, several students have complained to his superiors that such events are becoming fixtures of his classes. Rather than simply detailing Kéres’ lapses of time, however, With My Dog-Eyes as a whole is structured in a way that mimics their effects. Time and again events underway are cut off and interrupted by recollections of other, unrelated events, and these interruptions are in turn interrupted by yet other events, and even these interruptions of interruptions are themselves interrupted, until the narratorial focus snaps back to one or another of the previous recollections and the events therein resume or conclude as if they weren’t interrupted at all.
Disjointed, perhaps, but in another sense perhaps not. Although Kéres’ experience of madness no doubt disjoints his perception of reality, his recollection and articulation of that experience rejoints his reality along apparently mathematical lines. Every interruption of an event suggests some sort of association between that which is interrupted and that which interrupts. Moreover, every conclusion to an interrupted event delineates a boundary that encases all of the event’s associated interruptions no matter how disparate they may otherwise be. As a result, although the events detailed by Kéres appear to lack coherent narrative organization because they are presented achronologically and without any evident causal connections, a closer look at their structure reveals an attempt at mathematical organization instead. Sequences of interruptions constitute something akin to mathematical sets when bound together within broader events that receive a conclusion. Other events, outside of these sets, perform the role of functions when by modifying either an entire set or one of the events within it, and still other events that interlace the sets work to establish or modify the relations between several of them.
Beyond serving as a mathematician’s account of his own descent into madness, then, With My Dog-Eyes also stands as Kéres’ attempt to reclaim his sanity by conforming his experiences to a non-narrative logic that may still enable him to make sense of them. This logic affords him a structural foundation on which to articulate his experiences and better equips him to literally commensurate the bursts of “incommensurable meaning” that afflict him. Of course, every narrative that surveys a life and takes stock of its significance is, in a sense, a narrative pegged to a mathematical formula, at least to the extent that it fixes some sort of value to the life in question by illustrating “what it all adds up to.” But while most works of that sort cleave to fairly linear formulae that are compatible with conventional narrative logic, With My Dog-Eyes employs a formula more appropriate to its narrator and his mathematical mind. The result is not the pure and simple chaos of a man’s reality falling apart: “a mind unravelling,” “a descent into madness,” “utter insanity pervading each and every page.” It is an experience of chaos relentlessly subjected to a system of order whose principles are not easily accommodated by the medium in which the experience is given expression.
Infinite Patience 
One response to “The Mathematics of Madness”
Hi Daniel,
Rod Morrison here at Xoum in Sydney. I work with David Henley. Just wanted to say how moving I found your piece about your daughter. I can’t imagine the journey you’re on, but am sure you will find much joy amidst the heartache.
By the by, I’m entering BLOOD AND BONE in as many relevant awards as I can; will let you know of its progress.
In admiration,
Rod
http://www.xoum.com.au