Ian Scuffling's Reviews > Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

A mind to marvel at. Douglas R. Hofstadter may be the most brilliant man alive, and his genius is a staggering machine that perceives the infinitesimal operations that are within operations that are within operations. The Eternal Golden Braid that is Gödel, Escher, Bach is as fully realized in its structure, form, and content as any of the greatest novels I’ve ever read in my life—the beauty of a complex simplicity, even in its most inscrutable moments, left me brain drunk on connectivity, recursion, how the mind works, how logic works, how deconstruction works.

I think the core success for Hofstadter in this is how he is able to find conceptual dendrites across multiple disciplines—number theory, art, music theory, genetics, zen, information theory, artificial intelligence/machine learning, literary theory and more—and twist them together like a double-helix, the DNA of a colloidal unconsciousness. In this way, the book is almost like an Akashic Record of 20th century advancements through physics, biology, electronics, art and more. Really, the only absence of scientific philosophy was that of astrophysics and the quantum—but as I say it, it seems possible that it’s in there somewhere.

There’s probably a great case to be made about the density of the work being to its detriment—how impenetrable the number theory work is and therefore unusable the subsequent games are for a non-mathematically-inclined reader who has little to no training in formal logic. But I don’t think these are failings of Hofstadter’s, but rather failings for us as readers to take the time to fully engage the explication, or seize the opportunity to peruse secondary sources for deeper understanding. Truth is, by my measurement, if those things really mattered to you as a reader, and such comprehension were required for “getting” the larger concepts and themes of GEB, then you would dedicate yourself to those moments.

This isn’t to say there aren’t flaws—surely Hofstadter’s fictioneering isn’t as adept and nuanced as some of his arguments, the overlaying structural experimentation, or the intricacies of Bach’s fugues he tries to mimic. In fact, the Dialogues, albeit quite useful for the lay-reader to absorb and prepare for the successive chapter’s density, are a little too precious to be taken seriously as fictions that plumb great depth. That is, they’re doing demanding, deep things by playing with the ideas of the more straight forward science/philosophy chapters, but it amounts to a pretty surface level of experimentation. One can read them and see the cleverness of how they’ve been constructed, but beyond the construction and execution of the idea, there’s not a rigorousness to the fictions that other, similarly styled fictions (ie. metafiction) do. This, I think, gets to a core point people often (and often erroneously) make about metafiction: it’s too cerebral without any of the heart. However, for Hofstadter’s fictions, I do find them cold. It almost didn’t ever matter who was talking, whether the Tortoise or Achilles or the Crab, and the natures of their relationships were utilitarian rather than deeply or vividly wrought.

But, this is really a small quibble to be making with what are ultimately just riddles, puzzles, pieces of a larger thing that does say something deeper about our human selves. In another dimension, Hofstadter is likely another John Barth. At least in this timeline, he’s the Barth of Science Philosophy.

Finally, and kind of as an aside, it seems clear to me that Mark Z. Danielewski read this book and was inspired to create House of Leaves. The house is, like an AI, like a brain, an infinitely recursive structure composed of formal components carrying out rote operations that add up to a larger whole (and larger inside than out). In fact, even the size, shape, length and structure of the book mimics Hofstadter’s. I haven’t taken a chance to revisit if Hofstadter formally appears somehow in MZD’s novel, but he may have wanted to mask the face lurking behind the conceptual bases of his own seminal fiction.