Professional solipsism vs. the community/gift-economy — Petros's withdrawal restated in nonfiction

echoes

Early text: "it is this solipsism that leads to Petros’s “failure”—as both a mathematician and a person"; "his progressive withdrawal from the professional community"; the enlistment of Lewis Hyde's The Gift and the "community of scholars, one in which each individual thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of “group mind” develops". [late essay] [e-text]
IJ echo: IJ's opposition of self-enclosure to community — the isolating logic of addiction and depression vs. the AA fellowship that works only by surrender into a group; the archive's gift-economy readings of AA (which also draw on Lewis Hyde's The Gift). Wallace reading Petros's tragedy as withdrawal-into-solipsism, and reaching for Hyde to name the cure, is the same move the AA material makes in the novel.
Weight: shared-preoccupation