Proof: The Professor and the Housekeeper
The Professor and the Housekeeper by Yoko Ogawa has a beautiful rhythm to it, easy-going, fluid, and peaceful. The characters are well-defined and the situation they are in is compelling. But the three devices Ogawa employs to keep her plot going, the beauty of math, the fact that the Professor has a memory span of only eighty minutes, and the game of baseball, slowly break down over the course of the novel and become unconvincing, annoying, and intrusive. The characters lose their identity, overwhelmed by the devices, and they become flat symbols, incapable of change, other than the changes time itself brings.
Ogawa teases us with secrets from the past, the discovery of which would allow each character to grow and change, but we are never given satisfaction. I didn’t need all the ends tied up at the end but I did want a stimulus towards resolution — a catharsis — and instead the situation remained in stasis and incomplete. There is much potential in this book, many issues raised and secrets hinted at, and yet we are as much in the dark at the end as we were at the beginning.
Ogawa uses math as a metaphor for life: mysterious, full of problems and demanding proof. But math and life are not equivalent quantities. Math has an endless number of problems to explore, mysteries to uncover, and proofs to solve: the novel is full of wonderful examples of mathematical problems of easy and difficult scale. Life is also full of mystery, and has been around since the beginning of time (as the Professor tells us about math, again and again), and like math, life is intricate and complicated, and its moments of solution/resolution (love, joy, peace) have an incredible beauty. But the beauty of math is based on its inherent logic and quantifiable, if not always easily discoverable, concepts, and the mysteries of math can be solved through working and thinking the numbers through. Life is a mess and cannot be approached logically or mathematically: we do our best to make sense of it but the problems of life cannot be solved through a formula, although I suppose you could argue that its beauty can be demonstrated through a proof, if we call moments of perception, of love, of joy, and of peace, “proof”.
Math is not only used as a plot device but also in how the plot is presented, moving in numbered chapters that culminate in the eleventh chapter with the celebration of the eleventh birthday of the housekeeper’s child on the eleventh day of September. But what is the importance of the number eleven? What is the importance of the formula that the professor scribbles out in response to the sister-in-law’s anger and that works to calm her suspicions of the housekeeper? Complicated relationships between people and people, and between numbers and people, are presented but no solutions are offered and no truth is revealed.
The eight-minute memory span that the professor is burdened with provides another metaphor for Ogawa to use, this time to explore the nature of friendship. The friendship between the housekeeper and the professor is certainly made more interesting given that each morning the friendship must be renewed: they have a chance each day to start fresh. That is both good and bad. New beginnings and a chance to do something better is certainly a situation we’ve all craved at some time, and I loved when the housekeeper tells of how having such a person teach her math is perfect: “Things that most people would get the first time around might take me five, or even ten times, but I could go on asking the professor to explain until I finally got it.” For him, it was always the first time she’d asked the question. The bad part of the limited memory span is that a friendship is based on shared experiences and understandings that build up over time: when there can be no over-time construction, can there be a friendship?
What the memory constraints do create for the professor and the housekeeper is a friendship free of purpose or motive: it is of the moment, valuable only for its present comfort. The professor argues that math is the same, serving no purpose other than to seek truth: “The mathematical order is beautiful precisely because it has no effect on the real world. Life isn’t going to be any easier, nor is anyone going to make a fortune, just because they know something about prime numbers. Of course, lots of mathematical discoveries have practical applications, no matter how esoteric they may seem. …But those things aren’t the goal of mathematics. The only goal is to discover the truth.” Although I was not persuaded by this argument of the purposeless of math, I did find the idea of a purposeless friendship intriguing. Of course we love our friends with no purpose in mind but on the other hand we do depend on our friends for certain back-up and support.
What the professor could give the housekeeper was a consistent response: he always greeted her in the exact same way, asking her birthday, and he always relied on number games and thoughts to get himself through anxious moments. The housekeeper knows this, just as she knows where the professor will be every day, and that the professor will always respond positively to her son (why, we never know: another unanswered question in the book).
The final plot device is the game of baseball: the professor loves baseball, as does the son, and the housekeeper grows to see the games almost as omens of both past and present. But the paragraphs about baseball and math and memory become boring. Ogawa becomes bogged down in her devices and there is too little honest writing about character growth, struggle, and resolution. It is a waste of good writing mechanics: Ogawa writes simply and quietly in weaving her story, and the story has such potential. But the devices work like loose threads: at first Ogawa is able to weave with the threads but in the end, the threads cannot hold the story together.
